ART NEWS
Francis Bacon portraits to go on display for first time
How Monaco and France Inspired Francis Bacon
FARAH NAYERI | INTERNATIONAL ARTS | THE NEW YORK TIMES | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2016
MONTE CARLO — The glamorous Mediterranean principality of Monaco is not usually viewed as a cradle of pioneering modern art. Yet in the 1940s, the painter Francis Bacon spent three productive years there, developing his best-known pictorial theme: the “screaming” popes, inspired by a Velázquez portrait.
Those years are the focus of Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture which runs through Sept. 4 at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo and then opens on Sept. 30 (in an expanded version that also highlights Bacon’s Spanish influences) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, illustrating the influence of Monaco on Bacon’s career and his lifelong relationship with France.
There are 66 Bacon oil paintings on show, along with a dozen works by Picasso, Soutine and other artists who worked in France and inspired him. Bacon was born in Dublin but spent most of his life in Britain, travelling frequently to Paris, where he kept a studio apartment. The exhibition is curated by Martin Harrison, a Briton who edited the first catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work, published in June.
Bacon, who visited Monaco as early as 1940, moved there in July 1946 with the proceeds of a painting sale.
One of Monaco’s undisputed attractions for the painter was gambling.
“I became very obsessed by the casino, and I spent whole days there,” the artist recalls in a filmed interview that is part of the exhibition. “I used to think that I heard the croupiers calling out the number at roulette, the winning number, before the ball had fallen into the socket.”
On one particular afternoon, Bacon “heard these echoes” as he was playing “rather small stakes” at three different tables. Soon, he had won himself the equivalent of 1,600 pounds — “a lot of money for me then” — which he immediately spent on renting a villa, stocking it with food and drink, and entertaining nonstop. Ten days later, Bacon said, he could barely afford the fare back to London.
Monaco was more than just about fun and games. It was here that Bacon started developing his pope paintings, a few months after his arrival, by copying the Velázquez masterpiece Portrait of Innocent X (circa 1650).
“I don’t know how the copy of the Velázquez will turn out,” he wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland in December 1946. “I have practically finished one I think, and am going to start on a portrait I want to do, but it is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you.”
Bacon ended up destroying most of those early depictions of popes. One survivor, Head VI (1949) — a howling, caged figure in a purple shoulder cape — is in the exhibition. Next to it are his later paintings of popes and authority figures. Another source of inspiration for the series, in addition to the Velázquez portrait (represented in the show by a 19th-century copy), is a clip of the screaming nurse from the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein movie Battleship Potemkin.
Art historians interpret the popes as depictions of dictatorial figures, but also as evocations of Bacon’s father, a retired army major with whom the artist had a difficult relationship.
Although he lived for three years in Monaco, Bacon — a studio painter — scarcely ever depicted the Mediterranean coastline. It appears as a thin, ribbonlike blue strip that runs across two unrelated paintings in the show: Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) and Dog (1952).
The exhibition illustrates the deep attachment that Bacon had to France, a country he first visited in his late teenage years and to which he often returned.
A robust Rodin sculpture of a woman stands beside equally corpulent and muscular Bacon male nudes. Picasso’s swirling and circular Femme couchée à la mèche blonde (1932) hangs next to Bacon’s similarly shaped Lying Figure in a Mirror (1971).
Bacon’s relationship with France reached its apotheosis in 1971, when he became the only living artist aside from Picasso to have a retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Photographs show him smiling at the exhibition preview and at a celebratory dinner, surrounded by dignitaries and intellectuals.
Yet his public glory was coupled with personal tragedy: Two days before the preview, Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, who was in Paris with him, committed suicide. A posthumous depiction of Dyer (Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps, 1972) is among the show’s most poignant displays.
Dyer reappears in the exhibition’s closing section — a partial recreation of Bacon’s studio at his death in 1992 — via a note that he wrote to Bacon in Paris, and a black-and-white photograph. Archival material consists of color photographs of the crowded atelier, and facsimiles of the paraphernalia that he left behind. These include a magazine cover picturing the Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, medical images of diseased feet and toenails (a major source of inspiration for Bacon), and a painting of a crucifixion by the 13th-century Italian artist Cimabue.
One standout document (an original) is a letter from Bacon to the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, who had refused to lend Bacon’s three heads of Henrietta Moraes (an artists’ model) for the Grand Palais show.
“As it is probably the last retrospective exhibition I shall have,” Bacon writes in large, slanting cursive, “I would be very very grateful if you would change your mind and lend it, as I believe them to be one of the best sets of 3 heads I have done.”
Agnelli eventually agreed.
AN EXHIBITION of Francis Bacon’s paintings anywhere in the world is always a major artistic event. In Paris he has approached the status which was once accorded to Picasso. Hardly a month passes without reading about the artist whose paintings sell for record millions.
He’s also appreciated further south. I was invited recently to view the summer exhibition at Monte Carlo’s Grimaldi Forum, entitled Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture.
The installation with sensitive lighting guides the viewer from one room to another, each room more exhilarating than the other with Screaming Pope, Triptych’s, Heads by Bacon inevitably present, a portrait gallery of his friends, since the heads are always of people he knew, like Michel Leiris 1976; who was a close friend of the artist for many years.
For me it was a visual and emotional tour de-force — seeing the work that was so familiar to me for over 50 years and seeing others that have never been exhibited and were found by Martin Harrison who curated the Monaco exhibition and whose definitive five-volume catalogue raisonne (by the Estate of Francis Bacon, costing £1,000) was published in June, the most scholarly work on Francis Bacon now in print.
The extraordinary intense emotional charge in his works is still shocking and enthralling an ever- growing public, books about Bacon are constantly published with titles, Bacon and Picasso, Bacon and Henry Moore, Bacon and Rodin, Bacon and Nazi propaganda.
FIRST ENCOUNTERS
During the 1950s, Bacon lived in the south of France, and loved visiting his favourite city Paris, where he regularly visited the Musées Rodin. I first met and photographed the artist in 1971 outside the Marlborough Street Magistrates Court in London where he had just been found not guilty of possessing cannabis following a police raid.
He moved effortlessly from the high life to the world of the Colony Club in Dean Street, Soho. Hosted and founded by his friend Muriel Belcher, who created a refuge for Bacon along with petty criminals, actors, poets and those who were Beats of a certain generation. Sadly the Colony Club is no longer with us, those who knew Francis are diminishing in number, Soho is now very much a mixture of cafés and overpriced restaurants.
Like many others I was captivated by the Colony Club and spent much of my time there in the early 70’s and 80’s.
Those who frequented it went there in the hope that Francis Bacon would be there in his affable and abusive manner, “Champagne for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends” was his favourite toast.
As obstreperous and obnoxious as he could be to people at the Colony, he was always kind to me inviting me to his show in Paris in 1977 at the Claude Bernard Gallery. I have fond memories of Francis sitting alone a few years before he died, having lunch and liquid refreshment at the most exquisite Bibendum Restaurant in what was the Michelin Building on the Fulham Road, a 10 minute walk from the Bacon Studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington.
TATE RETROSPECTIVE
I remember calling him on the day of his retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985 and asking what time he would arrive, as I wanted to photograph him outside on the steps of what was then the original Tate Gallery, now renamed Tate Britain.
As always, his manner over the phone was welcoming and he said I should be there about 2pm as he would be arriving with his friend’s Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller for what was then his second retrospective at the Tate.
The press pack were already in the gallery waiting for Bacon who gave me the exclusive outside this illustrious building.
His subjects were always a handful of friends and himself painted from photographs.
He would often visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, near his studio Mews home, and look at the Eadweard Muybridge photographs in the collection, very often stopping at the Auto-photo booth in South Kensington tube station to pose for a sequence of head shots, that he would paint from.
Bacon created his own legend well before he became a Sunday supplement name.
Born in Dublin in 1909, moving between England and Ireland in his childhood, receiving little formal education — his time in Ireland was marked by the violence in the early years of the Troubles.
“I was aware of danger at a young age,” Bacon would say. It was a world from which Francis Bacon had to escape in order to invent himself.
Bacon at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo until September 4, 2016.
The late artist Francis Bacon with photographer John Minihan
From Picasso and Matisse to Bacon and Freud,
Artists’ Rivals Are Also Their Greatest Assets
As he trailed Lucian Freud up the stairs of the artist’s Holland Park home, something caught art critic Sebastian Smee’s eye. There, hanging beside the studio door, was a “wanted” poster printed with an image of Freud’s Portrait of Francis Bacon (1952). The flyers had been part of an unsuccessful campaign to recover the work, which was stolen in 1988 from a Berlin museum. To this day, the portrait has never been found.
Bacon and Freud had famously befriended each other in London in the 1940s. But by the 1970s their relationship had completely unraveled. (The photograph, above, from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection captures their friendship near its end.) Even a decade after Bacon’s death in 1992, it was considered taboo to broach the subject with Freud during interviews. So why, Smee wondered, did the portrait of Bacon still hang next to his studio door?
“I knew that he wanted that painting back very much because of its quality,” Smee recently told Artsy. “But I also thought it must have been partly to do with the fact that the subject of the painting was this person who had played such a crucial role in his life and in his artistic career. And in that sense it felt poignant.”
For Smee, the lingering questions posed by the “wanted” poster served as the jumping off point for his latest book, The Art of Rivalry. Out August 16th, it traces the complicated relationships between four pairs of modern masters—Freud and Bacon, Picasso and Matisse, Manet and Degas, and Pollock and de Kooning. Although the term “rivalry” may conjure up visions of bitter adversaries pitted against each other, Smee believes that model is outdated. “The famous rivalries you hear about, whether it’s between Delaccroix and Ingres in the 19th century, or the famous Renaissance rivalries, they’re all about competing with your enemy—a kind of macho idea,” he said. “I detected something really different in these relationships between artists coming into the modern era.”
Instead of out-and-out competition, Smee spends much of the book exposing the layers of uneasy friendship and intimacy that existed between the pairs—subtle moments that are often overlooked in the art historical narrative. “I just related to it; I think perhaps we all can, if there are people in our lives who we are seduced by and impressed by,” Smee said. “We’re drawn to them—and if they’re an artist, their way of looking at things—and that’s a very intoxicating feeling. But at the same time, we are made conscious of things that may be lacking in ourselves, and again, if we’re artists, in our own artistic approach.”
Freud’s relationship with the older Bacon came early in his artistic career. Although he always painted portraits, initially these were crafted in a childlike, innocent manner. The smooth surfaces and wide eyes of Freud’s early subjects were miles away from the eventual fleshy, paint-heavy portraits that would go on to define his oeuvre. It was Bacon’s risk-taking, his loose, smeared paint and fascination with the space surrounding his sitters, that inspired the younger artist. Freud later said, “I think that Francis’s way of painting freely helped me feel more daring.” Bacon’s influence led the painter—considered by critics to be an excellent draftsman—to give up drawing completely for several years, resulting in a rapid shift in style that alienated many of his supporters. In fact, art historian Kenneth Clark, one of the artist’s early admirers, never spoke to Freud again.
Public rejection and disapproval often helped forge these artistic relationships. It wasn’t until the modern era that originality emerged as a factor in the way art was judged, a shift “that creates all sorts of problems,” Smee noted. “Once you value originality over so many other things, you lose hold of the criteria that used to exist to help us judge the quality of art. It affects the artists themselves in profound ways, because they’re suddenly unable to know for sure whether what they’ve just done is any good.”
Matisse’s experiments with Fauvism in the early years of the 20th century are one such example. These works, so far from accepted artistic practice at the time, provoked panic attacks, insomnia, and fierce anxiety as the painter considered public reaction. “In that context, other artists become incredibly important—people whose judgment you can trust, people who you can admire for their own originality and their own artistic virtues, whatever they may be,” Smee explained.
Matisse and Picasso served as each other’s sounding boards for years, with each pushing the other to new experiments and broader horizons. At first, it was Matisse who took the risks—painting with increasingly brighter colors in flatter and more saturated compositions. Picasso’s work, while original and capable, did not yet push boundaries in the same way as his fellow painter. But as the two of them spent hours together, often in the home of Leo and Gertrude Stein, Picasso started to chafe at living in the established artist’s shadow.
“I think Matisse deeply destabilized Picasso in a way that ended up being unbelievably fruitful for his whole artistic career,” Smee explained. “It’s a dynamic of being drawn to him and the things he was experimenting with and his influences, and yet at the same time pushing against him and trying to find his own identity and his own voice.” Inspired in part by the African masks that fascinated Matisse, Picasso commenced work on his eventual masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). And while Matisse initially thought of Picasso as a protégé, the older artist eventually realized that the relationship might be more fluid than he first imagined—even taking cues from Picasso’s competing artistic school of Cubism.
ometimes the rivalries between the artists had an obvious visual representation. Such was the case with Manet and Degas, whose relationship came to head when Degas painted a portrait of his fellow artist and his wife, Suzanne. Inexplicably, Manet—who was known by all as an easygoing and affable man—slashed the painting in half, slicing through his wife’s face and body. Degas later began to repair the painting with a strip of canvas but never got around to repainting the missing portion. De Kooning and Pollock’s rivalry had an even more visceral personal connection. In a move that shocked the close-knit New York art world, de Kooning began an affair with Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s lover, soon after Pollock died in a car crash.
What is perhaps most intriguing, however, about Smee’s four pairings is the undercurrent of uncertainty that runs throughout. In a world where a Picasso sells for $179 million and a Pollock for $140 million, it can be easy to forget that these artists once felt insecure, even threatened, as they set out to create works that would redefine artmaking in the coming decades. “You really do feel their vulnerability in these early years,” Smee said. “And that’s something that when they’ve become haloed in this aura of greatness, you think, ‘Oh, it must have been always like that. They must have always known that they were great.’ And I just don’t believe that at all.”
New Francis Bacon Exhibition Announced By Guggenheim Bilbao
Francis Bacon Exhibition, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
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A new exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon titled Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez has been announced by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The show presents a selection of nearly 80 of the Anglo-Irish artist’s most compelling paintings, including some of his most important and yet least exhibited paintings. These are displayed alongside the works of the classic masters from French and Spanish culture who played an influential role in his career, including El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.
The exhibition will span six decades of Bacon’s career over eight rooms, including his portraits, nudes, crucifixions, landscapes and bullfighting series, offering a new perspective on the artist’s oeuvre by highlighting the impact that French and Spanish cultures exerted on his art. Visitors will be able to see one of his earliest works Composition (Figure) (1933) alongside Picasso’s series of bathers, the monumental triptych Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972) with John Philip’s La Bomba (1863) and the Portrait of a Dwarf (1975) with Velázquez’s The Buffoon el Primo (1664).
The human figure is at the core of most of his compositions, which reflect a stark existentialist view of the individual. Bacon painted extraordinarily expressive portraits with a large dose of authenticity, which means being alive in all senses and with all its consequences. He sought to capture the mystery of life and reduce reality to its essence, synthesizing it in the guise of paint.
Bacon created a new universe of images conceived via literature, film, art, and his own life using a totally unique language, reflecting human vulnerability with utter rawness. The exhibition will show how Bacon broke down many barriers that were deeply entrenched at the time, placing human beings in front of a mirror in which we could see ourselves in a raw, violent way. It will become apparent how Bacon was an avid consumer of French and Spanish culture, developing obsessions with the literary and visual works of the countries’ masters from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, appropriating and twisting their visual language in order to create his own unique style.
The exhibition is organised by Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with Grimaldi Forum Monaco, curated by Martin Harrison.
Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976, Francis Bacon
THE VISITORS’ BOOK: IN FRANCIS BACON’S SHADOW
THE LIVES OF RICHARD CHOPPING AND DENIS WIRTH-MILLER
By Jon Lys Turner
By JIM BURNS | REVIEW | PENNILESS PRESS MAGAZINE | AUGUST 2016
Now that Soho is no longer the shabby but lively area it once was, and has perhaps largely lost its reputation as a bohemian enclave, it may be inevitable that more books will appear celebrating its golden days. The period from the mid-1930s through to the mid-1980s might be seen, in retrospect, as one when numerous artists, writers, and others, congregated, first in Fitzrovia, the area to the north of Oxford Street and on the west side of Tottenham Court Road, and then Soho, to the south of Oxford Street and on the west side of Charing Cross Road, and talent abounded. Some will, no doubt, question the dates I’ve mentioned, but I think I’m reasonably accurate in suggesting that, by the 1980s, the old idea of bohemia was declining. Observers of bohemia might say that its oncoming death was noticeable before then, and that it was the commercialised pop scene of the 1960s that finally killed it off. But I’ll leave the question of whether or not bohemia still exists, other than in the minds and actions of individuals, for another time.
Jon Lys Turner hasn’t set out to provide a history of bohemian London, but as the central characters, and many of the rest in his book, all spent a fair amount of time in Fitzrovia and Soho, it’s guaranteed that it will add to the library of publications which, in one way or another, revolve around the subject. The name of Francis Bacon in the title will, of course, attract the required attention, but it will be a pity if most of the others mentioned, including Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, are overlooked or dismissed as of no interest.
It is true that, in the larger scheme of things, Chopping and Wirth-Miller were comparatively minor artists. Neither did anything likely to change the direction of art, but in their day they both produced work that had something worthwhile to offer. They met in the 1930s – Turner says they encountered each other in the Café Royal on Regent Street, then a fashionable place for more-affluent artists and writers to congregate. Not that they were particularly well-off. Chopping was from a comfortable middle-class home and had a good education, whereas Wirth-Miller had a more basic background (his parents ran what is described as a “down-market hotel), an unsettled childhood, and little extended formal learning. They were both homosexual and soon formed a partnership that was to last for the rest of their lives, albeit with more than a few ups and downs along the way.
They quickly got to know other artists, among them Augustus John, William Coldstream, Lucien Pissarro, and Nina Hamnett. She had been around the Paris bohemian scene in earlier years, and her book, Laughing Torso, published in 1932, and reprinted by Virago in 1984, is a lively account of her encounters with Picabia, Picasso, Modigliani, and many others. She was a talented artist, but by the late-1930s was beginning a descent into the alcoholism that would blight her later years when she became a character around the pubs and clubs of Soho. A later book, Is She a Lady? (Wingate, 1955) is fragmentary, but interesting, and perhaps shows the influence of her increasingly dissipated life-style. Denise Hooker’s Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia (Constable, 1986) is informative about her, and Hooker says that Is She a Lady? was “rambling, disjointed and inconsequential, a sad reflection of Nina’s own state.” There were others that Chopping and Wirth-Miller met, including the poet Anna Wickham, and the Scottish artists, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde who were, like them, life-long partners and prone to drinking too much and falling out. Roger Bristow’s The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBryde (Sansom & Co., 2012) tells their story.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller soon moved to Soho and the Gargoyle Club where they came across John Minton and Francis Bacon. Turner provides some background information for both, though Bacon has been extensively written about elsewhere, and Minton, if not as well-known, has had at least one book devoted to him (see Frances Spalding’s Dance till the Stars Come Down, Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), and crops up in accounts of the London art scene of the 1940s and 1950s. By this time Chopping had begun to attract some attention when a couple of his paintings were in an exhibition alongside works by Lucien Pissarro, John Nash, Jacob Epstein, and Duncan Grant. But when the war started in 1939 he was called up for service in the army.
Chopping was eventually discharged from the Forces on medical grounds and he and Wirth-Miller resumed their activities. It’s obvious that the main purpose of Turner’s book is to tell the story of how the couple related to Bacon, and in particular how Wirth-Miller got along with the more-famous artist. Chopping, though a heavy drinker and sexually promiscuous, wasn’t much inclined towards Bacon’s approach to art or life. But, as I said earlier, it would be a pity if his work, and that of Wirth-Miller, was ignored simply because it didn’t match up to Francis Bacon’s paintings. Chopping became quite successful with illustrations for children’s books and for those about natural history. You can still pick up copies of the book he did about British butterflies. And, a little time later, he achieved a degree of minor fame for the covers he designed for several of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.
Wirth-Miller probably never achieved great success as an artist, and was fated to always be dominated by Francis Bacon. They spent a lot of time in each other’s company, both in London and at the Storehouse, the property that Chopping and Wirth-Miller had bought in Wivenhoe. Turner has stories of them painting together and consequently creating problems for later researchers trying to decide if some of Bacon’s canvases could have had contributions from Wirth-Miller. Also, it would seem that, in more recent years, collectors and others, perhaps wanting to make a financial killing, or possibly a name in the art world, have bought canvases by Wirth-Miller and scraped off the top layer of paint in the hope that there may be a Bacon painting underneath. He was known to have left unfinished paintings at the Storehouse that Wirth-Miller possibly painted over.
It would be unfair to dismiss Wirth-Miller as simply a crony or follower of Francis Bacon. His work was in an exhibition, British Landscape Paintings, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944. As Turner puts it: “There was no better commercial gallery in London at that time for his debut. The association gave him validity as an up-and-coming artist.” And it’s worth quoting Turner again on Wirth-Miller’s paintings: “He was already developing non-narrative landscape at this time. The mood of the works may suggest a threat from nature, which would become more obvious in the darker, later paintings, but no story is explicit. The works are deliberately unpopulated and consciously full of movement: they are a moment and not a narrative in the manner of Constable’s The Haywain. The only storyteller is the viewer.”
Turner, referring to the post-war bohemia in London, mentions the Colony Room Club on Dean Street in Soho. Opened in 1948, it soon became a notorious hang-out for Francis Bacon, the photographer John Deakin, John Minton, and Wirth-Miller. When Chopping was taken to the Colony Room he quickly came to see it as a “hellhole,” a description that quite a few others may have agreed with. There are any number of reminiscences of the drinking and bickering and worse that went on in the Colony Room, though Bacon appears to have thrived on the atmosphere of verbal aggression that, if various accounts are to be believed, was the norm as the nights wore on and drinks were downed. Sophie Parkin’s The Colony Room Club, 1948-2008: A History of Bohemian Soho (Palmtree Publishers, 2012) provides a useful account of the club. It’s also worth referring to Robin Muir’s Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho (Art Books Publishing, 2014).
Despite the drinking, Chopping and Wirth-Miller were busy with their respective projects. Chopping got good reviews for work in the Royal Academy Summer exhibition in 1952, and his paintings were also on show at the Hanover Gallery. As a result, he received commissions for portraits. And Wirth-Miller had successful exhibitions at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 and 1958. They were not short of money and Wirth-Miller turned out to be an imaginative speculator on the Stock Exchange and added to their overall income. He went on a trip to Tangier with Bacon, while Chopping indulged himself closer to home with various male friends. His behaviour, which he was always quite open about, didn’t seem to initially affect their relationship, though Turner does say that it “was sowing the seeds of further problems.” Wirth-Miller’s association with Bacon appears to have been based on shared interests in drinking and painting and was not necessarily sexual.
As the 1950s progressed attention switched from the Neo-Romantic movement in British art and painters like the two Roberts, Minton, Keith Vaughan, Robin Ironside, and John Craxton, to the so-called Kitchen Sink school, the more abstract artists associated with St Ives, and the abstract expressionists from the United States. Pop Art was also starting to make itself known. Chopping and Wirth-Miller, never perhaps at the forefront of artistic activity, found themselves beginning to be forgotten. Bacon, of course, was too big a name by this time and individual enough to be able to withstand attempts to dismiss him along with others active in the 1940s and early-1950s. There were casualties, too, among the Soho bohemians. Nina Hamnett died in 1956 after throwing herself from her upstairs flat onto some railings. John Minton committed suicide in 1957. Robert Colquhoun died in 1962 as a result of his alcoholism, Robert MacBryde was killed in an accident in 1966, probably while drunk. Keith Vaughan killed himself some years later.
Wirth-Miller’s landscapes were still arousing a certain amount of interest, and thanks to his friendship with the fashionable interior designer, David Hicks, they were recommended to the well-to-do as suitable for hanging in their houses, Chopping, in the meantime, had started to devote more time to writing, and his first novel, The Fly, was published by Secker & Warburg in 1965. It sold quite well, but a second one, The Ring (Secker & Warburg, 1967), which was about the homosexual underworld in London, was less successful. A third novel was rejected and remained unpublished.
It’s Turner’s contention that bohemia, or at least the bohemia that Chopping and Wirth-Miller thrived in, was dead by 1967. Fitzrovia was for tourists hoping to catch sight of the ghost of Dylan Thomas. It was no longer associated with anything new or interesting in British art. As for Soho, it was “still a place for hard drinking and sexual antics, but the likes of the Colony Room were no longer attracting young artistic transgressors; it was the same old faces, increasingly alcoholic, their lives more chaotic.”
Chopping and Wirth-Miller continued on their own merry-go-round, though not always in London. Their house in Wivenhoe was a centre for visitors and partying was often in progress. Chopping had obtained a position at the Royal College of Art, though teaching creative writing, but almost lost it when his drinking caused some embarrassment. And Wirth-Miller continued to follow Francis Bacon around as the two drank and argued. There was one terrible experience when he had an exhibition at the Wivenhoe Arts Club. Bacon, by this time famous with exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York, was invited to the opening, turned up drunk, and proceeded to laugh and make disparaging remarks about the paintings. As a result Wirth-Miller, never the most confident of people with regard to his own work, gave up painting and spent the rest of his life drinking, travelling, and becoming increasingly violent towards Chopping. Their arguments, often conducted in public, caused a lot of old friends to stop associating with them.
Their final years were not happy ones, with Chopping suffering from ill-health and Wirth-Miller becoming increasingly senile: “Chopping had made friends with a younger set of people, but he was sentimental about the past, about being part of a bohemia that seemed capable of rearranging the universe, and about the old friends from that time, now deceased. Wirth-Miller, meanwhile, retreated further into his troubled memories: his treatment as a child, his imprisonment, and his final failure as an artist.” The reference to “imprisonment” relates to a conviction for “gross indecency” in 1944 when homosexuality was illegal.
Francis Bacon had died in 1992, and Chopping and Wirth-Miller had been approached by journalists who wanted information about him. They refused to co-operate with them, and even turned down Daniel Farson who was working on a biography of Bacon. Farson had, after all, been a part of the Soho bohemia of the 1950s and beyond (see his Soho in the Fifties, Michael Joseph, 1987), so might have expected to be given a more positive response. Chopping had been writing an autobiography for many years, though it was never completed, and that may have had insights into their friendship with Bacon. Farson’s book, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (Vintage, 1993) mentioned Chopping and Wirth-Miller a few times, but the latter claimed that it was full of inaccuracies.
Richard Chopping died in 2008 and Denis Wirth-Miller in 2010. It surprises me that both, like Bacon, lasted so long, bearing in mind their chaotic life-styles. It’s understandable that they resented the fact that when journalists contacted them they only wanted to talk about Francis Bacon or Ian Fleming. Both Chopping and Wirth-Miller had produced some work of value, and rightly thought they ought to be credited for it. But they’re probably now fated to be footnotes in books about Bacon or Lucien Freud. They had known Freud in their younger days but had fallen out with him. They’ll be remembered in connection with him because of a painting that Wirth-Miller gave to Jon Lys Turner. It was said to be an early example of Freud’s work, though the painter always denied that it was. But a recent BBC TV documentary seems to have established that it was, at least in part, painted by Freud when he was a very young student at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. Chopping and Wirth-Miller were also there at the same time.
There’s no getting past the fact that, had it not been for the Francis Bacon connection, The Visitors’ Book (the title refers to the guest register at The Storehouse in Wivenhoe) might never have been published. And that would have been a pity because it provides a fascinating picture of a period in British art, the 1940s and 1950s, that has been neglected in recent years. The bohemian capers and tragedies have sometimes been written about, but too much of the art has been overlooked. It wasn’t all just Bacon and Freud.
I remember the splendid exhibition, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935-55 at The Barbican in 1987. Malcolm Yorke’s The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times (Constable, 1988) followed. In 2002 The Barbican had Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties, with an informative book using the same title (Merrell Publishers Ltd) by Martin Harrison accompanying it. Robin Ironside: Neo-Romantic Visionary was an exhibition in Chichester and Chester in 2012. And the two Roberts (Colquhoun and MacBryde) had an exhibition devoted to their work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2015.
I’ve used a few examples to indicate how much was happening in the 1940s and 1950s when Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller were active. And, for all its follies and foibles, there was a productive bohemia.
Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller in the shadow of Francis Bacon
'London Calling' at the Getty and the tension between abstract and figurative painting
Is the School of London real?
A new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum features six prominent painters working in London in the decades following World War II, and it assumes as much — although without making a vigorous case for their coherence as an artistic school one way or the other. “London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj” is a pretty loose-limbed show. It hinges on what the artists didn’t do rather than what they did.
What they didn’t do is make abstract paintings.
Postwar art saw abstraction definitively push figurative painting to the margins, where it mostly languished for a generation. Pushback came from several quarters in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. It rumbled through Willem de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings, as well as the black paintings of Jackson Pollock. Most notably as a group, it fueled the great Bay Area figurative paintings of David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Joan Brown.
It came from London too. Elena Crippa — the Tate Britain curator who co-organized the show with Getty director Timothy Potts and drawings curator Julian Brooks — notes “the central role granted to the human figure” in the British painters’ work.
All but 12 of the show’s 51 paintings come from the Tate, which has considerable depth in these artists’ work. Each gets his own room in “London Calling.” Two-thirds of the way through, a seventh room mixes 27 small studies and works on paper by all six. The artists were friends, colleagues and carousing pals, and eventually they all showed their work with the same London gallery (Marlborough Fine Art)
Yet the artistic differences among them is most often dramatic. It’s a very long way from the strangled heads and twisted torsos of Francis Bacon to the lurching London streets of Leon Kossoff or the gooey painted flesh of a Lucian Freud nude.
The show’s title, “London Calling,” is somewhat incongruously drawn from the postpunk 1979 album of that name by the band the Clash. It’s incongruous because the painters were at least a generation older than the twentysomething British bandmates. But the “clash” slyly being intimated by the show is between these painters as committed figurative artists in an era dominated by abstraction.
I think that misses the mark.
That sort of clash is more fittingly applied to an art movement like the one known in Britain as Stuckism, which elevates often untutored figurative expression above the dominance of academic Conceptual art. Stuckism is reactionary. The highly refined paintings at the Getty are anything but.
Rather than oppose dominant abstraction, these artists probe the tension between the figurative and the abstract. The friction yields the paintings’ energy. Techniques of radical abstraction are used as a powerful tool in constructing a compelling image.
The show’s first great painting to navigate those shoals is Frank Auerbach’s riveting “Oxford Street Building Site I” (1959-60), which piles on thick slathers of oil paint. London was being rebuilt after the urban ruin of wartime blitzkriegs, and Auerbach positioned his painting to be as much of a physical, material construction site as the scene it depicts.
The palette is a wide array of browns — raw umber, chestnut, russet, burnt sienna and more. Red, green, black, white and other submerged colors enter the mix, but the dominant browns that Auerbach troweled on attach the gravity associated with Old Master painting to his own work. Engorged layers of firm, deliberate strokes of clotted paint are themselves objectified, even as they describe objects like machinery, a fence or a steel I-beam.
As surely as Britain was rebuilding London, Auerbach was engaged in rebuilding British painting, which had mostly languished in the Modern era. And he used abstraction as one forceful implement in his toolbox. The conjoined construction of image and canvas manufactures a painting as edifice.
The show opens with six paintings by Michael Andrews (1928-1995), the least-known, least captivating of the group. His work ranges from precisionist realism, which recalls the measured tedium in paintings by his teacher, Sir William Coldstream, to optically distorted realism, which also follows Coldstream’s dull commitment to painting only what the eye sees.
Andrews’ best work is an eccentric view of himself teaching his young daughter to swim. The child’s kicking, flailing feet dissolve into flecked splashes of light, while refraction through the dark water turns the adult’s foot into an oversize, stable anchor. A familial narrative merges with a salute to conformist tradition.
Next comes Auerbach, whose inventive fusion of abstraction and figuration packs a sudden wallop. (On first view, several landscapes could be mistaken for being completely abstract.)
Kossoff, whose thickly gestural canvases are stylistically most like Auerbach’s, chronicles the grinding anxieties of modern city life. And American expatriate R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007), who first proposed (and then withdrew) the School of London moniker, painted literary themes in overlapping, abruptly clipped planes that recall torn collages.
The two most well-known artists, Freud (1922-2011) and Bacon (1909-1992), occupy the final two rooms. Mostly they share artistic celebrity.
Freud (psychoanalyst Sigmund’s grandson) is among the most overrated painters of our time. Nine of the 14 canvases are in the repetitive post-1970 style that linked him to international developments in Neo-Expressionism. Impasto paint becomes sensuous skin in nudes whose eccentric poses are sometimes claimed to expose underlying states of psychological strain in the confrontational dialog between artist and model.
Yet it is the confrontational dialog between painting and viewer in his earlier work that is infinitely more captivating. The thinly painted, finely wrought 1947 picture of a staring young woman who wraps her white-knuckled hand around a kitten’s neck is as weirdly mesmerizing as anything in German New Objectivity painting from before the war. Made in its immediate aftermath, the woman’s gesture is somewhere between caressing and strangling innocence and autonomy. A chill goes up your spine.
Bacon’s seven paintings are capped by a big triptych of disquieting figures trapped within flat, blank, geometric voids and caged in a wide, golden frame — a Bacon signature. Art, like life, is its own prison, yet also a place for transgression.
A seated self-portrait on the right is loosely mirrored in a seated portrait at the left showing his lover, George Dyer, who had committed suicide barely 10 months before. In the triptych’s center, the spot where a traditional religious painting would put the Virgin Mary or a crucified Christ, a blob of two entwined figures grapples in a macabre dance of sex and death. Before 1969, homosexual coupling was criminal under British law.
The slick, carefully contrived elegance of Bacon’s paint handling is regularly interrupted by oozing discharges of color. There is no narrative here, only direct visual sensation connected to visceral experience.
“London Calling” is unusual — even unprecedented — for the Getty. It’s the museum’s first-ever historical survey in the field of 20th century painting. The Getty’s own European painting collection ends circa 1900, and the conceit is that contemporary British figurative painting is being connected to a collection of pre-Modern European painting. That’s pretty wobbly.
I’m not so sure we really need yet another art museum to present overviews of contemporary art, especially one with the Getty’s distinctive capacity to explore just about anything else. But if it is to be, perhaps connections of more depth can be drawn.
Bacon’s paintings, for instance, were profoundly influenced by camera images — photojournalism, film stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, medical albums, Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies (the center panel in the show’s triptych comes from the British-born California photographer’s studies of wrestlers) and more. The Getty, given its unparalleled photography collections, is uniquely positioned to examine such an angle.
ANDREW HIRST |
IPSWICH
STAR
Their hell-raising antics in a small riverside town in north-east Essex became the stuff of local legend.
With week-long parties of hedonistic excess, Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard “Dickie” Chopping carved out a bohemian enclave in sleepy Wivenhoe. Among their guests were famous artists including Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who would enjoy wild nights of debauchery away from their regular Fitzrovia haunts.
Esteemed artists in their own right – Wirth-Miller for his landscape paintings and Chopping as an illustrator for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels – they both fell away from the limelight towards the end of their lives. Now, however, the full extent of their story and the roles they played in Britain’s turbulent post-war art scene is being revealed in never-before-seen detail.
Jon Lys Turner, a close personal friend of the couple, was bequeathed their extensive personal archive; a collection of letters, notes and unseen material, which he has used to write The Visitors’ Book. Described by the Tate gallery as “one of the most important finds in decades”, the archive offers a unique insight into the couple’s lives together and the intriguing social scene around them.
Turner, himself a successful creative designer, was at first unsure what to do with his inheritance. But after arousing the interest of arts experts, who were captivated by its contents, he started the painstaking four-year process of cataloguing the vast array of material.
The collection covers decades of their life together, from when they first met at a Noel Coward show in 1937, through to Bacon’s death in 1992. Some of their earliest days together came when Wirth-Miller was studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Hadleigh, alongside Lucian Freud.
Turner said the art school was popular for young men from London during the war. “It was almost like Fitzrovia in the country,” he said. “They could get way from London and come and have a lovely time getting roaring drunk at this huge house.”
The couple’s Wivenhoe home, which they renovated from an old storehouse in 1945, is where much of the book revolves. “It was the bedrock to everything that went on,” explained Turner. Here they would play host to their artistic contemporaries, a group of mostly gay young men, who pushed social boundaries for their art. Turner described their nights in Wivenhoe as “unpredictable, lively and potentially dangerous”.
“There are some pretty hair-raising stories in this book,” he added. “They made the next generation look like amateurs when it came to drinking, debauchery and promiscuity.” While Turner said many of the town’s pubs would ban the men for their drunken behaviour, he claims the letters show how they were accepted and welcomed in the community, despite their unconventional lifestyles.
Michael Parkin, one of the artists who visited the couple in Wivenhoe, said it retained a similar atmosphere to the community portrayed in Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. Turner added: “They lived against the law as a same-sex couple but they were accepted, loved and embraced by the people.”
The book also shows how destructive some of their relationships could be, particularly the friendship between Wirth-Miller and Bacon. Bacon, who defined friendship as “two people pulling each other to pieces”, would argue fiercely with Wirth-Miller, and was a harsh critic of his work.
Turner describes how Bacon turned up “blind drunk” to one of his friend’s exhibitions at the Wivenhoe Art Club and started slating the paintings on display. “The opening was closed down, people were ushered out and Denis went to pieces,” he added. “He totally destroyed the whole show and did not paint for years.
“Bacon had knocked him down, not just publicly, but in Wivenhoe, where he felt most at home.” Having humiliated his friend, further details emerged of Bacon’s attempts to help Wirth-Miller, painting together on the same canvas. “I found that to be a real revelation,” Turner said.
Turner first met the couple at the Royal College of Art in 1981, where he was studying for his masters degree. While he has been shocked by some of their behaviour he said he would always remember them kindly.
“For me, they completely changed my life,” he added. “I would not have attended the Royal College unless I had won a scholarship and so, the fact they believed in me and helped me along was amazing.
“I loved them dearly, as though they were uncles or part of my family. “But I also found from doing this, some of the reviews of their work have been rather disparaging, calling them lesser artists.
“I don’t believe that their work was not important. “They were the glue that held this early co-operative of artists together.
“I hope that by doing this I can bring their work to a wider audience.” The Visitors’ Book, was published by Constable last month.
Francis Bacon would only have his hair cut in Colchester. Letters from the artist while in France contain reference to his need to return to see the couple so that he could have his hair cut. Denis Wirth-Miller was a friend of Prince Yusupov, the Russian who took part in the assassination of Rasputin. When Chopping met Wirth Miller for the second time, he was in Cafe Royale in London with the Russian.
The painting Man in the Black Cravat, now proven to have been almost certainly painted by Lucian Freud, is thought to have a portrait of John Jameson, of the Irish whisky family. Jameson was a contemporary of Freud and Wirth-Miller at the East Anglian School of Painting in Hadleigh, where he was rumoured to have pursued an interest in witchcraft.
Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Chopping
Francis Bacon loved to gamble. More than anything else – apart from making art, of course – he loved to gamble at the casino in Monte Carlo, the most famous in the world. "You could go in at 10 in the morning and not come out ’til about four the following morning," declared the Irish-born roué, who apparently did this a lot when living in Monaco, that tiny, showy principality on an ancestral rock in the French Riviera.
Francophile and bon vivant, painter of screaming popes and robust gay sex
scenes, Bacon was already a hugely famous artist when he died in Madrid in 1992
aged 82, a week before he was due to lunch in Monte Carlo with a friend. But few
could have predicted the levels to which his posthumous fame would skyrocket: in
November 2013, a painting by Bacon of his friend Lucien Freud became the world’s
most expensive artwork sold at auction, fetching a staggering $US142.4 million
($190.6 million).
The Tate Gallery in Liverpool is presenting the largest exhibition of Bacon’s
work staged in the north of England, and the Getty Centre in Los Angeles,
drawing from the Tate in London, is featuring Bacon among six postwar British
artists who revolutionised and reinvigorated figurative painting. (Australians
got up close to the artist’s controversial oeuvre in 2013 when the Art Gallery
of New South Wales hosted a five-decade retrospective.)
Here in Monte Carlo, down on the seafront, the great glass-domed Grimaldi Forum
is hosting Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, a major new
exhibition that celebrates the years in the late 1940s and early ’50s when Bacon
lived in Monaco and southern France; a period, argue Monégasques, that gave
Bacon his oomph, his guts. That made him.
"Bacon was always returning to Monaco for extensive stays with friends, family
and lovers," says Cecilia Auber, our guide at the Francis Bacon Art Foundation,
a not-for-profit institute on the ground floor of a small villa in the hilly
streets behind the central, long-established Hotel Metropole, rebuilt in 1989 a
la belle époque (the "beautiful age" before the First World War) and glimmering
at the end of a drive dotted with white statues, as if magicked out of history.
Bacon first pitched in Monaco in 1946, staying at the compact Hotel dé Ré before
moving from villa to villa – bijou residences not dissimilar to that occupied by
the foundation, which was inaugurated by Prince Albert II in 2014 on 28 October,
Bacon’s birthday.
"It was in Monaco that Francis Bacon started painting the human form," says the
chic, straight-backed Auber, stewarding us past the likes of 1929’s Watercolour,
Bacon’s earliest surviving painting. "It is also where he began painting on the
raw, unprimed side of the canvas."
There she is at the tres exclusive Yacht Club de Monaco, with its landmark
clubhouse designed by Sir Norman Foster and marina of sleek super-yachts flying
the distinctive red-and-white burgee. There, at Thermes Marins, an opulent spa
linked by subterranean corridors to the Hotel Hermitage and the aforementioned
Hotel de Paris – home to Alain Ducasse’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Louis
XV, done up in chandeliers, cherubs and gold leaf and boasting a superlative
tasting menu delivered with Swiss timing and almost balletic grace.
There she is too, at the Wine Palace, a new venue built on the prow of the Yacht
Club and kitted out in oak, bronze and dark red leather, with 2300 wines and
spirits in its temperature-controlled cellar, complimentary delivery to yachts
both berthed and at sea and good-looking staff with serious vinous knowledge.
Asked to name their most expensive tipple, our sommelier Joshua doesn’t hesitate. "Last month we sold a double magnum of 1986 Pétrus for €20,000 [$29,500]," he says, though he won’t say to whom. With just 36,000 permanent residents including Ringo Starr, Shirley Bassey and Novak Djokovic, and regular A-list visitors such as Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio, Monaco (and Lady Luck) insists upon, and receives, discretion.
Bacon, who loved a drink, once mistook a bottle of Pétrus for cooking wine and made a stew that was talked about for weeks says Auber, indicating a black-and-white photograph of the artist, dishevelled after a long lunch in Soho, his other spiritual stomping ground.
The foundation’s collection includes more than 2300 items ranging from photos
provided by Sydney-based artist Eddie Batache, a long-time friend, and triptychs
featuring Bacon’s ill-fated lover George Dyer, to a Paris bathroom door signed
by French surrealists including André Masson and Pierre Soulages and completely
covered with drawings of penises.
"It is," says Auber sagely, "a homage to the phallus."
But despite the eye-popping door and the emotionally charged paintings (some of
which feature in the Grimaldi Forum show) the overall vibe of the foundation is
understated and elegant. Curtains, tassels and low-hanging bulbs are drawn from
Bacon iconography; interior walls are shades of grey, in keeping with his
late-1940s palette.
What Bacon, who lived simply and messily, throwing out much of his work, would
have made of this neat, intense homage is anyone’s guess.
"Great art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation," declares a wall decal – as indeed, Bacon might have added, does great gambling.
The sun and the shadiness were relished by Bacon, who loved nothing more than to take the Train Bleu, the sleeper from Paris, which pulled in right beside the casino – and offered, en route, strangers to meet.
These days, visitors to the casino tend to fly in via helicopter from Nice, or
hop off a cruise ship or super yacht moored in the marina at Port Hercules, the
natural deep-water bay at the foot of the landmark Rock of Monaco. Sensibly,
perhaps, Monégasques are forbidden from gambling in the casino, sparing them
from the addiction that gripped Bacon who early on and desperate for cash, had
hoped to sell his work there.
"I always feel with a little clever manipulation the casino would buy our
pictures," he wrote to friends in 1946.
It didn’t, and instead the rooms are lavishly decorated with sculptures and paintings of sensuous, Lady Luck-like women, overseeing winners and losers all day and all night long.
Francis Bacon in 1984.The artist loved the sunny shadiness of Monaco, returning often for extensive stays
The
InterContinental hotel is offering wealthy art fans a unique private view
NIGEL TISDALL
Photographs of Francis Bacon often show the artist sitting amid the chaos of his London studio like a bomb survivor surrounded by debris. For 31 years, until his death in 1992, one of the greatest figurative painters of the late 20th century worked in a dingy rented mews space, just six metres by four, that was reached by a steep wooden staircase with a rope handrail. “I cannot work in places that are too tidy,” he declared, with notable understatement.
In 1998, this crucible of creativity was donated to the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane where, three years later, it was put on show in a purpose-built space — an astonishing feat of relocation that cost over €2m. Even the dust was carefully bagged up and then resprinkled.
Along with the studio, the Hugh Lane acquired an archive of over 7,000 items — including 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases and 70 drawings. Academics can make requests to see these, and some of them are loaned out to exhibitions, but they can now for the first time be viewed privately, by tourists with deep pockets, through a collaboration with the InterContinental Dublin hotel. Set in leafy, wealthy Ballsbridge, this five-star is keen to align itself with modern Irish art, with over 80 works by leading artists such as Sean Scully, Louis le Brocquy and Brian Maguire currently displayed in its public spaces. Its tie-up with the Hugh Lane is part of a range of “insider experiences” being offered by 16 InterContinental hotels across Europe.
While some are interesting if you happen to be there (goldsmithing in Athens, watchmaking in Geneva), the Dublin hotel’s offer seems most likely to merit a special trip, especially in these days of packed-out blockbuster exhibitions and private views that are not at all private. Its package for two people includes the Hugh Lane being opened in the evening just for you and special access to the Bacon archives for two hours. Once at the gallery, guests are served champagne and hosted by Dr Barbara Dawson, the genial director of the Hugh Lane and the Bacon expert who pulled off the extraordinary coup of getting his studio transferred to Dublin.
What has this box of wonders got to do with Ireland? Bacon may have been a keen traveller but his famous atelier was in South Kensington, his spiritual home in Soho, and he was very much a London-lover. He was, however, born in Dublin in 1909 and lived in Ireland, on and off, until the age of 16, when his father kicked him out after discovering him trying on his mother’s underwear. He headed for London, Berlin and then Paris, where Bacon discovered Picasso. The rest is art history.
A great deal of the archive’s treasures came from the sea of apparent rubbish found on the studio floor, and Dawson has selected 21 items to show me (visitors can nominate particular subjects in advance). Two technicians in disposable gloves and steel-toe-capped trainers lay the exhibits out as if they are holy relics, turning pages with spatulas and keeping a watchful eye. “This is not a shrine,” Dawson insists, “it’s an investigation into the painting process.” Some of what we view is little more than ephemera — a business card from the Lowell Hotel in New York, a cheque to Wheeler’s restaurant in London. You can smell the turps on a 1988 Observer Magazine devoted to Irish personalities. Other items have more force, such as a fragmented photo of Lucian Freud sitting on a bed, which clearly influenced the 1969 triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” (a work that sold for $142m in 2013). “This was all found in the chaos,” Dawson sighs.
As with all the best exhibitions, it is the unexpected discoveries that get under the skin. For me it’s an archive photo of Bacon in the dining car of the Orient Express, taken in 1965 with his lover and model George Dyer. It is a happy, tender, after-lots-of-wine snapshot, in marked contrast to the dark seriousness of his work. As Dawson puts it: “Bacon made paintings of the human psyche — and what does it take to do that?” There’s no simple answer, but it is a privilege to be alone with the studio in which he created so many astounding works, talking about such things. And when you see the many empty Krug boxes spread around his “chaos”, it seems only fitting to be doing so with a chilled glass of champagne in hand.
Bacon in the dining car of the Orient Express with his lover and model George Dyer
Shady person in a sunny place
Francis Bacon | A Monaco exhibition and a new catalogue raisonné
show us more about ‘the last great European Modernist’.
By Jackie Wullschlager
Sometime between 1948 and 1950, Francis Bacon won £1,600 at the casino in Monaco and splashed it all on renting a villa there. The Côte d’Azur, Somerset Maugham’s “sunny place for shady people”, was perfect for Bacon.
“Nobody here is at all interested in ART, which is perhaps a comfort,” he wrote to Graham Sutherland. On the other hand, gambling “is for me intimately linked with painting” — the studio and the gaming tables shared dramas of chance, accident, risk — and “I love being on this coast, with this light, one always seems to be on the edge of the real mystery”. He kept revisiting the principality for the rest of his life.
Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, the summer exhibition at Monte Carlo’s Grimaldi Forum, is pure pleasure: visual, emotional, intellectual. In this glassy seafront gallery, Bacon’s art of sensation and excess is staged in an extravagant mise-en-scène of purple velvet curtains, red carpets and, at the centre, an enormous black room with light filtering through blinds, reminiscent of the shuttering device in the dark early canvases.
In this cavernous installation, you feel dizzyingly as if you are walking into an airless 1940s Bacon painting. Ghostly striated renderings from 1949 here include “Figure Crouching”, an abject form in a space frame leaking a greenish shadow, never shown before; a little-known snarling “Head”, compressed by tight collar and tie and confined in a cage; and the famous “Head VI”, a screaming Pope with phallic gold tassel mockingly swinging above his nose — Bacon’s first composition to converge imagery from Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” with a still of the howling nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
“It is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you,” Bacon told Sutherland. It was in 1949 that, at 40, he really found his subject of a figure isolated in a room or constrained abstract space. “I do absolutely understand what Giacometti meant when he said ’why ever change the subject?’” he said. “Because you could go for the whole of your life painting the same subject.”
Nevertheless, variety early on, and the references to Monaco and to French painting as explored here, are revelatory. The unstable forms against a Mediterranean blue ground in “Figure with a Monkey” (1951), where the chimpanzee and the human spectator, manacled in white collar and cuffs, seem imprisoned by a chain fence separating them, was inspired by endocrinologist Serge Voronoff’s experiments with monkeys at the Chateau Grimaldi. “Study of a Dog” (1952) swirls menacingly within a giant roulette wheel set on Monaco’s coastal road with a single palm tree; an azure line denotes the Mediterranean.
That line reappears in “Fragment of a Crucifixion” (1950): two bloodied falling forms, sourced from a photograph of a bam owl carrying its prey, are placed on a canvas left half-unpainted. On this raw surface, small abbreviated walking figures recall the calligraphic taches of Henri Michaux — a pen and ink sketch similar to one Bacon owned is on display — and cars purr through the heat: death amid banal, quotidian reality.
Emerging from the black box of these early works, you enter a brilliant display of the deformed 1960s-80s portraits on shrill coloured grounds: bright yellow for three distorted heads of Henrietta Moraes, shocking pink overwhelming a curled up John Edwards.
The highlights are the paintings composed for Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais (“Paris is the supreme test”) including “Lying Figure in a Mirror”, an androgynous twisted form evoking Michelangelo’s “Leda and the Swan”, and the gender-bending lilac “Triptych — Studies of the Human Body”, where Bacon contorts and isolates figures derived from a Picasso nude, the Belvedere Torso — the absent head concealed by a black umbrella, another shadow of death — and Caravaggio’s “Narcissus”.
“Portrait of a Man Walking Down the Steps” (1972), unseen for 40 years, depicts Bacon’s lover George Dyer, tentatively holding a blackened window frame as blood drips beneath him on a staircase resembling that of the Hotel des Saint-Peres, where Dyer committed suicide on the eve of the retrospective.
It is among many later rarities: “Study for Self-Portrait” (1980) in a pale, diffused blue reminiscent of Degas’ pastels (“there, this is my Impressionist period”), comes here from a private collection for the first time; “Study of a Bull” (1991), a monochrome of a magisterial, threatened beast receding through a white mirror, on a canvas sprinkled with aerosol paint and dust, is Bacon’s last painting and has never been exhibited before.
Such trophies keep the show startling until the end. Although not all have direct French connections, the 6cole de Paris context, with Giacometti, Soutine and Picasso, favoured by Bacon for “un sens très fort de la tragedie” also on display, resoundingly positions Bacon as the last great European modernist.
Benefiting from years of research unearthing paintings across four ‘I’m like an albatross: I take in thousands of images like fish, then I spit them out on the canvas’ continents, Monaco’s exhibition is curated by Martin Harrison, whose definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné (Estate of Francis Bacon, £1,000) appeared last month. The most significant work of 20th-century art history this decade, it is also lively, engaging and, in a defiantly biographical approach, illuminates works with gossip and anecdote, as well as with iconographic and literary reference.
It features 100 previously unpublished and unseen paintings, ranging from “Landscape with Pope/Dictator” (1946), in which Bacon sets an early version of his recurring motif against a classical colonnade and decorative purple flowers, to “Self-portrait with Injured Eye” (1972), painted after Bacon “suffered many beatings, which as a masochist he may not have found entirely uncongenial ... the injured eye ... stands as an autobiographical symbol”.
There are fewer homosexual couplings (11) than one imagined, more female nudes (18), and an unexpected menagerie of animals alive, dead and ornamental. Bulls, gorillas and dogs predominate, plus a camel with a thrown rider in “Unseated Picador”; “Chicken”, modelled from a Conran cookbook illustration but recalling Soutine in bloodsmudged pathos, on display in Monaco; an idiosyncratic ceramic cat, worked up from a photo of a London cat’s-meat seller, in a malevolent, unique double portrait of Dyer and Lucian Freud.
“Flesh and meat are life,” Bacon said in his final interview. And “I’m like an albatross: I take in thousands of images like fish, then I spit them out on the canvas.” Harrison, in book and exhibition alike, eloquently enhances our understanding of the process, by which Bacon sustained 20th-century figuration with paintings “that can carry over from the sensation to our nervous system”, and continue to disturb and astonish.
Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, to September 4.
The complete collection of Francis Bacon’s paintings is published - at last
BY ALEXANDER ADAMS | THE ART NEWSPAPER | THURSDAY 21 JULY 2016
It was an absurdity that until June of this year Francis Bacon (1909-92), the foremost British painter of the 20th century and one of the giants of Modernist art, did not have a catalogue raisonné. Researchers had to scour miscellaneous catalogues (including the incomplete 1964 catalogue raisonné compiled by Ronald Alley) in search of images and data. Now, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, a grand five-volume affair (boxed and bound in dark-grey cloth) documents 584 paintings by Bacon.
No expense was spared in preparing this catalogue. Paintings dispersed worldwide were traced and examined, new photographs commissioned, and technical research carried out. Volume one contains an introductory essay and chronology by Martin Harrison, the Bacon expert. The chronology (illustrated by rare and previously unpublished photographs) draws on primary sources while an essay discusses Bacon’s techniques and materials. Volume five contains Krzysztof Cieszkowski’s extensive bibliography, listing hundreds of items. This volume also reproduces several dozen drawings in dilute oil paint that Bacon did on scraps of paper and book flyleaves. It leaves open the question of whether these cursory outlines should be considered visual notations, skeletal paintings or painterly drawings.
Volumes two, three and four catalogue all the surviving paintings and those photographed before destruction or loss. Each is given a full-page colour illustration (large triptychs are given fold-out pages); facing pages of technical data are supplemented by exhibition history. There are several paragraphs of discussion about the history and condition of paintings, possible influences and sources. The reproductions are exceptionally good: extremely crisp, colour-accurate, with actual-size details so clear you feel you could run your hands over the canvases. Bacon’s paintings have never looked better.
Bacon’s motto was “the National Gallery or the dustbin”. “Bacon destroyed many hundreds of paintings,” Harrison notes, for failing to meet to his standards. There are numerous accounts by collectors of visiting the studio and witnessing Bacon slashing paintings with a straight-edge razor in front of the appalled spectators. Over the years Bacon sometimes set up temporary studios in St Ives, Monte Carlo, Tangiers and at the houses of friends. When he vacated studios he would give abandoned paintings to local painter friends so they could paint on the backs of the canvases. Naturally, the painters rarely did any such thing; they sold the paintings for whatever they could get.
One of the revelations of this publication is Lying Figure (around 1953), a beautifully painted recumbent male nude. Bacon abandoned the unfinished painting in a temporary studio and when it resurfaced he would not permit to be included in exhibitions.
The development of Bacon’s career is fairly well established. The mystery period is 1929 to 1944, during which time Bacon moved from furniture and rug design to painting. There are only 15 extant works between 1929 and around 1936 and then nothing until the famous triptych of 1944. The catalogue can shed no light on the 1936-44 period.
During the Second World War Bacon found a unique approach by painting melded, damaged figures in complex, spatially ambiguous interiors. From 1946 until around 1957 he generally painted single figures or animals in linear cages, subdued in colour, against black backgrounds. The period 1957 to 1962 was a transitional one, characterised by a dominance of green grounds and the development of a more energetic and colourful approach to figure painting. From 1962 until his death in 1992, Bacon refined his late mature style of contorted faces and reconfigured bodies against audaciously coloured, dramatic interiors.
The catalogue documents all this and adds new works: portraits of Bacon’s last love, José Capelo, his last complete painting (of a bull, to be exhibited soon in Monaco) and some others. Harrison has described the publication of this catalogue not as the end of a period but the beginning of a reassessment. For the first time it lets us see everything that the artist allowed to leave the studio. Bacon’s great achievement has been matched by this impeccably thorough and beautiful catalogue.
Francis Bacon con Joan Miró y André Masson en la inauguración de su retrospectiva en París en 1971
En una carta de 1952 Francis Bacon escribe a sir Colin Anderson, su mecenas entonces, muy preocupado por las repetidas pérdidas del artista en el casino de Montecarlo: “Un día me gustaría explicarle el vicio del juego. Para mí, está íntimamente ligado a la pintura”. Le cuenta que al igual que a veces oye cómo elcroupier apela al número que finalmente ganará un gran pote, sus telas más logradas son un asunto de “suerte” y “casualidad”. No porque sus imágenes se le hubieran impuesto de manera automática sino por ser el resultado de un desafío a la pintura en el que la suerte es “el movimiento accidental del pincel”. Bello, ¿no?
Son algunas de las cosas sobre el pintor de altísima fama hoy que se pueden aprender y apreciar en la excelente exposición que el Forum Grimaldi y la Fundación Francis Bacon presentan en Montecarlo hasta el 4 de septiembre, una muy hermosa muestra a cargo del historiador Martin Harrison, autor asimismo del catálogo razonado del artista editado este mismo año. Para quienes creemos en momentos culturales de probada importancia, este año Bacon es uno. Por el catálogo razonado y por esta exposición de doble recorrido. En la capital monegasca, Harrison presenta las relaciones de Bacon con la cultura francesa. En el Guggenheim bilbaíno presentará en octubre la relación baconiana con la pintura española, a la que habrá que volver porque ciertamente es de envergadura: Picasso, Velázquez, Goya, Miró, Zuloaga...
Si la desgracia abatida sobre Niza y la Riviera francesa no es impedimento para comentar esta exposición y animar a verla, tampoco cabe pensar que el principado de Mónaco se dedique en materia cultural a programar cualquier cosa por ser lo que es en otros aspectos. Más bien su política cultural y la oceanográfica son su contrapeso. Mónaco no es Marbella, por decirlo suave. Desde luego, muchos residen aquí para blanquear su dinero. Otros, como Bacon en 1946, para jugar en el casino.
El pintor de nacimiento irlandés en 1909 y muerte madrileña en 1992 pasó largas temporadas aquí. Se sabe muy poco de su vida artística hasta entonces. Cuenta Harrison que aunque empezó a pintar en 1927 se conservan únicamente veintisiete dibujos y telas de los diecinueve años transcurridos hasta que en julio de 1946 se instaló en Montecarlo. Bacon hizo cruz y raya. Llegó a la ciudad mediterránea gracias a su primera tela vendida aquel mismo año y con una imagen en mente: el retrato de Velázquez del Papa Inocencio II. Una de las obras que por primera vez se ven en exposición es Paisaje con Papa/Dictador, realizada ya en Mónaco. Aquí pintaría las demás telas que parten del cuadro velazqueño en diálogo con el grito de una mujer en el film El acorazado Potemkin de Einsentein. Iconos perdurables, eternos.
Paisaje con Papa/Dictador produce escalofrío baconiano en estado puro. Oscuro, muy oscuro, en el centro está un desdibujado Papa de color morado que grita mientras por su derecha revolotean batallones alados y, a su espalda, el panteón de la civilización clásica no puede protegerle. Es clave su fecha, tras la II Guerra Mundial, y su título, que por primera vez, pero también la única vez en Bacon, apela de manera fuerte a que tras Auschwitz e Hiroshima no hay representante de Dios en la Tierra que valga. Mirar pinturas como si estuvieran fuera del tiempo no es de recibo.
La muestra es en gran medida una revelación de conjunto. Tantísimas obras son inéditas, que por algo Harrison las conoce todas. Lo son incluso para la vecina Francia, que cree sin razón saberlo todo sobre Bacon. París le consagró en 1971 en el Grand Palais, un museo que previamente sólo se había abierto a Picasso (los museos entonces no acogían a artistas vivos). Pero mucho de Bacon había sucedido en Mónaco.
Así la casualidad, el azar, el accidente, resultado del juego. Bacon se pasaba las noches en el casino y a menudo salía sin un céntimo. Al regresar a casa pintaba. Pero un día, sin dinero y sin telas preparadas para pintar, dio la vuelta a un cuadro y se puso a trabajar en la tela sin preparar. De la rugosidad y las muchas capas de pintura necesarias para aplacarla, que dieron una textura casi de cuero, nació en Montecarlo el Bacon definitivo. Ahí es nada.
Si van por allí, no se pierdan una visita (concertada) a la Fundación Bacon, en una pequeña villa urbana que alberga indicios muy interesantes del pintor. Así la puerta del retrete de uno de sus estudios parisinos, pintarrajeada con dibujos pornográficos de sus invitados pintores, Soulages uno de ellos.
Mercè Ibarz es escritora y profesora de la UPF.
An exhibition and a new catalogue show us more about 'the last great European Mondernist'
BY JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER
Sometime between 1948 and 1950, Francis Bacon won £1,600 at the casino in Monaco and splashed it all on renting a villa there. The Côte d’Azur, Somerset Maugham’s “sunny place for shady people”, was perfect for Bacon.
“Nobody here is at all interested in ART, which is perhaps a comfort,” he wrote to Graham Sutherland. On the other hand, gambling “is for me intimately linked with painting” — the studio and the gaming tables shared dramas of chance, accident, risk — and “I love being on this coast, with this light, one always seems to be on the edge of the real mystery”. He kept revisiting the principality for the rest of his life.
Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, the summer exhibition at Monte Carlo’s Grimaldi Forum, is pure pleasure: visual, emotional, intellectual. In this glassy seafront gallery, Bacon’s art of sensation and excess is staged in an extravagant mise-en-scène of purple velvet curtains, red carpets and, at the centre, an enormous black room with light filtering through blinds, reminiscent of the shuttering device in the dark early canvases.
In this cavernous installation, you feel dizzyingly as if you are walking into an airless 1940s Bacon painting. Ghostly striated renderings from 1949 here include “Figure Crouching”, an abject form in a space frame leaking a greenish shadow, never shown before; a little-known snarling “Head”, compressed by tight collar and tie and confined in a cage; and the famous “Head VI”, a screaming Pope with phallic gold tassel mockingly swinging above his nose — Bacon’s first composition to converge imagery from Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” with a still of the howling nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
“It is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you,” Bacon told Sutherland. It was in 1949 that, at 40, he really found his subject of a figure isolated in a room or constrained abstract space. “I do absolutely understand what Giacometti meant when he said ‘why ever change the subject?’” he said. “Because you could go for the whole of your life painting the same subject.”
Nevertheless, variety early on, and the references to Monaco and to French painting as explored here, are revelatory. The unstable forms against a Mediterranean blue ground in “Figure with a Monkey” (1951), where both the chimpanzee and the human spectator, manacled in white collar and cuffs, seem imprisoned by a chain fence separating them, was inspired by endocrinologist Serge Voronoff’s experiments with monkeys at the Chateau Grimaldi. “Dog” (1952) swirls menacingly within a giant roulette wheel set on Monaco’s coastal road with a single palm tree; an azure line denotes the Mediterranean.
That line reappears in “Fragment of a Crucifixion” (1950): two bloodied falling forms, sourced from a photograph of a barn owl carrying its prey, are placed on a canvas left half-unpainted. On this raw surface, small abbreviated walking figures recall the calligraphic taches of Henri Michaux — a pen and ink sketch similar to one Bacon owned is on display — and cars purr through the heat: death amid banal, quotidian reality.
Emerging from the black box of these early works, you enter a brilliant display of the deformed 1960s-80s portraits on shrill coloured grounds: bright yellow for three distorted heads of Henrietta Moraes, shocking pink overwhelming a curled up John Edwards.
The highlights are the paintings composed for Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais (“Paris is the supreme test”) including “Lying Figure in a Mirror”, an androgynous twisted form evoking Michelangelo’s “Leda and the Swan”, and the gender-bending lilac “Triptych — Studies of the Human Body”, where Bacon contorts and isolates figures derived from a Picasso nude, the Belvedere Torso — the absent head concealed by a black umbrella, another shadow of death — and Caravaggio’s “Narcissus”.
“Portrait of a Man Walking Down the Steps” (1972), unseen for 40 years, depicts Bacon’s lover George Dyer, tentatively holding a blackened window frame as blood drips beneath him on a staircase resembling that of the Hotel des Saint-Pères, where Dyer committed suicide on the eve of the retrospective.
It is among many later rarities: “Study for a Self-Portrait” (1980) in a pale, diffused blue reminiscent of Degas’ pastels (“there, this is my Impressionist period”), comes here from a private collection for the first time; “Study of a Bull” (1991), a monochrome of a magisterial, threatened beast receding through a white mirror, on a canvas sprinkled with aerosol paint and dust, is Bacon’s last painting and has never been exhibited before.
Such trophies keep the show startling until the end. Although not all have direct French connections, the École de Paris context, with Giacometti, Soutine and Picasso, favoured by Bacon for “un sens très fort de la tragedie” also on display, resoundingly positions Bacon as the last great European modernist.
Benefiting from years of research unearthing paintings across four continents, Monaco’s exhibition is curated by Martin Harrison, whose definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné (Heni Publishing £1,000) appeared last month. The most significant work of 20th-century art history this decade, it is also lively, engaging and, in a defiantly biographical approach, illuminates works with gossip and anecdote, as well as with iconographic and literary reference.
It features 100 previously unpublished and unseen paintings, ranging from “Landscape with Pope/Dictator” (1946), in which Bacon sets an early version of his recurring motif against a classical colonnade and decorative purple flowers, to “Self-portrait with Injured Eye” (1972), painted after Bacon “suffered many beatings, which as a masochist he may not have found entirely uncongenial … the injured eye … stands as an autobiographical symbol”.
There are fewer homosexual couplings (11) than one imagined, more female nudes (18), and an unexpected menagerie of animals alive, dead and ornamental. Bulls, gorillas and dogs predominate, plus a camel with a thrown rider in “Unseated Picador”; “Chicken”, modelled from a Conran cookbook illustration but recalling Soutine in blood-smudged pathos, on display in Monaco; an idiosyncratic ceramic cat, worked up from a photo of a London cat’s-meat seller, in a malevolent, unique double portrait of Dyer and Lucian Freud.
“Flesh and meat are life,” Bacon said in his final interview. And “I’m like an albatross: I take in thousands of images like fish, then I spit them out on the canvas.” Harrison, in book and exhibition alike, eloquently enhances our understanding of the process, by which Bacon sustained 20th-century figuration with paintings “that can carry over from the sensation to our nervous system”, and continue to disturb and astonish.
Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, to September 4.
Who Stole These Francis Bacon Masterpieces?
The whereabouts of five Francis Bacon paintings, stolen from his former
partner’s home in Madrid, remain a mystery.
LIZZIE CROCKER | THE DAILY BEAST | SUNDAY 17 JULY 2016
Last July, five Francis Bacon paintings were stolen from a Spanish banker’s home in central Madrid. Thieves disabled the alarm system before slipping into a fourth floor loft belonging to 59-year-old José Capelo, who was in London at the time. They escaped with roughly $28 million-worth of portraits and landscapes by the late British artist, bequeathed to Capelo when Bacon died.
Neither the doorman nor Capelo’s neighbors noticed anything suspicious the day of the robbery. It was the kind of spotless, silent job romanticized in art heist movies like The Thomas Crown Affair. Seven months passed before detectives uncovered any substantial information about the robbery. In February, British private investigators passed on an anonymous email with photos of one of the paintings.
When forensic investigators tracked down the camera used to photograph the paintings, they had found a suspect. In late May, Spanish police released a statement confirming that seven people had been arrested in connection with the heist. None of the suspects were named. And none of the paintings were recovered—or even publicly identified. The case seems to have baffled both local police and international investigators. But that’s because every element of the story is baffling.
How did an aging Spanish banker—not an art collector, nor a fixture in the art world—come to possess five paintings by Francis Bacon, whose Three Studies of Lucian Freud set a $142,405,000 world record at auction in 2013? How did such a sophisticated robbery unravel with such an unsophisticated email, easily traced back to a bumbling crew of thieves?
José Capelo met Francis Bacon in the 1980s at a London party hosted by Sir Frederick Ashton, a choreographer for The Royal Ballet. The two were introduced by Barry Joule, a close friend of Bacon, who was 78 at the time and took a shine to the handsome, 35-year-old Spanish financier.
Capelo was temperamentally different from the other men Bacon had loved—all “brutes,” as he often described them to his longtime friend and biographer, Michael Peppiatt.
In his dishy memoir, Peppiatt recalls the artist happily relaying that Capelo was a refined man: “The marvelous thing is that I usually only find brutes and with José, who speaks every known language, I can talk about all sorts of things.” What luck, then, that Capelo was also “terribly well hung, almost too well hung,” Bacon gushed.
“He was physically infatuated with him,” said Peppiatt, speaking to The Daily Beast from his home in Paris. “And Capelo was fascinated by Bacon’s brilliance and aura, but there was a huge age gap between them.”
Peppiatt frequently had lunches with Capelo and Bacon in London at the height of their love affair. He describes feeling like a chaperone on one such occasion, writing in his memoir that he tried to “extricate myself from this tryst, but neither man will accept my bowing out, although that does not stop them from becoming totally absorbed in a lengthy, delicate billing and cooing.”
He’d never seen Bacon fawn over a man as he did over Capelo. “All the acid that was so present before was suddenly gone from his system,” said Peppiatt. “Being in love [with José] probably wasn’t good for his painting. It calmed and tamed him and made him curiously benevolent. He’d always had a benevolent streak, but the characteristic harshness was pacified.”
But Bacon’s advancing age and poor health (he was asthmatic) ultimately deterred Capelo.
“I suppose the whole thing was rather tragic,” Peppiatt said of their romance.
In April 1992, Bacon set off to Madrid in hopes of rekindling things with Capelo, despite his deteriorating health and against his doctor’s orders. Four days after arriving, he was rushed by ambulance to the Clínica Ruber, a medical facility specializing in respiratory dysfunction.
He spent six days in intensive care before suffering a fatal heart attack. No one came to visit him, including Capelo, according to one of the nuns who looked after him. She told Peppiatt that Bacon expressed no desire to see anyone. Capelo was even less forthcoming. “There was no way of getting in touch with him,” Peppiatt said, “and I know that even if I had reached him there would have been a blank wall. José is very reluctant to talk about the relationship.”
Indeed, he denied most everything that was said about him and Bacon in a taped conversation between the artist and Barry Joule, in which Bacon said he bequeathed $4 million to Capelo in his will (Joule leaked their chat to the London Sunday Times in 2014, claiming Bacon gave him permission to publicize the tapes after his death).
In 2013, a 1987 painting titled “Portrait of José Capelo” went up for sale at a blue-chip Swiss gallery. Capelo also posed for a 1991 triptych that is housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, though Bacon told Joule that Capelo asked him to paint over his face.
Speaking to the Times, Capelo insisted that these conversations were “full of inaccuracies and full of things that are not true.”
He insisted that he “has never had any inclination to profit from that,” referring to his relationship with Bacon. “Why should I do it now? I don’t want to be a part of that.”
As for Joule’s claims, Capelo declined to comment beyond stating: “I don’t have that much respect for his opinion and his approach and his views...I think I have a right to my privacy and I want to keep it that way.”
Two years after Bacon died in Madrid, Capelo bought the apartment that was looted last July, according to El Pais.
Much has been written about the self-destructive sadists and thugs Bacon was drawn to — namely, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, both of whom committed suicide. They were brooding, brutish muses who manifested in the raw, “grotesque” imagery that characterized Bacon’s work.
Yet we know little about the artist’s last serious lover. Had Bacon met with Capelo in Madrid before he was rushed to the clinic? Why did Capelo not visit him at his death bed? Was he simply respecting Bacon’s wishes, as the nuns who took care of him suggested? (Capelo could not be reached for comment for this article.)
In the wake of the robbery, their relationship is perhaps more shrouded in mystery than ever. Capelo himself has become a source of intrigue.
It’s tempting to read into his strident declarations about not wishing to “profit” from their relationship. Was this a subtle dig at Bacon’s former lover John Edwards, who was in charge of the late artist’s estate after Bacon died (Edwards himself died in 2003)? Or a genuine sentiment from a pathologically private man?
The National Police in Spain could not be reached for comment on the ongoing investigation. Nor did the Bacon estate return repeated requests for comment about the five stolen paintings.
Their collective worth may seem insignificant compared to what Bacon’s other works have fetched at auction. But most of us care less about the numbers than the untold stories behind these paintings. And if Capelo has any say in the matter, those stories likely won’t be exposed any time soon.
Francis Bacon at The Grimaldi Forum Forces a Complete Reappraisal of his Work
By DUNCAN BALLANTYNE-WAY | SENIOR EDITOR | FINE ART MULTIPLE | EXHIBITION | JULY 2016
Exactly as the title suggests Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture the exhibition at The Grimaldi Forum focuses on the extraordinary influence of French culture on Bacon’s practice. The artist was immediately taken by France after he first visited Paris at the end of the 1920s, and so began a long love affair with the country, which culminated in what he considered to be his greatest achievement—his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971. An exhibition only once before bestowed on a living artist (Picasso), and an honor he cherished despite being awarded two Tate retrospectives in 1962 and 1985.
The exhibition is curated by Martin Harrison, the author of the recently published Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, 2016. The curator’s ten-year research is incredibly in depth and he masterfully brings to the fore Bacon’s influences and sheds new light on the artist’s oeuvre—who would have thought, for instance, that Bacon was so moved by works by Van Gogh that he painted portraits of him in his signature style in 1957?
Harrison brings together famous triptychs as well as less renowned works, which are displayed thematically, highlighting the relationship between his work and France and Monaco. More than 66 paintings by the artist have been collected for the exhibition as well as works by Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Auguste Rodin, and Chaim Soutine, which have all been cross-referenced with Bacon’s paintings. Many of the works by Bacon have never been exhibited before, including one of his last ever paintings, For Study of a Bull, 1991.
All in all this is a thrilling new take on the artist who has always been linked with the decadent streets and pubs of Soho, London. But perhaps this should not come as such a shock as the only Francis Bacon Foundation in the world is actually established in Monaco. It has often been remarked that one of Monaco and Monte Carlo’s biggest attractions for Bacon were the casinos. On his gambling obsession Bacon once remarked in an interview in 1962 that he would often visit them “at 10 in the morning and needn’t come out till about four the following morning.”
More than anything the exhibition sheds light on Bacon before 1960, a period that “we know almost nothing about”, according to Martin Harrison. “But when you put the evidence together, you’re forced to the conclusion that Francis Bacon, as we understand him today, was formed in Monaco.”
The Exhibition Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture runs from the 2nd of July through to the 4th of September 2016.
Francis Bacon in Vaux-Le-Vicomte, December, 1977. © Eddy Batache
By ANNA MCNAY | THE DAILY MAIL | SATURDAY 16 July 2016
Throughout his career, Francis Bacon vehemently denied ever doing preparatory work for his paintings. ‘I do not make sketches nor drawings,’ he said. ‘I just proceed.’ But in Invisible Rooms, Tate Liverpool’s stunning exhibition of the painter’s work, there is an extensive section of sketches, many discovered strewn on the floors and work surfaces of his South Kensington studio after his death in 1992.
The sketches here – of boxers, wrestlers and crouching, caged figures – sit alongside lists of ideas. In almost illegible writing, inside the covers of books, he scrawled hasty reminders to himself of what he might want to paint: ‘portrait of Peter as opposite’, ‘figure going through door as in Eichmann photo’, ‘butcher shop hanging meat’. It could almost be a shopping list, yet these ingredients are the recipe for some of the greatest 20th-century British figurative paintings we know.
A particular favourite source material appears to be studies of the human figure in motion from the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Images of his Soho circle in the Sixties, taken by photographer John Deakin, are also on display, alongside sketches Bacon did based on them.
In the case of Bacon’s fellow artist and friend Isabel Rawsthorne, Bacon took a photograph of her and turned it into a disturbing full-size painting, with Rawsthorne standing caged in a circular arena, face glowering and distorted. As an artwork and composition, this piece is captivating; as a portrait, the distortion takes us beyond physical appearances to a psychological interpretation.
This exhibition shows just how much Bacon manipulated his source material, condensing the content, intensifying the figures and creating for them a new – and unsettling – stage or arena. And it is the structures that Bacon created on the canvas that is this show’s common theme. These framing devices are often in the form of cages and curtains, and they draw attention to the painted figure and our encounter with it.
Asked by the critic and curator David Sylvester about this technique of creating frames within frames, Bacon explained that he simply wanted to concentrate the image down. Much has been made, however, of the similarity between the cage in Study For A Portrait from 1949 and photographs from the Nuremberg trials, showing Nazi war criminals boxed behind glass.
Bacon was undeniably influenced by these events, and much of his work speaks of the violence and cruelty of mankind. ‘The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility,’ he said.
He also believed that humans were simply animals, subject to carnal desires, urges and fears, and his caging might therefore be seen as a direct reference to this bestial nature. Certainly it is captured in his gaping mouths, from which silent screams rage, and his distorted, grotesque bodies, sometimes carcasses, that writhe within these confines.
Invisible Rooms contains many
well-known Bacon works. There are his terrifying paintings based on Velázquez’s
Portrait Of Pope Innocent X, in which the subject sits, as if strapped into an
electric chair, mouth wide open, so that his scream is almost audible. And his
works relating to the Crucifixion, including Tate’s own ghoulish triptych,
Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion, from 1944, with its
maimed, mutilated and bandaged figures, drained of colour and set against a
bloody red background, are also included here.
There are pieces, too, from his Man In Blue series from 1954, thought to portray Bacon’s lover, Peter Lacy, in which a ghostly white presence drowns in a dark blue lake, imprisoned within bars, capturing the disembodiment, isolation and hopelessness of homosexuals in an era when same-sex relations were still illegal.
For fans of Bacon, this is a worthy exposition. While the premise of framing techniques might seem to be just a spurious excuse to bring together another mini-retrospective of an over-exposed painter, this exhibition does shed some light on the techniques of this nevertheless most mysterious and confounding of artists.
Photograph of Bacon (1967)
MICHAEL PEPPIATT | REVIEW | THE GUARDIAN | FRIDAY 8 JULY, 2016
If you spent any time going around with Francs Bacon, you were bound to come across Dicky Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller. Bacon introduced them to me as early as 1963 as “the oldest queer couple in the land”, although they would go on living together in their quayside house in Wivenhoe, Essex, for more than another 40 years. A briefly successful book-illustrator and a frustrated minor painter respectively, Dicky and Denis were also Francis’s closest friends, partly because they managed to survive so many spectacularly drunken ups and downs in their relationship à trois.
From a young age, when I first witnessed their antics, I came to think of them fondly enough as errant uncles. Dicky was the more restrained of the two, being naturally less confrontational even when drunk. But Denis (known inevitably as “Denis the Menace”) was never content until he had exasperated everyone within earshot by shouting out one provocatively camp remark after another as he teetered from bar to restaurant, apparently feeling duty-bound to shock anyone bourgeois enough to be still shockable.
Tall and elegant, Dicky tended to withdraw into himself as the stockier Denis plunged manically into this act, his gestures growing ever wilder and his purplish face suffused with the gallons of wine he had put away. “He had a cock as hard as a steel hawser,” Denis would announce at random. “He was so in love with me that he wanted to lick caviar off the back of my throat,” he shouted. And any attempt to cut off his embarrassing tirades merely reassured him that his brilliance and originality were at last being acknowledged.
While Dicky looked ever more disapproving, Francis would slyly egg Denis on with acid little comments such as, “I don’t know who she thinks she’s going to impress with that nonsense” or, “the trouble is, Denis, you’re as coarse as those ghastly little paintings you do”. But then Francis would resent no longer being the centre of attention and lay viciously into him. Denis seemed to revel at first in this onslaught, but Francis was his idol, his central and absolute article of faith, and he grew so unnerved by these attacks that he would eventually kick over any chairs within reach and disappear melodramatically into the night.
I came to accept this kind of behaviour as the norm on nights out with Francis, who once defined friendship as “two people continuously pulling each other to pieces”. At times, Denis and Francis tore into each other with such wounding malice, going for the jugular with every remark, that I imagined they would never see each other again. But they soon returned to the fray as if they couldn’t live without the self-destructive passion of their fights.
Like other Bacon nuts, I imagine, I first raced through Jon Lys Turner’s book picking out all the choice Bacon bits, before reading the book properly as a whole. Right away I was fascinated, for instance, to find the description of an early punch-up between Denis and the art critic, David Sylvester, because I had witnessed an exact repeat, with Denis ending up with his nose broken once again, in the Colony Room club. Since he was their confidant and inherited Dicky and Denis’s personal archives, Lys Turner provides several nuggets of this kind, in particular extracts from the numerous letters that Francis sent to Denis and a variety of hitherto unseen photographs (although I have to say the photos published here of Francis’s boyfriend, George Dyer, don’t look much like the Dyer I knew).
What you find when you do read the book from cover to cover is very much what is announced in the subtitle. Despite their (sometimes enduring, often fleeting) contacts with other movers and shakers – from Frances Partridge and Randolph Churchill to Ian Fleming and John Gielgud – Dicky and Denis’s lives were indeed lived in Francis’s shadow, and that seething darkness seems to be where they themselves came most into their own, warts, disastrous boozing, camp mischief and all.
Much of what happened to Dicky and Denis outside Francis’s sphere of influence is mildly interesting as an adjunct to the main theme, illuminating minor episodes here and there of recent British cultural history. (Lys Turner’s title comes from the couple’s visitors’ book at their Essex townhouse.) But these accounts seem distinctly peripheral. Dicky’s painstaking illustrations for the James Bond novels, the couple’s fraught relationships with other gay men or their shared dislike of Lucian Freud are certainly not to be discounted, but they and the numerous other extraneous anecdotes would never amount to a book by themselves.
The central story here, the central tragedy one might say, is Denis’s obsession with Francis. While Dicky was too well balanced a character ever to fall wholly under Francis’s sway, Denis craved it. Francis, with his iron constitution, aristocratic self-belief and unpredictable genius for being both of and beyond his times, had a creative power and aura that Denis could only dream of. At the same time as living in Francis’s shadow, and to some extent because of that, Denis achieved a certain distinction as a painter of technically adept estuary landscapes, wind-flattened sedge and Muybridge-inspired dogs in headlong flight. But his images patently lack conviction, no doubt because (as Lys Turner emphasises) Denis himself chronically lacked self-confidence. He also worked on certain of Francis’s paintings with him, helping him to achieve more credible blades of grass or well-delineated feet, and thereby bolstering the illusion that he too was at the heart of creation.
But when, as Lys Turner recounts, Francis went careening round what was for Denis a crucial exhibition of his work, mocking every one of his pictures in sight, the poor man gave in completely to his self-doubt and decided there was no point in continuing to paint. Thenceforth, he would devote himself instead to drinking and outrageousness. As a direct consequence, in his declining, increasingly bitter and destitute years, Denis never recovered the sense of himself that he had painfully gained as an artist. I now understand much better why, when I called him to talk about Francis for the biography I was writing, he said: “I don’t want to talk about him ever again. He was an absolutely horrible man.” By then, Denis had found out that if anyone still bought his pictures, it was to scrape off the surface layer in the hope of finding a hidden work by Francis beneath. As Lys Turner says at the end of this moving and ultimately saddening account, Francis had in part created Denis, and in so doing he also destroyed him.
Francis Bacon and Dicky Chopping
FRANCIS BACON AT THE
GRIMALDI FORUM IN MONACO
ART IS ALIVE | SINCE 2007 | THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016
“Bacon’s single, most famous art-historical reference is probably that to Velàzquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. But in fact his paintings were more directly inspired by French artists, or artists living in France – Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Giacometti. Signs of this are visible across his oeuvre.” Martin Harrison, curator and editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné on the the most visible signs of French culture in Bacon’s work.
Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture presented at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco until 4 September 2016 explores the influence of French art and culture on the artist’s oeuvre. Based on an original idea by Martin Harrison, curator of the exhibition, the scenography by the Grimaldi Forum Design Office references the work of set designers Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig.
Major paintings from international collections, including Tate Britain and Centre Pompidou, are thematically displayed – The Human Body, The Portraits, Influences etc. – to demonstrate Bacon’s love-relationship with France and Monaco. The exhibition brings together sixty-six paintings by Bacon himself alongside works by leading artists who inspired him, including Picasso, Giacometti, and Léger.
Major loans from public collections around the world include Head VI (1949) from the Arts Council England, the extraordinary Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), and Pope I (1951, Aberdeen Art Gallery). Private collections were also asked for works, including the triptych, Studies of the Human Body (1970), Turning Figure (1962), and Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps (1972), Bacon’s most poignant tribute to George Dyer, painted shortly after his death. Other highlights include two pictures from Bacon’s Van Gogh series. The works are on show in a corridor leading from “the Dark Cave” section of the show to a room devoted to the artist’s representation of the human body.
The exhibition includes – for the first time – Francis Bacon’s first work, Watercolour (1929, Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation) and Bacon’s last painting, completed in 1991, the never before-exhibited Study of a Bull (1991, Private Collection). Tate dedicated two retrospectives to the artist during his lifetime, in 1962 and 1985, but Francis Bacon regarded the retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971 as the most significant of his career. This blue-chip exhibition certainly rivals with these retrospectives.
BT SAM PHILLIPS | RA MAGAZINE | WEDNESDAY 13 JULY 2016
When I used to think of Francis Bacon, I always imagined gloomy London interiors, the painter in his murky, messy Reece Mews studio, or propping up the bar in the smoke-filled Colony Room in Soho
But a significant show at Monaco’s Grimaldi Forum has drawn back the curtains on this dinge, shedding sunlight on Bacon and arguing for an alternative idea of the man: Francis the Francophile, who sojourned at every opportunity to Paris, Monaco and the French Riviera, absorbing ideas aplenty from French painting while he was at it
The argument pivots on a period in the late 1940s when Bacon moved to Monaco, during which he began a significant series of paintings of heads, including Head VI (1949). This is the earliest surviving of his “Pope” paintings – works that take Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X(c.1650) in a decidedly existential direction. The purple-robed Pope sits – as if restrained – in a rudimentary cube, his mouth open in agony, his eyes, nose and upper face eradicated by downward daubs of black. On display in one of the exhibition’s opening spaces, it has a high-octane hellishness that is rarely matched in the works that follow
Bacon loved the region’s climate – it helped his chronic asthma – but also Monaco’s famed casino. “I became obsessed by the casino and I spent whole days there,” he told David Sylvester in 1966, “and there you could go in at ten o’clock in the morning and needn’t come out until about four o’clock the following morning….” It is tempting to extend gambling as a metaphor for Bacon’s art, to speculate that he took more risks than his contemporaries because of his love for a flutter. During his time in Monaco, Bacon first began painting on the unprimed side of the canvas; the story goes that he had lost all his cash at roulette, so instead of buying a new canvas he had to recycle the back of an old one, and realised he preferred the unprimed surface.
The artist’s relationship to Monaco is an obsession of Majid Boustany, a Lebanese-born property developer, art collector and philanthropist. With the blessing of the Bacon estate, Boustany has established the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in a Monégasque villa. The foundation supports research, events and exhibitions about the artist, including the Grimaldi Forum show, to which it has loaned the earliest surviving Bacon, Watercolour (1929).
This Cubist interior, displayed in a section entitled Inspirations, sees the 20-year-old Bacon drawing on the work De Chirico, Léger and Picasso. The latter’s work was “profoundly unillustrative but profoundly real about figures”, in Bacon’s words; in other rooms, one sees how brilliantly Bacon learned from Picasso to create his own signature style of biomorphism, in which men’s muscles are mangled or merged
A breathtaking example is triptych Studies of the Human Body (1970), painted for Bacon’s 1971 Grand Palais retrospective. The three oils are suspended away from the wall, so that the work appears to float in space in the same way as its subjects. Such bold exhibition design is one of the show’s great strengths. The cavernous Grimaldi Forum space, often used as a conference venue, has been a help and not a hindrance in this respect, allowing the curators to design walls and lighting around the requirements of the 66 Bacons.
But as I emerged into the summer sun, a question troubled me. If Head V is one of the 20th century’s most affecting images of anxiety, how could it be made in the benign world of the French Riviera? Excluding a rare Bacon seascape, little in the show is emblematic of the coast or the atmosphere of Southern France. The show, in this way, is an argument against the direct connection of a work of art and the place it is made – perhaps it was just distance and time that Bacon needed, and Monaco allowed him both.
Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2 July–2 September; the exhibition travels to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 30 September–8 January. An accompanying book, Francis Bacon: France and Monaco, edited by Martin Harrison, is co-published by Albin Michel and The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, in partnership with Heni Publishing, £35.00. Francis Bacon MB Foundation, Monaco +377 93 30 30 33, open by appointment.
Art buyers are bringing home the Bacons and the Moores
Foreign collectors have been out shopping in London auction houses but there are still some bargains left
There wasn’t too much talk of Brexit or storm clouds at the Sotheby’s private view of Old Master paintings on Monday as collectors and society types drank Cuban cocktails under the gaze of Flemish madonnas.
The big London auction houses believe their markets are resilient as British buyers seek alternatives to mainstream investments and foreigners take advantage of cheap sterling. So, while commercial property funds were “gated”, gilt yields tumbled and parts of the stock market struggled, collectors have set a series of record prices in West End sales.
Helena Newman, the head of Impressionist & Modern Art for Sotheby’s, says it is striking that sales were strong shortly before and after the referendum vote. “London’s a global art hub and there’s no reason that shouldn’t continue.”
So what’s going on and what does it mean for ordinary collectors?
Orlando Rock, the chairman of Christie’s, says: “There will always be people who look for opportunity in these sorts of times.”
In Christie’s Defining British Art sale on June 30 many sales went to international buyers who benefited from the currency fluctuations, which equate to a 10 per cent discount. Reclining Figure: Festival, a sculpture by Henry Moore, sold for a record £24.7 million. It was estimated at £15 to £20 million. World records were also set for works by Francis Bacon (£20.2 million), John Constable (£14 million) and Bridget Riley (£4.3 million).
What is most resilient?
“Quality will always win,” Mr Rock says. Bidding was strong for stand-out pieces across a range of periods and styles. Yet, he says, fashion is always a factor, and postwar and contemporary art sales have held up most consistently in recent years with prices strong for good pieces in the middle price range, as well as at the top-end.
The top of the art market is truly international and driven by super-rich individuals and institutions who can ride out economic crises. If the UK economy does suffer, the risk is it will hit the middle market in more categories because people will have less money to put away.
During Christie’s Classic Week, which continues until Wednesday, Mr Rock says it is encouraging that prices for Rembrandt prints and antiquities are holding up. These sell to ordinary (if well-heeled) collectors, rather than those who can spend millions of pounds a piece, so they are an interesting barometer. A self-portrait etching of Rembrandt with his wife Saskia sold for £37,500 — above its estimate of £15,000 to £25,000.
Despite the record sales, Mr Rock says that the Brexit vote could make it harder to find great works for sale. Long term, however, he says that less regulation and a removal of the 5 per cent import duty could be good for the market.
JAMES RATCLIFFE | APOLLO | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | THURSDAY 7 JULY 2016
The recent news from Madrid of the arrests of seven people linked to the theft of five paintings by Francis Bacon has highlighted the role that technology can play in the fight against art crime.
When the Art Loss Register was contacted by an individual wishing to search a Bacon painting against our database of stolen and missing art, we quickly matched it to one of the stolen works. We then passed the information we had received straight on to the Spanish police.
It has now been revealed that the police were able to track down the digital camera that had taken the images, thus leading to the arrest of the person who took the photos and others.
Technology is proving an increasingly useful tool in tracking down stolen paintings. At the Art Loss Register, we have seen works of art searched against our database, the pictures of which were taken on a smartphone and therefore tagged with geolocation data. Possibly not the best way to keep hidden the stolen painting in your barn.
Information such as locations, or the model of camera that took the image, undoubtedly makes the lives of those investigating art crime much easier. But the greatest advantage of digital imaging that we have observed is simply how much easier it is for people to find photos of works that have been stolen from them, and then to circulate those photos to assist in the identification of the works should they reappear later on. Gone are the days of faxing images across the world and hoping that they are still vaguely recognisable at the other end.
It is not all positive though; technology is a double-edged sword and can benefit criminals too. High quality images make it much easier to rapidly create reproductions to hang in place of stolen art, meaning that thefts such as the nine Warhols found to be missing in LA last year can go undetected for years. Similarly, technology makes reconnaissance and the recording of targets easier and opens up new routes to carry out a theft. Hacking into the accounts of those shipping art, to change the destination so that art is delivered into the thief’s hands at an empty address, is now all too possible. By the time anyone notices the error, both the thieves and the art will be long gone, having left only an impenetrable signature with the courier. The worst case scenario (still, thankfully, hypothetical) might be someone hacking into a museum’s collection management system and altering records so that a picture that is stolen no longer shows up even on the museum’s inventory.
Ultimately technology simply provides a range of forensic tools. It then takes skill to establish their relevance of as part of the process of tracking down a stolen picture.
The Spanish police made good use of technology to find and arrest individuals who could be connected with the crime. But in the end the reason they were able to do so is just the same as ever. The best leads come from a criminal’s mistakes. In this case that was the mistake of using an identifiable camera, and failing to remove identifying information from the image files. Had this been done, or had they simply used a cheap digital camera bought with cash (they rented theirs), then they would have been a lot less likely to be caught. Technology moves on, but mistakes will always be made. In the case of these Bacons the question is whether this will ever lead to the pictures themselves, which appear still to be missing.
BY CLAIRE WRATHALL |
ART
It’s not hard to see why the artist Francis Bacon should have been drawn to Monte Carlo, where he spent three years in the 1940s, and to which he returned repeatedly during the course of his life, staying in room 681 of the belle époque Hôtel Balmoral (now apartments). Long favoured by Britons seeking respite from the northern winter, its appeal to Bacon in post-war Europe was obvious. The sea air and sunny climate would keep his asthma at bay. The sparkling Côte d’Azur light would delight his eye. And there was the casino, with which he became, in his words, “obsessed” and where he would “spend whole days”.
Indeed it was gambling debts incurred in 1947 when he was living on what is now the Avenue Princesse Grace, and his consequent inability to afford new canvas, that first compelled him to recycle an existed work by painting on the raw, unprimed side, a practice he continued throughout his life. Back in London, he gambled at home with friends too on a roulette wheel now displayed in the final room of the Francis bacon MB Art Foundation in a 19th century villa at 21 Boulevard d’Italie, which opened (by appointment) to the public last year, and is one of a host of new gallery and exhibition spaces that have turned the principality into a near-ideal city-break destination for art lovers.
The Foundation is the creation of the Monaco-based Swiss-Lebanese property developer Majid Boustany, owner, with his brother, of the Jacques Garcia-designed Metropole, the most fashionable and alluring of the principality’s great grande-dame hotels. As a post-graduate student in the UK in the early 90s, he encountered Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now in Tate Britain, and had a kind of epiphany. “I knew then,” he told me over dinner at the hotel (where Joël Robuchon has oversight of the kitchens), “that I would be busy with Bacon my whole life.”
He began to collect, first lithographs and photographs (Bacon’s paintings do not come cheap; witness the version of Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe, which was sold at Christie’s for £20m last week), then major works, as well as furniture - Bacon began as a designer of pieces very much in the vein of Eileen Gray or Charlotte Perriand. The collection also runs to books and other memorabilia, more than 2,500 items in total that range from his easel and the Carte Orange (or season ticket) he used on the Paris metro to the artist’s first known painting, an abstract watercolour from 1929 now on show, along with the triptych he first saw at Tate, in a major exhibition, Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, at the Grimaldi Frum Monaco.
If the exhibition’s focus is essentially Bacon’s connection with France and Monaco – witness a rare seascape from 1950 and the outline of a distinctive local mountain in the top-left corner of Fragment of a Crucifixion (1953) – it works equally as an introduction to the life and work of an artist generally hailed the most important British painter of the modern age.
More than 60 major works from major international museums as well as 20 private collections never before seen in public hang alongside works by artists who influenced him: Giacometti, Léger, Muybridge, Picasso, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec, among them. To this end there are some quite surprising juxtapositions. In a room devoted to studies of the human form, Marie Laurencin’s 1924 portrait of Madame Paul Guillaume, which Bacon would have known, hangs opposite his Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, painted 60 years later. Both are striking for their use of pink. Look at them together, and suddenly Bacon’s genius as a colourist is evident.
The Grimaldi Forum was not designed to exhibit art, but in this instance its cavernous, windowless interior works to its advantage, not least for the sheer amount of space given over to this theatrically installed show. (The exhibition’s curator, Martin Harrison, author of the just-published Bacon catalogue raisonné, acknowledges a debt to the influence of the influential European stage designers Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) and Edward Gordon-Craig (1872-1966).) In several of the galleries the walls are hung with acres of rich velvet drapery in an appropriately papal purple. (It was in Monaco, it turns out, that Bacon painted the first of his homages to Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a copy of which is hangs at the start of the show.) But as the show continues, more austere style prevails, with a sequence of great metal structures between and, in one instance, suspended above the galleries, commissioned to evoke the “cages” within which Bacon often enclosed his figures. There is another visual coup towards the end of the exhibition when one confronts the monumental Studies of the Human Body triptych from 1970, which appears to float free from the walls, so discreet are its fixings.
Even the lighting seems audacious. For the most part the paintings are dramatically spotlight both to focus attention and enhance the glitter of their gilt frames amid Stygian gloom. Enter the final room, however, where his final painting, Study of a Bull (1991) hangs alongside his 1987 corrida triptych, and suddenly you are out of the sombra and into the bright light of a Madrid bullring. The experience is exhilarating, the culmination of a show that is original, illuminating, immensely enjoyable and, I’d say, well worth the trip.
BY STEPHANIE WHALLEY
There have been some pretty prolific artistes cross the renowned orange threshold of TATE Liverpool and the bustling gallery is the gift that just keeps on giving, it seems. We’ve had Pollock, we’ve had Mondrian and of course, we’ve had wonderful Mr Warhol (just to name a few) but this summer TATE Liverpool is whetting our appetites with a taste of Francis Bacon. Definitely more of a three-course feast than a light lunch bite, the Invisible Rooms exhibition is a must-see event in the city this season and I was lucky enough to be invited to spend a Sunday afternoon strolling around the showcase.
The ticketed exhibition is made up of two solo exhibitions, throwing the spotlight on two of the 20th Century’s most influential artists: Maria Lassnig and Francis Bacon. I imagine the latter will need no introduction whatsoever but let me just begin by explaining that both of these artists had a particular interest in “staging the figure on canvas”. Both demonstrated a distinct preoccupation with war and a penchant for using the human body as a “nucleus” around which they centred their stylised pieces. While Lassnig favoured self-portraiture and Bacon preferred portraits of others, each was on a mission to express internal feelings and social influences by manipulation of space, illusion and the mere mortal.
Now, neither of these artists are a sit-on-the-fence, meek-mannered kind of creative. Both Bacon and Lassnig were put on this planet to make a paint-based statement and this has been wholeheartedly celebrated throughout Invisible Rooms. Bacon’s work is known for it’s dark, macabre nature in terms of both message and aesthetic, which has been cleverly enhanced by the low-lit exhibition space itself. The Lassnig space is TATE-typical – a bright, airy blank canvas upon which her eclectic mix-bag of multimedia pieces are hung but as you pull back the heavy glass door into Bacon’s designated arena, the atmosphere takes on a much heavier dimension. After a quick glance around the space, the pain, turmoil and troubled mindset of his subjects are almost audible. You then inspect the extensive collection more specifically and I swear, they only get louder.
We are first greeted by Bacon’s famous Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which is heavily symbolic as this is considered his breakthrough piece. As an open atheist, the crucifix motif provides no religious connotation and instead marked the beginning of Bacon’s signature architectural approach to framing his imagery. All of his subjects are quite literally trapped within geometric outlines and shapes, which is thought to be a direct response to the social struggles of wartime. As we all know, art is entirely subjective but no matter how you read these incredibly deep images, it can’t be denied that Bacon possessed a creative quality quite like no other.
From time to time, I have to admit that I am sometimes left with the feeling that the gallery hasn’t quite done the artist in questions justice to the full potential but you done good this time, TATE Liverpool. The Invisible Rooms exhibition is going to be there in all it’s beautifully gruesome glory until the 18th September so make sure to take a trip down to the Albert Dock to catch a glimpse. I can now confidently confirm that Francis Bacon’s work is best appreciated in the flesh so grab the chance while you can.
BY MARTIN BAILEY
A Bacon exhibition opening in Monte Carlo on Saturday 2 July reveals the close
links between the artist’s obsessive gambling and his paintings. Both depended
on chance. As Rebecca Daniels, a contributor to the Grimaldi Forum catalogue
explains, so inextricably linked were gaming and art that Bacon regarded his
losses on the roulette table as “an expense related to painting”. He once used
this as an argument for his dealer to advance more money.
Francis Bacon loved the French Riviera, but what made Monaco particularly
attractive was its gambling opportunities. He moved to the independent
principality in 1946 and spent most of the next five years there, returning
often up until his death in 1992.
Bacon’s haunt was the Casino. He recalled: “I spent whole days there... you
could go in at ten o’clock and needn’t come out until about four o’clock the
following morning”. Bacon would quickly dispense any winnings on champagne and
the finest food for friends. It was his symbol of living in the present.
Among the paintings in the Grimaldi Forum show is Study for a Figure
(1950), which includes a vaguely outlined circular object. This picture was
assumed to have been lost, but in 2006 it was rediscovered on the reverse of a
canvas. Lucian Freud then recalled having seen it in 1950, describing the
circular object as a roulette wheel.
Bacon even owned his own roulette wheel, with which he would play with friends
back in England. This relic of the artist’s tortured life has recently gone to
Monaco, when it was purchased by Majid Boustany for his Francis Bacon MB Art
Foundation.
Daniels believes that Bacon approached gambling and art with the same spirit, displaying a determination to take risks and allow chance to intervene. Bacon wrote that “the vice of gambling... is for me intimately linked with painting”. Clive Barker, a sculptor and a friend, recalled that Bacon would talk endlessly about how “chance” affected his paintings, with success or failure being likened to “the spin of a roulette wheel”.
Bacon would persevere with a painting until it either became a masterpiece or a
complete failure. When the gamble went wrong, he would simply destroy the work.
The Grimaldi Forum exhibition presents 62 of Bacon’s paintings that relate to
his visits to Monaco and France, showing his deep interest in French culture.
These essentially represent the successes, but the artist also destroyed
hundreds of pictures where his gamble had failed.
A failure of a different kind in Bacon’s early career was the idea to sell his
work to the Casino. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland: “I always
feel with a little clever manipulation the Casino would buy our pictures”. They
never did, and instead its magnificent Belle Epoque rooms are decorated with
paintings of languorous females, who still today sooth the disappointments of
the unlucky as they lose their chips.
Just for this summer, Bacon’s work has returned to Monaco, at the Grimaldi
Forum, a modern conference and exhibition centre a few minutes’ walk from the
Casino. For anyone going to see the show, do go on to the Casino for its
magnificent interiors and to imbibe the theatrical atmosphere of the gaming. To
see Bacon’s roulette wheel, take a guided tour of the Francis Bacon MB
Foundation with its artworks and memorabilia (advance booking required).
• Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2 July-4
September.
Among the paintings in the Grimaldi Forum show is Study for a Figure (1950)
One evening in the late Eighties, I was walking down Brompton Road in South Kensington, when I saw a figure turning in the doorway of a late-night chemist. His face, caught in the neon glare, was pale and oddly ageless, and in the split-second that our eyes met I glimpsed an expression that was at once impassive and strangely haunted.
Francis Bacon, I thought, without breaking my stride.
Bacon, who must by then have been about 80, had lived in that area of London for decades, and was long since established as the greatest and most controversial British painter of the 20th century. Since his death in 1992, the Bacon industry has grown ever larger, leading to increasingly detailed speculation about both the meaning of his harrowing, morally ambivalent paintings, and his rackety private life in the gay clubs and seedy drinking dens of post-war London.
Yet there remain whole aspects of his life about which we know very little. Not least among them is the three-year period in the late Forties when Bacon lived in Monaco. This barely chronicled moment is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo: Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture.
“We know almost nothing about Bacon before 1960,” says Martin Harrison, curator of the exhibition and editor of the monumental catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s works that is being published concurrently. “But when you put the evidence together, you’re forced to the conclusion that Francis Bacon, as we understand him today, was formed in Monaco.”
Walking now through a somewhat antiseptic pedestrian precinct, just a couple of hundred yards from Monte Carlo’s famous casino, I’m struggling to imagine what might have drawn Bacon to this manicured, high-security tax haven. Gravity-defying highways course between well-appointed tower-blocks and the belle époque villas sprouting from the slopes of this Mediterranean principality. There’s the atmosphere of discretion and anonymity you’d expect of a place with the highest property prices in Europe, but there’s little in the way of street-life; the few restaurants and shops are expensive, but oddly characterless. What, beyond the casino – and Bacon was an inveterate gambler – could have attracted the great connoisseur of the more sordid aspects of metropolitan life to this strangely sterile place? Documents show that Bacon moved here from London in July 1946, setting up home in the Hôtel de Ré in an unlikely ménage à trois with his lover of the time, Eric Hall, and his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who had nursed him through childhood asthma and remained his closest companion until her death in 1951.
“The warm weather was good for his asthma,” says Harrison with a shrug. “He was an upper-class Englishman, and Monaco was where upper-class English people went.” He produces a letter from Bacon to his fellow artist Graham Sutherland, written shortly after his arrival here in 1946. “Bacon was 37, he’d destroyed almost everything he’d done up to that point. But here he is talking about what’s wrong with art at that time, with Picasso and all the French guys, about what we – by which he meant himself – must do in art. Up to that point he’s endlessly messed around, but here in Monaco he realised what his project was: to become the greatest artist of his time.”
Born in Dublin in 1909 to upper-class English parents, Bacon had a troubled relationship with his father, an army officer and racehorse trainer, who disapproved of his sensitive, “unmanly” second son. He may even have sexually abused him; a trauma that left Bacon, it has been speculated, with a lifelong yearning for a “cruel father” figure. Rather than going to art school or university, Bacon drifted between London, Paris and Berlin, eking out a tiny allowance from his mother with menial jobs, stints as a paid “gentleman’s companion” and bouts of shoplifting with Lightfoot.
In the late Twenties, he set himself up as a modernist interior designer, a role in which he had some success (despite his later claims to the contrary). Designing rugs led him to painting, and by the time of his move to Monaco he was established as an enfant terrible on London’s tiny avant-garde art scene. Indeed, he’d already created two of his defining works: the sinister Painting (1946), now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in which an ominous demagogic figure stands framed by two huge sides of meat, and Tate’s emblematic Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with its howling mutant faces. Doesn’t that rather undermine the idea of “Francis Bacon” having been formed in Monaco?
“He knew he could do better than both those paintings. The MoMA Painting is interesting, but a bit of a mess,” says Harrison who, having spent 10 years on the catalogue raisonné, should know. “Three Figures is still heavily influenced by Picasso, and he arrived in Monaco with the intention of transcending that.”
The isolated figures and tortured surfaces of Bacon’s paintings have come to be seen as emblematic of the existential angst of post-war Europe, embodying the bleak residue left by the revelations of the Holocaust and the atom bomb. So it’s disconcerting to find him in the immediate aftermath of war not in chilly, bomb-ravaged austerity London, but in the relatively frivolous atmosphere of the Côte d’Azur. Monaco then must have been very different from what it is today: greener, less built-up, with much of its original elegance still intact – with more of a real sense, perhaps, of place. Bacon’s cultural and artistic tastes were resolutely Francophile; he was dismissive of almost all British art. But why did he move to Monaco, rather than the nearby and much livelier Nice, for example?
“He loved gambling and the casino in Monte Carlo is the most famous in the world,” says Harrison. “The Train Bleu, the sleeper from Paris, pulled in right beside the casino, and Bacon found trains, particularly night trains, sexy: you never knew who you would meet.”
Bacon recalled in an interview in 1962 that he became obsessed with Monte Carlo’s casino and spent whole days there at a time. “You could go in at 10 in the morning and needn’t come out till about four the following morning.”
Gambling appealed to his lifelong fascination with chance, in life and art, his sense of the cruel arbitrariness of existence. “He loved the exhilaration of roulette, staking everything on the spin of a wheel,” says Michael Peppiatt, who chronicled his 30-year friendship with the artist in the excellent memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood. “He enjoyed it even when he lost. But he adored winning, of course, making an enormous amount of money through something so frivolous, then spending it all on champagne, taking people out to dinner and giving enormous tips.”
After one particularly big win, Bacon went home with a handsome stranger, the owner, he said, of a yacht moored in the marina. After his departure, the Monaco police descended on Bacon’s apartment in search of the man, who was wanted all along the Riviera. “Francis enjoyed that,” says Peppiatt. “Monaco was a place apart, and it attracted louche people who he found intriguing: con men, doctors who’d perform not quite legal operations, the old women who queued to get into the casino every morning.”
But Bacon can’t have spent four years solely on gambling. “He was very disciplined,” says Peppiatt. “He needed the regularity of getting up early and painting every morning before lunch. And that came easiest to him in London. He always said he found it difficult to paint in strong light, which is why he did very little painting in Tangier, which he also visited very frequently.” Peppiatt, indeed, is sceptical that Bacon did much significant painting in Monaco, or that he spent years there at a time. The fact that Bacon maintained a London residence throughout this period, but lived at five different Monaco addresses, might seem to corroborate that view. The expense of such a lifestyle would have been considerable even without losses at the gambling tables, though Bacon was bankrolled, to a degree at least, by his lover Hall. An art collector and a director of the Peter Jones department store, Hall remains a shadowy figure, though like many of Bacon’s early patron-lovers – “sugar daddies,” Harrison calls them – he was married with children.
For Bacon, gambling was a means of self-exploration to be pursued no less obsessively than painting. In his mind the two activities were so closely entwined that losses at the roulette table were seen as collateral damage to success at the easel. Writing to a London dealer in 1947, having sustained heavy losses at the Monte Carlo Casino, he requested the then hefty price of £750 for a triptych on the grounds that this was “not one quarter of what (the paintings) have cost me with gambling etc”.
In Monaco, Bacon, who in Peppiatt’s words “saw himself as a person apart”, found a place apart, where he could immerse himself in his twin preoccupations, in light that gave him, as he wrote to his friend Sir Colin Anderson, the sense “of being on the edge of the real mystery”, yet where equally, as he told Graham Sutherland, “nobody is at all interested in ART, which is perhaps a comfort”. The private side of Bacon’s personality, which wouldn’t allow anyone to see him working, found in the principality a sense of energising detachment, an atmosphere which, as he told the critic David Sylvester years later, was “very good for pictures falling ready-made into the mind”.
The few surviving Monaco works illustrated in the catalogue raisonné are unresolved, though he is understood to have destroyed many others. Yet the stamp of a Nice framer on the back of the ferocious and unnerving Head II reveals that important work was done here. One of two paintings showing a chimpanzee’s bared teeth merging with a man’s head, it is so thickly impasted it was described by Bacon as “like rhino hide”. The companion work Head I contains the rudiments of an ornate chair or throne, suggesting it may have started out as one of the earliest of the reworkings of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X that are among Bacon’s greatest works.
Bacon had painted the first of his “Popes” (Landscape with Pope/Dictator) shortly after his arrival in Monaco, a work reproduced for the first time in the catalogue raisonné. If it barely hints at the extraordinary things Bacon was to do with this image over the following decades, it nevertheless embodies the conflicts between spontaneity and order, brutality and impassivity, that were at the root of Bacon’s art and personality. “He was debonair and sophisticated,” says Peppiatt. “He could be very charming, extremely generous and great fun to be with. But there was also a treacherous and destructive side to his personality, something diabolical. He pushed himself to the limits, and he pushed others to the limits too. You only have to look at the various suicides around him.”
These included his lover George Dyer, who killed himself in 1971, and Peter Lacy, considered the great love of Bacon’s life – his ultimate “cruel father” figure – who drank himself to death. If the latter wasn’t a suicide as such, Bacon, as Peppiatt observes, “certainly framed it as that in his own mind”. Lacy died in 1962, the year of Bacon’s breakthrough retrospective at the Tate, which also saw the beginning of the famous interviews with David Sylvester in which the artist consolidated the story of his life as he wished it be known – “the myth”, as Harrison puts it. “Before that it was all much less formal, wilder and more dangerous. But as Bacon didn’t keep diaries or records of any kind it’s hard to piece it together.” Bacon’s early years, not least his unlikely Monaco sojourn, are likely to remain a mystery.
Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, July1st, 2016
Exactly as the title suggests “Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture” the exhibition at The Grimaldi Forum focuses on the extraordinary influence of French culture on Bacon’s practice. The artist was immediately taken by France after he first visited Paris at the end of the 1920s, and so began a long love affair with the country, which culminated in what he considered to be his greatest achievement—his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971. An exhibition only once before bestowed on a living artist (Picasso), and an honor he cherished despite being awarded two Tate retrospectives in 1962 and 1985.
The exhibition is curated by Martin Harrison, the author of the recently published Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, 2016. The curator’s ten-year research is incredibly in depth and he masterfully brings to the fore Bacon’s influences and sheds new light on the artist’s oeuvre—who would have thought, for instance, that Bacon was so moved by works by Van Gogh that he painted portraits of him in his signature style in 1957?
Harrison brings together famous triptychs as well as less renowned works, which are displayed thematically, highlighting the relationship between his work and France and Monaco. More than 66 paintings by the artist have been collected for the exhibition as well as works by Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Auguste Rodin, and Chaim Soutine, which have all been cross-referenced with Bacon’s paintings. Many of the works by Bacon have never been exhibited before, including one of his last ever paintings, For Study of a Bull, 1991.
All in all this is a thrilling new take on the artist who has always been linked with the decadent streets and pubs of Soho, London. But perhaps this should not come as such a shock as the only Francis Bacon Foundation in the world is actually established in Monaco. It has often been remarked that one of Monaco and Monte Carlo’s biggest attractions for Bacon were the casinos. On his gambling obsession Bacon once remarked in an interview in 1962 that he would often visit them “at 10 in the morning and needn’t come out till about four the following morning.
More than anything the exhibition sheds light on Bacon before 1960, a period that “we know almost nothing about”, according to Martin Harrison. “But when you put the evidence together, you’re forced to the conclusion that Francis Bacon, as we understand him today, was formed in Monaco.
The Exhibition “Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture” runs from the 2nd of July through to the 4th of September 2016
BY KATYA KAZAKINA
London’s art market was whipsawed like the financial world during the two weeks of auctions surrounding Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union.
Uncertainty leading up to the June 23 referendum left some sellers hesitating to part with holdings. The political and economic volatility that followed voters’ shock decision, with the pound plunging the next day and Prime Minister David Cameron resigning, disrupted some sales but spurred more.
Held a week after the U.K. voted, the event shrugged off volatility, selling all but four of the 31 offered works. Two scheduled lots were withdrawn.
Titled “Defining British Art,” it was estimated at 95.7 million pounds to 138 million pounds, a significantly higher target than Christie’s two preceding evening sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art, combined.
Francis Bacon’s 1968 Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe drew two bidders and sold for 20.2 million pounds, as estimated. The work was being resold after 10 years; it had been purchased for $15 million in 2006 at Sotheby’s.
By SHANA BETH MASON
For all of its imagined glamour, Monaco doesn’t offer much in terms of art galleries or institutions. Secondary market work does find its way into tiny storefronts (dwarfed by the incessant number of real estate and private yacht sales firms), but the principality doesn’t have a national or state-owned art collection open to the public. So its surprising that one of, if not the, most comprehensive exhibitions by an institutionally-adored artist is posited in the tiny city-state.
Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture reads like a “Bacon For Dummies” class. It is curated by Bacon’s longtime friend and art historian Martin Harrison and will travel to the Guggenheim Bilbao in September, where the focus will shift towards the artist’s relationship with Spain as a cultural haven. It is presented chronologically, from his first documented work in 1929 to a never-before seen work (among his last) in 1991. Bacon’s canvases are interspersed with candid photographs of him, his family, his entourage and, in rare glimpses, his tortured lovers. His movement from abstraction to figurative studies is perceivable to the naked eye. Had you never encountered Bacon before, this exhibition would be your cheat sheet. Each wall text enhances obvious visual parallels Bacon created between his works and those of Tolouse-Lautrec, Soutine, Guilllame and Velásquez. How about some extra credit? Original works from the aforementioned artists are all placed alongside their respective Bacon counterparts.
Initiating a new audience to Bacon and contextualising his complex relationships with those around him seem to be the primary objectives of this exercise. Harrison appears to have taken no risks in the show’s physical presentation or its intellectual thesis. The viewer is meant to proverbially “pay homage” to the major works on display; often hung in complete isolation, dimly lit from above, and in the case of Studies of the Human Body (1970), possessing a sweeping circular mini-stairway leading up to the “altar” where the work hangs. A strategically-placed bench in front permits further adoration, and in one eerie moment I swore that the overhead lights just ever-so-slightly swung to and fro over the triptych; the drama exponentially heightened.
I had been taught to be aware (and wary) of this kind of exultation of contemporary art, in that regression is inevitably triggered; if Duchamp aimed to destroy the “ghost in the machine” of art, signifying that art was nominal and not wedded to history or religion, then this exhibition would have been his worst nightmare. But, if an exhibition can serve as a teaching device or a bridge to the general public, rather than a repeated gesture of condescension in expecting that its viewers immediately apprehend all subject and context related to what’s on view, then it can be successful, too. This thoroughly-researched exhibition was the latter. It was “textbook”, but inspired. It was visually “predictable”, but no less breathtaking in scope and scale.
It didn’t matter that French culture or Monaco wasn’t blatantly advertised, because when you’re presented with some of Francis Bacon’s most outstanding works in tandem with Impressionist gems, none of the lofty preoccupations of the “art world” seem to take hold. Hands-down, this was Bacon at his best.
Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture opened at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco on 2 July and runs until 4 September.
It travels to the Guggenheim Bilbao from September 2016 to January 2017, where the focus will switch to Bacon’s relationship to Spain and Spanish culture.
Extraordinary things occasionally happen to each of us. They can be positive, but mostly they’re not. When these occurrences arrive uninvited into our lives they erode comfortable reality. When we’re in their raucous midst we’re often heard exclaiming ‘I thought this only happened to other people’. FRANCIS BACON’s life was made up entirely of experiences like this. He didn’t seem to mind. They shaped him and they shaped his art. The marks he made on canvas continue to get under our skin and his considerable understanding of the allure of violence still pushes our buttons. He may well be our most individual painter – but I bet he was a better drinking partner.
His worldview and portraits were uniquely unsettling, unbelievably wise. His time for drinking was plentiful and his drinking time was 1950s Soho. England was still letting out sighs of relief, the horrors of WWII absorbing into the mauled fabric of memory. Horrors Bacon avoided fighting in by hiring a German Shepherd from Harrods and sleeping next to it in order to aggravate his asthma on the eve of his army induction. They granted him immediate medical exemption – but not from pulling dismembered bodies from bombed-out buildings or the who-gives-a-flying-fuck attitude of Soho’s dimly-lit dens of iniquity. In these boozers, between fleshpots on a grubby warren-like assembly of back-alleys and streets, bonds were formed and livers were scarred. Drinkers often fell foul of cirrhosis or Sohoitus: a geographic illness causing drinkers to become frayed at the edges and riddled with Bohemian tendencies, dahling. Bacon’s Wrecking Crew was no exception, staffed by a rag-tag collection of aristos, lowlifes, writers, chancers, fighter pilots and career criminals. All of whom lived their lives as theatre, lead characters or walk-ons, beneficiaries or victims of Bacon’s legendary generosity, his precision guile and his character-building put-downs. To be given the nickname ‘Cunty’ in his treasured local, the Colony Room, meant you’d been accepted.
Iconoclastic paintings often reveal as much about their painter as the times in which they were painted. And in much the same way as the work of his friend Lucian Freud, it’s Bacon’s portraits that slosh the truth onto the canvas. The ridiculously good summer exhibition at Tate Liverpool features a wealth of Bacon’s paintings that provoke and jab at the senses, the outcomes of which I’ll not do justice with cod-psychology or highfalutin’ words. It was a familiar feeling: when I left his 2008 retrospective at Tate Britain, I felt as if I’d been watching pure violence from a moving train. Bacon himself said that, “If I could express what I mean with words, I wouldn’t bother painting it.” It remained his life’s desire to capture the human scream on canvas, obsessed as he was by atrocity’s open mouth. It was his belief that he’d failed in this endeavour, and countless scrapped paintings (he estimated he destroyed nine-tenths of his paintings, “very probably the best ones, too”) act as proof of this unwavering ambition. He was careless with these discarded paintings and they often fell into the wrong hands; approaching the height of his fame, one appeared in a London gallery. Bacon bought it for thousands, stamped it to shit on the pavement outside the gallery and then went for oysters at his favourite restaurant. Fuck you.
The new exhibition’s title, Invisible Rooms, refers to the boxes he painted around his subjects: these became an essential part of his painterly repertoire although they were chiefly used to draw his eye. But they have another, far more devious, effect: they trap the subject against their will, perpetually howling for their lives. It is cage-fighting on canvas. Although he never worked on portraits with the sitter present, he always referred to the work he did to their faces as ‘doing them an injury’. Given that he often painted people he cared for, we arrive at an insight: hurting those we love. An accomplished sadist, Bacon believed that true love and artistic aspirations were incompatible: tempestuous is the one word that applies to his affairs of the heart. Two paintings in this exhibition, Study For A Portrait Of P.L, No.2 and Three Figures And Portrait, act as silent biographers of his fondness for turmoil. Both are of significant partners, both of whom died tragic deaths on the eves of pivotal solo shows: Peter Lacy the night before the 1962 Tate Gallery show and George Dyer the night before his show Grand Palais in Paris, 1971. Fuck me.
Peter Lacy was a fighter pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain and was held captive by Sohoitus, precisely where he met Bacon. Lacy was a talented pianist who squandered much of his sizeable inheritance on promoting a pop group. Forever in a pristine white suit and bow tie, he is described by Bacon as quintessentially English with “the face of a poet who has dropped in to remark that life after death is tolerable”. Needless to say, he liked a drink. And he ended up playing in a piano bar in Tangiers, soundtracking the bar’s tyrannical owner stuffing cannabis in the asses of exotic birds he then sold for export. Tangiers at this time was heaving with spies, gigolos, smugglers, countless brothels and proper hedonists. Tangiers made Ibiza look like the Norfolk Broads. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch there and Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall all fell for its badman charms. It was also the preferred playground of the latterly-born English aristocrats; the ones set not to inherit the bulk of the family money. Tangiers was small beer; here they could live like white royalty and behave as such, creating a behind-closed-doors lawless atmosphere in open water in which Lacy revelled and Bacon swam on frequent holidays. Their rows were catastrophic; one such saw the end of 30 paintings, Lacy slashing them in a fit of rage before they could be shipped to New York for his first stateside show. Bacon, ever the nihilist, later confessed he “rather enjoyed” watching him do it. It was that kind of relationship: although Bacon felt privileged to have known him and painted him frequently, they never fully-clicked in late-fifties Soho, and Moroccan distance settled their differences in a way proximity never could. In May 1962 Bacon was in the Colony Room the day after his first solo Tate show, opening wads of praise-filled telegrams from around the globe: he had arrived on the world art stage and the champagne was flowing. The last telegram he opened informed him Peter Lacy had died the night before.
George Dyer haunts plenty of Bacon’s paintings. And there are many myths about their relationship – which is surprising because the truth is eye-watering enough. Despite a genuine affection and an undeniable connection, it wasn’t to be. Dyer was an East End petty crook with old-fashioned manners who (you guessed it) knew the Krays. And it was his air of violence that attracted him to Bacon – he liked ‘em rough. And Dyer was drawn, moth to flame, to Bacon’s assured manner and considerable cultural clout. Before long, Dyer was a kept man; a situation that exacerbated the despair that underlined his savage ways. As so often happens in imbalanced relationships, one half loses their identity as it becomes subsumed by the power of the other. When this unfolded, shit got messy real quick. They were arguing on holiday, screaming ab-dabs and bitch-slaps, when Bacon stormed from the bedroom headed for the hotel bar. Whilst drinking champagne a call came through to say that George had taken an overdose, but that Mr Bacon would be glad to hear he’d been saved by the house doctor. Bacon asked the manager if the doctor was still with him, the manager replied yes: without missing a beat Bacon said, “Then tell him to write another prescription so he can do the job properly.” When they got back to Blighty, George Orwell’s wife, Sonia, hired a hit man to kill Dyer: you really couldn’t make it up. News of the contract skulked around the back streets of Soho and ended up in the ear of Lucian Freud, who wrote to Sonia Orwell instructing her to call Blond Billy the hit man off. He ended the letter, “With friends like you I really don’t need enemies.” Along with a large group of friends including Sonia Orwell, Bacon and Dyer took their caustic dance to Paris for the grand opening of his show at the Grand Palais. At the Hotel St Peres, Dyer was found dead on the toilet: suicide. The news was kept hush-hush but inevitably some of the French dignitaries found out. When Bacon was showing the Minister of the Arts around the exhibition, the first painting that caught the Minister’s eye was a portrait of Dyer on the toilet: a reverberating image of his actual death hours before, blood spilling from every orifice.
Francis Bacon lived what he painted and painted what he lived. Capturing these experiences on canvas was his greatest gift to us: it gives us the luxury of the voyeur without the discomfort of turmoil. His work is the sea milliseconds before the shark attacks, the air turning thick when someone pulls a knife. The paintings in this exhibition are brooding masterpieces, touched by something impossible to explain. His power is undiminished by time. I’m writing this on the day a discarded pair of his paint-splattered gloves sold for £7,000 at auction. They were both left-handed. I’m reliably informed Bacon held his drink in his right. Here’s looking at you, Cunty.
Francis Bacon, Study For A Portrait Of P.L, No.2, 1957
London’s June sales ended on a high note with Christie’s much-anticipated 250th-anniversary auction, Defining British Art. The house had set aside much of its prime material for this curated session and was rewarded with a strong showing — a final tally of £99,479,500 ($133 million), four artist records set — that more than made up for the relatively mediocre performance of its previous auctions this week and last.
The sale was remarkable for the efforts the house made to win consignments of material that it had auctioned previously, in some cases, in the same room. Ironically, because it coincided with a decline in the pound following the Brexit vote, international players might have had an advantage in bidding for works one would expect to appeal to a more local crowd.
Francis Bacon’s 1968 Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe brought £20,242,500 ($27 million), about what was expected. Other versions of the work are in the Beyeler Foundation and the Reina Sofia. This one might have fetched a higher sum if the markets weren’t in turmoil, but that’s up for debate.
Though this panoramic portrait of "the madness of the 20th-century art world" is immensely entertaining, it can’t be said that any of the characters represented were admirable or worthy of emulation. Indeed, rarely can there have been a more obnoxious and grotesque crew — and they were like this on purpose.
Lucian Freud, for example, evinced "a great desire to be rude for the sheer love of the thing", according to Frances Partridge, one of the last of the Bloomsberries. Francis Bacon believed cruelty was a form of moral honesty. He wished, says Jon Lys Turner, to "push excess to its furthest limits and offend without compunction". Bacon and Freud spent their adult lives seeking opportunities to witness "human interplay in a raw, raucous, unconstrained and sometimes obscene state". Perhaps that’s why Bacon wore fishnet stockings under his trousers and administered "a cornflour enema up his anus so that it would pour out during sexual activity with [his boyfriend George] Dyer"?
In this book, Bacon, and the rest of the Colony Club mob, are discussed in relation to a pair of minor artists, Dicky Chopping (1917-2008) and Denis Wirth-Miller (1915-2010), who kept open house in Wivenhoe, Essex. They acquired their premises on the quay in 1945, making repairs using spare parts from coffins.
The rambling, knocked-through cottage, known as the Storehouse, was rat-infested and often flooded. On one occasion it also caught fire. The insurance claim stated that the conflagration was caused by "a passing jackdaw with a glowing cigarette in its beak". Terrence Conran designed the new kitchen and Robert Carrier dropped by to cook omelettes.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller were a pair of sadomasochistic queens who lived together for 70 gruesome years. Chopping went to a minor public school and was obsessed with John Gielgud — but it was Wirth-Miller who succeeded in being picked up by the great Shakespearean and was fellated by him "to the sounds of muffled chocking". This was because Gielgud had thoughtfully taken his false teeth out first.
Wirth-Miller, who was jailed for nine months for having homosexual sex in a "bombed-out Blitz slum street" during the war, affected an upper-class accent and said his father was shot as a spy in the Tower of London. In fact, he was born in Folkestone, where his mother was a maid and his father ran a hotel.
Wirth-Miller "lost his virginity to an Indian cricketer" on the promenade in Folkestone and fell in with Chopping on the fringes of Fritzrovia, where everyone was drunk and debauched and enjoyed "the ensuing chaos". The artist Nina Hamnett, for example, "was fond of declaring that Modigliani had told her she had the best breasts in Europe". She later flung herself from the window of her top-floor flat and was impaled on the railings.
Indeed, none of these artists who flocked to Wivenhoe fared well. Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were scarcely house-trained. Chopping and Wirth-Miller would find that "they frequently smashed glasses and drank to excess, and they would carry on even after vomiting". Indeed, they would prise up the floorboards and be sick into the voids. Colquhoun died of alcoholism in 1962. four years later MacBryde was knocked down and killed after emerging from a pub wearing a kilt. John Minton, who was mocked for his "parochial and constrained draughtsmanship" - i.e. he could draw - and was always comatose on the floor, committed suicide with tablets, as did Keith Vaughan.
The survivor was Bacon. Wirth-Miller, in Turner’s account, was a minor artist, thoroughly over-shadowed by Bacon, professionally and personally. Bacon, for example, had retrospectives at the Tate and in Paris. Wirth-Miller exhibited at the Wivenhoe Arts club. Bacon, indeed, mocked Wirth-Miller’s pictures of bulrushes and mudflats in the Essex marshes.
Nevertheless, although Bacon bought a house of his own locally, he scarcely used it, preferring to share a studio at the Storehouse, using the same paints and canvas as Wirth-Miller. Turner says "their styles may have rubbed off on each other and, in the case of some unattributed works discovered in Wirth-Miller’s studio after his death, it is difficult to tell which painter is responsible". Indeed, the disputed works in the plate section are the best Bacons I have seen, especially the shape-shifting hounds and a ghostly figure emerging through a door frame
Chopping, in his turn, didn’t wish to compete. He was more of an illustrator and became an expert in the painstaking depiction of insects, animals and plants for Penguin. His books about butterflies and flowers became bestsellers, but his break-through came when Ian Fleming commissioned him to design the jackets for the James Bond novels.
The Chopping skulls, bluebottles and guns became as integral to the 007 image as the immaculate dinner jackets and dry martini cocktails. chopping became well connected enough to be invited to a society wedding, where Wirth-Miller was accidentally hit in the testicles by an 11-year old Prince Charles during an electricity blackout.
Nevertheless, it is not the work that is the focus of Turner’s concerns, but the terrible lives that these people felt compelled to lead. Was the constant combativeness their reaction to the expectations of how artists and homosexuals were traditionally meant to carry on? Was it some sort of statement about their aversion to the virtues of middle-class neatness and decorum? ("Your studio is far too tidy. Personally I like a mess," Minton told Wirth-Miller.)
Bacon may have worn foundation and rouge and put boot polish on his hair, and he may have lived with his nanny in Cromwell Place ("she would take the coats and serve the guests drinks"), but he was happiest when, for instance, one of his partners knocked out a tooth during a fight outside the St Ives harbourside pub, the Sloop Inn.
When some younger neighbours — the Bee Gees as it happened — complained about the noise in Wirth-Miller and Chopping’s London home, Bacon flung an empty champagne bottle through their window. Nor was he unduly discombobulated, in public at least, by the suicide of Dyer, shortly before his big Paris exhibition in 1971. "Rather than damaging his artistic reputation," says the author, "the story only inflated the Francis Bacon legend."
Chopping and Wirth-Miller were always squabbling. The fashion designer, Zandra Rhodes found them facing each other with knives at the ready. The first problem was the effect of chronic financial insecurity. To make ends meet they once worked as gardeners in a convent, until sacked when some wigs they had given the nuns for a production of The Sound of Music turned out to have been used previously in a drag act
The second bone of contention was sexual jealousy. "It is incredibly difficult," a well-meaning friend told Chopping and Wirth-Miller, "to sustain a kind, loving relationship with endless, promiscuous fucking," e.g. with a spanking gardener in Stockwell and a man in the lift at the British Museum. Chopping and Wirth-Miller treasured a biscuit tin filled with the brass buttons they had snipped from the uniforms of obliging soldiers. Turner has counted more than 200 buttons.
Old age made them worse. Wirth-Miller dyed his hair black and came to resemble Hitler — apt perhaps as the Wirth-Millers were originally Warthmullers from Bavaria. Chopping went bald and purchased a hairpiece, which lifted clean off his head when he removed his motorcycle helmet. They went on holiday to France with Bacon, who sat in the back of the car "with a handkerchief tied round his head, frequently complaining". They dumped him at a railway station. When next they met in Essex, bacon went into an antique shop, bought a plate for £40, smashed it over Wirth-Miller’s head, and said: "Now will you fucking shut up?"
Bacon died in Madrid in 1992 and his two friends rapidly slipped into obscurity. In 2005 they became one of the first gay couples to form a civil partnership. Dementia set in, however, and when Chopping slipped on the floor, Wirth-Miller left him there in agony for days. "He deserved it because he was so irritating," was his excuse. Chopping died in 2008, aged 91, Wirth-Miller two years later, a week shy of his 95th birthday. People have been eagerly buying up Wirth-Miller’s pictures to scrape the paint off, hoping to find a lost Bacon underneath.
BY ANDREW HOLLERAN
ONE OF THE THINGS we learn from critic Michael Peppiatt’s memoir of his decades-long friendship with the British painter Francis Bacon is that the way Bacon met his lover George Dyer in the 1998 film Love Is the Devil is not how it happened in real life. In the movie, they meet when Dyer (played by Daniel Craig) comes crashing through the skylight of Bacon’s (Derek Jacobi) studio during a robbery attempt. In fact, Bacon tells Peppiatt in Francis Bacon in Your Blood, Dyer simply saw the painter and his pals in a club in London and introduced himself, because they seemed to be having a good time.
A good time is only one way to describe what Bacon called “the sort of gilded gutter life” he lived, “constantly surrounded by nothing but drunks, layabouts and crooks”—i.e., the regulars at the Colony Room, a legendary SoHo dive that Bacon favored. The doyenne of the Colony Room, a lesbian named Muriel Belcher, never let the man she liked to call her “daughter” think too much of himself. In one scene, when someone refers to the painter as a superstar, she snaps, “You’re not a superstar, dear, you’re just a cunt.” “Well, I suppose I am,” Francis replies, almost gratefully. “If you say so.” Upon which another habitué has the final word: “I don’t care who calls who what. We’d all be better off dead. The whole lot of us.”
The Colony Room was a Joe Orton play come to life. The put-downs and teasing are cruel and hilarious. Death, Bacon tells Peppiatt, is what it’s all about. But meanwhile, “we might as well be as brilliant as we can be.” Bacon’s paintings had indeed made him a superstar by the time Peppiatt, an undergraduate at Cambridge trying to edit an arts magazine, came to London to interview him. But this did not prevent another of the barflies from telling Bacon to his face: “You’re a pig in name and a pig in nature,” which doesn’t bother him at all. As Bacon puts it: “I always think of real friendship as where two people can tear each other to pieces.”
What was it about postwar England that produced Joe Orton, the Angry Young Men, the Kray Twins, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Brutalist architecture, and Francis Bacon? Bacon, who read Nietzsche when he was a young layabout himself, had a rather dark world view, fueled by considerable alcohol consumption. “Well, this is my life,” he says, sipping cognac. “From bar to bar, person to person.” Peppiatt’s book is based on what used to be called table-talk—though here, bar, pub, studio or restaurant might be a better prefix. As the years pass Peppiatt realizes that Bacon says the same things over and over, so that he doesn’t have to write them down—they will be repeated—though he goes back after their bar crawls and records them anyway, just as Boswell copied down Samuel Johnson’s conversation. His memories, recalled here in the present tense, are an ongoing notation of not only what Bacon said but what wines were consumed, which ones sent back, which ones spat out—which makes his book an oenophile’s delight.
There’s also whiskey, cognac, and champagne. “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!” Bacon cries when he buys yet another round. “I myself always want the best of everything for myself and for my friends. I want the best food and the best wine I can get as well as the most excitement and the most interesting people around.” And he’s got the money to have all that. By the time Peppiatt shows up, Bacon’s paintings are selling for enormous sums (and still are—in 2013 a Bacon painting sold at auction for a record $142.4 million). It’s money Bacon spends as fast as it comes in, not only tipping extravagantly, treating people to drinks and dinners, but offering to help Peppiatt out the minute a hint of need arises—something at which Peppiatt draws the line, though help is given nonetheless in other ways.
Indeed, this memoir is really the story of how the narrator eventually finds his place in the world with Bacon’s help. “Listen, Michael,” the painter says at the outset, “you’ve got looks, you’ve got charm and you’ve got intelligence. Your life’s only just beginning, you’ve got everything before you. You can go anywhere and have anyone you want.” Peppiatt sees himself quite differently: as “an obscure young man filled with self-doubt and painfully adrift in the universe.” Or, as Sonia Orwell puts it, when Bacon urges her to include the Cambridge student in a dinner party: “Well, I suppose you can come if you think you’ll fit in, but I should warn you you’ll be out of your depth intellectually, and probably socially.” Bacon doesn’t see it that way. His advice to his young friend, when Peppiatt, still in school, doesn’t know what he wants to be, is simple: “Drift and see.” And that’s just what Peppiatt does—in Bacon’s glittering wake. He ends up not only going to the dinner party but having sex with Sonia Orwell while her former lover, Cyril Connolly, paces up and down in the corridor outside. And he will go on to write at least five books on Bacon, along with others on Giacometti, Miró, and other artists.
Peppiatt is drawn to homosexuals, which makes him wonder about himself; but in Barcelona, when he gives it a try and lets a man kiss him on the mouth, he is so revolted that he jumps up and runs out of the apartment. In fact, for Bacon, part of Peppiatt’s attraction is that he’s straight—a straight man who is waiting to be “turned.” “I think there are a great many men who don’t really know what they are sexually,” says Bacon. “Often of course they’re neither one thing nor the other. And then some of them who are really homosexual simply can’t accept it. They probably think it’s not manly or something.”
But in Peppiatt’s case this never happens. Something else happens instead: Bacon becomes for Peppiatt a father figure. Estranged from his own father—a difficult manic-depressive—the young drifter is the perfect audience for Bacon’s bleakness. Indeed, quotes cannot convey the theatrical magnetism of Bacon’s mono-logs, the black humor that makes one think of an English drawing room comedy set in an abattoir, but Peppiatt is mesmerized. Among the aphorisms: “We all live off one another. You have only to look at the chop on your plate to see that.” “We go from nothing to nothing.” “Life’s a charade.” And: “We’re all on our way to becoming dead meat. … And that’s all there is.”
Death and disaster are always in the wings in Bacon’s universe—summoned up with the sort of wit Mary McCarthy once called in an essay on Oscar Wilde “the comedy of heartlessness.” On encountering plastic flowers in a Parisian salon, Bacon hisses: “Why can’t she have real flowers? The whole point of flowers it that they die.” On his closest sibling: “My sister Winnie … had one catastrophe after another, even before she developed multiple sclerosis. She only had to get on a train for it to burst into flames.” On being told a man has just murdered his girlfriend and then turned the gun on himself: “Well, I suppose it’s a gesture. But it’s a gesture one can make only once.” And then there’s the horrified waiter in a Parisian restaurant the night Bacon wrests the bottle of wine from him and empties it into his friends’ glasses. “But Monsieur,” the waiter says, “those are the dregs.” “But I love the dregs,” Bacon replies, beaming up at him. “The dregs are what I prefer.”
And then there’s the suicide of George Dyer on the very day that Bacon is receiving accolades at the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Grand Palais. Again one thinks of Joe Orton—whose lover Kenneth Halliwell bashed Orton’s head in with a hammer the day before Orton would go off in a limousine to work on a screenplay for the Beatles. Both Halliwell and Dyer sensed they were losing lovers who were far more successful than they. Dyer had entered Bacon’s life as an East End tough but proved to be far less powerful than the homosexual who took him in. “He didn’t know who he was,” Bacon tells Peppiatt. “Most men never do.” Dyer was trying to drink himself to death—though the suicide involved pills as well. After that Bacon acquired another companion from the East End, John Edwards, to whom he left his eleven-million-pound estate, and another companion named José, a Spanish financier who was, Bacon tells Peppiatt, not just “well endowed, but perhaps too well endowed.” But by that point Bacon is complaining about old age and claiming that he can no longer feel anything for anyone.
So claustrophobic is this round of dinners and drinks—these benders that go on night after night, that move from hotels like Claridge’s to dives like the Colony Room—that we forget time is passing, which makes it a shock when Peppiatt announces that twelve years have passed, their friend Sonia Orwell is dead, and he is having a nervous breakdown over the lack of success in his own life. But then he acquires a magazine, Art International, a wife, and his first child; and when he goes to London and finds himself having a business lunch at the Ritz a few tables away from Bacon and Peter Bogdanovich, it is not only the first time we’ve seen them eating separately, but a strangely poignant moment because of that. The next day, however, Bacon calls to invite Peppiatt on another of the arduous booze slogs that leave Peppiatt wondering how Bacon, much older than he, can do it.
BACON KNEW people hated his work—Punch published a cartoon showing people going into a Bacon show and then coming out, retching—but he was celebrated for it when he was alive, and he became very rich. The art critic John Russell said that British painting could be divided into Before and After Bacon. Why? For one thing, there is a singularity, a unique look to his paintings, whatever one thinks of them. One of Peppiatt’s goals is to find where the art came from; but Bacon, like so many artists, is not about to say. It all happens by chance, he claims, while painting, though the camera has left painters with so few options that he wonders if painting can only come now from a painter’s “critical faculties.” Bacon said he wanted to find the one image that would wipe out all others. Abstract art he found pointless—“nothing comes from nothing”—and he refused to be called an Expressionist. (“I have nothing to express.”) “All painting,” he said, “well, all art, is about sensation. Or at least it should be. After all, life itself is about sensation.”
The sensation Bacon’s painting produces is usually unpleasant. Faces look as if they are covered with nylon stockings, or cut away to expose the tendon and bone beneath; figures are reduced to a tiny space on the canvas, as if they are in a cell being tortured, or shrinking away to nothingness. Much of Bacon’s work looks like the incision a doctor has made and then pulled back with clamps so he can get to the tumour—a glimpse of bone, and muscle, and blood, and tendon. There is a sense of flayed flesh, of nightmares and silent screams. Bacon defended himself by saying every day the newspaper contained horrors that surpassed anything in his art.
Peppiatt compares Bacon to Jekyll and Hyde: after painting these horrific images, he goes out and becomes this bon vivant who “raises the temperature” of every room he enters, this generous host who loves to eat and booze and talk and laugh—until he turns on you, which Peppiatt knows will happen to him eventually, and does, especially when he tells Bacon that he is about to become a father. “And I hope,” Francis repeats, his face going white with fury, “I just hope that if it’s a monster or something, or even if the thing doesn’t have all what’s called its five fingers and all its five toes, you’ll just do it in and get rid of it. Do you see? Do you see what I mean? Just do it in and get rid of it altogether.”
Peppiatt’s memoir does not attempt to explain this outburst. It’s not a biography. It does not go into the moment Bacon’s father threw him out of the house after finding him standing in front of his mother’s mirror admiring himself in her clothes, or his early affairs with older men, one of them a brutal sadist. There are references to his amatory history; but it’s hardly the whole story—though what a story it is! It’s startling to hear that Bacon was once shy. “But I’ve got over that now, and I’ve worked a great deal on myself, because I thought there’s really no point in being both old and shy.” As for advancing years: “Old age is horrible. Horrible.” “It’s like having a terrible disease, and there’s nothing, nothing, you can do about it.” As for his sexuality: “You know, I don’t actually like what are called homosexuals, and I hate it when they go on and on about being queer. I actually prefer men who aren’t queer, or who don’t think they are. In the beginning at least. Afterwards, of course, they’re just as boring as the others.”
All this is a far cry from the diaries David Plante has recently published about his relationship with Stephen Spender—but then the circle around Stephen Spender gathers at small dinners and musical evenings, while the circle around Bacon tends to end in a dive in Paris where the Arab men are so menacing that Peppiatt worries Bacon will be found the next day beaten up in the street. Still, it’s the same era. At one point Sonia Orwell is even heard on the phone inviting someone to a dinner at which Nikos Stangos and “a very talented American writer named David Plante” will be present. There are other curious cameos in this book. Peppiatt even finds himself in a Parisian restaurant with Marlene Dietrich, whose conversation with a couple at a nearby table he strains to hear, though when he does, all she’s saying, it turns out, is: “My husband never let me eat hot dogs.”
And the painter Lucian Freud is, of course, here—he and Bacon were great friends till they had a falling out neither one would explain, so it’s impossible to know if it’s before or after their rupture that Bacon tells Peppiatt that Freud once tried to be homosexual but failed, though “Lucian has what’s called the smallest cock in England and of course you can’t go far in the queer world with that.” There is also a French writer named Michel Leiris, who has an ongoing discussion with Bacon about the difference between realism and reality and who—odd for a writer—arrives at every dinner in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. But then the pattern of Bacon’s life is very High-Low: in London, the Connaught, in Paris, the Ritz, followed by drinks with butchers at Les Halles and a bar popular with Algerians. Bacon is never at a loss, not even on the day of his great show at the Grand Palais when news reaches him that Dyer has committed suicide in their hotel room—the very room that Bacon reserves for himself on later trips to Paris, to Peppiatt’s astonishment. But then, as Bacon observes elsewhere, “One is never hard enough on oneself.”
Francis Bacon in Your Blood is so enthralling in part because, whatever you think of the art, Bacon is such a welcome corrective to our era of gay marriage, glaad, and service in the military—the age of what a friend calls the White Picket Fence. At the Colony Room, the gay bar from hell, you are in an era of booze and hurt and homophobia, and a cruelty that seems peculiarly English, though part of the viciousness is simply the coldness gay men bring to appearances. “When I want to know what someone looks like,” says Bacon, “I’d never ask a woman. I’d always ask a queer. They’re very accurate. After all, they spend most of their time pulling other people’s appearance to pieces.” Which he proceeds to do himself after a dinner with Michel Leiris: “ I kept looking at the way those veins stuck out on Michel’s temples and wondered what would happen if I pricked them with my fork. I suppose they’d just burst.” But this is too mean even for Peppiatt, who replies, “Well, why don’t you give it a go?” and then departs before they can have a row. To his credit, Peppiatt knows just when to push it and when to drop it, and that’s how he manages to stay friends with this tough old queen (who, like Proust, was asthmatic) for so many years—so many years that when Bacon dies in 1995, and Peppiatt, on a visit to Manhattan, finds the news on the front page of The New York Times, he can only go into the men’s room of his hotel lobby and dry retch. Francis Bacon in Your Blood is a gutsy embrace of a man whose companionship we can experience vicariously only because Peppiatt hung in there long enough to be Boswell to Bacon’s Johnson.
MARCO TONELLI
XXth Century was the century that changed in a radical way the subject and the language of art, since the birth of abstraction during the period of the so-called “avantgarde” to end with conceptual art during the Sixties, of whom in our days we still feel its influences on art. In all this painting passed profound mutations, preserving the swing between abstraction and figuration as they were two different ways not only of painting, but also of thinking reality itself. On the background rests the subject matter of a pictorial work of art respect not only respect to its style and iconography, but to the intentions of the creator, his vision of history of art, his way of thinking the contemporaneity.
Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, two of the most influential painters of XXth century, having represented two opposing tendencies of abstract and figurative painting, share, contrary to the appearances and in a literal meaning, the same pictorial background, fact that can’t be considered a chance, also if the likeness in itself doesn’t say anything but must be explained and motivated.
This different pictorial conception mean indeed a different kind of tension between foreground and background, a kind of dynamic contrast that on the side of Rothko was settled in a slow but clearly perceivable movement of chromatic planes, of emergences of monochromatic spaces, of real and spiritual contrasts between light and darkness, while on the side of Bacon we can talk of a violent opposition between convulsed, expressive figures and faces with uniform, estranging and cool backgrounds. The image that best of all may synthesize these different approaches to the painting is for Rothko an ancient painted wall of a fresco of the XVth Century or of a Russian iconostasis, while for Bacon we can talk o a real bullfight, a mortal combat between the man as an artist and the painting as an animal.
The purpose of this article is to illustrate the secret complicity and analogies between the paintings of Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, the two most important protagonists of painting of the XXth Century, and is to try to illustrate psychological and cultural subjects that are behind their works.
What joins both Bacon and Rothko, respect to a lot of painters, friends and contemporaries of theirs, is the fact that the two painters had in common a cultural background made with some identical book and authors, who formed a point of reference for all those artists who tried to match and resolve the question posed from Cubism first while and Surrealism second while about the end of traditional painting, in favour of subjects closer to the tensions and dramas of the contemporary man, the more after the tragedies of the two World Wars and the genocide of the Jews, which were for Rothko and Bacon, in different way, nodal points of their vision of the world and the art of their time.
Francis Bacon (Dublin, 1909–Madrid, 1992) and Mark Rothko (Dvinsk, 1903– New York, 1970) are two of the most important painters of the second half of the XXth Century (and perhaps of all the XXth Century) respectively in the field of figurative and abstract painting. None of them made any sculpture but dedicated themselves exclusively to painting and both painted triptychs, though Bacon in a more extensive way than Rothko. One can safely say that Bacon and Rothko are at the antipodes and that is difficult to find a more contrasting pair in the history of art.
Bacon was a child during World World I, lived in Ireland during the war of Independence of IRA and Sinn Fein, was in London during the bombings of World World II: all his early life was spent amidst the violence of war.
Rothko lived in Russia in the Jewish district under Imperial Russia, the so-called Pale of Settlement, during years of pogroms and was the only one of his family (he had three siblings) to attend a Talmudic school (from ages four to ten) before his family emigrated to the United States in 1913.
Though we don’t know from Rothko if he ever spoke about Bacon, we know what Bacon said about Rothko. In 1985, in an interview to Melvin Bragg for The South Bank Show, Bacon answered the question about the American born Lithuanian painter: “Rothko completely escaped me. I always used to think that abstract painting might at least bring you the most lovely, vibrant colours, but if you want to be really depressed for the rest of the day, you’ll go into that room [the room dedicated to the Rothko’s paintings in the Tate Gallery of London]. I suppose you can say that’s a quality, it’s just that I hate that dirty maroon colour he’s used in those things, and if I wanted to be depressed, I’d go in for a few hours into that Rothko room to look at maroon. I think that’s the most dreary painting that’s ever been made”. And in many other interviews Bacon spoke often of Rothko, unprovoked by the interviewer, we could say obsessively, deploring the absence of a subject in the paintings of the latter.
The word “dreary” in modern English means depressive, boring, gloomy, sorrowful, monotonous, dull, but in the original meaning, as Jorge Luis Borges noted in the Norton Lectures on poetry held in Harvard in 1967–1968, its meaning was related to blood, bloodthirsty, involving bloodshed and killing: it meant literally “blood-stained”.
Bacon painted a lot of blood in his work, from bodies with bloody wounds to crucifixions to real stains of blood on the floor, on the pavement, on chairs, on dresses, on mattresses. Rothko never painted a bloody scene in the literal sense, but all his painting are about death and his own suicide testifies to some tragic sense of life during his existence.
Bacon and Rothko had some other points of convergence, first of all their love for myth and tragedies. Both painted works dedicated to the only extant Trilogy of Eschylus, The Oresteia, or to Oedipus and loved the topic text by Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. The Oresteia and The Birth of Tragedy comprised the heart of their iconographies and literary urges.
During the Forties Rothko, after a series of works dedicated to Oedipus, Tiresias, Antigone and other tragic characters of Greek mythology, titled one of his works The Omen of the Eagle, taking the inspiration from a single line of the first act of The Oresteia: Agamennon.
It is no accident that the bloody myth of the Eumenides and Orestes, who took vengeance of the assassination of his father by the mother herself, Clytemnestra, to vindicate the sacrificial murder of her daughter Iphigenia in the Iliad (the omen of the eagle who convinced Agamemnon, bride of Clytemnestra, to kill her daughter and leave for Troy) was used in the same years by Bacon and Rothko in their paintings, but also by Eliot and Sartre and in their literary and theatrical pieces, respectively The Family Reunion of 1939 and The Flies of 1943.
Rothko believed the myth to be the only reality that an artist must paint to transmit the meaning of his age, even if in our time we don’t have any more myths, but must try to find a new mythological language to express reality. Bacon, on the other hand, would paint examples of absolute grandeur, as the Portrait of Innocence X by Velazquez, who for Bacon himself was “the best painting in the world”, and then crucifixions or very evil men, taking inspiration from the the iconograpahies of Nazi and Fascist Propaganda, with the aim “to produce a latter-day version of what is commonly termed history painting”1. Both for Bacon and Rothko the artist is seen as a hero who takes the burden of the tragedy of life of all humanity. Nietzsche, in The Birth of the Tragedy had written about the hero as a cathartic figure and of ancient Greeks who could bear the sorrow of life thanks to the sublimation on the tragic scene of a theatre. But Bacon felt like Rothko the problem of the contemporary myth in relation to a tragic art, as he said very explicitly to David Sylvester: “I one could find a valid myth today where there was the distance between grandeur and its fall of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, it would be tremendously helpful. But when you are outside a tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situation as closely to one’s own nervous system as one possibly can”2
Rothko, on the other hand, wrote that Leonardo and Titian were able, without making recourse to the myth but on a technical level, to substitute a myth with another one, that of sensuality. Rothko, in a few words saw, through the unity of space of the Venetian light of Titian and the atmosphere of Leonardo, the opening toward new spaces and mythological realities. Bacon told he didn’t want to illustrate in an anedoctical sense the facts of reality, but to represent a “sensational image” of reality, that is his instinctive participation to the power of images, allowing the fact itself to impress on the canvas his truth, unifying image and sensation. Bacon and Rothko felt in a similar but opponent way the tragedy of life and when Rothko, at the end of his existence, makes the famous series of thirteen canvases for the Chapel of Houston projected by the architect Philip Johnson, he hangs on the walls of the church very gloomy paintings of which six are assembled like triptychs, a format that Bacon used for all his life, in particular for three works dedicated to the theme of his major crucifixions, painted in 1944 (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion), in 1962 (Three Studies for a Crucifixion) and in 1965 (Crucifixion).
One evident difference between Rothko and Bacon is, needless to say, the absence of figures in the first and the presence of it in the second, but if we read what Rothko said about abstraction, that “I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationships between colours and forms, but to express fundamental human emotions, such as tragedy, ecstasy, extinction”, we should revise the concept of abstraction and figurative expression, or at least of realism. For Rothko violence is the humus of his works and the only possible equilibrium is the moment which “precedes the instant of the disaster”. Bacon himself could have said similar words.
In the words by the English writer Jonathan Littell, both Bacon and Rothko “considered their paintings as, in a sense, a “theatre” or an “arena” [Bacon made some works about bullfighting]; both reasoned in terms of shallow space; and both understood, and mastered, the use of tonal as opposed to value contrast to manipulate this space as well as to convey primal emotions”.3
Maybe Bacon and Rothko painted the same thing (that tragic side of the life) but seen in different instants and with different aims. Rothko imagined his art as a sort of entombment and resurrection, a quest for death and a search for the transcendence, Bacon of suffering without hope and death without resurrection, but both tried to paint the inner core of reality of human beings and of their private lives. Martin Harrison, the curator of the catalogue raisonnè of Bacon, has said that one specific work of Rothko, published on the American issue of April 1950 in Vogue, influenced Bacon’s work Painting from 1950!4
For Rothko the relationship of death with art was very important, as he said expressly to the French painter Pierre Soulages: “All art is in relation with death”. In order to understand where the sense of tragedy and beauty, blood and resurrection in the painting of Rothko come from, as he grew up in the rabbinic tradition of Talmud, it can be useful to quote from the words of Rabbi Rav Kook, born in Latvia, Greve, in 1865 (very close to the native town of Rothko), who in 1908, only two years after the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement: “Here and there, in the dispersion of our brothers, there is nothing but disorder and darkness; blood is spilled, bodies are trampled, skulls are crushed, houses, shops and all the ornaments are pillaged and looted…The important realm of the fine arts can truly open the gates of subsistence to many families. It will give crushed spirits a clear and enlightening vision of the beauty of life and nature”5. That is, art could be the tool to give a sense of resurrection to the suffering Jews!
Bacon blew away the historical code of images and the Christian iconography of the popes, while Rothko tried to convey that tension as the end of the physical suffering, in order to arrive to a kind of fusion of dualisms and contradictions of history and existence.
By comparing Rothko and Bacon we cannot help but try to understand the meaning of the words “reality” and “realism” for both: two completely different ways of approaching reality through the point of view of painting, but similar in their fundamental essence.
For Bacon, reality was the subject matter of art and for this reason he saw Rothko as merely decorative, lacking of apparent subject matter. The contemporary artist, in the words of Bacon, since the myths are past and there is not tradition, “works according to his own nervous system” and “realism” means to be close to “one’s own inner self”. Rothko too, in the end of the myths and the loos of tradition of the modern art, saw the dramatic essence of the existence of the contemporary artist. For him the new reality of the artist (not by chance Artist reality, written between 1940 and 1941, is the title of his fundamental book about his vision of art) is the sensuality, that is the abstraction of the human emotions in terms of forms, pictorial spaces, colours, rhythms of a painting to express the inner self of men.
The fact itself that a lot of paintings by Bacon, only if we take out the bodies of his figures, become as if by magic identical to works by Rothko, demonstrates that two of the most important and tragic artists of XXth Century had a common thin red line. The most emblematic example in this case is in the painting Blood on Pavement by Bacon of 1984 and Untitled (Black and Gray) by Rothko of 1970. David Sylvester, who was the major and more acute critic of Bacon during his life, was sure that Bacon had in mind exactly the painting of Rothko while making his one.
We could end synthesizing this double link between Rothko and Bacon once again with the words of Littell: “Bacon obviously looked long and hard at Rothko, and years after his death continued working both with and against him: consider, for instance, the crimson background in the outer panels of the 1988 Second Version of Triptych 1944. His Blood on Pavement, painted in 1988, is a late Rothko”6.
Reality, subject matter, abstraction, figuration, are only some key words which constitute the essential themes by which we can articulate and put in motion the polarity between Bacon and Rothko. Though normally these are fundamental and general themes which every painter faced and put at the base of his work, only the big master could give concrete form and body to those words, making them objective qualities of their painting and transforming them in philosophical and existential reasons, not only formal, for their works and for those of future generations of artists. We need to read what wrote a philosopher as Gilles Deleuze about the concept of “figure” and figurative” in Bacon to understand its huge philosophical and importance, without considering that Rothko subjected the word “abstraction” to a radical critic and review.
Even if it is not easy to speak of iconography, subject and theme in a work of abstract art, painting for Rothko proved the possibility to give real and objective form to these concepts, without having to speak of metaphysical qualities but only visual and inner ones in a painting. Rothko’s aspiration forward transcendence and spirituality, though it was expressed in his works and words, is not an explanation in optical, but in subconscious terms.
The same, but in an oppositional way, we can say about Bacon: nothing forces us to read in his work its nihilistic essence of his thinking ( “I am optimist about nothing”, he was used to say), though every of his paintings is drenched with vitality, violence and brutality of his way of living.
Painting, thinking and life was, both for Bacon and Rothko, fused together and made of the same substance.
1. David Anfam, Mark Rothko. The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonne. Yale University Press, 1998.
2. Francis Bacon. Late Paintings, Martin Harrison in Conversation with Richard Calvocoressi. New York, Gagosian Gallery, 2015.
3. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Vers. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusets and London, England, 2000.
4. Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko. Toward the Light in the Chapel. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2015.
5. Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda. London, Tate Publishing, 2012.
6. Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné. London, Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016.
7. Jonathan Littell, Triptych. Three Studies after Francis Bacon. London, Notting Hill Editions, 2013.
8. Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies on Art. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004.
9. Mark Rothko, Scritti. Milano, Abscondita, 2002.
10. David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London, Thames and Hudson, 1987.
11. Marco Tonelli, Francis Bacon: le atmosfere letterarie. Roma, De Luca Editori, 2014.
1 Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda. London, Tate Publishing, 2012, p. 9.
2 David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London, Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 43.
3 Jonathan Littell, Triptych. Three Studies after Francis Bacon. London, Notting Hill Editions, 2013, p. 93.
4 Francis Bacon. Late Paintings, Martin Harrison in Conversation with Richard Calvocoressi. New York, Gagosian Gallery, 2015, p. 134.
5 Quoted in Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko. Toward the Light in the Chapel. New Haven and London Yale University Press, 2015, p. 17–18.
6 Jonathan Littell, op. cit, p. 93.
MICHAEL PEPPIATT
Francis Bacon in Your Blood
New York and London, Bloomsbury, 2015;
416 pages, $30 hardcover
BY DAVID EBONY
Readers of Michael Peppiatt’s recent memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood may feel a bit hungover after finishing the book. That’s because the author so vividly describes the intense, booze-soaked, all-night carousing he frequently participated in as one of Francis Bacon’s favorite drinking buddies and a trusted friend for nearly thirty years, from the mid-1960s until Bacon’s death in 1992. A work with significant art historical value, illuminat[1]ing some hitherto little-known aspects of the School of London milieu, Peppiatt’s raucous book reads like a highly entertaining picaresque novel. While it details drunken jaunts with Bacon to seedy straight bars and queer private clubs, it also portrays the artist as a savvy operator, gracefully maneuvering through high-end art galleries and museums as well as many of the most socially exclusive watering holes of London and Paris.
The author of an earlier, well-received biography of the artist, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996), and the curator of a number of important posthumous Bacon exhibitions, including “Francis Bacon in the 1950s,” a museum show that toured internationally in 2006 and 2007, Peppiatt has already made a sizable contribution to Bacon lore. In recent years, Bacon’s legend has grown in tandem with the soaring prices of his works. His Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a 1969 triptych, became one of the world’s most expensive works of art when it sold at auction in 2013 for $142.4 million.
In addition, a critical reassessment of Bacon’s late paintings is currently under way. Some writers have seen Bacon’s work produced after the mid-1970s as formulaic or rote. A number of recent exhibitions, however, such as “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings,” a museum-quality show at Gagosian Gallery in New York last fall, aimed to demonstrate how Bacon in his later years pushed his art toward a refined visual language of ever greater psychological and sociological impact, with correspond[1]ingly greater art historical depth. Francis Bacon in Your Blood serves to dispel many misconceptions about Bacon’s late work and, in a sense, to “rehumanize” the man, debunking the myth of a slightly mad, sadomasochistic personality.
The book is an unusual hybrid, both a revealing study of a well-known artist and a candid autobiography. It traces the author’s coming of age in the art worlds of London and Paris in the 1960s and the ’70s, with Bacon as a kind of father figure and mentor. Peppiatt eventually emerges as a compelling character in his own right, in some ways just as eccentric as Bacon. The author began his career writing exhibition reviews of contemporary art for various international publications, such as the Financial Times, Le Monde, Art News, and Art International. One of the most engaging parts of the book is Peppiatt’s account of how he came to purchase Art International in 1985, and the tumultuous time he had running the magazine as editor and publisher, operating out of his Paris apartment. In a crisis, he could depend on Bacon for financial support. Soon after the artist’s death, the magazine folded.
WHEN THEY FIRST met, in 1963, Peppiatt was a Cambridge student and Bacon, thirty years his senior, was in the midst of a burgeoning career—a controversial but respected figure enjoying a great deal of art world attention, and earning considerable sums for his art. He also attracted a growing throng of friends, enemies, and hangers-on. Peppiatt sought out Bacon for an interview while editing a special issue of the student magazine Cambridge Opinion focused on the theme of “Modern Art in Britain,” a bold topic at the time for the stuffy institution.
Approaching the assignment with some trepidation, Peppiatt tracked down Bacon at a notorious bar in London’s Soho district called the French House. Much to his surprise, Bacon immediately consented to the interview. Peppiatt describes how the project dragged on for weeks as Bacon pulled Peppiatt into his inner circle. Bacon was never equivocal about his homosexu[1]ality, but their relationship was strictly platonic. Bacon relished the idea of having an attractive, young heterosexual friend who was fluent in several languages, including French, as Bacon was. He was impressed by the young man’s knowledge of art history, and especially by his ability to consume massive quantities of alcohol on any given night and still remain an attentive listener.
Through Bacon, Peppiatt met some of the most prominent artists, writers, and celebrities of the day, ranging from Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns to film stars Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren. Fortunately, Peppiatt kept a detailed journal of his evenings out on the town with Bacon, which forms the nucleus of the book. He manages to capture some enlightening and often hilarious exchanges between Bacon and friends like Lucian Freud, David Sylvester, Michel Leiris, and Marguerite Duras, as well as many intimate, one-on-one conversations he had with Bacon over the years. Even in a drunken stupor, Bacon would say eloquent and profound things about art and life, the only evidence of his inebriation being that he repeated these statements over and over throughout the night, so by morning Peppiatt could easily recall his comments verbatim and write them down.
Early on in their friendship, during a late-night, champagne-sodden conversation, Peppiatt ventured to ask Bacon why he twisted and deformed his painted figures:
“I’m only trying to deform into truth,” Francis says. “After all, photography has done so much, and how are you to make a portrait nowadays unless you bring what’s called the facts of someone’s appearance more directly and more violently back on to the nervous system? You have to deform appearance into image. There it is. If I didn’t have to live, I wouldn’t let any of this out.”
Despite the excessive drinking and frequent predawn cruising, Bacon was extremely prolific in the last decades of his life. He rarely painted when drunk, but with little sleep he managed to be very creative in the morning, even after an all-night bender. “The worse the hangover, the more my mind seems to crackle with energy,” the artist explained.
When it finally appeared, the Cambridge Opinion’s “Modern Art in Britain” issue caused something of a national stir. By that time, Peppiatt was a permanent fixture in Bacon’s entourage. He was one of the few invited to the artist’s tiny, ramshackle home and studio at 7 Reece Mews. Despite the fact that Bacon owned a number of more spacious properties in London and Paris, he felt comfortable living and working only in this hovel.
Peppiatt recalls the place as “a kind of mad, visual treasure chamber,” heaped full of torn photos, clippings, layers of debris, slashed canvases, dried paintbrushes, and crusty, paint-splattered clothes. Soon after the Irish-born artist’s death, a team of archaeologists dismantled the squalid studio bit by bit and reassembled it in the Hugh Lane municipal art gallery in Dublin, where it is now on permanent display.
As Peppiatt’s friendship with Bacon strengthened, he decided to continue the informal interviews, and they met on a regular basis for drinks and conversation. “In a sense, I realize, interviewing him has become quite central to my life,” Peppiatt writes, “It’s become personally important to me, almost as if by finding out more about Francis’s life and his painting, I will have a better chance of finding myself and what I want to do with my life.”
Peppiatt inevitably established close friendships with Bacon’s lovers, including the hapless George Dyer, a former thief and vagrant, who became the subject of many classic Bacon works. Some of the most riveting pages of the book record the circumstances of Dyer’s death in 1972, when, during the night of the formal vernissage of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, he committed suicide in the hotel room he and Bacon shared.
Throughout the book, Peppiatt is never judgmental about Bacon’s choice of paramours or pickups. His own private life was at times in horrific disarray, making Bacon’s lifestyle seem tame by comparison. At one period, for example, Peppiatt spent a great deal of time and effort creating elaborate schemes to keep his pregnant mistress a secret from his then live-in girlfriend. In the end, the relevance of Francis Bacon in Your Blood may reach well beyond the art world. Peppiatt often mentions Proust’s monumental Remembrance of Things Past as a major source of inspiration for himself as well as for Bacon. But the aspiration of this Bacon-centered reminiscence is closer to that of George Orwell’s 1933 tale of a luckless writer, Down and Out in Paris and London, which Peppiatt also cites as an influence. A few lines from Orwell’s book would have made an appropriate epigraph to this volume: “As for the wine, I sucked it all down in one draught, and it seemed to go straight into my veins and flow around my body like new blood. Ah, that made a difference!”1
1. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and New York, New York, Harcourt, 1933/1961, p. 86.
STEPHEN SMITH
An unsparing observer of the human condition, Francis Bacon was as unsentimental about death as he was about life. “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter,” the old hellraiser told the proprietor of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den which was Bacon’s second home, if not his first. In his lifetime, the artist reportedly declined honours, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit. “They’re so ageing,” he complained. His friend Daniel Farson once asked if he was pleased that he had secured his place in the history of art. “Oh don’t talk such rubbish!” was the reply.
Bacon had little use for the arts establishment. Despite the lack of an art college education, or perhaps because of it, he emerged self-made. “No one could imitate Bacon without looking stupid,” wrote the critic Robert Hughes. “But to ignore him is equally absurd, for no other painter has set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that surround all efforts to see, let alone paint, the human figure in the age of photography.” Finding little to praise in the ranks of his fellow artists – or the critics – Bacon got on with his singular calling of confining screaming popes and anguished lovers to grid-like boxes, as rudimentary and lethal as gin traps. But posterity has refused to repay Bacon’s snub in kind. Since his death in 1992, the fashionable end of the art market has clasped him to its bosom. Three years ago, his triptych of fellow artist and one-time friend, Lucian Freud, set a record price for a work at auction. Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) went for £89m. And now every last shrieking pontiff and writhing lover has been hunted down and captured between the pages of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, a handsomely bound and presented five-volume box set the size and weight of a fully laden builder’s hod. Bacon is the one in a box now.
A cat res, in the art world shorthand, is an authoritative record of an artist’s oeuvre, to be consulted by scholars, gallerists, dealers and collectors. Bacon’s includes scores of previously unseen and little known works, and seems certain to challenge the established art history on him. It’s highly collectible in its own right: at 1,538 pages with 800 illustrations, it will set you back £1,000. It’s finished in a louring Baconian grey, the colour of a hospital gurney. Although its object couldn’t have cared less it has been produced with great gravity by the estate of Francis Bacon, which administers the artist’s staggeringly successful posthumous career. And it’s the estate, with its geologically deep pockets, that has supported years of painstaking research to make the catalogue possible. “Although the cost is not being disclosed, it probably amounted to several million pounds,” according to the respected Art Newspaper.
Such an inventory would be the work of a moment in the case of a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst. All you’d have to do is access the codes to the artist’s digital cloud and download a fully comprehensive record of every work, including the date, title and perhaps even the names of the men and women who actually made it. But such a neat and tidy solution wasn’t an option with Bacon. He lived a rackety version of the artistic life, gambling, picking up rough trade and shoplifting with his old nanny, like Soho’s answer to Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte. His art, too, involved a surrender to chance, accident and disorder. In BBC footage from the 70s, we encounter the painter at his home in Reece Mews, South Kensington. At first sight, it looks like an early pilot for one of those programmes where hoarders are talked out from behind their stockades of junk. Bacon blinks at the heaps of paint-soaked rags that clutter the place like grape skins in a winery. He says, “I feel at home here in this chaos. Also chaos suggests images to me. In any case, if I go into a new room, in a week’s time, the place is in chaos.”
“Can you imagine Francis Bacon keeping a record of a painting?” asks Martin Harrison incredulously. The editor of the catalogue raisonné, Harrison spent a decade tracking down all 584 surviving Bacons – the ones the artist didn’t destroy. For the first time since Bacon’s scandalising forms left his studio, they have been reunited on Harrison’s pages. At the gallery where we meet – where else but Soho? – he has the exhausted but quietly satisfied air of a priest who has performed an exorcism, and has just heard that a well deserved medal is on its way from the Vatican.
Harrison says the artist left him little to go on. “There are one or two diaries with a couple of lines in them. He’d get them from places like Charlie Chester’s Casino, where they handed out little leather-bound diaries. And like lots of us, by 4 January he’d given up.”
Before Harrison, the definitive guide to Bacon was a 1964 catalogue raisonné, published when the artist still had three active decades ahead of him. By then, Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair had begun to represent him, and the gallery’s administrator Valerie Beston proved to be “an assiduous recorder”, as Harrison puts it. But her ledgers only took him so far. “One was usually searching for paintings which one knew existed. You just didn’t know where they were. Either they hadn’t been exhibited for a very long time, or they had never been exhibited at all. If their owners were middle-aged or older at the time they acquired the paintings, they were almost certainly no longer alive, so the pictures had changed hands. But there were also paintings that turned up and came to my authentication committee that hadn’t previously been recorded at all.”
Harrison discovered that the painter of bracingly uninhibited homosexual encounters had actually produced more female nudes (18) than gay sex scenes (11). And his finds include what may have been Bacon’s “best pope”, which the artist wrongly believed he had scrapped. Bacon was obsessed with Velázquez’s famous study of Pope Innocent X and made variations of it until 1965. He told the critic David Sylvester that he regretted destroying what he regarded as his finest attempt after Velázquez. But perhaps he didn’t destroy it, and perhaps Harrison has found it: a figure in papal purple, legs crossed in a chair or throne, pinioned within a thicket of orange bars and roaring his head off. This pope, painted in 1950, is on the walls of the gallery, one of half a dozen unseen Bacons exhibited to promote Harrison’s text. He says, “Is this his best pope? We can’t tell. All we can say for certain is that this one was lost and has now re-emerged.” It belonged to a group of works that ended up in storage at an art lock-up in Chelsea. “There’s nothing recorded about this but I think Bacon simply forgot about them. After he died, a room was found there with a lot of paintings that he had abandoned.”
Compiling the catalogue demanded the skills of a gumshoe as much as an art historian. “You get on the phone and start ringing people up,” Harrison says. “You’re looking for someone and it turns out there are seven people in Welshpool who have the same name. Or someone would say of a painting, ‘Oh, there was someone in Turin who had it.’ So there was a lot of hopping on planes.” The editor’s labours recall the travails of Norman Sherry, the indefatigable biographer of Graham Greene. For the sake of his triple-decker life, Sherry went everywhere the globe-trotting novelist had been, exposing himself to every blowpipe and mosquito-loud interior. Sherry caught the same illnesses as Greene, and even parted with a length of his intestine. Happily, Harrison can still talk with relish of coming face to extraordinary face with the Bacons he found. “The excitement of getting up close to them is in the ravishing texture, power and energy of the paint, which truly does still turn me on. It’s spine-tingling.”
Though the catalogue raisonné has a steep price tag, it will be made available to deserving institutions free of charge through the largesse of the estate, says Harrison. It is also expected to appear online. “I know someone who ordered three already,” he says. “She owns about eight Bacons. Anyone who owns eight Bacons can afford three of these.” He has uncovered fascinating curios that future biographers will thank him for, including a photograph of Bacon in the unlikely guise of an air-raid warden during the blitz. Harrison’s research has led him to the “unfashionable” conclusion that there are psychological motivations for a lot of the artist’s imagery. “They’re not abstracts, and he’s so devoted to the figure, the human body. I believe things that came out of his own life and experience were crucial to that.”
But mysteries remain about Bacon’s subject matter and motives. Harrison hopes to tease out more about them with an exhibition he’s curating in Monaco next month, which looks at the time Bacon spent in Paris and the Riviera, and some of the artists who inspired him, including Léger and Toulouse Lautrec.
The French capital was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Bacon’s life. In 1971, his lover George Dyer killed himself a few hours before the opening of a Bacon exhibition. Among the painter’s threadbare jottings, Harrison found a reference to the suicide. “George died a year ago today,” he wrote. A new book claims that he tried to hush up the death for the sake of his career, but that’s not how the tragedy is recalled by friends who were with him at the time.
Dr Paul Brass, Bacon’s former GP, told me, “I remember thinking that Francis wouldn’t come to dinner the night of the opening. But he did. I think he just had a feeling that he couldn’t let everyone down, and he had to go through with it.”
On more than one occasion, Brass was roused from his bed in the early hours of the morning to patch up the worse-for-wear artist. “I once found him in a bad way at his studio, and I said you’re going to have to see a plastic surgeon. He said ‘Absolutely not – you can stitch me up now.’ So we lay him on the table in his studio. I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused. He was so drunk I don’t think he felt anything.”
Brass once gave evidence for Bacon in court after Dyer, in a jealous rage, planted cannabis in the kitchen at Reece Mews and called the police. “Francis was a chronic asthmatic, and I was able to show that smoking cannabis would have made him very ill.” Shortly after Bacon was cleared, he left a brown paper parcel at Brass’s surgery. It was a thank you present, a self portrait, which the doctor and his wife sold after Bacon’s death for £350,000. It paid for the home they retired to on the south coast. A Bacon of similar size and quality recently went for £5m.
Brass said, “When Francis was very ill, he would say, ‘You know Paul, when I’m dead my paintings won’t be worth anything.’”
• Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (ed Martin Harrison) is published by the estate of Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture is at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, fromThe accompanying book Francis Bacon: France and Monaco, is co-published by Albin Michel and the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, in partnership with Heni Publishing.
Irish patients lead the world in generosity to family doctors, writes
Maurice Gueret, who finds plenty of Brass in Bacon
MAURICE GUERET
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Irish patients can be very generous to their doctors. BBC2’s Newsnight recently interviewed an old-style London GP about a very famous Irishman that he treated. Dr Paul Brass, and his father before him, were family doctors and friends to the artist Francis Bacon. There were frequent house calls to the artist’s studio, and Dr Brass described one visit when his patient sustained a nasty laceration. The doctor recommended seeing a specialist plastic surgeon, but Bacon was having none of it. He lay up on the studio table to have stitches put in. Dr Brass said his patient was so inebriated that there was no need for a local anaesthetic.
Bacon had once written to the elder Dr Brass, complaining that he was not getting any medical bills. He demanded invoices for all treatments, or he would have to find a new doctor. Dr Brass recalled that Bacon always paid by return post and was always 15 minutes early for his appointments. Francis Bacon offered the younger Dr Brass a choice between two paintings as a gift. The doctor picked Jet of Water, but Bacon cautioned that it was merely spilled paint on a canvas. So Dr Brass took the other painting, of a rather tortured-looking English cricketer. Bacon told Dr Brass that his paintings would be worthless when he died. Almost 20 years after Bacon’s death, the good doctor put the painting up for auction with Sotheby’s of New York. It fetched US$14m. There’s money in Bacon and Brass.
HOW MANY FRANCIS BACON works are there? You might think the answer would be well-known, given the strength of the market for the late British painter’s work. Just one of his pieces—Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)—sold for a record $142.4 million in 2013; this May, a smaller series, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970), fetched $34.9 million, nearly $5 million above the top estimate. Yet until recently no one really knew what the total Bacon output was.
Now we have at least a provisional tally: 584. It comes from the monumental Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, published by the artist’s estate this June. The opus is so substantial in stature—five clothbound volumes, comprising 1,538 pages, in a stand-alone slipcase—as to qualify as an art objet itself (and it’s priced accordingly at $1,500). The contents, including many never-before-published pieces, represent a decade of meticulous detective work by the principal author, Bacon expert Martin Harrison. “I was constantly sending letters all over the world,” he says, trying to find canvases that hadn’t been seen in a half century.
Hugh Davies, the outgoing head of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, who served on the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee, notes that many of the works were new to him. “I think it will really change the scholarship about Bacon,” he says, “and also scramble the canon a bit.” Indeed, Bacon emerges as a somewhat different artist than the one his reputation suggests: a master, for example, of animal painting as well as screaming popes and naked men.
But how could works by such a major talent fall into obscurity? One reason is that the only previous catalogue, from 1963, covered less than half of Bacon’s career. Another has to do with the painter’s capricious attitude to his own creations. In 1951 he abandoned his London studio, leaving behind numerous pieces that he then disowned. Harrison speculates that if Bacon had gone through the 584 cataloged pictures, “blowtorch in hand,” he might have left “about 80.” Art lovers and auctioneers alike will be relieved that didn’t happen.
Tate Liverpool is currently presenting the largest exhibition ever staged in the north of England of the late great existential master of the 20th century: Francis Bacon. ‘Invisible Rooms’ features approximately 30 paintings by the artist alongside a group of rarely seen drawings on paper, but more significantly the exhibition turns out to be a survey of a particular painting device employed by the artist, a curatorial decision designed to shed new light on what is now Bacon’s well known obsession with the entropy of the flesh, and ‘the valves of feeling’.
Curated by Kasia Redzisz and Lauren Barnes, the exhibition brings together works that share the artist’s particular device of framing his figures. For such a long time we have all focused on Bacon’s preoccupation with the visceral subversion of our physical form, while certainly paying less attention to the artist’s spatial constructs: the world in which his figures reside. This architectural form serves to isolate Bacon’s raw screaming lumps of meat – this we already knew. But the artist’s cages are his recurring ‘leitmotif’ embodying a specific idea: that Bacon’s approach to space was of equal importance to the artist’s approach to the human form. The space frame was the essential context for his existentially wrought bodies.
This is never more apparent than in Bacon’s ‘Man in Blue IV, 1954’ and ‘Man in Blue V, 1954’, displayed midway through the exhibition – devoid of the artist’s later cavorting carcuses – instead the central lone figure of each painting is placed in an abstracted space evocative of a room-like environment through the demarcation of space. The faces of these two figures [The paintings being placed together in situ] are closer to traditional portraiture than in other works by the artist, but with a ghostly transparency. These are reminiscent of many other of Bacon’s works from the 50’s, where there is a subtlety to the figures that would later become unusual: forms slightly closer to traditional figuration which would be discarded in later paintings. This gives rise to an increased focus on the spatial environment of the painting; a mixture of representational and abstract lines. The isolated male figure, possibly Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy – is thought to reference the ongoing illegality of homosexuality during the period – leans trapped in an architectural space: a dark and empty room inundated with a superabundance of claustrophobia and social estrangement. With these works the device of the cage is highlighted, the power of Bacon’s space frames are apparent and create that essential context.
It is now no wonder the artist considered creating sculpture (and why Damien Hirst ‘converted’ certain paintings by Bacon into vitrine-enclosed three-dimensional works). Perhaps Bacon could have worked with ‘actual’ space in light of his interior design background, which obviously had a greater influence on his later work than was ever truly realised. As here there is an acute awareness of the spatial properties of the artist’s compositions. Bacon understood and manipulated the architectural space of his paintings to effect his figures. While our eyes were all focused on twisted meat and screaming nurses, Bacon was manipulating their place in the psychological halls of our minds, adding pathos and isolation to the violence of the flesh.
These space frames of late 50s have a greater complexity in later works as the ongoing motif evolves. With ‘Three Figures and Portrait, 1975’ elliptical and circular ‘lenses’ focus on the corrupt body of a suicidal George Dyer with a sense of sadomasochistic voyeurism. These architectural devices not only focus our attention, but also the intent of the artist’s vision, in this particular work the device is a reflection of the artist’s own history with the subject. When British art critic and curator David Sylvester asked Bacon about the artist’s cages and space frames, Bacon replied: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. They are there to highlight, to focus, to point to the figure. They are intensifiers.”
These cubic cages give a solitary existential angst to the artist’s contorted flesh, as behind the visceral screams simmers a neurosis. The rawness of ‘being’ belies paranoia, angst, loneliness and loss. A theatrical stage for the artist’s writhing spines and tortured faces: there is nothing beyond those walls. Nothing beyond the frame. Cages, chambers, and fenced frames lock Bacon’s subjects into a temporal Godless eternity. The flesh rendered all the more futile because of its architectural prison.
The curatorial decisions made in this exhibition highlight the artist’s Godless architecture. It is apparent that Bacon’s ‘theatre’ was of the same importance as the artist’s ‘players’. With all of the myth surrounding Bacon as an instinctive painter, immediate and visceral – from the existential angst of the 50’s to what is sometimes described as almost the self-parody of the artist’s final works – Bacon maintained the physiological complexity and considered structure of his spaces. The real existential horror of the artist’s environments was never really to be found in Bacon’s renditions of screaming haunted meat, but in the voids surrounding them.
When I wrote Breaking the Mould in 2009, a book about the art career of my father — the sculptor Edward Delaney — and the arts scene in an emerging modern Ireland in the 1960s, I wanted to make reference to a rare portrait of the painter Francis Bacon by his friend, Lucian Freud. It hung in a large country house in Ireland, but the owner was understandably fearful that, such was the astronomical sums that these two artists now fetch, this detail would have attracted thieves to the owner’s relatively isolated demesne and to the coveted painting.
So I obligingly changed the detail. But I regretted it too, for the painting is that special thing in art which is a portrait of one painter by another. It is also a collaboration between these now famous artists, who feature large in this absorbing and unusual account of a bohemian and mostly gay (in every sense) post-war London scene into the late 1950s and early 1960s before a different and more public form of bohemianism took over
Freud and Bacon are not the main figures depicted here, perhaps mercifully, given their dominant and often wild behaviour (Freud seems to have been on the 'disinvite' list everywhere!) but instead the focus is on the lives, thoughts and works of less well-known artists Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, sensitive and brave souls who specialised in illustrated book covers and nature drawings. They were also generous hosts, on little means, and most importantly kept a rich and colourful archive of the cultured and exciting milieu that they had helped to create.
Sensitive but tough and often fearless, Chopping and Wirth-Miller were part of a demi monde who tested the conventional limits in their art and relationships against the backdrop of an already culturally rich hinterland of Fitzrovia and Soho in London. There is much alcohol consumed and almost all of the participants were gay when there was still widespread discrimination and entrapment (and violence) for homosexuals in the UK. This always seems strange to outsiders, given that so much of English society — in terms of arts, fashion and even politics — seems a natural fit for gay culture.
But that was the way it was, and so 'the love that did not speak its name' remained furtive, secret and dangerous, with violence and prison sentences looming. There is a sad description here of the actor John Gielgud being busted for 'cottaging' as it was then called. Nevertheless, this repression and illegality did not stop an active gay scene, and indeed there is an impressive level of promiscuity depicted here. In the post-war era, trysts with soldiers and sailors were a particular attraction.
However, Chopping and Wirth-Miller were very much a couple, with all the joys and domestic stresses which that brings. And, beyond the gay element, the bohemian and artistic scene they created is inspirational in the way that any such group that breaks out of the bland norms of conventional society is. One thinks of the 'Catacombs' scene of the very same period in Dublin, which produced Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Indeed, Lucien Freud visited Dublin and drank with Behan. It is a similar hedonistic scene that is captured in JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man.
When Chopping and Wirth-Miller died in their nineties - welcome proof that such hard living does not affect longevity perhaps — their close friend Jon Lys Turner inherited an extensive personal archive, including letters with, and lively memories of, many of the pivotal figures in modern British art, most especially Bacon, who looms large. One of the delights of such books is the flurry of interesting names which connect to other names and worlds and disciplines.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller first met the Irish-born Bacon in 1937 and remained friendly with him right up to the latter’s death in 2008, partying, working, painting and travelling. The author has teased out connections between Bacon’s famous apocalyptic and shocking paintings and the images explored by the two men, and if these linkages sometimes seem ambitious they are necessarily valid. Chopping was exploring similar haunted territory and Wirth-Miller executed almost disturbingly hyper-realistic images of insects, plants and fauna.
In a diary entry, Chopping provides a startling image of how he first saw Bacon, standing in the Gargoyle club. "He had already taken to wearing foundation and rouge and using boot polish on his hair, and would fix fellow drinkers with an intense stare."
The author has nicely peppered his books with drawings, photos and memorabilia such as lists and handwritten notes, adding greatly to the atmosphere invoked. It also makes more intriguing the recreated Francis Bacon studio in Dublin’s Hugh Lane — The City Gallery in Dublin on Parnell Square — with its paint-spattered detritus and torn-out magazine photos, given that this was just the sort of milieu (and inspirational imagery) that all three men would have shared. If you haven’t been to the reconstructed Bacon Studio in our capital, it is well worth a visit.
Interestingly, Bacon was rejected by the British arts establishment before the war and vanished for a good 10 years, although he re-emerged as an acclaimed confronter of real and existential angst and horror in the post-war period. His paintings soon sold for large sums. His companions found a more modest form of fame and income.
Chopping made a splash as a designer of Ian Fleming’s famous James Bond covers, while Wirth-Miller became an innovative landscape artist.
Meanwhile, they kept company with a host of artists and writers, including the 'two Roberts' — Colquhoun and MacBryde — John Minton, poets WS Graham and Stephen Spender and had wild parties in both London and at their small but gorgeous looking harbour-front country 'retreat' in Wivenhoe, Essex. The Visitors’ Book of the title refers to this modest bolthole.
A further value to a book such as this is the way it creates a linkage between the different artistic and bohemian scenes, through the decades. The Fitzrovia scene described is a fitting successor to the Bloomsbury set of Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and others, except without the latter scene’s wealth and privilege — but with more alcohol. Chopping’s closest friend was Francis Partridge, described as the last of the Bloomsbury Group. But the Fitzrovia milieu was also an important precursor to both the Soho scene of the late 1950s and then of course the big explosion of rebellious counter-culture in the 1960s, both in London and internationally. Punk followed in the late 1970s, again often on those very same London streets.
The world described was also very important to the emergence of gay culture in later decades, into legality and public respect, and by the end of the book, there is a wonderful description by Chopping of going to a bacchanalian New York in 1975 (gay nightclubs, poppers, disco, etc) and visiting Andy Warhol’s famous downtown Factory art and fashion complex, again connecting to a rich counter culture.
"Big scruffy building," writes Chopping. "Bullet proof door. Stuffed Great Dane in reception. Young man offered us champagne and magazines. Andy Warhol and Francis arrived. Very frail, paint be-spattered. Back of his hair black with a white switch so that it looked like a badger. Red veined nose and strong glasses. Young swarthy man with cookies, girl photographer, sexy hairy man photographer. Strange mixture of dereliction. 'My pictures are so fresh they stick together', said Warhol."
This handsome book is a stimulating and absorbing description of intertwined bohemian and artists’ lives but also an important slice of social and cultural history from original sources. It not only describes the ferment of post-war Britain and the collapsing norms of class and convention, but also offers an example for all of us of a few brave souls doggedly pursuing their artistic vocations and world views against all the odds.
They are the paintings for which Francis Bacon is perhaps most famous. Now a previously unknown prototype for the artist’s iconic series depicting "screaming" popes has been discovered in northern Italy.
The discovery of the ghostly, distorted figure was made by the art expert Martin Harrison as he was compiling Bacon’s catalogue raisonné, a comprehensive guide to all his 584 paintings, to be published on June 30.
The portrait, entitled Landscape with Pope/Dictator, is believed to have been created in 1946. It has been thought that Bacon’s attempts to depict popes during that period had been destroyed by the artist.
The series, which by the mid-1960s had grown to more than 45 works, was inspired by a portrait of Pope Innocent X painted in 1650 by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez.
Bacon’s Pope paintings are worth millions of pounds. In 2012 one called Untitled (Pope) sold at Sotheby’s in New York for almost $30m (£21m at today’s rates).
But the elderly owner of the newly discovered work, who was given it as a present by her late husband, has no intention of selling and only allowed Harrison to include it in the catalogue raisin if he promised to keep her identity a secret.
"The lady’s husband bought it in 1967. Sorry, but I can’t tell you her name or the city [where she lives]." said Harrison, who described the discovery as "amazingly important, historically".
Harrison, who has spent a decade tracking down Bacon works for authentication after being commissioned by the painter’s estate, tried to persuade the owner to allow him to include the portrait in a Bacon exhibition in Monaco that opens next month.
"I told the lady that the value of the painting could easily triple if it went on public display, but she still said no," he said.
Landscape with Pope/Dictator was probably painted after Bacon, who died aged 82 in 1992, moved to the south of France with Eric Hall, his then boyfriend, and his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who cared for him into his forties.
In a letter to his fellow artist, Graham Sutherland in 1946, Bacon mentioned his fascination with Velázquez, who had been the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV.
Records show the painting was acquired from Bacon’s London studio in 1951 and was later held by galleries in Milan and Turin before being bought by the unnamed Italian man.
Harrison is coy about the detective work that took him to the unassuming warehouse in an Italian suburb. "It was a hunch which led me there rather than a tip-off," he said.
Born in Dublin, Bacon spent the late 1920s in London and Paris where he financed his love for fine food and wine by becoming a male escort.
The reasons for Bacon’s interest in Velázquez’s 1650 painting and why he depicted a figure screaming in many of the works has long fascinated commentators.
Michael Peppiatt, whose memoir of Bacon was published last year, said: "Nobody is absolutely sure what influenced Bacon to depict either a pope [or] somebody screaming... He had what I can only call a crush on that Velazquez painting.
"He may also have absorbed some Catholicism being brought up in Ireland... Bacon never gave clear reasons for anything he painted. He did not want it to interfere with the mystique of the image."
While Peppiatt has some reservations over the date attributed to the painting, Harrison and the Bacon estate have no doubt about its authenticity.
Bacon probably painted the work in about 1946 after he moved to the south of France
Figurative painters don’t come much more influential than Francis Bacon and Tate Liverpool’s latest exhibition not only presents the best of his work, but a whole new perspective on it.
Invisible Rooms brings the largest collection of the Irish-born artist’s paintings ever seen in the North West to the Albert Dock venue, offering a retrospective look at his iconic portfolio.
The exhibition is set against ambient low-lighting which enhances the haunting quality of some of Bacon’s most famous pieces, such as the nightmarish ‘Crucifixion’ and 1952’s ‘Study for a Portrait’.
Visitors have the chance to get up close and personal with around 30 of these large-scale paintings, spread across a spacious gallery that takes a good while to explore, even without stopping for a moment to study the hidden. intricacies of each exhibit
These hidden intricacies take centre stage in Invisible Rooms, as the show highlights the subtle elements that appear throughout Bacon’s work, barely-decipherable nuances which change our perception of the artwork once. brought to the fore
For instance, the tortured figure depicted in ‘Study for a Portrait’ is surrounded by a ghost-like prism which, when flagged up, gives us insight into the trapped subject matter’s psychological state.
This aspect of Invisible Rooms sets it apart from your average Bacon exhibition. The show isn’t content with merely showcasing the great painter’s work, it delves beneath the surface and gives visitors a greater understanding of the artworks on display.
Alongside this sizeable collection of the artist’s greatest hits, the show displays exhibits salvaged from the painter’s workshop, from rough sketches to preparatory materials, laid out in strategically-placed glass cabinets to supplement the main attractions.
These rarities are a must-see for any Bacon enthusiast, unique titbits from his illustrious career which serve as the perfect side order to the main course. Make no mistake, this is full-fat Bacon with all of the trimmings.
The sheer volume of artwork on show in Invisible Rooms makes it a definitive look at one of the most influential figurative painters of the 20th Century.
Moreover, the career-spanning nature of the show will bring Bacon novices up to speed, while his long-term admirers will leave Tate Liverpool with fresh insight into his body of work.
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms opens at Tate Liverpool today (18 May) alongside an exhibition of fellow figurative painter Maria Lassnig’s work. Both shows run until 18 September.
What happens to Ben Lerner, or Ben Lerner’s character in Leaving the Atocha Station, when he has a profound experience of art cannot happen to a person too many times, or it stops being profound. I do not fall in love all the time, and I distrust the cultural vocabulary that insists I should. I’ve looked at a lot of art, and thought deeply about what I’m looking at, how I’m looking at it, and I think only two or three times has it been profound. This might be a failing on my part, and I could strive, like the ecstatic saints, to prolong the jouissance, the sweet heightened encounter. But for now, here is one of those times:
I was seventeen. I was preoccupied with death, with sex and flesh. I was darkly interested, for various reasons, in people who die on the loo, who end their days alone on a cold plastic seat, mid-shit. The death on the toilet is fantastically banal. It is not humiliating because it is gloriously normal, and you are dead. Let your final act be a flinging of limbs, a spreading of waste, a painterly use of the small space, a bravado arrangement of body parts, plumbing parts, white porcelain and red blood. Someone will find you. Someone will deal with your mess. None of it matters to the dead. We are all meat.
I had this quotation, “We are all meat,” pinned to my bedroom wall, because I was going through a phase of obsessing about the work of Francis Bacon. I had his attributed witticism “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends” pinned next to it. I was doing my school art project on Bacon. I read every book I could find about him. I tried to paint like him (impossible: nobody can paint like him, just—as he discovered—nobody can paint like Velázquez.) I looked at faces and bodies and I splashed paint around. I used combs and toothpicks and turpentine. I drew and drew and drew. I drank, because this was a way to understand him. I thought about sex and violence and the vicious farce of life, because this was a way to understand him.
I went with my mum to the David Sylvester–curated exhibition “Francis Bacon: The Human Body” at the Hayward Gallery in 1998. I must have been excited to go. It was on the South Bank, my favourite place in London. I expected that it would transform my understanding of Bacon. And I would surely get a fucking great grade for my Francis Bacon project.
My mum left me in front of Triptych May–June 1973. An hour later she came back and asked why I hadn’t moved. I could not move, I explained. I could not understand these three huge paintings behind glass. I refused to move until I could begin to understand what was happening here.
I knew the painting depicted a man, George Dyer, Bacon’s lover, dying on the loo. These were facts, and I tried to reconcile them with what I was seeing. A broken, rolling, squashed, organic heap of something, still, on a toilet. Then the purple, intrusive, bruising center panel—the viewer is shoved onto it as if by a drunk thug to be, a pervert voyeur, a prurient judger of naked men dying. I recognized (the nose, the hairline) that this was the same face ripped sideways, attacking or being attacked, spewing from a black monstrous shadow horrifyingly unrelated to the body. It was somehow disgustingly middle, as if these curved clean shadow lines had come to the wrong audition to tell a lurid story. They’re a careful moment of attentive blackness in a windowed world, an architectural violation. I thought, How dare you? And then the right panel, which restores narrative order while flinging the figure, in a rush, in a compositional urge, to vomit into the ghostly bowl. To die. Two white arrows pinned to the surface—very funny; where else would I look?—meaning nothing, meaning flat space, artifice, game, pure picture-making satisfaction. Come. Cum. Don’t get too close.
I wondered how a person capable of such vicious spontaneity with a tool like paint could also be so tender. I wondered how those clean surfaces—the immaculate floor, the perfect deep red walls—were achieved. I thought of the famously messy Reece Mews studio. How so spotless then, here on the wall? Some trickery must be involved. Bacon must be lying to us all about how he makes these things. And the biographical odor creeps around the viewer’s experience and pollutes it, ripens it, makes it grossly more interesting, nudging us against our better judgement into voyeurism. Bacon is quaffing champagne, hearing the terrible news; Bacon is fucking, fighting, selling, lying, twisting the body into these shapes on the canvas; but Bacon is also applying a perfect surface of unblemished oil. He is rigor, control, exactitude, and technical virtuosity.
I hated the glass. How ludicrous, for a sheet of reflective glass to get in the way of me and this challenge. I can see myself, and all I want to see is paint. All I want to see is George. I felt sick that this feeling was roped in to the mechanics of display, art for the public. I felt thrilled that it was. I felt lightheaded with gratitude and curiosity. This work is fit for purpose, I felt. This furious truthful work is an affront to all liars and cheaters and deniers. This work is for the bombed world, the abused world, the shamed and humiliated and lied-to world. For lovers. I was seventeen, and this was a profound experience of art
Max Porter is the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Delicious anecdotes abound in this celebration
of two minor artists who knew everyone
The Visitors’ Book:
In Francis Bacon’s Shadow:
The Lives of Richard Chopping
and Denis Wirth-Miller
by Jon Lys Turner
Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller, I hadn’t, either. It doesn’t matter. They were minor players in the British art world from the 1940s onwards, but the main point is that they knew everyone — first and foremost Francis Bacon, but also Graham Sutherland, John Minton and Lucian Freud (though they hated him), as well as many unexpected people such as Bloomsbury stalwart Frances Partridge (Chopping’s best friend), Kathleen Hale (who created Orlando the Marmalade Cat), the television chef Robert Carrier and the decorator David Hicks. They befriended Noël Coward on a train back from Hicks’s wedding to Pamela Mountbatten; Randolph Churchill invited them to a new year’s party where they were the only guests; Terence Conran designed their new kitchen when their old one caught fire. They invited everyone they met to come and stay at their house in Wivenhoe, in Essex, and many of them did, hence the importance of the Visitors’ Book.
They would have been called pansies in their youth (Wirth-Miller was born in 1915, Chopping in 1917), and Wirth-Miller once spent nine weeks in prison for gross indecency, but they lived long enough to form one of the first gay civil partnerships in 2005. They met at the Café Royal in l937 and Chopping moved into Wirth-Miller’s studio soon afterwards. Up till then, Chopping had had a hopeless crush on John Gielgud and was very excited once when Gielgud followed him down the street. He dived into a cinema, hoping Gielgud would follow, which he did — but sat several rows away. Wirth-Miller explained that he should have gone to the lavatories, where Gielgud would have joined him, but anyway, he said, when he’d been picked up by Gielgud he didn’t like the fact that the actor removed his false teeth before performing fellatio.
The couple spent a rackety two years in Fitzrovia before moving to a tumbledown cottage in Essex at the outbreak of war. They found Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing just over the border in Suffolk, and took lessons there in exchange for doing odd jobs. Wirth-Miller was included in a prestigious show of British landscape painting at the Lefevre gallery, and Chopping became known as a natural-history illustrator. By 1944 they had saved enough money to buy the Storehouse in Wivenhoe, which remained their home for the next 60 years.
Wirth-Miller was the more serious artist, who concentrated on painting landscapes (two of his works are in the Royal Collection), but Chopping was more highly paid as an illustrator. His Butterflies in Britain remained in print for years, but his biggest coup was designing the trompe l’oeil James Bond book jackets, which were so distinctive they were used as posters for the books. (He once went round the Circle line, counting the posters for Thunderball at every station.) In later life he took up writing, and also gave classes at the Royal College of Art, where he taught the students about “Life. About wonderful, salacious life.”
Chopping was the steadier character — “affectionate, gentle, kind”, according to Partridge. Wirth-Miller had demons, much exacerbated by drink. This is probably why he got on so well with Bacon, who told him towards the end of his life: “I consider you my only true friend.” Bacon would often take a taxi down to Wivenhoe at the end of a Soho evening and he wrote to Wirth-Miller whenever he was away. They attempted sex on one occasion but it was no good — “bread with bread” — though this didn’t affect their friendship.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller were both promiscuous; Chopping once drew up a list of his sexual encounters: “Spanking gardener in Stockwell — name escapes me; Dumpy man with rubber boots — by dustbins; Man with hair transplant — bus stop near Harrods” et al, but gave up after filling seven pages of A4.
The end was terrible. By 2008, Chopping was increasingly frail and Wirth-Miller was losing his marbles. Chopping could no longer climb the stairs so he slept downstairs, but one day, when his carer didn’t arrive, he tottered into the kitchen to get some water. He fell, cracking his head and dropping his mobile phone out of reach, and spent a night on the cold floor. When Wirth-Miller came down in the morning to make breakfast he stepped over Chopping, ignoring his cries for help, and did the same at lunchtime. He also deliberately smashed his mobile phone. “He deserved it because he was irritating,” he explained. Eventually, Chopping was rescued by a neighbour but he died in hospital 10 days later. Wirth-Miller survived another two years.
This book will be an absolute goldmine for Bacon biographers, especially as the letters cover patches of his life barely known about before — for instance, a three-month stay in St Ives during the autumn of 1959, which he found “a stronghold of really dreary abstract stuff”. But it would be unfair if The Visitors’ Book was read only as a footnote to Bacon. Though somewhat scattily written, it is full of memorable vignettes, delicious anecdotes and many moving letters from Chopping to Wirth-Miller and vice versa. Jon Lys Turner first met Chopping at the RCA in 1981 and remained a friend till his death in 2008; he inherited the couple’s archive, including the eponymous Visitors’ Book, and he has made good use of it in this haunting biography.
One of the stranger items left after their deaths by Wirth-Miller and Chopping
was a wartime biscuit tin full of buttons from military uniforms. Each time
either of them had a sexual liaison with a serviceman, they would snip a memento
from his uniform as a keepsake. The tin contained some 200 buttons.
Culture vultures: Chopping (left) and Wirth-Miller with Bacon at the latter’s Tate show in 1985
John Lys Turner’s dual portrait of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller –
who knew everyone on the art scene from the 1930s to the 1980s – zips along gaily
Somewhere I have a couple of neat letters from the artist Richard Chopping, politely declining my requests to interview him about Ian Fleming. ‘Dicky’ is best known for the trompe l’oeil dust jackets he painted for nine of Fleming’s James Bond novels. Because of this patronage, an accomplished second-division artist gained wider prominence, becoming at one stage, according to the New Yorker, the world’s highest paid book designer.
It didn’t make him happy. He was involved in a long, bickering relationship with his fellow artist Denis Wirth-Miller, who was wilder and more experimental, but whose reputation, despite a close working association with Francis Bacon, has not endured so well.
Chopping and Wirth-Miller were a couple of sociable gay painters who flitted through various phases of British art for more than 50 years from the mid-1930s. They knew everyone, from Nina Hamnett and denizens of the clubs and pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, through the irrepressible Bacon and Lucian Freud, to David Hockney and Zandra Rhodes, who befriended Chopping when, in later life, he taught her at the Royal College of Art.
They settled during the war at the Storehouse in Wivenhoe, Essex, where their bohemian lifestyle was legendary (Bacon would travel the 75 miles from London by taxi). Although hugely promiscuous, they eventually committed themselves to each other in one of Britain’s first civil partnerships in 2005, shortly before their deaths.
Their friend Jon Lys Turner tackles their story perceptively, though, as one of their two executors, he is perhaps too close for total objectivity. His title The Visitors’ Book provides a clue. It refers to the record of all who stayed at the Storehouse. Perhaps inevitably with this kind of biography, Lys Turner occasionally resorts to breathy lists of supporting characters, like the one Chopping kept of his sexual conquests.
During the war, when the two were particularly sexually active, they snipped buttons off their conquests’ uniforms. Lys Turner found a tin box containing 200 servicemen’s buttons (replicas of which the publisher has, bizarrely, sent out with the press pack for this book).
The narrative zips along, providing an excellent social history of gay life in the 20th century, from Chopping’s unrequited schoolboy crush on John Gielgud, through Wirth-Miller’s imprisonment for homosexuality during the war, and the strange mixture of furtiveness and licence over the following two decades, to the liberalisation of the law (Wirth-Miller was not in favour, preferring a sense of transgression) and the couple opting for civil partnership late in life.
It’s also a lively commentary on modern British art and culture. Frances Partridge, one of the last members of the Bloomsbury set, was a great friend, who would entrust her troubled son Burgo to the two artists’ care. She was devoted to Chopping, while Wirth-Miller stayed close to Bacon. Lys Turner untangles these dynamics, while drawing out the pathos and often cruelty of the bonds between the two central figures.
While the more introverted Chopping later found an outlet for his macabre imagination in the cult gay novel The Fly, Wirth-Miller enjoyed more modest success with his landscapes, until, almost to his chagrin, they were taken up and popularised by the interior designer David Hicks.
Along the way, Lys Turner serves up entertaining yarns, such as Randolph Churchill’s rudeness when he asked both artists to paint commemorative roses for his parents’ golden wedding anniversary. Chopping himself gets drunk and abusive when the Queen visits the Royal College of Art. And he was accosted by journalists as a result of his friendship with Guy Burgess, who had recently defected to the Soviet Union.
Chopping’s communications with Fleming are a constant theme. The two men were introduced by the latter’s wife Ann, who knew Bacon and Freud. Fleming liked Chopping’s output, declaring that ‘no one in the history of thrillers has had such a totally brilliant artistic collaborator’. He paid handsomely, but there were disagreements — glossed over here — about the ownership and copyright of the artwork, so disappointingly none of Chopping’s Bond novel covers are included among the illustrations. Chopping was left bearing a grudge and fending off requests from would-be biographers of Fleming and Bacon.
The largest exhibition of Bacon’s paintings ever held in the north of England, it
takes as its curatorial framework the spaces the artist painted around his famously
brutalised figures – outlines of cubes, rings, platforms and provisional rooms
Tate Liverpool 18 May – 18 September 2016
ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN
From howling heads to the abstract meat fetishes of his later work, Invisible Rooms is organised into thematic, roughly chronological sections, that chart the evolution of Francis Bacon’s spatial demarcations. Crucifixion (1933) – a small, early painting of a skeletal figure on the cross – provides a key to the significance of the over-arching theme, showing how the libidinal violence that marks the imagery of Bacon (1909-92) is also fundamental to his use of pictorial space. The outline of the room begins at the corners of the canvas, shrinking to a vanishing point that penetrates the tortured figure. Perspective: another technique for exacting injury, another tool for baiting the wound.
In one of Bacon’s best known triptychs, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c1944), a trio of toothed, phallic monsters are set against a vivid orange backdrop. Here, the outlines of the rooms serve to wall these creatures in, ramping up the intensity. Ascension? Not a chance. Bacon offers no horizon, no escape, revelling instead in the dark erotics of flesh under duress. This febrile potency of entrapment is made explicit in a section of the show titled Cage, where, alongside a number of shrieking, boxed-in heads, hangs Chimpanzee (1955), in which an incarcerated ape shakes itself in primal frenzy.
It is a mark of Bacon’s influence that his rabid monsters, eerie scene-setting and theatrical meat-fests have become popular tropes of psychological turmoil. We now return to such imagery through the lens of David Lynch, whose cult series Twin Peaks takes Bacon’s surreal operatics to the point of kitschy psycho-drama, and director Ridley Scott, who based the priapic monsters in sci-fi horror film Alien on those in Three Studies. While this attests to Bacon’s enduring status, it places his most overtly dramatic works in the shadow of Castle Camp-Noir: entertaining, yes, but largely drawn of poison.
At Tate Liverpool, then, it is the less familiar works that pack the most visceral punches. Study for a Portrait of P.L., No. 2 (1957), on loan from the University of East Anglia, is a prime example. A sickly pink torso is boxed into the centre of the canvas, painted about the groin in broad, ragged strokes, so that the legs appear not so much unfinished as ripped off. The mask-like face is painfully exaggerated, with swollen brow and hollow cheeks, but held back from descending into Bacon’s trademark psychedelic miasma. Eschewing his penchant for the papal palette of deep reds, emerald greens and ceremonial purples, the background here is painted hospital green – a pallid colour that combines with Bacon’s mutilating brushwork to nauseating effect.
Tate curators Kasia Redzisz and Lauren Barnes, along with Ina Conzen of Staatsgalerie Stuttgart – where the show will tour when it closes in Liverpool – have constructed a relatively anonymous curatorial framework, allowing Bacon’s development to set the tone. There are moments, however, when this comes unstuck, most notably in the introduction to two works from Bacon’s Man in Blue series (1954), on show under the vaguely titled section heading Subject/ Space. On both canvases a suited figure sits at a desk in a dark blue room, exuding the menace of banker and brute in equal measure. Tate speculates that these figure are based on Bacon’s lover, Peter Lacy – Lacy destroyed many of Bacon’s works in drunken rampages, as well as assaulting Bacon himself – explaining that they depict the “isolated male figure”, and communicate “a sense of anxiety and hopelessness”, resulting from the “illegality of homosexuality.
For a painter who once suggested the government “bring back hanging for buggery”, this is a sanitised reading. These paintings appear neither “anxious” nor “hopeless”: they emanate a colossally injurious atmosphere, channelling the erotic terror of the businessman – a terror far more palpable to the contemporary viewer, say, than the histrionic popes displayed beside them. When Bacon’s paintings are in the ascendency, it is as if they are dancing in an open wound: they offer no judgment, no moral, and they certainly table no plea for sympathy. Remarkably for an artist dedicated to painting fetishised, mutilated masculinity, this is the only mention of sexuality in the entire exhibition – what a shame, that this maker of difficult, electrifying erotics should be subjected to such a vanilla revision.
Study of the Human Body (1982), on show at the end of the exhibition, counts among Bacon’s most absurdly sexual works. A body from the waist down stands proudly on a plinth, genitals out, wearing cricket pads and with buttocks for a torso. This ridiculous figure captures with dark humour Bacon’s fetishising of masculine dominance. Not an ape, a pope or a businessman, but a distinctly normal “master” – and a subject whose very normalcy brings to the canvas its own shudder of horror: the gentleman savage of the English county green.
It is now par for the course that institutional shows dredge up archival ephemera, and a selection of sketchbooks and drawings has been duly assembled. Bacon “denied making preparatory sketches”, Tate tells us, and the overwhelming purpose of this section appears to be to prove this a lie – a bubble-bursting ambition, which suffers the deadening consequences of demonstrating the most humdrum aspects of Bacon’s workings. (The printed transcription placed beside an illegible diary entry from 1958 is a prime culprit, revealing an instruction to “concentrate entirely on studies of human figure” – one wonders what insight this can possibly offer us to an artist who focused, for more than six decades, on little else.)
Among this generic ephemera is one illuminating document – an undated newspaper clipping of two boxers in a ring, one standing fist raised, the other lying prone on the mat. Bacon has painted a cube tight around the standing man, and blue wavy lines over his legs, enhancing his musculature. It is the victor, and not the victim, who is exulted by this invisible room. “Pity the meat!” wrote philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in response to Bacon’s taste for brutalised bodies. But within this show, the question of how we should feel with regards to Bacon’s subjects is brought to the fore – whether to pity or fear, abhor or fetishise, and most importantly of all, how to deal with the excited shock of standing before his paintings and feeling both.
Francis Bacon conspired to hush up his lover’s suicide so that the death would not jeopardise the most important show of his career, an author has claimed.
George Dyer, a burglar and associate of the Kray twins, took an overdose of barbiturates in the couple’s hotel room in October 1971 shortly before Bacon’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. The pair had argued before Bacon went out gambling and drinking with friends.
The official story was that he learnt of the death during the private viewing on Monday, October 26. One art critic said that Bacon reacted with powers of self-control “to which few of us could aspire”. Photographs of that evening show Bacon laughing with friends.
Fresh evidence suggests that Dyer died on the Saturday and was found the following morning, one and a half days before the private view Jon Lys Turner, author of The Visitor’s Book, has found testimony from two sources that suggests Bacon and his friends persuaded the authorities to keep the death secret overnight in case it caused the show to be cancelled.
Turner found a note written by Bacon’s friend Richard Chopping that recalled the artist’s reaction on seeing the body. He shouted: “How am I going to have a big opening with this scandal? Oh, trust George to totally fuck it up!” The story was corroborated by Terry Danziger-Miles, who worked at Bacon’s gallery in London. Valerie Beston, who represented Bacon, persuaded the manager of the Hôtel des Saint Pères to be discreet about the death.
Turner wrote: “Beston was capable and intelligent. She had been at Bletchley Park before joining the Marlborough Gallery. She immediately went to speak to various officials so that Dyer’s death would remain unreported.”
The Visitor’s Book is published next Thursday.
Bacon with his lover George Dyer, who killed himself in a Paris hotel
YOU don’t look to Francis Bacon for wall art, unless, that is, you’re a gallery. With its claustrophobic dystopic figures which teeter between discomfort and howling searing anguish, Bacon’s work is not something you’d hang above your bed and hope for a good night’s sleep.
However, the pictures in the Invisible Rooms exhibition certainly make an impact and there are many lurid full-size canvases on display including well-known works. Big name shows like this often have an instant appeal which fades on realisation that the exhibition contains only a couple of pictures but umpteen preparatory sketches. This is different. This is the largest exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work ever staged in the north and, as such, it’s unmissable for anyone with even a passing interest in figurative art.
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms explores the artist’s use of a ghost-like framing device around his subjects, charting indications of room-like spaces in early works to barely visible chambers which heighten subjects’ isolation and moving on to almost-theatrical arenas with their nightmarish, circus-of-horrors quality
Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (main image) demands attention as soon as you enter the gallery with its vivid tomato-orange background. The greyish figures are a disconcerting juxtaposition of ears, flesh, ribs, mouths, never seeming to add together to make a whole.
Reminiscent of knitting ladies by the guillotine, it is never quite clear if the screams and grimaces are of disgust or approval. The faint lines of perspective which hint at an internal setting and the plinths for each figure add a macabre staginess to the triptych. The unsettling picture seemed an odd choice on t-shirts and coffee cups in the gift shop afterwards.
The exhibition is loosely grouped into different sections and it is the Cage part which seems to sum up the notion of invisible rooms with the pale, sketchy framework entrapping the figures within.
With glasses slightly askew and the scream which brings to mind Bacon’s famous Screaming Popes, Study For A Portrait is a very human portrait which captures an almost animal fear. The normality of the ruched curtains in the background offers a stark contrast to the separation imposed by the confines of the cage framework. It’s a haunting piece of work, also available as a fridge magnet which lessens the impact somewhat.
The bright, childish colours of Woman Emptying A Bowl Of Water/Paralytic Child Walking On All Fours, the arena-like space and the tension of the trapeze-style structure – will they fall? – bring to mind a circus. The skin seems to have been pulled back to reveal the muscles and sinews underneath. Messy, almost grotesque but also gloriously alive, the water suggesting everything has been stilled for just an instant
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms – uncomfortable, provoking, best not reduced to gift shop tat. But reader, I bought a fridge magnet.
Throughout his career Francis Bacon painted figures surrounded by a ghostly cage or structures that reference stages or arenas. Now Tate Liverpool has brought together more than 30 of Bacon’s paintings for Francis Bacon: Painted Rooms, the first exhibition to explore this mysterious aspect of his work. Although they are subtle, these cages hold the key to unravelling the painter’s most complex themes, as the curator Francesco Manacorda explains.
Didn’t the Tate hold a wonderfully comprehensive Francis Bacon exhibition only relatively recently in London?
Francesco Manacorda: When you go to a typical retrospective you’re thrown into themes and technique at the same time. At Tate Britain’s 2008-09 show, for example, people might have seen these cages, but it’s unlikely that they would have noticed what changes about them, and what they come to mean in different periods.
Why focus on something so subtle?
It’s a discreet part of the composition, but it can change the dynamic of the painting. For example, looking into a vitrine is a voyeuristic act.
Did the cages mean different things to Bacon at different times in his career?
In the 1950s it’s the shattering element that’s important. So he’ll paint a figure through a curtain-like screen. It’s a very interesting device when you think of theatre, or you think of psychoanalysis and the idea of what is taboo and what you show and don’t show — the idea of fetish and how you want to hide and reveal at the same time.
Those are things that are not present in the 1970s or 1980s. Colour becomes more important and the arena or stage is like a fourth element in a more complex space, where you have the background, the podium or stage, the figure and the structure.
The boxing ring-like space is an interesting one. It’s a fixed structure, a containment of a force or animal-like struggle, and also pertains to people looking at it, so again there’s an element of voyeurism.
Why is it important to highlight these differences in his work?
Bacon’s paintings might seem, on a superficial level, to express bleakness and angst. In fact, as soon as you start reading them on a deeper level, they’re always expressing a tension or an unresolved feeling, such as sexual desire and guilt. Or the conflict within us as a both a social and a wild animal, which is what he’s trying to stage with the screams. It is this element of two forces in opposition that this exhibition helps to reveal more clearly.
How did looking at some of the very rough drawing studies in Tate’s collection help spark the idea for this show?
Bacon tries in his drawing to see how a blobby figure might look in this particular vitrine or frame. It’s interesting because his sketches are like the preliminary workings of a theatre designer. They investigate how to incorporate movement, and how a scene can develop and unravel in a space, and in front of the public.
Bacon was not interested in abstract painting. Do you think that by including this sculptural structural device he was separating himself from a tendency in painting to proclaim the flatness of the canvas?
I think his research is absolutely unique. He was not interested in abstraction, but he wasn’t interested in figurative painting either. He abhors the idea of narrative in painting — being able to describe something taking place. Even when I talk about theatricality, there’s this tension of theatricality without resolution. There’s never a dramatic development. His works are almost like a stop-frame image from a film — a teaser — that doesn’t let you see what’s going on.
Do you think there’s something about the ambiguity of the structure, the ghostliness of the outline, which makes the figure seem more real and more present?
That contrast is definitely what he was looking for. The more ghostly and unreal the architectural structure is, the more vivid it makes the opponent. That element of dualism, of two things working against one another, is there in all his work.
If Bacon had depicted proper rooms, the reality and the dynamism that he managed to achieve through the blurriness of the moving figure would not be there.
He seems to use a dry brush sometimes — to convey the cage in a thin, scratchy way?
Yes, and by contrast he would add sand to his impasto so that it becomes fleshier.
What have been the main surprises for you in your research, taking in the drawings and the source material as well as all these paintings?
It’s helped me to understand that these paintings are not necessarily staging one existential feeling, but a variety of them. They are particularly rich because they enable us to perceive this sense of being. Looking at the drawings and in particular his unfinished painting, you can really feel that journey — that’s he’s struggling to resolve a problem. It’s really a great thing.
Francis Bacon was an extraordinary and extreme artist and one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. He was also a Right-wing elitist and individualist who approached the problem of creating art in the twentieth century with an honesty and intensity that have not really been matched. Generally speaking, it is probably true to say that most of the Right dismiss Bacon along with other contemporary artists mainly because of his unique treatment of the human form. But in my view his art enunciates a violent assault on the complacency of conventional thinking and perception that should be seen as deeply consonant with the project of the Alt Right. In particular, his extreme interrogation of the human subject in a world after God will be seen to provide a denunciation of the triviality engendered by secularism.
Tate Liverpool’s current exhibition, Invisible Rooms, provides a perfect opportunity to look again at Bacon and his enduring importance. The exhibition is themed around the strange, floating cubes that hover around the subjects in so many of Bacon’s paintings. These “invisible rooms” both elevate and entrap the subject, and this sort of tension is central to Bacon’s art.
The beginning of the exhibition space is dedicated to two paintings concerned with the crucifixion. The triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944) is one of Bacon’s most recognizable and disturbing images. The figures are conceived as being the Eumenides (or Furies) from Greek tragedy and are depicted as bestial entities. Their status as subjects isn’t clear. The title of the painting encourages us to anticipate human subjects but their form clearly belies this. They have a solid, fleshy appearance but their form is unlike any product of natural selection; neither human nor animal. Each of the figures appears to be blinded in some way but their gaping mouths are prominent, suggesting some urge to inhuman vocalization. It is as though they are an attempt to depict an embodiment of the alien horror of subconscious drives.
The second crucifixion painting is 1933’s Crucifixion. The Christ is only recognizable as a human form in the most rudimentary sense. In fact, it barely even achieves a skeletal sense of solidity; the figure becomes transparent in certain places suggesting the ghostliness of Christ, and this is reinforced by the oppressively dark interior in which the crucifixion appears to have taken place. But more than this, the painting is structured so as to bring to mind Rembrandt’s painting Slaughtered Ox (1655). By drawing this parallel Bacon is treating the enactment of the crucifixion as the hanging of meat on a wooden frame. When discussing his work, he was always keen to foreground the structural reasons for his compositions but he was also clear about the religious implications. The body of Christ is meat just like all other animals.
Considering Bacon’s unambiguous atheism, it is noteworthy that he returned to religious themes throughout his career. One painting that he returned to again and again is Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), and there are two examples of Bacon’s treatment of that painting here. Throughout this series of “screaming pope” paintings Bacon was concerned with the framing of the figure within the confines of the throne. He was also obsessed with drawing out the full implications of Innocent X’s semi-sneering facial expression. Untitled (Pope) (c. 1954) pulls back the skin of the Pope’s face so that the expression becomes fully bestial, the head being a means of supporting the underlying gape of the skull.
This expression can also be found on other paintings here. Study for a Portrait (1952) shows the human subject enclosed within one of those suggestive glass boxes that seems to hover in the air. The screaming subject is also seated before a banal blue curtain which somehow adds a Lynchian sense of the sinister to the scene. Chimpanzee (1955) has the titular figure grimacing in similar fashion, caged within both an invisible box and within a more literal zoo enclosure. It is as though we are witnessing the same fixed realization of mortality emerging from the animal, human and divine worlds, crystallizing in the dreadful rictus grin of death.
Bacon was entirely insistent regarding the implausibility of religious doctrines such as life after death. He realized that life is a very brief unfolding in time, a struggle full of difficulty and suffering that would very soon end in total annihilation of the self. In fact, it was this sort of clear sighted nihilism that provided much of the motivation behind his work. In a 1974 interview, he explains that he has no time for ideas of social justice or the welfare state because, in reducing the extremities of experience, they promote boredom and complacency: “I think [social injustice] is the texture of life. I know that you can say that all life is completely artificial, but I think that what is called social justice makes it more pointlessly artificial. . . But I think, as I live in a country where there has been a certain amount of wealth, it’s difficult to talk about a country where there has always been extreme poverty. And it’s quite possible that people could be helped in extremely poor countries to exist on a plane where it was possible for them to escape from their hunger and their general despair. But I’m not upset by the fact that people do suffer, because I think the suffering of people and the differences between people are what have made great art, and not egalitarianism.”[1]
What is important about this view of art is that Bacon is not attempting to ameliorate the suffering of life in any way, neither through the comforts of religious belief nor through egalitarianism. Whether salvation is offered as a religious or a secular solution to the problem of existence it is seen by Bacon to be an illusory comfort, simply augmenting the artificiality that one already experiences in the form of being alive.
Most of the other paintings in the exhibition are concerned in one way or another with the human form and the problem of how to make representations of this form more real in an age of photography. One of the reasons why Bacon is such an interesting artist is that he was concerned with the problem of form and the problem of representation. He recognized the banality of Abstract Expressionism and insisted on a representational form of painting. But he knew that something approaching a photographic form of representation (what he referred to as “illustration”) was no longer adequate to the business of creating serious art. In this respect he is a fascinatingly liminal artist, seeking to re-present the human form in a violent and extreme manner so that the shock of reality can be reignited within it. And key to this manner of re-presentation is the isolation of the human figure in a hauntingly empty, decontextualized interior.
Consider Study for the Nurse in the Film ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1957). Despite what shallow critics of Bacon’s work might assert, the face does bear a likeness to the relevant shot in the movie. But Bacon is so obviously not trying to recreate that image (what would be the point?), rather he is using the image as a sort of visual template on which he can work to discover something more profoundly and ambiguously important to communicate. In Bacon’s rendering, the figure has become a nude and is reasonably coherent but again there is the insuppressible scream and the disturbing quality of the flesh: part meat, part something else. The background manages to be simultaneously inviting and inhospitable. The beautiful richness and texture of the emerald green draws you in but the sense of almost cosmic isolation and emptiness repels. The background of the picture invokes Rothko, but Bacon saw that type of painting as being merely aesthetic and something of a cop out. He wanted the human form to be present so that the question of the real could be attacked again and again. The Abstract Expressionists completely sidestep this question and simply paint feelings in more or less attractive pattern.
The final question, when confronting Bacon, is to understand how the distortion of the human form can return it to a higher level of reality. Obviously distortion in itself can tell us nothing, it is just a manipulation of surface appearance. If Bacon’s art really is expressing something important, there must be a deeper form, or at least something behind the appearance, that Bacon is trying to excavate otherwise his pictures would just be badly rendered portraits. When discussing this question, Bacon again and again talks about the importance of violence, how he wants to return violence to the image
“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 that a rose or something is violent, but it’s the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint. When I look at you across the table, I don’t only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens — a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.”[2]
In Study for the Nurse, the thick and messy oils making up the human form contrast with the sinisterly cool background so that the figure is presented in oppressively stark terms. In this way, the violence inherent in the image is brought forcefully to bear upon the viewer. Additionally, the sort of distorted facial expressions that Bacon specializes in produce a jolt of shock due to the uncanny similitude these figures bear to real human faces. The key thing with Bacon is not that the appearance has been distorted, it is rather the fact that from the clockwork nullity of a world without God he has been able reconfigure something that resembles the person. Looking at a Bacon portrait is somewhat like looking in a mirror in that we see an image of the human face that seems to coexist with a personality, an autonomous self. But with Bacon we fear that we might be seeing what is really there, rather than a flattering image of what we believe is there.
Bacon is a figure of enduring importance for two primary reasons.
Firstly, he resisted the twentieth century’s urge to erase form, to exult in pure abstraction or conceptualization. The uncanny appearance of his figures has to do with his struggle to render reality in a really primal form, prior to ideological abstraction.
Secondly, in his attempt to show the human form in a world without God he did not retreat to a position of hyper-triviality or consumerism. Instead he hacked away at the human form like a butcher trying to find out what it really is that lies beneath the meat. He would not accept a religious answer but perhaps it is significant that in the above quotation he talks of “a whole emanation” coming from a person. He resisted a spiritual or mystical interpretation of this but nevertheless it is significant because it gestures towards a non-material source of whatever it is that we understand to be human.
Bacon’s art allows us to glimpse the horror of what it might be that lurks behind the curtain, through the screen or under the skin. If we do not like what we see it is necessary to keep looking deeper and deeper so that the numinous violence of existence becomes apparent. We might then begin to see something of his dark theology of meat.
1. Francis Bacon in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 125
2. Ibid., 81-2.
WEEKEND IN MONACO
Though firmly anchored in London, British painter Francis Bacon found much substance in France and the artists who had made the country their home. After first travelling abroad at seventeen, it was in Paris that Bacon encountered the art by Picasso that inspired him to dedicate himself to painting; much later, he would consider his 1971 retrospective at the city’s Grand Palais the most significant of his career.
As an exhibition at Grimaldi Forum will soon show, these are just two of the numerous interactions accounting for France and Monaco’s particular influence on Bacon. Organised by art historian Martin Harrison, editor of the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, the exhibition includes more than 60 works by the artist.
Among them are his first recorded work, Watercolour, 1929, and his last, the never-before-exhibited Study for a Bull, from 1991. Presented alongside the artists who influenced him — Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Giacometti, Léger and Soutine — many of Bacon’s works at the Grimaldi have rarely been shown in public.
Preferred members are invited to spend a weekend in and around the principality shortly after the exhibition opens. Join us for a private tour of the show, and of an exhibition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Fondation Maeght near Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Enjoy lunch and an exclusive visit with artist Bernar Venet at his foundation near Nice, as well as a special timed access to the Francis Bacon MB Foundation in Monaco.
Proffered Weekend’s in Monaco begins 7 July. Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco. Tour: 9 July. Exhibition: 2 July—4 September.
are going to
auction
Francis Bacon’s painting gloves, used by the artist in his studio at the Royal College of Art, are headed to auction.
Is art a modern religion? It’s like the joke about sex being dirty: it is if you’re doing it properly. At its most powerful, art can offer a cosmic sense of place that for many of us religion no longer provides. The other day, I visited the latest incarnation of the Mark Rothko room at Tate Modern. No matter how much Tate moves it about (right now it’s with Monet), this imposing installation of black, purple and red paintings of dark portals always takes me out of myself and makes me think about the bigger things.
Art resembles medieval Christendom in another way: we revere not only artists but also their relics. A curious instance of artistic worship is the sale next week by Chiswick Auctions of a pair of gloves warn by Francis Bacon. They are painting gloves, apparently, and Bacon wore them when he created one of his most renowned works, his triple portrait of Lucian Freud.
Chiswick Auctions obviously hopes a bit of the price-tag magic Three Studies of Lucian Freud’s conjured when it sold for £89m in 2013 will rub off on the gloves when they go under the hammer. The paint-stained gloves are framed like a work of art and have an estimated value of £5,000 to £7,000. Who would pay that much for a pair of gloves? Quite possibly a Bacon fan with some spare cash. And I would be the last to carp, because relics of artists really are moving.
Last year, I made a pilgrimage to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to see a single painting by Jackson Pollock. I was equally moved by the brushes and sticks the artist used to drip and flick paint, still stained with his strong colours. Pollock’s painting gear is a wondrous, intimate record of how he worked. At the Picasso Museum in Paris you can see the chair the painter used as a rest for his brushes. It is kept behind glass, like the precious artefact it is. If Turner is more to your taste, Tate Britain owns not only a huge hoard of his paintings but also his palette and paintbox, carefully preserved since his death in 1851.
Bacon’s gloves are a comparatively humble relic of the Irish-born artist. The Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin, has preserved his entire studio behind glass. Bacon’s work space can be viewed in this installation as a paint-spattered reliquary. Is there a connection between Irish Catholicism and this appetite for Bacon’s relics? Regardless, it is fascinating to see – a sealed room haunted by his macabre imagination. And what did you see, Clarice?
Bacon is a living force in art – and the art market. The strangest mementoes preserve artists who many people have long forgotten. I include the sculpture studio of GF Watts, immaculately maintained along with other souvenirs of this Victorian artist at the Watts Gallery in Surrey, as well as the perfectly conserved flat in which Gustave Moreau lived that adjoins his studio in Paris. I am a big Moreau fan, so I love it, but when I took a group to see it, they were aghast at this bizarre remnant of symbolist Paris. Other relics of the 19th-century avant garde include some Moroccan musical instruments collected by Delacroix.
Artists keepsakes go back to the Romantic age and reflect our romantic belief in artistic genius. Yet the greatest ones are works of art themselves. Michelangelo’s sculptures, their unfinished surfaces pockmarked by his chisel, are evidence of genius at work. Personally, I feel a religious awe at these tangible marks of Michelangelo’s living presence. Great artists are immortal, and their physical being is held in their art like a face on a shroud.
Francis Bacon felt no desire to draw
ALEXANDER VERNEY-ELLIOTT
Martin Harrison, the author of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné to be published on 30 June, is absolutely correct, in my opinion, in stating that the 600 drawings owned by Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, an Italian lover of Bacon, are not by the artist (“Unauthenticated Francis Bacon works go on sale in London”, published online on 19 April).
I visited Bacon in his Reece Mews studio in 1981 and asked him if he ever considered using charcoal, as it is a medium that enables one to make non-illustrational (non-literal) facial features. Bacon told me he never used charcoal and found pencil to be far too limited to make non-illustrational “free” marks. He also said that he did not like Lucian Freud’s pencil drawings because they were too detailed and literal. Drawing with pencil is completely antithetical to the ethos of anti-illustration that Bacon aimed at.
The Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino drawings have eyes that are far too literal, far too illustrational, to be by Bacon. Also, the crude and garish bright colour schemes used are reminiscent of Pop Art and were not used by Bacon. Why would the artist—who was into “chance”, making “arbitrary” and “irrational” marks—use a graphic-fine-art medium such as pencil? Bacon used to throw paint at the canvas, but one cannot throw pencil at paper. The Francis Bacon Estate is right to reject these drawings as not being by the artist.
I am truly astonished, surprised and perplexed that the renowned art critic Edward Lucie-Smith should authenticate these idiotically childish scribbles as having been “drawn” by Bacon.
—Alexander Verney-Elliott, London
Tough love from a formidable pair of painters
Tate Liverpool’s double bill of Bacon and Lassnig is ‘a stroke of curatorial
inspiration’, writes Jackie Wullschlager
“The only reality is pain”: Kafka’s summing up is quoted by Maria Lassnig in her writings on her own art, and it informs all Francis Bacon’s work. What a stroke of curatorial inspiration at Tate Liverpool to show these painters together, in two impressive solo presentations, independent yet sparking myriad connections.
Bacon and Lassnig, born within a decade of each other — 1909, 1919 — fought the same battles: to paint figuratively during the heydays of abstraction and pop; to convey the anguish of the human condition when irony and conceptual games held sway. Both staged the figure in artificial space, both set out to translate bodily sensations into paint..
But on other fundamentals facing mid-20th century painters — the uses of photography, expression of self — they were polarised. Tate’s juxtaposition sensitively unravels opposing strategies and possibilities.
Lassnig’s is straightforwardly an art of autobiography. Her most famous painting is the confrontational, bald, wrinkled, naked old age self-portrait “You or Me”, in which she holds two guns, one pointing at her own head, the other at the viewer: it says that her relationship with the outside world is so troubled that to express herself in paint was a matter of survival.
Liverpool opens with the large-scale 1960s “Harlequin Self-portrait” and “Figure with Blue Throat”, evocations of Lassnig’s cropped body set down in economical, fluid, ravishingly coloured painterly lines, with the white canvas as torso. They take their stance from art informel and are about subjectivity, boundaries between self and exterior.
The show closes with blisteringly frank self-depictions of extreme frailty: sagging body fragmented and doubled on an institutional bed in “Hospital” (2005), the defiant “Self-portrait with Brush” (2010-13) where the left arm and hand wielding the brush are incomplete because at the age of 94 Lassnig could barely hold it.
An urgent yet loose, sensual handling, and a Fauvish palette of heightened flesh tones from rose to crimson, occasional brilliant yellow or bright blue grounds, interspersed sometimes with toxic greens or sickly yellows, lasted her life. She could be witty, as in her self-portrait “Lady with a Brain”, in which her brain is placed outside her head as a difficult appendage. Or sarcastic, as in “Kitchen Bride”, which depicts a cheese grater bowing in deference. But always the drive was to depict what the body feels like within.
A space-age techno-nun enclosed in a plastic veil, Lassnig suffocates in “Self-portrait under Plastic”. Blind with domestic rage, mouth shrieking wide, neck constricted by red bands, she turns a cooking pot into a blindfold in “Self-portrait with Saucepan”. In “High Seated Female Figure” she is so hemmed in by the pressure of a confining armchair that her body morphs into it. “Pink Electricity” is orgasmic, torso and upper legs abstracted into luminous pulsating pink waves.
So intensely does paint represent feeling here that you understand why Lassnig rejects photography as an unthinkable mechanical intrusion into what painting does. She called photographers “protheses artists”. “Double Self-Portrait with Camera” shows Lassnig as the camera would render her appearance — banal, moderate — and as she feels: a monstrous, squat, depressed figure.
Repeatedly she draws attention to her medium. In “Inside and Outside the Canvas” a figure has climbed through the canvas and wears it like a dress. In “Self-portrait with Stick” an enormous stick — brush? crayon? — merges with her body, while behind, on a canvas-within-a-canvas, is a portrait of an elderly woman, Lassnig’s mother, whose hands project into the picture’s “real’ space, resting on Lassnig’s shoulder: a psychodrama of control and liberation, artifice and emotion.
Lassnig, little known outside her native Austria until her last decade (she died in 2014 at the age of 95), is the revelation of Liverpool’s double bill. The reason her art does not dwindle before the power of Francis Bacon, the greatest postwar figurative painter, is because it is so subjective, even narcissistic, that it demands to be taken only on its own terms. (An animated film, The Ballad of Maria Lassnig, whose jazzy strains enliven the show, is comically self-absorbed.)
Bacon demands the opposite. “The very great artists were not trying to express themselves. They were trying to trap the fact,” he said. Aping Velázquez’s sumptuous surfaces and grandeur of composition in the velvety purple 1950s popes in “Figure Sitting” and “Study for a Portrait”, or deconstructing Picasso’s deconstructions, and throwing in filmic and photographic sources — in the wildly cruel “After Muybridge ‘The human figure in motion’: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours” — he went for timelessness: pictures which would end up in “either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between”.
But Bacon is never simple. He also admitted that his crucifixion compositions — the ghostly silver 1933 “Crucifixion” and “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944) launched his oeuvre and open this exhibition — were “nearer to a self-portrait”. The art historical motifs, the twisted, sprawling, leaking figures who howl, wrestle, suffer, die, in the triptychs, all transform autobiographical experience — savage beatings by his father, masochistic relationships with lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, their lonely deaths — into modern myths of alienation and futility. A standout loan from the Hirschhorn in Washington DC is “Triptych Inspired by TS Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’”, tight multi-hued canvases of battered dissolving bodies on a sort of trampoline that condense nihilism into vast sweeping formal rhythms, as Eliot did.
That triptych also starred at Tate’s Britain’s massive 2008 retrospective, and Liverpool’s show, the largest ever devoted to Bacon in the north of England, feels essentially like a scaled-down version of that London exhibition, with a welcome stronger focus on the earlier period — Bacon’s greatest. Collaborating with Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie, Liverpool has garnered stellar German-owned works: Düsseldorf’s caged “Man in Blue V”, Stuttgart’s “Chimpanzee”, eerily close to Bacon’s bestialised human forms, Frankfurt’s silky screaming “Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin”, Berlin’s awkward sexy “Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho” before what looks like a car morphing into a bull.
The show’s subtitle, Invisible Rooms, proposes a theme about trapping the image in a space frame, but since Bacon placed almost all his figures in such transparent cages, this is neither basis for selection nor offers fresh illumination. Bacon insisted his reasons were formal — “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down” — rendering Tate’s attempt to organise by content (“Cage”, “Arena”, “Body/Sculpture”) irrelevant.
It doesn’t matter: Bacon is Bacon, his nightmarish claustrophobic vision magnificently offset here by the open views of the Mersey in the most compelling, beautifully hung show I have seen at Tate Liverpool.
Spanish police arrest 7 suspects in Francis Bacon painting heist
BY
Spanish police said Saturday they have arrested seven people in connection to the theft of five paintings by renowned artist Francis Bacon worth more than $27.8 million from a home in Spain almost one year ago.
Without naming the suspects or specifying when they made the arrests, Spanish police wrote in a statement that they were tipped off by private British investigators who specialize in stolen art in February. The investigators had received an email from one of the suspects, who sent photos of the paintings and asked whether the work had been stolen.
They noticed what looked like forged signatures on the backs of the paintings in the photos, which provoked them to email Spanish police.
Spanish authorities analyzed the metadata from the images and saw that the camera had come from a rental company. Customer records from the company led them to a person in the coastal town of Sitga.
The person who sent the photos “kept in touch with an art dealer in Madrid,” the statement said in Spanish. The person who rented the camera, the art-dealer, the art-dealer’s son and four other people who received the photos were arrested.
Police searched four homes, seized six phones and two computers, but did not recover any of the paintings.
Bacon, who was an Irish-born painter known for his emotionally charged, surrealist work, died in Madrid in 1992 at age 82.
His paintings were stolen from someone who was a close friend of Bacon’s during a professional heist in a heavily policed area while the homeowner was visiting London last July, according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.
The thieves also stole jewelry and other valuables, according to the police statement.
Seven people have been arrested in Spain on suspicion of involvement in the theft of five paintings by Francis Bacon, worth a total of €25m (£19m).
The paintings were stolen last July, along with other valuables belonging to the owner, who is reported to have been a close friend of Bacon. The works, which comprise portraits and landscapes, are yet to be recovered.
Detectives said they were approached in February by British private investigators specialising in the recovery of stolen artworks who had received an email with photographs of the paintings and asking whether they were listed as stolen.
Investigators analysed the photo and were able to determine that the camera that took the images was owned by a photographic equipment rental company, which supplied details of the customer who had rented it at the time the paintings were photographed.
The customer, who is suspected of involvement in the crime, was among those arrested, along with a Madrid art dealer and his son. Sources close to the investigation said in March that the theft appeared to have been a highly professional operation that took place while the owner was away in London.
The thieves disabled an alarm system and tracked the owner’s movements to ensure he did not return to his apartment to catch them, they said. El País quoted a source as saying the works were stolen last June, but news of the theft was only made public earlier this year.
It is not known which paintings were involved but one contemporary art specialist told the newspaper they would be extremely difficult to sell. “It is not at all easy to sell a Francis Bacon, large or small, without that getting to the ears of those who pore over such a rarified sector,” said the expert, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Irish-born Bacon often visited Madrid, where he spent time studying old master paintings in the Prado Museum, and died in the city in 1992, aged 82. His paintings are hugely sought after, and in 2013 the sale of his 1969 work Three Studies of Lucien Freud fetched $142,405,000 (£90m) at auction, a world record at the time.
Spanish police did not say when the arrests were made. The investigation continues.
The forthcoming
Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné will offer an unprecedented view into his
art—and his controversial private life. Bacon’s surviving oeuvre, totalling 584
paintings, is catalogued in 1,538 pages. Less than a third of the pictures are
in museums, with most hidden away in anonymous private collections. Thanks to
colour reproductions, some available for the first time, it is now possible to
clearly see the development of Bacon’s art.
Although the catalogue will not be published until 30 June, it was launched
yesterday (24 May) in London’s Soho—the quarter where Bacon drank and felt at
home. Martin Harrison, the editor, has devoted 10 years to the project. He
travelled endlessly, failing to locate only one painting, Head with Raised Arms
(1955), which was last recorded in Turin more than fifty years ago. The
catalogue was funded by the Francis Bacon Estate and although the cost is not
being disclosed, it probably amounted to several million pounds.
Harrison believes his catalogue will provide a much more nuanced view of the
artist’s work, showing us “what Bacon painted, rather than what people imagine
he painted”. He points out that there are only 11 pictures of copulating males,
compared with 18 female nudes (although Harrison admits that some are
androgynous, making it difficult to give precise figures). The paintings also
offer a view into Bacon’s private world, including his complex relationships
with male lovers.
Francis Bacon’s Self-Portrait with Injured Eye (1972).
The sadomasochistic side of Bacon’s life emerges in Self-portrait with Injured Eye (1972). According to Harrison’s entry, “Bacon reputedly suffered many beatings, which as a masochist he may not have found entirely uncongenial”. The injured eye in his painting stands as “an autobiographical symbol”. At the catalogue launch, Harrison said that when it came to George Dyer, a long-term companion, Bacon “wanted to be raped by Dyer, whereas Dyer wanted to cuddle Bacon”.
Harrison also
discusses the “complicated” relationship between Bacon and Lucian Freud. Bacon
painted Freud 16 times between 1951 and 1973, although they fell out after Freud
saw the injuries sustained by Bacon after he was beaten by his friend Peter
Lacy. Freud retaliated by twisting Lacy’s collar around his neck.
Among the more surprising images in the catalogue is a privately-owned triptych
of Mick Jagger (1982). Although no rock and roll fan, Bacon was fascinated by
the lead singer of the Stones. Three Studies for a Portrait (Mick Jagger) (1982)
was painted from photographs.
The catalogue also includes numerous portraits of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who
were among his early patrons. Harrison suggests that one of Lisa (1955), now at
the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, was based on the bust of Nefertiti and
“bore only a slight resemblance” to the wife of the supermarket chairman.
Harrison also deals with the controversial question of Bacon drawings. He
describes the status of 40 works on paper dating from 1958 to 1961 acquired by
Tate in 1997 as “problematic”. They are not drawings, in any conventional sense,
but “rapid sketches”, he says.
Notable for their absence are the 600 drawings which some claim Bacon gave to an
Italian lover, Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. Ten were on sale at the Herrick
Gallery in London last month, at prices of up to £750,000. Harrison has not
authenticated the Ravarino works.
The final painting in the catalogue raisonné is an unfinished portrait done
shortly before Bacon’s death in 1992. The work, which is now at Dublin City
Gallery, was found on Bacon’s easel in his studio. Although usually described as
a self-portrait, Harrison admits that “some uncertainty surrounds the identity
of the man”. Bacon’s world still remains shrouded in layers of mystery. Although
the catalogue raisonné represents an astonishing achievement, it cannot be the
last word on the artist’s legacy.
• Martin Harrison (ed.), Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 5 vols., Francis
Bacon Estate (distributor Heni Publishing), 30 June, £1,000
• A one-day exhibition of six major Bacon paintings is being held today (25 May)
at 6-10 Lexington St, London W1F 0LB, 10am-9pm
Six rarely seen works by Francis Bacon are going on show in his spiritual home of Soho — for one day only.
The painter, who died in 1992, was a regular in the drinking clubs of the area and a group of paintings will be on display in Lexington Street tomorrow to coincide with the landmark publication of a book about his life’s work.
The five-volume Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné covers his 584 paintings across more than 1,500 pages and is on sale for £1,000.
The exhibition is free and among the works going on show, which are all from private collections, is a poster designed by Bacon for a Van Gogh exhibition, right, and Marching Figures, c 1952, above, and a 1987 triptych. Bacon’s work regularly attracts huge prices, with Two Studies For A Self-Portrait selling for £24 million at an auction in New York this month.
Several major exhibitions dedicated to his career are planned this year at venues including Tate Liverpool and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
The exhibition at 6-10 Lexington Street runs from 10am to 9pm.
Francis Bacon, Polar Bear overseeing Marching Figure, 1952
Tate Liverpool
The raw melodrama of Francis Bacon meets the humour and humanity
of Maria Lassnig in this superb double bill
There is a Francis Bacon pope in Tate Liverpool that is barely a squeak from high camp. It shows the pontiff in sumptuous purple robes, raising his dainty little hands in a fit of girlish horror. It is a very strange addition to the long sequence of screaming popes; indeed this pontiff is not screaming so much as wincing with his eyes closed. But it makes the point, as Bacon’s paintings so often do, that there is sometimes very little distance between hilarity and nervous hysteria.
This is not why the image is currently on display in the largest Bacon show ever held in northern England. No, it is here because the figure is immured in a diagrammatic version of the throne in Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, from which all of Bacon’s many variations issue. And more than that, he is boxed in a black cube (within an already dark painting) that might be the very definition of an invisible room.
This phrase, which gives the show its subtitle, was coined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in a famous mediation n Bacon. Deleuze was preoccupied by the painter’s strange and original pictorial space. This is so familiar by now that it is odd to come across a Bacon that doesn’t have that flat backdrop of glowering darkness or gorgeously rich colour; that doesn’t have those architectural sketch-lines hinting at cubes, cages, arenas, plinths or cells; that doesn’t have those thin black or white lines, sometimes scumbled, sometimes spectral, sometimes incisively clear.
Often they set a scene quite precisely: a window and the door of a hotel room; a parlour with curving architecture and a portrait by Bacon hanging on the wall; a sheaf of vertical lines that look like the shimmering strip curtains of an otherwise sepulchrally dark nightclub, though this might also be the anteroom of hell, given the contortions of the figure.
This man is Peter Lacy, one of Bacon’s lovers, who appears in another painting apparently mired to the waist in a newscaster’s kidney-shaped desk, except that this is 1957 and they hadn’t yet been invented. Nor indeed had Samuel Beckett yet written of Winnie, up to her waist in sand in Happy Days. For all that Bacon found so many of his sources in the past – Velázquez, Eadweard Muybridge’s motion photographs, Victorian boxing, Picasso’s cubist distortions – his visions often leapt in advance of western culture.
Since these diagrammatic structures appear everywhere it seems an odd theme for a show: practically anything by Bacon might be admitted, for one thing, and attention to these schematic stagings, what’s more, seems quite unnecessary. The relationship between ground and figure, to use that old phrase, has always felt conspicuously theatrical in Bacon’s work. His pictures are stage sets with wings, entrances, scenery and downstage performances in which the figures stand out starkly against the backdrop, sometimes in ellipses like spotlights.
And while the curators harp on about the usual themes of postwar futility, theatrical alienation and existential angst, it is worth pointing out that when the art critic David Sylvester asked Bacon about those invisible rooms, he simply replied: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down.” They are there to highlight, to focus, to point to the figure. They are intensifiers.
Tate Liverpool has managed to borrow 29 major works from European collections, such as the outstandingly sinister painting of a child creeping round a circuit on all fours from Amsterdam, and the raw, screaming figure of the nurse in Battleship Potemkin, trapped in some kind of cage-like swing from the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt. In each case the mise-en-scène implies a horrifying perpetuum mobile.
It gets worse in the Hirshhorn Museum’s immense Triptych, where the bodies appear thrashed to a pulp and contained in some kind of glass case raised up on a platform. An observer, hanging on the phone, peers at them through the glass. And in an anonymous hotel room with a deep blue view some terrible bloodbath has apparently occurred: or are these simply bloodstained clothes tumbling out of a case? It is hard to know what is going on in this sequence – as hard as Bacon wanted it to be.
For what is really going on in his opera of gaping mouths and writhing figures, what is Bacon actually doing with – to – his figures? Flanged, spraddled, twisted, split apart and reassembled like the botched and shattered faces in Henry Tonks’s first world war portraits, they appear to twist and melt, materialise and evaporate against the backdrop in nameless torsions. How this is done remains elusive. Bacon used the grainy back of the canvas, and somehow got his paint to seep into the surface like blood – very often while describing blood with exceptional brilliance, and his drawings (many shown here) indicate all sorts of sources, from medical textbooks to monkey manuals. But still these morphings remain defiantly mysterious.
And they veer quite melodramatically from violence to Carry On comedy. A mouth yowling in silence becomes funny when the teeth inside are awfully clean and tidy. A brutal coupling, when the bodies are as hard to tell apart as eels in a pail, gets a comic punchline with a neatly painted packet of fags. John Berger long ago compared Bacon to Walt Disney, and this goes to the balletic exuberance and graphic zip of his art. All these rectangles, cubes and ellipses are marvellously concise and strong. Whatever else, they keep the wild dynamism in place.
Whether they describe actual places, too, will perhaps become clearer when Martin Harrison’s immense Catalogue Raisonne is published next month, with its revelation of many unfamiliar paintings. In the meantime, their ingenious ambiguity is apparent all through this show. Here is the ghoulish circus ring that doubles as a cattle pen; here is the black void that might be an electric chair. Narratives begin to form in your head – is this figure trapped in a gas chamber, or a witness box; is this ectoplasm gas or a man’s shadow? – but the story is sidelined every time by the sheer force of the image. The lesson of Liverpool is that Bacon’s art is exactly what he wanted it to be, no matter how many ways we might like to explain it: not stories but pictures that hold their own, a set of deathless, inexplicable images.
In an embarrassment of riches, Tate Liverpool is also presenting a show by the late and very great Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1919-2014), which appears to have strong links with Bacon. Lassnig was also compelled by the experience of having, and being, a body; with sex and death and mordant humour. Her coinages are superb, especially with the self-portraits: herself as a shrieking cheese grater or a saucepan head, herself as triangle jabbing away at a square. She clambers out of the canvas, sinks into it, emerges from it like a newborn baby. Painter and painting are inseparable.
The late works, which seem to grow brighter as she aged, are masterpieces of courageous invention: above all, paintings such as What Next?, where the woman is becoming a thing of paper, and Hospital, which shows what few artists have ever portrayed. Three heads lie on pillows beneath triangular lights. They are dozing, suffering, waking; but beneath the sheets, like a tideline, their poor thin bodies are dying away. It is a most magnificent picturing of mortal illness and it has a quality that Francis Bacon lacks: the abiding power to move the viewer.
Invisible Rooms is a captivating, major new exhibition of works by the artist Francis Bacon. It displays more than thirty paintings alongside rarely seen drawings and documents. As well as painting the human figure, Bacon also took inspiration from photographic reproductions showing a range of approaches to his subject matter. This is the largest Francis Bacon exhibition ever staged in the north of England.
In Francis Bacon’s painting, ‘ Three figures and a portrait’,1975, three haloed figures, one of which could refer to George Dyer, Bacon’s lover at the time who committed suicide in 1971 are brought together in a room. Their forms are twisted, sculpted, a contrast of mutating forms and shapes. The painting is also made of planes of various types of space. The mustard colour tones and yellows of the painting contrasted with the black portrait of the fourth figure give this painting an unusual and disturbing intensity.
In many of Bacon’s works, the artist uses spheres, flat spaces of intense colour and the cube, a kind of ‘glass invisible cube’, to decipher how he includes the viewer in the space of the painting and to emphasise his subject. Sometimes the viewer is isolated from the painting and sometimes it seems as if one can walk into the actual space. In the painting of ‘three figures’, the blind-folded portrait in the background observes the scene. There is a sense of suffering but something that is also aiming to try and discover the root of human existence. In the painting,‘ Crucifixion’ he also suggests an understanding of human brutality. This sense of suffering, cruelty and brutality is something that re-occurs within his paintings
This feeling of observing the world and expressing human suffering is something that Bacon is preoccupied with in certain works. For instance in his painting of ‘Pope Innocent X ‘1650, originally painted by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, he introduces ambiguous space, recalibrating the relationship of subject to space’, similar in some ways to Picasso, an artist he admired and who also interpreted and experimented with themes and portraits by Velázquez. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X. The work is one of a series of over 45 variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. In this painting, the throne becomes a complex framework of representational and abstract lines.’
There is also the concept of the ‘screaming figure’ in his works, which could be seen as a reference to his interest in the human condition at its core, something quite organic and primitive, as if the human condition is composed from this and everything else transcends from this basic human instinct. ”In Bacon’s version of Velázquez’s masterpiece, the Pope is shown screaming, yet his voice is “silenced” by the enclosing drapes and dark rich colours. The dark colours of the background lend a grotesque and nightmarish tone to the painting. The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent and appear to fall through the representation of the Pope’s face.”
Bacon refers to fictional forms and characters, at other times portraits of friends and self portraits and sometimes he uses photographs to inspire his work. Some of these were taken by his friend the photographer, John Deacon as in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho 1967.
Isabel Rawsthorne was an artist and model at Liverpool college. Brought up in Liverpool, her life story is interesting. A painter and designer, well known in her day, it would be well worth looking further into her life history. As well as being a model, many of her artworks depicted dancers in the Royal ballet. Her photograph is displayed at the exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Bacon’s painting of Isabel is striking in its intense blue, its ambiguity and multi-layered space. The car in the background has also been transformed into something unusual other than a car. Perhaps everyone will see the car differently. ‘’For Bacon, a figure’s setting could be firmly abstracted while still being evocative of room-space.’’ Bacon uses the cube and the curved line to express interesting shapes and drawing within his works taking the subject away from the domestic context.”
Throughout these works, there is a sense of observing how the human figure is perceived by the artist In terms of how he feels rather than what he actually sees. Representation is not as important as feeling and not as important as memory and interpreting the memory or feeling of that person or the relationship. This is also an approach which runs through the other two significant exhibitions by female artists Ella Kruglyanskaya and Maria Lassnig whose exhibitions run parallel to that of Francis Bacon.
On entering the exhibition by Francis Bacon, I was immediately lured by the overall space and positioning of the paintings which were displayed elegantly. I was surprised to encounter such vivid colour in his works. I had always perceived his works as quite dark but this exhibition shows the colourist in Bacon’s works, the vivid emeralds and oranges and blues which dominate the walls. Powerful works and in my opinion many of them masterpieces. The giant canvases and the references in his works to poetry, his relationships and friendships were interesting and there was something dark and slightly disturbing that kept the exhibition moving, making me want to find out more about the artist and his work. I was particularly taken by Bacon’s triptych of 1967
This Triptych inspired by TS Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ evokes the experience of reading the themes of violence and life’s futility in Eliot’s poetry.’ What I loved about this piece was not only the dramatic and interesting use of colour but the way that Bacon creates a sense of illusion, emphasising shadows and space, creating new spaces and perspectives within each work. There is an otherworldly feel about many of these works creating barriers between spectator and the artworks as well as creating a very personal space within the works. A sense of not being included or able to embrace these works personally is emphasised through the use of his ‘glass cubes’ which focus on the ‘architecture of his paintings’ creating a new approach to conveying the human figure within their surroundings in order to express the condition of humanity as he experienced it.
I found that people had mixed reactions to Bacon’s works, some unsure and some very engaged with his work. Whether you enjoy Bacon’s works or not they are without doubt, extremely thought provoking. My personal view was that his works were masterpieces in their honesty and his own dark view of the world, his ability to send out the message that all is more than meets the eye. His works are important for art to communicate on levels of expression that push the boundaries of what people are used to feeling, important works to encourage us to think about the human condition. Bacon does this in a way that is not too threatening, allowing us to create our own decisions and to find our own meanings. The answers to his works are not obvious but rather ambiguous.
BY CRAIG RAINE
The Waste Land was one of Francis Bacon’s favourite poems. A phrase from section 2, “A Game of Chess”, exactly epitomises Study of the Human Body (1982): “And other withered stumps of time/Were told upon the walls”. This closing picture, one of 29 paintings on show at Tate Liverpool, depicts a body part, a gross truncation, bereft of torso and head. Topped by its bottom, it is a rump, a sturdy circumcised cock in a haze of pubic hair, and white-booted legs, advancing towards the viewer, clad in cricket pads. We are advised that David Gower, the England batsman, was an inspiration, but I wonder if Eliot’s word “stumps” didn’t also play its part, consciously or sub-consciously, as a verbal trigger.
The whole of Bacon’s masochistic homosexuality is encapsulated in this painting. Most of the indispensable parts are there – the penis, the buttocks, the anus – though the mouth is absent, presumably too tender for the ideal rough encounter. In fact, a mouth-part is there, displaced, but not the lips and tongue. You can see a row of teeth in the right cricket pad where, just below the knee, the white protective ridges have been summarily and severely pruned. We are familiar with Bacon’s much-advertised “bleakness” – his default position that flesh is simply meat – but this painting is replete with grim humour. It captures the ridiculousness of sex, its quirks, its absurd categorical imperatives, as well as its terror. It is also a painting about vulnerability: those protective pads represent the fear (and desire) of being hurt and they expose paradoxically the body parts that are conspicuously unprotected, parts that have agreed to be a sexual object.
Before Bacon became a painter in the 1930s, he was an interior decorator, by all accounts rather derivative, sub-Bauhaus. It’s hard to get excited about furniture, so we lazily accede to this verdict, eager to get on to the paintings. However, there is one aspect of interior decoration that makes a significant contribution to the painting. It is the curtain. In his early days, Bacon had Bloomsbury connections, including Dorothy Todd and Madge Garland, a lesbian couple who were the sometime editor and fashion editor of Vogue. Garland’s Bruton Street flat had as part of its furnishings Bacon’s surgical white rubber curtains. There are curtains, glistening Dacron drapes, in many of Bacon’s early paintings, all of them painted with effortless bravura, as you might expect from a former interior decorator.
Critics have been puzzled by the recurrent presence of a tassel in many of Bacon’s pictures. In Study for a Portrait (1952), a man’s head and bust, you can see the tassel and, on the suit lapel, the shadow of the tassel. The head is based on the bleeding nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, a favourite Bacon source easily identifiable by the skewed pince-nez. Halfway up the painting there is a curtain on metal rings. The tassel isn’t symbolic. It is there to close and open the curtains. (Photographs of Bacon’s Reece Mews studio by Perry Ogden in this exhibition show similar tassels for electric lights and blinds.)
The ubiquity of curtains is explained by the potent sexual topos of medicalisation – those latex curtains in Bruton Street, the suggestive safety pins in other curtains – where the implicit scenario is one of prescribed helplessness. Where procedures take place and things are done to the patient’s body. Behind the curtains, obedience and submission and the strong possibility of pain. (Many of Bacon’s compositions, we know, were based on K C Clark’s Positioning in Radiography.) This Tate Liverpool show centres its interest on the cage of lines that Bacon used to contain his images – those spectral glass or perspex cubes that are touched in. I think the curtains are more important and carry more charge. The spectral booths are sufficiently explained by Bacon’s admission that they are a simple pictorial device to anchor the central image and concentrate the viewer’s attention. They are there against the threat of aesthetic amorphousness. Whereas the curtains are there to enclose their subjects – who are subject to the premise of physical threat, the imminent arousing unknown, the claustrophobic promise of pain.
Which brings us to the Baconian signature scream. We remember all those screaming popes after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. There are also screams emitted from apes and chimpanzees and various other human figures. We are familiar with the photographic sources – the bloodied nurse and her crushed pince-nez, the teeth of a machine-gunner also from Eisenstein. But if they are a signature touch, they are someone else’s signature – a brilliant forgery.
There is a famous anecdote about Bacon. Princess Margaret, a touch tipsy at a ball thrown by Lady Rothermere, decided to seize the microphone and sing a selection of Cole Porter and similar stuff. Everyone listened respectfully. But Bacon, who was there, couldn’t bear it – the singing and the sycophancy. He booed very loudly. Caroline Blackwood, who was later married to Lucian Freud, recorded Bacon’s account: “Her singing was really too awful. Someone had to stop her. I don’t think people should perform if they can’t do it properly.” Lèse-majesté – and an index of Bacon’s fearlessness, of his refusal to be intimidated, which is part of his gift as a painter. He is no respecter of reputations and he takes what he needs when he needs to, just as Eliot believed that great poets steal and minor poets borrow. He asset-strips Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655) for several crucifixions.
The scream is stolen from Munch’s iconic painting. What a heist. So huge a theft that no one mentions it. You search David Sylvester’s Looking Back at Francis Bacon(2000) in vain for any reference to Der Schrei. Instead, Munch is dismissed brusquely as a non-influence because he is Expressionist, a painterly stance Bacon explicitly repudiates: ‘I’m not really saying anything [as he thought Munch was], because I’m probably much more concerned with the aesthetic qualities of a work than, perhaps, Munch was.’ So, a rather disingenuous denial of content. But it is unsurprising to me that Giacometti, later a friend and ally, should have initially dismissed Bacon’s work as Expressionist. Bacon takes Munch’s kitsch Nordic universal scream, critiques it and refines it. He gives it teeth.
And the teeth are interesting. They come in two basic types. For human beings, the teeth are uniform, regular at top and bottom. For animals, there are additional incisors – which, now and then, are given to the human mouth to suggest a shared animality. They express pain, the agony of orgasm, pity and terror, rage, appetite, fear, pleasure. One of them might be booing Munch’s cosmic vulgarity. Bacon is true to the versatility of the human mouth. He loved the mouth: “I’ve always been very moved by the movement of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth. People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications . . . I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.”
What do we make of this declaration? Of this desire to remove the mouth from its bodily functions, its ingestions, its semantic gestures, and see it as a simple inanimate phenomenon? (It is no surprise to learn that Bacon admired Damien Hirst’s flayed cow’s head aesthetically, for its colours – that wet intestinal pink.) We see, I think, Bacon’s dislike of “illustration” and his fascination with the painterly process and the part played by chance. The playwright Patrick Marber remembers “playing roulette with Francis Bacon in the Charlie Chester casino in Archer Street, Soho. He was gleeful. ‘Isn’t it wonderful when you win! And you know what, it’s quite good fun when you lose.’” It sounds perverse and is part of gambling pathology, but it is also indirectly a telling anecdote about Bacon the artist. The excitement of gambling reflects on the comparable excitement of painting – the way it can go wrong at any moment, as well as the brilliant accidents created by the pigment on the brush.
When Bacon spoke in favour of keeping Titian’s The Death of Actaeon for the nation, he emphasised the top corner in which Actaeon is transformed into a stag and torn apart by the dogs: the images, he said, were “never absolutely definite”. This lack of clarity and definition is often a strength in Bacon. Take Chimpanzee (1955): the animal is contained in a spectral cage, incisors savagely bared, behind it and to one side a dark grey wall marked with darker slant lines like a sign for rain in Japanese painting. The lines represent steel mesh, very effectively. But what Bacon really gets, in spite of the apparent blur of brushstrokes, is the chimpanzee’s pink prehensile feet and the shortness of the legs.
Or consider Triptych (1967) (formerly known as Triptych Inspired by T S Eliot’s Poem Sweeney Agonistes, a title wished on Bacon by his gallery). The right-hand panel shows two men fucking, a composition based on two wrestlers in Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic “dictionary” of movement, like stills from a film. The painting gives new meaning to the phrase “one flesh”. It is inextricably itself, with a single set of teeth there in the mix. In the left-hand panel, two post-coital women with long hair and possible breasts, lie intertwined and splayed, having done it in front of a mirror, a mirror that reflects their feet and a desolate chest of drawers with its upper drawer pulled suggestively open. The confusion of the bed is captured exactly by virtue of its inexactitude.
Bacon can be surprisingly exact and representational. In the foreground of this panel Bacon has painted an ashtray and a softpack of cigarettes. In the central panel is an eviscerated hold-all, rendered with great panache, with a line of zip teeth. There is a cloth-covered stool on which rests a leather-bound ledger. All these details are unmistakable.
His rendering of faces is recorded strikingly in this show. We think of the archetypal Bacon face as a set of smears and swipes that emulate motion pictures and movement, but this is a relatively late development. Early on, there are faces in mid-dissolve, partially corroded representations. There are striated features that derive from Picasso’s “primitive” paintings, which look to African carvings. And there are straightforwardly representational portraits, for example of Lucian Freud entering a room down a set of stone steps. The face is conventionally set down and doesn’t look much like Lucian Freud. Bacon gets better likeness with greater freedom of treatment. And he wanted likeness, reasonably enough: “I mean, there’s no point in trying to make a portrait that doesn’t look like the person.”
There are two paintings from the Man in Blue 1954 suite (IV and V) in which the faces are poised between the conventionally realistic and the faintly unfocused. You could pick out the person in an identity parade – his combed-back dark fair hair, the strong jaw and mouth, the pronounced eyebrows – but the whole is on the edge of pixelation. The paintings have immense conviction: the upper torso is suited, the lower body masked by a conference table, the hands clasped and resting attentively on the table. In V, the posture is listening. He isn’t screaming. His face is recognisable but hard to describe, like a model in wax, just this side of melting. Here there is no cage of lines. That particular function is performed by the lines of the table and the sequence of pleated drapes behind the sitter’s head. It is exquisitely, unostentatiously composed, and miles away from the melodrama and rhetoric we often, lazily, assume in Bacon’s paintings: “But it is more than that: it has a cosmic dimension, as if it were a Mouth of Hell. It seems to suck in and expel every particle of energy in the air.” David Sylvester, mouthing off, as if Bacon were Munch.
Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1952
Francis Bacon was the greatest painter in postwar Britain. And this is certainly the most extensive and probably the most significant show of his work to be staged in the north. So no one could argue that it is not a good thing. Britain’s regional galleries should get more great exhibitions. However, is this one of a calibre to lure visitors from outside Liverpool? To convince complacent Londoners, for instance, to take a train north?
The answer is no. You will find only a few of the best of Bacon’s impetuous and hence hit-and-miss paintings. The most important of these are his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion from 1944. These are the images that launched his artistic career (before that he worked as an interior designer), but don’t imagine the weeping Marys of Christian tradition.
gainst a burnt orange backdrop, bruised and misshapen lumps squat, yowl and stretch, yawning dark-mouthed or baring rows of bloody teeth. There is something brutally primal about these embryonic mutants; something that feels frenzied and savage and viciously instinctive. Violence runs berserk. And no wonder. Bacon identified them as the Eumenides, the furies of Greek legend who would pursue wrongdoers to a vengeful death.
A triptych first exhibited at the close of the Second World War, in the same month when Nazi atrocities in concentration camps came to light, it was seen as an image of insatiable human brutality. Visitors were “brought up short” by pictures “so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut up with a snap at the sight of them”, declared one contemporary report.
Bacon’s pictures can still work in this way, but you wouldn’t know it from this exhibition. His aim — famously stated in The Brutality of Fact, his series of classic interviews with David Sylvester — was to create images that could rise to the surface with the “foam of the unconscious” still clinging freshly to them. “Some paint comes across directly on to the nervous system,” he said. “Other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain."
His greatest works do the former. They work by a mixture of feeling, intuition and luck. Yet by and large Bacon’s best works — his haunting screaming popes, his triptych recording the death of his lover George Dyer, his magnificent portraits in which faces are smashed in, their flesh muddled — are missing from this exhibition. Instead there are far too many images that over-do the detail and look more like a hammed-up mess than a sublimation of some visceral experience. There are too many pictures from his late years.
The curators try to make up by instead offering us “a long diatribe through the brain”. They focus specifically on the way in which Bacon articulated space in his canvases, introducing artificial structures (as an introductory wall text explains it) that can elevate or exaggerate the figures within. These enclosures are the “invisible rooms” of this show’s title.
They are there, it is true. Bacon does frequently capture an atmosphere of psychological claustrophobia, evoke an animal energy about to burst through restraining bars, by presenting figures within arenas of colour or cages of crude brush strokes, by creating mirroring structures and strong veering planes. Yet the curators, in bringing all these images together, turn what should feel like an untamable energy into what starts to seem more like a trope or even a trick. Bacon is trapped in the structures of his artifice.
It doesn’t help that Tate Liverpool scarcely has enough space. A secondary show, of the work of the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, another artist who wrestles with the body but in a very different way, fills the other half of the exhibition galleries. It would have been better to have given her a miss and to have given Bacon the space for his energy to break out.
Explanatory wall texts further deplete the experience. Avoid reading them. It adds nothing to know that a cloth in a picture “may relate to the curtain of his Cromwell Place studio”. Nor can the suggestion that the lurid pink arms of a pope may refer “to photographs of Hitler rehearsing hand gestures for a speech” detract from your suspicion that this canvas is one of Bacon’s failures.
The conveyance of “fact” that Bacon refers to so frequently is nothing to do with the iteration of detail. And the concentration of this show upon his “preparatory drawings” only further dissipates the force. Far too much is made of the few daubs — often just a crude splodge or two of paint — that Bacon has applied to magazine images. This show may have begun as a laudable venture, but it ends up imprisoning Bacon within all too visible rooms.
By CATHERINE
DID the Tate’s powers-that-be realise, back in 2008, that Capital of Culture year would have such far-reaching effects? Nearly a decade after its record-busting Klimt extravaganza attracted so many visitors the lifts couldn’t cope, the gallery has just unveiled its seventh successive summer blockbuster show.
The annual stellar summer exhibition has become a much-anticipate event. No pressure then. Last year, it was all about Jackson Pollock and his “black pourings”. For 2016, curators have looked closer to home to present the largest-ever exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work in the north of England. Like Pollock, Bacon was a colourful character.
And, similarly, he can be something of a Marmite figure — one of the most important painters of the 20th century, his solitary, almost animalistic subjects (an actual animal in his 1955 work, Chimpanzee) and their anguished contortions aren’t necessarily easy to love.
Still, Bacon fan or not, visitors will certainly find the Tate's staging of his work visually impressive. While there are just over 30 paintings on display, they have a grandeur of scale — the 6ft canvases presented Old Master-like in the extravagant gilt frames Bacon chose for them.
“Invisible Rooms” refers to the ghostly cage-like device Bacon used to frame, draw the eye towards and yet at the same time isolate his figures. Once you start looking, it’s such an obvious motif that it's a surprise it’s never been fully explored before.
Were the structures taken for granted, hiding in plain sight as it were, or was it, as curator Lauren Barnes suggests, because Bacon himself set the narrative when it came to discussions of his work? The spindly cages started to emerge in his work from the late 40s onwards, and, once they're introduced, this show is set out in broadly chronological fashion.
It works well in part thanks to Bacon himself, who developed additional ideas and motifs over the next 40 years, such as the circular arenas, or the presence of mirrors, which help group the works — vibrant, anguished, disturbing — into natural sections. And, towards the end, there’s a fascinating unfinished canvas which clearly shows his “invisible rooms” process at work.
One slight disappointment from a Liverpool sense — more could be made of the role of Bebington-born photographer John Deakin’s role in Bacon’s work. He took carefully choreographed images which the artist used as the basis for some of his most important paintings.
A trio of original snaps are on show in a glass case, but it’s easy to miss their significance when surrounded by the colourful giant artworks. It would be beneficial to see the image of Isabel Rawsthorne alongside Bacon’s finished painting of the Liverpool art college-trained artist, for example.
Bacon is paired in one ticket with the first major UK retrospective of fellow 20th-century artist Maria Lassnig, with whom he shared some similarities. Cannily, the show’s flow has visitors walking through Lassnig first.
Blockbuster show — the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Tate Picture: ANDREW TEEBAY
By
The British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was a self-taught artist. Born in Dublin, he moved to London in 1928, where he earned his living as an interior decorator until he won almost instant notoriety with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). His instinctive, visceral paintings are predominantly figural. This week tae Liverpool opens Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms, which considers the cages and enclosures Bacon sometimes painted around his subjects, to make them appear trapped.
Author Michael Peppiatt was 21 when he met Bacon, in 1963, while writing a piece for an issue of the student magazine Cambridge Opinion dedicated to Modern art in Britain. Despite the difference in age (Bacon was then in his mid-fifties) the two struck up a friendship and met regularly over the next 29 years, until Bacon’s death. This the latest in our In the Studio interview series draws on his knowledge of Bacon’s routine.
Bacon got up very early, usually with first light, even if he’d come home very late and very drunk, because he liked to get going at the first possible opportunity.
Sometimes he didn’t feel like working, and pottered around a bit, but if he did he would go straight into a picture. He used to say: “If it’s going to work, it usually works right away, or not at all.” He worked quickly, so often he managed to finish a painting in a few sessions.
He started the day with strong tea – he made a very good cup, usually to battle the hangover. He was a very disciplined person. He said, “You have to be disciplined in everything; above all in frivolity.”
He had a mews house in South Kensington, where he lived and worked for the last 30 years of his life. It consisted of two rooms with a bathroom and kitchen in-between. He had his bed in the sitting room and the other room was his studio, so he could just pad straight in from where he slept.
It was very, very chaotic, with about a foot of books and photos and rags and paint brushes and paint, old sweaters and socks on the floor. It looked like detritus but in fact a lot of it was an image bank: he had all these photos and pictures, and sometimes you couldn’t really work out what he’d seen in them, but obviously he had seen something. I was lucky enough to get in on a few occasions when he wanted to show me a new painting or I was helping him look for something. It don’t remember it smelling of turps and linseed oil – he was asthmatic and he must have done something to go a little easy on his lungs. It was the visual shock that I remember more than any other sense.
It was an ordered chaos – I think he knew vaguely were things were, but he was often looking for things – images, clothes, books, and on one hilarious occasion when we were out gambling and he had run out of money, cash. He kept shaking out all these pots of dried paint and suddenly there was a flutter of big notes falling through the air.
He treated his walls as a sort of huge palette. There were paint marks rising up all over them and over the door, too. It was partly trying out colours, and partly cleaning his brush. The room was lit by a skylight, which wasn’t particularly bright, and a small north window. I think he had the electric light on a lot of the time, which was just a powerful bulb hanging down, no shade.
It was a small space; narrow with low ceilings and very crowded. They had difficulty getting the big paintings in and out. He usually worked on one painting at a time, the exception being the triptychs, which he would have lined up against the wall – it would have been impossible to make room for three easels next to each other in that room.
He was always immaculate when he went out, in a freshly pressed suit, without a trace of any paint. I think he was quite careful to differentiate. He made a point of not letting people into the studio when he was working. For Bacon, painting was a very solitary activity. I think he worked in a dressing gown or an old pair of trousers and a sweater.
He never listened to music while he was working, he just wanted to focus on the painting. But outside of that, he liked things like Edith Piaf and other crooners, such as Nat King Cole.
He worked until about midday, when he went out and had his first glass of champagne. He either turned up in Soho and bumped into whoever was around, or he made a date for lunch proper. Then he sort of lurched through the afternoon and into the night from bar to bar. Sometimes he came back drunk and would think he had the solution to a problem with a painting, but if he started to paint when he was like that it was always a disaster.
He found inspiration everywhere. From his own life, his experiences. Most of his paintings are about sex and love, and about his friends. He also drew on the Greek tragedies and poems by Yeats and Eliot, some painters, too – Velasquez is the famous one, but also Picasso, and photography, and cinema. He was a deeply cultured, cultivated man. He looked and he felt and he combined looking and feeling into imagery.
Finishing paintings was always hard for him. Very often his gallery would have a van waiting below to come up and grab a painting before he took it too far. They had to carry it wet out of the studio. Sometimes he wanted to get a painting back because he felt that it wasn’t what he had wanted to let out, but on the whole I think he learned over time that there was a danger of taking a piece too far and losing whatever he’d already got.
He did suffer from a kind of block at times. It wasn’t a case of just churning his pictures out – I think he was a fluent painter but he tended also to paint in bursts. I remember him being a bit incoherent at times, which I think was down to the painting not going well, or perhaps it was his life not going well, but he had distinct highs and lows. I do think that’s one of the things that attracted him to painting, though, that sometimes it worked and sometimes it ground to a halt. He just accepted it. He knew from past experience that, with any luck, things would ease and he’d begin to work again.
He didn’t use assistants, although early on he had a bit of input on how to paint some grass from his friend Denis Wirth Miller.
He only slept for a couple of hours a night. Those who had been drinking with him would be crouched under the pillow, wondering how to cope with the day. I don’t know how he did it – perhaps with enough discipline, one can. He was remarkable in that way.
Bacon, the visionary architect
Francis Bacon
Tate Liverpool
It seems there isn’t a major modern-art auction that goes by without a Francis Bacon painting selling for multiple millions. Just last week his diptych Two Studies for a Self-Portrait sold for $35 million at Sotheby’s, New York. Next month, at a sale marking the 250th anniversary of Christie’s in London, his Version No.2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe is expected to fetch a similar sum.
Bacon has become the iconic artist de nos jours, his disturbed, isolated figures reflecting man’s pointless place in a godless universe, utterly disconnected from those around us.
Despite his popularity, however, and the guarantee his name will attract visitors by the lorryload, two big problems face the curator looking to stage a Bacon exhibition. One: what’s left to say that we haven’t heard (many times) before? And two: Bacon being such an uneven artist, who turned out almost as many misses as he did hits, how to maintain quality control throughout?
A new show at Tate Liverpool solves both problems with minimum fuss, by including just 30 canvases and by focusing, tightly, on one relatively neglected aspect of his career: the architectural “frames” he used in many of his pictures. Most famously, these took the form of transparent cages in which his figures were trapped. Beneath the cage in 1952’s Study for a Portrait, for example, the subject – his mouth alarmingly wide-open – can be seen letting off an existentialist howl.
Bacon saw man, essentially, as little more than an animal with clothes on, in thrall to the same carnal needs and urges. That connection is made explicit in Chimpanzee, the simian cramped in its zoo-like cage recalling many of Bacon’s human subjects on show here.
The artist said his enclosures were, in part, just structural devices that made for more interesting pictures, but they surely reveal something of Bacon’s view of the human condition too. There’s a sense throughout this show of psychological claustrophobia – of Bacon’s subjects all being, in one way or another, imprisoned. Take his series based on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is an example: the throne that in the Spaniard’s original emphasised papal pre-eminence now becomes a seat of entrapment, Innocent’s arms raised in a pathetic plea for release.
In Man in Blue, meanwhile, a suited gent appears alone in a dark bar, subtly penned in by the barman’s counter and the wall behind him. Suddenly, once you start seeing these “cages” in Bacon’s paintings, you stop seeing much else – you even start to view Bacon’s fondness for diptychs and triptychs in a new light. For what are these painting formats other than a way of isolating different figures in different scenes?
Bacon wasn’t really one for making preparatory drawings, but a selection of sketches of boxers and wrestlers from the Fifties sees him testing out various compositional ideas. The ring served as a natural container, the fighters – depicted in all manner of contorted positions – serving as metaphors for trapped humans going about their struggles.
The show progresses chronologically – which, with Bacon, means the risk of anti-climax. Much of his later work is a self-parody of what went before, the tragic replaced by what often feels like the overblown and the near-farcical.
However, it’s interesting to see here that he was experimenting with new framing devices – from voids to mirrors – till the end, creating complex spaces that confound our expectations. In Three Figures and Portrait, his subjects are distorted into various strange poses by optical lenses that Bacon has carefully deployed about the scene.
I used to think it little more than a biographical footnote that Bacon started out life as an interior designer. But after visiting this show, it now seems central to his whole career. It honed, one suspects, a keen sense of space, which the architectural elements in his canvases made manifest. Despite the myth of him as a visceral, instinctive painter, this revealing show presents a much more considered artist than we once believed. A Bacon of a very different flavour.
Francis Bacon’s painting gloves...
only for lefties
NEWS
Two left-handed gloves worn by the artist Francis Bacon as he painted the Three Studies of Lucian Freud are to be sold at auction.
Bacon would paint with his right hand and wear a glove on his left so he could clean brushes and test colours. The white gloves are covered in the yellow and brown shades of his triptych, which became the most expensive British painting when it sold in 2013 for $142.4 million.
Bacon left the gloves at the Royal College of Art, where he moved temporarily in 1969 when his own studio was destroyed by fire. They were found by a teacher who gave them to a pupil with a note saying: “These Really ARE Francis Bacon’s Painting Gloves... amongst the rubbish I actually found them!!!”
They will be sold by Chiswick Auctions, London, on June 7, with an estimate of £5,000 to £7,000.
Francis Bacon self-portrait fetches £24m at New York auction
A Francis Bacon double-panel self-portrait which had been in a private collection for decades has sold for about 35 million US dollars (£24 million) at a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art. Bacon’s 1970 diptych, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait, had remained in the same collection for 46 years, having been acquired the year it was created.
The work has been exhibited only twice, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971 and the Marlborough Fine Art Small Portrait Studies exhibition in London in 1993. Bacon created two self-portraits using the double format. One sold last year at Sotheby’s for 22.4 million dollars. The record for a Bacon work is 142.4 million dollars.
Other top lots among 44 artworks going under the gavel included Cy Twombly’s Untitled (New York City), which sold for just under 36.7 million dollars (£25.4 million).
The 1968 work is the only composition from his celebrated Blackboard series which features blue loops on a grey background. It was acquired directly from the artist and has since remained in the same collection.
Sotheby's also offered another large-scale canvas by Twombly, this one created in 2004 in the last decade of his life. Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version V), which fetched 15.4 million dollars (£10.6 million), is executed in blood red swirls and is one of six paintings from his famous Bacchus series.
Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait (Fright Wig) — the pop artist's last self-portrait, made in 1986 just months before his death — sold for 7.7 million dollars (£5.3 million).
Skin, body, self: the question of the
abject in the work of Francis Bacon
Ernst van Alphen
Based on a common sense understanding of the abject and of abject art – which I will complicate later – the paintings of Francis Bacon can easily be understood as abject. The effect of the abject on the viewer is usually seen as discomfort, repulsion or even nausea. This is an aesthetic judgment. To many viewers Bacon’s work is repulsive or frightening, which could imply that his paintings are abject. His works have, however, other characteristics, them[1]selves of an aesthetic nature, that complicate such a judgment. To begin with, his paintings always have a vertical format, and the figures in his paintings are usually represented vertically; they are standing or sitting. This vertical format mirrors the viewer’s own bodily dimension. It functions as a Gestalt, ‘a whole body from the outlines of which nothing is missing’ (Krauss, 1997: 240). This counters a consideration of Bacon’s work as abject. But, of course, and in support of the position that his work is abject, it is precisely the wholeness of Bacon’s figures that is under siege. His figures are losing their contours; it is as if their bodies dissolve into the space that surrounds them.
Other elements support these paintings and their figures to function as perfect Gestalt, however. Bacon was very outspoken about how he wanted his works to be shown. He wanted his paintings to be covered by glass. To hide paintings by glass is a kind of curse in the art world. It is only done in the case of extremely valuable paintings, which need to be protected, as required by the insurance. But Bacon thought that his paintings looked best when they were covered by glass. The glass in front of the painting tends to mirror the viewer’s body. It is as if the paintings’ potential functioning as a Gestalt for the viewer is emphasised, or made easier. The viewer has difficulty seeing the painting as paint. The glass dissolves the materiality of paint and what can be recognised is only the represented figure and space. It is only after some effort, after the viewer has positioned herself at the right spot and angle, that she can look through the glass and see the skin of the figure as well as of the paint.
But this Gestalt effect, too, is reversed. It is the skin of the represented figure as well as of the paint that undermines, in turn, the functioning of Bacon’s paintings as Gestalt. Whereas the spaces in which the figures are located are usually painted in flat, uniform paint, the figures are tooled and worked on. Bacon often used all kind of tools to belabour not the surface of the whole painting, but just that of the figures. As a result the skin of the paint as well as of the represented figure becomes ambiguous. The distinction between the two can no longer be made. The materialities of paint and of the represented body are undifferentiable. The fact that the boundary between matter and representation has been crossed produces yet again the affect of abjection.
So far, the works’ leaning towards the abject after all, is based on a somewhat simple notion of what abject is. In order to assess if Bacon’s work is a prime example of the abject or not, we first have to understand what the abject entails more precisely. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject developed in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection has been the most influential, so I will discuss hers (Kristeva, 1982). The abject is what the subject-in-becoming must get rid of in order to become an I. According to Kristeva the protection of the boundaries of the body is the main function of abjection. The anxieties triggered by the abject are first of all anxieties resulting from the end-products and by-products of the body, such as body fluids, blood, urine and faecal matter. What defines these end- or by-products of the body is that they are neither subject nor object. They embody the transition between the body and what is outside it. Although we treat them as objects outside of us, they were once inside or part of our body but we got rid of them. And while we distance ourselves from these bodily discharges they remain a constant threat to a consistent body identity. It is through socialisation that we learn to mark the boundaries of our self. By removing waste and creating a clean, obedient body we safeguard these boundaries. This happens at the cost of, or thanks to, abjection.
According to Kristeva, abjection can be traced back to the first rejection, that is, to the separation from the mother helping her baby to establish him/ herself in the symbolic order. Abjection preserves some of that pre-objectal relationship and some of the ambivalence that is experienced by the subject when it becomes an independent body separated from the mother. Kristeva’s psychological notion of the abject has, however, social ramifications and has been developed further into a theory of abjection. Abjection, no longer referring to an ambiguous object but to a process or activity, refers to cultural mechanisms that exclude certain groups of people or individuals by stigmatising them with loathing. Xenophobia is usually fuelled by abjection. But not only foreigners, also other marginalised groups within a society are often considered to be ugly, dirty or frightening, which evoke aversive responses in the rest of that society. Homophobia, racism, sexism and ageism are also structured by the mechanism of abjection. Subjects react to the abject with repulsion and loathing in order to restore the border separating self and other. The other is ‘abjected’ from the self, because the abject is seen as not respecting borders, rules and positions of a society. These abject others are not only abjected by means of exclusionary mechanisms but they are simultaneously needed and produced by societies. This is so because subjects are formed by the exclusion of what they are not. In the words of Judith Butler: ‘the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’ (Butler, 1993: 3).
This short account of the abject and abjection reveals a slippage between the condition to be abject and the operation of abjection, in other words, to abject. In Hal Foster’s words: ‘To abject is to expel, to separate; to be abject, on the other hand is to be repulsive, stuck, subject enough only to feel this subjecthood at risk’ (Foster, 1996: 156). This distinction makes clear that the work of Francis Bacon has little to do with abjection, even though it can possibly be understood in terms of the condition of being abject. For, it is clear that the figures in his paintings demonstrate subjecthood at risk. Bacon is then representing figures from the experience of having no boundaries, that is, from the position of being abject.
Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, not long after Bacon had become one of the most prominent international artists, the abject became an important notion in the understanding of contemporary artworks. Foster has argued that abject art of those days has tended in two directions:
The first is to identify with the abject, to approach it somehow – to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene object-gaze of the real. The second is to represent the condition of abjection in order to provoke its operation – to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right. (Foster, 1996: 157)
An example of the second direction is the work of Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ (1987) represents the condition of abjection, provoking evangelical senators like Jesse Helms to complete the work of abjection negatively. The first direction, identification with the abject, has developed, according to Foster, a division of labour according to gender. Artists who probe the maternal body repressed by the paternal law tend to be women. Examples are Kiki Smith, Maureen Connor, Rona Pondick and Cindy Sherman (after her turn to the grotesque in the mid-1980s). Artists who assume an infantilist position to mock the paternal law tend to be men. Examples include Mike Kelley, John Miller and Paul McCarthy (Foster, 1996: 159). In spite of this difference, the art objects of both female and male artists embody the abject and the feelings raised by the abject such as loathing or disgust. Those feelings are imposed on the viewer.
Francis Bacon is not part of this generation of artists from the 1980s and 1990s obsessed with the abject and abjection. And, although some viewers consider his works as horrifying and repulsive, it is not so evident that the feelings raised by the abject are imposed on Bacon’s viewers. In the introduction to my argument I pointed out how Bacon’s work functions in some respects as Gestalt of and for viewers, which opposes the possibility that abject feelings are imposed on them. Perhaps we should make a more precise distinction between horrifying and repulsive: the fact that the tormented look of many of Bacon’s figures can be horrifying does not imply that they are repulsive in the way the abject can be. If the viewer is horrified by his figures, this affect is not the result of the sight of something abject, but rather of identification with figures who experience themselves as abject, in the sense that their subjectivities are at risk. For the viewer, Bacon’s figures are not an abjected outside, or abjected others, but they represent an abjected condition viewers can identity with. This identification is stimulated, rather than undermined, by their Gestalt form.
This is a problematic statement because identification is in many ways the opposite of horror or repulsion. How is it possible that the viewer will identify with figures who look horrifying or repulsive; in other words, what kind of sinister case of identification is this? What is the point of identifying with figures that seem to lose their self and whose subjectivities are in the process of dissolution? This identification is not only remarkable in its target, but is also qualitatively different from the common understanding of identification. But as Kaja Silverman has argued, identification takes one of two forms (Silverman, 1996). One form involves taking the other into the self on the basis of a (projected) likeness, so that the other ‘becomes’ or ‘becomes like’ the self. Features that are similar are enhanced in the process; features that remain irreducibly other are cast aside or ignored. Silverman calls this idiopathic identification. The other form is heteropathic. Here, the self doing the identification takes the risk of – temporarily and partially – ‘becoming’ (like) the other. This is both exciting and risky, enriching and dangerous, but at any rate, affectively powerful. This distinction can help to get more clarity about the relation between Bacon’s paintings and the abject. When the viewer of Bacon’s work identifies with figures that experience themselves as abject, the kind of identification that is at stake is heteropathic identification. The viewer takes the risk of temporarily and partially putting her or his subjectivity at risk.
If the viewer of Bacon’s paintings identifies (or not) with figures from the position or experience of being abjected and as a result having no clear boundaries, we must assess how this dissolution of boundaries in Bacon’s paintings is realised. As remarked earlier, this dissolution concerns the skin of the represented figures as well as of the paint. In the former case we remain within the representational domain: it is as if the figures dissolve or fall apart within the represented space that surrounds them. In the latter case the materiality of the paint and that of the represented body become nondifferentiable. The boundary between matter and representation is being blurred, or crossed. A good example of such boundary crossing can be found in the triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984). As the title announces, we see Bacon’s friend John Edwards on each panel, sitting on a stool, but from different angles: the left hand panel from the right, the middle panel frontally, and the right hand panel from the left. The space in which Edwards is located is ambiguous: it can be an empty room, but the curved edge between wall and floor also suggests that it is open space. The curved line is then an allusion to the horizon of an open landscape. The space in which the three figures are represented is painted in thin paint, covering the canvas with homogeneous colour fields.
The figures are in sharp contrast with the space that surrounds them, especially their faces. The three figures are not just representations. We notice how they are built, constituted by paint, hence, matter. The paint is sometimes wiped or whisked away. This belabouring of the paint does not result in a representational illusion. It does not transform the paint into representation; the paint remains matter. The skin of the face of all three figures is covered with regular stripes, usually pink but also in dark grey, almost black. These stripes look like footprints, the sole consisting of a striped pattern. The patterned surface of the figures’ skin can also be the result of a kitchen tool used for the treatment of meat. Whatever the tool has been that Bacon has used for making this striped pattern on the face of the three figures, the pattern never crosses the border of matter to representation. It remains paint.
This example demonstrates the importance of skin in Bacon’s work. Bacon’s notion of skin is grounded in a phenomenological and psychoanalytical view of skin, although not limited to such a view. I invoke this view to complicate the standard conception of abjection. French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu explains this view in his book The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach of The Self (1989). According to Anzieu the skin serves the purposes of containment, protection and communication:
The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out; it is the barrier which protects against penetration by the aggression and greed emanating from others, whether people or objects. Finally, the third function – which the skin shares with the mouth and which it performs at least as often – is as a site and a primary means of communication with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by those others. (Anzieu, 1989: 40)
Anzieu is not speaking of the physical properties of the skin but of the metaphoric qualities of flesh. His concept of ‘skin ego’ articulates this beautifully. By ‘Skin Ego’, Anzieu explains, ‘I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychic contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body’ (Anzieu, 1989: 40). The skin’s functions of containment, protection and communication are the result of a dual process of interiorisation. Two spatial aspects of the skin need to be internalised. First of all, the subject needs to internalise the interface between the bodies of the child and the mothering figure (what Anzieu calls the ‘psychic envelope’), and second, the mothering environment itself with all its verbal, visual, and emotional properties. Anzieu articulates this concept of skin ego and this dual interface by means of the somewhat odd word combination ‘the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words’.
Clearly, this psychoanalytic notion of skin is closely related to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of the abject. They presuppose each other. The skin’s functions of containment and protection can only be realised by means of exclusion and abjection of that which threatens the safety of this bodily and psychic envelope. This view of a psychoanalyst can surely not be unproblematically brought to bear on works of art. But to the extent that it represents a philosophical conception as well, it can be brought into dialogue with art. And that is exactly what happens here, so that Bacon, not Anzieu or Kristeva, complicates the notion of abjection. I contend that Bacon’s work engages a dialogue with this rich conception of skin. The artist’s work ‘on the skin’ seems to propose a notion of the subject, which is not ‘contained’ to use Anzieu’s term, nor does it need abjection in order to establish its borders. The condition of the abject is not seen as repulsive, but as a mechanism that is needed for maintaining ‘open borders’ between self and (abjected) other.
This assessment implies a paradoxical re-evaluation of the abject. When the skin is not the body’s envelop, then skin and body can no longer adequately be distinguished from each other. Body and skin permeate and sink into each other. This seems to be the condition of most of Bacon’s figures. Elsewhere, I have explained the relationship between body and self of Bacon’s figures by the difference between the form in which a human subject experiences her or his body and the way it is perceived by others.1 Simply stated, one does not see oneself as one is seen by others. While others see the subject’s body as object and as whole, the subject has only inner experiences or fragmented views of her or his body. This view complicates Kristeva’s notion of the abject. Within her theory body and self are seen as self-sufficient. She does not take the visual dimension of existence into account. Instead, by means of the mechanism of abjection the subject is itself able to maintain and safeguard its wholeness and borders. In this alternative view, inspired by the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, the relationship between self and other is a new element, and so is its visual dimension. As Bakhtin writes:
The body is not something self-sufficient: it needs the other, needs his recognition and form-giving activity. Only the inner body (the body experienced as heavy) is given to a human being himself; the other’s outer body is not given but set as a task: I must actively produce it. (Bakhtin, 1990: 51)
Others create an external shape and form for the string of inner sensations of self: they create a perception of the body as ‘whole’.
If we look at Bacon’s images in light of this understanding of the self/other relationship, it becomes immediately clear that the subjects/figures in Bacon’s paintings are all represented as trapped in a solely inner sensation of self. Again and again we see bodies as series of fragments, dangling on the string of the inner sensation of self. Bacon’s subjects seem to lack the wholeness the self-other relationship would produce. This lack is particularly strongly foregrounded in Three Studies for Portraits including Self-Portrait, 1969 (Figure 6) While in most cases the fragmented bodies are clearly distinguishable from the space that encircles them, in the three panels of this triptych it is not exactly clear where the body ends. The faces are fragmented in such a way that we cannot decide whether the formless appendices belong to the subjects’ faces or not. Even in the middle and left panel, in which the appendices are directly contiguous with their faces, differentiating the subject from its context is not easy. Subject and non-subject become one visual field constructed upon contiguity, making it impossible to speak of a subject or self.
Similarly, although in a less radical manner, the faces in Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970 (Figure 7) are not clearly delineated. This painting, belonging to the genre of the diptych that Bacon practised less frequently, shows two figures facing each other. Bacon makes here ironic use of a genre in which husband and wife, facing each other, are traditionally represented to preserve for posterity the identity of the bourgeois couple in early capitalist Europe. While in the conventional couple each partner derives his or her identity from the allegiance to the figure they face, in Bacon’s diptych the visual relationship is not defining but undoing the characters. Facing each other with blind eyes, these figures seem to lose their boundaries from the confrontation. Dyer’s face is extended by a strange pointed element that seems to be reaching toward Rawsthorne; she, on the other hand, displays one of the characteristic substantial shadows, characteristic because occurring in Bacon’s work almost systematically.2 Here, again, Bacon’s representation of the inner experience of self ends up deconstructing the idea of self: if there is only an inner-self there is in fact no self at all.
If we try to describe these two examples of Bacon’s work in light of the abject and abjection, the only way is then to contend that Bacon has represented the figures from the position of being abject, from the experience of having no boundaries. The question is then if we should consider this as a negative or a positive experience. The conventional idea of the abject would suggest it to be negative, because subjectivity depends on boundaries, distinctions and differences. I will argue, however, that Bacon’s figures do not suffer from their loss or lack of self. Their abject condition is privileged above the wholeness of a contained self.
In order to make this argument I will first provide another dimension to Bakhtin’s account of self-other relationship by adding the one of Roland Barthes. In the case of Barthes self-other relationships are not seen as form bestowing, as in Bakhtin’s account of these relations, but rather as the cause of the loss of self. At first sight Barthes’ view of the self-other relationship is very similar to the early Bakhtinian position.3 In both accounts the subject’s experience of self is determined by the position of her body in the world and by the very limited perspective she has on her body. In both stories about the creation of self the other has a strong hold over the subject through her ability to represent the body of the subject, an ability the subject herself lacks. While in Bakhtin’s account, however, this relationship of dependence on the other is sweet, loving and desirable, in Barthes’ account the subject is sentenced to this dependence.
In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (notice, in this title, Barthes’ effort not to be defined, represented by the other: par Roland Barthes) he expresses the pain of this dependence: ‘You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image …: even and especially for your body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images’ (Barthes, 1975: 82). In Camera Lucida he even describes the dependence on the form-bestowing relation with the other as mortifying: ‘I feel that the photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice’ (Barthes, 1982: 11).
In Barthes’ view the objectification of the subject is not the work of another individual subject. For him the other is discursive. The objectification of the subject that bestows on her or him the experience of wholeness is a discursive transformation that translates the subject into the terms of the doxa, the already-said, the platitudes of public opinion (Jefferson, 1989: 170). The dependence on the other to achieve wholeness is unbearable for Barthes, because
it is through the other that the subject falls prey to a representation that constructs him in terms of the stereotype. The Barthesian subject is alienated not merely by becoming an image in the eyes of the other but through this assimilation into the doxa. (Jefferson, 1989: 170)
There is no longer a question of a loving and shaping self-other relationships, but of a grim conflict between discourses.
The only thing the subject can do in order to fight the mortifying images of the doxa is to try to undo the objectification and mortification of the self through the practice of writing or representing. But the assertion of an alternative discourse that would be her or his own is impossible because the subject cannot avoid using the elements of the discourse which preceded it to build up a ‘private’ one. Even behind a very particular style or discourse, developed by the subject itself, the doxa will be lurking. Only the practice of representation as an ongoing bodily activity with no special object as its goal besides this movement, succeeds in destabilising the objectifying transformations of the other, of discourse: ‘In this practice the body’s relationship to language is altered from being the object of its representation to becoming the support and condition of a certain linguistic activity’ (Jefferson, 1989: 170).
Instead of allowing the doxa to objectify the body, Barthes proposes to keep the body in a movement that asserts its resistance against, even if through the use of, the doxa. This movement re-subjectifies the body, thus escaping total colonisation through full awareness of the dependence on the discourses of the other.
Barthes’ account of the self-other relationship as a conflict between discourses makes it possible to reconsider Bacon’s paintings as so many efforts to unsettle representations of the self (of the body) that mortify any experience of the self. In his interviews with David Sylvester Bacon’s incessant emphasis on the need for distortion in order to represent the ‘real’ appearance of somebody can be understood as a fight against stereotypical representations of the body:
FB: What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.
DS: Are you saying that painting is almost a way of bringing somebody back, that the process of painting is almost like the process of recalling?
FB: I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back. (Sylvester, 1987: 40)
It seems that Bacon wants to represent the self of a subject without the mediating, form-bestowing role of the perspective that the other, here meaning discourse, offers. His remarks about the effect on the viewers he strives for, and very incessantly too, shows that he aims for the opposite of an objectifying discourse: ‘It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester, 1987: 12). His paintings try to avoid offering the objectifying, healing effect that makes the onlooker’s self feel whole; instead his images should evoke a violent, direct response in the onlooker.
The gaze of the other, represented, embodied in the image, is not allowed by Bacon to offer an image of the subject’s self as whole. The presented image should cling to the fragmentation and shatteredness that the subject previously knows as inner-self experience. By calling on the nervous system, Bacon tries to fragment again the experience of self in order to ‘re-call’, ‘bring back’ the real ‘appearance’ of a subject. And that real appearance is the condition that people have called abject because it is lacking in boundaries. And like Serrano who provokes evangelical senators like Jesse Helms to complete the work of abjection negatively, Bacon provokes his viewer to complete the mechanism of the abject. He re-shatters the viewer’s sense of self by refusing to offer the projections of whole bodies that enable the onlooker to experience her- or himself as whole.
This refusal manifests itself, of course, literally by representing bodies as clearly fragmented. Bacon’s recurrent subject matter of disfigured people like the paralytic child or the dwarf, can, however, also be understood in this light. The strange posture of the paralytic child in Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (From Muybridge) (1961) has a very uncanny effect. It is as if his limbs do not fit his body. Bacon’s choice for this subject could be explained by arguing that the paralytic child is already fragmented by nature. There is in fact no need to fragment this body by representation. The short legs and big head of the dwarf in Portrait of a Dwarf (1975) make up a body which is already not ‘whole.’ The shortness of his legs is even emphasised by his being depicted as sitting on a barstool. His limbs do not ‘fit’ together, so the body remains fragmented. At the same time there is no radical difference between the dwarf, the paralytic child, and the ‘normal’ figures in Bacon’s paintings. All figures are fragmented as if they were dwarfs or paralytics. Every figure, deformed or not, is disfigured.
Bacon’s position, then, appears highly ambivalent. On the one hand, he militates against the mortification of the subject by the objectifying force of the gaze of the other, folding the subject back onto itself and endorsing the resulting fragmentation as the inevitable consequence of this denial of the power of the other. His statements in the interviews emphasise this denial. This is the side of mortification, the price to pay for this autonomy undeniably present in the painted figures. Struggling his way out of the either/or mechanism of discourse, Bacon fights the domination of the other by drawing the other in. The viewer cannot resist the violently powerful figures whose wholeness is lost but whose presence is absolute. The endorsement of the loss of self bestows on these figures a power of absorption that accounts for the strong responses they solicit.
Notes
1 See the chapter ‘Bodyscapes’ in my book Francis Bacon and The Loss of Self, Cambridge MA: Reaktion Books, 1992.
2 For shadows in the work of Bacon, see the chapter ‘Perception’ in my book Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self.
3 Jefferson argues that Barthes’ view is also strongly influenced by Sartre in this respect of self-other relations. He has, as she calls it, ‘an undeniably Sartrian streak’ (p. 153). This is made explicit by Barthes himself in his dedication of Camera Lucida as homage to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire.
Francis Bacon, Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970
Curator and Writer Martin Harrison Discusses
Francis Bacon’s 'Two Studies for a Self-Portrait'
SOTHEBY’S
Martin Harrison, author of the highly anticipated Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné and curator of a major new Francis Bacon exhibition that opens at Monaco’s Grimaldi Forum in July, joined Sotheby’s Oliver Barker in London for a conversation about the artist’s life and work. Read highlights below as they discuss Bacon’s Two Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1970, which is a highlight of the Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York on 11 May.
BARKER AND HARRISON WITH FRANCIS BACON’S TWO STUDIES FOR A SELF-PORTRAIT
On Francis Bacon: Interview
What
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms will be the first dedicated exhibition to survey an underexplored yet significant element of Bacon’s work. Many of his iconic works feature an architectural, ghost-like framing device around his subjects. Looking at the interplay between the background, the subject and the structure will allow viewers to understand how sensation is transmitted through a flat image. The energetic representation of conflicts and contradictions between passions, desire and reality will be particularly clear thanks to the exploration of this compositional elements. Bacon is recognised as one of the most important figurative painters of the twentieth century, but what has rarely been considered in depth is the way these figures are staged in very particular forms of architecture.
The starting point for these frames can be found in the 1930s and 1940s when Bacon started to introduce suggestions of confined rooms behind his figures – for example in the Tate painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c. 1944. By the 1950s he was using a barely visible cubic or elliptic cage around the figures depicted to create his dramatic compositions – these imaginary chambers emphasise the isolation of the represented figures and bring attention to their psychological condition. After a period of experimentation in the latter part of the decade, these cages, frames and arenas became even more complex in the paintings of the 60s, 70s and 80s and we see a real tensions between architecture and the body developing across this period. The exhibition will trace the development of this architectural structure throughout his career; from the first indications of room-spaces in early works including Crucifixion 1933 and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c. 1944; the 1950s, including Man in Blue IV 1954 and Chimpanzee 1955; through to the 1980s, Untitled (Kneeling Figure) c. 1982. We will also try to replicate architecturally the feeling of entrapment in a particular display design.
I think Bacon was trying to visualise tensions of all kinds that we experience in our life. The imagery he created testify to his commitment to such radical uncompromising vision. The cages and cubes were not just compositional devices to focus attention on the figure, but tools to communicate isolation, the loneliness of existence, and Bacon’s interest in the animalistic tendencies of humans.
The exhibition urges visitors to focus on the sensation that Bacon’s work evokes and develop a new understanding and appreciation for the cages he created. His masterful compositions create a relationship between the work and the viewer where the condition of the subject in the painting can almost be felt. His use of colour is something that might surprise viewers – he often used very vibrant, bright fields of colour to create powerful architectural spaces on canvas.
The power in Bacon’s paintings can only be truly experienced when you see them for real, the size, the materiality, the gesture of painting, the material he uses, it needs to be experienced in person. All the paintings are under glass by instruction of Bacon himself and framed with gilded frames — if you see this painting in a catalogue or online it’s not the same.
Despite being largely underrepresented until recent years, Maria Lassnig has played an influential role in the development of painting in the 20th and 21st centuries and through pairing Bacon and Lassnig we are bringing two of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century into dialogue. Both artists form the gallery’s summer season which celebrates painting as a way to bring images to the world that do not already exist thanks to photography and to demonstrate that painting is still so relevant today.
Some of the most powerful stories about Bacon are the ones he told himself – one thing that I find fascinating is that Bacon denied that he drew, and kept his drawings secret – we are presenting a hugely important set of these drawings from the Tate collection that reveal the importance of the cages and frames in the way Bacon devised his compositions.
Unauthenticated Bacon works on sale in London
Herrick Gallery is marketing two pastels and eight drawings said to be by the Irish-born artist
A London gallery is selling drawings said to be by Francis Bacon from a group rejected as fakes by the author of the new catalogue raisonné. The Herrick Gallery, in Piccadilly, is marketing ten works. Two large pastels are on sale for £795,000 each and eight drawings for a total of £1.2m. The London show runs until 21 May.
Alice Herrick, the owner of the gallery, believes the works are “by Bacon”, although she “cannot guarantee the authenticity of the drawings and pastels”. She says that around 600 drawings were given to Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, an Italian lover of Bacon, from 1977 up until the artist’s death in 1992. The drawings she is selling are owned by Ravarino, but are in the “temporary custody” of David Edwards, the brother of Bacon’s long-term lover, the late John Edwards.
Most specialists believe that Bacon never made such large-scale finished drawings. Martin Harrison, the author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Bacon paintings undertaken for the Francis Bacon Estate, rejects the Ravarino works. He told a Cambridge court in 2012 that six drawings he had been shown were “pastiches, or even parodies, and profoundly disrespectful of Bacon’s authentic body of work”.
Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Harrison said, “The works on exhibition at the Herrick Gallery have not been authenticated and do not appear in the forthcoming Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, the official catalogue of Bacon’s oeuvre.”
Pictorial Athleticism and Intensity in Francis Bacon
Deleuze’s concept of athleticism is a rare creature. It appears in his work in only a few places, notably in Francis Bacon, What Is Philosophy?, and Essays Critical and Clinical. The latter two texts employ the concept briefly, almost in passing, and even Francis Bacon, which devotes one of its seventeen short chapters to athleticism, treats it sparingly. Thus athleticism is, by any standard, a marginal concept in Deleuze, both with and without Guattari. This marginality is reflected in scholarship on Deleuze, which has largely ignored the concept of athleticism. On those occasions when scholars have turned their attention to athleticism, moreover, they have often treated the concept briefly and inexactly.1 In this article I offer a sustained examination of the concept of athleticism, showing that it, in spite of its ostensible marginality, links up with some of the most fundamental ideas in Deleuze’s philosophical system and provides a novel way to understand the imbrication of metaphysics and aesthetics in his thought. Athleticism, I argue, is the name Deleuze gives in Francis Bacon to the power of the painter’s work to produce a “clear and durable” sensation through a careful orchestration of visual relations or forces. The athleticism of a painting consists in communicating series of pictorial elements whose dynamic relations both generate and, more importantly, clarify sensation. As such, athleticism is a kind of intensity, according to the definition of that term in Difference and Repetition. Athleticism is the intensity proper to painting.
In what follows, I flesh out and make a case for these claims. In part I, I offer a close reading and contextualisation of Deleuze’s discussion of athleticism in Francis Bacon. Through this reading, I develop an initial account of what athleticism is and how it functions both in Bacon’s work and in painting in general. In part II, I develop the fundamental conceptual ground of Deleuze’s notion of athleticism by articulating it with his concept of intensity.
First, however, a note on scope: I focus here on athleticism only as it appears in Francis Bacon. I do this both because it simplifies the analysis, and because it is only Francis Bacon, in my view, that develops the concept in a robust, precise, and singular way. In Essays Critical and Clinical, athleticism is discussed so briefly, rarely, and elliptically as to be underdetermined (Deleuze 1997: 2–4, 133). In What Is Philosophy?, by contrast, the term appears relatively frequently (more frequently, in fact, than in Francis Bacon), but it refers to a diverse array of things: the ‘rivalry of free men’ in ancient Greece, the ‘specifically philosophical’ exercise of etymology, the resource that allows ‘hybrid geniuses’ like Melville and Kierkegaard to ‘install themselves within [the] very difference’ between philosophy and literature, and the discipline through which ‘the novelist or the painter’ is able to reveal certain kinds of force through her work (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 4, 8, 67, 172). Even if we were to discover a single and substantive sense underlying this array of references, or if we were to focus only on the aestheticsoriented references, we would still encounter a significant inconsistency between What Is Philosophy? and Francis Bacon with respect to this concept. The latter text, as I have said, treats athleticism as a capacity of the work of art; the former treats it as a capacity of the artist (or philosopher, or demos member). In this respect, the athleticism of Francis Bacon strikes me as stranger and more interesting than that of What Is Philosophy?: in Francis Bacon, this trait that we typically assign only to human actors is attributed to a non-human work of art. For these reasons, I restrict myself here to athleticism in Francis Bacon.
I. Pictorial Athleticism
The concept of athleticism appears explicitly in only the third and seventh chapters of Francis Bacon, though its implications, as we will see, resonate throughout the book. The first of these two chapters, entitled simply ‘Athleticism’, contains Deleuze’s most focused treatment of that concept. Here he refers repeatedly to the ‘derisory’ character of Bacon’s athleticism (Deleuze 2003: 15–16). In the seventh chapter, however, Deleuze shifts from the language of the ‘derisory’ to that of the ‘affective’: alluding to Artaud, he discovers in Bacon’s painting an ‘affective athleticism’ (Deleuze 2003: 40; see Artaud 1958: 133–144). Since ‘derisory’ and ‘affective’ are neither synonymous nor even clearly related, and since Deleuze does not explain this terminological shift, we cannot take it for granted that he is talking about one and the same athleticism from the third to the seventh chapter. Accordingly, we will treat the derisory and the affective as distinct species of athleticism – at least initially. As we will see, they turn out not to be distinct kinds of athleticism, but rather related attributes of a single athleticism, which we will call pictorial athleticism. We could, of course, simply assert this conclusion from the outset, but it is philosophically sounder and conceptually richer to discover it through analysis.
Ia. Derisory Athleticism
We examine the athleticism of chapter three – derisory athleticism – first. Deleuze’s account of this athleticism springs from his consideration of the relations among the elements of Bacon’s images, so we would do well to examine these elements briefly. Deleuze identifies three basic components of nearly all of Bacon’s canvases. First, there is a contour or set of contours that delineates the almost ubiquitously curvilinear space of the picture and establishes the place of the image. Second, there are flat fields of pure colour that fill and, in a sense, energise the space defined by the contour. Finally, there is ‘the Figure’: a body of some kind – usually human – which is painted in impure tones and occupies the place delimited by the contour. These three pictorial elements – the contour, the Figure, and the flat colour-field – together constitute the image (Deleuze 2003: 8). The relations among these elements, Deleuze observes, produce a ‘movement’ or an ‘exchange’ in the painting; they establish visual tensions that resolve themselves in certain characteristic ways. Deleuze identifies two general paths which this movement or exchange tends to take: either it travels from the colour-field, through the contour, to the Figure; or it travels from the Figure, through the contour, to the colour-field (Deleuze 2003: 15). The first of these is frequently a circular or centripetal movement: the colour-field, following the contour, wraps around the Figure, closing in on and ‘imprisoning’ it. In the second movement, the Figure, attempting to break out of this prison, undertakes a movement of its own across the contour and into the colour-field. These two pictorial movements express certain basic forces – ‘invisible forces’, Deleuze says, that Bacon’s work aims to ‘render visible’ (Deleuze 2003: 48). The first movement expresses a force of isolation; the second, forces of deformation and dissipation. We see these forces at work clearly in Bacon’s pictures: encircling the Figure, the colour-field isolates it, cuts it off from its surroundings. The Figure, in turn, struggles to free itself; it twists, contracts, stretches, and ultimately disintegrates or disperses itself as it tries to pass through the contour and into the colour-field. This effort determines what are perhaps the most recognisable traits of Bacon’s work: the various violent distortions of the human body, its mutilation, liquidation, and sublimation – ‘the entire series of spasms’ (Deleuze 2003:16).
‘Derisory athleticism’ names these two coexisting movements and corresponding fields of force, insofar as they are considered from the perspective of the Figure. The Figure is a derisory athlete whose athleticism consists in suffering isolation and undertaking to deform and dissolve itself in the face of that isolating pressure. We must take care, Deleuze repeatedly insists, not to commit the error of narrativising the relations and forces constitutive of this athleticism: Bacon’s paintings are not single- or (in the case of his triptychs) triple-frame graphic novels that repetitively tell the story of a figure who experiences isolation and, in response, attempts to break out into the world beyond (Deleuze 2003: 6). Rather, this dialectic of relations and forces is primarily visual: the isolation of the Figure by the colour-field is a compositional isolation in which the Figure qua image is cut off from other elements of the picture. Concomitantly, the selfdeformation and -dissipation of the Figure can be called a response to this isolation only at the level of pictorial composition: the Figure’s isolation creates a visual need for a kind of balancing or counter-value, which is fulfilled in its deformation and disintegration. Instead of telling a story, in short, Bacon organises a set of forces that we sense in beholding the painting. Hence his stated ambition, cited frequently by Deleuze, to make paintings that act directly on the nervous system, rather than on ‘the intelligence’ (Sylvester 1975: 56–58; Deleuze 2003: 31ff, 88, 92). Derisory athleticism is the distribution of these pictorial forces in and around the Figure, which makes possible Bacon’s project of producing a painting that acts directly on the nervous system.
In what sense does this compositional strategy merit the rather unusual name ‘derisory athleticism’? A brief remark in What Is Philosophy? offers an initial clue: athleticism involves an agon, a contest (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 4). Bacon’s Figure, as an athlete, is engaged in a contest with the colour-field upon the contour, a confrontation of two opposed movements. Just above, we described athleticism as a dialectic of forces; perhaps now we can be more precise: it is an agonism of forces, a pitting of force against force. It is not, however, the agonism Deleuze and Guattari attribute to the demos of ancient Greece – the agonism that, as amphisbetesis, adjudicates among rivals or claimants and, as Deleuze shows in Difference and Repetition, finds its metaphysical and epistemological model in the great Platonic task of distinguishing icons from simulacra (Deleuze 1994: 60ff). The athleticism of Bacon’s painting consists, rather, in a contest without judgement or claimant, an agon whose upshot is not the exclusion of the violent sensuousness of simulacra, but rather its production. But why is this athleticism ‘derisory’? The answer to this question is less clear, but a plausible explanation can be found in Deleuze’s complex comparison of Bacon to Kafka, which appears just before his introduction of the concept of athleticism. ‘Bacon’s Figure’, Deleuze writes, ‘is Shamefaced Lanky, or the great Swimmer who does not know how to swim, the hunger artist’ (Deleuze 2003:14; translation modified). In each of the texts to which Deleuze alludes here (in almost all of Kafka’s writing, in fact), Kafka develops characters whose efforts are paltry, inadequate, risible in spite of their immense sadness and even their success. The figure of the great Swimmer is particularly instructive. He is an Olympic champion, a world record-holder, but he claims not to know how to swim, never to have had the opportunity even to learn (Kafka 1996: 118–120). Something very similar appears in Michaux’s dream of being a virtuoso ice skater, diver, and swimmer, to which Deleuze refers in one of his quick allusions to athleticism in Essays Critical and Clinical: Michaux-the-dreamer is a world-champion athlete without ever having practiced or learned his discipline, an ‘athlete in bed’ (Michaux 1968: 113–115). These literary examples of derisory athleticism show us an athlete who both possesses and lacks a great power, who is both eminently capable of and totally inadequate to a tremendous task. Bacon’s Figure suffers from an analogous paradox. On the one hand, the Figure is the site where the forces of the picture coalesce, where they attain their full dynamism; but at the same time, the Figure alone cannot fulfil the sensuous task of the painting, which depends on the constellation Figure–contour–colour-field. The forces made visible in the painting are concentrated in the Figure and its athleticism, but these forces pass from, through, and to the other components of the picture. Thus the Figure’s athleticism, in spite of its centrality, is inadequate to the full dynamism of the painting – is, in other words, derisory. This athleticism, moreover, as expressed in the forces of isolation, deformation, and dissipation, gives the body of Bacon’s Figure a simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous character – see, for instance, the simultaneously sickening and cartoonish mouth of the monster in the centre panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, or the face of the figure in Seated Figure of 1974, which is contorted in such a way as to suggest both agony and hilarity. The more time one spends with Bacon’s paintings, the more one discovers beneath or beside the immediately manifest violence a deeply comedic quality: ‘a violent comedy’, Deleuze says, a kind of self-directed comic derision (Deleuze 2003: 15).
Ib. Affective Athleticism
As we noted earlier, Deleuze introduces a second sort of athleticism in the seventh chapter of Francis Bacon: affective athleticism. Affective athleticism concerns the process through which Bacon’s paintings clarify and give duration to sensation, so we should again pause to give a quick résumé of this process. Derisory athleticism, we saw, names the set of forces arrayed in Bacon’s painting. Drawing on Bacon’s remarks (and alluding, perhaps, to the philosophical empiricism associated with Bacon’s homeland), Deleuze calls the pictorial visualisation of this set of forces a ‘fact’. Typically we think of a fact as something simply given, but in painting a fact is anything but given. Rather, a fact must be won. It must be won, moreover, from what is given: clichés and opinions. The canvas or panel is covered in advance by clichés and opinions, and the painter must find a way around or through these pernicious obstacles in order to create a fact. Part of Bacon’s genius lies in his discovery of an entirely sui generis procedure to convert the clichés that pre-exist the creative act into rudiments of a non-clichéd image, or into a ‘possibility of fact’. Bacon’s procedure goes roughly as follows: he begins to sketch out an image; he interrupts this initial image via certain aleatory processes – he throws paint at the canvas, scrubs part of the image with sponges or rags, or covers a region of the picture with quick, involuntary marks; he allows this aleatory distortion of the initial image to suggest to him a new image, which he could not have planned or foreseen; finally he attempts to realise the suggested image in paint. When this procedure works – Bacon is quick to point out that success is far from assured (Sylvester 1975: 17–8) – the new image constitutes the created fact, ‘the pictorial fact’. But this pictorial fact is more than just an unforeseeable image built on the ruins of a clichéd image. It carries out a very specific aesthetic function: it makes sensation clear and durable, in Deleuze’s words (Deleuze 2003: 97ff); it ‘unlock[s] the valves of feeling’, in Bacon’s (Sylvester 1975: 17).
To make sensation clear and durable, or to compose a sensation, is to relate sensation to its genetic conditions. The genetic conditions of sensation, and the true objects of Bacon’s painting, are bodies and forces. Thus to clarify and give duration to sensation, to win the pictorial fact from clichés and opinions, Bacon paints the intersection of bodies and forces – the isolation, deformation, and dissipation of bodies under some pressure, whether internal or external. Sensation is produced when a body encounters a force, so when Bacon paints the intersection of bodies and forces, he is at the same time painting the genesis of sensation. We should take care to be clear about what exactly this means. Even the most cursory reading of Francis Bacon cannot miss Deleuze’s rejection of the idea that Bacon represents or illustrates the sensation-producing encounter between a body and a force. Bacon’s paintings, for Deleuze, are not pictures of sensation or of force. Rather, they are what we might call force-pictures or sense-pictures: they compose force and sensation. But precisely what does this mean? It means that the Figure itself is a site for the application of force. As a plastic element of the picture, it actually is – in fact – isolated, deformed, and made to dissipate, both in the sense that it bears the marks of Bacon’s violent application of paint, and, more profoundly, in the sense that its presence amid the colour-field and contour generates compositional exigencies that are registered on the surface of its isolated, deformed, and dissipated body. The Figure does not represent these processes; it undergoes and enacts them. Thus Bacon’s painting renders force visible, gives it a visual form in the body of the Figure, which ‘comes across directly onto the nervous system’ (Sylvester 1975: 18). One does not in the first instance recognise or infer these forces from Bacon’s Figure; one immediately feels them. This is ‘affective athleticism’: the genesis and clarification of sensation through the pictorial encounter between a body and a force (Deleuze 2003: 40).
We saw in our discussion of derisory athleticism that this encounter between bodies and forces is, in Bacon’s painting, concentrated in or expressed through the Figure. Since affective athleticism is the clarification of sensation through this encounter, it follows that it, like its derisory counterpart, belongs primarily to the Figure, but only insofar as the Figure is caught up in force relations with the other components of the picture. Clearly, derisory athleticism and affective athleticism are closely connected. The precise nature of their connection is this: they constitute the two faces of a single pictorial athleticism though which Bacon’s paintings orchestrate forces in the production of a sensation that is clear and durable. Derisory athleticism names the distribution of forces among the Figure, colour-field, and contour; affective athleticism names the production of a clear and durable sensation that obtains from this distribution. Pictorial athleticism, as their union or completion, is thus the power of Bacon’s picture, which is concentrated in the Figure in relation to the colour-field and contour, to compose a sensation through the organisation and rendering-visible of force.
Any study of Francis Bacon must at some point grapple with the problem of whether and to what extent Deleuze’s claims about Bacon’s painting can be applied to the work of other painters, or even to painting in general. We have now reached the point where we should address this question with respect to athleticism. Is pictorial athleticism as we have characterised it a property unique to Bacon’s work, or does all painting – or all successful painting, or some subset of successful painting – possess a form of athleticism? Shortly after the appearance of affective athleticism in chapter seven (entitled ‘Hysteria’), Deleuze writes the following:
What we are suggesting, in effect, is that there is a special relation between painting and hysteria. It is very simple. Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. The colour system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system. …With painting, hysteria becomes art. (Deleuze 2003: 45)
Note that Deleuze is talking about painting in general. Painting in general bears a special relation to hysteria, insofar as it makes hysteria into art by ‘releasing the presences beneath representation’. The latter phrase shows us what Deleuze means by ‘hysteria’ (another theme that he takes from Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester): it essentially involves a kind of presence, an ‘interminable’ or ‘excessive presence’ that acts ‘directly on the nervous system’ and ‘makes representation… impossible’ (Deleuze 2003: 44). What is this presence? In a word, it is force. Hysteria is the unceasing action of force on the body, on the nervous system. Returning to the passage cited just above, then, painting – not just Bacon’s painting, but painting in general – ‘releases’ or renders this unceasing action of force on the nervous body. The action of forces on bodies, we have argued, constitutes the genetic condition of sensation, and in rendering this action visible – that is, in relating sensation pictorially to its own genetic condition – a painter composes and clarifies sensation. Thus, in rendering the ever-present action of force on the body visible, painting in general clarifies sensation. This is precisely what we found Bacon’s pictorial athleticism to be: it is the power of a painting to compose a sensation through the rendering-visible of force. Athleticism is, in other words, the power of a painting to make hysteria into art, to render visible the interminable action of force on the body. Pictorial athleticism would thus seem to be a property of all painting, or at least all painting that succeeds in rendering force visible. Obviously, not all painters will enact this athleticism by the same pictorial means as does Bacon. Indeed, it is tempting to say that all great painters invents their own unique version of this athleticism, and each great painter’s reinventing of athleticism in her work is constitutive of what we call her ‘genius’. But we are not here concerned with such differences in athleticism; rather, we are concerned with its commonality. Pictorial athleticism, we have found, is a potential property of all painting, and not just the painting of Francis Bacon, insofar as all painting, for Deleuze, strives to make hysteria into art.
II. Athleticism and Intensity
We have shown that athleticism is the power of a painting to compose sensation by rendering force visible. We can, however, articulate this concept in a more fundamental way: athleticism is the form of intensity unique to painting. Thanks to the thorough saturation of Deleuze’s thought by the concept of intensity, the demonstration of this claim could take any number of paths. The path that leads most directly through Francis Bacon passes by way of a motif that Deleuze develops uniquely in that text: the motif of the fall. We will thus begin our exposition of the relation between athleticism and intensity with an examination of the fall in Bacon. The fall will guide us immediately to Deleuze’s appropriation of Kant’s notion of intensive magnitude. From there, we will see how in Difference and Repetition Deleuze converts that Kantian notion from a local principle of judgement to a fundamental genetic principle of sensibility, at which point we will be able to explicate the full connection between athleticism and intensity.
IIa. Intensive Magnitude and the Fall
The concept of the fall first appears in a discussion in chapter four, ‘Body, Meat, and Spirit’, in which Deleuze characterizes the ‘athleticism of the body’ as an ‘acrobatics of the flesh’. ‘We can see here the importance of the fall in Bacon’s work’, Deleuze writes; ‘what interests Bacon is the descent’ (Deleuze 2003: 21). What Deleuze means by ‘the fall’, however, does not become totally clear until the tenth chapter, ‘What Is a Triptych?’. For the sake of simplicity and concision we will leave the particulars of Deleuze’s discussion of the triptych to one side. Doing so, to be sure, will elide part of Deleuze’s analysis, but it will not, I think, undermine our argument.2 The fall appears here as a central element of Deleuze’s account of sensation in Bacon’s painting. ‘Sensation develops through the fall’, Deleuze writes, ‘by falling from one level to another’ (Deleuze 2003: 67). Given that pictorial athleticism, as we have seen, is the power of a painting to compose a sensation, it follows that athleticism must involve this fall in some essential way. But what exactly is the fall? Why does sensation ‘develop through’ it? Deleuze explains:
Kant laid down the principle of intensity when he defined it as an instantaneously apprehended magnitude: he concluded that the plurality apprehended in this magnitude could only be represented by its approximation to negation = 0. Consequently, even when sensation tends toward a superior or higher level, it can only make us experience it by the approximation of this superior level to zero, that is, by a fall. (Deleuze 2003: 67)
Sensation, Deleuze is saying, develops through the fall because sensation is fundamentally intensive. To understand this connection in full, we must turn to Kant. In a section of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘Anticipations of Perception’, Kant develops an account of the intensive character of sensation – an account that is, as the passage just quoted suggests, extremely influential for Deleuze (Kant 1998: 290– 295). In this section of the Critique, Kant inquires into whether we determine a priori, or ‘anticipate’, anything concerning the sensuous element of empirical perception. It would be strange, Kant notes, if we could do this, since sensation constitutes the ‘matter’ of perception, or the part of perception that is not reducible to the a priori forms of space and time, and that therefore appears to be entirely empirical. This strangeness notwithstanding, there is indeed, Kant argues, something we determine a priori about sensation: namely, that it always affects us to a certain degree. In other words, sensation always has a magnitude that is intensive, rather than extensive. Kant demonstrates this claim as follows. Every sensation is capable of undergoing a steady diminution until it disappears. For instance, the overwhelming fragrance of oriental lily that I experience in the presence of blossoms of that plant will weaken as I draw away from its source, and will eventually evaporate completely if I draw far enough away. This shows that between the ‘reality’, or the given character, of a sensation and its complete annihilation (its ‘negation = 0’, as Kant says), there is a continuum of smaller diminutions. The magnitude of the sensation – the unity containing this continuous multiplicity of possible diminutions to zero – can be conceived only by approximating the difference between the reality of the sensation and its negation. Although the qualities that we perceive via sensation are distributed spatially and temporally (the smell of oriental lily fills a room and persists over a period of time), the magnitude of a sensation (the strength of the smell) is neither spatial nor temporal; the ‘parts’ contained in it – the continuous multiplicity of diminishing degrees – are neither ranged one outside another in space nor ordered sequentially in time. The magnitude is thus not extensive; it is on the contrary intensive, composed of a multiplicity that is non-spatial and non-temporal, in which the whole precedes the parts. Thus the upshot of Kant’s argument: we know a priori that every perception, insofar as it necessarily includes sensation, will have an intensive magnitude.3
This Kantian idea of intensity, according to which the magnitude of a sensation is equivalent to the continuum of diminutions between its reality and its negation, fleshes out Deleuze’s concept of the fall: the fall is this relation between reality and negation, constitutive of a sensation’s intensive magnitude. Deleuze, however, goes well beyond Kant’s stated claims in his understanding of intensity. For Kant, the role of the idea of intensive magnitudes in transcendental philosophy is epistemological: it explains what we can know a priori about sensation. In Deleuze’s version of transcendental philosophy, by contrast, intensity plays a metaphysical role: it provides a fundamental explanation of the genesis of our sensations. Note again the final sentence in the passage from Francis Bacon block-quoted above: ‘even when sensation tends toward a superior or higher level, it can only make us experience it [elle ne peut nous le faire éprouver que] by the approximation of this superior level to zero, that is, by a fall’. The intensive character of sensation does not just provide us a clue as to what we know in advance about our sensations; it makes us experience our sensations as such.4 We will see shortly how Deleuze thinks this works. For now, let us observe that ‘sensation develops through the fall’, as Deleuze says, because every sensation, insofar as it has an intensive magnitude, contains a continuous multiplicity of diminutions, or internal differences, which proceed all the way down to its total annihilation. This is so regardless of whether the intensity of the sensation increases, decreases, or remains steady over time. At every instant, sensation is determined only through its internal relation to its own decrease to zero.
We concluded at the end of section I that pictorial athleticism is the power of a painting to compose sensation. If all sensation develops through the fall in the way just specified, then the power of athleticism must consist in a capacity to mobilise falls, or to manipulate and deploy intensive magnitudes. We may therefore say that the composition and clarification of sensation consist in a choreography of plunges, an orchestration of descents. No wonder, then, that Deleuze repeatedly refers to the Figure as a gymnast, an acrobat, a trapeze artist – its athleticism consists in tumbling; it is an adept of the fall (Deleuze 2003: 15, 20–21, 29, 36, 69).
This last paragraph should give us pause. It says that the athletic power of a painting to compose sensation consists in a capacity to mobilise intensive falls. But in the preceding section we concluded that pictorial athleticism is the power of a painting to compose sensation by rendering force visible. This rendering-visible of force, we saw, constituted the ‘derisory’ face of pictorial athleticism. One would be justified in asking, then: Which is it – does athleticism compose sensation by choreographing intensive falls, or by rendering forces visible? The answer, of course, is both. There is a fundamental connection between intensity and the pictorial rendering of force, which we have not yet elucidated. To do so, and thereby to complete our account of intensity and athleticism, we will turn to the theory of intensity developed in Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze goes well beyond the Kantian idea of intensive magnitude.
IIb. Intensity and Pictorial Force
Though Deleuze’s citation of the Kantian understanding of intensive magnitude appears to be thoroughly approving in Francis Bacon, he critiques it quite sharply in Difference and Repetition. ‘While he refuses a logical extension to space and time’, Deleuze writes there, ‘Kant’s mistake is to maintain a geometrical extension for [them], and to reserve intensive quantity for the matter which fills a given extensity to some degree or other’ (Deleuze 1994: 231). For Kant, as we have seen, intensive magnitude belongs to the ‘matter’ of sensation. But in order for this matter to constitute usable experiential data, Kant argues, it needs to be organised according to a form – two forms, in fact: space and time. Insofar as our perceptions are structured according to the forms of space and time, they are extensive; space and time give our perceptions extensive magnitude. An extensive magnitude is one ‘in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and therefore necessarily precedes the latter)’ (Kant 1998: 287). The parts of such a magnitude, moreover, are homogeneous: every centimetre of linear space is equivalent to every other centimetre; every second of time is equivalent to every other second. In order for us to perceive objects, Kant thinks, our perceptions must be pre-structured as extensive magnitudes; we must experience space and time as homogeneous extensities in order for objects to appear and events to occur in an orderly way. For Deleuze, however, this Kantian view is mistaken (or perhaps better, superficial), because it ignores the requirements of a genetic method. Kant treats the extensive structuration of perception as simply de facto, as pre-given. He may be right that our perceptions must have extensive structure in order for us to perceive things in the way that we do, but as far as his analysis goes, this structuration is a kind of brute fact: it just is the case that our perceptions appear to us in the form of extensive magnitudes. Deleuze proposes that we go beyond Kant by asking where these forms come from. His answer: they come from intensity.
Interestingly, Deleuze cites Kant himself as pointing toward this answer. In section 13 of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant develops an argument in which he seems to recognise that, in Deleuze’s words, ‘space and time are not presented as they are represented’ – that is, they are not fundamentally extensive magnitudes (Deleuze 1994: 231). This argument, which aims to demonstrate, pace thinkers like Newton, that space and time cannot be qualities inhering in objects themselves, concerns the ‘paradox’ of symmetrical objects (or ‘incongruent counterparts’, as much of the contemporary literature on Kant calls them). He claims that the difference that makes such symmetrical objects – for example a right hand and its mirror-image left – incongruent (mutually non-superimposable) cannot be grasped conceptually by the understanding, but only perceptually by sensibility. This shows, he thinks, that space is not inherent in objects (if it were, the difference between symmetrical objects would be intelligible to the understanding), but is a structure belonging to our intuition. It is by virtue of the spatial structuration of our perception, Kant concludes, that symmetrical objects bear to one another this strange, non-conceptual difference. In other words, the determination of such a difference – indeed, of any difference characterising a part of space – is possible only by virtue of its relation to the whole of space (Kant 1977: 27–8).
Now, Kant’s argument here is widely regarded as far from unproblematic.5 Nevertheless, Deleuze takes this argument as highly instructive for a proper, genetic understanding of space. Note the reformulation of Kant’s conclusion just above: the determination of any difference characterising a part of space is possible only by virtue of its relation to the whole of space. This means, as Kant himself points out, that concerning determinations of space, ‘the part is possible only through the whole’ (Kant 1977: 28). This relationship between parts and wholes characterises intensive, rather than extensive, magnitudes. Kant seems here to envision (or to come close to envisioning) the unified manifold of space not as an extensive expanse composed of homogeneous units, but rather as an intensive field containing a multiplicity of possible, or as Deleuze says, ‘virtual’, parts. This, it would seem, is the sense of Deleuze’s claim that space (as well as time) is not presented as it is represented: representation requires that space be grasped as extensity, but the presentation of space – its genesis – is intensive. Intensity, then, is not just the magnitude of the sensuous ‘matter’ that fills up extensive space and time; it is the genetic principle of extensity itself, as well as the matter that fills it.6 Intensity is ‘the reason of the sensible’ (Deleuze 1994: 222).
What is this intensive whole through which the parts of space are determined? For Kant it is simply the a priori form of external sense. Deleuze characterises it slightly differently. Drawing on Leibniz, Deleuze calls this whole ‘the intensive spatium’. With this concept, we find Deleuze not only broadening the transcendental significance of intensity, but also altering the very structure of intensive magnitude as understood by Kant. For the latter, as we saw, an intensive magnitude is a unity containing a multiplicity of heterogeneous parts, which is represented as a continuous diminution from a reality to its negation = 0. Deleuze retains the idea of intensity as containing a multiplicity of differences. But the notion that the structure of intensive magnitude is given as a continuous diminution, which clarified for us the sense of Deleuze’s discussion of the fall in Francis Bacon and which is directly tied to Kant’s restricting intensive magnitude to the matter of sensation, largely disappears from Deleuze’s genetic understanding of intensity. Deleuzian intensity does not proceed by a simple fall, but by a vast complex of falls and rises linked stepwise – a ‘choreography of falls’, as we said above, or an ‘abstract line’, to slightly abuse a term Deleuze takes from the French symbolist painter Odilon Redon. This is because intensity in Deleuze is not, as it were, a one-dimensional ordering of degrees of the reality of a particular sensation from one to zero; it is an essentially implicated field of differences in which each difference refers to others in series, thereby establishing not the conditions by which the matter of a sensation may be represented, but the conditions by which a potential will be actualised sensibly. This field of differences is what Deleuze means by ‘intensive spatium’. Deleuze’s account of the mechanism of its actualisation of potentials – the process of genesis signified in his identification of intensity as a genetic principle – is extremely complex. We will simplify it greatly by saying that the intensive field gives rise to phenomena when series of differences that it implicates come into communication with one another. These intensive series of differences constitute asymmetries or inequalities in the field, so when they come into communication, Deleuze argues, an equalisation takes place. Each such equalisation, which is tantamount to a cancelling-out of intensive difference, produces a phenomenon. The world as we experience it, according to Deleuze, is a vast network of equalisations of intensity.
At this point, perhaps, we should stop and try to find an example to illustrate the intensive genetic process that we are trying to articulate. Luckily for us, we already have an example ready-to-hand: the compositional structure of Francis Bacon’s paintings. As we have seen, this structure comprises three components: the Figure, the colour-field, and the contour, whose relations constitute vectors of visual tension and exchange in the picture, which render certain forces visible. This process, centred on the Figure, constitutes the ‘derisory’ face of athleticism. Derisory athleticism, we saw, establishes the conditions for the composition and clarification of sensation, or the act of affective athleticism. Bringing these observations together, we see that the compositional components of Bacon’s painting express serialised differential elements whose communication establishes tensions and exchanges productive of sensation. They therefore constitute an intensive system in the sense developed in Difference and Repetition. Not only does this provide a convenient illustration of Deleuze’s concept of intensity, it also forms the answer to precisely the problem we set out in this section to solve: how to reconcile the conclusion, arrived at in section Ib., that pictorial athleticism clarifies sensation through the rendering-visible of force, with the conclusion, arrived at in section IIa., that this clarification of sensation is achieved through a choreography of intensive falls. We now see that the compositional structure through which force is rendered pictorially expresses the choreography of falls, or abstract line, constitutive of an intensive field. With this, we may finally conclude that what we described in the first half of this article as ‘pictorial athleticism’ – the power of a painting to compose sensation by rendering force visible – is the form of intensity proper to painting.
III. Conclusion
We close with two remarks. The first of these concerns a possible objection. ‘Deleuzian intensity’, one might point out, ‘is the condition of genesis of the sensible. As such it is not itself sensible – at least, not under typical conditions of sensation and perception. The compositional components of any painting, by contrast, are sensible. They therefore cannot be said to constitute an intensive system.’ The premise of this objection, to be sure, is true; as Deleuze says, ‘we know intensity only as already developed within an extensity, and as covered over by qualities’ (Deleuze 1994: 223). Phenomena are generated precisely through the cancellation of intensity, through the equalisation of its constitutive inequality. Thus we do not encounter intensity itself in experience; we infer it on the basis of the qualities and extensions in which it disappears. Art, however, seems to be a special sort of phenomenon which demands atypical conditions of sensation and perception, a phenomenon in which, in spite of its phenomenality, intensity remains uncancelled – or, as it were, becomes de-cancelled. Thus, for Deleuze, ‘the being of the sensible’ – that is, intensity – ‘reveals itself in the work of art’ (Deleuze 1994: 68). An account of the precise means of this de-cancellation of intensity lies beyond the scope of this paper. We may speculate, however, that such an account is to be found in Deleuze’s understanding of the relation among art, cliché, and chaos, which we touched on just briefly in section 1b. The idea that art liquidates clichés through a careful and limited, but nevertheless ‘catastrophic’, deployment of chaos – a common refrain of Deleuze’s writings on art, both with and without Guattari – is essential, we suspect, to explaining the work of art’s rejuvenation of intensity within phenomenality, and therefore the work of art’s power of pictorial athleticism (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 203). We suspect, moreover, that for Deleuze such a deployment of chaos must be understood to engender a certain aesthetic attitude, or mode of receptivity, in the viewer, in which the usual processes of conceptual synthesis and recognition are blocked, thereby freeing up the sensibility to grasp what in sensation remains inaccessible to other modes of thought, namely intensity. Here Francis Bacon comes into contact with chapter three of Difference and Repetition, with its theory of the ‘encounter’ and the ‘transcendent exercise of the faculties’. This aesthetic attitude, uniquely receptive to intensity, would itself constitute an intensive mode of receptivity in which the perceiving individual is taken back to her intensive origins. Borrowing a term from Difference and Repetition, we might call this larval spectatorship: to the athleticism of the picture corresponds the ‘larvality’ of the spectator. We leave this inchoate thought as a possibility for future research.
Our second concluding remark concerns pictorial space and athleticism. Above, we discussed Deleuze’s conception of the intensive genesis of extended space. We treated this point as a way to understand the development of Deleuze’s theory of intensity from Kant’s theory of intensive magnitudes, and not as an element of the account of the intensity involved in athleticism itself. As such, this point remains rather abstract. Painting, obviously, is strongly spatial, so it provides a nice opportunity to concretise this idea of the intensive genesis of extensity. Such a clarification is not strictly necessary to our account of pictorial athleticism, so we include it here, as a kind of appendix.
Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon’s paintings contains a notable discussion of their unique spatiality, a discussion that we have so far completely neglected. Deleuze discovers in Bacon’s work what he calls a ‘shallow depth’. Like almost all paintings, Bacon’s are flat surfaces. They have no ‘real’ depth; their depth is an ‘illusion’ engendered on the surface of the support. When we consider the production of the illusion of depth in painting, we often think immediately of the technique of linear perspective. In fact, however, the illusion of depth in painting – even in the Renaissance painting we associate most strongly with the use of linear perspective – has been achieved to a great extent through variations in colour or value. This is particularly true in the case of Bacon’s work, where the use of linear perspective is often minimal, if not perfunctory. Bacon’s shallow depth is an effect of chromatic relations – what Deleuze calls ‘colour modulation’ – particularly the relations between the flat, pure tone of the colour-field and the patchy, impure tones of the Figure, as these are mediated by the nonperspectival linearity of the contour. By virtue of differences in hue, value, and saturation, these colours push forward or recede in relation to one another: ‘the juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface forms a progression and a regression that culminates in a close vision’, to which corresponds the shallow depth of Bacon’s painting (Deleuze 2003: 107). The depth of Bacon’s painting is thus engendered through differential colour relations, that is, through intensity. A similar argument can be made for the production of pictorial depth through linear perspective, which depends on the recreation of what Deleuze calls ‘an arrangement of coexistent, tiered, mobile planes, a “disparateness” within an original depth’ (Deleuze 1994: 51).
Even when, instead of considering the ‘illusory’ depth of the painting, we examine the ‘real’ two-dimensional space of the picture – the horizontal and vertical distances separating parts of the image – we discover intensities underlying the apparent extensities. This is because painters do not compose their pictures geometrically, in the uniformly partitioned space of the Cartesian plane. In fact, paintings are not composed ‘in space’ at all. They are composed in a continuous, self-responsive and self-regulating movement from idea to space and back. A painting is produced as the spatialisation of an idea, even when, as in Bacon, that idea involves a great deal of chance. As idea, the painting does not consist of elements distributed throughout an extensive, homogeneously divided space; it subsists, rather, as a set of virtual relations – a kind of ratio – among ideal elements that will correspond to, as Bacon says, ‘areas of sensation’. It is this ratio, this determinate inequality, that grounds the spatialisation of the image, and it is this inequality that is first expressed in the spatial composition of the picture. Afterward, of course, we can map the image geometrically in extensive space. But the extensity manifest in the image is generated from the intensive inequality implicated in the idea of the picture. This is no truer of Francis Bacon than it is of ‘geometrical abstractionists’ like Bridget Riley, whose conception of pictorial space and of the aesthetic importance of effects of rhythm, variation, and speed is remarkably close to Deleuze’s understanding of intensity and the spatium.7 In such effects, we speculate, one finds traces of the kind of pictorial athleticism unique to Riley’s work, through which she, by different means than Bacon, harnesses intensity as the condition of sensible genesis in order to render force visible and clarify sensation.8
Notes
1 See, for instance, Egginton 2001: 54, Watkins 2012: 4, 17–18; Sauvagnargues 2013: 56, 141, 147; and Hilton 2013. Of these, Hilton offers the richest and most extensive discussion of athleticism, examining its function in a work of performance art by the group Art Orienté Objet. While his analysis of the performance is illuminating, however, his reconstruction of the concept of athleticism is imprecise, relying too much on an everyday understanding of athletics.
2 In the final sentence of this chapter on the triptych, Deleuze claims, ‘there are nothing but triptychs in Bacon: even the isolated paintings are, more or less visibly, composed like triptychs’ (Deleuze 2003: 70). This assertion suggests that although the concept of the fall is developed in the context Deleuze’s discussion of the triptych, we may treat it as applicable to all of Bacon’s paintings without invalidly extending it.
3 For a careful, thorough account of the Kantian doctrine of intensive magnitudes, see Longuenesse 1998: 298–324.
4 Perhaps one can plausibly think that something like this claim is implied in Kant’s remarks on intensive magnitude: insofar as intensive magnitude explains how a given section of perceptual space-time can be filled to a greater or lesser degree by sensuous matter, one might conclude that the intensive character of sensation constitutes a transcendental condition for our having sensations at all. It is not clear whether Deleuze, in claiming that we experience sensation only by virtue of its intensive character, takes Kant to imply such a conclusion or whether he sees this as his own contribution.
5 For a careful account of Kant’s argument and its problems, see Rusnock and George 1995.
6 This, to be sure, is not Deleuze’s only argument for the genetic status of intensity with respect to space. For a succinct statement of another such argument (derived, in this case, from Hermann Cohen’s reading of Kant), see Smith 2012: 95.
7 See Riley 2009: 140–142.
8 Many thanks are due to Sarah Mann-O’Donnell, Rachel Zuckert, Penelope Deutscher, Will Meyrowitz, Maha Jafri, and Elizabeth R. Johnson for their discussion and feedback. This research was generously funded in part by the American Society for Aesthetics. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the American Society for Aesthetics.
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Kant, Immanuel (1977) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Longuenesse, Béatrice (1998) Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. Charles T. Wolfe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Michaux, Henri (1968) Selected Writings, trans. Richard Ellman, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Riley, Bridget (2009) The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley, ed. Robert Kudielka, London: Thames and Hudson.
Rusnock, Paul and Rolf George (1995) ‘A Last Shot at Kant and Incongruent Counterparts’, Kant Studien, 86:3, pp. 257–77.
Sauvagnargues, Anne (2013) Deleuze and Art, trans. Samantha Bankston, New York: Bloomsbury.
Smith, Daniel W. (2012) Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sylvester, David (1975) Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames and Hudson.
Watkins, Raymond (2012) ‘Robert Bresson’s Modernist Canvas: The Gesture toward Painting in Au hasard Balthazar’, Cinema Studies, 51:2, pp. 1–25.
Skin, body, self: the question of the abject in the work of Francis Bacon
Ernst van Alphen’s essay is a synoptic study of abjection in the context of Francis Bacon’s art: it investigates the various ways and senses in which Bacon’s art can be described as abject. On the face of it, Bacon’s paintings are abject but this appearance needs to be probed further to examine the significance of the boundary between matter and representation, for instance, and of his figures themselves which are fragmented and which demonstrate various positions of subjecthood at risk. Calling on the work of theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, van Alphen explores the identity of the Baconian figure and argues for a fresh way of thinking about the abject condition of Bacon’s figures. A further area of study in his essay draws on Hal Foster’s work and concerns how the viewer is provoked to complete the operation of the abject, which results in a reshattering of the viewer’s sense of self. Van Alphen’s study shows how abjection can be used to elicit a host of other Baconian themes about representation, viewing and identity.
Based on a common sense understanding of the abject and of abject art – which I will complicate later – the paintings of Francis Bacon can easily be understood as abject. The effect of the abject on the viewer is usually seen as discomfort, repulsion or even nausea. This is an aesthetic judgment. To many viewers Bacon’s work is repulsive or frightening, which could imply that his paintings are abject. His works have, however, other characteristics, themselves of an aesthetic nature, that complicate such a judgment. To begin with, his paintings always have a vertical format, and the figures in his paintings are usually represented vertically; they are standing or sitting. This vertical format mirrors the viewer’s own bodily dimension. It functions as a Gestalt, ‘a whole body from the outlines of which nothing is missing’ (Krauss, 1997: 240). This counters a consideration of Bacon’s work as abject. But, of course, and in support of the position that his work is abject, it is precisely the wholeness of Bacon’s figures that is under siege. His figures are losing their contours; it is as if their bodies dissolve into the space that surrounds them.
Other elements support these paintings and their figures to function as perfect Gestalt, however. Bacon was very outspoken about how he wanted his works to be shown. He wanted his paintings to be covered by glass. To hide paintings by glass is a kind of curse in the art world. It is only done in the case of extremely valuable paintings, which need to be protected, as required by the insurance. But Bacon thought that his paintings looked best when they were covered by glass. Te glass in front of the painting tends to mirror the viewer’s body. It is as if the paintings’ potential functioning as a Gestalt for the viewer is emphasised, or made easier. The viewer has difficulty seeing the painting as paint. Te glass dissolves the materiality of paint and what can be recognised is only the represented figure and space. It is only after some effort, after the viewer has positioned herself at the right spot and angle, that she can look through the glass and see the skin of the figure as well as of the paint.
But this Gestalt effect, too, is reversed. It is the skin of the represented figure as well as of the paint that undermines, in turn, the functioning of Bacon’s paintings as Gestalt. Whereas the spaces in which the figures are located are usually painted in fat, uniform paint, the figures are tooled and worked on. Bacon often used all kind of tools to belabour not the surface of the whole painting, but just that of the figures. As a result the skin of the paint as well as of the represented figure becomes ambiguous. The distinction between the two can no longer be made. The materialities of paint and of the represented body are undiferentiable. The fact that the boundary between matter and representation has been crossed produces yet again the affect of abjection.
So far, the works’ leaning towards the abject after all, is based on a somewhat simple notion of what abject is. In order to assess if Bacon’s work is a prime example of the abject or not, we first have to understand what the abject entails more precisely. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject developed in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection has been the most influential, so I will discuss hers (Kristeva, 1982). The abject is what the subject-in becoming must get rid of in order to become an I. According to Kristeva the protection of the boundaries of the body is the main function of abjection. The anxieties triggered by the abject are first of all anxieties resulting from the end-products and by-products of the body, such as body fluids, blood, urine and faecal matter. What defines these end- or by-products of the body is that they are neither subject nor object. They embody the transition between the body and what is outside it. Although we treat them as objects outside of us, they were once inside or part of our body but we got rid of them. And while we distance ourselves from these bodily discharges they remain a constant threat to a consistent body identity. It is through socialisation that we learn to mark the boundaries of our self. By removing waste and creating a clean, obedient body we safeguard these boundaries. This happens at the cost of, or thanks to, abjection.
According to Kristeva, abjection can be traced back to the first rejection, that is, to the separation from the mother helping her baby to establish him/ herself in the symbolic order. Abjection preserves some of that pre-objectal relationship and some of the ambivalence that is experienced by the subject when it becomes an independent body separated from the mother. Kristeva’s psychological notion of the abject has, however, social ramifications and has been developed further into a theory of abjection. Abjection, no longer referring to an ambiguous object but to a process or activity, refers to cultural mechanisms that exclude certain groups of people or individuals by stigmatising them with loathing. Xenophobia is usually fuelled by abjection. But not only foreigners, also other marginalised groups within a society are often considered to be ugly, dirty or frightening, which evoke aversive responses in the rest of that society. Homophobia, racism, sexism and ageism are also structured by the mechanism of abjection. Subjects react to the abject with repulsion and loathing in order to restore the border separating self and other. Te other is ‘abjected’ from the self, because the abject is seen as not respecting borders, rules and positions of a society. These abject others are not only abjected by means of exclusionary mechanisms but they are simultaneously needed and produced by societies. This is so because subjects are formed by the exclusion of what they are not. In the words of Judith Butler: ‘the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’ (Butler, 1993: 3).
This short account of the abject and abjection reveals a slippage between the condition to be abject and the operation of abjection, in other words, to abject. In Hal Foster’s words: ‘To abject is to expel, to separate; to be abject, on the other hand is to be repulsive, stuck, subject enough only to feel this subjecthood at risk’ (Foster, 1996: 156). This distinction makes clear that the work of Francis Bacon has little to do with abjection, even though it can possibly be understood in terms of the condition of being abject. For, it is clear that the figures in his paintings demonstrate subjecthood at risk. Bacon is then representing figures from the experience of having no boundaries, that is, from the position of being abject. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, not long after Bacon had become one of the most prominent international artists, the abject became an important notion in the understanding of contemporary artworks. Foster has argued that abject art of those days has tended in two directions:
The first is to identify with the abject, to approach it somehow – to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene object-gaze of the real. The second is to represent the condition of abjection in order to provoke its operation – to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right. (Foster, 1996: 157)
An example of the second direction is the work of Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ (1987) represents the condition of abjection, provoking evangelical senators like Jesse Helms to complete the work of abjection negatively. The first direction, identification with the abject, has developed, according to Foster, a division of labour according to gender. Artists who probe the maternal body repressed by the paternal law tend to be women. Examples are Kiki Smith, Maureen Connor, Rona Pondick and Cindy Sherman (after her turn to the grotesque in the mid-1980s). Artists who assume an infantilist position to mock the paternal law tend to be men. Examples include Mike Kelley, John Miller and Paul McCarthy (Foster, 1996: 159). In spite of this difference, the art objects of both female and male artists embody the abject and the feelings raised by the abject such as loathing or disgust. Those feelings are imposed on the viewer.
Francis Bacon is not part of this generation of artists from the 1980s and 1990s obsessed with the abject and abjection. And, although some viewers consider his works as horrifying and repulsive, it is not so evident that the feelings raised by the abject are imposed on Bacon’s viewers. In the introduction to my argument I pointed out how Bacon’s work functions in some respects as Gestalt of and for viewers, which opposes the possibility that abject feelings are imposed on them. Perhaps we should make a more precise distinction between horrifying and repulsive: the fact that the tormented look of many of Bacon’s figures can be horrifying does not imply that they are repulsive in the way the abject can be. If the viewer is horrified by his figures, this affect is not the result of the sight of something abject, but rather of identification with figures who experience themselves as abject, in the sense that their subjectivities are at risk. For the viewer, Bacon’s figures are not an abjected outside, or abjected others, but they represent an abjected condition viewers can identity with. This identification is stimulated, rather than undermined, by their Gestalt form.
This is a problematic statement because identification is in many ways the opposite of horror or repulsion. How is it possible that the viewer will identify with figures who look horrifying or repulsive; in other words, what kind of sinister case of identification is this? What is the point of identifying with figures that seem to lose their self and whose subjectivities are in the process of dissolution? This identification is not only remarkable in its target, but is also qualitatively different from the common understanding of identification. But as Kaja Silverman has argued, identification takes one of two forms (Silverman, 1996). One form involves taking the other into the self on the basis of a (projected) likeness, so that the other ‘becomes’ or ‘becomes like’ the self. Features that are similar are enhanced in the process; features that remain irreducibly other are cast aside or ignored. Silverman calls this idiopathic identification. Te other form is heteropathic. Here, the self doing the identification takes the risk of – temporarily and partially – ‘becoming’ (like) the other. This is both exciting and risky, enriching and dangerous, but at any rate, affectively powerful. This distinction can help to get more clarity about the relation between Bacon’s paintings and the abject. When the viewer of Bacon’s work identifies with figures that experience themselves as abject, the kind of identification that is at stake is heteropathic identification. Te viewer takes the risk of temporarily and partially putting her or his subjectivity at risk.
If the viewer of Bacon’s paintings identifies (or not) with figures from the position or experience of being abjected and as a result having no clear boundaries, we must assess how this dissolution of boundaries in Bacon’s paintings is realised. As remarked earlier, this dissolution concerns the skin of the represented figures as well as of the paint. In the former case we remain within the representational domain: it is as if the figures dissolve or fall apart within the represented space that surrounds them. In the latter case the materiality of the paint and that of the represented body become nondiferentiable. The boundary between matter and representation is being blurred, or crossed. A good example of such boundary crossing can be found in the triptych Tree Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984). As the title announces, we see Bacon’s friend John Edwards on each panel, sitting on a stool, but from different angles: the left hand panel from the right, the middle panel frontally, and the right hand panel from the left. The space in which Edwards is located is ambiguous: it can be an empty room, but the curved edge between wall and floor also suggests that it is open space. The curved line is then an allusion to the horizon of an open landscape. The space in which the three figures are represented is painted in thin paint, covering the canvas with homogeneous colour fields.
The figures are in sharp contrast with the space that surrounds them, especially their faces. The three figures are not just representations. We notice how they are built, constituted by paint, hence, matter. The paint is sometimes wiped or whisked away. This belabouring of the paint does not result in a representational illusion. It does not transform the paint into representation; the paint remains matter. The skin of the face of all three figures is covered with regular stripes, usually pink but also in dark grey, almost black. These stripes look like footprints, the sole consisting of a striped pattern. The patterned surface of the figures’ skin can also be the result of a kitchen tool used for the treatment of meat. Whatever the tool has been that Bacon has used for making this striped pattern on the face of the three figures, the pattern never crosses the border of matter to representation. It remains paint.
This example demonstrates the importance of skin in Bacon’s work. Bacon’s notion of skin is grounded in a phenomenological and psychoanalytical view of skin, although not limited to such a view. I invoke this view to complicate the standard conception of abjection. French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu explains this view in his book The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach of Te Self (1989). According to Anzieu the skin serves the purposes of containment, protection and communication:
The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out; it is the barrier which protects against penetration by the aggression and greed emanating from others, whether people or objects. Finally, the third function – which the skin shares with the mouth and which it performs at least as often – is as a site and a primary means of communication with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by those others. (Anzieu, 1989: 40)
Anzieu is not speaking of the physical properties of the skin but of the metaphoric qualities of flesh. His concept of ‘skin ego’ articulates this beautifully. By ‘Skin Ego’, Anzieu explains, ‘I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychic contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body’ (Anzieu, 1989: 40). The skin’s functions of containment, protection and communication are the result of a dual process of interiorisation. Two spatial aspects of the skin need to be internalised. First of all, the subject needs to internalise the interface between the bodies of the child and the mothering figure (what Anzieu calls the ‘psychic envelope’), and second, the mothering environment itself with all its verbal, visual, and emotional properties. Anzieu articulates this concept of skin ego and this dual interface by means of the somewhat odd word combination ‘the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words’.
Clearly, this psychoanalytic notion of skin is closely related to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic notion of the abject. They presuppose each other. The skin’s functions of containment and protection can only be realised by means of exclusion and abjection of that which threatens the safety of this bodily and psychic envelope. This view of a psychoanalyst can surely not be unproblematically brought to bear on works of art. But to the extent that it represents a philosophical conception as well, it can be brought into dialogue with art. And that is exactly what happens here, so that Bacon, not Anzieu or Kristeva, complicates the notion of abjection. I contend that Bacon’s work engages a dialogue with this rich conception of skin. The artist’s work ‘on the skin’ seems to propose a notion of the subject, which is not ‘contained’ to use Anzieu’s term, nor does it need abjection in order to establish its borders. The condition of the abject is not seen as repulsive, but as a mechanism that is needed for maintaining ‘open borders’ between self and (abjected) other. This assessment implies a paradoxical re-evaluation of the abject. When the skin is not the body’s envelop, then skin and body can no longer adequately be distinguished from each other. Body and skin permeate and sink into each other. This seems to be the condition of most of Bacon’s figures. Elsewhere, I have explained the relationship between body and self of Bacon’s figures by the difference between the form in which a human subject experiences her or his body and the way it is perceived by others.1 Simply stated, one does not see oneself as one is seen by others. While others see the subject’s body as object and as whole, the subject has only inner experiences or fragmented views of her or his body. This view complicates Kristeva’s notion of the abject. Within her theory body and self are seen as self-sufficient. She does not take the visual dimension of existence into account. Instead, by means of the mechanism of abjection the subject is itself able to maintain and safeguard its wholeness and borders. In this alternative view, inspired by the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, the relationship between self and other is a new element, and so is its visual dimension. As Bakhtin writes:
The body is not something self-sufficient: it needs the other, needs his recognition and form-giving activity. Only the inner body (the body experienced as heavy) is given to a human being himself; the other’s outer body is not given but set as a task: I must actively produce it. (Bakhtin, 1990: 51)
Others create an external shape and form for the string of inner sensations of self: they create a perception of the body as ‘whole’.
If we look at Bacon’s images in light of this understanding of the self/other relationship, it becomes immediately clear that the subjects/figures in Bacon’s paintings are all represented as trapped in a solely inner sensation of self. Again and again we see bodies as series of fragments, dangling on the string of the inner sensation of self. Bacon’s subjects seem to lack the wholeness the self-other relationship would produce. This lack is particularly strongly fore-grounded in Tree Studies for Portraits including Self-Portrait, 1969 (Figure 6). While in most cases the fragmented bodies are clearly distinguishable from the space that encircles them, in the three panels of this triptych it is not exactly clear where the body ends. The faces are fragmented in such a way that we cannot decide whether the formless appendices belong to the subjects’ faces or not. Even in the middle and left panel, in which the appendices are directly contiguous with their faces, diferentiating the subject from its context is not easy. Subject and non-subject become one visual field constructed upon contiguity, making it impossible to speak of a subject or self.
Similarly, although in a less radical manner, the faces in Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Rawsthorne, 1970 (Figure 7) are not clearly delineated. This painting, belonging to the genre of the diptych that Bacon practised less frequently, shows two figures facing each other. Bacon makes here ironic use of a genre in which husband and wife, facing each other, are traditionally represented to preserve for posterity the identity of the bourgeois couple in early capitalist Europe. While in the conventional couple each partner derives his or her identity from the allegiance to the figure they face, in Bacon’s diptych the visual relationship is not defining but undoing the characters. Facing each other with blind eyes, these figures seem to lose their boundaries from the confrontation. Dyer’s face is extended by a strange pointed element that seems to be reaching toward Rawsthorne; she, on the other hand, displays one of the characteristic substantial shadows, characteristic because occurring in Bacon’s work almost systematically.2 Here, again, Bacon’s representation of the inner experience of self ends up deconstructing the idea of self: if there is only an inner-self there is in fact no self at all.
If we try to describe these two examples of Bacon’s work in light of the abject and abjection, the only way is then to contend that Bacon has represented the figures from the position of being abject, from the experience of having no boundaries. The question is then if we should consider this as a negative or a positive experience. The conventional idea of the abject would suggest it to be negative, because subjectivity depends on boundaries, distinctions and differences. I will argue, however, that Bacon’s figures do not suffer from their loss or lack of self. Their abject condition is privileged above the wholeness of a contained self.
In order to make this argument I will first provide another dimension to Bakhtin’s account of self-other relationship by adding the one of Roland Barthes. In the case of Barthes self-other relationships are not seen as form-bestowing, as in Bakhtin’s account of these relations, but rather as the cause of the loss of self. At first sight Barthes’ view of the self-other relationship is very similar to the early Bakhtinian position.3 In both accounts the subject’s experience of self is determined by the position of her body in the world and by the very limited perspective she has on her body. In both stories about the creation of self the other has a strong hold over the subject through her ability to represent the body of the subject, an ability the subject herself lacks. While in Bakhtin’s account, however, this relationship of dependence on the other is sweet, loving and desirable, in Barthes’ account the subject is sentenced to this dependence.
In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (notice, in this title, Barthes’ effort not to be defined, represented by the other: par Roland Barthes) he expresses the pain of this dependence: ‘You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image …: even and especially for your body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images’ (Barthes, 1975: 82).
In Camera Lucida he even describes the dependence on the form-bestowing relation with the other as mortifying: ‘I feel that the photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice’ (Barthes, 1982: 11). In Barthes’ view the objectification of the subject is not the work of another individual subject. For him the other is discursive. The objectification of the subject that bestows on her or him the experience of wholeness is a discursive transformation that translates the subject into the terms of the doxa, the already-said, the platitudes of public opinion (Jeferson, 1989: 170). The dependence on the other to achieve wholeness is unbearable for Barthes, because
it is through the other that the subject falls prey to a representation that constructs him in terms of the stereotype. The Barthesian subject is alienated not merely by becoming an image in the eyes of the other but through this assimilation into the doxa. (Jeferson, 1989: 170)
There is no longer a question of a loving and shaping self-other relationships, but of a grim conflict between discourses.
The only thing the subject can do in order to fight the mortifying images of the doxa is to try to undo the objectification and mortification of the self through the practice of writing or representing. But the assertion of an alternative discourse that would be her or his own is impossible because the subject cannot avoid using the elements of the discourse which preceded it to build up a ‘private’ one. Even behind a very particular style or discourse, developed by the subject itself, the doxa will be lurking. Only the practice of representation as an ongoing bodily activity with no special object as its goal besides this movement, succeeds in destabilising the objectifying transformations of the other, of discourse: ‘In this practice the body’s relationship to language is altered from being the object of its representation to becoming the support and condition of a certain linguistic activity’ (Jeferson, 1989: 170). Instead of allowing the doxa to objectify the body, Barthes proposes to keep the body in a movement that asserts its resistance against, even if through the use of, the doxa. This movement re-subjectifies the body, thus escaping total colonisation through full awareness of the dependence on the discourses of the other
Barthes’ account of the self-other relationship as a conflict between discourses makes it possible to reconsider Bacon’s paintings as so many efforts to unsettle representations of the self (of the body) that mortify any experience of the self. In his interviews with David Sylvester Bacon’s incessant emphasis on the need for distortion in order to represent the ‘real’ appearance of somebody can be understood as a fight against stereotypical representations of the body:
FB: What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance. DS: Are you saying that painting is almost a way of bringing somebody back, that the process of painting is almost like the process of recalling? FB: I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case, inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back. (Sylvester, 1987: 40)
It seems that Bacon wants to represent the self of a subject without the mediating, form-bestowing role of the perspective that the other, here meaning discourse, offers. His remarks about the effect on the viewers he strives for, and very incessantly too, shows that he aims for the opposite of an objectifying discourse: ‘It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester, 1987: 12).
His paintings try to avoid offering the objectifying, healing effect that makes the onlooker’s self feel whole; instead his images should evoke a violent, direct response in the onlooker.
The gaze of the other, represented, embodied in the image, is not allowed by Bacon to offer an image of the subject’s self as whole. The presented image should cling to the fragmentation and shatteredness that the subject previously knows as inner-self experience. By calling on the nervous system, Bacon tries to fragment again the experience of self in order to ‘re-call’, ‘bring back’ the real ‘appearance’ of a subject. And that real appearance is the condition that people have called abject because it is lacking in boundaries. And like Serrano who provokes evangelical senators like Jesse Helms to complete the work of abjection negatively, Bacon provokes his viewer to complete the mechanism of the abject. He re-shatters the viewer’s sense of self by refusing to offer the projections of whole bodies that enable the onlooker to experience her- or himself as whole.
This refusal manifests itself, of course, literally by representing bodies as clearly fragmented. Bacon’s recurrent subject matter of disfigured people like the paralytic child or the dwarf, can, however, also be understood in this light. The strange posture of the paralytic child in Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (From Muybridge) (1961) has a very uncanny effect. It is as if his limbs do not ft his body. Bacon’s choice for this subject could be explained by arguing that the paralytic child is already fragmented by nature. There is in fact no need to fragment this body by representation. The short legs and big head of the dwarf in Portrait of a Dwarf (1975) make up a body which is already not ‘whole.’ The shortness of his legs is even emphasised by his being depicted as sitting on a barstool. His limbs do not ‘fit’ together, so the body remains fragmented. At the same time there is no radical difference between the dwarf, the paralytic child, and the ‘normal’ figures in Bacon’s paintings. All figures are fragmented as if they were dwarfs or paralytics. Every figure, deformed or not, is disfigured.
Bacon’s position, then, appears highly ambivalent. On the one hand, he militates against the mortification of the subject by the objectifying force of the gaze of the other, folding the subject back onto itself and endorsing the resulting fragmentation as the inevitable consequence of this denial of the power of the other. His statements in the interviews emphasise this denial. This is the side of mortification, the price to pay for this autonomy undeniably present in the painted figures. Struggling his way out of the either/or mechanism of discourse, Bacon fights the domination of the other by drawing the other in. The viewer cannot resist the violently powerful figures whose wholeness is lost but whose presence is absolute. The endorsement of the loss of self bestows on these figures a power of absorption that accounts for the strong responses they solicit.
Notes
1 See the chapter ‘Bodyscapes’ in my book Francis Bacon and Te Loss of Self, Cambridge MA: Reaktion Books, 1992.
2 For shadows in the work of Bacon, see the chapter ‘Perception’ in my book Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self.
3 Jeferson argues that Barthes’ view is also strongly influenced by Sartre in this respect of self-other relations. He has, as she calls it, ‘an undeniably Sartrian streak’ (p. 153). This is made explicit by Barthes himself in his dedication of Camera Lucida as homage to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire
References
Anzieu, D. 1989. The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach of the Self. Translated from the French by Chris Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bakhtin, M. 1990. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. In Holquist, H. and Liapunov, V. eds. Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 4–256.
Barthes, R. 1975. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Barthes, R. 1982. Camera Lucida. Refections on Photography. London: Fontana.
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.
Foster, H. 1996. The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Jeferson, A. 1989. Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes. In Hirschkop, K. and Shepherd, D. eds. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 201–228.
Krauss, R. 1997. The Destiny of the Informe. In Bois, Y-A. and Krauss, R. eds. Formless: A User’s Guide. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 235–252.
Kristeva, J. 1982 [1980]. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Silverman, K. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge.
Sylvester, D. 1987. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Tames and Hudson.
Van Alphen, E. 1992. Francis Bacon and Te Loss of Self. Cambridge MA: Reaktion Books.
Francis Bacon life mask by sculptor Clive Barker at the NGV
KITTY HAUSER
When the Australian-born writer Peter Conrad saw painter Francis Bacon in passing in the 1970s, he couldn’t take his eyes off his face. It wasn’t just the make-up or the boot polish on his hair
“His eyes,” Conrad said, “kept watch from inside asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted … He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream on their thrones in his early paintings.”
Conrad wasn’t the only one to be taken aback by the painter’s appearance. Novelist and composer Paul Bowles described Bacon’s head as always seeming liable “to burst from internal pressures”.
Bacon was as fascinated by his appearance as everyone else. As he got older he was much preoccupied with the degeneration of his looks. “Each day in the mirror I see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass,” he was fond of quoting from the Jean Cocteau film Orphee.
One of the reasons for Bacon’s obsession with photography was because of the way it brought home this connection between appearance and death, while appearing to cauterise it by freezing time.
Life (or death) masks — casts taken from a face — were the proto-photographic portraits of a pre-photographic era and did much the same thing. We know Bacon took an interest in them because in the 1950s he made a series of paintings based on the life mask of poet William Blake. As an artwork, Life Mask seems to belong to Bacon as much as to its maker, pop sculptor Clive Barker. It was, I suppose, a sort of collaboration; the result of a congruence of interests between friends.
Barker’s formal interests were in cladding and casting, a result of his unusual training. Instead of doing a proper stint at art school, as was his plan, Barker worked at the Vauxhall Motors factory in his native town of Luton. It was here that he got the idea of plating ordinary objects with chrome and other metals, and he wondered whether artworks could not be made by dividing up the labour, as on a production line, among different skilled workers.
The objects he started to make — Coke bottles cast in bronze and plated in chrome, for instance — humorously took their cue from the Duchampian ready-made but were in love with industrial shiny surfaces.
Plating Bacon’s face, as it were, was in practice necessarily a collaboration. Barker used a new and lighter sort of plaster that didn’t weigh down the features (as was the case with Blake), creating a very accurate likeness. Straws were inserted up Bacon’s nose so he could breathe while the plaster set.
Bacon held Barker’s hand throughout, with the idea that he would squeeze if he became too uncomfortable. He didn’t squeeze but later admitted that he had been in agony because of his asthma. Still, the finished product, cast in bronze, pleased him. Barker did other versions, some chrome-plated or gilded, some deliberately squashed.
Life Mask is exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria next to Bacon’s 1949 Study from the Human Body, — beside which it looks rather small and mysterious. Like Blake, Bacon necessarily has his eyes closed in his life mask, lending to his visage a certain intense interiority.
The work is the recent gift of David Angel QC. In June the NGV will be showing works from David and Anita Angel’s collection of contemporary Aboriginal art given as a gift to the gallery in an exhibition titled Artists’ Hand and Collectors’ Eye: The Angel Gift.
Clive Barker, Life Mask of Francis Bacon (1969). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of David Angel QC through the Australian government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015.
Life mask of Francis Bacon. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Gift of The Hon. David Angel QC through the Australian Cultural Gifts Program.
What use would Bacon have for a pencil?
ALEXANDER VERNEY-ELLIOTT
Sir Colin Gleadell (The Daily Telegraph, April 19) discusses the disputed authenticity of a body of drawings attributed to Francis Bacon. I believe that these drawings, owned by Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, an Italian journalist, are not by Bacon.
I visited Bacon in his studio in 1981 and asked him if he had ever considered using charcoal, as it allows one to make what he called “non-illustrational” (non-literal) facial features. I also asked if he ever made pencil drawings. Bacon told me he never used charcoal and found pencil to be too limited.
Mr Ravarino’s drawings have eyes that are far too illustrational to be by Bacon. Why would Bacon — who embraced chance in his work, making arbitrary, irrational marks — use a medium such as pencil? Bacon used to throw paint at the canvas; one cannot throw pencil at paper.
Alexander Vemey-Elliott
London WC1
No substitute: Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970), painted in Bacon’s distinctive style
The Art Market: Fair with a new look
Bacon show raises eyebrows
GEORGINA ADAM
Would you pay £795,000 for a Bacon pastel that experts have rejected? Herrick Gallery in London is offering two such works, plus eight drawings (at £52,000-£156,000) from a contentious group owned by one of the artist’s lovers, Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. He claims Bacon gave him the trove of some 600 pastels and drawings between 1976 and 1992. Six were rejected by the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné Committee in 2012, and none is in the catalogue raisonné.
Director Alice Herrick says that the gallery “is not in a position to guarantee authenticity” but the show “reopens an ongoing conversation about the history of the drawings”. Asked whether the whopping pricetags imply that they are genuine, she said the values were set on the basis of other sales. Maintaining that she — along with scholars such Edward Lucie-Smith — believes that the works are indeed “by the hand of Francis Bacon”, she also affirms that “there are negotiations for other pastels, but may include the ones in the exhibition”.
Georgina Adam is art market editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper
Francis Bacon Controversy:
Unauthenticated Drawings Go On Sale
The Herrick Gallery London is selling eight pencil & graphite drawings and two pastel collages said to be by the late great British painter Francis Bacon. The works are alleged to have been made between 1977 and 1992 and donated to his good friend in Italy, Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, but have been rejected as fakes by the author of the new catalogue raisonné.
The gallery in Piccadilly, is marketing the ten works’ authenticity as neither proved nor disproved. The drawings are described as in “temporary custody” of David Edwards, the brother of Bacon’s long-term lover, the late John Edwards, but are still owned by Ravarino. Gallery owner, Alice Herrick told the Art Newspaper that around 600 drawings were given to Ravarino, who was one of the artist’s lovers, from 1977 up until Bacon’s death in 1992.
Artlyst spoke to Calvin Winner, Head of Collections at Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, and co-curator of ‘Francis Bacon and the Masters’ regarding the artist’s preparatory work – “The question of whether Bacon sketched – because famously he didn’t sketch, he didn’t make preparatory drawings – and the reason of course is that his preparatory work is on the canvas. This is Bacon sketching, this is Bacon drawing, it’s all here in these unfinished canvases…”
It is entirely possible that Bacon believed that the existence of preparatory drawings for his visceral paintings would somehow detract from the authenticity of the final works, and that their raw directness would be tempered in the eye of the viewer – in doing so the magician would have given away his secrets.
This may be why the artist always denied that drawing was any part of his practice – even though he often sketched with paint over torn-out photographs found strewn around his studio. In fact Tate acquired a number of drawings by Bacon and exhibited them in ‘Francis Bacon: Working on Paper’ in 1999. But did the artist ever work on independent large-scale drawings?
The author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Bacon paintings, undertaken for the Francis Bacon Estate, has rejected the Ravarino works. In 2012 Martin Harrison told a Cambridge court that six drawings he had been shown were “pastiches, or even parodies, and profoundly disrespectful of Bacon’s authentic body of work”.
The two large pastels are on sale for £795,000 each and eight drawings for a total of £1.2m. Herrick believes the works are “by Bacon”, telling The Art Newspaper that she “cannot guarantee the authenticity of the drawings and pastels”. The authenticity of the Ravarino drawings has been frequently contested, it appears that there will be no certificate of authenticity from the artist’s estate. The authenticity of the works remain a tantalising mystery.
Analysis
A London Gallery Is Selling Controversial
Works Attributed to Francis Bacon
The artist’s estate has deemed them fakes.
Ten works claimed to be by Francis Bacon have gone on sale at London’s Herrick Gallery despite being rejected as fakes from the artist’s first catalogue raisonné, to be published by the artist’s estate this June.
The works in question include two pastels, priced at £795,000 ($1.1 million) each, and eight drawings on sale for a total of £1.2 million ($1.7 million), The Art Newspaper reports. The works are said to be some of an estimated 600 drawings given by Bacon to his lover Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino between 1977 and his death in 1992.
Adding to the intrigue, although the works are owned by Ravarino they are currently in the temporary possession of David Edwards, the brother of Bacon’s late, long-term lover John Edwards.
Alice Herrick, owner of the Herrick Gallery, says that although she believes that the paintings are by Bacon himself she “cannot guarantee the authenticity of the drawings and pastels,” according to TAN.
The author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné, Martin Harrison, completely rejected the authenticity of six of the drawings already in 2012. “[These works are] pastiches, or even parodies, and profoundly disrespectful of Bacon’s authentic body of work,” he told a Cambridge court.
It is a widely held belief that Bacon never made drawings of this large scale. “The works on exhibition at the Herrick Gallery have not been authenticated and do not appear in the forthcoming Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, the official catalogue of Bacon’s oeuvre,” Harrison told TAN.
The catalogue, which has been in production for a decade, will feature over 100 previously unseen canvases, some of which were recently unearthed from a private Italian collection, including the previously unknown Screaming Pope painting. Compiling the book was difficult, as Bacon is known to have destroyed many of his works.
“The stuff that has been written about Bacon, some good and much of it less good, is based on about a third of his work,” Harrison told the Guardian. “The great revelation of the new catalogue raisonné will be that, for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen and assessed. It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings.”
The most comprehensive catalogue of Bacon’s work to date was published in 1964 by a former director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, with whom Bacon refused to cooperate.
Is it or isn’t it?
The Bacon mystery grows
Controversy abounds over a collection of drawings said to have
been made by the artist late in life. Colin Gleadell reports
BY
C
An exhibition titled Francis Bacon/Darren Coffield opened in London last week, reviving the debate about the authenticity of a hoard of large-scale drawings purportedly made and signed by Bacon and given, it is claimed, by the artist to Italian journalist Cristiano Locatelli Ravarino, in about 1989.
According to Alice Herrick, whose gallery is hosting the exhibition, the drawings she is showing were part of that gift, and then given or lent by Ravarino to David Edwards, the brother of John Edwards, to whom Bacon left everything when he died in 1992.
Herrick, an artist and exhibition curator, specialises in showing works by living artists such as Darren Coffield, who makes up the other half of the exhibition. As a younger man, Coffield had frequented the Colony Room club in Soho, where Bacon and Edwards often drank, and is writing a book about it; hence the joint exhibition.
The authenticity of the Ravarino drawings has been frequently contested, and they are not to be included in the official Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné (catalogue of complete works) to be published by his estate this summer. Yet in this exhibition they are presented as authentic, fully catalogued works, and priced from £50,000 to £785,000 each.
As any market professional will tell you, for any painting or drawing purporting to be by an important modern artist to have any significant value, it should normally be listed in a catalogue raisonné, have a certificate of authenticity from the artist’s estate, or at least be recognised by authorised experts. Without these, they are virtually worthless. Neither Sotheby’s nor Christie’s has ever accepted any of the Ravarino Bacons for sale. But could they still have some kind of speculative value?
Herrick does not believe that their exclusion from the catalogue raisonné means they are fakes. “The estate may have rejected them,” she argues, “but they haven’t said they are fakes.” She points to a long list of supporters, mostly Italian critics, and including the British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith, who has described the drawings as “complete works” by Bacon, as opposed to studies, and to an exhibition history in which sections of the collection have been shown around the world, from Venice to Buenos Aires (curated by Lucie-Smith) and even to China.
There was also a court case in Ravarino’s home city, Bologna, brought by dissatisfied parties who had bought drawings from him and needed convincing they were by Bacon. In 2004, having heard evidence from a graphologist about the signatures, the judge declared his confidence that the drawings were genuine. Herrick has a catalogue (she calls it a catalogue raisonné) of some 400 drawings from the Ravarino collection in the gallery, with yet more to be added.
However, a judge at Cambridge county court more recently declared other drawings from Ravarino’s collection “not authentic Francis Bacon drawings”. This 2012 case centred around the bankruptcy of David Edwards and his sale in 2007 for £1.3 million of a dozen Bacon drawings and some photographs he had received from Ravarino. After the buyers asked for their money back and he couldn’t pay, Edwards was declared bankrupt.
Subpoenaed to appear as an expert witness, Martin Harrison, editor of the forthcoming Bacon catalogue, told the court the drawings were “merely pastiches, or even parodies, and profoundly disrespectful of Bacon’s authentic body of work”. The court estimated their value at a mere £480 in all, or about £40 each.
There is a growing feeling in the market that the Bacon estate, controlled by stained-glass artist, Brian Clarke, which has the right to declare them fakes or not, should make a statement about the Ravarino drawings, one way or another.
In Search Of The New..... An Interview With Michael Peppiatt
In 1963 a Cambridge undergraduate embarked on writing an article for a failing arts magazine called Cambridge Opinion. His piece was to be titled Modern Art in Britain. He knew little about the subject matter but a friend’s mother had recently been photographed by John Deakin for Vogue and he suggested that Deakin could be a good contact to get to a new and exciting artist called Francis Bacon.
So it was that an incredible journey was to begin – with one of the most exciting artists of the last century or maybe even any century. In addition to this – Peppiatt relaunched Art International magazine and has written a succession of acclaimed art history books. He’s also curated some important international art exhibitions. His pedigree and reputation speak for themselves.
After reading Peppiatt’s book
I set off to London from Yorkshire on a glorious spring day – not a cloud in the sky or breath of wind in the air. Four hours later I arrived in a beautiful London square with a communal garden for its residents – surrounded by houses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Mary Poppins. I parked the car and climbed the steep steps to a large front door. A young assistant greeted me and took me through to a tall ceilinged room that was crammed with books, paintings and writing materials. Peppiatt shook me warmly by the hand and without further ado tea was prepared and we were ready to go. It’s a fantastic story.
I suppose it was an odd reason really. My Father who was much brighter than me, certainly academically, received a scholarship to go to either Oxford, Cambridge or London. His parents had a small family hotel just off Piccadilly near the Ritz. Along came the depression and my grandfather’s finances were severely dented. While my father wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge he went to Imperial College London because it was cheaper to live at home. It was understood that because he didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge that I would. In the end it took me several attempts to get in. I wanted to read Languages so although I could speak French I had to learn a second language and was sent to Germany for a crash course in German. I eventually got my place at Cambridge. So I did Languages but after about a year I switched courses to Moral Sciences. I found it very dry though. It wasn’t for me so I searched around again and found Art History and I thought well – that sounded like a soft option. So I did that with some interest for a year but the course was limited – it stopped at Rubens. I got very impatient with this. I knew nothing about contemporary art but it seemed to me there must be some contemporary art out there.
So I thought I’m going to find out if there is something out there – I didn’t believe it just stopped at Rubens. After about a year or so I changed again to English. At the same time there was a struggling arts magazine called Cambridge Opinion. I thought I’d try and help revive it by doing a piece called Modern Art in Britain. Really in the face of my Professor – to show them there actually was something after Rubens!
This is the odd thing. I had this idea I was a sort of feckless, aimless and footloose adolescent who couldn’t settle on anything and was kind of drifting but at the same time there must have been some drive there. I don’t remember it like that I just remember going from one semi failure to another. I suppose underneath all that there must have been some impetus. It opened my world – I met Bacon, I met Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and David Hockney. From all of a sudden being this provincial student I had this parallel life in Soho.
He was a relatively big name at the time. He’d had his first retrospective at the Tate and it had put him very much on the map. However everything in those days was much smaller. The catalogue would have been a soft cover – maybe 7" x 5". The art world wasn’t gorged with money.
I knew nothing about contemporary art – it’s the absolute truth. It was only because I had spoken to my friend at Cambridge that I got in touch with Bacon. His mother had been photographed by John Deakin and he proposed that I go to the French House in Soho (where both Deakin and Bacon drank) and mention his name in a bid to make contact with Bacon. So I rolled up and didn’t really know what I was doing. I stood around in the French pub feeling very awkward and then I spotted Deakin – I recognized him from a photograph. John was very camp and he told me all about himself because he had a sense of himself. I listened and then told him I was doing this issue on modern art in Britain and was wondering if there was any chance of meeting Bacon. John sort of went in to his camp mode and said "well I don’t know my dear now that she’s famous – so incredibly famous – whether she wants to meet a mere student like you". His voice carried across the Pub. I realized later that he did it on purpose to deliberately needle Bacon. Bacon turned around and said "don’t listen to that old fool – I adore students".
So I was in. He asked me what I was doing for lunch and of course I wasn’t doing anything. I was clutching my return ticket to Cambridge thinking I’ll get a sandwich somewhere. He swept me off for this marvelous lunch and then a party afterwards where I got hopelessly drunk. I had a whale of a time. Bacon said I should go back and see him and we could talk as much as I liked.
He tended to repeat himself quite a lot so it sort of got drummed in to you. I started scribbling things down because I realised early on that this was someone out of the ordinary. What did I think of him? I thought he was a bit alarming. He’s queer – which is what we called it then. He drinks like a fish. I’d heard he gambled. I hadn’t even seen his paintings at this point. If I’d seen the painting’s I probably wouldn’t have gone. Particularly then – they seemed unusually terrifying. I think I would have turned tail. I think I’d have thought he was a depraved monster and I’m not sure I want to get too close.
The paintings were much more shocking 50 years ago. We’ve got a bit used to them now. They were fresh and raw. People literally put their hands up to their eyes. They were too much.
Yes indeed. Of course homosexuality was a punishable offence in those days and his paintings if you think about it are largely about homosexuality – that’s his main subject really. The male body or two male bodies – usually naked. He sailed very close to the wind. When I met him – not knowing the pictorial horror as it were – I took him at face value and he was terrifically charming. He had a natural charm. He was fun. He was amusing. He knew how to put young people at ease.
I went back to see him maybe a dozen times over a six month period. I got a copy of the Tate catalogue and I was very disturbed. I thought Christ is this what he does? I thought why is it so tortured when he was the life and soul. You know – it was champagne all round. It was dribbling off the back of his hands as he filled up all the glasses. Cheers and off we go.
Most of the time we were just falling about laughing and at the same time you knew there was a very unusual view coming across. I was drawn by the freedom this guy exuded. As a student we used to make a couple of half pints last all evening but with Francis I saw bottle after bottle after bottle of wine drunk. He was always careful to eat well and then of course he drowned it all in gallons of champagne.
Once I’d seen the pictures I realized there was another side. When I got the interview together he gave me so much time. We’d meet at noon and usually go through the afternoon and well in to the night. I’d then get the last train back to Cambridge or on one or two occasions stay the night at Reece Mews where he painted. If my mother and father would have known that I’d been staying the night on the couch of this outrageous queer I don’t know what they would have thought but he behaved impeccably. He never made a pass he was with George Dyer. Things could turn nasty at times with all the drink. There were some odd people and we went to some very odd clubs. He was always aware of what was going on around him and I think he was very protective of me. He would have moved in if things had got really ugly.
There was always rogues and con men hanging around London in the small hours. It could easily have happened. I think we got out quite smartly once or twice because things were getting too hot to handle. His lover, George Dyer, was a sort of minor failed gangster. Poor old chap. George on the whole was a rather amiable lost soul. He looked the part because he was built like a boxer but he wasn’t an aggressive bully boy – he was rather gentle. A nice man but just a bit adrift.
That was sort of a privilege. His studio was off bounds basically. Sometimes I’d go and meet him for drinks there before we had dinner. Once or twice I had dinner cooked by him. I must have actually been in the studio part half a dozen times over the years. It was very spartan but he loved Reece Mews.
They came in from time to time but they weren’t big drinkers. John Deakin and Jeffrey Bernard and his brother Bruce were regularly in there. It was an odd place. It was a kind of England that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. It was camp, very free and eccentric. It was run by this strict looking foul mouthed lesbian called Muriel Belcher. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.
I think it was Frank Auerbach who said that friendship’s wear out and I think that was the main reason for the cooling off. People also said it was about a gambling debt or something that Bacon had said that was unflattering about Freud’s painting. At the time when I came on the scene they were very thick together and I think that Lucian was in awe of Francis. He saw him as the senior figure and I think he admired both the man and the artist. It was only after Bacon’s death that Freud started to see his star rise.
Yes I did. He was a clever guy - some might say unscrupulous. A good businessman. He didn’t mind cutting corners when it suited his purposes. According to Bacon he had a very good eye for painting. Bacon liked him. He accepted on the whole it was a situation that suited him otherwise he would have changed it I’m sure.
I don’t think so. They may have tried but Francis was a very unbiddable type of person. He was a law unto himself. He was very clever at manipulating his own career. I don’t think he would have signed a contract or if he had he wouldn’t have towed the line. I think they took what was available. They would have a van waiting when they thought a painting was going to be ready so they could grab it before he worked too much on it and destroyed it.
He was quite territorial. When he saw a newcomer like me he became quite protective of Bacon. We didn’t get on that well. I don’t think he would have a good word to say about me. I quite admired him occasionally and I admired the position he created for himself but it wasn’t a cordial relationship.
Yes - he was very generous. He always insisted on paying for things. He looked out for his friends. I tended not to ask him for anything because he was naturally generous. He would understand when he could help and if he could help he would. He allowed me to produce a litho edition of one of his works and that helped pay some bills.
Terribly difficult. We kept it going for about 5 years and then I got married and had two children. My wife helped me but with two young children it became increasingly difficult. We were exhausted with it. It began to suck everything from us. Whatever money was there got completely absorbed by the magazine. It was a crazy life. Good training for me though as I’d avoided all responsibility for quite some time. I’d been brought up with a halt with all this stuff.
Well – I think it’s got so huge, so international, so sort of glamorous, so over heated – I don’t know. It’s been exciting but I think that money is playing too large a role. I can’t pretend that it’s not helped me make my living but all these fairs, all these magazines, and electronic newsletters pouring out. It’s like a stock market with artists going up and down and artists needing retrospectives at a museum and then a book and then a catalogue to promote them. I’m not saying it’s all together a bad thing but it’s become over swollen and bloated.
I guess it’s the fact that so many mediocrities get puffed up. You don’t know where to turn. In this huge art world some people can’t tell the difference and it becomes too much of a market and not enough about quality. The art world has become monetized and things become good because it’s made £20m or whatever. I think it’s quiet unhealthy. Too many people in the art world are in it to make a quick buck.
It was a fascinating conversation. Peppiatt has a wealth of experience to draw
upon. Not only did he play the role of confidante to a complex and talented
painter he went on to document his story in the wonderfully written –
There’s an old school charm about Peppiatt. Correctly spoken and considered – embroidered with a delightful sense of humour. The room was filled with laughter before we began the interview but once we got down to business his recall was assured and he clearly has an excellent grasp of the art world going way back. His is not a romantic view of the scene he experienced in London. Peppiatt’s view is more pragmatic. Not matter of fact but simply that’s the way it was – for better or for worse.
We shake hands and say we’ll stay in touch. From the shade of the hall I am greeted by the remains of a beautiful spring day in London. Children play in the communal garden and I walk back to my car. In 1963 Michael Peppiatt was indeed in search of the new. He beat a path to its living breathing heart and lived to tell the tale. It was my own privilege to be able to hear these stories at first hand on that sunny spring day in London.
Hollywood-style heist nets five Francis Bacon paintings worth more than $43m
The unidentified works were part of an art collection kept in a house on a quite
street near the Spanish Senate, one of the most policed areas of the city
WORLD NEWS
Five works by Francis Bacon worth more than $44 million have been stolen from the Madrid home of their owner in a heist police say was worthy of a Hollywood film.
The five paintings, inherited by a close Spanish friend of the late Irish artist, were taken last June. It was not clear why the theft had not been made public earlier.
The works were part of an art collection kept in a house on a quiet street near the Spanish Senate, one of the most policed areas of the city.
Sources close to the investigation said the theft appeared to have been highly professional. It took place while the owner was away, with the perpetrators disabling the alarm system.
The owner was identified only as JCB, aged 59, an art lover who had been a friend of Bacon, who often visited Madrid and died there in 1992 aged 82.
The robbery was described as the biggest art theft for decades in Spain with the works worth 30 million euros ($44.2 million). As well as the five Bacon paintings, “other valuable objects” were taken.
Neither the porter at the five-story block nor neighbours heard anything. One art expert told Spain’s El Pais newspaper: “The circle in which works like this could be sold is very small. It’s not easy to offer a Francis Bacon, big or small the thieves are not going to have any easy task.”
An unidentified police source was quoted as saying: “This class of robberies aren’t real, they only happen in films.”
In 2013 Bacon’s 1969 work Three Studies of Lucian Freud fetched $142,405,000, a world record.
Francis Bacon paintings worth £23m
stolen in clean Madrid heist
L
Five of Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon’s paintings were stolen from the home of their owner in Madrid. Spanish news paper El Pais reported that the theft was a work of highly professional art thieves who managed to disable the alarm system and left no trace of their handiwork. The owner was not at home at the time.
The robbery took place in June 2015 but news of it came to light on 13 March when the Spanish media reportedly got information from a source close to the investigation. It has not been clarified which of the Bacon paintings were stolen but their combined worth is expected to be worth £23m ($33m).
"It is not at all easy to sell a Francis Bacon, large or small, without that getting to the ears of those who pore over such a rarefied sector," an expert told the Spanish newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicating that it would be very hard for the thieves to sell the works on the black market.
The paintings had been passed down to the owner, who was a close friend of the artist considered one of the top 10 frontline artists of the modern age.
Bacon who died in Madrid in 1992 painted expressionist-surrealist works which are much sought after in the art world. The sale of his triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud in November 2013 broke records and became the world’s most expensive artwork sold at auction, when it fetched £100m ($142.4m) at Christie’s in New York. In 2015 Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Algers took over that record when it was sold for £124m ($179m).
‘To see Bacon’s entire oeuvre is a revelation’
Working on a project as extensive as a catalogue raisonné, one incurs debts to countless individuals and organisations. At present I am completing the final section, the ‘Acknowledgements’, trying to ensure that no one who should be thanked is forgotten. In this section I have also briefly slipped into the first person, to remark that while I think I now know exactly how to produce a catalogue raisonné, when the project began 11 years ago, this was not the case. I believe my methodology was reasonably efficient, but with hindsight I suspect I would have changed the general approach in certain respects. Of course the standard apparatus – provenance, exhibition history – must be there (it was Rebecca Daniels’ task to research these topics, drawing information out of sometimes recalcitrant owners), but I anticipate criticism of the subjective aspects of my texts; though not, I trust, of the factual information.
For 10 years I have met twice yearly with my colleagues on the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee – Richard Calvocoressi, Hugh Davies, Norma Johnson, and Sarah Whitfield – to review paintings submitted for our consideration. Their advice has been invaluable, and has helped set the parameters of the project. I had to deal with strange questions from ‘outside’, for example about whether I intended to include Bacon’s ‘abandoned’ paintings in the catalogue, as though it were within my remit to be selective, to weed out paintings that I (or someone else) deemed inferior or unsuitable. I have deviated from the Committee’s precepts in only one respect: at the eleventh hour I drew back from including Bacon’s so-called ‘slashed’ canvases, the paintings that he destroyed by cutting out the ‘image’, leaving only tattered fragments of background hanging from the stretchers. The ruthless destruction of failed paintings was crucial to Bacon’s creative process, but I could not bring myself to have him represented by over 50 of these scraps. Anyone so inclined is free to research them; there are 40 in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. The only destroyed paintings in the catalogue are those exhibited in Bacon’s lifetime (which are accessible in old catalogues) and three that were unfortunately lost in accidents while in private ownership.
To say that the most significant contribution in the catalogue is the illustrations rather than the words is not false modesty. To see Bacon’s entire oeuvre – 585 paintings – arranged in chronological order and illustrated in colour is a revelation. Until now the critical reception of his work has been predicated on less than half of that total, and consequently is skewed: there are not really so many ‘screaming popes’. It has been a great privilege to get close to almost every one of Bacon’s extant paintings. I was acutely aware that I was peering at paintings that very few people had ever seen, or knew only from small, rather dim black and white reproductions in the 1964 catalogue raisonné. Many of them were startling. Among Bacon’s statements about his artistic aims, the one he repeated most frequently was that he wanted to affect the viewer’s ‘nervous system’. When he achieves this his paintings induce a literally spine-tingling reaction – arguably more visceral (albeit not necessarily more profound, or moving) than experiencing Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at Kenwood – or whichever artworks turn you on.
In seeking to explain the impact of some of Bacon’s paintings, I have invoked biographical details, all too aware that this flouts current art-historical convention. Bacon became a great painter of the human body in 1949 and made many of his groundbreaking images during the next three years. But in 1952 he met Peter Lacy, who, though seldom identified in the paintings’ titles, became Bacon’s muse for the next decade. A high proportion of Bacon’s paintings were motivated by his feelings towards Lacy, which ranged from (perhaps surprising) affection to violence or the sexually transgressive. Bacon’s partially hidden agenda was similarly personal in 10 masterpieces of George Dyer that he painted between 1966 and 1968, which chronicle his frustrations with, and ambiguity towards, his younger partner: his search for ‘the Nietzsche of the football team’ was doomed to failure. There are many ways of looking at Bacon’s paintings, but there was undeniably a psychological impulse at play. In attempting to decode their iconography I do not pretend it is possible to penetrate all of their mysteries, but their palpable presence continues to suffuse our consciousness, posing questions.
Sotheby’s will auction Two Studies for a Self-Portrait, which
has only been exhibited twice before, in New York in May
MARK BROWN | ART | CULTURE | THE GUARDIAN | THURSDAY MARCH 17 2016
A rare and unusually positive self-portrait by Francis Bacon, an artist better known for the many demons that haunted him throughout his life, is coming to the market for the first time. The auction house Sotheby’s said Two Studies for Self-Portrait (1970) was the finest of all Bacon’s self-portraits and would be sold in New York on 11 May with an estimate of $22m-$30m (£19m-£26m).
Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s senior specialist in international art, described it as “No 1 of all the paintings I’ve handled in my career”. He added: “Discovering a work such as this is like finding gold dust. To my mind, the painting is worthy of a place alongside the very finest self-portraits of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso. It’s certainly among the greatest self-portraits ever offered at auction.”
The work shows an almost cheery Bacon and was painted a year before his career-defining retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais in 1971, that made him only the second living artist after Picasso to have been afforded that honour. It was also a time, it can be assumed, that things were steady between Bacon and his partner George Dyer. The following year, on the eve of the show, Dyer killed himself – an incident that haunted the artist for decades to come.
Two Studies for a Self-Portrait has been exhibited only twice before. At the 1971 retrospective and in 1993 at Marlborough Fine Art, London. The painting was also chosen as the cover shot for Milan Kundera and Frances Borel’s book Francis Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits.
The painting comes to auction as exhibitions of Bacon’s work are planned at Tate Liverpool, the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Bacon’s catalogue raisonné will also be published in the spring, representing an almost 10-year search to find and document every Bacon painting.
Particularly exciting is the discovery of Bacon’s final and previously unseen work from 1991, in which he contemplates his own death. Francis Bacon works attract some of the highest auction bids, with Three Studies of Lucian Freud selling for $142m (£89m) in 2013, far more than its $85m estimate.
Lost Francis Bacon Nude fetches €550,000 at Christie’s
‘It being St Patrick’s Day, the stars could not have been more aligned’
MICHAEL PARSONS | FINE ART & ANTIQUES | THE IRISH TIMES | THURSDAY MARCH 17 2016
A pair of paintings by Irish artist Tony O’Malley which, when reversed and joined up reveal a lost, unfinished painting by fellow-artist Francis Bacon sold at Christie’s in London on Thursday afternoon for £435,000 (€554,000) – more than 14 times the top estimate of just £30,000.
They were sold to an unnamed buyer during an auction of British and Irish Art in Christie’s South Kensington saleroom. Announcing the lot as “a pair of O’Malley’s with, of course the Bacon on the back” the auctioneer quipped: “It being St Patrick’s Day, the stars could not be more aligned”. Bidding opened at £26,000 and jumped quickly. When the hammer fell, there was applause in the saleroom.
The paintings by the Callan, Co Kilkenny-born O’Malley, who died in 2003, were made in the early 1960s.
“Currach, Clare Island” and “Evening Landscape, Tedihy Hospital” were consigned to the auction by separate owners. Christie’s did not name the vendors but the first painting had been gifted to the Irish poet Padraic Fallon who died in 1974 and the second is understood to have been in the collection of O’Malley’s widow Jane.
The auction also featured another lot by Tony O’Malley “Still Life with Vase and Lemon” dating from 1962 which sold for £2,750 – within the estimate – and a more normal price for the artist.
O’Malley had met Bacon in the English seaside resort of St Ives in Cornwall in 1959. When Bacon left his rented studio there the landlady gave his discarded boards and canvases to other artists – one of whom used one to roof a chicken shed. O’Malley cut his board in half and used both pieces to paint these two pictures – “Currach, Clare Island” and “Evening Landscape, Tedihy Hospital”. However, the board had an almost life-size unfinished image of a male nude by Bacon which O’Malley seems to have accorded no value.
Before the auction Christie’s had said “for years these works [by O’Malley] were separated, residing in the collections of two different owners. Now these paintings, and the lost Bacon study, will be reunited and viewed together for the first time in almost 60 years”.
Christie’s offered the paintings as the work of O’Malley with an estimate for the pair of £20,000-£30,000. Paintings by Francis Bacon, by contrast, routinely sell for tens of millions. Bacon, who was born in Dublin and died in 1992 has become one of the most famous and expensive artists in art history.
One of his triptychs (three-panel paintings) entitled “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, New York, in November 2013 – the second highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.
Earlier this week, Spain’s El Pais newspaper revealed that police in Madrid were hunting for thieves who stole five Bacon paintings worth an estimated €30 million from a private home in the city last year.
Separately, Sotheby’s chose St Patrick’s Day to announce that a Bacon self-portrait made by the artist in 1970 had been consigned from a private collection to be auctioned in New York in May with “an estimate of $22 million-$30 million”.
Heist nets Bacon paintings worth £23m
By William Bond in Madrid
WILLIAM BOND | WORLD NEWS | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | MONDAY 14 MARCH 2016
FIVE works by Francis Bacon worth more than £23 million have been stolen from the Madrid home of their owner in a heist police say was worthy of a Hollywood film.
The five paintings, inherited by a close Spanish friend of the late Irish artist, were taken last June. It was not, clear why the theft had not been made public earlier.
The works were part of an art collection kept in a house on a quiet street near the Spanish Senate, one of the most policed areas of the city.
Sources close to the investigation said the highly professional theft took place while the owner was away, with the perpetrators disabling the alarm.
The owner was identified only as JCB, aged 59, an art lover who had been a friend of Mr Bacon, who often visited Madrid and died there in 1992 aged 82.
Neither the porter at the five-story block nor neighbours heard anything. An unidentified police source was quoted as saying: “This class of robberies aren’t real, they only happen in films.”
Francis Bacon paintings worth €30 million stolen in Madrid
Francis Bacon paintings stolen in Madrid
ART NEWS DAILY | APOLLO | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | MONDAY 14 MARCH 2016
Five paintings by Francis Bacon have been stolen from the home of a Madrid collector, reports El Pais (Spanish language article).
According to the paper’s sources, the robbery – thought to be a professional operation – took place last June, and it is unclear as to why it has been made public only now.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to which Bacon works were taken and why they were targeted.
Agence France-Presse Madrid quotes one anonymous specialist, ‘It is not at all easy to sell a Francis Bacon, large or small, without that getting to the ears of those who pore over such a rarefied sector.’ A mystery, then…
Thieves steal Francis Bacon collection worth £23 million
DAVID RANKIN | NEWS | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY MARCH 13 2016
Five Francis Bacon paintings worth an estimated £23m have been stolen from a private collection in Madrid.
The works were taken in June of last year, with the thieves thought to have followed their mark while he was on holiday, to ensure he did not disturb the burglary at his home.
They were also said to have disabled the alarm in a highly professional heist, although police refused to comment on the details of the crime.
Exact identities of the paintings are not known, but it was thought that works in both portrait and landscape were taken from the collector, who was a friend of the Irish-born artist.
Bacon was a prolific and bleak artist, but his work has fetched record prices at auction, most notably at Christie’s in New York when his triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which he painted in 1969, fetched £100m in November 2013 – at the time it was the most money ever paid for a work of art at auction.
His Figure Writing Reflected in Mirror went to auction at Sotheby’s in May 2012, selling for $44.8m (£31.6m).
Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, bought Bacon’s Triptych 1976 for $86.3m (£61m) in 2008, breaking the record for a post-war painting.
El Pais newspaper said that police from a specialist arts and antique unit were running the investigation into the burglary, but claimed the thieves had left no trace in the flat.
Bacon died in Madrid in 1992, having become the most expensive living artist on the planet, and the value of his work has kept climbing, particularly for triptych pieces.
Bacon, who was known for his bleak work, was in person a charismatic and outgoing character
Francis Bacon’s lover is victim of €30m raid
GRAHAM KEELEY
A gang of art thieves broke into the home of a Spanish banker and disabled the alarm before stealing five Francis Bacon paintings worth €30 million, it was reported yesterday.
In one of the country’s biggest art heists in decades, the group broke into the house in Madrid of José Capelo, with whom Bacon had reportedly fallen in love, and removed the works in less than two hours.
The theft took place last June, but police and Mr Capelo have been keen to avoid publicity and details of it were only revealed yesterday. Detectives have begun a manhunt for the gang.
Bacon met Mr Capelo, 59, in 1988 at a party hosted by Sir Frederick Ashton, the choreographer. Bacon told friends that he developed a romantic interest in the banker and their friendship has been a subject of the artist’s work. He bequeathed paintings and $4 million in cash to Mr Capelo after his death in Madrid in 1992. Mr Capelo has denied having any romantic ties to the artist.
Police said that the gang left no trace and targeted Mr Capelo’s home because they knew it contained valuable works by Bacon. The identities of the paintings have not been released.
“This type of thing does not happen in Spain, it only happens in films,” a police source said.
It is believed that a member of the gang acted as a lookout to make sure that Mr Capelo did not return to the house during the theft.
Five Francis Bacon Paintings Reported Missing From Madrid Home
A professional thief has stolen five paintings by the British artist Francis Bacon worth an estimated 30 million euros. The artworks were reported stolen from a Madrid home today. The thieves, disabled the alarm system and the home was surveyed to make sure no one was to return to the premises. The works belonging to a close friend of Bacon were a mix of portraits and landscapes. They were stolen last summer and it is not clear as to why news of the theft was not made public until now.
Art specialist said the paintings would be extremely difficult to sell. “It is not at all easy to sell a Francis Bacon, large or small without that getting to the ears of those who pore over such a rarified sector,” said the expert, speaking on condition of anonymity. El Pais newspaper said police from a specialist arts and antiques unit had opened an investigation into the heist.
“Three Studies of Lucien Freud” a triptych by Bacon realised $142,405,000 at auction, a world record for the artist. Art market analysts place Bacon as one of 10 most valuable modern artists alongside Picasso and Warhol these works comprise 18 percent of global art market sales.
Police have refused to comment on the report and provided no explanation as to why information about the theft had only just emerged the thieves left no forensic traces in the flat.
Sale 12303
March 17 2016, London, South Kensington
Tony O’Malley, H.R.H.A. (1913 - 2003) (recto);
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) (verso)
Currach, Clare Island (recto); Evening Landscape Tehidy Hospital (recto); Figure (verso)
Price realisedEstimate
GBP 434,500
USD 620,900
Estimate
GBP 20,000 - GBP 30,000
(USD 28,180 - USD 42,270)
Tony O’Malley, H.R.H.A.
(1913-2003) (recto); Francis Bacon (1909-1992)(verso)
Currach, Clare Island (recto); Evening Landscape Tehidy Hospital (recto); Figure
(verso)
signed and indistinctly dated ‘TONY O’MALLEY MAY 1962’ (lower left), dedicated
and dated again ‘with love to/Paddy from/Tony Aug/1962’ (on the reverse);
inscribed 'Evening Landscape Tehidy Hospital' (lower right), indistinctly
inscribed again and dated 'Evening Landscape/Tehidy/Hospital/1961’ (on the
reverse)
oil on board; oil and chalk on board
29 ¾ x 47 in. (75.5 x 119.4 cm.); 30 ¼ x 47 in. (76.8 x 119.4 cm.)
(2)Figure, circa 1959, will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of
Francis Bacon, edited by Martin Harrison, under the number 59-16
Lot essay
The present lot consists of two early paintings by Tony O’Malley which, when turned over and joined together, reveal an unfinished nude by Francis Bacon. Divided into two boards, these paintings are viewed together for the first time in almost 60 years. For years this ‘lost’ Bacon was separated, residing in the collection of two different owners. One half remained with Tony O’Malley, while the other was owned by the poet Padraic Fallon, who had been gifted Currach, Clare Island by his close friend O’Malley. The two halves of Bacon’s Figure were first displayed together when an image of the joined paintings was shown at Tate St Ives’s 2007 exhibition Francis Bacon in St Ives.
O’Malley and Bacon both stayed in St Ives in the late 1950s, working just two doors down from one another. In the immediate years following the Second World War, St Ives established itself as the centre for avant-garde art in Britain. Attracting a new generation of artists who, like Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth before them, were searching for inspiration in the wild landscape of West Cornwall. In September 1959, Bacon travelled from Penzance to St Ives to work on a series of paintings for his exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in March 1960. Bacon’s stay in St Ives occurred during a significant stage of transition in the artist’s career, where he experimented with colour and technique, readdressing how he located the figure in space.
Whilst working in St Ives Bacon rented 3 Porthmeor Studios from the sculptor William Redgrave and his wife Boots, in a row of studios previously occupied by tenants including Ben Nicholson and Terry Frost. Intending to stay for six months, Bacon’s visit was cut short after a turbulent argument with his then partner Ronnie Belton. Hurriedly leaving in January 1960, Bacon abandoned many of his works, including the male nude on the reverse of the present lot. On clearing the studio Boots gave away many of his discarded works to friends who would re-use the materials. Those known include the present nude given to O’Malley and another work gifted to Canadian sculptor Bill Featherstone who used it to roof his chicken shed. It is reported that O’Malley was approached by a dealer who propositioned him to fraudulently ‘complete’ the Bacon and in disgust he split the board in two, while others, such as artist David Page, recount that it was cut to suit O’Malley’s propensity for smaller sized boards.
Since its rediscovery Figure has been examined by the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné Committee and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné, to be published in April 2016.
Specialist Angus Granlund on the exciting moment when the two halves were joined, and Bacon’s brief spell in St Ives
When turned over and joined together, these two early paintings by Irish artist Tony O'Malley reveal an unfinished nude by Francis bacon. For almost three decades this ‘lost’ Bacon was separated, residing in the collection of two different owners. One half remained with O’ Malley, while the other was owned by the poet Padraic Fallon, who had been gifted Currach, Clare Island by O’Malley. It was offered as a single lot in the Modern British & Irish Art sale at Christie’s South Kensington on 17 March 2016, and sold for £434,500.
‘This is the first time that both works will be viewed together in almost 60 years,’ says specialist Angus Granlund, lifting O’Malley’s seascapes out of their frames and turning them to reveal Bacon’s sweeping brushstrokes, which join to form a fleshy, unfinished study of a male nude. An image of the two halves of Bacon’s Figure was shown at Tate St Ives’ 2007 exhibition Francis Bacon in St Ives.
Completed during Bacon’s fleeting stay in the Cornish town in 1959, the work is one of only six paintings the artist is known to have made during the period, which, says Granlund, ‘makes this even more rare and interesting.’ The authenticity of the reunited halves of the same unfinished work were recently confirmed by the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné committee
‘Lost’ Francis Bacon Nude found on the back of two paintings
MICHAEL
PARSONS
An unfinished “lost” painting of a male nude by Francis Bacon has been discovered on the reverse of two paintings by Irish artist Tony O’Malley which are being auctioned on St Patrick’s Day. The paintings by Co Kilkenny-born O’Malley were made in the early 1960s. They each measure about 30ins by 47ins. They will be sold as a pair at Christie’s in London and have an estimate of £20,000- £30,000 (€25,827-€38,753).
O’Malley made the oil paintings using a board which he had cut in half. But the board had earlier been used by Bacon to create the unfinished picture. The two O’Malley paintings went to different owners but have now been reunited. When they are turned over and joined up they reveal the Bacon image, which has been assigned the title Figure, circa 1959.
“For years these works [by O’Malley] were separated, residing in the collections of two different owners,” Christie’s said “Now these paintings, and the lost Bacon study, will be reunited and viewed together for the first time in almost 60 years.”
The O’Malley paintings are entitled Currach, Clare Island and Evening Landscape, Tehidy Hospital. In the late 1950s the two men crossed paths in the artists’ colony of St Ives in Cornwall, where O’Malley was then living and working.
Christie’s said Bacon moved to St Ives in 1959 but “cut short his visit following an argument” with his partner and “abandoned the work”.
The woman who had rented him a studio gave Bacon’s discarded works to friends who reused the materials. Another artist reputedly used one of Bacon’s paintings to roof a chicken shed.
Dublin-born Bacon, who spent his working life in England and died in 1992, has, in the past decade, become one of the most expensive painters in art history.
One of his triptychs entitled Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142.4 million (€129.4m) at Christie’s, New York, in November 2013 – the second highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. A spokesman for Christie’s South Kensington saleroom said the paintings had been “assessed on the basis that they are works by Tony O’Malley”.
Christie’s said O’Malley gave Currach, Clare Island to his friend the poet Padraic Fallon but kept Evening Landscape, Tehidy Hospital. Tehidy is a few miles from St Ives. O’Malley left St Ives and moved to the Bahamas before returning to Ireland with his wife Jane. He was elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 1993. He died in 2003.
Barbra Dawson, director of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which houses Bacon’s reconstituted London studio (which was donated to the State by his heirs) and paintings by O’Malley, said the paintings would make a “very desirable acquisition”.
She declined to comment on the possibility of the gallery bidding for them.
A lost and unfinished nude by Francis Bacon discovered on the reverse side of two paintings by the Irish artist Tony O’Malley is up for auction at Christies South Kensington. Bacon started working on the figure in St Ives, Cornwall in the late 1950s, but when the artist cut short his visit following an argument with this partner, he abandoned the work, among many others. The Modern British & Irish Art sale at Christie’s South Kensington on 17 March will include the two early paintings which feature the Bacon when turned over and joined together. The canvas was divided and painted on by O’Malley who created two scenes on the opposite sides: Currach, Clare Island and Evening Landscape Tehidy Hospital. For years these works were separated, residing in the collections of two different owners. Now these paintings, and the lost Bacon study, will be reunited and viewed together for the first time in almost 60 years, when the public pre-sale viewing opens on 12 March at Christie’s South Kensington. They will be offered in the Modern British & Irish Art auction on 17 March with an estimate of £20,000-30,000.
In September 1959, Bacon travelled to St Ives to work on a series of paintings for his exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in March 1960. Bacon’s stay in St Ives occurred during a significant stage of transition in the artist’s career, where he experimented with colour and technique, readdressing how he located the figure in space. Whilst working in St Ives, Bacon rented 3 Porthmeor Studios, from the sculptor William Redgrave and his wife Mary, known as ‘Boots’, in a row of studios previously occupied by tenants including Ben Nicholson and Terry Frost. Intending to stay for six months, Bacon’s visit was cut short after a turbulent argument with his then partner Ronnie Belton. When clearing the studio Boots gave away many of Bacon’s discarded works to friends who would re-use the materials. It has been reported that O’Malley was approached by a dealer who propositioned him to ‘complete’ the Bacon, which he refused to do and split the board in two, while others recount that the board was cut to suit O’Malley’s preference for working on smaller sized boards.
The two halves of Bacon’s Figure were first displayed together when an image of the joined paintings was shown at Tate St Ives’s 2007 exhibition Francis Bacon in St Ives. This March will be the first time that the two paintings are displayed together in public. Figure will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon, to be published in April 2016.
D
SINCE his death in 1992, virtuoso painter Francis Bacon’s name has never faded.
In his own lifetime, he was well-known for the menacing, ghostly half-man, half-who-knows-what figures he painted, to the bad-boy boyfriends, booze-fuelled Soho sessions and romantic relationships, some as dark and twisted as his paintings.
His work, and his reputation have stood the test of time. Art collectors still clamour to Bacon.
Last year, two of his self-portraits, which had been kept from the eyes of the public in a private collection for many years, sold for a combined £30million at Sotheby’s in London.
This May, a new generation in the north of England will get the opportunity to see his works in the flesh when a new exhibition opens at Tate Liverpool.
Francesco Manacorda, artistic director at Tate Liverpool says they are confident Bacon’s name will be a draw. “Bacon is definitely a household name that people recognise. The pictures are visceral and very sensual and effective so I think people will be compelled to see the show.”
Margarita Cappock, head of collections at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and author of the book, Francis Bacon’s Studio, says that Bacon’s longevity comes down to the work he produced.
“Because of the quality of the work he hasn’t fallen out of favour in any way, there’s a heightened realisation with younger scholars coming up that what Bacon was doing was quite unique. He was a unique individual, a towering figure of British figurative painting in the 20th century and he’s retained that reputation”, she explains.
Unique is the right word.
Born in a nursing home at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin on October 28, 1909, Bacon was the second of five children. His well-to-do parents were both English.
They first settled in Cannycourt House near the Curragh, Co. Kildare, where Bacon’s father Anthony Edward ‘Eddy’ Mortimer Bacon, wanted to work breeding and training horses.
Home life was no bed of roses for young Francis Bacon. His father was cold and argumentative, his mother wrapped up with herself.
In 1926, Bacon’s father caught him dressing up in his mother’s clothes, kicked him out and he set off on his own path.
However, he didn’t start to paint right away. In the late 1920s, he moved around between France and Germany and then settled in London where he started off as a furniture and interior designer. “He was self-taught, he didn’t go to art college so that immediately made him a bit different”, says Margarita Cappock.
In fact, Bacon was something of an accidental artist. He saw an exhibition of drawings by Picasso in the summer of 1927 and it affected him deeply, firing his imagination. Soon afterwards, he started to draw and paint images of his own.
Francis Bacon in a London street. Photo by James Jackson
Major success came in his 40s and 50s when he was producing the large-scale paintings he is best known for.
Around 1944, he finished the painting that made his name. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (which lives in Tate London collection but will form part of the new Liverpool exhibition) is in triptych format, a form normally associated with religious art. “He was a complete atheist, but he made that form his own”, says Cappock.
Cappock calls the piece his most iconic. Hung in London just after the end of the Second World War, it caused a strong reaction. She describes it as “almost cinematic the way the eye can move between the three. The slightly menacing and horrific nature of the figures that aren’t human… It touched a raw nerve coming at the end of the War to see these biomorphic figures with the bare teeth and bandaged eyes.”
Bacon was master at portraiture too. “What really strikes people is the ability to capture the essence of a personality. Not an easy thing to do,” explains Cappock. Unusually, he didn’t paint his portraits from life, preferring to work from photographs alone in his studio.
That studio was presented to the Hugh Lane gallery in 1998.
Moved “lock, stock and barrel” from Bacon’s South Kensington digs and reconstructed down to the last tube of paint in Dublin. It opened in 2001, and Cappock says those who visit are still intrigued to see an artist’s studio inside a gallery, with over 7,500 items packed into it – Bacon’s books, photographs, materials, and his easel, which was left with his last unfinished work sitting on it.
While critics agree that Bacon is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, there have been a few tussles over his nationality.
The Irish claim him as their own, but he is more often referred to as a British artist. Cappock, who has just written a paper on the subject for Yale University is well-placed to weigh in on this irksome issue.
Dublin-born to English parents (who had no ties to Ireland), he spent the first 16 formative years of his life in Ireland, and although an atheist, died in the care of nuns. “There’s an Irish dimension to his work”, argues Cappock. “He was very influenced by what he saw… he used to go around butchers’ shops and look at the meat. Meat is such a motif in his work.”
After the bust up with his father, Bacon apparently said he’d never go back to Ireland after he left, but Cappock knows otherwise.
His sister, now dead, confirmed that he returned to Ireland on holiday. In 1965 there was an exhibition of his work in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin but on that occasion Bacon didn’t return, saying it would be “too much fuss”.
Francesco Manacorda, Artistic Director at Tate Liverpool says the fact that Liverpool is so connected with Ireland should help draw crowds to see Bacon’s work. The show has been planned for years, a partnership from the beginning with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (where the show will travel to next from 7 October 2016 – 8 January 2017). It’s been a laborious process, requesting 30 paintings, rarely seen drawings and documents from as far as the US and transporting fragile pieces has required persuasion and negotiation but they are nearing the end.
To someone who has never seen the work before, Manacorda and Cappock agree that you need to see Bacon’s work in the flesh. “You need to see them for real, the size, the materiality, the gesture of painting, the material he uses, it needs to be experienced in person. There’s a whole sort of ritual around it, the ceremony. All the paintings are under glass by instruction of Bacon himself and framed with golden frames — if you see this painting in a catalogue or online it’s not the same”, says Manacorda.
“Look closely at the way he manipulates the paint on the canvas and the beauty of the works regardless of the subject matter”, says Cappock, or as Manacorda succinctly suggests: “Focus on the sensation, not the thinking.”
The art world received an unexpected gift last week, when art historian Martin Harrison unveiled the final, completed work by British figurative painter Francis Bacon. Epitomizing liminality, Study of a Bull (1991)―completed when Mr. Bacon was 82―depicts a semitransparent beast entering or exiting an area of black emptiness.
As Mr. Harrison puts it, Mr. Bacon―who passed away in 1992 on a Madrid vacation―was painting his own death. “Bacon is ready to sign off … he was so ill,” Mr. Harrison told The Guardian. “He knew exactly what he was doing here.”
Mr. Harrison discovered Study of a Bull in a private collection two years ago while editing a compendium of the artist’s works, out in April. Of the 584 works in the catalogue, the product of a decade-long project, 100 will be displayed publicly for the first time in that exhibition. Miraculously, Mr. Harrison succeeded in locating all but one of Mr. Bacon’s surviving paintings.
At the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, where Mr. Bacon lived for a time after World War II, drawn to the temperate weather and gambling culture, Mr. Harrison is curating a comprehensive exhibition for July.
Bacons have been hot at auction recently. Last May, for instance, Seated Woman (1961), a moody nude, went for $28.2 million at Phillips Contemporary Art Evening Sale. His paintings have also been listed at Sotheby’s in New York and London for tens of millions.
While the Grimaldi exhibit―which also features Mr. Bacon’s first known piece, a 1929 watercolour ― doesn’t open until July, fans of the artist with £1000 to spare can preorder Mr. Harrison’s five-volume, clothbound set, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, from Heni Publishing.
If you want to know about the artist Francis Bacon then there are his celebrated interviews with David Sylvester, two biographies by Michael Peppiatt (Anatomy of an Enigma, Francis Bacon: In Your Blood), a memoir by his longtime friend and boozing buddy Dan Farson (The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon) and a film Love is the Devil starring Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig. Then there is this: Melvyn Bragg’s access all areas documentary with Bacon from 1985 that is one of the finest portraits of an artist ever committed to film.
What makes this South Bank Show documentary so utterly brilliant is the honesty and directness with which Bacon answers Bragg’s questions. He often pauses and considers his answer before committing himself to a reply. When he does, Bacon reveals his essence as an artist.
Bragg asks him how he paints:
‘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.’
‘You’ve thrown paint at the canvas?’
‘Once or twice. I couldn’t stand the sight of them so I just threw a pot of
paint at them.’
‘You put yourself at risk.’
‘You have to, otherwise you’re an academician.’
‘When is a painting finished?’
‘I know instinctively when it’s finished. There it is…I’m always hoping chance will work in my favour. I don’t want to tell a story. I’ve no story to tell. I like the starkness of the image. I want it to give me a sensation. Shock, you could say. It’s a form of experience. A visual shock.’
‘What does your painting mean when you’ve finished?’
‘Nothing. Except what people want to read into it.. Nothing.’
Bragg always allows his subjects to present themselves as they want to be seen. Unlike too many other presenters, he does not interpose himself between the camera and the subject. He is the unseen hand who steers the ship through the storms, around the hidden rocks, towards its final destination. Bragg once told me in an interview (long, long ago) why he wore suits:
...basically because it’s easier if you are doing a television programme to wear the same thing all the time then you don’t get in the way over the programme. Another way to get people to forget about me and concentrate on the person I am talking to.
It’s advice worth heeding.
In 1985, when Francis Bacon was being hailed as the world’s greatest living artist and on the verge of his second Tate Gallery retrospective—a major feat in itself—Bragg interviewed Bacon at length about his life and art. At one point during the filming, while at lunch in Mario’s restaurant in Kensington, London, Bacon and Bragg became increasingly drunk. As Bragg later wrote in his book The South Bank Show: Final Cut:
There’s bound to be truth in clichés some of the time or they wouldn’t be. In vino veritas is less spouted now that there is less Latin about but still the notion persists that people when drunk tell the truth. That they also tell lies, come out with rubbish, destructive abuse, venom, hysterical hyperbole and all manner of degrading speech has not entirely impaired its claim. When Francis Bacon and myself appeared on The South Bank Show and for a few minutes were caught in a state of naked inebriation it provided, I think, a true insight into Francis as a man and as a painter. So I left it in the film.
As the wine flowed, Bragg asked Bacon if he paints the real world, to which the artist replied:
‘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.’
‘So what do you do about it?’
‘I do nothing about it. I just drift.’
‘You paint.’
‘Yes, but my own life is just going from bar to bar and drifting, that sort of
thing. I’m an optimist. But I’m an optimist about nothing. I was born with that
nature.’
Bacon was seventy-five when this film was made. He had enviable stamina managing a four-hour lunch at Mario’s before climbing the rickety stairs of the notorious Colony Room, where he dispensed fifty pound notes like confetti and gargled the millionaire’s mouthwash—champagne. Throughout, Bacon is old school courteous—even when utterly pissed—and collaborates with Bragg in creating an unequaled intimate film portrait.
Toast of London: Francis Bacon and friends at the Colony Room
Francis Bacon’s final painting is going on public display for the first time after an art historian found it in a “very private” collection.
Painted in 1991 when the artist knew he was dying, “Study of a Bull” shows a bull emerging from darkness into light. Experts believe that Bacon intended it to be his last work, noting that he mixed dust with his paint to create a fading effect.
Martin Harrison has spent 11 years compiling a catalogue of Bacon’s complete collection and has identified 584 works to date. “Study of a Bull” is one of over 100 unknown artworks that Harrison has unearthed over the course of his career. It has never been been talked about, written about or printed in any form.
Harrison discovered its existence after stumbling across a black and white paper image of the painting in the archives of London’s Marlborough Fine Art gallery. Making use of extensive contacts, he traced the real artwork to a private family home.
“Study of a Bull” is two metres high, with Harrison reading the “absolutely magnificent” painting as a goodbye from Bacon. “He is ready to sign off, he was so ill,” he told the Guardian.
“He knew exactly what he was doing here. Is the bull making an entrance? Is he receding to somewhere else? To his cremation? He often used to say: “Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust’.
The painting’s owners have agreed to loan “Study of a Bull” to Monaco’s Grimaldi Forum, where temporary exhibition Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture will open in July and run until early September. Bacon’s first surviving painting, a watercolour from 1929, will also be displayed alongside 60 other artworks by the Irish-born figurative painter known for his bold and often grotesque imagery.
The catalogue of Bacon’s work will be published by the Francis Bacon estate in spring to mark the anniversary of his death aged 82 in April 1992. Be warned, the five, cloth-bound hardcover volumes cost £1,000
– Behold the Study of a Bull
Francis Bacon was a highly influential figurative painter, his impacting career and life ended on 28th of April, 1992. Twenty-four years later, the last picture ever painted by Bacon is surfacing up, going on show for the first time available for public. Entitled Study of a Bull, the artwork was completed in 1991, it has never been publicly seen nor published, and is said to provide new insight into Bacon’s life and legacy. Art historian Martin Harrison spent 11 years tracking down the artist’s entire collection, and finally, after identifying 584 works by Bacon, he ultimately rediscovered the final piece made by the famous Irish-born artist.
Lauded for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged and raw imagery, Francis Bacon produced some of the most iconic images depicting wounded and traumatized humanity in post-war art. It wasn’t too long before his name became one of the most widely recognized in the scene of figurative art in the 1940s and 1950s. Bacon’s subjects were almost always portrayed as violently distorted, emanating the anti-social spirit, filled with inner and external isolation, ravaged by the existential dilemmas. Even though the artist himself did get to witness and enjoy his success and celebration of his work during lifetime, it was after his death in 1992 that the public began to view him as one of the world’s most important painters. In fact, in 2014, it was Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud that became the most expensive painting in the world, sold for 142.4 million dollars at a New York Sotheby’s auction, although the record has been broken numerous times since. Bacon indulged himself in extensive debauchery, judged by any standards, and just before his imminent ruin by it, he created his last piece of art.
Study of a Bull was completed in 1991, just a few months before the artist’s death in Madrid in April 1992. The painting shows a faded figure of a bull which seems to be emerging from a burning black void, or perhaps escaping it, exiting from the darkness and stepping into the bright light. Martin Harrison, the art historian responsible for tracking the picture down, said that the image is actually Bacon’s depiction of his own death. The vague placement and the transitive position of the animal indicate the artist’s realization that he was soon to be experiencing a similar experience, not knowing exactly where he would be going. The grand two-meter-high painting is mostly made of raw canvas. Interestingly, underneath the bull, Bacon used real dust from his studio in South Kensington, which is utterly poignant according to Harrison. The artist often used to say "Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust."
This work, which has never been publicly seen, discussed, reproduced or even written about, has been residing in a very, very private collection in London. The endeavour of tracking it down was made by Martin Harrison who has spent the best part of a decade working on a catalogue of every work by Bacon, which is due to be published in April. The extensive research of Francis Bacon’s work will include 584 artworks, with more than 100 paintings which are to be presented for the first time. Harrison will also curate an exhibition this summer, featuring both Bacon’s last painting, Study of a Bull, and his very first work, Watercolour, from 1929. The show is entitled Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture, and it will be on view July 2 – September 4, 2016, at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. After the original showing, the exhibition travels to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to be displayed from September 30, 2016 – January 8, 2017.
Study of a Bull from a “very private collection”, has never been exhibited before
An exhibition on Francis Bacon in Monaco will include the artist’s first and last paintings. The show, opening in July at the Grimaldi Forum, is being organised with the recently established Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, set up by the Lebanese-born businessman Majid Boustany. He is a Swiss national now resident in Monaco, where he owns a stake in the Hotel Metropole. In the past few years Boustany has acquired 2,500 Bacon items, mainly documentary material but also some important early paintings.
Boustany bought Bacon’s first work, entitled Watercolour (1929), after it sold at Christie’s in 2013 for £183,000. It was painted just after Bacon’s return to London from Berlin. The picture was first owned by Eric Allden, Bacon’s probable lover at the time.
The last painting, Study of a Bull, was completed in 1991, a few months before Bacon’s death in Madrid in April 1992. Partly inspired by Picasso’s bull scenes, it has never been exhibited. The picture is being lent by a “very private collector”, according to the exhibition’s curator, Martin Harrison.
Although Tate Liverpool is holding its own Bacon show, the Tate is lending
Study of a Dog (1952). The Monaco exhibition will include 60 Bacon
paintings, alongside works by artists that inspired him, such as
Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Giacometti, Léger and Soutine. After Monaco the
exhibition will go on in a slightly different form to the Guggenheim Bilbao,
where the focus will be on Bacon’s links with Spain.
• Francis Bacon: From Picasso to
Velázquez, Guggenheim Bilbao, 30 September-8 January 2017
• Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms,
Tate Liverpool, 18 May-18 September
Francis Bacon in Nice, March 1979
It could be a bull backing in to a burning, black void or one escaping it, moving hopefully into the heavenly light. What seems certain is that this final, extraordinary painting by Francis Bacon, unseen and undocumented until now, is by an artist who knows he will soon die.
The art historian Martin Harrison on Tuesday revealed Bacon’s final completed painting – a work that has never been publicly seen, reproduced, discussed or written about. Residing in a “very private, private collection” in London, Study of a Bull. 1991, only came to light as Harrison worked on editing a catalogue of every work of Bacon, due to be published in April.
Harrison said it was Bacon painting his own death, just as he was in his final Triptych 1991, which is in the collection of MoMA in New York. “Bacon is ready to sign off ... he was so ill,” he said. “He knew exactly what he was doing here. Is the bull making an entrance? Is he receding to somewhere else? To his cremation?”
Most of the two-metre-high painting is deliberately raw canvas. Underneath the bull Bacon has used real dust from his famously shambolic studio in South Kensington. “To me that is terribly poignant,” said Harrison. “He often used to say: ‘Dust is eternal, after all we all return to dust.’”
The bull also testifies to Bacon’s enduring fascination with bullfighting, a subject he first addressed in 1969 and returned to a handful of times until 1987 when he made his only triptych on the theme. Bacon’s introduction to bullfighting was probably through the writings of his great friend, the French surrealist Michel Leiris, and it is no coincidence that Leiris died a year before Bacon completed this final bull painting.
The artist was 82 when he finished Study of a Bull and after a lifetime of, by any standards, extensive debauchery, things were catching up with him: he was dying and he knew it. “Everything was wrong with him, he was clapped out,” said Harrison. “The drinking, the lifelong asthma. He had a lot of operations but he never made a fuss, he never wanted sympathy, hated hospitals ... he knew his time was up. He always looked younger than he was except for that last year.”
n 1992, against the advice of friends, he went on holiday to Madrid, where he died on 28 April.
Harrison has spent the best part of a decade working on the catalogue and more than 100 Bacon paintings, out of the 584 total, will be seen for the first time. “One of the jobs preparing the catalogue raisonné is finding stuff. Art doesn’t come into it really, watching Sherlock Holmes is the only help ... you have to find the paintings.”
Harrison has conducted successful and unsuccessful searches all over the world. He said: “These people who have them ... It is not their job to tell me about their paintings, they are very rich and have lives to lead and they don’t care. You need a slice of luck.”
He first got on to Study of a Bull about two years ago discovering that it was only a mile and a half from where he lived in London. “It was the last painting he finished and there is no documentation for it and it is far too late for him to have spoken about it in interviews and it has never been shown before.”
Harrison called it an “absolutely magnificent painting” and it will be a star of a Bacon exhibition he is curating for the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco exploring how important France and Monaco were to Bacon. He said: “His main cultural orientation was always to France. He deprecated almost all English artists and dismissed most English painting ... Paris and France-based artists were his key influences.”
Bacon particularly loved Monaco, living there after the war as a slightly odd trio with his partner Eric Hall and childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot, attracted by its fresh air, sunshine and plentiful gambling opportunities. It was where Bacon became Bacon, said Harrison.
Also in the show will be Bacon’s first known work, a watercolour from 1929 – a period when the young Bacon was more occupied with working as a male prostitute, interior decorator and furniture designer.
That work is owned by Francis bacon Foundation in Monaco and the fact it exists is remarkable given Bacon got rid of so many of his works from that and other times. “He had this strange, staccato early career,” said Harrison. “Not many of his early works survive because he tried to destroy them. It’s really because they stayed in the collection of friends and relatives that we have any.”
Harrison has managed to track down every Bacon work for the catalogue apart from – to his immense frustration – one, Head with Arm Raised, 1955. “We don’t know where it is on earth ... it is still missing.”
The deadline for its inclusion in what will be a lavish, cloth-bound £1,000 publication has now passed. He warned the Guardian: “You better not bloody find it ... just to mock me!”
• Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture is at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco 2 July-4 September. It will then travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao 30 September-8 January.
ADRIAN CLARK | NEWS | THE BRITISH ART JOURNAL | VOLUME XVII | NUMBER 2 | FEBRUARY 2016
Beautifully and meticulously produced, these five volumes are a magnificent work. Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels have laboured for many years to produce them: the result is surely a model of what a dedicated team can do if given sufficient time and resources. High quality catalogues of this type underpin the ability of scholars to study the work of a given artist seriously and in detail. The volumes are overwhelmingly scholarly and informative. Rather than seeking to contribute directly to the long-running debate about the meaning of Bacon’s work, they contribute indirectly by displaying the material which can enable objective analysis.
Martin Harrison has written extensively about Francis Bacon; he is one of the leading writers about the great artist of 20th century Britain, (who should be treated as wholly English and not Irish, despite the place of his birth; just as England does not claim Jack Yeats, born in London but thoroughly Irish in all ways). His writing on Bacon bears certain characteristics. Always thorough, he likes to base his opinions on facts and one can imagine the pleasure which the accumulation of the facts in these books must have given him. He and his associate editor must now be the most knowledgeable people in the world about Bacon’s work.
It is particularly important in the case of Bacon to establish facts about his career as an artist, as many things which are not facts intrude in his case. Over his long life in the public eye – from 1945 to his death in 1992 – Bacon spoke a great deal of nonsense. Fortunately, one does not have to wrestle with his writing because he was unable to – or chose not to – write anything much except chatty and harmless short letters to his friends. But a decision to write about him forces the writer to consider what Bacon is said to have said. Some of what we are told he said comes down to us in fabricated form. The gospel according to David Sylvester, in the published interviews, is not a transcript of what Bacon said; it is a paraphrase, tidied up for publication by the artist himself after extensive interventions by Sylvester to suit his agenda. Here is what Sylvester wrote about the structure of the published interviews:
“What is preserved here amounts to no more than about a fifth of the material in the transcripts – out of choice, not because of any arbitrary limitation on length. Furthermore, since the editing has been designed to present Bacon’s thought clearly and economically – not to provide some sort of abbreviated record of how the taped sessions happened to develop – the sequence in which things were said has been drastically rearranged. Each of the interviews, apart from the first, has been constructed from transcripts of two or more sessions, and paragraphs in these montages sometimes combine things said on two or three different days quite widely separated in time. In order to prevent the montage from looking like a montage, many of the questions have been recast or simply fabricated. The aim has been to seam together a more concise and coherent argument than ever came about when we were talking, without making it so coherent as to lose the fluid, spontaneous flavour of talk.”
The other person whose contribution to the Bacon canon needs close attention is Michel Leiris. When he “translated” Sylvester’s work into French, even Bacon was a bit surprised about the results, finding the translation “possibly better than the original”. Leiris had somehow “managed to give it a much more profound meaning than I had been able to express. It’s extraordinary: I felt myself to be much more intelligent when I read it. I didn’t think I had said such things”.
That does not mean that, in searching for facts about the artist and his thoughts, one has to ignore the record of what Bacon allegedly said, but it does mean that anyone writing from the point of view of a historian rather than, say, that of a polemicist, has to be wary of it. One also has to be extremely wary of David Sylvester’s role in Bacon studies. His motivation in promoting Francis Bacon and his work, for a very considerable period, seems to have been a mixture of admiration bordering on worship of the artist, together with an impression of wishing to promote his own career as the keeper, and to some extent creator, of Bacon’s growing reputation. My feeling is that, as artist and disciple interacted in the early days of their relationship, it dawned on the highly intelligent and loquacious artist, who could talk but not write, and whose intellectual rigour was limited by his autodidacticism, that he could use the highly intelligent, but obsequious Sylvester, who could write, to help to create for him a reputation as a serious artistic thinker which would help Bacon’s pictures sell. Bacon was no doubt aware of how other serious contemporary artists were burnishing their reputations as participants in the wider intellectual world around them by using the work of others. The catalogue for Giacometti’s first solo exhibition in New York, in 1948, had, for example, a piece by Sartre.
Bacon had all sorts of ideas about art, some of them mildly interesting and original when first aired; but he was inconsistent in his views, easily bored and, like most of us, ignorant about art which he was not particularly interested in. Moreover, he drank a lot, mixed with some rather strange people in a milieu which did not, shall we say, encourage studious reflection, and liked to show off verbally and to dominate and if necessary subjugate those listening to him. Sylvester was his route to consistency and to being taken seriously intellectually. Between them they developed some catch phrases, which I cannot bring myself to reproduce here, so tiresome has their repetition made them. Even if they ever had any deep philosophical meaning, they have become nonsensical through their repetition. Bacon was a very great artist, but not a great thinker or artistic philosopher.
Martin Harrison cannot go too far in the direction of agreeing with my analysis, but he does nod towards it. On page 44 he says “But he was a painter, not an art historian. Evidently he felt under no obligation to be consistent in his opinions, as contradictions and infelicities in his recorded remarks testify”. This lets the artist off the hook completely: he could say anything he liked, however ridiculous or inconsistent with what he had said previously, and be forgiven on that basis. Jeffrey Bernard, the sage and soak of Soho, was acute enough in his sober moments to skewer Bacon in a few words describing his conversation: “One minute Monet is a giant and four drinks later he’s absolutely ghastly”. I think that says it all about Bacon the philosopher of art.
The other thing which Martin Harrison has to cope with, and he copes with it quite brilliantly, is somehow keeping a cool head when writing about Bacon in a relatively short essay in Volume I, when the bibliography enveloping the subject is so large and so full of its own pretentious dead-ends. Harrison stays very largely factual: he is cool under fire; one would want him on one’s side in any Bacon-scholar contest. The essay has calm, logical sections on aspects of Bacon’s productions: how he painted his pictures, in what format, requiring what types of frame, how some pictures were amended and so on. I liked this approach very much. One feels that the writer knows what he is talking about and is using his heavy knowledge to make simple, powerful points. These are not the last words on Bacon the artist: they are probably (hopefully) not even Harrison’s last words; but they are careful, thoughtful words. Those interested in Bacon would do well to read them.
Now to the catalogue which fills Volumes II, III and IV. There are some choices to be made about the way such catalogues are prepared. I have had to use a number of them in my own research and one does sometimes find oneself groaning with frustration as they impinge negatively on one’s nervous system (but via the brain). They can be infuriating, especially if they skimp on, or omit, detailed provenance information. Here the work is a triumph. I hope I am allocating praise fairly if I say that I think much of this work has been done by Rebecca Daniels. I know she has slaved to verify the details supporting each entry, not taking for granted the information easily available to her in the previous catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work, published in 1964 by Ronald Alley of the Tate, under the encouragement of the great director of the Tate, Sir John Rothenstein. That work was done relatively early in Bacon’s career and yet the current editors have been able to locate approximately 40 new works from the period it covered, which gives a hint of the extent of their original research. These have come to light, in the years following Bacon’s death, from private collections and stores where their existence had been unknown or forgotten; some of them are pictures which Alley thought had been destroyed, but which in fact survived, probably unbeknownst to the artist. New discoveries include Bacon’s first Pope (“Landscape with Pope/Dictator” of c.1946. Catalogue number 46-05).
The catalogue is significantly more professional than the 1964 work, to an extent reflecting the greater ability now to obtain and cross-check information via the internet and to obtain obscure exhibition catalogues for the more esoteric shows. Many owners and former owners have been spoken to. As a result, exhibition history and provenance information is fulsome, although the editors have not always been able to circumvent the infamous “Private Collection” entry, which so infuriates provenance researchers seeking to piece together the history of a particular collection, for example, by breaking their ability to trace the chain of descent of a picture from the artist’s studio. Each entry has a short narrative passage to give the picture’s context and background. Of course, even in a work of this stature the impression of finality in the information provided is an illusion, as more provenance information will inevitably emerge. There may have to be a second edition in the years to come. One small item which I would have preferred to see, as a practical help to hard-pressed scholars struggling to research something, is an index of names. If the user wants to look up which pictures were owned by Peter Watson or the little-known early collector Jimmy Bomford, he has no choice but to dredge his way through the provenance sections against each painting, jotting down notes as he goes. This is possible but painful.
Special mention should be made of the photographs. It is difficult to photograph and reproduce photographs of works of art in a way which ensures consistency of tone and colour and accuracy to the original marks on the canvas. There are many variables which can intervene to complicate the overall picture. To state only the most obvious, non-technical, issues, different photographers, at different times in varying light and using different film and so on will inevitably produce different images. When one knows a picture it can be astonishing to observe how different it can appear in reproductions. The nature of the paper used for the printing in the book is another source of unwelcome intervention. In this work, the illustrations are a triumph. In an attitude typifying the rigorous approach of the editors, up to date digital photographic techniques have been used to ensure that the illustrations are of the highest quality which could reasonably be achieved. Prudence Cuming Associates were used for the photography because they had photographed works for the artist during his life. The person who undertook a lot of the new photography which had to be commissioned for the catalogue was the same person who had often photographed the pictures when Bacon had originally completed them and released them from his studio. The result of all this care in seeking to achieve accuracy is, for example, that the beautiful fluid brushstrokes that sometimes characterise Bacon’s work are clear and strong in the image. Simply to take an example at random would be “Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, 1959″ (catalogue 59-10), where the clothes are gorgeously painted. The photographs also enable a study of the many different surface treatments which Bacon deployed.
Apart from various essays, Volume I contains an extremely useful chronology of Bacon’s long life. It is detailed and provides the best available starting point for those seeking to base their comments on the artist on a factual armature, although the methodology used is not apparent. Have the editors transported into the chronology every single date they are aware of, regardless of significance? Entries like “FB and the Sutherlands have dinner in Monte Carlo” (24 December 1949) or “FB in Wivenhoe” (14 February 1966) suggest by their banality an attempt at a comprehensive coverage of known dates. If that has been the approach, it shows the astonishing shortage of facts known about even an artist of Bacon’s stature, as the vast majority of days of each year are blanks. If, in fact, selections have been made, that is understandable but unclear. There will be many more dates available from research and some of them will be about people who were important to Bacon’s career.
An example of a person whose interaction with Bacon was highly significant for the artist was Peter Watson. He procured the first serious piece of art criticism on Bacon, in the final issue of Horizon, and he facilitated the first retrospective of his work at the ICA in 1955. Although there is an entry of a meeting between Bacon and Watson on 16 February 1956, there is no entry for the dinner which took place in London a few days before Watson’s death in May of the same year, when Bacon met up with Richard Chopping, Cecil Beaton and Rosamond Lehmann, but no Watson, who was prevented by illness from joining them. Similarly, Watson and Waldemar Hansen had dinner with Bacon in Monte Carlo on 9 July 1947.
Another example of a piece of information which the editors might have included if they had been aware of it relates to the house called Horsemoor Studio, which Bacon bought in 1964, from the artist Jim Page-Roberts, who had built the house for himself a few years earlier. Bacon responded to an advert in the Daily Telegraph offering the house for sale, saw it and, according to Page-Roberts, agreed to buy it immediately. It probably appealed to him because, whilst small and manageable, it had been purpose-built for an artist, with one very large picture window. Page-Roberts went down for lunch on one occasion, with Bacon and George Dyer, and was later told that the house was given to Dyer by Bacon after a heavy drinking session. The chronology picks up, presumably from the Marlborough Gallery records, that the house was acquired in 1964 and was given to Dyer on 15 October 1965, but it does not record that Bacon wrote to Page-Roberts as late as 31 March 1966 saying that he was hoping to sell the house. The fact that he was involved in decisions about the sale may suggest that the gift to Dyer was more gestural than legal.
The glory of Volume V is the bibliography. This, like the chronology, is a great thing for those who want to tackle Bacon, or more likely some aspect of him. It seeks to list all the possible sources of published information about him. The aspirant new writer on Bacon would do well to look mournfully at the length of this bibliography, and the extraordinary range of topics which have already been covered, before jumping into the same shark-infested pond. I picked up an odd omission when checking a cross-reference. On page 58 of Volume I, Martin Harrison refers to the scratchy little pieces of writing that were probably written by David Sylvester, but which were published during Bacon’s lifetime under his name. The famous piece for Matthew Smith’s 1953 retrospective is picked up in Part 1 of the bibliography, but not things like the short piece which appeared under Bacon’s name in a catalogue for a Louis le Brocquy retrospective exhibition which appeared in Dublin and then in Belfast in 1966/7, even though it is referred to on page 58. The contribution to the catalogue consists of one long sentence. It is far too ordered and crafted to have been written by Bacon, but it says things which he may have believed or said he believed (or was prepared to have said in his name). It should certainly be in any bibliography. But what carping! The bibliography alone is a major art historical achievement.
Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels are professional art historians in the best sense of the term. They are scholars who are keen to achieve the worthy aims of factual completeness and accuracy. They have produced a work which reflects their skills and their approach. It is a monument to a great artist’s work: he has secured the editors he deserveS.
The art historian Martin Harrison believes Bacon knew Study of a Bull was to be his last work
By Hannah Furness
ARTS CORRESPONDENT
HANNAH FURNESS | NEWS | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2016
THE previously unknown last painting by Francis Bacon is to go on display for the first time after an art historian spent 11 years tracing the artist’s entire collection. Study of a Bull, from 1991, uncovered after decades out of the public eye, is said to give new insight into Bacon’s life and legacy.
Experts believe it shows the artist knew the fading image of the animal could be his last work, for which he mixed dust with his paints. It has been identified by Martin Harrison, an art historian who has compiled Bacon’s catalogue, identifying 584 works.
Study of a Bull is one of more than 100 previously unknown works Mr Harrison tracked down after being given access to the archives of Marlborough Fine Art, in London. In them, he found a crumpled piece of nondescript paper including a black and white image of the painting, not recorded anywhere else.
In touch with an extensive network of art contacts throughout Europe, he eventually tracked down the picture to a private home in London, where its owners displayed it for the benefit of friends and family alone.
Mr Harrison has persuaded the owners to loan the work to the Grimaldi Foundation in Monaco for a temporary exhibition opening in July, where it will take centre stage in Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture. It will be joined by the first painting from Bacon’s collection, the 1929 Watercolour, and around 60 others.
Mr Harrison said Study of a Bull was particularly interesting for being “intensely autobiographical”, clearly suggesting Bacon knew It may be his last work. Months later, in April 1992, the artist died while in Madrid.
“It’s never been seen before,” said Mr Harrison. “I don’t think it will be most people’s favourite Bacon. But it’s a completely brilliant painting, one of my absolute favourites, and frankly anyone who doesn’t recognise that is an idiot.”
Oliver Barker, the Europe deputy chairman it Sotheby’s, which is sponsoring the exhibition, added that the painting was a “huge revelation” with “great significance” for admirers of Bacon.
Despite being cut in half, the painting is expected to fetch up to £7 million
MICHAEL PARSONS | FINE ART &
ANTIQUES | LIFE & STYLE | THE IRISH TIMES | SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6,
In 1975, Francis Bacon made a startling (and typically shocking) painting of himself and his lover George Dyer, who had taken his own life in 1971, observed by a dwarf-like voyeur.
He later cut the painting in two – the “dwarf” half is now, reputedly in a private collection in Australia but the 6-feet-high, vertical format half of the painting depicting Two Figures is to go on sale at Christie’s in London on February 11th.
The estimate is £5 million-£7 million.
The painting is being sold by Michael Peppiatt, a friend and confidant of the artist and a curator and biographer of his work.
The Daily Telegraph said Peppiatt’s ownership was “one of the art world’s best kept secrets” until now and that “now in his mid-70s” he’s decided to sell “mainly, he says, because he can’t afford to live with it”. Insuring a Bacon painting is expensive.
When he received it in the 1970s, paintings by Bacon could be bought for under £100,000.
Commenting on the painting, Christie’s said: “Two Figures consummates one of the darkest self-reflective periods of Bacon’s life: a period defined not only by an intensive, highly analytical stream of self-portraiture, but also by the landmark series of four ‘black’ triptychs, in which he sought to exorcise the painful memories of Dyer’s suicide.”
Two Figures: the painting is being sold by Michael Peppiatt, a friend and confidant of the artist and a curator and biographer of his work
Michael Peppiatt
is neither tribute nor apologia.
By JOHN REED | BOOK REVIEW | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7,
WHEN MICHAEL PEPPIATT, at 21, met Francis Bacon, the 53-year-old artist was already all artifice, well spoken when well rehearsed, his bistro doctrines applauded by clinking glasses. Peppiatt, having taken over a student arts journal at Cambridge, had shown up in London’s Soho. It was 1963, and Peppiatt laid claim to but a tenuous introduction to the renowned painter he sought. At the bar of the French House, the youth was handled by the photographer John Deakin, who loudly advised: “My dear, you should consider that the maestro you mention has as of late become so famous that she no longer talks to the flotsam and jetsam... I fear she wouldn’t even consider meeting a mere student like you!” When Michael Peppiatt, at 21, met Francis Bacon, the 53-year-old artist was already all artifice, well spoken when well rehearsed, his bistro doctrines applauded by clinking glasses. Peppiatt, having taken over a student arts journal at Cambridge, had shown up in London’s Soho. It was 1963, and Peppiatt laid claim to but a tenuous introduction to the renowned painter he sought. At the bar of the French House, the youth was handled by the photographer John Deakin, who loudly advised: “My dear, you should consider that the maestro you mention has as of late become so famous that she no longer talks to the flotsam and jetsam.... I fear she wouldn’t even consider meeting a mere student like you!”
Deakin’s proclamation turned the heads of the patronage, and a man called back, offering Peppiatt a chair. It was Bacon; Deakin had made an artful introduction, and Peppiatt, however accidentally, had found his apprenticeship. Over the next 30 years, Peppiatt would emerge as a critic, curator and publisher, and ultimately Bacon’s biographer. Joining Bacon for his nightly rounds, from restaurants to clubs, Peppiatt would ply Bacon with “interview” questions — a writer challenging the bromides of his celebrity subject. “Francis Bacon in Your Blood,” arriving some 20 years after Peppiatt’s seminal biography, “Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,” is the result, a gouache découpé of a friend, against a background of art history.
As of the 1960s, and Peppiatt’s arrival in Soho, the landscape of Cold War painting had been thoroughly mapped; Pablo Picasso’s new way of seeing had been assimilated; Surrealism was as familiar as an old show tune; Abstract Expressionism had been packaged for global export; and Existentialism had been offered in abridgment, Jean-Paul Sartre advising that we act and Jack Kerouac advising that we be. In its historical place, Bacon’s aesthetic was both courageous and compromising. His paintings nestled in the between — not quite abstraction, Surrealism, Cubism or representation. At the same time, Bacon vociferously objected to the direction his contemporaries had taken. “Jackson Pollock?” asked Bacon. “Oh are you talking about the old lace maker?”
If Abstract Expressionism saw Bacon as timid, Bacon’s response was sanguine. His life’s mantra, which he might have proclaimed almost brightly, was: “Nothing. Nada. Just nada, nada.” With their spooky appeal, Bacon’s images summoned carcasses on hooks like the ones that prompted him, after a bloody meal of chops and trotters, to tell Peppiatt: “Life’s just like that. We’re all on our way to becoming dead meat. And when you go in that restaurant .... you see the whole cycle of life and the way everyone lives off everything else. And that’s all there is.”
Peppiatt catalogs Bacon’s presumed vices — cruelty, avarice, debauchery. But in Peppiatt’s rendering, the deaths of Peter Lacy and George Dyer, Bacon’s lovers, evidenced Bacon’s penchant for self-destructive people, not cruelty. “Everyone I’ve ever been really fond of,” Peppiatt quotes Bacon, “has always been a drunk or a suicide.” Bacon’s avarice — drink and sumptuous meals — is a last gasp of Western Empire, which, in the context of today’s pressboard furniture, is tempting to recall with nostalgia. “I think I’ll move into a hotel like this just so that I have a place to die in,” Bacon pondered. “I love the atmosphere of these luxury hotels, though I suppose with the way the economy is going and everything else, they won’t exist for much longer.”
Bacon’s debauchery is patiently questioned by Peppiatt’s devoted telling. Bacon gambled, usually losing, and his sexual escapades, mostly in retrospect by his late 50s, tended to the rough stuff, the violent couplings of his paintings. But 60 years later, the criticism of Bacon’s homosexuality is uncomfortably anachronistic, especially in counterpoint to Bacon’s contemporary and onetime friend Lucian Freud, who fathered 12-plus children out of wedlock. But Bacon himself was disposed to midcentury intolerance. His maxims about sex and art are his own, but also the bluster of cafes; Peppiatt portrays Bacon as a man of his times. As with Alberto Giacometti, who opined, “One day perhaps I shall reach my goal,” Bacon had a creative attitude, forged in an era of pervasive repression, that was dogged and fatalistic: “I would like to make images that bring you closer to what being human is actually like... Of course, after all these years, I don’t know whether it’s ever worked.”
Bacon’s entourage, which included Sonia Orwell, was no cheerier. The influential critic and editor Cyril Connolly casually remarked to Peppiatt, “The very idea of Sonia being happy is obscene.” Orwell, among Bacon’s gallery of rogues, is a highlight of Peppiatt’s memoir; after their near sexual incursion is foiled by Connolly’s lurking presence, Orwell asks Peppiatt how Connolly can still be lusting for her “after all these years.”
With the arrival of the 21st century, Bacon’s works have fetched exorbitant auction prices, drawing fire from critics, who call for reappraisal. But Peppiatt’s remembrance is neither tribute nor apologia. “Francis Bacon in Your Blood” is a candid portrayal of a famous man who could be very generous, even with his foes, and very petty, even with his friends — and Bacon, to his credit, was acutely aware of his own frailties. When Peppiatt, always anxious about exciting Bacon’s temper, ventured that “people only have the despair they can afford,” Bacon conceded, “You’ve just said something very profound.”
Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt in David Hockney’s studio in Paris in 1975.
Francis Bacon:
Late Paintings
GAGOSIAN GALLERY|—
DAVID CARRIER | ART SEEN | THE BROOKLYN RAIL | 3 FEBRUARY 2016
The installation at 980 Madison Avenue of more than twenty of Bacon’s works from 1976 to 1991, including three large triptychs, provided a unique opportunity to reevaluate the final fifteen years of work by Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painter. This was a period when Bacon turned increasingly to painting his own features, many of his close friends having died. There were six self-portraits in the exhibition, including one small triptych of heads showing successive aspects of the artist’s face, as if it were always in motion or a state of flux, and two paintings in which his likeness, based on a photograph, is ‘pinned’ to a square of unprimed canvas. In some of the self-portraits, the artist seems to be fading away or backing out of the picture. In the last self-portrait in the show, a small head from 1987, Bacon’s use of spray paint gives the image a dissolving, deathly appearance.
One of Bacon’s deceased friends was his former lover George Dyer, a regular subject in his art from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Dyer committed suicide in 1971 in a Paris hotel, on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais. Bacon commemorated his death in a series of paintings that recall its tragic and sordid details, most notably in the so-called ‘black’ triptychs of the early 1970s. At the time of the Grand Palais opening, Dyer was living separately from Bacon, in an apartment the artist had given him, and their relationship was over. But he insisted on joining Bacon in Paris, against his wishes. Bacon knew Dyer would be drunk, and before Dyer arrived, Bacon carefully hid all his own sleeping pills, remembering Dyer’s three previous attempts at suicide when drunk. Each time, he had managed to get Dyer to the hospital in time. That morning, Bacon had to leave the hotel early to put the finishing touches to the exhibition. While he was out, Dyer found the pills and locked himself in his room, which connected to Bacon’s. When Bacon returned, he saw that the pills were missing, but could not get to Dyer through the locked door. Having to go out again, he was reassured by Valerie Beston, his devoted minder at the Marlborough Gallery, who was also staying in the hotel, that Dyer would be alright. Later that evening, Dyer was found naked, slumped on the lavatory, having vomited into the washbasin. The cause of death was an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates.
Ten years later, Dyer’s shadow still haunts Bacon’s work. Even when addressing less autobiographical, more universal themes from classical Greek drama, such as vengeance and justice, in his Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus 1981, a headless, naked figure hunched over a bowl, open, connecting doors, and trails of bodily fluids contribute to its violent atmosphere. In an earlier work that includes Dyer’s unmistakable profile, Painting 1978, a naked figure is shown locking a door with his upraised foot. Bacon said that he had been inspired by the lines from T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, beginning:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only.
Bacon’s visual imagination was stimulated by his reading of Aeschylus and Eliot, and this may have merged unconsciously with feelings of guilt over Dyer’s suicide, despite maintaining that he wasn’t especially attracted to Dyer—saying, rather, ‘he was very useful to work from at the time.’ In Agamemnon, the first play in Aeschylus’s trilogy, Clytemnestra murders her returning husband Agamemnon, king of Argos, after enticing him to walk from his chariot into their palace over a long drape of crimson silk. Presumably Bacon had this image in mind when he came to paint the center panel of his triptych, with its deep red backdrop, a detail he repeated in the center panel of his Second Version of Triptych 1944 1988—his reprise, on a grander scale, of his disturbing early masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
Bacon described Agamemnon as ‘the most blood-bathed tragedy that exists. ... The line ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me’ suggests a million different kinds of images.’ Another classical source for Bacon was the Oedipus myth, as dramatized in Sophocles’s Theban tragedies, in which Oedipus fulfills the prophecy that he will kill his father, Laius, king of Thebes, and marry his mother, Jocasta. When all is revealed, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus, overcome with remorse, gouges out his own eyes. Bacon’s Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres 1983 is loosely based on Ingres’s famous painting in the Louvre, Oedipus and the Sphinx 1808. Bacon depicts the moment when Oedipus confronts and defeats the Theban Sphinx by answering her riddle, thus removing the only obstacle on his journey to Thebes. Where he departs from Ingres is in portraying Oedipus as an athlete with a blood-soaked, bandaged foot—a reference to the injury Jocasta had inflicted on him as a baby, before leaving him to die, she hoped, on a mountainside. The other detail not found in Ingres is the hanging, bat-like shape visible through a door in the background. This mythological creature, identified by Bacon as one of the Furies, is present in other paintings shown in the exhibition, including the left-hand panel of the Oresteia triptych, where it spurts a jet of gore. The Furies, or Eumenides, were female spirits who avenge family murder by pursuing the guilty. In Agamemnon, Cassandra foresees Agamemnon’s imminent murder by his wife and cries:
Howl, Furies, howl, you bloody ravening
pack,
Gorged with this house’s blood, yet thirsting still;
The victim bleeds: come, Fiends, and drink your fill!
Another characteristic of the late work is Bacon’s tendency to turn some of his figures into sculptures. This can be seen in his Oedipus/Ingres painting, where the sphinx on her rock is transformed into a stone statue on a pedestal. In another painting inspired by Ingres, Diptych: Study of the Human Body—From a Drawing by Ingres 1982–84, the truncated bodies, one male, the other female, are shown on plinths. The right-hand, female torso bears a resemblance to one of Picasso’s Boisgeloup sculptures of the early 1930s, such as the plaster Bust of a Woman 1931, in which male and female genitals form a composite whole. Bacon was aware of the emotive power of the broken or fragmented body, as in surviving sculptures from classical antiquity. He was profoundly interested in sculpture, and it is noticeable how the decomposing forms of his earlier figures are replaced in the later work by more muscular torsos and limbs recalling Michelangelo.
If Bacon had a guiding principle in these late paintings, it was to pare down, to reduce to essentials: he talked about the ‘essence of a torso,’ the ‘essence of landscape,’ the ‘essence of water.’ He also said that ‘a shorthand of forms, really, is what I’m trying to do.’ This newfound economy of means is evident from the greatly simplified backgrounds, often consisting of large expanses of a single, radiant color such as cadmium orange, pink, or blue. His Triptych 1991, which has a markedly symmetrical composition, resembles an architectural memorial. The portrait heads in the side panels evoke photographs of the dead attached to tombstones, while the copulating figures in the center panel are like a distant memory, generalized almost to the point of abstraction. A sense of something close to equilibrium pervades this final triptych.
Previously-unpublished diaries of a friend and early patron of Francis bacon have been discovered, offering significant new insights into the life of the artist long before his genius was widely recognised.
They challenge myths about Bacon’s early life, including the painter’s own claims about his “loveless” family, shed light on his work as a designer of rugs and furniture, and reveal an unrecorded painting of “three horses jumping in a circus”.
Little is known about the author of the diaries, Eric Allden, save that he bought some of Bacon’s first works and lived with him in the early 1930s. Allden had been an intelligence officer and an attache at the British embassy in Peking before meeting Bacon by chance in 1929 on a cross-Channel ferry. Bacon was 19, some 23 years his junior, but they struck up a close friendship.
James Norton, a research assistant on a major Bacon biography, discovered 33 handwritten volumes of Allden’s diaries in private hands in London.
He reveals his find in the January issue of the art journal the Burlington Magazine, before the biography’s 2017 publication. He writes that Bacon’s beginnings as an artist are obscure partly because of the myths that he created, and that the diaries and other discoveries by the biographers “recast our understanding of [his] early life … including Bacon’s claim that he was estranged early on from his family”.
Bacon’s father, a retired army major, was said to have been repulsed by his son’s burgeoning homosexuality, and to have thrown him out of the house after catching him in his mother’s clothes. Norton observes that Bacon rarely spoke of his father, except in the most disparaging terms, but the diaries show that a definitive rupture between the two was false. There are other significant differences to those found in existing biographies”, he says.
In 1929, Allden described an idyllic holiday in Ireland with Bacon, his parents and two younger sisters: “He is simply delighted because his mother has … rented a cottage … for the whole of September [near] the house they have taken … He wants me to remain all the time he is there and is quite ecstatic … We shall take plenty of books and lead a simple life.”
Shortly after their first meeting, Allden wrote: “His people live in Ireland, County Kildare, and he told me that when he was 16 he ran away to Paris, but was brought back, though soon after he was permitted to return there.”
That entry records a visit to see Bacon at his Knightsbridge home, shared with his loyal childhood nanny. Allden describes Bacon as having “a most original mind, intensely modern and futurist in art”.
Bacon asked Allden to stay for dinner, he writes. “I like this boy, who is extremely intelligent, but he has the complexion of a girl, with big blue eyes and long lashes. He is really too pretty for a boy, and his ways are rather effeminate.”
Of their initial meeting on the ferry, Allden wrote: “On deck sat beside a young fellow who spoke to me. He told me he was starting a shop in London for ultra modern furniture and was going to Paris to purchase examples. His name was Francis Bacon.”
Bacon never did open a shop. After a long struggle, the self-taught artist found recognition with masterpieces that convey the pain of human existence. More than two decades after his death, he is widely regarded as the greatest British painter since Turner. His 1969 painting, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, sold for a record $142m (£100m) in 2013.
Allden, who died aged 62 in 1949, sensed Bacon’s artistic promise, buying his first three paintings and several rugs, including one that Bacon wanted to give him. “I wouldn’t hear of it … He is such a generous, loving boy.”
He did, however, struggle with some of Bacon’s painted subjects. “I can’t say that I care about the rather gruesome distortions of heads, bodies etc.”
Other art references include a National Gallery visit. Bacon “wanted to see the Piero della Francesca Nativity as he had heard a lecture on the wireless say it was composed of a series of cubes”. Later, in 1933, he wrote: “He is mad about Grünewald’s paintings and the German primitive school, and Michelangelo, whom I remember he rather despised at one time.”
The nature of Bacon and Allden’s relationship is never made explicit, writes Norton. “Allden often describes separate sleeping arrangements … Although the relationship may not have been sexual, there were evidently strong bonds of feeling on both sides.”
Further entries are being held back for the biography, written by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. “We’re thrilled with the diary,” Stevens said.
“Information on Bacon’s early years in London is somewhat thin … and comes mostly from Bacon himself. The diary … helps fill out the life.”
Francis Bacon in his studio, circa 1960.
In focus Bacon’s works come out of the shadows
The shadowy, ghostlike structures that enclose the subjects of many of Francis Bacon’s most famous paintings are to be the focus of a new exhibition exploring the development of the Irish-born British painter’s technique.
Thirty works from around the world will be brought together in May at Tate Liverpool for “Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms”, the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work yet to be held in the north of England.
Rarely seen drawings and documents will show how Bacon began incorporating architectural framing devices — often as faint traces of cages or cubes — within his paintings from the 1930s, heightening the emotional intensity of the image. He experimented with the motif in different ways throughout his career until the 1980s.
“It is these imaginary chambers that Bacon used to emphasise the isolation of the represented figures and bring attention to their psychological condition,” Tate said. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and runs from May 18 to September 18.
James Pickford
On show: ‘Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin’
The shadowy, ghostlike structures that enclose the subjects of many Francis Bacon’s most famous paintings are to be the focus of a new exhibition exploring the development of the Irish-born British painter’s technique.
Thirty works from around the world will be brought together in May at Tate Liverpool for Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms, the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work yet to be held in the north of England.
Rarely seen drawings and documents will show how Bacon began incorporating architectural framing devices — often as faint traces of cages or cubes — within his paintings from the 1930s, heightening the emotional intensity of the image. He experimented with the motif in different ways throughout his career until the 1980s.
“It is these imaginary chambers that Bacon used to emphasise the isolation of the represented figures and bring attention to their psychological condition,” Tate said.
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms is a collaboration with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and will run from May 18 to September 18.
Francis Bacon’s Two Figures is a tribute to George Dyer, the great love of his life.
CHRISTIE’S POST-WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART WEDNESDAY JANUARY 27 2016
Dr. Michael Peppiatt is an internationally renowned art historian, scholar, and curator. He was a close friend to Francis Bacon for over 30 years and is the author of over 20 books, including the definitive biography of Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma. His latest, critically acclaimed book, Francis Bacon in Your Blood, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
In the Post-war and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 11 February in London, Christie’s will offer Two Figures, a self-portrait conjoined with the figure of George Dyer that stands as a tribute to Bacon’s great muse and lover. Dyer’s tragic death in 1971 gave rise to some of Bacon’s most powerful work, including the four acclaimed ‘Black Triptychs’. Michael Peppiatt, who acquired Two Figures directly from Bacon, spoke with Stephen Jones in New York.
Stephen Jones: You first met Francis Bacon as a 20-year-old. You were a student at Cambridge University who had decided to shake things up on one of the student magazines by interviewing a modern artist. What can you tell us a about that meeting?
Michael Peppiatt: This might give you some idea of how innocent and ill-prepared I was: a friend said, ‘If you want to do an issue of this magazine’ — which was calledCambridge Opinion — ‘on modern art in Britain, you’d better go and talk to Francis Bacon.’ I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That’s an Elizabethan statesman.’
It was 1963 and Bacon had just had his first exhibition at the Tate Gallery. This friend of mine knew somebody who was close to Bacon, who was a bit of a terrifying figure. I have to say, in retrospect, if I’d seen his paintings before going to meet him, I probably wouldn’t have gone. But I did and turned up in a pub in Soho to try and meet this photographer friend of Bacon’s called John Deakin. Suddenly, I saw a small man was sitting just behind me, on a stool by the bar. He was talking in an exaggeratedly posh, camp voice, and waving his cigarette holder about.
What were your first impressions of him?
I was a bit overawed. He was very, very charming. He knew how to talk to young people, and he was very seductive. He made out that he and I were talking at the same level. He never, ever talked down to people, unless he disliked somebody, and then he could talk down to them very, very effectively. Basically, if he liked you, he drew you out and drew you in.
He was an extraordinarily charged kind of person. When you were with him, the atmosphere tended to go up. He had such a sense of life, and such vitality. He was clearly very intelligent, but also he had this resilience — he was able to drink all day and all night, have a couple of hours sleep, and then be up the next morning, painting.
What was your reaction when you first saw his art?
I was horrified, totally horrified! I couldn’t square these images, which seemed to be of horror, of pain, of guilt and of every sort of negative emotion, with this charming, chuckling boulevardier who just seemed to walk through walls from one place to another, from one bar into another.
When you saw the paintings, did you like them? Did you understand them?
No, I didn’t like them at all. But because I was studying art history at Cambridge, I knew some of his sources, and he was illuminating when he talked about his work. I came to realise that he was talking about a venerable tradition and literally giving it a twist to make it relevant to his own time.
At what point did this friendship become something more long lasting?
To begin with, it was chaotic. The interview I was doing just went on and on. I kept turning up, and then we kept going out and drinking far too much. We used to meet at midday, and then it would go on until about four or five in the morning. The conversation went on, really, for 30 years.
We talked often, just the two of us, late into the night. I was very moved by a lot of this, because I saw the extraordinary freedom that he lived his life with, the way he was always pushing the boundaries back and questioning everything.
It was quite a scary experience, and sometimes things went a bit wrong and in some of the bars there were dangerous situations, let’s say. He was very good at pushing a situation as far as it would go, and then somehow managing to get out of the the danger that he had created.
How did he go about explaining his art to you?
He’d say things like, ‘What I’m trying to do is give the sensation over as directly as possible’. He had this sense of life and of death, and I think that’s why I found it so horrific. I’m not sure so many people find it horrific now, but then it was so new.
In London people were still coming out of the nightmare the immediate postwar period. We can see the beauty of the painting now, but it at the time it was so violent, so radical. The violence really was the force of the new.
George Dyer became a very important figure in Bacon’s life, both personally and professionally. The relationship between Bacon and Dyer may be what produced some of this fantastic art…
Bacon was attracted to something as sexually different from himself as possible: muscular young men who he thought were dangerous criminals. George looked the part, even though as a crook he’d been quite unsuccessful. He was always in prison although in reality he was quite a timid soul. Part of the tragedy is that Bacon took George out of that life by giving him enough money not to have to steal. For George, he got into this this very sophisticated world of Bacon’s and really lost his footing.
Dyer, as your book depicts so well in the passage on Bacon’s first big Paris exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in 1966, didn’t really care for the art crowd…
Bacon was always very amused by the fact that George didn’t rate [these people]; he felt a certain truth there. George was always upsetting things and Bacon enjoyed that; he liked barriers to be broken.
What I find interesting from the book is you get a sense of Bacon as being a very jovial figure socially, and yet the work he was producing at this time is incredibly dark, almost tortured. How do you account for that dissonance?
I can’t account for it, really. I don’t pretend to know. I think Bacon was somebody who was stretched between extremes. He could be extremely generous, and unbelievably mean. He could be very supportive and unbelievably critical and destructive.
We see the paintings as dark because they come over with this incredible force. It’s why a Bacon painting never disappears — it’s always there, you’re always conscious of a presence. I lived with Three Heads for about 20 years when I was living and writing in Paris. I could never stare them down. Somehow, he managed to transmit this force into his paintings.
This painting of George Dyer was done in 1975, four years after Dyer committed suicide. Can you talk us through Two Figures, and where you think it fits within that period of Bacon’s grieving and recovery?
How do you paint death? How do you paint loss? How do you paint guilt in a way that isn’t sentimental? In a terrible way, George’s death gave Bacon the great subject of his painting. It was about loss, about grief, about guilt, because he felt guilty that he hadn’t managed to save George from killing himself.
George had attempted suicide several times, and Bacon had managed to get him to hospital, but since his big exhibition opening at the Grands Ballets in Paris, he hadn’t been available.
What followed George’s death was four years of painting, almost without interruption. These were very dark paintings, and this is where he begins to come to terms with his loss, and remembers a particularly intimate moment with George. So it’s remembering, in a sense — a passion, a certain happiness of the past. A happiness lost.
Bacon did a bigger picture, of which this one-half. I first had the complete picture, and then he came round to my flat in Paris one day and said, ‘If I could get my hands back on that, you know, I think I could make it so much better.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, you must take it back then.’
He thought it was too narrative, and he wanted to cut it in two, and make two paintings out of it. It happened to me more than once in that he’d see something that he’d given me, and then want to take it back to ‘improve’ it. Very often I wouldn’t see it again.
It’s only with hindsight that these things take on importance. It didn’t occur to me that I’d be standing here 40 years later, talking about it.
Revels recalled
RICHARD DAVENPORT–HINES
Michael Peppiatt FRANCIS BACON IN YOUR BLOOD
A memoir 416pp. Bloomsbury Circus. £25. 978 1 4088 5624 6
Walking through Les Halles in the 1970s, Francis Bacon skidded in a pool of blood and clutched at a cask to steady himself. Peering inside, he saw that the vessel was full of calves’ heads with jellied eyes and severed necks ending in a dried bubble ruff of lymph and blood. Stimulated, he examined the next container, which held a gratifying mess of foam-specked tongues resembling disembodied screams. Bacon jabbed one of his thick, meaty fingers at a nearby carcass of beef. “Life’s just like that”, he told his acolyte Michael Peppiatt standing beside him. “We’re all on our way to becoming dead meat.” Bacon was the artist of gristle and offal rather than of delicate cuts. He was also a man who kept his pockets crammed with banknotes, crushed fivers into the hands of waiters whenever his wine glass was refilled, favoured flash restaurants patronized by expense account parvenus and boasted, “I’ve bought my way through life”. The gruesome nihilism, the grasping of chances, the quick profit from actes gratuits, and the flourishing improvisations in a fractured and destructive environment – how right Keith Vaughan was to call Bacon a “spiv-existentialist”.
Michael Peppiatt (then finishing his second year as a Cambridge undergraduate) first met Bacon in a Soho bar in June 1963. Usually Bacon surrounded himself with alcoholic toadies, rough trade and undisciplined artistic tinkerers. Peppiatt was none of these: a coureurde femmes whose one attempt at homosexual experimentation lasted about four seconds, he was nevertheless taken into Bacon’s train, joined his revels, watched his private abasement and public triumphs, and apparently noted his table talk over twenty-nine years. In time, Peppiatt became an editor of Le Monde's culture section, Paris-based arts correspondent of The New York Times, an exhibition curator and expert on Giacometti. He has produced several books on Bacon, including a biography in 1996 which scrutinized the paintings, analysed Bacon’s creative impulses and recorded (in his subject’s phrase) “the gilded gutter life” of big earnings, alcoholic squalor and masochistic queer sex. Peppiatt’s new book is an intimate memoir of two intense and interlaced lives, his own and Bacon’s, which augments rather than duplicates his previous efforts.
One caveat should be made about this punchy, gutsy, jumpy memoir, full of gossip, binges, nausea, bruises, stained sheets, punchlines and death wishes. It brims with long quotations, sometimes extending over pages, which Peppiatt says that he recorded in diaries and cahiers. These are unsourced and dateless, though, and often relate to marathon drinking bouts of which reliable detailed recall must be doubtful. The aggression, the gambling against the odds, the power plays, the aesthetic disquisitions and existential rants are brutally credible in their substance. Even if the long reconstructed dialogue after the boozeand-pills suicide of Bacon’s companion George Dyer lacks exact verisimilitude, it is not worthlessly false. But alert eyes will spot recurrent moments of legerdemain and feel sure that sometimes Peppiatt’s refashioned memories must be faulty. Sonia Orwell, for example, is quoted as enthusing in 1963 about “the publisher Nikos Stangos who’s delightful and a very talented American writer called David Plante”. Stangos worked in the Greek diplomatic service until 1967; talented or otherwise, Plante did not publish a novel until 1970. It makes one doubt the further tale of Peppiatt being fellated, while washing up dinner dishes, by Sonia Orwell as Cyril Connolly paced in the corridor outside.
There would have been no difference to Bacon’s art or to the careening trajectory of his life if he had not met and trusted Peppiatt. The latter, though, was propelled by his friendship with Bacon from a life of dabbling enthusiasms, with the likely destiny of becoming either a frustrated arts administrator or niggling columnist, into being a watchful fast-lane hanger-on. It was because of Bacon’s introductions that Peppiatt was hurtled around London in Lucian Freud’s murderously accelerating Bentley, welcomed into the Marlborough Gallery for privileged viewings of new work, lunched at Wilton’s with the Duke of Devonshire, overheard dealers in the Connaught bar peddling an Andrea Mantegna to Heini Thyssen, and sat on the adjacent banquette to Marlene Dietrich in a Paris bistrot and heard, not Hollywood star anecdotes, but a dull, drunken grumble, repeated like a stuck record, “My husband never let me eat hot dogs”.
Bacon was sexually submissive but alcoholically dominant. He incited weaker cronies (including his bedroom masters) to drink themselves to death. His money created the private hells in which these miserable sots lurched and perished. The booze, beatings and buggery raise an easy journalistic sensation, but they surely mattered less to the form of Bacon’s art than his life’s financial nexus. He started his career as a rent boy, loved wads of cash in his pocket, savoured the power of money and was supremely an artistic merce0nary in an epoch when huge fortunes could be made by the great dealers. It is the created market demand and the price manipulations – not the delinquency – that make Bacon interesting. Like the black market profiteers whom he knew in post-war Soho, he flouted rules, supplied needs and defied conventions to make money. Like any spiv with contraband goods to peddle on the street he was encouraged by adversity and saw the opportunities in deprivation and deformity. “I’m optimistic about nothing”, Bacon told Peppiatt. “Even though I don’t believe in anything I’m rarely depressed because my nervous system is filled with optimism.” There speaks the quintessential spiv.
The mystery owner of a Bacon masterpiece has finally come forward, says Colin Gleadell
One of the art world’s best-kept secrets will be revealed next month when Christie’s sells Two Figures, 1975, a painting by Francis Bacon. For 40 years, Michael Peppiatt, arguably the world’s greatest authority on Bacon, has owned the painting, but has kept it under wraps. Even some of his best friends will be surprised to learn he owned a Bacon at all.
Author of the much applauded memoir, Francis Bacon in Your Blood, Peppiatt met Bacon in the Sixties when he was a Cambridge undergraduate and wanted to interview an artist for a student magazine. After tracking down Bacon to a pub in Soho, he embarked on a lifelong adventure that was to take him not only through the drinking dens of London, but also into the mind and soul of one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
The two established an extraordinarily close friendship, beyond that of artist and diarist and more like a father and son, says Peppiatt. In such a relationship, it was inevitable that the artist would bestow gifts on his confidant. One was a small study for a Pope which Peppiatt later sold to finance the purchase of a studio for the artist’s use in Paris.
As a replacement for the sold Pope, and in return for some translation work, he was then given a portrait in 1976 of the French writer Michel Leiris, though this was taken back after a few months to make changes. It was, however, replaced in turn by a large and significant painting of two entwined figures, Bacon himself and his lover George Dyer, who had committed suicide in 1971, observed by a dwarf-like voyeur.
Then one evening, Bacon came round for a drink and announced that he thought the painting with the two lovers and the voyeur had too strong a narrative element in it and took it away. Possibly using a photograph to mark how he might reconfigure the painting, he cut the two figural elements out, discarding much of the background.
How Bacon cut it is significant, as it establishes how two parts of a larger composition became independent and complete art works in their own right. He didn’t just divide it in half; he kept the Two Figures section at its original height (74¾ inches), and cut down the right hand side of it to just clip off the corner of the lovers’ bed and the glass cage which encloses it, bringing the viewer into much closer, intimate proximity with the action he is depicting. Looking at it behind glass, the viewer becomes the voyeur.
The other section of the canvas, named Portrait of a Dwarf, 1975, which was lent to the Tate’s Bacon exhibition in 1982, was cut lower (62½ inches) and thinner to allow the figure to dominate the new composition more completely. So, in dividing the original work, Bacon took the trouble to reorganise each section to create new, self-sufficient compositions. He gave Peppiatt back Two Figures, while the Dwarf found its way to a collection in Australia.
For Peppiatt, Two Figures, which combines the influences of Michelangelo and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, is one of Bacon’s most brilliant inventions. “The metaphor of two bodies tumbling together through space …recreates that feeling of sexual release – of being outside gravity, outside oneself, in free fall.” Coming after the dark and depressed “black triptychs” which followed Dyer’s suicide, Two Figures is a cathartic exercise which celebrates love. “It is Bacon at his most private and most tender,” Peppiatt says.
By the time he received the painting, however, Bacon prices were beginning to rise. A large canvas sold for over £90,000 at auction in 1976. Afraid that his painting might attract thieves, Peppiatt kept it out of sight. It was never exhibited or reproduced until 2006 when he included it in an exhibition he curated at the Sainsbury Centre, and even then his ownership was not revealed. When the exhibition then travelled to America, Peppiatt was mildly shocked to learn it was valued for insurance at $28 million. On its return to Britain, Peppiatt lent it anonymously to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester which needed a Bacon and where he would not have to shoulder the larger insurance and storage bills.
Now in his mid-70s, Peppiatt has decided to sell, mainly, he says, because he
can’t afford to live with it. Due to its unusually vertical format, Christie’s
has valued it conservatively at £5-7 million pounds. “That’s an attractive
price,” says Francis Outred of Christie’s, pointing to a full size portrait of
George Dyer of similar height but double the width, which he sold two years ago
for £42 million pounds.
Francis Bacon’s original composition
CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION
11 February 2016 London, King Street
£5,458,500 ($7,920,284)
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Two Figures
oil on canvas
78 x 27¾in. (198 x 70.3cm.)
Painted in 1975
Artist’s Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist’s Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist’s collection agent.
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1975.
Property from the Collection of Michael Peppiatt
M. Harrison, “Francis Bacon: Lost and Found”, in Apollo, March 2005
(illustrated in colour prior to completion, p. 95).
M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, London 2008, p. 259
(illustrated in colour, unpaged).
A. Bond (ed.), Francis Bacon: Five Decades, exh. cat., Sydney, Art
Gallery of New South Wales, 2012-2013, fig. 112 (illustrated in colour prior to
completion, p. 186).
M. Harrison, “Collection in Focus: Two Figures, 1975”, in Pallant House
Gallery Magazine, no. 31, October 2013 – February 2014 (illustrated in
colour, p. 60).
M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir, London 2015, pp. 266
and 270.
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Francis
Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, 2006-2007, cat. 39 (illustrated in colour, p.
114). This exhibition later travelled to Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum and
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Rome, Galleria Borghese, Caravaggio Bacon, 2009-2010, p. 206 (illustrated in
colour, p. 207; detail illustrated in colour, pp. 24 and 180 – 181).
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery (on extended loan, 2009-2015).
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Francis Bacon to Paula Rego, 2012, pp. 65 and
37, pl. 17 (illustrated in colour, on the cover and p. 37).
Oxford, The Ashmolean Museum, Bacon/ Moore: Flesh and Bone, 2013-2014, p. 142,
no. 61 (illustrated in colour, p. 143).
London, Christie’s Mayfair, Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth, 2015,
pp. 51 and 209 (illustrated in colour, p. 59; detail illustrated in colour, pp.
50 and 58).
Please note this work has also been requested for the following exhibitions:
Francis Bacon, Monaco and the French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco
July–September 2016.
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 18 May–18
September 2016; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart 7 October 2016 – 8 January 2017.
Giacometti/Bacon, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 15 May – 15 August 2018.
This work will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon,
edited by Martin Harrison, under the number 75-08.
‘How can you cut your flesh open and join it with the other person?’ – F. Bacon
‘Not an hour goes by when I don’t think about George’ – F. Bacon
‘A compact and chunky force of nature, with a vivid and highly [unorthodox] turn
of phrase, [George Dyer] embodied pent-up energy. As a spirit of mischief,
touched at times by melancholia, he had been the subject, and the inspiration of
some of Bacon’s greatest images’ – J. Russell
‘In a way Dyer’s death allowed [Bacon] to paint some of his very greatest
pictures. Suddenly he had no need of mythical or religious structures because he
had his own tragedy. His loneliness and shock gave him a very grand subject:
life and death, love and loss, guilt and retribution’ – M. Peppiatt
‘The two figures, closely intermingled (except for the heads they are virtually
fused into one) in a glass cage, resemble a sculpture on display in a vitrine,
albeit a conspicuously kinetic type of sculpture: one of the protagonist’s legs
actually bursts out of the cage structure’ – M. Harrison
‘In the case of Two Figures the men are so completely and intricately united
that they come across almost as a single figure, in which the influences of
Michelangelo’s drawings and Muybridge’s photographs in motion are indissolubly
linked. Caught in the last throes of desire, the two figures are held up, as in
some erotic theatre, for public display. But there is also an intensely private
poetry in the way they not only meld into one but are shown tumbling through
space in the fierce rush of their desire’ – M. Peppiatt
‘Actually, Michelangelo and Muybridge 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, and it would be very
difficult for me to disentangle the influence of Muybridge and the influence of
Michelangelo’ – F. Bacon
‘You might say that this is the painting where the wound of losing George is
beginning to heal – it’s a poignant picture because Bacon is looking back on
past - that’s to say, lost - happiness. This is Bacon at his most private and
most tender. The painter who produced such violent, shocking images was also,
perhaps even above all, a great poet of love’ – M. Peppiatt
‘He felt that [Paris] was the absolute centre of the art world – the city of
Picasso, Duchamp and Giacometti, the three contemporary artists he admired most’
– M. Peppiatt
‘Francis has upped the ante, if that’s the phrase, by presenting me with an
extraordinary new, large canvas... I am obviously delighted to possess this
major painting, not least because it records such an intimate moment of Francis
and George together’ – M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon In Your Blood: A Memoir
INTRODUCTION
Standing nearly two metres in height, Francis Bacon’s Two Figures is a
deeply poignant final farewell to George Dyer, the artist’s great muse and
lover. Rendered with tactile, near-sculptural brushstrokes, Bacon’s figures are
intimately conjoined in a state of sublime torsion, captured in ecstatic,
free-falling metamorphosis. It is an extraordinary tribute to the man who
transformed Bacon’s life and art, and whose tragic death in 1971 would give rise
to some of his most powerful compositions. Painted in Paris in 1975, Two
Figures consummates one of the darkest self-reflective periods of Bacon’s
life: a period defined not only by an intensive, highly analytical stream of
self-portraiture, but also by the landmark series of ‘black’ triptychs, in which
he sought to exorcise the painful memories of Dyer’s suicide. In the present
work, Bacon’s attempt at catharsis reaches something of an apotheosis: the
haunted narratives of the triptychs are replaced by a tender invocation of male
desire, its two protagonists inextricably entwined in the throes of passion.
Like an incognito zoom lens, a single square frames the central figure’s face –
elements of Dyer’s profile spliced together with those of Bacon himself –
producing an inlaid portrait of sorts that anchors the couple’s descent. In
certain lights, the figures confront the viewer like a voluptuous statue,
preserved, levitated and spot-lit within the sharp geometries of Bacon’s gridded
cage. In others, their translucent bodies form a writhing motion picture – a
blurred time-lapse sequence that flickers in and out of focus. The visceral
nature of the recollection is borne out in the sheer physicality of Bacon’s
painterly bravura: a raw, almost carnal handling of pigment that animates the
cascading figures. Here, for the first time, the clouds of grief and sorrow
begin to lift: exposed before the world, Bacon’s protagonists come to life in
celebration of the private intimacies shared with Dyer.
Two Figures was acquired directly from Bacon by Michael Peppiatt, a close
friend and confidant of the artist, and a leading scholar and curator of his
work. Held in Peppiatt’s distinguished collection for forty years, the work has
featured in major exhibitions including Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006
(Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich), Caravaggio Bacon, 2010
(Galleria Borghese, Rome) and Bacon/Moore: Flesh and Bone, 2014 (Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford), and has been on permanent display at the Pallant House Gallery
in Chichester since 2009. Like several of Bacon’s compositions, Two Figures was
originally part of a larger canvas that the artist deliberately divided into two
separate paintings. The right-hand portion of the initial work was subsequently
titled Portrait of a Dwarf, and features a foreshortened figure upon a
stool. The voyeuristic relationship between the couple and this figure played
directly into Bacon’s fascination with the erotic power of watching and being
watched. A ruthless editor of his own work, notorious for his abrasions,
erasures and annihilations, Bacon’s conscious bisection of the canvas freed each
beautifully painted work from interaction with, and interference by, the other.
In doing so, he transposed that interaction and complete sense of engagement to
the viewer, which was always Bacon’s primary concern.
Within the charismatic cast of characters that touched Bacon’s life, none had a
more profound impact than Dyer. The two first met in a Soho bar in the autumn of
1963, and quickly became lovers. Dyer’s classical good looks, combined with his
troubled past and fragile spirit, provided Bacon with a fascinating character
study, giving rise to a prodigious series of portraits and triptychs now mostly
held in museum collections. Towards the end of the decade, however, Bacon’s
mercurial character and Dyer’s own bleak prospects gave way to a tumultuous
relationship, punctuated by sharp mood swings and fits of emotion. In 1971,
shortly before the opening of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais in
Paris – an accolade granted to no other living artist except Picasso – Dyer was
found dead in his hotel room. In the black triptychs, which include Triptych
– In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel) and Triptych,
August, 1972 (Tate, London), Bacon brutally replayed the events of that
fateful night, releasing his anguish and despair into emotionally-charged
narrative panels. Though the darkened interior of Two Figures recalls the
billowing swathes of black that engulf Dyer in the triptychs, the work’s subtle
chiaroscuro lighting effects imbue the composition with a reverential solemnity.
Gone are the tortured meditations upon the tragedy of Dyer’s death. Instead,
Bacon stages a moment of cathartic reflection: liberated from all physical laws,
the figures take flight in a surge of rapture. Whilst many of Bacon’s
self-portraits of the 1970s were imbued with an impending awareness of the
artist’s own mortality, Two Figures finds solace in the power of memory
and fantasy. It is no longer simply an attempt to come to terms with the pain of
his loss, but an ecstatic letting-go of the grief that had gripped him so
furiously during the preceding years.
MICHELANGELO AND MUYBRIDGE
The metamorphic properties of the two figures bear witness to the dual influence
of Michelangelo and Eadweard Muybridge: artists who Bacon admitted were
fundamentally ‘mixed up in my mind together’. On one hand, the fleshy curves and
exaggerated musculature of the figures is deeply rooted in Bacon’s fascination
with the sculptor who, in his eyes, ‘produced the most voluptuous nudes in the
whole of the plastic arts’ (F. Bacon, 1975, quoted in D. Sylvester, The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 114). In
the landmark series of interviews with David Sylvester, published in the year of
the painting, Bacon described how ‘for several years now I’ve been very much
thinking about sculpture, though I haven’t ever done it, because each time I
want to do it I get the feeling that perhaps I could do it better in painting’
(F. Bacon, 1975, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews
with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 108). Nowhere within his output of this
period is this assertion more profoundly embodied than in Two Figures. In
places, his application of paint suggests the smoothness of polished marble;
elsewhere, it recalls a rough-hewn block of stone. At the same time, the statue-esque
qualities of the figures are held in tension with the sheer level of movement in
the work’s surface. Like Bacon’s early portrayals of male couplings – most
notably Two Figures and Two Figures in the Grass of 1953 – the
figures evoke Muybridge’s photographs of wrestlers in motion: a source that
Bacon returned to almost obsessively throughout his oeuvre. Arms, legs and
torsos are so closely entwined that they mutate to form a single entity. Like a
film paused on rewind, or a long photographic exposure, time and movement
collapse and coalesce, creating a hybrid being that quivers with heightened
sensory charge.
The rectilinear frame in which the figures are suspended also finds its origins
in filmic media. Frequently compared to the Chinagraph markings used by
photographers to indicate areas for enlargement, Bacon’s gridded cages had,
since the 1950s, been used as devices for spotlighting his subjects. Its usage
also invites comparison with the paintings and sculptures of Alberto Giacommetti
– an artist who, for Bacon, truly embodied the existentialist concerns of
post-War European art. Here, the structure becomes a projection of his own
mental architecture: a delineated space in which Bacon is able to confront his
most personal recollections and desires. The rapid striations of dark paint that
cover the walls of the interior recall the ‘shuttering’ effect that Bacon
adapted from the pastels of Edgar Degas, and incorporated into many of his
screaming Papal portraits. Used throughout his oeuvre to express a release of
tension, these lines create a kind of shuddering optical static that
destabilises the rigid geometries of the cage, emphasising the work’s sense of
cinematic distortion. The embedded square snapshot of the central figure’s face
recalls the celebrated fourteen-by-twelve inch portrait heads that dominated
Bacon’s output of the 1960s and 1970s. The allusion to this format – which,
according to John Russell, was ‘the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious
investigations’ – is particularly poignant here. ‘Just as a gunshot sometimes
leaves after-echo or parallel report’, writes Russell, ‘so these small
concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them’ (J. Russell, Francis Bacon,
London 1993, p. 99).
In Peppiatt’s recently-published monograph Francis Bacon in Your Blood –
a critically-acclaimed memoir of his relationship with the artist – he recalls
his joy in acquiring the work. ‘I am obviously delighted to possess this major
painting’, he recounts, ‘not least because it records such an intimate moment of
Francis and George together’ (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A
Memoir, London 2015, p. 266). Though flickering traces of Dyer’s likeness
would continue to permeate Bacon’s portraits for the rest of his life, it is in
Two Figures that the artist is finally able to bid farewell to his lover.
The darkness that permeated Bacon’s output in the immediate aftermath of Dyer’s
death is momentarily quelled and, in the hallowed arena of the artist’s
imagination, the two are reunited.
London, 10 December 2015
FO: Your relationship with Francis Bacon is legendary. Can you recall how and
when you first met?
FO: What were your first impressions of George Dyer?
FO: At what point did the story shift from Soho to Paris?
FO: And of course this is the moment when, just before the opening of the
exhibition - a real breakthrough for Bacon - Dyer commits suicide.
FO: And then he embarked upon this landmark group of paintings known as the
‘black triptychs’.
FO: These black triptychs were painted in the early 1970s, and your painting is
situated right at the end of that phase. I think it can be associated with those
works in the sense that he was memorializing his great love.
FO: The painting originally came to you in a different form – perhaps you could
talk about the evolution of the work and how you came to acquire it.
FO: Much has been written about Bacon’s relationship with London and his Reece
Mews studio. How do you perceive his relationship with Paris? What was his
studio like?
FO: You recently published your memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood. What
projects are you currently working on?
A newly discovered diary found during research for a major biography of the painter Francis Bacon has uncovered new information about this important artist’s early career as a designer and furniture maker. Little was known about Its author, Eric Allden, other than they shared an address for two years during the early 1930s. Allden had been a civil servant before meeting Bacon, and as a cultural attaché at the British Embassy in Peking. He was twenty-three years older than Bacon when they first met, by chance, on a ferry from Dover to Calais in 1929, and immediately formed a close bond. Allden’s interest in Bacon and his work is made evident in his diary. It records facts and insights that challenge some of the long-established myths surrounding Bacon’s early life. It also provides details about his early work as a designer of rugs. Whether this relationship was more than just a friendship has not been discussed in the article and hopefully will be revealed in the book.
The Burlington Magazine has published an article, titled ‘Bacon’s Beginnings’ and based on this discovery, which can be found in the January 2016 issue. Its editor the author Frances Spalding, remarks: ‘Leading museums tried hard over the years to get information out of Bacon about his early work as a designer and he refused to collaborate. But Allden was his companion at this time, and witnessed some of the negotiations that went on in the making of this work.’ The diary came to light when Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, authors of the forthcoming biography of Bacon, hired researcher James Norton to do a comprehensive internet and archival search of early Bacon acquaintances. Stevens and Swan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2005 for their de Kooning: An American Master.
Stevens and Swan’s biography marks a new, more scholarly approach to Bacon’s life and art. In so doing, they are challenging the mythologies which have grown up around this artist, some of which were partly of his own making. Stevens and Swan’s biography is not ‘authorised’ but they were given a research grant by the Estate of Francis Bacon and have worked closely with the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Their eagerly awaited book will be published in the fall of 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S., Harper Collins in the U.K. and also in Italy, and will follow the publication of a five-volume catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s paintings in April 2016.
‘I TRAVELLED VIA Dover to Calais by Pullman train. The sea was perfectly calm [. . .] on deck sat beside a young fellow who spoke to me. He told me he was starting a shop in London for ultra modern furniture and was going to Paris to purchase examples. His name was Francis Bacon and he had big childish pale blue eyes’. Thus reads Eric Allden’s diary for 15th July 1929 (Fig.24), the meeting having occurred three days earlier. 1929 was the year Francis Bacon turned twenty and began to make a living as an artist, producing his first three paintings, a decorated wooden screen and several rugs, all of which have survived thanks to the dedication to Bacon of their first owner, Eric Allden (Fig.25). Bacon, however, never did establish a shop, although the following year he used his South Kensington studio as a showcase for items of furniture that he had designed.
Until now little was known about Allden other than his ownership of these first works and a listing in the electoral register showing that he shared an address with Bacon at the beginning of the 1930s. Bacon’s beginnings as an artist are also obscure, due to his own reticence, his disregard for personal records at this time and his subsequent self-mythologisation. Although in 2009 Tate Britain showed three rugs and a painted screen in a small display entitled Francis Bacon: Early Work in Tate Britain, many questions remain about Bacon’s earliest paintings, his rugs and furniture and about the friendship that developed between him and Allden. Some of these find answers in Allden’s unpublished diaries, which recently came to light.1 As will be seen in this article, they also describe previously unknown works and reveal a new narrative of this stage in Bacon’s career, with significant differences to that found in existing biographies. For instance, his biographers state that in his late teens he became estranged from his family.2 The diaries, however, record a lengthy holiday in Ireland in September 1929, which the two men spent with Bacon’s family, providing new insights into Bacon’s family background. In this way, the diaries rewrite the first chapter in Bacon’s artistic biography, offering deeper insights into his personality, lifestyle, tastes and work as a painter and designer.
Allden, born in 1886, and therefore twenty-three years older than Bacon, was a devout Roman Catholic, his diaries uncovering a life of globetrotting intrigue and distinguished service. From the extant volumes, we know that he began writing a diary in 1897 and went on doing so for the next fifty years. After university and travels to Europe, in 1912 he crossed Russia to Vladivostok where he was jailed for six weeks, having been accused of espionage, perhaps with justification for we know that, after a stint with the War Refugees Committee at the start of the First World War, he served as an intelligence officer for the remainder of that war in London and Switzerland.3 Once peace had returned, Allden became Private Secretary to Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, the Secretary of State for War, and was awarded a CBE in the 1922 dissolution honours list. He subsequently spent two years as an attaché at the British embassy in Beijing. By 1928 he was in London. Apparently retired from the diplomatic service, Allden makes no reference to further employment, with only occasional mentions of investments suggesting a source of income.
Bacon had also been leading a peripatetic lifestyle. Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents, he had run away from his boarding school in Cheltenham at the age of sixteen, ending up back at the family home in Ireland. His father, Eddy, a retired army major who trained horses, was an irascible authoritarian whom the asthmatic, somewhat effeminate Francis was bound to antagonise. When Francis was caught trying on his mother’s underwear, he was thrown out of the house by his father. It was thought, until now, that Bacon never returned to Ireland. He rarely spoke of his father except in the most disparaging terms, but the prevailing belief, fostered by Bacon himself, that the rupture was definitive is quite false, as will be shown.
Bacon then drifted from one place to the next, beginning in London. He spent a couple of months in Berlin being sexually educated by an older male relative, in whose charge he had been misguidedly placed by his father, and eventually made his way in the spring of 1927 to Paris, where he remained until at least late 1928. In Paris he saw a Picasso exhibition at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg which, as is well known, had a major effect. Back in London, Bacon emerged as an accomplished interior decorator and designer of Art Deco furniture. Without any apparent training, it is probable he learned much in Paris and may have picked up some professional guidance. An illustrated article entitled ‘The 1930 Look in British Decoration’ in The Studio magazine of August 1930 (Fig.26) shows an array of modern furniture, rugs and wall hangings which had been photographed in Bacon’s South Kensington studio. The article contains the claim that he had ‘worked in Paris and in Germany for some years’.4 He had certainly spent these years in Berlin and Paris, and the latter in particular was then a vibrant modernist centre for the decorative arts. Almost certainly, he had visited Eileen Gray’s shop, Galerie Jean Désert, at 9 rue de Lota, Paris, where he would have encountered not only an elegant and economical modernism, which the furniture on view in The Studio imitates, but also the stark abstract patterns which she and others at this time had introduced into rug design.
Bacon’s home and studio at the time of the article was at 17 Queensberry Mews West in South Kensington, until now his first known London address since returning from Paris. However, Allden’s diaries reveal that, when he visited Bacon at the end of July 1929, for the first time since their encounter on the Channel ferry, the younger man was living at 6 Relton Mews in Knightsbridge with his loyal childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. Allden’s diary notes that, as he arrived, the Egyptologist Guy Brunton was leaving Bacon’s flat (Bacon later pronounced that ancient Egyptian art was ‘the greatest art that’s ever been done’)5 and that after he had gone Bacon and Allden had a long talk: ‘He is very young, only 19, and has a most original mind, intensely modern and futurist in art. He designs very odd looking furniture and rugs and has just furnished somebody’s yacht. He asked me if I’d stay to dinner with him, and when I accepted sent his old nurse out for food [. . .] I like this boy, who is extremely intelligent, but he has the complexion of a girl, with big blue eyes and long lashes. He is really too pretty for a boy, and his ways are rather effeminate. His people live in Ireland, County Kildare, and he told me that when he was 16 he ran away to Paris, but was brought back, though soon after he was permitted to return there’.
Thereafter the two men were frequently in each other’s company. They met again the following morning at the National Gallery, as Allden records: ‘I pointed out my favourite pictures and told him a little about some of them and the painters. He is extremely intelligent and has a most attractive mind’. After lunch Allden accompanied Bacon to Euston Square ‘where a wholesale firm named Erard is going to upholster his modern metal furniture’. This was the cabinet maker Charles Erard who, when their visit ended, drove them ‘to another wholesale place off New Oxford Street where we examined calf skin and sheep skin leather which is going to be used to cover some of Francis’ things’. These remarkable details are the first that have come to light concerning the manufacture of Bacon’s furniture, and they tally with the furniture shown in The Studio. Allden’s diary also records that Bacon had ‘an astonishingly cultivated taste in reading’ and that ‘he has asked me to go to Ireland to stay with his people at the beginning of September’. This same week they made a visit to the zoo and Allden dined at Bacon’s flat again. The meal was ‘cooked by his old nanny who is a treasure and who rejoices in the name of Miss Lightfoot’. Allden continues: ‘Francis announced that he had been to see a certain Dr. Fielding-Ould as he had been sleeping badly, digesting badly etc. for some time past, & that the latter said he was very run down, rather anaemic, poison in his system etc. and had better go into his nursing home for a bit & take a starvation & fruit juice cure’. They also spent the first of several evenings at the theatre, Bacon enjoying plays by Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw and particularly Anton Chekhov.
The treatment for Bacon’s digestive problems is confirmed by a further entry from 8th August 1929: Bacon had been admitted to the nursing home at 106 Cromwell Road. Allden found him there ‘looking rather feeble, but over the worst of the cure, as the first 36 hours of starvation are the most trying’. Bacon was allowed out on 13th August, Allden tells us, because ‘he wanted to have his hair cut at Harrods [. . .] Then we went round to his flat as he wanted to look at his glasses which had arrived from Paris & in his eagerness to get them out, broke one of them!’ – a reference presumably to glassware that Bacon had either bought or designed. The diary continues: ‘We talked over plans for when he is well. He has suggested to his mother that she should motor him & me to some quiet place by the sea in Ireland, and it is a suggestion that appeals to me very much’.
By the following week these plans were well advanced. Allden reports: ‘He is simply delighted because his mother has written that, though she cannot manage the motor tour, she has rented a cottage for him for the whole of September, about 6 miles from the house they have taken [. . .] It is understood that I am to accompany him and stay there. He wants me to remain all the time he is there and is quite ecstatic about it [. . .] We shall take plenty of books & lead a simple life’. By the end of the month Bacon had recovered in time for the journey.
On 31st August they travelled to Dublin. After two days of sightseeing, Allden recorded in a matter-of-fact manner that ‘Francis went off very early to Broadstone station with some of our luggage to meet his father there and send it with the dogs by the 7 o’clock train’. Later that morning Bacon met his mother and set off with her for Galway by car, Allden taking the train and the three of them dining together that evening at the hotel. ‘The hotel was very full, so Francis & I had to share a room’.
The next day, 3rd September, they drove fifty miles west from Galway to Letterfrack where Bacon’s parents had rented a cottage in the grounds of Bunnaboghee House. Here they joined Bacon’s father and Francis’s two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winnie, who had arrived a little earlier. After tea Bacon’s mother drove him and Allden the six miles to their bungalow in Renvyle. It is described by Allden: ‘A long passage runs across the house from end to end, having on the right a good sized bedroom, which I have appropriated and at the left a large sitting room with another small bedroom next to it, which Francis has taken [. . .] The sitting room has a window looking each way, and from one of them there is a beautiful view seawards, across the sloping fields to the shore of Killary Bay, half-a-mile away. A series of rocky hilly islands shuts out the open Atlantic, and across the bay are the mountains of Mayo’. The first night was ‘unforgettable’, their beds too damp to sleep in and Bacon afraid to stay alone, so they sat together by the turf fire: ‘The noise of the stream, which runs by the house, and the general strangeness & loneliness had got on his nerves. I must say the whole place had a strange eerie feeling. There were noises outside, as if people were prowling about the house, and up in the roof things kept rustling’.
They spent the next morning with Bacon’s family, and Allden’s record of what he heard about the family’s history adds a wealth of detail to what was previously known: ‘Major Bacon is a man with a temper, so Francis tells me, and the whole family, Mrs. Bacon included, has had a lot to put up with in the past. He had malaria very badly soldiering in Burma and suffers much from indigestion, and at times his temper has been appalling. Both Francis & his elder brother at different times ran away from home. The elder boy could not live at home, and work was found for him in South Africa, where last spring he died of tetanus, a great shock to his family.6 Francis says that his father has been better tempered since the boy’s death, having been much affected by it. Mrs. Bacon, née Watson, is an attractive woman with light blue eyes and a pretty smile. She hunts with the Kildare during the winter, and the rest of the time is entirely devoted to husband, children and household. But she is intelligent and interested in things of all kinds, whether she understands them or not’. It is possible that the rift between Eddy and Francis could have been healed by his father’s remorse and grief over the death of his eldest son (two years before, in 1927, Bacon’s younger brother, Edward, had also died, of tuberculosis).
Two days later Nanny Lightfoot arrived to join Francis and Allden. In her absence, Allden had commended Bacon for being an excellent cook. They often dined with the family at Bunnaboghee or picnicked with them on the beach. When the wife of the writer and politician Oliver St John Gogarty called, ‘Nanny hauled Francis out of the room by the bathroom which he has turned into a studio. He went to the door palette in hand, and received an invitation, “for him & his friend” from the lady, Mrs. Gogarty, to fish tomorrow on their lake’.
On 24th September, while preparing to leave, Allden noted down insights into Bacon and his family. ‘I have been here three weeks and enjoyed it very much. I know Francis much better now than I did, and he has stood the test well. He is a delightful companion & has as keen an intellect as anyone I know. It is extraordinary that at his age (19) he should have such a vivid interest in such intricate and abstruse studies. For instance the books he brought with him to read on his holiday are the following: Spengler’s Decline of the West; Jung’s Psychological Studies; The Development of Dramatic Art by D C Stuart; Plato’s Symposium; and two or three novels such as Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. His brain is an intensively speculative one, and is thirsting for knowledge. He is capable in other ways as well. He can cook admirably. He drives a car with skill. His drawing & painting in his own peculiar modern style are extremely interesting and clever. His parents must feel that they have little responsibility for their offspring in his case, for I cannot see that any of his characteristics come from either of them. His mother is anxious to understand him and sympathises with him in his aims & achievements, but she was married at 17 to her husband & has been overshadowed by him. He is as selfish as it is possible to conceive; thinks of nothing but his own pleasure in sport of various kinds; never gives Francis a penny, yet, although eternally grumbling about being hard up, can always find what money he needs for his own entertainment. He is quite agreeable but unattractive’.
Bacon, never otherwise known to be a motorist, drove Allden to his train. ‘We didn’t mind saying goodbye because in a fortnight we shall meet again in London, but Francis said it would be terribly lonely without me in the cottage. His two little sisters were to go over today and stay there with him’. In Dublin, Allden received from Bacon ‘a charming letter, full of his delightful fanciful thoughts. Here is an extract from it: – “Last night I walked down to the sea: it was so calm and beautiful. I cannot stay in the big room here as the twilight falls. The hills seem to press down into the room to fill it with some primeval despair. Trees grow lecherously into the walls and the sea creeps slowly across the floor – and then night comes down, the mountains are drawn and once again my mind becomes normal. Eric, there is a strange melancholy about the twilight – you too, I’m sure have felt it, the time when the sinister Dionysian side of nature predominates most”’.
Back in London, Allden began to look for rooms which he and Bacon could share in November, Bacon having to leave his flat by then. On 8th October they were reunited. Allden immediately noticed the rugs (Fig.27). ‘His rugs arrived from Wilton’s. They have made them up beautifully. One, called “Formal Design”, in black & grey with a touch of white & scarlet, he is letting me have at cost price as a birthday present. His cousin, Diana Watson, who lives near York, also came in for tea. She is quite young, very intelligent, with a type of mind similar to Francis. Apparently she reads all sorts of books girls shouldn’t, and there can be few mysteries for her’. Watson was another early collector of Bacon’s work.
The rugs Bacon designed were manufactured by the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Allden eventually owned at least four, two of which can be seen in a photograph of him in his flat (Fig.28), as well as a painted wooden screen (Fig.29), a watercolour, a gouache and an oil painting (Fig.30), all dated 1929, these amounting to all Bacon’s earliest surviving works. (Bacon later destroyed early work that was not in the hands of collectors, a habit he maintained throughout his career with work he deemed unsatisfactory.)
The two men returned at this time to the National Gallery. Alden writes: ‘He wanted to see the Piero della Francesca “Nativity” as he had heard a lecture on the wireless say it was composed of a series of cubes’. Then, while Bacon was laid up with a respiratory ailment, Allden found ‘a maisonette in Vincent Square [. . .] It was at No.54 and the owner is a Miss Green [. . .] [who] wants 3½ guineas a week, which seemed reasonable enough. The windows look out across the playing field of the Westminster school, filling the square & beyond one can see the towers of the Houses of Parliament. It was very quiet’.
On 18th October, the day before Allden’s forty-third birthday, which they celebrated over lunch, Allden departed for his family’s country house in Suffolk where he often stayed with his younger brother Guy. He took with him on the train from Liverpool Street Station a rug. ‘It is one of Francis’ last batch and I have purchased it for £12.16.0, its cost price. He wanted to give it to me but I wouldn’t hear of it. So on Friday morning he gave me a beautiful book as a birthday present, Burckhardt’s Renaissance in Italy. He is such a generous, loving boy’. Alongside such happy moments ran Allden’s concern about Bacon’s health. ‘He complained that he wasn’t feeling well again, his nerves seemed upset as well, and I rather lectured him; told him he mustn’t run about such a lot, because if he tired himself physically so much, it was bound to react on his nerves’. But he was certainly well enough to attend language classes: the next day Allden picked up Bacon from the Berlitz School ‘where he is having German lessons with his cousin Diana Watson’, presumably in preparation for his forthcoming visit in 1930 to Germany.
Bacon and Allden agreed to rent the maisonette in Vincent Square until 11th January 1930, Bacon moving in on the 28th October 1929, his twentieth birthday. ‘Francis & Nurse had moved in after lunch, but Francis had rushed out again, to the City, Nurse thought [. . .] Francis came back presently bringing with him a metal and glass stand for cocktail glasses, which he wanted there & then to fasten up on the wall “to see how it looked”. I managed to restrain him, because it would have meant huge holes in Miss Green’s immaculate walls, and as we’ve only got the place for 10 weeks, we must be careful what we do to it. This put him in a mood, which in spite of all his efforts, lasted till bed time. He is a dear boy and very seldom gets into such moods. I used to be like it myself, so understand him well. He is always so terribly penitent afterwards’. The arrangement was apparently chaste: ‘My room is on the first floor, a big room with two windows [. . .] Francis has the back room on the same floor [. . .] On the ground floor, our sitting room looks out on the square, with Nanny’s room behind it, & our bathroom. Below in the basement is our dining room, kitchen & lavatory’.
The nature of Bacon and Allden’s relationship is never made explicit. Allden often describes separate sleeping arrangements, scrupulously giving reasons when occasionally they had to share a room, and is at any rate too discreet a diarist to go into prurient details. Yet, although the relationship may not have been sexual, there were evidently strong bonds of feeling on both sides. Similarly, the level of financial support given by Allden to Bacon is not specified, other than the gifts and outings occasionally mentioned. He may well have paid Bacon’s rent; it is not known how successful Bacon’s furniture business really was although there were certainly commissions and he enjoyed a level of financial independence.
Their shared interest again took them to galleries, for the next day Allden recorded that Francis wanted to show him certain pictures in the Tate Gallery. ‘He pointed out two pictures by Stanley Spencer, one of ‘Christ bearing the Cross’, the other, a large canvas of ‘the Resurrection’. Both are most strange in conception [. . .] There is a Watts room, full of abnormalities as they seemed to us today, and there is a long gallery filled with the French Impressionists, very interesting’. On another occasion, visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum, they admired the Torso of Banovic Strahinja by Ivan Mestrovic and Rodin’s La terre se Détache de la matière.
Allden had earlier considered going to Rome for the winter and staying with his brother Guy, but he opted to remain with Bacon: ‘Francis is so full of intellectual activity that he inspires me & creates a desire not to fall below whatever standard he may have given me. He does me good’. Allden also affords a precious glimpse of at least one lost and previously unknown Bacon painting. After a weekend spent ‘hard at work painting’, Bacon showed Allden ‘a picture of three horses jumping in a circus with a big curtain down one side, rather in the style of John Armstrong, also an oil painting of a sketch he did for me at Renvyle, a furnished [sic] landscape’. They had visited an exhibition of Armstrong’s work the previous week, which Allden thought ‘obviously influenced by Chirico in his use of Greco-Roman forms’. The circus picture has not survived, but the oil painting may be Painting (1929; Fig.30), an ensemble of pollarded trees and wooden screens by the sea that Allden subsequently owned.7
On 6th November Allden’s diary for 1929 ended, and no diaries survive for the next three years. This is curious: such a conscientious diarist is unlikely to have suddenly abandoned his habit, and it is therefore possible that these diaries have been destroyed. It is known that for the next two years Bacon, Allden and Jessie Lightfoot lived together at 17 Queensberry Mews West in South Kensington, where they presumably moved in January 1930. Allden may have later suppressed the diaries in deference to Bacon’s growing celebrity, or Bacon may have been unhappy with anything that contradicted the nihilistic image of himself which he later projected.
The remaining diaries contain few allusions to the missing years but they do flesh out the existing biographical record. Around this time, two influential older men entered Bacon’s life: the artist Roy de Maistre, newly arrived from Australia; and Eric Hall, a high-living married alderman who must have challenged Allden’s position in Bacon’s life by becoming another patron, he and Bacon embarking on a fifteen-year relationship. De Maistre, meanwhile, became Bacon’s artistic mentor, painted several revealing studies of Bacon’s studio, and also befriended Allden, sharing with him a strong religious conviction and growing exasperation with Bacon’s delinquency.
In November 1930 Bacon’s first exhibition was held at his Queensberry Mews studio, a converted garage beneath the rooms where he lived with Lightfoot and Allden.8 The exhibition was shared with two other artists, de Maistre and Jean Shepeard, and Bacon exhibited four paintings, a print and four rugs.
When Allden’s diaries start again in August 1933 it soon becomes clear that a change has occurred. On 11th September Allden dined with de Maistre, whom previously he had tended to dismiss. ‘When he used to come to the studio in Queensberry Mews I never paid much attention to him, classing him rather with Mrs. MacDermot, Ernst and Francis’ other odd friends’.9
A week later he and de Maistre met again. ‘We talked of Francis, who he thinks is beginning to get restless. He fears that he is deteriorating in his habits and way of living. Poor little boy. Francis is one of those people who always arouses my protective instincts. He is like a child and needs to be cared for like a child’. While Bacon was attracted to father figures at this time, he seems at other times to have wilfully evaded their paternalistic clutches.
Bacon’s first significant success came in 1933. On 19th October Allden learnt from Diana Watson that Sir Michael Sadler, the educationalist who had acquired an outstanding collection of modern art, had paid £20 for a painting by Bacon and commissioned another for £30 ‘of his skull from an x-ray photo’. Allden comments: ‘Francis is rather sniffy about doing the commissioned one! So like him, with his supreme contempt for filthy lucre!’ A week later Allden went to see an exhibition of modern painters curated by Herbert Read at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street. ‘There I saw Francis’ picture which Sir Michael Sadler has bought. It is called “Crucifixion” and has a quite remarkable quality. It suggests a spidery emaciated cruciform shape, with a bent figure clasping it, white on greyish black. It is far & away the most significant picture there and marks an enormous advance in his work’. He also noted that Bacon had completed the commission: ‘a strange powerful figure against lurid yellow, and a skull below’; and he bought a copy of Read’s book, Art Now, as it featured a reproduction of Bacon’s Crucifixion.
Now that Allden and Bacon were no longer sharing living accommodation, they saw much less of each other. In early December 1933 Allden found himself invited to tea at Harrods by Bacon’s mother. A few days later he had lunch with Mrs Bacon and Francis at the Criterion. ‘I enjoyed seeing them both again. It was the first time for a long time that I had had any long talk with Francis, who looks much as he did when we were living together, though he has grown a bit I fancy. He is mad about Grünewald’s paintings and the German primitive school, and Michelangelo, whom I remember he rather despised at one time’.
In February 1934 Bacon organised his first solo exhibition of paintings, which Allden visited with Diana Watson. ‘Francis’s exhibition opened on Ash Wednesday, the 14th in the little room he has rented for 6 months in the basement of Sunderland House, and which he has called the Transition Gallery. He has had it painted a sombre green, on which the bright gold picture frames & the predominantly reds of his paintings show up well. I did not care for any of the pictures as much as the one I saw at the Mayor gallery, which Sir Michael Sadler bought. They are very abstract and suggest strange organs of the human body, rather disagreeably. One is entitled ‘Wound for a Crucifixion’, a gash of congealed blood on a background of green & yellow. I bought one called ‘Head in Extacy’ [sic], which is not recognisable as a head, is pleasing in colour and drawing, though it has a strangeness, which makes me slightly uncomfortable. Francis has genius undoubtedly, but he is too introspective. I am afraid he will not sell at present’. In April 1934 Eric Hall, who encouraged Bacon’s taste for gambling, was causing Allden and de Maistre to fret: ‘We talked of Francis and we both regretted the influence Hall continues to exercise over him. Poor little Francis!’ The next day ‘I went in to see Douglas Cooper at the Mayor gallery for a moment and he too talked of Francis, whom he is not allowed to see because Hall dislikes him so’. However, Eric Hall was soon to become an equally enthusiastic champion of de Maistre’s work and sat to him for his portrait.
By this time, Bacon and Nanny Lightfoot were living at 71 Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea, where Allden visited them on 28th June 1934, Lightfoot’s birthday. ‘She and Francis were both very pleased to see me. I took her some red carnations and a 10/- note. Francis was just as untidy as ever attired in a filthy red bathrobe, and the studio was like a pig sty with paint all over everything. The picture I bought at his show I had sent back by Diana a short time before, as I felt it didn’t go in my room, and I am to have another when I see one I like better. There was nothing there however that I could have taken in preference, and I cannot wait till the present phase of Francis’ work is past. I can’t say that I care about the rather gruesome distortions of heads, bodies etc. in which he seems to find his only self-expression at the present moment’. Allden’s dislike of the recent paintings may have wounded Bacon, already despondent at the failure of his exhibition, for the artist destroyed both of the works named in the diary.
It would be almost five years before Allden recorded another sighting of Bacon. On 23rd May 1939: ‘I ran into Francis Bacon, & brought him back to see my Tchelitchew, as he had been taken to see him in Paris by Douglas Cooper. He liked it very much. He was on his way to dine with Diana Watson. He wants to take up sculpture now. He has been painting a lot but not showing anything’.
When the war broke out, Bacon, although unfit for service owing to his asthma, was eager to do his duty. On 8th September Allen records hearing from Diana Watson ‘that Francis is working 12 hours a day at first aid’, even though the air raids had yet to begin. On 1st June 1940 Eddy Bacon died at home in Dorset. Francis had recently visited him. Allden must have known this because Bacon’s mother thanked him on 5th June for his letter of condolence. After another five-year gap, Bacon reappeared fleetingly on 6th April 1944: ‘Got my rations at Harrods,’ writes Allden, ‘& brought them home, then walked to the Oratory for High Mass at 11. Met Francis Bacon on way’. The following year Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion made Bacon’s name well known. No diary survives for 1945, nor does Allden show us his reaction to the burgeoning fame and notoriety of this artist whose emergence he had chronicled in such revelatory detail. Their last recorded meeting, on 12th January 1946, found Bacon in a strange mood. A major exhibition of recent work by Picasso and Matisse was on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum which had a significant impact on the course of modern British art. But, after the two men met in Brompton Road, Allden was pleased to discover that Bacon shared his disappointment with this show. Perhaps Bacon was pandering to his friend’s tastes, as the main demand he made on Allden during this meeting was to ask for help with his widowed mother who had recently moved with her daughter Winnie from Dorset to London. Allden notes: ‘He asked me if I could introduce his mother to any people as she doesn’t know many people in London’. Allden must have been socially obliging as on 8th October 1947 he attended ‘a little sherry party to bid goodbye to Mrs. Bacon who leaves tomorrow on her long journey to South Africa’. She remained in South Africa for the rest of her life, Francis visiting her often. The final entry in Allden’s diary, made on 21st December 1947, records an exchange of gifts between him and Roy de Maistre. Allden died aged sixty-two in February 1949.
The bulk of Allden’s estate passed to Francis Elek, a Slovakian Hungarian Jew who had approached Allden in 1942 for help in tracing his family, owing to Allden’s connections with the Red Cross. The two men had subsequently gone into business together. Elek thus acquired three of Bacon’s rugs, the 1929 gouache and Painting of the same year. To these he later added the painted screen which Allden had given to de Maistre, whom Elek had met through Allden. All were entrusted to the Tate on long-term loan after Elek’s death in 2008. The only other picture in Allden’s collection, Watercolour (1929), was later acquired by Valerie, the widow of T.S. Eliot, whom Bacon greatly admired.
You’ve seen them before, those three eyeless monsters with their maws stretched taut in terrible screams. The unforgettable characters at the centre of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (above) were so shocking when they were first revealed in 1944 that the critic John Russell declared, “We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them.” Yet the three figures which have been on show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York do not fill the viewer with the same sense of terror. In fact the effect is quite the opposite. Here are the same shrieking creatures, but this triptych is much larger and neater than the original, which was as small as a devotional painting and as raw as a chunk of meat. That’s because this is not the same picture but a copy entitled “Second Version of Triptych 1944”, a painting made almost half a century later when the Tate wouldn’t loan the original out for an exhibition of Bacon’s work.
Gagosian’s show of Bacon’s late paintings is full of such double-takes and do-overs. All the signifiers of his best known pictures are here – the bare rooms, the fleshy shadows, the sickly puces and vulgar violets – but they appear in lesser known works. As the wall text proudly states, “there has until now never been a show devoted solely to investigating the innovations and departures of his late paintings.” Judging from the evidence, that is because Bacon appears to have innovated and departed not very much at all.
It’s true that in the last 15 years of his life he started using spray paint to add blossoming white lesions to his murky canvases. He also began imprinting them with strips of corduroy and developed a peculiar obsession with dressing his amorphous, fleshy lumps in cricket pads. But if there is one significant change it is that by the 1980s his once terrifying ghouls and gobbets had come to seem almost familiar. These are horrors drawn by rote. In his late paintings Bacon was no longer painting the void, he was decorating it.
It’s hard to venture into a museum these days without stumbling upon a “rediscovery” of the “late” works of a great artist. Matisse, Rembrandt, Malevich and Turner have all had major exhibitions devoted to such pieces over the last couple of years. Similarly, commercial galleries like Gagosian have been strip-mining artists’ late careers for hidden value. The question for today’s viewer is whether such art has an intrinsic value that has been overlooked, or whether it is derivative twaddle being revived purely for financial speculation.
The idea of a “late” period in an artist’s life comes from Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century tome, “Lives of the Painters”. He recalls a visit to the 70-something Titian in Venice, and remarks that “it would have been well for him in these his last years not to work save as a pastime, so as not to diminish with works of less excellence the reputation gained in his best years.” In Vasari’s eyes an artist’s work followed the path of an artist’s body, going through stages of maturation, mastery, decline and eventual decrepitude. Nevertheless, by the following century Titian’s late works were being roundly praised and have been ever since. Goethe called them a major revolution in painting, depicting “in abstracto those materials which he had rendered before concretely: so, for instance, only the idea of velvet not the material itself.”
Rembrandt’s late work is the examplar. The paintings made between the 1650s and his death in 1669 are wildly original and strikingly emotional. Nevertheless, as with Titian’s later works, they were not popular at the time. One of his most famous late paintings, the weird and mystical “The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis” (1661), was commissioned for the walls of Amsterdam’s town hall only to be taken down almost immediately. Similarly J.M.W. Turner’s late paintings, with their pre-Impressionistic take on natural phenomena, were roundly attacked by critics at the time for not telling “the general truth.” They are now among the most popular pictures in Britain.
FRANCIS BACON: LATE PAINTINGS
Few artists that came into their own after high modernism measure up to Francis Bacon, whose paintings are models of twisted introspection. What’s more, Bacon actually knew how to paint. Not silk-screen, not put messages on LED boards, not make collages, not arrange objects together, but actually work with phenomenal skill like the greatest of the artists had done. And his work hits not only on the visceral level, but on the intellectual as well.
A delicious slice of Bacon’s oeuvre is now on view at the Gagosian gallery in New York (though you will have to hurry, as the last day of the exhibit is tomorrow). This is the third exhibit of the artist at Gagosian since 2006, and this one “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings” concentrates on the last twenty years of Bacon’s career. Since Gagosian has significant pull in the art world, some of the twenty paintings were pulled from Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and the Smithsonian, among others.
Though the late paintings are less brutalist in some ways – the colors are more subdued and the paint lays flatter on the canvas, their subject matter remains as challenging as ever. The large red triptych in the first room, the second version of his infamous 1944 painting “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” in particularly emblematic of Bacon’s tortured work – the figures in the right and in the left painting look like they were modeled from something you’d normally find at the butcher. The torsos are gone, only the connected limbs remain, fleshy white, like butchered chicken. In place of faces are screaming mask.
There is a fare share of self-portraits in the exhibit. In all of them Bacon had taken the existential pain that twisted him inside, and put it on the outside. One part of his face remains lifelike, while the other one is irreparably warped. It’s captivating, it demands attention in a way that genuine pain, and genuine art does. One cannot look away
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings – Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Through Dec 12.
Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body, 1981
Over the past several years the Gagosian Gallery in New York City has mounted shows described as "museum quality," Borrowing heavily from institutions and private collectors these exhibitions such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (2013), the Takashi Murakami exhibition (2014), Picasso & the Camera (2014), and the two-part exhibition In The Studio (2015) all wowed New Yorkers with their breadth and depth. Each drew impressive crowds — with lines down the block — for a commercial gallery
The most recent show Francis Bacon: Late Paintings is perhaps the most stunning of them all. Not because of size; in fact, it’s probably the smallest of all the aforementioned blockbusters. Twenty-seven paintings all made in the last two decades or so of Bacon’s turbulent life have been hung on mushroom-colored walls on the two floors of Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery. The works are complemented by a hallway exhibit of candid personal photographs of Bacon taken by Eddy Batache, mostly shot in the mid-1980s, in which Bacon appears almost happy, an occasional flutter of a smile replacing his usual look of utter despair.
Having not really focused on Bacon’s work in quite a while I was blown away by how fresh, shocking, and incredibly beautiful the paintings are. His work seems to be a lightening rod for strong reaction. From Jerry Saltz’s fierce review of the 2009 retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the group of ladies on an art tour, who were at the gallery the day I visited and left muttering “too hard.” Indeed, a group young art students in the gallery were so moved that they were almost unable to speak when asked what they thought of the show.
The paintings in the exhibit reflect a change of mood in Bacon’s work over time. Work of the earlier decades portray the agonies of man, masses of ectoplasm, flesh, bone, and loneliness, whereas his later works give way to calmer psycho-landscapes. Gone are the piles of flesh, replaced by a vision more stripped to its essentials, both in terms of painting and psychology.
There is, of course, that gorgeous color that Bacon’s work has characteristically employed. His palette has always been sophisticated. Pairings of brilliant oranges and reds with cool blues and greens, and of odd, neutral tones with warm black set the images in motion. The work is both aggressively modernist, reflecting a color palette that was initially used in fashion and interior design in the ‘60s and 70s (look at Rudi Gernreich’s clothes and Harry Bertoia’s furniture) and is distinctly 20th century. The use of oil pastel in conjunction with oil paint contributes to many of the urgent gestures in these works as well as the delicate veils of color we see.
All of this sublime color of course belies the deep psychological trauma and loneliness of the figures that inhabit Bacon’s world. The later paintings more often than not portray a solitary figure constrained by the suggestion of a geometric architecture. In the triptychs, there is a single figure in each frame. As always, Bacon walks the line between figuration and abstraction. Figure in Movement (1978) can be seen as an acrobat caught in movement, the backdrop and suggestion of a painted ring hinting at a performance. Or one may look at the work as the interplay of form, color, and paint, the figure reduced to a tangle of strong, abstracted forms. The kicker in this painting is the purple shadow that lies underneath the figure. The shadow, which appears as a standing figure with hands on its hips, bears no relation to the movement or figure above, suggesting that it is perhaps someone else’s shadow, a watcher of some sort, and perhaps it is we who are the watchers, a tacit acknowledgement of the relationship between the painter and the viewer. It is part of the mystery of the narrative.
In Study From the Male Body (1986) Bacon has placed a male nude on what could be a sculpture stand or a piece of mid-century furniture. The figure sits in an awkward pose, head looking right, torso dissolved into vague outlines of muscle and flesh. There is a very odd spatial game in this painting. It’s impossible to tell whether the architecture is advancing or receding — everything is out of whack here in time, space, and mind. The architectural black square behind the figure’s head melts and merges with the body, a depiction painted in beautiful, glowing color, like darkness descending over the mind.
Much of the overt pain and fear of Bacon’s earlier work from the 1940s seems to turn inward in the ‘70s and ‘80s. These paintings are more contemplative. We see few of the screaming rictuses that haunted the paintings of the 1940s; rather, that pain feels more muted. The small portraits that hang interspersed between the huge canvases seem to be exploring form and abstraction, rather than the “horror” often attributed to Bacon’s portraits. In Study for a Portrait (1978) we see a placid male face, perhaps painted from a photograph, as Bacon was known to prefer this to painting from life. The face is defined by pastel forms and gesture begins to take over figuration. Bacon has begun to carve the face, not in a gristly way, but into abstraction. The concrete forms have begun to be more prominent than the flesh of the man beneath them
If you didn’t already like Francis Bacon’s work, this exhibition may not change your mind. However, perhaps those who found Bacon’s early work too graphic and too “fleshy” will be drawn in by the sheer beauty of his painting as well as by what some might perceive as a more palatable sensibility. These later paintings convey both a technical mastery and the self-reflectiveness of an artist who had entered a new phase of maturity.
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings continues at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through December 12.
In the long shadow of abstraction
Jackie Wullschlager salutes the first major show of modem and contemporary
painting in London for a decade
Painting after abstraction is a subject so rich that it could support scores of group shows. But until now it hasn’t. White Cube’s compelling Tightrope Walk: Painted Images after Abstraction is not only the first exhibition on the theme, it is the first major survey of modern and contemporary painting in London for almost a decade, since the Hayward’s The Painting of Modern Life in 2007.
This is extraordinary. Tate Britain in these years has presented just one small snapshot of conceptual practice (Painting Now). Tate Modern has had only A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, essentially about performance art. No other public institution has attempted an overview of painting.
Immensely welcome, therefore, is this vast private gallery’s ambitious display of some 60 works, ranging chronologically from Matisse’s “Laurette au châle vert” (1917) through Patrick Caulfield’s sunny graphic architectural delineation “Springtime: Face à la mer” (1974) to Gary Hume’s laconic glossy abstracted “Yellow Nude 4” (2014), and Michael Armitage’s decorative/violent “Conservationists” (2015), painted in acknowledgment of Gauguin in oily swirls of pastel colours on coarse lubugo bark cloth from his native Kenya. Curated by US writer Barry Schwabsky, the exhibition considers a subject at the heart of 20th- and 21st-century figuration: how representational painters had to revise their strategies in acknowledgment of abstraction as a competing proposition. Tightrope Walk is not trying to be a museum show — there is an informal, scattergun quality to Schwabsky’s choices that feels closer to art-fair randomness, and the contemporary work is uneven: weakest links include Tracey Emin’s oversized wispy nude “I think of you All the time” and Karen Kilimnik’s Christmas-card kitsch “the fairy washing the mountain stream”. Yet a lightly worn erudition underpins a generous, pluralistic tone and many pleasures.
The highlights are from classic modernism, and indeed some of these come straight from this year’s art fairs. Francis Picabia’s “Halia” (1929), where four portraits are superimposed like photographic transparencies, giving a ghostlike illusory effect, was at Helly Nahmad at Art Basel, and Thomas Gibson offered the Matisse at Maastricht. But here, these belong to a narrative: the Picabia implies how abstraction was one response to photography, and “Laurette” signifies a critical moment in Matisse’s development.
For in the bleak war years of 1914-17 Matisse came as close to abstraction as possible: “French Window at Collioure” reduced to monochrome panels, “Shaft of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux” to an equilibrium of green and black slabs.
Francis Bacon admired Picasso’s 'brutality of fact', which had made him decide to be a painter
Then, at the end of 1916, he engaged Laurette, an Italian model with black curls, strong features and a flair for role-play and dressing up. She liberated the artist back to a more naturalistic way of working — although, as the geometric patterning of Laurette’s heart-shaped face and the triangular dip of her shawl demonstrate, the impact of abstraction invigorated the composition.
The show’s title comes from Francis Bacon, who said he aimed to achieve an image by “a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction. It will go right out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do with it.” Bacon’s enigmatic oil and pastel “Study for Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne” (1982) here captures her strong beauty of high forehead and long cheekbones, emerging from a sumptuous crimson ground. This is the “brutality of fact” Bacon admired in Picasso’s deconstructions, which had made him decide to become a painter.
Schwabsky’s broad aim is to illuminate links binding the pioneering modernists with the mid-century generations for whom the abstract/figurative divide was a determining formal consideration — and for some American painters in Clement Greenberg’s orbit even a moral one — and in turn to today’s artists embracing more hybrid approaches. Inevitably central is Picasso, continuing to test the limits of figuration to the end: an especially burlesque “Homme à la moustache”, the artist’s stand-in image for the vanity, fear of impotence yet desperate vitality of old age, and a contrasting rare, blocky yet tender portrait of childhood, “Mère et Enfant”, are the examples from the 1960s-1970s.
In Schwabsky’s reading, these sit easily with works by US artists who famously repudiated yet incorporated abstraction. Philip Guston developed a comparably late grotesquerie in which the swollen, lumpy, soft forms — the pink-blue mock-prettiness of “Cloud”, the furnacelike hints of “Frame” (1976) — of his cartoon realism were fleshed out from earlier abstract grids and modules. And assimilating abstraction’s flat planes and broad swaths of colour, Alex Katz’s lucid, hard-edged, condensed depictions of beautiful people were established in New York by the 1970s — “Dorothy” here — and continue to evolve with the playful spot-the-difference portraits of a gymnast in red bathing suit, “Double Sarah B” (2011).
Fight in the Elevator', based on footage of Beyoncé’s sister Solange attacking Jay Z, is the star new work
And what a delight, after the Royal Academy’s revelatory Richard Diebenkorn show this spring, to encounter another marvellous Bay Area figurative painter: “Untitled (Portrait of Tom Jefferson)” (1957), a push-pull of mystery and declaration, fluidly mixing delicate brushwork and brusque scrapes of the palette knife, is by David Park, who, in 1949, took all his abstract canvases to the dump and set about “much more troublesome” representational works, infused nevertheless with the gestural freedom of abstract expressionism.
Today’s most accomplished inheritor of that language is Cecily Brown. “Ever and Anon” (2015), a diptych of fraught bodies tangled up in splashes and clots, presumably refers both to the battles of sex and of abstraction and figuration — terms she avoids “because I’ve always tried to have it both ways”. Maybe only a woman painter in the late 20th century could have dared take on this macho legacy, co-opting it to express intimacy and female sexuality.
Perhaps for similar reasons, the 21st century’s most persuasive neo-cubist is also a woman: Dana Schutz. Her eight-foot “Fight in an Elevator”, based on CCTV of Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles attacking Jay Z in a Manhattan hotel lift in 2014, is the star new work. A drama of eye-gouging claw-like hands, severed limbs and blue stilettos stamping on squashed faces is crammed into three wedges — the interior of the lift as a trapezoid flanked by doors — and executed in crisp, broken geometric shapes and gaudy colours. It is suffused with the claustrophobia of celebrity media saturation and the panicky exuberance of urban life, yet luxuriates in the splash and resonance of painterly history.
Tightrope Walk: Painted Images after Abstraction’, White Cube, London, to January 24.
By KEN JOHNSON | THE NEW YORK TIMES | THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2015
In 1944, Francis Bacon painted a triptych called Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which caused a considerable stir when it was exhibited in London the following year. With its horrifying, anguished, gargoyle-like figures rendered in gray against vivid orange backgrounds, it captured the feeling of a mind pushed to the brink of insanity by the violence, terror and absurdity of a world at war. Bacon (1909–92), who had no formal art schooling, was in his mid-30s and not well known. Generally seen as his first mature work, “Three Studies” started a career that would make him one of the most popular artists of the 20th century.
Forty-four years later, Bacon reprised the Three Studies with a triptych called Second Version of Triptych 1944, this one much bigger, at about 20 feet wide and almost 5 feet high, with the same three demonic figures on backgrounds of velvety maroon. It’s one of the outstanding works in Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, a show at Gagosian Gallery of paintings from his last two decades. Billed by the gallery as the first in-depth presentation of the artist’s late work, it’s an exhibition that Bacon fans should not miss.
The show proves that Bacon worked at a high level into his 80s. The eight works displayed in Gagosian’s sixth floor, skylit gallery are all terrifically vivid, psychologically as well as visually. The 17 miscellaneous works of portraiture and narrative crowded into the narrow gallery on the fifth floor make a weaker impression, but they testify to a still vital imagination and painterly ambition.
The exhibition also offers an opportunity to rethink what kind of artist Bacon was. If your idea of him was formed by the more than 45 versions of the so-called screaming popes that he started producing in the early 1950s, you may think of him as a painter of 20th century horror. But is this scathing image of hysteria not also hysterically funny? As his palette brightened from the 1960s on, and as broader areas of pure color set off his smeary, rubbery, cartoonish figures, he started to look more like a painter of mordant comedy than existential tragedy.
Second Version of Triptych 1944 might not seem funny at first, but consider the gray monsters pictured in the middle and right-hand panels. They’re more goofy than scary. The middle one has an egg-shaped body on three, long, pointy stilts; the other resembles a side of beef. Both have long serpentine necks ending in toothy mouths, one grinning, the other either screaming or threatening to bite. They resemble escapees from movies like Ghostbusters and Men in Black. The kneeling, armless woman in gauzy orange dress in the left-hand panel seems to be warily eyeing them.
On the other hand, the deep red backgrounds of the outer panels, darkened in places by black spray paint, suggest high seriousness. Without the figures, they could be late Rothkos. In the middle panel, a red carpet leads to a platform where the central chimera presides like a nightmarish priest. With shiny gold frames and reflective glass containing each canvas — required by Bacon for his later works — the whole ensemble becomes a hyperbolic, ultimately comedic mix of the sacred and the profane, the ridiculous and the sublime. That can be said about his entire oeuvre.
Bacon wasn’t a painter’s painter in the sense that, say, his onetime friend Lucian Freud was. But if you don’t think of illustration as a bad thing, then it’s fair to say he was a great illustrator. Often his paintings are like much-enlarged panels from an unusually stylish graphic novel. The two canvases of Diptych: Study of the Human body – From a Drawing by Ingres could be details lifted from a longer, sequential narrative. The right side features a headless, fleshy, nude female torso, while the left pictures a headless man, naked but for a cricket player’s leg- and foot-wear, crouching with hands ready to catch a ball. Backgrounds of lush cadmium orange and overall dimensions of about 6½ feet high by 10 feet wide, give the diptych an imposing physicality, but it remains essentially a kind of surrealistic cartoon.
Oedipus and the Sphinx After Ingres updates an ancient myth with help from one of Bacon’s favorite artists. In a room with bright pink walls, a muscular man in a sleeveless white undershirt, with his foot and lower leg in bandages leaking blood, faces a beast inspired by an Ingres painting with the head and breasts of a woman merged with a stumpy body of indeterminate species; whether animate or carved from stone is hard to say. An open closet door reveals something ragged, bloody and spectral hanging from a horizontal bar. As Bacon was wont to do, he added graphic signs like forensic markers: an oval around Oedipus’s foot and a white arrow pointing to the thing in the closet — the Sphinx’s secret revealed, perhaps.
The exhibition’s funniest painting is Jet of Water. From the end of a pipe emerging to one side of an urban alley or rooftop a diagonal swath of white paint shoots across the whole canvas. It’s a visual pun linking Abstract Expressionist-style splatter to a phallic reference.
Most surprising of all is Blood on Pavement, a nearly abstract painting of a puddle of blood on a sidewalk with a black wall directly behind it. Like a lingering shot in a noirish detective movie, this raises a question: What if Bacon had been a filmmaker? Chances are he’d have been a great one.
By DOMINIC GREEN | DISPATCH | THE NEW CRITERION | DECEMBER 01, 2015
John Deakin (1912–72) was a legend in the style of postwar Soho: brilliantly original, reliably nonconformist, and belligerently self-destructive. After learning on the job as a British Army photographer at the Battle of El Alamein, he became a fashion photographer—he was fired twice from Vogue, for alcohol-induced misdemeanours—and a freelance street photographer. Deakin produced only one small exhibition, John Deakin’s Paris (1956), and two books, London Today (1949) and Rome Alive (1951). In the Fifties and Sixties, perhaps fearing success more than failure, he turned from photography to painting, and then sculpture and collage. He continued to take photographs, though, notably for Francis Bacon, who preferred to paint from photographic images rather than from life, and esteemed the candour and composition of Deakin’s images.
Bacon used Deakin’s photographs as material for portraits of Muriel Belcher, the famously foul-mouthed proprietress of the Colony Room on Dean Street; George Dyer, the sharply dressed but incompetent petty thief who was Bacon’s boyfriend; Lucian Freud, who painted Deakin’s portrait in 1963; Isabel Rawsthorne, a painter, and the erstwhile muse of Epstein, Derain, and Giacometti; and Bacon’s friend and model Henrietta Moraes, who disliked the brutally intrusive nude photographs that Bacon commissioned from Deakin—photographs that Bacon reworked for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963).
Moraes later called Deakin a “horrible little man.” The jazz singer and Surrealist connoisseur George Melly called him “an evil genius.” As Robin Muir reports in Under the Influence, Deakin had the gait of a midget wrestler, the careworn, comical face of a hapless clown, and a boozer’s tongue that Daniel Farson described as being stained the colour of aubergine, and the poet Celia Osborne compared to a metal file. The Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who had an unspecified misunderstanding with Deakin in Tangier, called him the “second nastiest little man I have ever met.” Muir writes that when word of Hutton’s assessment filtered back to London, Deakin’s acquaintances were “astonished only that there could have been someone nastier.”
Deakin died in 1972, while recuperating from an operation for lung cancer. His small top-floor flat in Berwick Street was packed with photographs, as well as layouts for books that never found a publisher. He named Francis Bacon as his next of kin. “It was the last dirty trick he played on me,” Bacon said.
Posterity has played further tricks on Deakin, none of them nasty. In 1984, his friend Bruce Bernard curated “The Salvage of a Photographer,” an exhibition of photographs from Berwick Street, at the Victoria & Albert Museum. When Bacon died, Deakin’s paint-spattered photographs were discovered among the detritus of Bacon’s studio when it was transferred to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. And Robin Muir has returned Deakin to print, in the career retrospective Photographs (1996), the street photography collection A Maverick Eye (2002), and now Under the Influence, which focuses on Deakin in Soho.
Bacon called Deakin the best portrait photographer since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron. Deakin’s Soho portraits are remorselessly direct, exposing personality in all its vulnerability, but they are not heartless. Colin MacInnes observed that the beauty of Deakin’s Paris portraiture lies in “the fund of affection, and at times of pity” that Deakin, for all his legendary nastiness, expresses and responds to in his subjects. The dreams and struggles of Soho’s brawny-armed transvestites, stripe-shirted Italian waiters, smartly tailored thugs, shabby alcoholics, and suffering poets are laid bare without condescension or sentimentality. Like Brassai’s Parisians, many of Deakin’s subjects are what MacInnes called “creatures crushed by life,” though Deakin, unlike Brassai, posed them, as in the painters’ group at Wheeler’s.
Deakin photographed painters with the same harsh honesty, but these portraits are different. The painters may sense the crush of life—Bacon looks puffy and seedy, Freud demonically furtive, and Auerbach slightly hunted—but as visual artists, they are peers as well as victims of the lens. They look back at Deakin with an appraising eye, artist to artist, intimate to rival. As Deakin understated about Bacon, “He’s an odd one, wonderfully tender and generous by nature, yet with curious streaks of cruelty, especially to his friends.”
Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho, edited by Robin Muir; Art / Books, 176 pages, $50.
Francis Bacon, before the reflecting window of a Soho wine shop
Bloomsbury £25
Michael Prodger | The Sunday Times | Sunday, 29th November, 2015
There is a certain grisly satisfaction in watching an artist behave as one expects an artist to. Francis Bacon, with his “gilded gutter life” of rough trade and high living, always delivered and just how richly is recorded by Peppiatt.
Peppiatt was a student when he first met Bacon and accompanied him on a bender through the pubs of Soho. For the next 30 years their carousing never really stopped. This is a wonderfully vivid account of their many drunken evenings, and of the friends (both glamorous and rackety), conversations and scraps they shared.
Late
Colm Tóibín | The New York Review of Books | November 19, 2015
In his book On Late Style, published after his death, the critic Edward Said ponders the aura surrounding work produced by artists in the last years of their lives. He asks: “Does one grow wiser with age, and are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?” He considers the idea that some late works possess “a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality.” Yet he also questions the very notion of late serenity: “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness is all’?”
Said further ponders, as must anyone who thinks about this subject, the sheer strangeness of Ludwig van Beethoven’s late string quartets and his last piano sonatas, their insistence on breaking with easy form, their restlessness, their aura of incompletion (especially the piano sonatas), the feeling that they are striving toward some set of musical textures that have not yet been imagined and cannot be achieved in Beethoven’s lifetime. In other words, it is that these late pieces wish to represent the mind or the imagination not as it faces death but rather as it faces life, as it sets out to reimagine a life with new beginnings and new possibilities but also with the ragged sense that there might not be much time.
Said quotes Theodor Adorno on late Beethoven: “Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the final powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work.” As Said would have it, Adorno does not see late style as a departure. Rather, “lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness.” Finally, Said demands that we read late work with due subtlety, noting continuity as much as rupture, noting a deepening of something rather than a new departure. “As Adorno said about Beethoven,” Said writes, “late style does not admit the definitive cadences of death; instead, death appears in a refracted mode, as irony.”
Two weeks before he died, as his heart was failing, the poet W.B. Yeats wrote a poem he titled “Cuchulain Comforted,” which begins with a set of clear statements free of metaphor, tonally stark, sharp, and pointed almost like the arrows that appear in some of Francis Bacon’s work. The poem was written in terza rima, a form new to Yeats. Unusually for his work, this poem did not need many drafts. It seemed to have come to him simply, easily, almost naturally. In earlier Yeats poems and plays, Cuchulain, a figure from Irish mythology, had appeared as the implacable and solitary hero, prepared for single combat, free of fear. Now he has “six mortal wounds” and is attended by figures—Shrouds—who encourage him to join them in the act of sewing rather than fighting. They let him know that they themselves are not among the heroic dead but are “Convicted cowards all by kindred slain//Or driven from home and left to die in fear.”
Thus, at the very end of his life, Yeats created an image that seemed the very opposite of what had nourished his imagination most. His heroic figure has now been gentled; his fierce and solitary warrior has joined others in the act of sewing; instead of the company of brave men, Cuchulain seems content to rest finally among cowards. This poem, then, is not a culminating statement for Yeats but a contradictory one; it is not a crowning version of a familiar poetic form but an experiment in a form associated most with Dante. Instead of attempting to sum up, it is as though Yeats wished to release fresh energy by repudiating, by beginning again, by offering his hero a set of images alien to him that served all the more to give the hero ambiguity, felt life, unsettlement.
In this way, late work becomes itself unsettling. And in the late work of other writers this example of an imagination refusing to lie down and sum up can be seen. It would be easy to imagine, for example, that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was written toward the end of his life. In fact, it was written in 1911, when Mann was thirty-six. It is a young man’s book; its images of desire, decay, and death could not be so easily entertained by a writer facing into late or last work.
Mann’s last work, in fact, was a comedy, a book filled with trickery and amusing, almost throwaway parodies. It was begun when Mann was in his mid-thirties and continued when he was seventy-five and prone to illness, around the time when he would return from America to live in Switzerland. The book is titled Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. In its use of a heavy style to convey light material, in its episodic structure, in the sheer roguishness of Felix Krull, the novel represents a rueful commentary on its author’s own past seriousness, as well as a way of proposing a fresh start for him, narrated by a trickster. But more important, perhaps, is the fact that Mann completed volume one with the suggestion that subsequent volumes would follow. The picaresque story that Felix told of his exploits was open-ended. It left room for Mann to continue as though there would be no end. Its very lightness set about defying death, even if Mann died a year after the book’s publication.
“Every piece of work,” Mann wrote, “is a realization, fragmentary but complete in itself, of our individuality.” Perhaps the writer whose individuality seems to intensify the most, becoming in his late work both more mysterious and more apparent, is Bacon’s close contemporary Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s work in the 1980s—he died in 1989 at the age of eighty-three—pares down form and language to a minimum in both fiction and drama.
Two of Beckett’s very last works throw interesting light on the work of Bacon, especially the late paintings. Both are concerned with the figure or the self as protean, uncertain, unsingular, ready to be doubled or shadowed, poised to move outward into a second self, or another self, or into a figure hovering near, waiting for substance.
In Nacht und Träume, for example, written for German television in 1982, a figure known simply as A dreams a second figure, B, into being. Two hands then appear as part of the dream. There are no words, merely snatches of the Schubert lied “Nacht und Träume.” The dream fades when A awakens, only for the sequence to repeat itself more slowly as the music is heard once again. The short play is not concerned with death so much as with the fluidity of the self, or the way in which night and dream and indeed ghostly music allow the self to move into another realm, a shadow realm, or a realm made possible by the imagination itself in which another figure waits.
Nacht und Träume is Beckett’s penultimate play. In prose, the very last piece he wrote was Stirrings Still, conceived toward the end of 1984 and completed three years later. This short text starts with the same idea as Nacht und Träume. It questions the autonomy, the singleness of the self. It begins: “One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” The opening of the second paragraph repeats this with a minor variation. The figure is not, however, moving toward death, but toward another place in life. He will disappear only to reappear. The piece ends with: “Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” The very core of the process of fiction—the idea of self—is questioned here and undermined. This is fundamental to the drama that Beckett created as last work.
In this context, it is useful to look at Bacon’s grave triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1976), with its three faces fluid against a black background. As the eye moves from left to right, the face in the first section appears like a mask. It is fully visible in the center panel, gazing outward. In the right-hand section, the face is already in another realm, some of it having merged with the blackness. What little of it remains has an aura of enormous suffering. It is not nothing, just as Beckett’s “Oh all to end” emphasizes the fact of utterance within a continuity rather than an actual end. Nothing has ended. Instead of nothing, there is “all,” or the irony surrounding all.
As with Beckett’s Nacht und Träume or Stirrings Still, it would be too crude to suggest that Three Studies for Self-Portrait is a way of prefiguring death. In late work, no artist is concerned directly with death but rather with creating new form—often jagged, disturbing form, and often form that plays stillness against some deep and energetic stirring within the self, as though to emphasize that art is made only by the living.
In Beckett’s Nacht und Träume, then, the self lives with its dream-self, its shadow-self. In some of Bacon’s other late work, the figure, filled with painterly substance, is shadowed by another shape, a shape that has elements of the human form. In Still Life: Broken Statue and Shadow (1984), for example, it is interesting to see Bacon confronting the same problem faced by Beckett when dealing with the human presence, the human figure. In some of his late work, Beckett could not see the figure as single or self-contained, or simply moving toward death; instead he saw it as being able to extend beyond its own boundaries, finding what Joseph Conrad called a “secret sharer,” even if the secret sharer was just the next sentence.
Bacon in this painting makes the shadow figure more ghostly, stronger in outline than in positive space or texture. It is not a shadow of the statue itself, having a different shape, which suggests that it has its own leftover presence. It is, oddly, substance as well as shadow.
This happens, too, in a number of other late works by Bacon, such as Study from the Human Body and Portrait (1988), in which the face is filled with substance only to give way to the fleshy torso and legs that have less solid presence. And they in turn give way to their own shadow. This happens again in (1978), as the writhing, suffering sexual figure, filled with energy and life, has a shadow almost like something the police might chalk on the pavement at the scene of a crime to mark the outline where a body had been.
In both Beckett’s and Bacon’s work, this idea of the figure as fluid rather than, say, single or inert has its origins in necessity as much as in philosophy. There is a sense in the late work of both artists that they are too busy seeing and working with form to be bothered thinking about or burdening us with philosophy. There is something deeply exciting and dramatic about a second self, a figure waiting for the transfer of energy that will allow it to come to life, however flickeringly. Beckett was a dramatist even at his most minimal. He wished to create excitement even at his most restrained. And so he made such doubles. Bacon made clear in interviews how much the very imperatives of image-making mattered to him.
Thus these shadows, this blurring of self, at its most intense and magisterial—for example, in Bacon’s Self-Portrait of 1987—created a force and energy in the pictures that would strike the nervous system of the viewer more powerfully than any single, stable figure.
It is important to remember that playing with the ghostly or the shadowy, using them to create pictorial mystery and excitement, makes its way through Bacon’s entire body of work, just as the idea of a double or an alternate self will appear in earlier Beckett plays such as Krapp’s Last Tape, written in 1958. So, too, does Yeats use the same sort of clear, chiseled statements of “Cuchulain Comforted” in poems as early as “Adam’s Curse,” published in 1904. And Mann was interested in parody and trickery throughout his life.
Therefore when we think about late work we need to bear in mind connections as much as distinctions, continuities as much as departures. Nonetheless, if we look at Bacon’s Sand Dune (1983), Painting March 1985 (1985), and Blood on Pavement (1988), all three filled with mysterious shapes, layers, and presences, hovering toward and then resisting abstraction, set in a sort of aftermath, a place where the body has been, it is possible to feel that Bacon was not content merely to find images that would deepen what he had already done, or would distill his vision, or would totalize it. Instead, there is a restlessness here that we also find in Beethoven’s late chamber music—a feeling that Bacon might begin again, that he is searching for some way to make images that he knows will only be possible for artists of the future, if they are even possible at all.
Working is a way, in any case, of keeping such knowledge at bay at least for the time being, a way of confronting the material world, of outfacing it, as though time might actually relent or the spirit might gain more substance than anyone has ever before imagined.
BY MARY KISLER IN BOOKS | NEW ZEALAND LISTENER | THURSDAY, 19 NOVEMBER, 2015
This irresistible memoir about writer Michael Peppiatt’s friendship with Francis Bacon is as addictive as the champagne and chablis that seem to lace most encounters between the two. Their friendship began in 1963 when Peppiatt raced down from Cambridge to London to try to score an interview with the famous artist, 30 years his senior. That encounter at the French House was the start of a long, oft times devoted and sometimes tortured friendship. Peppiatt describes Bacon as a father figure, but this parental relationship came at a price.
He records a wide range of encounters with what Bacon described as his gilded gutter life, Peppiatt often staggering home to write down the evening’s conversation while still fresh in his mind. The reader becomes fascinated with the intonations of the artist’s voice, his ideas about art and why artists are driven to paint, the artists he admired (Giacometti and Picasso lead the group) and those he didn’t rate.
Peppiatt is meticulous in depicting Bacon’s courteousness at the beginning of a social encounter, always aware of someone younger or insecure of their place. But he also captures those moments when Bacon slid into drunken cruelty. Few people were immune from these verbal attacks although more than not, Peppiatt seems to leave the scene before Bacon’s depressed, choleric gaze turns on him.
One of the most vivid sections describes Peppiatt’s life in Paris. It becomes his home for a period, during which he relaunched Art International magazine in 1985. The city was hugely important to Bacon and where his success mattered most. At the artist’s request, Peppiatt kept an apartment that Bacon could use on his visits to the city. His descriptions of the extended lunches in elegant restaurants, where a maître d’ might try in vain to staunch the ever-flowing river of wine imbibed by their guests, are riveting.
This book also has a tantalising array of photos that book-end the text, some of the famously torn and paint-splattered images of paintings and people that triggered many of Bacon’s compositions; two that show the writer and artist, the latter bowed by booze, depression or both; and three self-conscious photographs of the author’s head and upper torso, possibly taken by Bacon.
Although Peppiatt has written formally about Bacon throughout his career, here he interweaves his observations of the wild and often tragic aspects of Bacon’s life with those depicted in the painter’s twisted forms and tortured expressions. He has no doubt that he is a great painter, but Peppiatt also wants to know why. Bacon once told photographer Daniel Frasnay that in his art he tried to give “the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of conveyance”. Francis Bacon in Your Blood brilliantly delves beyond that disembodied grin.
BY BROOK MASON
When it comes to Francis Bacon, his searing paintings skyrocket into the stratosphere. After all, his 1969 Three Studies of Lucien Freud soared to a staggering $142,404,992 at Christie’s three years ago, and is probably now locked away in a Russian plutocrat’s home.
But there’s an alternative way to take in his artistry and it doesn’t cost a fraction of that amount. The tormented artist’s late paintings are front and centre this season at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. Showcased in the exhibition titled ‘Francis Bacon: Late Paintings’ are some 20 paintings that the artist created in London as well as Paris during the last two decades of this life.
Featured in this first in-depth exploration of this particular period of his oeuvre are loans from the Pompidou, the Beyeler, the Tate and even the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon along with a number of private collectors. Further indication of the sheer quality of this show is that no less than seven of Bacon’s monumental triptychs are included.
What’s surprising is seeing Bacon’s disturbing and violent figures up close, which are frequently lanced with what appears to be blood painted occasionally on a somewhat serene background in a palette ranging from yellow to rose. Another distinctive slant to this period is the degree to which the artist turned to spray-painting, and even sometimes a roller, rather than his ingrained bold brush strokes.
In his harrowing 1987 Triptych, the artist whittles down and strips his figures of all recognisable features, and in some cases, truncates the forms while rendering only flesh coloured shadows for a ghostly sense of movement. As Gagosian director Valentina Castellani says, ‘The human body reveals itself by its absence, as exemplified by the superb Blood on Pavement. Nothing remains of our existence but a stain of blood, a shadow on the ground.’
A mission to catalogue all the artist’s work has turned up
previously unknown pictures, writes David Sanderson
DAVID SANDERSON
A ten-year hunt of archives and drawing rooms has turned up more than 100 unknown paintings from the brush of the greatest British artist of the 20th century.
A new comprehensive volume of Francis Bacon’s work is to reproduce 584 of the artist’s paintings, half of which are “hardly known”, having been in the hands of “difficult” private collectors unwilling have them exhibited.
At least 100 of the works are unknown, according to the catalogue publishers, with many having been discarded but not destroyed by Bacon, who died in 1992, aged 82. Martin Harrison, who has been employed by the Francis Bacon estate to compile the catalogue, said the task to find every surviving work was the “greatest privilege in art history ever.
Stick me in front of a painting and I get a chill down my spine. You know you are in the presence of greatness, it is palpable,” he said. He added: “We have trawled every archive imaginable. At least half of it would surprise people. They are never shown anywhere. They are with difficult private collectors who will not hand their work to exhibitions.”
He said that “through great charm or luck” and by being able to “point out in five minutes ten things they have never noticed before in the painting they have owned for 30 years”, he had been able to persuade the collectors to let him reproduce them. Bacon’s best known works include his triptychs and Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which set a world record when sold for $142 million (£90 million) in 2013.
Mr Harrison said that Bacon would destroy works by slashing the canvases but would also discard many, giving the canvases to art students to re-use. “The students would incur his wrath by putting it on the market,” he said. “Bacon used to try and buy them back, especially when he got rich.”
Mr Harrison, who has curated numerous Bacon exhibitions, said the discovery that had excited him most was a portrait of Peter Lacy, whom he described as the artist’s great love. “It is a lying figure from the 1950s. He discarded it, I do not get it, it is an absolute masterpiece. I would say to him ‘You are an idiot’. This was of a guy he was madly in love with. It is about his passion for him. It is beautiful,” Mr Harrison said.
He said that while the entire oeuvre confirmed that Bacon’s subject matters were “birth, copulation, death in TS Eliot’s way”, seeing his output in its entirety would demolish some myths. “It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings,” Mr Harrison said. “Some are more important historically than aesthetically . . . Then there are these clichéd categories of men copulating and screaming popes. Men having sex is of great interest to people. But only 11 of his paintings include men having sex, which is not a lot given how much people talk about it. There are 17 female nudes, rather more.
“There are also a few oddities. There’s a skull of a gorilla, almost a still-life, and it is an iridescent green. I have only ever seen it in black and white and was desperate to see it.”
There were also disappointments. Mr Harrison said he and his research assistant had searched for a portrait of the French cabaret artist Suzy Solidor, “who like most people had not been flattered” by Bacon’s portrait. “He destroyed it,” Mr Harrison said. “We know we will never find it.”
Mr Harrison said that he had to inform a large number of people who had paid high amounts for the works that their Bacons were fakes. Other fraudsters had tried to give their fakes the veneer of legitimacy by having them included in the catalogue raisonné.
“It makes you feel like God,” he said before joking: “If you have a fake Bacon, pay me £1 million and I will put it in the catalogue.” He said that while he was confident he had found every existing Bacon work, he would be delighted if more were discovered. “I would be very pleased to see a new Bacon. And if they found ten more then I would be ten times happier.”
The catalogue raisonné – three 400-page volumes including reproductions of every work, plus two 192-page volumes including his sketches — is to be published on April 28, the anniversary of Bacon’s death, and priced at £1,000.
MARK BROWN
More than 100 Francis bacon paintings are to be revealed for the first time with the completion of a 10-year project to publish a catalogue of every work he made.
They include the first in one of his best known and provocative series of paintings, the Screaming Popes, a previously unknown work discovered buried in a private Italian collection.
The Francis Bacon estate has now completed the artist’s catalogue raisonné and will publish it next spring to coincide with the anniversary of his death in April 1992. Bacon destroyed many of his paintings and only about half of the 584 that survive are accessible or in circulation.
“The stuff that has been written about Bacon, some good and much of it less good, is based on about a third of his work,” said the art historian Martin Harrison, who has spent the last decade attempting to track down every work.
“Irrespective of the care taken in documenting his extant oeuvre, the great revelation of the new catalogue raisonné will be that, for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen and assessed. It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings.”
Finding the first Screaming Pope was particularly exciting, Harrison said. The series was inspired by Bacon’s obsession with Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in the 17th century. He reworked the theme in the 1960s and 70s, and the results are seen as some of the most potent expressions of postwar horror at what mankind is capable of.
The first Screaming Pope has until now been identified as Head VI from 1949, but Harrison said he had found an earlier work stored in a warehouse. “It is not an amazingly great painting but it is amazingly important historically,” he said.
Bacon lived life to the extreme, and it has been convincingly argued that his best art stemmed from the sadomasochistic relationships he had with other men. The great love of his life was Peter Lacy, a former Battle of Britain pilot who was also sadistic, violent and a raging alcoholic.
The catalogue will reveal that there is less sex in Bacon’s surviving paintings than might be imagined. “There are only 11 paintings in his whole oeuvre where men are having sex and that is compared, for example, to 17 female nudes,” Harrison said.
The catalogue replaces one from Bacon’s mid-career, published in 1964 by the Tate’s director at the time, John Rothenstein, and its deputy keeper, Ronald Alley. It contains only 27 paintings in colour and was difficult to publish because Bacon was so difficult and uncooperative.
“They had the singular difficulty of having Bacon alive, I didn’t suffer from that,” Harrison said.
The project involved many tipoffs and false trails, and took Harrison across Europe and to the US, Australia and Japan. “It has taken more than 10 years, so in terms of time it has been a huge undertaking and the last year has been more huge than it might be as I’ve had no sleep.
“I was always a kind of boring researcher person. Somewhere I have a notebook I kept when I was nine. I used to go into the Coventry and Warwickshire collections and study the nomenclature of Warwickshire placenames. That’s pretty nerdy. There is obviously an impulse in me to record arcane things.”
Bacon works attract some of the highest prices at auction. A triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, set a world record in 2013 when it sold for £89.3m.
The Bacon we know, however, is based on a core of around 180 paintings. There are many more that hang in private collections, owned by people who have little interest in selling or lending
“Many of the owners to this day are really private,” said Harrison. “I kind of got access because I’m doing the catalogue raisonné and they thought ‘oh there’s this weird, boring bloke coming.’”
Harrison said he was undeniably excited about being the first art historian to have set eyes on some of the Bacons. If he had to choose a favourite, he said, it would be the 1964 Landscape in Malabata, once owned by Roald Dahl, as it was the first one he saw as a student.
“I didn’t understand it. I had never heard of Francis Bacon and I was absolutely riveted. I can remember to this day thinking he was a genius. I had never seen anything like and the colours just amazed me.”
Heni Publishing will release the catalogue on 28 April in five cloth-bound volumes, three with the paintings and two with an introduction and bibliography. Printed in Italy it will cost £1,000.
Study after Velázquez, 1950.
A
Owners of paintings by Francis Bacon have now missed the deadline to be included in his first complete Catalogue Raisonné, which closed at the end of October 2015. For this ten year project, collectors were requested to contact the Catalogue Raisonné Committee via The Estate of Francis Bacon. The Bacon Catalogue Raisonné will now go to press and is expected to be revealed on the anniversary of his death in April. The final meeting of the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee took place in London on May 23rd. All information received was treated in the strictest confidence and requests for anonymity were honoured.
Over one hundred undocumented Bacon paintings will be revealed for the first time in the comprehensive catalogue. They include a previously unknown Screaming Pope painting discovered in a private Italian collection. The book will also reveal the first Screaming Pope work painted. Francis Bacon’s most famous paintings were inspired by Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X portrait. Scholars have interpreted the paintings and the inspirations behind them ever since Bacon painted them in the 1950s. Bacon worked on his pope paintings, variations on Velázquez’s magnificent portrait of Pope Innocent X, for over twenty years.
All 584 surviving paintings are represented in the book. A few known works still remain outstanding and it is known that many were destroyed by Bacon himself. The following works have not been located, and information as to their whereabouts is still sought: Lying Figure (1953); Man with Head Wound (1955); Mlle Suzy Solidor (1957); Head of Woman (1961).
“The stuff that has been written about Bacon, some good and much of it less good, is based on about a third of his work.” The art historian Martin Harrison, told the Guardian, that he has spent the last decade attempting to track down every last work. “Irrespective of the care taken in documenting his extant oeuvre, the great revelation of the new catalogue raisonné will be that, for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen and assessed. It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings.”
The Estate of Francis Bacon has announced the publication of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, presenting the entire oeuvre of the artist’s work for the first time. Due for global publication on 28th April 2016 – the anniversary of Francis Bacon’s death - the impeccably produced limited edition will contain over 900 illustrations in five, cloth-bound hardcover volumes.
Edited by Martin Harrison, FSA, the pre-eminent expert on Bacon’s work, alongside research assistant, Dr Rebecca Daniels, this ambitious and painstaking project has been ten years in the making. Much needed, it replaces Rothenstein/Alley’s Francis Bacon1964 catalogue, the only previous catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, which comprised just 37% of Bacon’s ultimate oeuvre and 27 paintings illustrated in colour.
Bacon is known to have destroyed many of his paintings and only about half of the 584 that survive can be said to be accessible or in circulation; it is testimony to Harrison’s exacting and expert work that the new catalogue raisonné will include over 100 previously unpublished paintings.
Martin Harrison says: “Irrespective of the care taken in documenting his extant oeuvre, the great revelation of the new catalogue raisonné will be that, for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen and assessed. It will, we believe, have a profound effect on the perception of his paintings.”
The three 400-page volumes that make up the study of Bacon’s entire oeuvre are bookended by two further 192-page volumes; the former encompassing an introduction, a chronology, an index and a user’s guide, and the latter a catalogue of Bacon’s sketches, an illustrated bibliography compiled by Krzysztof Cieszkowski, and acknowledgements. Printed on 170 gsm GardaMatt stock in Bergamo, Italy, the five volumes of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné are boxed within a cloth slipcase and priced at £1,000 | $1,500 | €1,400.
“Francis Bacon (1909 - 92) is widely regarded as Britain’s greatest modern painter. Drawing on low-art sources, including photographs torn from magazines and imagery from films, coupled with a keen awareness of the rich historical tradition of painting stretching back to the Renaissance, Bacon developed a way of portraying the human body which was unique. His mastery of the medium of paint was recognised early. By 1946, the critic Kenneth Clark felt able to state simply: ‘Francis Bacon has genius’.”
Martin Harrison has published on 19th and 20th century art and photography and curated exhibitions in the UK (Victoria & Albert Museum; National Portrait Gallery; Ashmolean Museum), Italy, the USA and Mexico. He co-curated the Bacon exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf in 2006, and Francis Bacon / Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2013. His first publication on Francis Bacon was Points of Reference (Faggionato Fine Art, 1999). He is the author of In Camera: Francis Bacon – Photography, film and the practice of painting (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and with Rebecca Daniels, Francis Bacon: Incunabula (Thames & Hudson, 2008). In 2009 he edited Francis Bacon – New Studies: Centenary Essays, a collection of nine original essays to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the artist.
Too weird for telly
Thirty-three years after his death, the memoirs of a comic legend have come to light
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How odd to publish an autobiography — and it is an autobiography, not a ghosted effort — 33 years after your death. But Marty Feldman was always jotting things down (poems, jokes, memories, aphorisms) and told his wife he was writing an autobiography. Then he died, suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1982 when he was only 48. He just had time to call his friend Graham Chapman, who was a doctor before he was a Python, and Chapman dashed to his hotel room, but he was beyond resuscitation. His wife, Lauretta, was so distraught she could never face going through his papers. But when she died in 2010 she left them to a friend, Mark Flanagan, who found this autobiography, all neatly typed and ready to go.
An odd book, then, about an unforgettable and lovable man. Eric Idle says in the preface that when he went on the internet to ask who remembered Feldman, he was inundated with thousands of replies. Everyone who met him, who worked with him, loved him — he, in turn, hardly ever had a bad word to say about anyone, except perhaps British journalists, who kept asking about his eyes and why he and Lauretta never had children.
Obviously his eyes (which he spells evEs) were the first thing you noticed. They became bulbous after a thyroid operation in his twenties, but one of them was also "lazy” or, as he said, non-competitive. But he never lamented his strange appearance. On the contrary, he felt: “My looks are my comic equipment... I have the right packaging for a clown.”
He was born in the East End in 1934, and was evacuated to the country during the war, where he saw animals being slaughtered and became a lifelong vegetarian. He went to 11 or 12 schools, but never flourished in any and left at 15. He also broke his nose many times boxing for the Jewish Lads Brigade. The only prize he ever won at boxing was Best Loser, and he writes: “I’m still the best loser and still get up when I should have sense enough to lie down and stay there... Winning doesn’t interest me.”
Before he became a comedian, he worked as a runner for an ad agency, as assistant to a Red Indian fakir at Margate’s Dreamland and as a jazz trumpeter. He hung out in Soho, picking up gigs here and there, making friends everywhere. One of his Soho friends, John Law, enlisted him as a gag-writer, and soon he teamed up with Barry Took and was writing for The Army Game, Round the Home, and Julian and Sandy, which was remarkable for being about a gay couple when homosexuality was illegal. (Years later, Feldman ran into Francis Bacon who started quoting Julian and Sandy dialogue by the yard. He was such a besotted fan he wanted to paint Feldman, but, alas, never did.)
In 1966 David Frost hired him as the chief writer and script editor on The Frost Report, where his protégés included John Cleese, Chapman, Michael Palin, Tim Brooke-Tavlor and Idle. Then Cleese told him he was setting up a television pro gramme, At Last the 1948 Show, which he wanted him to write and perform in. Frost thought this was a terrible idea (Feldman was too weird-looking for telly), but Cleese insisted. The show made him a star and he was given his own series, Marty. He bought a house in Hampstead, and hung out with the Beatles. But by now he was getting offers from Hollywood, and went over to make Young Frankenstein (1974) with Gene Wilder. Moving to Los Angeles, he said, felt like moving to colour from black and white, and he sold his Hampstead house when Mrs Thatcher was elected: “England was over for me. ”
He married Lauretta in 1959 and from then on she was always by his side. The great thing about Feldman, Idle says, was that he blew away the stereotype of the tragic clown: “He was a very happy clown: indeed, the clown prince. lived a very full life doing what loved doing, making people laugh with the love of his life beside him.” This is a warm and engaging memorial.
EYE MARTY by MARTY FELDMAN Coroner £20 pp314
ALEX CLARK
When RB Kitaj invented the term “School of London” in 1976 to denote a group of postwar figurative artists that included him, Leon Kossoff and Maggi Hambling, he wasn’t really thinking about where they had their lunch. But the five painters in John Deakin’s evocative photograph – from left, Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews – clearly felt that after a hard morning at the easel, a decent meal was in order.
Their spot of choice was Wheeler’s of Old Compton Street, an oyster bar that had come a long way from its Whitstable origins, where it was founded in 1856 by master mariner Captain Richard “Leggy” Wheeler. In Soho, under the proprietorship of Bernard Walsh, it was to reach hitherto unimagined bohemian charms (for a brilliant encapsulation of its flavour, dig out Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life column in May 1981, occasioned by Walsh’s death; as Bernard wrote, “As far as I’m concerned Wheeler’s is Old Compton Street and all the other branches are mere imitations).
Walsh had set up shop in 1929 and, as Barry Miles explains in his brilliant social history London Calling, had benefited enormously when oysters subsequently escaped rationing, his wife keeping the restaurant open even during the Blitz; Miles also reports that the oysterman, Tim from Brighton, could open 400 shells an hour and might even go up to 600 when they were really busy.
Wheeler’s, with its checked tablecloths and maritime art, was not a cheap lunchtime option, so it was just as well that Walsh was generous with credit for favoured customers: Bacon and Freud ran accounts there, made all the more necessary by the frequency of their visits. Walsh once asked them to paint a portrait of one another: although Bacon painted Freud, Freud preferred to paint Walsh himself, resulting in the piece Portrait of a Man, completed in 1955, which was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2012 for £1.83m.
Where the Bacons or Auerbachs of today might be discovered having lunch is unclear; probably not Soho, now that Wheeler’s-as-was and that other bohemian haunt, Muriel Belcher’s Colony Rooms, have gone. Likely that those based in London have shifted to the east; but more likely that, in today’s accelerated and professionalised culture, a long, leisurely lunch is a thing of the past. And it’s certainly difficult to know who would give you a plate of oysters and a bottle of Chablis on tick.
Frank Auerbach is at The Tate: Britain until 13 March 2016
Behrens, Freud, Bacon, Auerbach and Andrews at Wheeler’s Restaurant, Soho, at just after 11.00am, in March 1963.
BY NOELLE BODICK
In old age, masters like Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt loosened up, allowing for more free-flowing brushstrokes, informal compositions, and unplanned events to enter their canvases. The late career of 20th-century painter Francis Bacon never followed this pattern. In the last two decades of his life, the Irish-born, English artist stripped down his evocative figures as his work took on a more formal, economical effect
This month, 25 pieces from this late period are on display at Gagosian gallery in New York, including loans from the Museum of Modern Art and Tate, among other institutions.
Richard Calvocoressi, formerly the director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Henry Moore Foundation, who recently joined Gagosian in London as director and senior curator, spoke to ARTINFO about why Bacon’s style transformed from more painterly to austere in these late years.
Francis Bacon once said: “Painting is an old man’s occupation. Some of the greatest have done their best work in old age: Titian and Picasso and others.” Should we count Bacon among them?
It has certainly been a period that has been overlooked, as so often with artists. And I do think it has taken awhile for people to appreciate just how radical and extraordinary he was as an artist in these last 15 years. Whether it is his greatest period is really difficult to say — really a subjective assessment. But, as he leaves out more and more, he is getting at the essence of things in this process of simplifying, paring down, and being more economical.
is earlier work was more improvised and spontaneous. What do you think he achieves in these more controlled late compositions?
What he achieves is not exactly a state of calm but a certain equilibrium. There is a Classical grandeur and authority about these late works. It is something you find in another great English artist who is more or less his contemporary, Henry Moore. In Henry Moore’s sculpture there is a kind of reduction to simplified forms on a large scale. Monumentality, I think, is probably the word I am looking for.
Would you say Bacon’s own work becomes more sculptural in the last 15 years?
Yes, I think so. He is looking at space, at the arrangement of forms in space, and the forms themselves become more three dimensional, more volumetric; the figures are often placed on plinths, pedestals, ledges. He is thinking of sculpture a lot — he wanted to make sculpture, in fact.
But he never did?
No, he never did. But he even at one point asked if he could take sculpture lessons with Henry Moore, astonishing as it may seem. It never happened; I think Henry Moore was politely noncommittal. They weren’t the best of friends, though they certainly admired each other.
Is there a particular work that is emblematic of this pared-down aesthetic and more sculptural expression of space?
Yes, in fact, his very last triptych, which MoMA has lent to the exhibition, is very simplified and very symmetrical. The left- and right-hand panels show the male human body from the waist down stepping out of a black rectangle, in each case with one leg still in the black rectangle. You could read these as some kind of tomb-like slab. The central panel shows the coupling figures you find in his work going back to the 1950s, but in a much more abbreviated form. And then again in the left and the right panels, as if pinned on, are portrait heads based on photographs — one of his friend, this lover, who was Spanish and lived in Madrid, and the other of himself. But the whole triptych has a kind of architectural, monumental feel about it. It is as if it were a kind of memorial or monument. Even the portraits on the side panels appear like portraits of the dead pinned to tombstones.
Generally there seem to be fewer portraits of friends in the work. Why is that?
He depended less on living people and his lovers — as many of them had died by that time — and more on ideas, emotions, feelings portrayed in Greek tragedy and literature. There is an extraordinary painting inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, a couple of paintings inspired by Ingres, another of a deceased friend depicted as a sphinx, as in Greek myths. And the other great literary source, of course, for his work was the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
He said that in the trilogy of the Oresteia, Agamemnon had always struck him and inspired him, particularly its violent nature. It is the most blood-soaked play that there is. He had always been fascinated by blood and butchery and man’s cruelty to man, so you get more of that coming in, less perhaps his own personal biography.
And do we see him reflecting more on death?
There is a kind of ghostlike quality to these last paintings: figures disappearing into nothing, or else just glimpsed. There is one particular 1987 self-portrait painted with aerosol spray where it looks as if he really is fading away. It is extraordinarily delicate, so much so that it doesn’t look as if it has been painted — it looks like some sort of x-ray.
Francis Bacon’s Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988.
ART
The Gagosian Gallery is opening its golden doors for the new museum’s quality Francis Bacon show.
This exhibition will display 25 paintings of the great Francis Bacon, that were created during the last two decades of his life.
The show has been conceived by two of the Gagosian directors Valentina Castellani and Stefan Ratibor.
All works are on loan from international museums like the Tate, Centre Pompidou and the Fondation Beyeler.
A catalogue edited by Michael Cary accompanies the exhibition show. The exhibition will be on display until December, 12th 2015.
November 7–December 12,
2015 980 Madison Avenue, New York
EXHIBITIONS
Gagosian New York is pleased to present “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings.” This will be the third exhibition of Bacon’s work following “Francis Bacon: Triptychs” (Gagosian London, 2006) and “Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon” (Gagosian New York, 2008).
Encompassing more than twenty paintings that Bacon made in London and Paris during the last two decades of his life, this will be the first in-depth exploration of the innovations in his late work.
In Bacon’s art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures strain like savage forces of nature against shallow fields of intense color and strict armatures that bind them to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching serialization of the human form and its sensations, he shows himself to be the unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of bodies and the primal fear of those who inhabit them.
In his late paintings, Bacon refined themes that had long obsessed him. He quoted reflexively from his oeuvre, reworking subjects to strip them to the bare essentials. In his last act, Bacon found inspiration in the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. He sprayed paint to achieve a chiaroscuro entirely different from the visceral brushwork of the 1940s to 1970s, ingeniously redressing the brute force of earlier portraits and figure studies in light of Ingres’s delicate, fleshy curves. Distilled figures lurk in voids that oscillate between bleak shadows and riots of color. Charged with implied narrative, Bacon’s stark paintings of self-representation mark significant departures in his technique.
Organized by Gagosian directors Valentina Castellani and Stefan Ratibor, the exhibition will include important loans from international museums and private collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Tate, London, among others. The works are assembled in a special layout designed by Annabelle Selldorf.
The accompanying publication, edited by Michael Cary, will include new essays by Richard Calvocoressi; Richard Francis, curator of the 1985 Bacon retrospective at Tate; Mark Stevens and poet and novelist Colm Tóibín. In addition, the catalogue contains an interview with Martin Harrison, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné; reprinted texts by Eddy Batache, Bruce Bernard, and Jeffrey Bernard; never before published documentary photographs by Edward Quinn; and an appendix of existing interviews conducted for international publications during Bacon’s late career.
In recent years, Gagosian Gallery has focused on gathering and reexamining the late work of groundbreaking artists in an ongoing series of exhibitions, most notably “Cast a Cold Eye: The Late Work of Andy Warhol” (2006); “Willem de Kooning: The Last Beginning” (2007); “Picasso: Mosqueteros” (2009); “Henry Moore: Late Large Forms” (2012–13); and “Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983–1985” (2013). “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings” is the most recent of this series.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909, and died in Madrid in 1992. Selected exhibitions include “Francis Bacon,” Tate Gallery (1962, traveled to Kunsthalle Mannheim; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin; Kunsthaus Zurich; and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam); “Francis Bacon,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1963, traveled to Art Institute of Chicago); “Francis Bacon: Rétrospective,” Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (1971, traveled to Kunsthalle Dusseldorf); “Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, 1968–1974,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975); “Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945–1982,” National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1983, traveled to National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and Aiehi Prefectural Art Gallery, Nagoya); “Francis Bacon,” Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1989, traveled to Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Modern Art, New York); “Francis Bacon,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1996, traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich); and “Francis Bacon,” Tate Britain, London (2008–09, traveled to Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
November 7–December 12,
2015 980 Madison Avenue, New York
MARK STEVENS
Late one night, outside a pub known for rough trade in London’s East End, Francis Bacon chanced upon some blood on the pavement. He was rather pleased.1 He was getting old, but an atmosphere of physical risk, in which the body might leak, break, or otherwise come undone, continued to attract him. In the right situation, he did not mind getting beaten up—he believed in it—and he famously and often expressed the hope that the visceral charge in his work would carry directly into the nervous system of the viewer, bypassing the usual filters, and there “unlock the valves of feeling and return the viewer to life more violently.”2 It would have surprised no one had he made a shocking image of this smear of blood. Instead, he did something rare. He created a contemplative painting, steeped in melancholy, in which he concentrated with power and luminous subtlety the obsessions of a long life.
Blood on Pavement (c. 1984) is a great summary work. It seems to remember—not just recall—what came before. That does not make it better than the other pictures Bacon painted in the 1980s. But it does center the painting in the discussion of a “late style” in his oeuvre. Talk of late styles can be murky. The phrase sometimes means no more than what an old artist does at the end of his life. At other times, it conveys an almost mystical profundity: as death approaches, the artist simplifies his art, laying aside the immaterial in order to focus upon the essence of his vision. (The frail Matisse, encircled by nudes, flowers, and doves, dances his scissors across the paper.) Bacon himself would have found the reverence directed at late styles mawkish. He had no faith in wisdom or in artists, and he did not believe that virtue attended age. In Blood on Pavement, however, he made a classic late style work. It is simple, but profoundly so. It captures what’s indispensable in his art. In a retrospective, it would serve ideally as the last painting.
Bacon became interested in blood as a boy. He was severely asthmatic and knew intimately, from the asthmatic’s cough, what it was to bring up the buried fluids flecked with pink that drown the body from within. During the Irish “time of troubles” in the 1920s, his neighborhood was often bloodied and, amid the greens of Ireland, he found himself drawn to the frank reds of the butcher shop. As he grew older, he became aware of high-flown uses of the word blood: lifeblood, noble blood, blood of our fathers. (His father admired the bloodlines of both horses and his own illustriously named family.) He also learned of its lower uses: bloody, a word not to be spoken in polite circles. Blood could be a marker of bad company, violent opposition, and the criminal underworld, all of which held interest for a young, marginalized homosexual. Blood was incarnadine, but hidden away. A vital truth concealed. When it emerged, it stained, leaked, puddled, scabbed. Blood was pain— and revelation.
Blood also had a special historical and cultural resonance. No art appealed to Bacon more than that of the ancient world, and he was drawn particularly to the Greek tragedies. His art retains the heavy redolent air, like something pungent in the nostrils, of ancient sacrifice; of blood ritually shed, or spilled by a providence that could not be placated, controlled, or known. Inevitably, Christ’s wounds and his sacrifice on the Cross, also from the ancient world, fascinated him. He painted several crucifixions and made a picture called Wound for a Crucifixion in the early 1930s that he regretted destroying. It contained, he said, a “very beautiful wound.”3 Despite his fierce atheism—or because of it—Bacon welcomed the Christian echoes. However attenuated or symbolic the Christian Mass might appear when compared to its pagan antecedents, blood remained at the heart of the Eucharist. In Blood on Pavement, the central image is set on a plane that visually cants forward, not unlike a table, a stage, or an altar.
Although the painting’s title conveys its subject, what the blood most resembles is an open wound. But a wound where? In what? To begin with, in the painting itself. Bacon would have enjoyed the idea of symbolically bloodying art. Especially abstract art. He believed that abstract art, by abandoning the world (and particularly the figure), inevitably declined into decoration. He disliked a pale aesthetic narcissism: art should not fall in love with its own practice, elevating itself above the bloody mess of the world. He was especially annoyed when claims made for abstract art became grandiose and hagiographic. “Oh, Rothko,” he dismissively told friends. “It’s all mooood.”4 Of course, he himself used whatever interested him, no matter where he found it. His close friend the critic David Sylvester likened Blood on Pavement to a Rothko, and Bacon probably had Rothko in mind when he made it.5 If the work looks like a Rothko, however, it doesn’t act like one. Bacon leaned his lance into the painting. He made abstraction bleed.
Bacon created, in Blood on Pavement, a visual synecdoche. The wound represents the figure; the part acts for the whole. (Life itself, after all, is an everrenewing wound.) Haunted by a palpable absence—someone has left the scene after a moment’s violence—the picture seems in any case still to harbor the figure, much as an uninhabited room in Vuillard or Hammershøi retains the human presence. Blood on Pavement is steeped in the body; sticky with it. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail,” Bacon famously said, “leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.”6 The wound is vividly specific, very much one man’s blood. But its centered isolation also gives it an everyman quality. “Blood on the Pavement” sounds like a caption or a news spot, whereas Blood on Pavement could stand for the human condition. The twentieth century itself often seems like an open wound.
In some respects, the wound may have served the elderly Bacon better than a more realistic image of the figure. He may have originally intended to make Blood on Pavement part of a triptych; but the addition of two further images, likely including more conventional Bacon figures, would have diminished the mystery of the solitary panel. He had always disliked the idea of “illustration,” in which an artist traces out a literal appearance or narrates a particular story. He preferred what he called “elliptical form,” by which he meant form that suggests rather than defines.7 Don’t, in other words, pen the figure in with a literal line or still the body with a photographic realism, but, in the Venetian tradition, render form more mysteriously. (In Blood on Pavement, the central image is just a few strokes, splatterings, and tonal variations that somehow convey the sensation of blood darkening and congealing.) The phrase “elliptical form” also meant something else to Bacon, however, something critically important. He hoped his pictures would remain open—elliptically—to memory and the imagination.
No painting in Bacon’s oeuvre is more elliptical than Blood on Pavement. The way he painted it—the touch, light, color, and arrangements of form he brought to bear—kindles imaginative play much as poetry does, prompting the viewer to wander in the work as he or she might look about in a poem, finding things, being uncareful, making analogies, associating freely, and following paths that lead in directions that are neither right nor wrong. This sort of imaginative play is not typically the province of the art historian, but that does not make it any less important. The painting invites—demands—imaginative response. What is happening to the wound? What is the situation of the figure? If, for example, the painting’s somber light is contemplative, conveying the brutal facts with a Whistlerian softness, what then of the hard black rectangle at its top? It weighs upon the wound. It’s the largest of the three stacked rectangles, and it has no interior light or sign of the artist’s hand. It is opaque, blank, characterless. Bacon’s sense of death—thoughts of death weighed on him every day—had this disturbingly featureless quality. He did not believe in death’s drama. (No black curtain comes down in Blood on Pavement.) But you would never want to announce that the black rectangle “represents death.” That would close off the picture. Death is more interesting unannounced.
All the drama takes place in the middle rectangle, the smallest and busiest of the three, which envelops the wound. The wound itself, rather than appearing grisly, looks as beautiful as a crushed ruby, full of depths and inner tightenings; four white highlights, like sparks of expression in an eye, add sharpness and definition. The grayish tan around the wound is softly painted and, as mentioned earlier, seems to cant the space forward. The wound appears enacted. It is still changing. Like a surgeon or a ticket holder in the dress circle, the viewer must look slightly downward at the drama, since the top of the wound begins at about the midpoint of the painting and then descends. On three sides of the wound Bacon has added a diaphanous wash—misty, like watercolor or reverie.
The transitional spaces are full of enigmatic import. Some slight intermingling occurs between the black rectangle and the bruised rectangle, for example, but otherwise the connection between the two is small. Their relation has a visual effect—of startling contrast—but is also provocative in the elliptical way: the opaque black lends a poignancy to the image of the wound, as if nothing above were paying attention. The transitional space between the middle and lower rectangles has many more incidents of color, line, and touch, and the two lower rectangles also commingle visually. Again, there is a compositional reason. Together, the lower two rectangles counter the downward pressure of the black rectangle; that confrontation creates a pleasing visual tension around the wound. But the lowest rectangle—which appears rather remote, like a vanilla sky—also adds a powerful note of the ordinary to the picture. It makes elliptical sense that it should have a porous connection to the bruising space above it: life is always passing by, like the hum of traffic outside the window, even as the wounded go about their bloody business.
Blood on Pavement, many would argue, reduces existence to just a puddle of blood. To which the right response is, “Yes, but—” Bacon was indeed a great deflator who took the air out of illusions. But deflation has power only when what’s being lost is palpably present, as the bull stamps and bellows before its sacrifice. (The pin must have the bubble to create the pop.) Bacon used elliptical form to shadow and infuse his art with the illusions that have been lost, which makes their loss the more telling. Where religion was concerned, his friend Helen Lessore— whose opinion about his art Bacon valued—said that “the very agony of his unbelief” and the intensity of his involvement with “final questions” were so acute that “the negative becomes as religious as the positive.”8 Bacon knew what it was to live well. That knowledge gave life to his intimations of death. Blood on Pavement, the work of an artist nearing death, is paradoxical. So much has been taken away, but nothing has been left out.
1 John Eastman, interview, August 19, 2015. Bacon’s friend John Edwards, who had accompanied Bacon to the pub, told Eastman the origin of Blood on Pavement (c. 1984).
2 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 17.
3 John Russell, Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 17. Bacon’s description of the work led Russell to describe the image as a “specimen wound.”
4 Anne Madden, together with Louis le Brocquy, interview, Dublin, May 7, 2008.
5 Eastman, interview. Sylvester had told Eastman that he believed Bacon had Rothko in mind when he painted the picture.
6 The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, edited by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 63. Usually, only the first part of Bacon’s statement is quoted. His full statement reads, “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. I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical form is dependent on the execution of detail and how shapes are remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces.”
7 Ibid. 8 Helen Lessore, A Partial Testament: Essays on Some Moderns in the Great Tradition (London: Tate Gallery, 1986), p. 77
A
A personal view of Francis Bacon by his Boswell, Michael Peppiatt
ANDREW LAMBIRTH | THE ART NEWSPAPER | WEDNESDAY 28 OCTOBER 2015
Michael Peppiatt (born 1941), an internationally acclaimed expert on Francis Bacon, is the author of the standard biography of the artist, Anatomy of an Enigma, first published in 1996 and revised in 2008. He has written Bacon catalogues, notably Francis Bacon in the 1950s, which accompanied a splendid exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and toured to Milwaukee and Buffalo, and he has compiled a volume of essays and interviews entitled Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (2008). What more, you may ask, has he to say about such a (by now) well known figure? Well, the answer is a very great deal of personal, subjective material – the true story, perhaps, of his complex relationship with one of the most enigmatic artists of our times.
This new book is not an objective account of an artist’s life and times, but the diary of an obsession. It is based on Peppiatt’s notebooks and journals, which recorded in detail the precise co-ordinates of Bacon’s long, and often rambling, conversations. In fact, it was the repetitive nature of these near-monologues that enabled the young writer to commit them to memory and re-present them to us today. This accounts for the occasionally unbelievable extent of Bacon’s recorded speech in the book, which flows imperturbably for paragraph after paragraph. Peppiatt calls Bacon a father figure, and the central influence on his life. When they first met, Peppiatt was 21 and still a student at Cambridge. Bacon was 53 and coming into his mature fame as an artist. The friendship (Peppiatt is not gay) is intriguing, to say the least.
The Baconian tone sounds unmistakably throughout the book. “I like phrases that cut me,” Bacon said, and he spoke of “trapping the image at its most living point”. The rhythms of his speech come across too: the repeated phrase “there it is”, like a punctuation mark; the emphasis on exhilarated despair and the belief in nothingness; the circular conversations, echoing the endless rounds of drinks. Some people maintain that Bacon drank little and poured more into others’ glasses, but Peppiatt tells otherwise, with one mammoth session accounting for 13 bottles of wine between them, and a few chasers. Peppiatt is good at evoking the “murderous voluptuousness” of Bacon’s paintings, and the book is shot through with perceptive asides and rewardingly direct analysis of the art. No one now alive knew the man and his work as well as Peppiatt, and he guides the enthralled (and sometimes appalled) reader through the switchback of moods that Bacon inflicted on his friends.
For those who enjoyed David Sylvester’s interviews with Bacon, Michael Peppiatt’s memoir will touch a nerve. In Peppiatt’s pages we have the unexpurgated version, fuelled by midnight binges, not the studiedly controlled and densely edited text of Sylvester. We also get something of the man Peppiatt, besides the ambitious writer, curator and art historian, and this makes the whole enterprise both more beguiling and more compelling. “From Bacon I learnt that my own contradictions could only be resolved by letting myself drift as freely as possible,” Peppiatt writes. Part of the excitement of being with Bacon must have been the frisson of danger that attended so many of his encounters with unorthodox types, though the artist was dexterous at averting trouble from his protégé at the last possible moment, usually defusing a situation with a mixture of sangfroid and cash. Peppiatt clearly did a lot of growing up in Bacon’s company and calls it “a revealingly accelerated introduction to life”. He now repays the debt by bringing Bacon to life as never before. A tremendous read.
Andrew Lambirth is a writer, critic and curator. He was the art critic of The Spectator from 2002 to 2014
Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir
Michael Peppiatt
Bloomsbury, 404pp, £25 (hb)
Francis Bacon with Michael Peppiatt (right), photographed by David Hockney in Hockney’s Paris studio, 1975
The young writer refused to shave off his beard, which displeased the artist. As a consequence, Peppiatt never had his portrait painted by Bacon.
Francis Bacon: ‘Sex and painting: that was his life’
In his memoir Michael Peppiatt describes Bacon’s hedonistic and masochistic lifestyle
CATHERINE CONWAY
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BOOKS
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THE IRISH TIMES
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In the Hugh Lane Gallery, on Parnell Square in Dublin, Michael Peppiatt is reading from his new memoir, Francis Bacon in Your Blood, which details his 30-year friendship with the painter. The art critic, who is naturally theatrical, delights his audience with his impersonations, bringing to life the camp bitchiness of Bacon and the rough and readiness of Bacon's young East End muse, George Dyer.
Down the corridor Bacon's studio lies dormant in a climate-controlled room, its meticulously catalogued chaos trapped behind glass. With torn pages, unfinished canvases, and brushes propped in tilted jars, it bears a Mary Celeste look of startled abandonment. Peppiatt is unsure about the studio’s relocation, given that Bacon left Ireland at 16 and never looked back.
“I think it would’ve been more normal for it to stay where it was,” he says, referring to Bacon’s home in South Kensington, in London. “Because that’s where he lived and that’s where he had his whole professional life.” The pair met in 1963, when a 21-year-old Peppiatt walked into a dank Soho bar looking for an interview with Bacon for a college magazine. He had not yet seen Bacon’s work.
“Probably, if I had seen them, I wouldn’t have gone along to that meeting, because I was very disturbed when I did. But by that time I had already been charmed by his exuberant personality and the whole freedom that he exuded.”
Peppiatt quickly became a confidante of the flamboyant "Soho hero", who was 54 when they met. As part of Bacon's inner circle, alongside Lucian Freud and John Deakin, Peppiatt rollicked through the glamour and gutter of the underground clubs and decadent restaurants of London and Paris, keeping detailed notes despite his throbbing hangovers.
He describes Bacon as a “romantic figure” and “swashbuckling”, a man who “tended to befriend rather lost young men. With some artists you meet you might like their work, but they don’t have an effect on you. There it was the man and the work and the life he made. So that was a triple force.” Bacon provided something lacking from Peppiatt’s own life, a father figure (“a strange father to choose”).
His father was manic-depressive, and moving into Bacon’s extraordinary shadow was a comforting distraction. “I would immediately get terribly uncomfortable if the conversation turned to my family or my background. I felt sort of embarrassed. The family life was loveless, so I wanted out as soon as I could, and that was the big missing element. So there we are. I think it’s partly my fault. I think I was a very difficult child. Very, very demanding. Perhaps I wanted affection and I didn’t get it.”
Just as Peppiatt’s family had watched for swings in his father’s mood, so it was with Bacon, whose garrulousness could turn sour in a heartbeat. “You needed to watch out, because you could be on a perfectly upwards swing, and then a glass too many, and suddenly it would all shift. I adored him, so if he turned against me I felt very vulnerable.”
Their relationship was platonic. Peppiatt describes how he once kissed Bacon on the cheek simply because “I felt such affection when I was leaving him”. Then “I felt him tense up, his cheek bristled and I don’t know what it was, whether it was a danger signal, whether it was sort of saying, ‘Don’t even bother, I know that’s as far as it’s going to go.’ I thought, That’s off limits.”
Bacon’s generosity was reckless and may have been intended to create a feeling of indebtedness in the receiver. “He was very controlling. It’s that thing of being one thing and the other. It meant he was on a tightrope the whole time.” What does Peppiatt mean, “one thing and the other”? “Very generous, very mean. Very kind, very cruel. Very tolerant, very intolerant.”
There is a remarkable scene in the book when Peppiatt tells Bacon that he and his wife are expecting a baby and Bacon reacts with pure rage. “Isn’t that odd? But I’ve talked about it with gay friends of mine, and they say that he was in love with me and that he felt he was losing me because of that.” The relationship was “very, very intense. Some people say that it destroyed me. I think it made me.”
George Dyer, Bacon’s most famous lover and muse, was another of the young men burned by Bacon’s dark influence – fatally so. Peppiatt describes him as a “lost soul” from the East End “drawn into this thing because it gave him a role to play. He was suddenly someone, whereas he had been an unsuccessful petty crook.” Bacon was darkly masochistic, leaving his friends at the end of long nights of drinking to go on to seedier pubs, wearing showy jewellery to attract the negative attention he desired.
“I was probably quite relieved not to have seen the kind of extreme . . . Obviously, I wasn’t present when [Bacon] was getting beaten up, but if that’s in fact what happened, I think that’s what he wanted, and one of the problems with George is that he was too nice to provide the sadistic treatment.”
Dyer became an outlet for Bacon’s own sadistic instincts. Bacon’s savage goading and subsequent guilt inspired his deformed depictions of Dyer on canvas, which Dyer hated. “He just thought what a crazy world it was that people were paying all that money for what he considered dreadful daubs.”
Dyer took his own life on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais, in Paris, in 1971. Peppiatt was in the city the night Dyer died. “It didn’t occur to me that there would be a tragedy. He had told me that he attempted suicide, but it’s a bit like watching a film – you think, That’s over there.”
According to Peppiatt, Bacon liked people who stood up for themselves. “And that’s really what happened with poor George. Although he sort of had bulging muscles and, if really pushed, could be quite decisive in a fight, temperamentally, he didn’t stand his ground.”
Despite the drinking and excess, Bacon remained prolific. “Francis was such a motor I don’t know how he managed to physically go from day to day. It was like all this punishment . . . He was very tough. He’d go through all sorts of really tough things: being beaten up, having swamped himself with drink, and everyone around him. He would go on after a very boozy lunch to a boozy afternoon. I was often with him, so I saw it. He would continue when you left him at 3am or 4am.”
Was Bacon’s behaviour driven by self-loathing? “There are a couple of things. A simpler one is that I think he was guilty about his homosexuality. And I think he took all this punishment as a kind of atonement. He felt absolved through the pain.” But then, as always with Bacon, there is an equal but opposite explanation. “There was also a kind of huge arrogance and superiority that . . . the masochist, if he outlasts the punishment, is the one who wins.”
Both in art and in life, Bacon believed that “only by going too far do you go anywhere at all. Very few stayed the pace. He exhausted people.” Despite the constant pushing of boundaries and the bleak nature of his work, Bacon was “very much a life force. He played with death and went very close to that, but he regularly said, ‘Life is all we’ve got.’ ”
Ageing, however, did take its toll on his extravagant heart. “I think he loathed the idea of growing old. He went on wanting to seduce and went on desiring. He said, ‘It’s tragic at my age to desire.’ And I think that’s one of the things that kept him going. Sex and painting: that was his life.
“I still believe that’s the key. When he said, ‘In painting I want to re-create the excitement of life,’ well, what is, in a sense, more exciting than having sex? That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t get excited by landscapes or paintings or political events. But it’s the ultimate. It’s an orgasmic activity, his painting.”
While the memoir is candid, it is also kind to Bacon. There is always a search for understanding. “Yes. Because I loved him: with huge reservations and very conditionally.”
Peppiatt describes one of the last times he saw Bacon before his death. “I think in old age the contradictions became resolved. Perhaps with this last, very good-looking boy he found a contentment. Also – he had been called the greatest living painter, he had all the accolades, the money – he looked positively cherubic.”
And although Bacon’s later art suffered from that lack of turmoil, “it’s interesting that he resolved it in his life work. So it’s a complete trajectory. Whatever was warring was now at peace.”
Francis Bacon in Your Blood is published by Bloomsbury Circus
Francis Bacon with Michael Peppiatt in Paris, 1975. Photograph: David Hockney
The artist’s Monaco connection has inspired two unlikely collaborators to create a
private foundation for his work.
Emma Crichton-Miller reports. Portrait by Fabio Massimo Aceto
ART
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FINDERS KEEPERS
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HOW TO SPEND IT
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THE FINANCIAL TIMES
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Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, 21 Boulevard d’Italie, 98000 Monaco (+377-9330 3033).
DR. JIM WALSH | MEDIUM | CONWAY
HALL|
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2015
A TASTE FOR FRANCIS BACON
An installation at the Tate which pairs paintings with tastes, sounds and smells
TOM CHATFIELD | THE DAILY ART |
LIFE & CULTURE | 1843 MAGAZINE | THE ECONOMIST|
SEPTEMBER 4, 2015
UK-Russia Bacon show goes on…
…but British government officially pulls out of joint Year of Culture
After the UK government decided in July to officially withdraw its support for the UK-Russia Year of Culture, it is unclear whether the remaining events in the programme will be affected. These include the long-awaited Francis Bacon exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which marks the end of the cultural exchange.
A spokeswoman for the UK government tells The Art Newspaper: “In light of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and continuing Russian support for the separatist destabilisation of eastern Ukraine, Her Majesty’s Government has withdrawn ministerial and senior official involvement in the Year of Culture.” The British Council, however, says it will continue to oversee the programme.
“Francis Bacon: the Process of Creation”, which is being organised independently of the British Council, is scheduled to run from 7 December to 8 March 2015. Key loans are due to come from the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, which has promised all of its 13 works by Bacon. These include studies for portraits of Van Gogh and Pope Pius XII and several portraits of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. Four loans have been agreed by the Tate, with archival material coming from the Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The idea is to draw on the Hermitage’s collection to present the artist in the context of earlier masters whom he admired, ranging from Rembrandt to Degas. The show is due to travel to Norwich next summer.
Before Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down on 17 July, Paul Greenhalgh, the director of the Sainsbury Centre, told us: “At this stage, the centre and the Hermitage are continuing with the preparatory organisation of the Bacon exhibition on the understanding that it will go ahead. We will let colleagues know if the situation changes.” Last month, Greenhalgh reiterated that this still stands; a further announcement is due to be made this month. The curator of the exhibition, Thierry Morel, says that the show is still “scheduled for December” and that some sponsorship has already been confirmed; a spokesman for the Hermitage also says that the show will go ahead.
Two UK-Russia shows that were originally due to open this month have been cancelled. These were the Young British Artists (YBAs) at the Ekaterina Foundation in Moscow and the Russian art collective AES+F at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There are hopes that the YBA show may be revived.
Meanwhile, the Polish government has cancelled the Poland-Russia Year of Culture 2015, in protest over developments in Ukraine. A statement issued by the Polish foreign ministry said that the decision was made by the council of ministers on 23 July because of “the deepening Russian-Ukrainian conflict, including the tragic downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17”.
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Moscow warns sponsor BP over sanctions
BP, the main sponsor of the UK-Russia Year of Culture, is facing the threat of seizure of its Russian investments. A source at the foreign ministry in Moscow told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that there would be retaliation against the UK if further European sanctions are imposed, pointedly adding that “BP and Shell have a lot of assets in Russia”. BP’s report to shareholders on 29 July warned that further Western sanctions “could have a material adverse impact” on its interests in Russia. The oil company is the founding sponsor of the UK-Russia Year of Culture. A spokesman for BP told us that he is “unaware of any changes” in its support for the cultural programme.
By CRAIG BROWN | THE MAIL ON
SUNDAY
| SUNDAY 29 AUGUST 2015
The poet Stephen Spender wanted his son to be a part of his bohemian circle.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen talks to Matthew Spender about the sexual complexities of his family life
HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN
| THE OBSERVER| SUNDAY 8 NOVEMBER 2015
A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents by Matthew Spender is published by HarperCollins at £25.
BY KAT HERRIMAN | ART | THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE| TUESDAY NOVEMBER 3, 2015
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings is on from Nov. 7 — Dec. 12 at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Ave., New York
Doing the Bacon
The gilded gutter life
AVEEK SEN | OPINION | THE TELEGRAPH | INDIA | FRIDAY 16 OCTOBER 2015
What does it mean, or what does it feel like, to have someone "in your blood"? It is a metaphor that mixes kinship and contagion, suggesting an encounter that is inevitable. Somewhere between privilege and doom, it is closeness of a sort that breeds as much productive resistance as hindering intimacy. Michael Peppiatt was 21 and Francis Bacon 53 when they met in London in 1963. According to Philip Larkin, the English poet, it was the year "sexual intercourse began". He puts it in history "between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP."
The intercourse that began between Peppiatt (straight and timid) and Bacon (gay and rampant) wasn’t sexual – in the sense that there was no sex, which need not, of course, make things asexual – but it deeply and irreversibly changed the direction, nature and quality of the younger man’s life and work. For Peppiatt, 1963 turned out to be exactly what Larkin had called his poem: the "Annus Mirabilis", in which life suddenly becomes a "brilliant breaking of the bank,/ A quite unlosable game." "Breaking of the bank" is surely a pun - a flood as well as a heist. Transgression was the name of this game, and Middle England, bored out of its wits since the end of the war and Empire, was desperate to play it again. Oscar Wilde had died long ago, and Auden had turned American.
Inequality of age, class, intellect and achievement, together with the peculiar self-consciousness that such things take on in England, was built into the way Bacon, to shift the metaphor a little, got under Peppiatt's skin. More or less comparable to a summer’s day, Peppiatt was then an Art History undergraduate in Cambridge trying to revive a dormant student magazine with an issue on modern art in Britain; his parents were unhappily married, middle-class Londoners, his father was bipolar, and his school had only been obscurely public. Bacon, on the other hand, had had his first big show at the Tate the year before. Already regarded as a genius painter, as much among the European avant garde as among the "lost souls of Soho", he was making and unmaking large sums of money, and was given to drifting from "bar to bar, person to person" driven by champagne, wit and the death wish, all of which had begun to come together as parts of a brilliantly self-curated personal mythology.
Repeatedly told that he couldn’t bring out his issue of the magazine without having Bacon in it, Peppiatt gets to the artist at last for an interview, in a bar in Soho. He is surrounded by a threatening moat of queens in various stages of inebriation and decay, led by the photographer, John Deakin - the "Mona Lisa of Paddington" - from whose photographs of models Bacon had made some of his most famous paintings. Mysteriously for Peppiatt, Bacon pulls him into his inner circle in an instant, thrusting into his hands a glass of wine that could well have been the Grail: "'Here’s to everything you want,' he says to me, anointing our newly formed group with a radiant smile. 'I can’t wish you more than that, can I?' 'To everything you want,' the others repeat in unison, as if we have engaged in a secret rite."
Thus began a "complex, volatile relationship" that lasted through homosexual thick and heterosexual thin for three decades until Bacon’s death. It was an amitié amoureuse that generated an invaluable archive of diaries and records, material as well as intangible, maintained by Peppiatt out of an immediate and overwhelming sense of vocation. Here was an extraordinary artist, and it was nothing but pure chance – if chance is ever pure – that had brought them together. So, he must "get it down", as Deakin had commanded him once. Peppiatt quickly trained himself to capture – first in his memory, and then in writing – the exhaustingly interminable, mesmerizingly repetitive, and brilliantly unflinching talk that came out of Bacon during their meetings, binges, sojourns and skirmishes over the years.
He has produced a proper biography out of all this material, apart from a lavishly illustrated book on Bacon in the 1950s, the years before they met. But Francis Bacon in Your Blood is a less proper, and more troubling, complicated, flawed by overwriting, and therefore more valuable, book. Peppiatt writes himself into it with a candour that sometimes risks leaving the reader uneasy with, or even cringing at, the unabashed use – there is no other word - that the two men make of each other and of the inequalities that draw them closer and closer apart. So, in Peppiatt’s life, 'growing up' and 'going up' become one and the same story of "doing the Bacon", symbolized by that steep flight of stairs leading up to the notorious chaos of the painter’s studio. And this is how Bacon, with his "masochistic generosity", wanted it written, too, when the writer first suggested such a book to him: "the more indiscreet it is the better... if you’re going to tell the story, only the whole story is worth telling." This was, of course, before making it, in his usual contradictory way, as difficult as possible for Peppiatt to get the book published during Bacon’s lifetime.
Just as well, perhaps, for the passing of time – Bacon died in 1992 – gives to Peppiatt’s book an aura of authentic loss and longing that comes close to the spirit of Bacon’s fellow-asthmatic, Marcel Proust, whose Time Regained the painter would read over and over again, calling it "the last great tragedy that’s been written". While I was reading Peppiatt’s book, I also happened to be watching, by sheer coincidence, Raúl Ruiz’s exquisite film of this last volume of Proust’s novel, and the incessant, slowly circular and slightly sickening movement of Ruiz’s camera, catching the phantasmagoric disorientation of Proust’s deathbed memories, together with the relentless morbidity and abjection of the Baron de Charlus (Proust’s great vision of perversion, and Bacon’s favourite character), merged in my mind with the ebb and flow of time and alcohol-fuelled talk recorded by Peppiatt, at the heart of which would always be Bacon’s vision of "nothing, just nada, nada": "it’s not just the circularity of places and the deadening recurrence of bottle after bottle which in themselves gradually swallow up all notion of time but the circularity imposed by Francis himself as he repeats what he just said, again and again like a mantra, until you feel imprisoned in a tightening circle of nihilism and finality." Reading this claustrophobic book, full of its own anxieties and panic, is a very different experience from reading that other, perhaps more self-assured and enduring, book of interviews with Bacon, The Brutality of Fact, by David Sylvester. He was Peppiatt’s chief rival among the "vestal virgins tending to the sacred flame", and therefore the subject of some wonderfully unkind anecdotes in the memoirs.
The bravura writing that forms the core of Peppiatt’s book, and captures, almost like great cinema, the grandeur, tragedy and, above all, the chilling classicism of what Bacon used to call his "gilded gutter life" of art, love and drink, comes in a chapter called "A Death Foretold" in the middle of the book. Bacon’s lovers had mastered the art of timing their suicides with the openings of his great shows, and in this chapter, Peppiatt narrates the experience of being with Bacon in Paris during his exhibition at the Grand Palais in April 1971, a major show with more than a hundred paintings, after the opening of which, at the grandest of banquets hosted by Bacon, the news arrived of his lover, George Dyer, a failed burglar, having killed himself in the hotel room where he and Bacon had been staying. There is a matchless conversation between Bacon and Peppiatt in front of Monet’s Waterlilies at the beginning of the chapter.
But its high point comes during the banquet after the news of Dyer’s suicide, with Bacon deciding to go ahead with the dinner, and Isabel Rawsthorne, his friend and subject, getting up to make a speech: "Isabel’s high, insistent voice rises like a rant, drowning out all whispered commentary in a stream of increasingly incomprehensible phrases that sound as if she was speaking in tongues, inducing an awed silence in every corner of the room. She is addressing Francis opposite her, as if he had asked her a question and she can no longer contain the truth now or for the future as it wells uncontrollably up in her. And everybody sits there, stunned, as she appears to be saying that this is what she had seen coming, fatally, and now that it was there it was final, and this was the price that had to be paid. And Francis sits there immobile, his head bowed." Trained in "living art" by the great painter himself, Peppiatt also describes how, during Isabel’s speech, the waiters had been darting around, noiselessly plying the guests with the Rully Clos Saint-Jacques and the Côte de Brouilly Château Thivin, both 1970, "as frequently and plentifully as possible".
STEFANIE MARSH | INTERVIEW | THE TIMES | SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2015
I think the difficulties he may have had reconciling his art with what one might call “real life” is what Auerbach, 83, is driving at when, later, he tells me, paraphrasing WH Auden, “If there’s a crisis, if there’s a pressure – instead of dealing with the crisis or the pressure, the artist will run back into the arms of the muse and go on painting.”
In the film, Julia, Stella and Jake (who also produced it) explain that sitting for Frank is quite a commitment – hours spent in his tiny, “squalid” (his word) studio, year in, year out, while Frank, an unusually proper, if not to say gallant, intellectual and self-possessed man when he’s not painting, has a “kind of fit”: goes under the spell of his art; dropping to his knees in front of the canvas, grunting, spitting, hissing, moaning, thrashing about angrily, reciting long passages of verse. All the while he’s applying paint, scraping it off, reapplying, over and over, until – two years or longer down the line – he judges the portrait to be finished. (Once or twice he’s even persuaded a buyer to sell him back a painting so that he can have another go at it.)
Why do they sit for him? “Because I loved him and he wanted it,” Stella tells the camera, it seems somewhat helplessly, given their relationship history. “It was,” another woman tries to explain, “the greatest, most marvellous thing in my life. I miss it dreadfully.” A businessman who first started sitting for Auerbach 30 years ago as a student tells us that he makes the weekly journey all the way from Switzerland now because it’s the only time he feels that he’s doing anything with any purpose – when he’s in that room.
And the artist? Why the intense, lifelong obsession with portraiture? He says it’s not up to him to look into his own motives: his intention when he’s painting is, “Like a physicist or an architect, to make something that is new and works … When people talk about painters expressing themselves, I have no idea what they mean,” he says with some passion. He is far too courteous to let his voice convey annoyance. “I think they think that painters wonder what they feel like and try to put down their feelings. It’s not like that. It’s the painting that expresses them. It’s when I look at it afterwards that I can see what I felt like, what was going through my mind.”
But Julia has her own theory about what is going on between artist and his living subject in portraiture: “You [the artist] are getting yourself off. It’s very intimate. You [the sitter] are vulnerable. And you’re there to do what they want.” People always think that Frank is very modest, Stella told someone once, “But he has the pride of Satan.”
With the words of his closest intimates in my head, I go to meet Frank Auerbach one weekday morning at his studio in Camden, north London, in the pouring rain, and try to calculate in advance what calibre of bombastic egomaniac will open the door to me on this unusually unpleasant autumn day. But when the studio door swings open, there stands behind it an outwardly considerate, dignified man who greets me warmly and, appalled at the state of me, hustles me into his studio, out of the rain. He’s already been out to buy some milk, “because I thought you might have coffee. And these days they sell you milk and it’s sour after two days.” And, because I’ve already had coffee and because I am still soaked, “Would you like a brandy?” There is a half-empty bottle somewhere. There’s only the tiniest trace of German inflection left in his diction: “Bran-dtee.” He pours himself a small cognac and me a medium-sized one.
The studio has been described as squalid and claustrophobic. Well, it’s small and smells of paint, and it’s a bit messy, but feels contained rather than squashed – a basement sanctuary, hidden from the street. Works by some of his heroes are tacked on the wall – Rembrandt, Picasso, De Kooning. The odd postcard from a friend. He and Lucian Freud, a painter nine years his senior but of the same generation of German Jews to flee Berlin, used to draw and send each other greetings cards; they’re museum pieces now.
This morning, like every morning as far back as he can remember, he was up by 5am to do some drawing. He works every day and only bad flu can keep him in bed. He does take breaks: with Stella there was a tradition of an annual holiday – a single day, once a year, spent on Brighton Pier. Art, he’s often said, is a way of pinning down time, controlling it. “In the very little time I have left” is a phrase he uses often. He’s frequently described as “reclusive”, “monastic”, a man trapped “in a prison of his own making”. But that conjures up an unhappy little agoraphobic hobbit, which Auerbach is not. “It’s not that I can’t talk to people; it’s just that I find everything except for painting not very interesting.” He’s one of the most contented people I have ever met.
“For an 83-year-old”, some people might say, he is an attractive man. I would say that he is attractive for a man of any age, and clearly always has been, provided you like a brain and can put up with the single-mindedness – some would call it selfishness – that a friendship with a person whose work always comes first requires. Withheld, handsome, warm, obtuse, funny, a pronounced obstinate streak that makes him both subtly ruthless with his time and, also, far too impatient to waste it digging about in his own psyche. He tells good stories, digresses sometimes, but comes back to the point. On being Jewish: “My grandfather was a rabbi. But religion means nothing to me. I don’t believe there is a life after death. I sometimes wonder whether the Pope himself doesn’t think this is a marvellous story in order to make people behave more imaginatively, rather than the truth, as it were – that there’s somebody out there with a beard.”
Looking back, he thinks he may have experienced “a certain amount of unease in dealing with the world in general because, first, I had a stronger foreign accent and England was far more insular. And, second, I was extremely poor.” Neither did him any harm – they were preconditions for the drive an artist needs, he says. He studied at Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. “I had a grant of £4.10 at the RCA. And then when I left I was again totally broke.”
He met Lucian Freud when the older artist came to an Auerbach exhibition. “Thank you,” is all he said to Auerbach that day. Years later, Freud would have paintings by his friend – bought, never gifted – all over his house. “I just love Frank,” he would explain.
Freud and Francis Bacon, another of the great pioneering British artists of the last century, became his close friends. Their styles had little in common, but they would show each other their work. A few times they painted each other. Bacon would often treat his impoverished colleague to lavish restaurant meals. Freud drove his Bentley badly and liked to take Auerbach with him – his rough, unshaven appearance, Auerbach joked, would frighten other drivers back into their cars if ever Freud cut them up. He is full of these neat little stories. You don’t want them to end.
The first thing that people seem to know about Auerbach, even before they know about his paintings, is that his parents both died in a concentration camp – he doesn’t know which one. His upbringing had been bourgeois. Auerbach found his mother’s cosseting ways somewhat stifling. His father was a patent lawyer, but then the Nazis came to power. Through relatives, seven-year-old Frank was smuggled to England in 1939 and sent, with lots of other refugee children, to boarding school in Kent. For a couple of years he still received the odd censored letter from his parents via the Red Cross. Then they stopped coming. He can’t remember anyone telling him that his parents were dead. He can’t remember being upset. The freedom he felt being away from his family came as a bit of a relief, he says. Journalists and biographers have pinched and probed him on this point, but he always says the same thing: “There’s just never been a point in my life when I felt I wished I had parents.”
“I think I did this thing,” he says, “which psychiatrists frown on: I am in total denial. It’s worked well for me.”
So the past is in those paintings somewhere. “And, I mean, people are absolutely justified to say that life’s the thing, and to live it fully and passionately and vividly and so on. That’s absolutely fine. But perhaps because of my background, from very early on I was aware that time was drifting off into nothing. That human life was meaningless, in a sense. So that is the motive for art.”
He knew what death meant from a very young age. “If you think, I came to England, I left the family I had, and didn’t see them again – I didn’t feel a depression or anything, but I realised that everything was very fragile and life could disappear.” Stapling down time is his main conscious preoccupation, he says.
As a child, he was taken on beach holidays by the Baltic. He remembers his mother as good-looking. Playing in the sand, he would see her from a long way off, sitting on the rocks and men looking at her. If – which Auerbach is not – you were given to ascribing meaning to childhood experiences, you might suspect you understand why he grew up to be an obsessive portraitist of mainly women
He has a temper. Stella said that. They’ve both described the terrible fights they used to have. She described him as “schizophrenic”, on account of how wild he gets when he’s painting. “But I think I’m two different people. I mean, something else happens when I’m working. I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It comes from somewhere else.” They were in a play together when he was 17, she, 32. She told the story of how, one evening over drinks, she felt somebody pulling out the pins in her hair one by one. It was Frank. Soon after that, he moved into the boarding house she ran in Earls Court and they became lovers
He’s not remotely eccentric. His diction is precise. He’s cordial in a way that only emigrés of his generation seem to be. It’s hard to imagine him angry. Well, he says, when one is young, one is more attracted to drama. He’s not as strong as he used to be. “I still try to explain to people that, in my case, it’s a highly physical job, and I can see their eyes glaze over. They still think painting is something peaceful, like embroidery.” Also, “You get more feminine when you get older. Francis [Bacon] said this to me.” Stella told people that she had been the “dramatic” one: “ ‘I hit him more than he hit me.’ But it was a lively relationship. Yes.”
He had his first retrospective, at the Hayward, in 1978. Now, the Tate is hosting his third. He thinks he’s probably painted more than 1,000 pictures in all. For the forthcoming exhibition he has chosen eight or so images per decade. Many of the early ones are of London landscapes and of Stella – bearing her initials as their titles. Some people complain his field of interest is too narrow: he does his portraits and he does his street paintings – they’re all of London, usually within walking distance of his studio. He’s currently working on a painting of the pillar box around the corner
The world he likes to inhabit is one made up entirely of fact. “I’m not disposed to looking back,” he says. Speculation, feelings, motives – irrelevant. Why he does something doesn’t interest him. So you’ll ask him a question such as, “What was your earliest memory of painting?” And he’ll say that he remembers being given a colouring book; he must have been two or three years old
And do you remember the feeling you had, dipping the paint?
“Well, that’s what I remember. What do three-year-olds remember specifically?”
They might feel scared or happy or delighted. Children feel things.
“Do you know,” he replies, “in that sense I’m an existentialist. I think the only thing we can be certain of is what we do. The motives are already a mystery. We are what we do and we are what we’ve done. The rest is supposition and guesswork. Certainly one acts out of one’s feelings, but the only way one can judge one’s feelings is action and the only thing worth thinking about is the action.”
I feel for Stella, like I feel for Julia. There’s a passivity in being a muse that must make you feel powerless. “Consciously,” he’s saying, “I’ll be dealing with some geometrical problem with a portrait, but when I look at it afterwards I can sometimes see my exceptional involvement with the person I’ve been painting.”
Can he think of a painting that maybe he’s looked at again after many years and, for the first time, understood his relationship with its subject?
“Well, I had a very intense and fraught relationship with someone who sat for me for a long time.” He means Stella. “I may have thought that this was a question of mutual obsession, as it were … Now I look at the pictures of her and realise I was really fond of her. It wasn’t the way I thought of it at the time. At the time, I thought it was a sort of passion, but I didn’t think of it as tender passion, if you know what I mean. But now I see I was quite clearly involved in her looks and probably her feelings and everything … There was an affection involved.”
Poor Stella. Would she had lived to hear this.
Stella lived for a time with her children in Deptford, southeast London. He would join them for a Sunday roast. Sometimes Lucian Freud would come, too – he would ask her what she made of his portrait of Frank. (Auerbach doesn’t much mind what his sitters think of his.) Francis Bacon put Freud and Auerbach in one of his paintings. I think it’s extraordinary, louche, sexually suggestive – both men seem to be naked from the waist down – and beautiful. “Francis did it from, I suppose, photographs. I mean, neither of us sat for it. And with photographs in Paris Match of French paratroopers resting in Algiers. That was the way his mind worked.”
For 15 years, Bacon extended Auerbach every kindness. “We saw each other a lot. We spoke a lot, and then we fell out.” Auerbach was disturbed by Bacon’s reaction to his partner, George Dyer’s, suicide. Some people felt that Bacon’s treatment of the unstable Dyer morally implicated him. “When George died I was somehow … One is not supposed to pass moral judgment, but something about it seemed to me – I think I was totally wrong – a superficial disavowal of responsibility. That somehow put me off and, I have to say, put Lucian off as well. Because – we never discussed this – without a conscious decision, I think our behaviour towards him changed.”
Then again, Bacon fell out with everyone. “All his friendships wore out, as most people’s do. But when his friendships wore out, having such a famous group of them, he actually got off on the idea of what he called treachery, which he talked about a lot.” We all get sillier with age, Auerbach says: “And he certainly did.”
He and Freud remained close until the latter’s death in 2011. “Lucian was instinctively a quite extraordinarily nice man.” When the Freud estate last year sold its 44 Auerbach drawings and paintings in lieu of £16 million inheritance tax, Auerbach was glad that the work found its way into public galleries.
Art is the only creative thing a person can do, he says, “Except what women do,” by which he means have babies. It’s an old-fashioned, unacceptable view, a lot of people would argue. Why so few famous female artists? “I don’t think it’s a simple answer,” he replies. “The physical drama for women before the menopause is entirely different from men’s. Not having a child, it must create a certain … I keep being forced to talk about things that embarrass me,” he grumbles, but carries on with his point. “But if you put one-year-olds into a play pen, the little girls will go towards each other and start interacting, and the little boys will stay in corners and start putting bricks one on top of another, so it’s not entirely conditioned. There does seem to be something genetic.” He admires Gwen John and Berthe Morisot, but, “I don’t think there are going to be more women artists now than there were before. Maybe writing novels suits women more.”
A few days later, I call him. I want to ask him about his son.
Was he nervous that his estranged son might not want to see him? By now, you can pre-empt his response. “I don’t inquire into my motives very much. I just did it. I may well have felt nervous, but I think one wastes energy when one inquires into one’s feelings.” He just feels extremely grateful that things worked out. You’re lucky, I say. Yes, he is. I can hear him smiling over the telephone. “I feel like little angels look after me all my life.”
Frank Auerbach runs at Tate Britain from October 9 to March 13, 2016.
‘Francis Bacon and the Masters’
RINA ARYA | ART AND CHRISTIANITY | AUTUMN | ISSUE 83 | TUESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER, 2015
‘Francis and the Masters’ presents more than 20 of Bacon’s works, with Old and Modern Great Masters from the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, including Egyptian mummy masks, Roman and Renaissance sculpture and a number of the museum’s well known paintings. The exhibition offers an opportunity to see Bacon alongside several of his acknowledged influences including Michelangelo, Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Picasso, amongst others. The range of source material found in Bacon’s Reece Mews studio is evidence enough of his eclecticism. Books were strewn on the studio floor with the occasional leaf having been torn out.
But integral to Bacon’s practice was to work from images and photographs; the most well known instance of his working from reproductions was his obsession with Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, which triggered a proliferation of images by him over many decades. Nine books on Velazquez were found in Reece Mews, with all but one having the image of Innocent X torn out, and one of these creased and paint-smeared images had clearly been used in the formation of his own image. Curiously, despite his fixation on this image, Bacon did not choose to see the work first-hand when he visited Rome. Having the original masterpieces present in the exhibition, then, somehow distorts the actual working practices of Bacon's image-making and also runs the risk of over-playing the affinities between Bacon and these other artists.
The narrative of the exhibition can be constructed as a series of definite and direct pairings with other nonpairs being grouped loosely as sharing aesthetic and other affinities. Inevitably the question of the pertinence of particular pairs becomes prominent, with some being mutually enlightening, such as the dramatic juxtaposition of Bacon Crucifixion, 1933 with Alonso Cano’s The Crucifixion, 1636-1638, where the latter heightens the solemnity and gravitas of the former and gives a fitting close to the show, whilst others, such as the echo of the raised arms gesture in Matisse’s Standing Nude, 1958, Gauguin’s Man Picking Fruit from a Tree, 1897 and Bacon’s Study of a Nude, 1953 are rather tenuous.
Odder still is the proximity of Bacon’s
Portrait of Lisa, 1957 to a Roman bronze sculpture. On
a symbolic level this connection is prescient as it was through the generous
patronage of Lisa and Robert Sainsbury that the current exhibition was made
possible. The correspondences between disparate works that are variously placed
in the exhibition are also worth pursuing. The Egyptian fragments of mummy masks
provide new insights into Bacon’s Study for Portrait II
(after the Life Mask of William Blake), 1955. The
most welcome addition is the collection of sculpture by Bernini, Rodin, and
Michelangelo which reinforces the already manifest sculptural potential of
Bacon’s work. The influence of Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy,
1524 is referenced in Bacon’s Figures in a Landscape,
c. 1956 and Two Figures in a Room, 1959.
The exhibition is certainly a cultural treat
–to
see all these masterpieces under the same roof is rare--and expresses the
syncretic and vibrant spirit of Bacon’s visual interests. The downside is that
visually the effects can be jarring, especially given the idiosyncratic tone of
Bacon’s palette. Many of his works look even more spectral and ghostly when
placed next to the warmer, fleshier offerings of Soutine and Rembrandt. Works
such as Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox, Picasso’s
Bathers or Soutine’s The Side of Beef,
which either directly influenced Bacon, or at least resonated with his subject
matter or outlook, are not included in the exhibition. Instead less overtly
relevant works by these artists are in their place. The advantage of exhibiting
less obvious works is that it forces one to think about stylistic affinities.
This is particularly fruitful in the connections that emerge between Bacon’s
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh I, 1956 and
IV, 1957 and Van Gogh’s landscapes.
The curators set themselves a difficult challenge. Bacon’s strong personal stamp, both in content and style, make any sort of visual (but not intellectual) dialogue with any other artist problematic. The Bacon-Moore pairing at The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 2014 worked because it was nuanced and sustained. The remit here was different because the intention was not to single out a few artists for comparison but rather to bring Bacon into contact with the work of artists that have featured greatly in his source material, personal statements and scholarship.
More importantly, it situates Bacon in mainstream histories of art, thus
acknowledging his debts to Old Masters from the 17th Century as well as the
giants of Modernism. This is crucial, as the painterliness of Bacon’s
representation is often overlooked in exhibitions of his work in favour of
thematic parallels. A focus on his fractured surfaces alongside his modernist
forerunners reveals the stylistic impact of the modeling of Rembrandt, Soutine
and others and adds a fresh angle to the show. The partnership between the
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and the State Hermitage Museum, as explained by
the former's director Paul Greenhalgh, and as inaugurated by this exhibition,
conveys the ongoing internationalization of interest in Bacon.
Rina Arya is author of Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World
(Lund Humphries, 2012)
Art’s Tormented Wild Man Finds a Resting Place in Glitzy Monaco:
A Surprisingly Apt Foundation Location
BY PATRICIA MORA | MUSEUMS | ARTS | CULTURE | PAPER CITY MAGAZINE | TUESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER, 2015
When it comes to pairing outré artist Francis Bacon with specific places on the globe, the tiny principality of Monaco does not leap to mind. Bacon’s “screaming popes” à la Velázquez and fascination with crucifixion motifs don’t instantly jive with the comfy Hôtel de Paris or the yacht-dotted coastline of some of the most spendy real estate on the planet. Yet The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation — housing artwork, memorabilia and documents relating to the artist — has been established in this shiniest jewel on the Côte d’Azur. The artist, it seems, had an abiding love for the splendidly gorgeous hot spot in the South of France.
Established by Majid Boustany, the foundation is devoted to the study of Bacon’s art, life and creative process. In fact, a research project was recently funded under the aegis of the institution that allowed art historian Katharina Günther to explore Bacon’s heretofore forgotten bond with painter Denis Wirth Miller. Her work also limns the central role that photographic elements played in Bacon’s work. After all, the artist noted that “images breed other images in me” — thus, Günther gives interested parties a fascinating and specific trail to follow with regard to photographs and the way they are integrated into Bacon’s work.
While it’s widely known that the South of France held huge appeal for a number of artists and writers — including Aldous Huxley, W.B. Yeats, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Eileen Gray — it still seems rather shocking that Bacon, too, was smitten by the Mediterranean haven. He was especially enamored of the Monte Carlo Casino — in fact, he was such a habitué of the place that he sometimes couldn’t afford new canvas and resorted to using the backsides of completed works. Eventually he found that the toothy quality of the “wrong” side of the material suited him so well that he grew to prefer it.
One article in The Daily Telegraph describes it this way: “The rough, unprepared, unpredictable surface that allowed for no neat rubbings-out was what he had been seeking. Here was something as intractable as him. Here you took your chance, and the first stroke had better be the best or you had to throw it away. From then on, he was devoted to it, threw paint at it, sculpted lines on it, and slashed it to pieces if it didn’t do what he wanted.”
The cruelty of Bacon’s addiction to the Monte Carlo Casino turned into a blessing in disguise. He initially visited Monaco in the early 1940s. When he sold a painting for ₤200 in 1946, he used the funds to move to a hotel there with his then-lover and patron, Eric Hall. Bacon maintained a residence in the principality until the early 1950s and visited Monaco for the remainder of his life. Thus, it’s fitting that a foundation dedicated to preserving his work and creating a growing understanding of his process is located there.
Surprising? Perhaps. But when you consider that Bacon was so enthralled with his own wealth that he pinned ₤50 notes to his attire and passed them out to passersby, his infatuation for a place known for its wealthy royal family and moneyed residents begins to make sense.
For those who love the work of Bacon — and for those who are strangely puzzled and mesmerized by it — a visit to The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in Monaco will prove gratifying. It provides a means of excavating the work and psyche of one of the most fascinating and haunting figures of the art world during the past century. Moreover, it’s said that Monaco is one of the few places Bacon spoke about with fondness. This offers proof that perhaps there are huge demons that only equally huge beauty can slay.
Brian Sewell (1931–2015)
OBITUARIES | NEWS DESK | ART FORUM | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2015
The British art critic Brian Sewell has died according to a report in the Art Newspaper. Sewell was a critic at the London Evening Standard newspaper for more than thirty years, where he accrued both fans and detractors alike for his at times controversial views, such as when he commented on women painters to say they “lacked the creative faculty,” or gave his view on the prestigious Turner Prize: “Ignoring it is the kindest thing one can do.”
Born in 1931, he grew up in London and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute, later beginning his career at Christie’s in the 1950s. Sewell was friends with many artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Salvador Dali. When taking stock of his career as a critic, Sewell stated “I shall soon be forgotten as a scribbler but it will not matter as long as there are others prepared to lock horns with the Establishment, to mock and make nonsense of it and all its works, to ride its blows and suffer an occasional black eye.”
Bacon’s Boswell
How an interview with the painter turned into weeks
of prodigious drinking and a lifelong friendship
LYNN BARBER | MEMOIR | BOOKS | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2015
Michael Peppiatt has already written a full biography of Francis Bacon so this is very much a footnote. But it is a fascinating one. He met Bacon in 1963 when he was studying history of art at Cambridge and was planning an issue of Cambridge Opinion about modern art. Someone told him he should go to the French House in Soho and look for a photographer called John Deakin who might, if he was lucky, introduce him to Bacon. Deakin was unhelpful but Bacon, who was standing nearby, overheard the conversation and called out: “I simply adore students. Come and join us.” Thus began a friendship that lasted until Bacon’s death in 1992.
Peppiatt asked for an interview — the interview became weeks and weeks of lunches and dinners and parties and bar crawls. Even when Peppiatt had written his article, he went on being Bacon’s Boswell because by then he was hooked. And so was Bacon. He loved talking about himself to this handsome young man who, unlike most of his contemporaries (Bacon was 53 when they met, Peppiatt 21), had the stamina to keep drinking with him all night.
An evening would typically begin with champagne at the Colony Room, then dinner at Wheeler’s, Claridge’s, the Connaught or the Ritz, followed by more drinking in various bars, and perhaps a second dinner at midnight. It was quite normal for them to drink a couple of bottles of champagne beforehand, then five or six bottles of claret over dinner — very fine claret, too, because Bacon was nothing if not generous. Peppiatt calls his generosity “almost masochistic” — he showered waiters with bank notes and was positively upset if anyone else tried to pick up the bill. Lucian Freud when they dined together made a comic turn of picking up the bill and then pretending to faint.
It is easy to see why Peppiatt, “a middle-class boy with an upwardly mobile penchant”, liked going round with Bacon — who wouldn’t? Bacon in turn liked him because he was obviously bright, spoke several languages (which Bacon admired), and was genuinely interested in everything Bacon had to say. He was also heterosexual, which was fine by Bacon, who often said that he disliked homosexuals, especially effete ones. He preferred thugs. When he met Peppiatt, he was already in a long sexual relationship with the failed burglar George Dyer who inspired some of his greatest paintings. But Dyer by this time was a hopeless alcoholic.
After Cambridge, Peppiatt moved to Paris to work for Réalités magazine, but Bacon was a frequent visitor. He considered Paris the centre of the art world and was delighted when he was offered a retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971. President Georges Pompidou opened the exhibition and Bacon sailed through a day of press interviews followed by a big celebratory dinner. At the dinner, people began whispering that Dyer had been found dead in their hotel bathroom. Officially it was a heart attack — in fact it was an overdose. Weeks later, Bacon told Peppiatt that Dyer had made several suicide attempts before and that he knew he was in the bathroom, with the door locked, when he left for the Grand Palais that morning. He could possibly have saved him if he had summoned hotel staff to break down the door. But he had destroyed Dyer years ago, he said, when he weaned him off burglary, his raison d’être, and left him with nothing to do but drink.
Dyer’s death and Bacon’s reaction to it form the emotional climax of the book — but we have another 200 pages to go. Peppiatt reveals more about his own life: he had passing girlfriends, but was happy to be known as a useful spare man, always available for dinner parties and weekend invitations. He made a precarious living as a freelance art critic, translator and editor but without ever achieving much renown. Then New York’s Museum of Modern Art threatened to sue him over a bad review and at the same time his father died, which hit him hard, despite the fact that he’d never got on with his father. He lost weight, had panic attacks, and could barely go out. Bacon proved a truly staunch and thoughtful friend, helping to restore his confidence and also his finances, by taking him to casinos where Peppiatt somehow managed to win the equivalent of his annual income. Thanks to Bacon he was able to buy a large apartment and eventually marry and have two children.
But, having set him up, Bacon seemingly then lost interest and was blisteringly cruel to him on a couple of occasions. Perhaps Peppiatt should have remembered Bacon’s very first words when they met at the French House — “I simply adore students.” Peppiatt had committed the cardinal sin of becoming middle-aged.
Peppiatt’s many interviews with Bacon were conducted without a tape recorder, but he wrote notes of everything he remembered afterwards. And Bacon tended to repeat himself so much that if Peppiatt missed a dictum first time round he knew it was bound to come up again. Thus he is able to provide a full crop of Bacon’s opinions on art — he loved Van Gogh (more than Cézanne) and Velasquez, he preferred Michelangelo’s drawings to his sculpture and Degas’s pastels to his paintings, he liked Freud’s early work but not his later, he had no time for Hockney. The only contemporary artist he deferred to was Picasso; he was particularly contemptuous of Jackson Pollock and abstract art generally.
So far so good. But when Peppiatt was commissioned to write a biography of Bacon after his death he realised that, though he knew many of his anecdotes almost by heart, there were huge swathes of his life that Bacon had never mentioned. He had talked a bit about his childhood and his difficult relationship with his father, but had never spoken about his schooldays. Even his date of birth was uncertain. Bacon had told him it would take a Proust to tell his life. Peppiatt is no Proust — but he is nevertheless an engaging writer.
Hard knocks
Bacon, Peppiatt remembers, was a man of extraordinary physical endurance. ‘I’ve seen him barely able to walk or turn his head,’ he says, ‘presumably because he’d had himself so badly beaten up by passing lovers, without ever complaining or explaining, and I know he’s had stitches taken out without anaesthetic.’
Bacon with the author in David Hackney’s Paris studio, 1975
JACK CASTLE | REVIEW | BOOKS | THE SPECTATOR | SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 2015
Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20 Tel: 08430 600033
For three decades, art historian Michael Peppiatt boozed with Francis Bacon after they’d drunk everyone else
under the table. He relives his days in a demi-mode of crooks, misfits and dodgy nightclubs
MICHAEL PEPPIATT| CULTURE | THE GUARDIAN | WEDNESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER, 2015
Francis Bacon in Your Blood is published by Bloomsbury (£25).
Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir
‘hurtles off the page’
MARK HUDSON | WHAT TO READ | REVIEW | DAILY TELEGRAPH | TUESDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 2015
Peppiatt, a naive young art history student, had tracked Bacon in his lair to pursue an interview for his ailing undergraduate magazine, Cambridge Opinion, while knowing little about the artist or even what his paintings looked like. Within what seems like minutes, Peppiatt was whirled into Bacon’s inner circle, lunching at Wheeler’s with him, Lucian Freud, the photographer John Deakin and other variously camp and sinister hangers-on.
A close, yet ambiguous relationship developed between the urbane, yet troubled gay artist and the perceptive, but directionless and apparently resolutely heterosexual young man, 30 years Bacon’s junior. Peppiatt became privy to some of the key events of Bacon’s life, including the suicide of his lover George Dyer on the eve of his triumphant retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais in 1971.
Since his highly acclaimed 1996 scholarly biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Peppiatt has been waiting to tell the more personal side of the story, and the narrative comes hurtling off the page with a palpable sense of release and an apparently guileless, even artless, candour. Great screeds of Bacon’s speech, the smells of streets and even the colours of people’s shirts and ties are recalled with implausible clarity over a distance of more than 50 years, yet such is the open-hearted energy of the writing you never for a moment doubt the veracity of what you are reading.
Peppiatt’s ingénue’s progress through early-Sixties London is almost comically crowded with emblematic personalities of the time. On his first meeting with Bacon, he finds himself at an East End party watching the disgraced “Profumo” doctor Stephen Ward talking to “two girls with large beehives”. A fumbled grope with Sonia Orwell is interrupted by shuffling feet in the adjacent corridor, which turn out to belong to Cyril Connolly (how and why is never explained). The cavalcade of bohemian celebrities goes on and on.
Bacon himself seemed able to plumb the depths, maintaining a regimen of heavy drinking and virtually no sleep that would kill most of us within a week, while keeping the world at bay with worldly charm and renewing himself through the act of painting, as though every work were a kind of Dorian Grey portrait. While Bacon is sharp-tongued, even cruel with others, he is endlessly considerate and welcoming to Peppiatt, regarding him with “those eyes that seem to pierce and take everything apart, even when he’s being friendly”. Bacon’s “long, thick, white fingers”, he notes, are “those of a butcher… or even a murderer.” Peppiatt’s responses to Bacon’s art are sensitively charted, from initial shock at its “brutal ugliness”, to a growing anxiety about what draws him to paintings that fuse a generalised 20th-century horror with the more intimate degradation of the artist’s sadomasochistic sex life, with paint standing in for spilt blood and semen.
Bacon is, Peppiatt comes to realise, “attracted above all to heterosexual young men who are just waiting to be turned”, while taking a masochistic satisfaction perhaps in the likelihood that Peppiatt never will be. For the writer, meanwhile, Bacon is a father-figure, someone able to hold in balance the emotional extremes that are destroying his real father, a sufferer from bipolar disorder.
When Peppiatt moves to Paris, distancing himself physically from Bacon, the lid comes briefly off the narrative pressure cooker. Why should we be interested in Peppiatt without Bacon? Yet there’s a captivating ambivalence in his account of his aimless life as a freelance journalist, his fleeting involvement with the May ’68 movement and his endless preoccupation with Bacon that makes you wonder how much is really being revealed by his avowed tell-all approach.
Yet the truth of his portrayal of Bacon we don’t doubt for a moment. With his endlessly repeated aphorisms and fierce certainty about his own uncertainty, the artist comes to seem quite straightforward, leaving the quicksilver narrator Peppiatt, with his detachment, covert snobbery and uncertain motivations, as the real enigma. It is this degree of ambivalent artifice, a quality hardly apparent in the book’s early stages, that may see it acclaimed as a classic, not only of art writing, but of personal memoir.
Francis Bacon on the Orient Express with his lover George Dyer in 1964 Photograph: John Deakin
TIM HILTON | AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | LITERARY REVIEW | SEPTEMBER 2015
In recent years, and especially since his death in 1992, there have been many proposals for a life of Francis Bacon. One of them came from Michael Peppiatt. He was well placed for the task, having been a friend of the artist for some thirty years; and his book is all the more moving because it explains why a full account of Bacon’s work and personality was impossible.
Or why, alas, it could not be written by Peppiatt himself. He was overwhelmed by his subject. He loved Bacon so much that he could not see him from a distance, and least of all with the judgement of an art historian. So the best parts of his book are close and immediate summaries of Bacon’s conversation. These he wrote, no doubt with a hangover, the morning after long nights of boozing. Here is Bacon’s voice, with his splutterings, repetitions, changes of subject and general disregard for other people’s opinions, his occasional bons mots and – far too seldom – his reminiscences.
Peppiatt was a listener rather than an interviewer. Bacon must have had many a story to tell, and they would have had a ghastly sheen over their seediness. He was Irish, from a quite rich but classless horse-breeding country family. His first sexual experiences were with one of his father’s grooms, at the back of the stables. The lonely boy was then sent to an English boarding school before a period in Berlin in the late 1920s, where he was an adolescent prostitute, and some months in Paris, where he decided that art was more interesting than any other part of his life, though it lacked the same immediate gratifications.
In Paris Bacon first saw works by Picasso. In later years, Peppiatt records, he often declared that Picasso was the only modern artist greater than himself, though he conceded that there might be something to be said for Matisse and Duchamp. How are we to treat this information? Many people can make idiotic remarks as they near the end of their first magnum of Pol Roger Brut 1947; but it appears that Bacon genuinely believed that he had such a status, and said so whether drunk or sober. The loyal Peppiatt does not demur from such egocentric imaginings. Everyone else will feel that Bacon’s table talk was massively benighted.
I surmise that Bacon’s mind lost touch with reality at the beginning of the 1950s, the time of his first public renown. This was probably a part of his mental surrender to alcoholism and high-stakes gambling – the years of his undocumented activities in Paris, South Africa, Monte Carlo and Tangier, where he had a long, unwholesome affair with Peter Lacy, a former test pilot who earned a living by playing the piano in fashionable bars. This lover may be the figure portrayed (or, rather, represented) in Bacon’s pictures of male couplings. But we have no documentation of any of these adventures, and Peppiatt never asked the questions that might have added to our partial knowledge.
Also mysterious is the period Bacon spent in various studios and flats in London, before and after the Second World War. He designed some furniture and found other employment in various places in South Kensington that dealt in domestic furniture. He was also painting, and came to know other artists of the day. Bacon destroyed his work from this period, or lost it. His early art is therefore unknown – though I once saw, in a recondite private collection (in a block of flats next to Marylebone station, since you ask), a small painting of a fox. Much as I dislike Bacon’s art in general, here was something that pierced me, so simple and eloquent was it, the brushstrokes pulsating as they came closer to the fox’s eyes, both malevolent and innocent of human ways. I dated it to the later 1940s.
After such a peculiar beginning to his career, there came some important canvases. I see Bacon as a child of the Blitz. He did no military service but experienced the fires in London and imagined the sufferings of people elsewhere. He was a war artist. And if you were to put the works of the postwar establishment, such as Graham Sutherland, Ceri Richards and Keith Vaughan, alongside Bacon’s pictures from the early 1950s, they would all fail to match his daring and emotionalism.
However, he could not maintain or vary the dramas of the paintings that gave us crucifixions and screaming popes. Aesthetically, the prints he made after his most famous paintings are more satisfactory than the original canvases. The banality of his palette matters less and the smearing nature of his touch – as though he were soiling linen – is not so apparent. The prints do not ruin our hope that beauty might once have been among his artistic goals.
Unfortunately, neither criticism nor the conversation of his artist friends had any effect on Bacon. The intake of champagne and burgundy, bottle after bottle throughout the day, prevented genuine cultural discussion, whether at table or in his head. He simply liked, and never tried to escape from, his way of life and thought – ‘my golden gutter’, as he called his existence. And he enjoyed being famous, which may be one reason why he took to Peppiatt.
Peppiatt was a young Cambridge undergraduate when they met in 1964, and not a happy or a successful student. He fancied a life in journalism. Half a lifetime later, Peppiatt has experienced many unpleasant things about the world, mainly because of his association with Bacon. But there is still some innocence in his writing. Perhaps it was his open character that attracted Bacon, even though the dirty old artist had quickly realised that his admirer was heterosexual. And Bacon would have liked the fact that Peppiatt was guileless, while most of his hangers-on had the mentality of pickpockets. His book is very long, and I suppose that its length has something to do with a generous spirit. In so far as anyone could be kind to Bacon, arrogant in his career of self-harm, Peppiatt was. Bacon was fortunate to have known him – more fortunate, perhaps, than Peppiatt was to have known Bacon.
The artist as subject and sovereign
Michael Peppiatt’s account of his time as Francis Bacon’s confidant shows
him to be acutely aware of living in the artist’s shadow, writes Tim Adams
TIM ADAMS | MEMOIR | THE NEW REVIEW | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015
James Boswell has much to answer for. Proximity to genius is the sorest temptation to a writer. As is the desire to have your authorial name in the same breath as your biographical hero. This is Michael Peppiatt’s second stab at containing his lasting impressions of his wayward mentor Francis Bacon in a book. The first, Anatomy of an Enigma, was begun, furtively, while Bacon – who hated the idea of biography – was alive and published four years after his death in 1996. It was a full-scale investigative effort, beginning with the Bacon begat Bacon grandparental lineage and ending with the final acts of the artist’s much-mythologised “gilded gutter” life.
This volume is really the story of the story of that book – the tale of how, as a 21-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, Peppiatt inveigled his way into the painter’s Soho drinking circle and how he subsequently became, for 30 years, one of Bacon’s primary confidants. There were plenty of others, of course. Bacon was as promiscuous in his confessors as in every other aspect of his life. Daniel Farson and David Sylvester both have claims to being gospeller-in-chief to Bacon’s rigorous morning work regime and after-hours extremes. Peppiatt gives each his due here, but reminds his readers from time to time that it was he who was singled out as the artist’s amanuensis. John Deakin, Bacon’s chosen photographer, introduced the pair one alcoholic afternoon in 1963 in the French House pub; and it was Deakin who at a subsequent lunch drawled to Peppiatt what sounds in retrospect a lot like a fateful life sentence: “I hope you are getting it all down, my dear. One day it will be of such value… It’s incredible, but you’ve become a sort of Boswell to Francis. It’s simply marvellous. He talks to you about everything. Don’t screw it up, now kiddo. Remember, get it down.”
Get it down, Peppiatt does. Though quite how he managed to recall with such precision Bacon’s table talk, in the aftershock of lunches that invariably began with several bottles of champagne and ended in the derelict small hours, is one of those miracles of journalistic transcription that readers are invited to accept as an act of faith. Certainly Bacon, in Peppiatt’s hands, mostly sounds like Bacon ought to sound, bitchy and quick and wildly exuberant and maudlin by turns. And, as Peppiatt says, by way of explanation of his uncanny methods, Bacon’s anecdotes and philosophy were rarely for one night only. If you happened to be semi-comatose the first time they were uttered, there would always be another opportunity to catch them once the venue or the company had changed.
By the time Peppiatt met Bacon, on the premise of an interview for a student magazine, the artist was already hefting his legend from the Colony Clubto Wheeler’s to the Ritz, taking on all comers. To the polo-necked student he looked like a living rite of passage. The necessity of the next three decades (and 400 pages) for Peppiatt lay mostly in how he would keep up, and stay interesting enough for the artist to want him around. His fluent French alone got him an entrée to the self-conscious salon of Sonia Orwell. He paid his respects to Lucian Freud, the only figure to whom Bacon appeared to defer; and somewhere along the way he grew up.
Or at least he grew up as much as Bacon, indefatigable master of revels, allowed. Peppiatt is good at exploring the power balance of his relationship with the artist, which in some ways is a shorthand for all writer/subject entanglements. He is retrospectively curious about the ways in which his own life has been both defined, enlivened and perhaps diminished by the association. Any act of biography involves a degree of self-abasement; it is based on the tacit acknowledgment that the life you are rapt by is of more interest than your own. For a long time Peppiatt lived in fear of being the “perpetual person from Porlock”, doorstepping Bacon at crucial moments and distracting him from his inspiration. Here though, you feel the conflicting appeal of this being Peppiatt’s own story – he dwells on the strictures of his parents, his academic and journalistic career, his successes and failures in love, his marriage and children – and affords them as much weight as Bacon’s passions. This is done in the somewhat desperate knowledge that none of it would be half so interesting were it not for the fact that all roads lead back to the artist’s infamous studio.
In other hands there might have been some comedy in this, but Peppiatt approaches his own life in something like the same tone he applies to Bacon: with a sense of its art historical significance. That desire to get it down, to not miss another night out in that most storied of London milieux – the bullying bar-room of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club – can seem wearying in its devotion to duty. Bacon’s gift, Peppiatt suggests, was his ability to “raise the temperature” of any room and any gathering. Sometimes that heat became suffocating, and feels so even at one remove. Peppiatt is honest in his revelation that Bacon’s death when it came offered the hope of release; he could finally define himself. In fact, as he says, in death as in life, “Francis did not go away.” The author was branded; this book is the latest expression of the biographer as marked man.
Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir, Bloomsbury £25, pp416
Francis Bacon in his studio, 1989
RICHARD BROOKS | ARTS EDITOR | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY 30 AUGUST 2015
Peppiatt, who lives mainly in Paris, where Bacon also often stayed, accepts that the artist’s views will still cause surprise and upset.
"You know that I don’t
actually like what I call homosexuals," Bacon once told Peppiatt
In another remark, Bacon likened gays to the disabled: "Homosexuality is like having a limp. Real homosexuality anyway. Homosexuals also become more and more impossible with age."
After the suicide in 1971 of his lover Georg Dyer, an East End rogue the artist had painted, Bacon also told Peppiatt: "I know I will never have a really intimate relationship again. In any case, there is something terribly depressing about old people in love. Also I don’t believe in love anymore."
The Irish-born artist, whose triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for a record-breaking $142m (£92m) in 2013 and is perhaps best known for paintings of popes and religious iconography, also expanded on his thoughts about old age.
"I have spent my life watching my youth slip away, hour by hour," he said. "You are just condemned to watch over your own deliquescence. With me, as I get older, I think less and less about happiness because my interest has grown more and more for my work."
Bacon fell out with friends over the years, partly because of his drinking and partly because he insulted people without thinking. He was dismissive of David Hockney, describing his art as "pretty, but containing nothing", and insulted Lucian Freud about the size of his genitals.
bacon, who was noted for paintings of distorted faces and features, once upset Peppiatt when the art critic told him his wife, Jill, was pregnant. "When I mentioned this in a London restaurant, Francis reeled back in his chair, started chocking and was unable to catch his breath," said Peppiatt.
In the book, he describes Bacon going "whiter and whiter before blurting out, 'I hope that if it’s a monster or something, or even if the thing doesn’t have all its five fingers and toes, you’ll just do it in, and get rid of it. Just do it in and get rid of it altogether.' "
Twenty-five years later, Peppiatt is still unsure whether Bacon wanted his wife to have an abortion or only if the child was disabled. "Whatever he meant, I was immensely hurt, and Jill would never see him again," he said. Bacon died two years after the clash.
Peppiatt thinks Bacon saw the child as a threat to their relationship. "My gay friends told me that Francis was in love with me. He would, particularly in the early days, ply me with champagne and caviar. Yet he never made a pass at me. I think that was because he knew he would be turned down and he could not cope with rejection," he said.
"To me he was much more of a father figure, partly as my relationship with my own father was bad. Francis is the father I chose instead."
Peppiatt also relates Bacon’s extraordinary consumption of alcohol, and how he could have stitches taken out without anaesthetic. He wonders, too, about the artist’s ability to take the beatings he received from his sexual partners.
The memoir tells how bacon gave him one of his early pope paintings, which he sold to help pay for a flat in Paris. "Yes, of course I wish I had hung on to it," he said. "The painting would be worth much, much more now."
Art sublime; writing appalling
RICHARD BROOKS | NEWS | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY 30 AUGUST 2015
IT WOULD be the perfect job for a pharmacist, well accustomed to deciphering a doctor’s handwriting.
The Tate gallery is to ask the public to make sense of some of the 17,000 handwritten letters and notebooks of British artists in its archive. If most are hard to read, some appear almost impossible.
“This will be the public as detectives,” said Jane Bramwell, head of the Tate Archive. “In getting them to help us by logging on to our new website, we are also encouraging them to get to know more about archives. They are interesting as social history.”
Possibly the hardest to read are the letters of Walter Sickert, best known for his avant-garde paintings from the 1880s to the 1930s. Darragh O’Donoghue, who works in the archive, said: “His writing is both spidery and creepy — so creepy you can see why he was accused of being Jack the Ripper.”
Sickert, who lived for a while in France, also used French words and phrases. Other hard-to-read artists include William Nicholson. He often wrote to his son, Ben, who became a famous artist too and was married to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Some of her letters are also in the archive.
Then there is the balloon-like writing of Francis Bacon in letters mainly to his dealer, Erica Brausen. Most include pleas for a loan or admissions that he was late in sending a picture. “The trouble with Bacon is he had very erratic schooling,” said O’Donoghue.
The painter Paul Nash’s writing is hard to decipher as he drew caricatures by his words. “It is a bit of muddle,” said O’Donoghue. “He also,wrote some sensual letters when he was courting the woman who became his wife.” The Tate, working with the Oxford-based online research organisation Zooniverse, which has developed the transcription tool, will have its deciphering website, going live from Tuesday.
Into the ‘gilded gutter’ with Francis Bacon
This fine portrait of the artist is both gossipy and poignant,
says Michael Prodger
MICHAEL PRODGER | SATURDAY REVIEW | THE TIMES | AUGUST 29 2015
The two men who emerge here are very different but share the traits of honesty, generosity and vulnerability and one finishes this wonderful, gamey book liking them both immensely. While reading Francis Bacon in Your Blood is undoubtedly easier on the liver than a night out with Bacon, one suspects it is just as entertaining.
Michael Proder is senior research in the History of Modern of Art at the University of Buckingham
Michael Peppiatt remembers a boozy lunch in Paris
with Francis Bacon
BY MICHAEL PEPPIATT | ART | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | FRIDAY 28 AUGUST 2015
Interview by Guy Kelly Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir, by Michael Peppiatt, is published by Bloomsbury (£25)
MARCUS FIELD | BOOKS | THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY 29 AUGUST 2015
Chocolate with your Bacon?
Tate Britain offers feast for the senses
London gallery opens ‘sensorium’ to explore whether taste, touch, smell and
sound change the way people experience art
By MARK BROWN | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | THE GUARDIAN | TUESDAY 25 AUGUST 2015
A woman experiences Francis Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape at the Tate Sensorium.
Revealed: How the Kray twins
By MICHAEL PEPPIATT | THE DAILY MAIL | MONDAY, 24 AUGUST, 2015
Adapted from Francis Bacon In Your Blood: A Memoir by Michael Peppiatt, to be published by Bloomsbury on Thursday at £25.
Genius who turned debauchery into an art form
His art — which sells for £89million a picture — was as disturbing and sexually charged as his life.
Now one of Francis Bacon’s closest friends paints an unflinching portrait
By MICHAEL PEPPIATT | THE DAILY MAIL | SATURDAY 22 AUGUST 2015
Read more:
‘It’s alright,’ said Francis. ‘We’ve all been like that.’
He hated Hockney and mocked Freud
THROUGH Francis, I got to know some of the leading artists of the Sixties and Seventies and was privy to his often very bitchy assessments of their personalities and talents. He was particularly vituperative about David Hockney. When I first met Francis, a magazine had just photographed Hockney like a film star in a gold Iam6 jacket and he felt this success was undeserved. ‘His paintings may be pretty, but when you look at them, there’s nothing really there,’ he said.
When I tried to argue otherwise, he dismissed my taste as ‘superficial’ and made no attempt to disguise his contempt for Hockney whenever they met in person.
We were once lunching at the same restaurant in Paris when Hockney came over to kiss Francis affectionately on both cheeks. As he moved on, Francis took out a handkerchief and made an elaborate show of wiping his face. He was rather fonder of Lucian Freud, who often clowned around for him. One of Lucian’s favourite turns was to look at a restaurant bill and pretend to faint, falling sideways like Charlie Chaplin, Francis would chuckle and write out a cheque, but in private he could be outrageously rude about Lucian.
‘He once tried to be homosexual,’ Francis said. ‘Or at least that’s what he told me, but I’m afraid that Lucian has what’s called the smallest cock in England, and of course you can’t go far in the queer world with that.’
Waspish friendship: Bacon (left) and Lucian Freud
ELAINE WYNN ON $142.5 M. BACON TRIPTYCH:
'I WAS AFRAID I WASN’T GOING TO OWN IT'
By M.H. Miller | ARTnews | Monday, 17 August 2015
BACON’S LATER WORKS
BY ROBIN POGREBIN| INSIDE ART | ART & DESIGN| THE NEW THE YORK TIMES| THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2015
By MATT RUDKIN | REVIEWS | TOTAL THEATRE | SUNDAY 9 AUGUST 2015
What does a Bacon taste like?
Feast for the senses at Tate Britain
Visitors get chance to experience great works through all five senses
NICK CLARK | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | NEWS | THE INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST 2015
Tate Britain is to offer art lovers a feast for the senses, encouraging them to experience work by artists including Francis Bacon not just with their eyes, but their noses, mouths and ears as well.
A pioneering new exhibition at the gallery is bringing in a master chocolatier, ascent expert and an audio specialist to change the way people interact with the paintings.
Tate Sensorium is the winning project of the second annual IK Prize, set up by the gallery to find new ways of using technology to widen the reach of British art. It wants to inspire visitors to experience the four works, all by 20th century British artists, in a completely different “immersive” way by using all their senses.
Tony Guillan, multimedia producer for Tate Media who oversees the prize, said it is based on “the idea that our senses work together, they are not in a vacuum. While painters obviously work in a visual medium, maybe they were inspired by non-visual things. Maybe Bacon was inspired by things he heard, tasted or touched.”
As well as sounds, visitors will ‘touch’ the work using the latest ‘haptic’ technology that provides the sense of feeling,
Picked from a shortlist of four, the winning entry was thought up by creative studio Flying Object, which has developed the project for six months. “We will tell visitors they should forget about the rest of the gallery and the world and be open to new experiences,” Mr Guillan said. “It is not a bit of cake and a soundtrack; these are pieces of stimuli to think about when looking at the art.”
The project has drafted in chocolate maker Paul Young, scent expert Odette Toilette, audio expert Nick Ryan and theatre maker Annette Mees to create the show. The Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab is involved, as is the company Ultrahaptics which creates the “touch” element.
From the end of the month, visitors will be able to head into gallery 38 in Tate Britain, in groups of four. Each work will be complemented with a different combination of taste, touch, smell and sound stimuli.
The first work seen will be Richard Hamilton’s Interior II from 1964. “In that, we are playing with smell,” Mr Guillan said. "It is a collage with a female figure, an actress from the Forties and we’ve recreated a perfume from that period.”
John Latham’s work Full Stop will have sounds and,touch involved. Visitors who hold their hands above Ultrahaptics' kit, which looks like a speaker, will feel sensations in the palms of their hand, programmed to respond to the form of the artwork.
“Without explicitly saying Latham was interested in physics and influenced by Zen Buddhism, we are trying to encourage people to consider that intuitively,” Mr Guillan said.
David Bomberg’s work In the Hold is the most abstract. “The subject is concrete, though, it’s a dockyard just before the war,” said the Tate mutimedia producer. The perfume and audio will reflect the smells and sounds of the dockyard.
The last room will feature a lesser known Bacon work from 1945, Figure in a Landscape. “Francis Bacon is an incredibly expressive and sensual artist. His work was perfect for this type of project,” Mr Guillan said.
That piece has a smell, a taste and a sound — though none relate to bacon. “Paul has created something confusing. The artwork itself has a multitude of interpretations. He’s played with that. You may recognise chocolate but once you’re eating it, it really doesn’t taste like that. It does highlight some of the forms from the work.” Mr Young has made the first batch which is currently with tire Tate’s catering team.
After Dark was named the winning project last year in which robots went round the darkened halls of the gallery after closing time controlled by people watching online.
Mr Guillan called it a “huge success” after more than 100,000 people from around the world logged into the app, with 500 people getting the chance to control a robot.
This follows a National Gallery exhibition called Soundscapes, “a new way of looking at paintings” which played compositions around works that had inspired them.
With technology playing more of a role in galleries, Mr Guillian expects further initiatives like this. “It makes sense to find new ways to interpret art through technology.”
Norwich
BY | | THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE| NUMBER 1349 | VOLUME 157 | AUGUST 2015
It is not that certain juxtapositions for
these parallels cannot be sourced in literature. Bacon professed admiration for
Cézanne
38. Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, by Francis Bacon. 1966. 38. A young woman, by Pablo Picasso. 1909.
| ARTLYST | MONDAY, 27 JULY, 2015
The new exhibition at Tate Liverpool will focus on Bacon’s use of ‘space-frames’ – considered one of Britain’s greatest modern painters – who set his subjects inside a ‘ghost-like’ frame.
The show will include around 35 large-scale paintings and works on paper which feature the barely-visible cubic technique which the great British artist used from the 1930s onwards
Tate Liverpool artistic director Francesco Manacorda stated: “I believe 2016 is set to be another exciting year for the gallery.
“Following in Tate Liverpool’s tradition of investigating a combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, we’re looking forward to inviting our audiences to see a new aspect of the work of Francis Bacon, one of Britain’s greatest modern painters alongside the compelling work of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig.
“Not only this, but throughout the year visitors will have many opportunities to discover and enjoy Tate’s fantastic collection of modern and contemporary art.”
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms – Tate Liverpool – May 18 to September 18 2016.
Irish artist Francis Bacon could
feature on new £20 note
BY JAMES MULHALL
| NEWS | THE IRISH POST | THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2015
ONE of Ireland’s most prolific artists is one of the front-runners to appear on Britain’s new £20 note. Francis Bacon, who was born in Dublin and raised in Britain, is on the longlist of prominent visual artists who are in the running for the honour.
Of the 436 names on the longlist, Bacon is the only Irishman. If he is selected, Bacon will replace Scottish philosopher Adam Smith on the back of the note, while Queen Elizabeth II will remain on the front.
Bacon’s paintings have become increasingly valuable in recent years – with two of his self-portraits recently selling for £30 million in a London auction. He is perhaps best known for his painting of his friend Lucian Freud, which set a new world record price for an art auction when it sold for $142.4 million in 2013.
The record was later broken by a Picasso painting which sold for $160m. Freud himself also appears on the longlist.
The next step in whittling down the list will see public focus groups work with the banks to narrow it down to between three and five possibilities. But the final say will go to the Governor of the Bank of England with an announcement expected in early 2016.
The note will be put into circulation by 2020.
Amanda Geitner Discusses Francis Bacon And Lisa Sainsbury
AMANDA GEITNER | ARTLYST PODCAST | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | ARTLYST | THURSDAY 2 JULY 2015
The Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts presents ‘Francis Bacon and the Masters’, bringing together over twenty-five major works by Bacon and juxtaposing them with old and modern masters, including Velázquez, Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, Rodin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse.
The exhibition forms the culmination of the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. The previous exhibition at The State Hermitage Museum showed the artist’s work from UK collections alongside objects from The Hermitage that influenced the artist.
Artlyst spoke to Amanda Geitner – Chief Curator of the Sainsbury Centre – who imparted a story to me regarding Bacon and Lisa Sainsbury. Bacon painted up to eight portraits of Lisa, but was notorious for destroying anything that he didn’t like, three survived the artist’s notoriously critical eye, and are among the last portraits that Bacon did in his studio with a sitter, and not from photographs taken by his friend John Deakin, after Bacon expressed a concern that sitters perceived his portraiture as an ‘injury’.
Lisa Sainsbury remembered vividly her experience of sitting for Bacon, and Amanda Geitner told Artlyst of the intimate friendship that grew between Lady Sainsbury and the acclaimed British painter, who Lisa ‘loved’ until the end of her life.
Francis Bacon portraits fetch £30 million at auction
The two previously unseen self-portraits sold for
£15 million apiece at Sotheby’s
CULTURE | ART SALES | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | THURSDAY 02 JULY 2015
London auction record as paintings by Francis Bacon
push night’s takings to £130million
TWO newly rediscovered Francis Bacon self-portraits have fetched
a combined £30million during a record sale at Sotheby’s
NEWS | THE DAILY EXPRESS | THURSDAY JULY 2, 2015
Works by Bacon, Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol featured at the auction house’s contemporary art sale in London, which raked in a total of £130.4million. Self-Portrait (1975) and Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980) sold for £15.3million and £14.7million respectively.
Also among the highlights was the sale of Four Eggs on a Plate (2002), a gift from Freud to the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, for £989,000, as seven bidders saw the painting fetch nearly 10 times the pre-sale low estimate of £100,000.
And American artist Warhol’s One Dollar Bill (1962) painting made £20.9million. Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, said: "We reached new heights at Sotheby’s with the highest total we’ve ever achieved for contemporary art in London.
"Bidders from across the globe were drawn to Warhol works that ripped up the rule book for 20th-century art; rediscovered Francis Bacon gems; and some of the greatest works by British artists of the last 70 years. Tonight’s achievements affirm the pivotal position of London within the international art market."
Experts knew of the existence of Bacon’s self-portraits but the works only went on public view for the first time this year after descendants of the original collector decided to sell. Self-Portrait (1975) was painted at the height of Bacon’s career, in the period which followed the suicide of his former lover George Dyer in 1971.
The triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980), shows the
artist, who was then in his 70s and becoming increasingly haunted by
the inevitability of death, with his eyes downcast.
Bacon painted the 1975 self-portrait when he was in his 60s but
looked much younger in the work
Big Bacon Fails to Get a Bid as Sotheby’s $204 Million
London Contemporary Sale Misses Target
By playing safe, Sotheby’s may have missed a trick.
BY COLIN GLEADELL| ANALYSIS | AUCTIONS | | THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2015
B
MATTHEW COLLINGS | EXHIBITIONS | THE ART NEWSPAPER | FRIDAY 19 JUNE 2015
Matthew Collings is an artist,
writer and TV broadcaster.
Francis Bacon and the Masters, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, until 26 July
£35 million expected to be paid for Francis Bacon’s 1961 Pope painting
FIONA AUDLEY | THE IRISH POST | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2015
Might Provide Fourfold Return on Investment
Bacon auction paints healthy picture for art
Buyers entering market from Russia and China are fuelling demand for British artists
JAMES PICKFORD | COLLECTING | INVESTMENT | NATIONAL | FINANCIAL TIMES | MONDAY JUNE 8 2015
He was an artist once left trailing in the saleroom stakes by glitzy American
painters such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock. But as
wealthy collectors’ appetite for Francis Bacon’s work has sharpened, so the
prices for his work have soared past his post-war rivals
Now a canvas from Bacon’s most famous series of paintings, showing the distorted
image of a seated pope, is to go on sale with an estimated value of £25m to
£35m.
The first of six “pope” paintings that Bacon made in 1961 for a landmark show at
the Tate, the work was bought in the same decade by the photographer and art
collector Gunter Sachs, former husband of Brigitte Bardot, who held it for 40
years before selling in 2005. The Vatican itself holds another example from the
same series in its museum in Rome
Oliver Barker, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, which is auctioning the
painting in London on July 1, said Bacon deliberately painted most of his works
“at arm’s length” from his subject matter, working from photographs of his
sitters or reproductions of other paintings in books or on posters. “This
enabled him not to get ‘crowded out’ by real life but allowed him to temper his
painting with his own interpretations.”
Bacon is one of very few European post-war artists — others being Lucian Freud
and Gerhard Richter — whose works regularly sell for £20m and above. He hit the
headlines in 2013 when his “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, a triptych of his
close friend, became the most expensive artwork sold at auction, fetching
$142.4m at Christie’s in New York (a record beaten last month by Pablo Picasso’s
“Women of Algiers”).
“All of these British artists are gaining increasing international interest and
the values of their works are rising,” Mr Barker said. Sotheby’s contemporary
sale has works totalling an estimated £204m, 35 per cent of which is accounted
for by British artists. In the equivalent sale in 2010, they made up 12 per cent
of total value
The market has simultaneously undergone a dramatic phase of globalisation. Ten
years ago, bidders for works by Bacon came from around three countries on
average, Sotheby’s said. Today they come from 18, with strong interest from
Russia and China.
A gay, former Catholic atheist who had a difficult relationship with his father
and authority figures in general, Bacon returned time and again to religious
themes in his work. He once said: “I think that most people who have religious
beliefs, who have the fear of God, are much more interesting than people who
just live a kind of hedonistic and drafting life . . . I can’t help admiring but
despising them . . . ”
Francis Bacon and the Masters
Primary sources: there is still much to learn about Bacon’s
debt to artistic tradition
LAURA GASCOIGNE | REVIEW | APOLLO | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | MONDAY 1 JUNE 2015
On a
visit to Francis Bacon’s reconstructed studio at the Dublin City Gallery The
Hugh Lane, Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St
Petersburg, was delighted to find reproductions of Old Master paintings among
the tattered photographs littering the floor. It confirmed his philosophy that
there is no such thing as ‘modern’ art, only the art of today, and it sowed the
seeds of the idea for an exhibition.
‘Francis Bacon and the Masters’, which comes to the Sainsbury Centre from the
Hermitage, sets up a dialogue between Bacon and the great artists of the past by
comparing works with ‘interesting typological similarities’. The 30 masterpieces
selected from the Hermitage collections include paintings by Velazquez, Titian,
Rembrandt, Cezanne and Picasso, and sculptures by Rodin, Bernini, Matisse, and
after Michelangelo.
The Sainsbury Centre holds an outstanding collection of works by Bacon, the
legacy of an extraordinary friendship between the artist and his early patrons
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury
—
documented here by letters from the Bacon Archive, including two rather touching
requests by the artist for loans. The relationship began in 1953 with the
couple’s acquisition of Study of a Nude (1952-53) and ended with their
accumulation of 13 paintings, enabling them to joke that theirs was the only
gallery 'with Bacons in the basement’.
The
Bacons are all out of the basement now and, joined by a similar number from
other collections, hang alongside works by masters he was known to admire, and
by a few he wasn’t.
The formative influence on Bacon’s
Crucifixion imagery was Cimabue's Santa Croce Crucifix, but the early
Crucifixion (1933) in this show hangs opposite a beautiful though unrelated
Crucifixion (1636-38) by Alonso Cano, under the gaze of Titian’s Christ
Carrying the Cross (1566-70). Some debts to the masters, however, are obvious.
The Sainsbury Centre's Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh I (1956) is the
first in the series directly inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s lost canvas
Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) that culminated in the Tate’s 1957
study, hanging beside it.
Bacon preferred to work from photographic sources when borrowing from the
masters, and eventually when painting portraits; Lisa Sainsbury was possibly the
last friend to sit for him. In the case of the lost Van Gogh he had no option,
but his choice was deliberate in relation to the Velazquez Portrait of Pope
Innocent X (1650) that inspired a record series of reworkings
—
Bacon
never even visited the original in Rome.
The four
related studies in the exhibition include Study (Imaginary Portrait of
Pope Pius XII) from 1955, which the dissatisfied artist cut from its stretcher
while still wet and gave to Robert and Lisa Sainsbury to take away. The Apsley
House version of the Velazquez portrait shown in St Petersburg has gone back to
the Wellington Museum, and in its place the Hermitage has sent two other
portraits by Velazquez
—
of the
Count-Duke of Olivares and Philip IV
—
which
have no special connection to the Bacon Popes.
There are several such disconnects in the exhibition. Cezanne’s
Self-Portrait in a Cap (c. 1873) has little in common with Bacon’s
Head of a Man (1960), apart from its green tonality and appraising
expression; while Picasso’s cubist deconstruction of A Young Lady (1909) seems
only distantly related to Bacon’s expressionistic disfigurement in Portrait
of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966). One difficulty with sourcing the Old Masters
from a single collection is that the typological similarities are not always as
close as they might be. Even so, some choices are baffling.
In a collection as rich in Rembrandts as the Hermitage’s, the pairing of Bacon’s Portrait of R.J. Sainsbury (1955) and Portrait of Lisa (1956) with Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Woman (1654) and Portrait of an Old Jew (1654) seems deliberately counterintuitive, only highlighting the differences between the artists.
The relationship that rings truest is with Michelangelo, represented by Crouching Boy (c. 1530-40) — the plaster cast from the V&A, rather than the Hermitage’s original marble and a pair of superb 16th-century terracotta copies of Day and Evening (1524-31) in the Medici Chapel in Florence. Bacon acknowledged a deep debt to Michelangelo and the dialogue between the Renaissance sculptor’s voluptuous male nudes and the crouching bodies in Two Figures in a Room (1959) and Figures in a Landscape (c. 1956) speaks volumes about Bacon’s manipulation of space and his tormented forms.
He thought of trying sculpture in
the late 1960s before finding, as he told David Sylvester, that simply by
thinking of images as sculpture, it ‘came to me how I could make them in paint’.
Another touchstone for him was the work of Rodin, whose splayed limbs and
fractured figures find strong echoes in Studies from the Human Body
(1970) and Lying Figure (1959)
—
although Rodin’s Iris, which is not
in the Hermitage’s collection, would make this point more forcefully than
Eternal Spring, which is.
An aspect of its holdings the Hermitage displays here to advantage is its
collection of Egyptian antiquities. Bacon had a fascination with Egyptian art
and his sphinx-like Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa (1955) sits
sympathetically opposite a row of carved wooden faces from anthropoid coffins.
The adjacent bronze Portrait of a Roman (50-40 BC) contributes nothing
to the conversation, but is a revelation in itself. This exhibition is a great
showcase for the Hermitage's treasures, with moments of illumination about
Bacon.
Francis Bacon and the Masters — 18 April-26 July 2015 — Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich
Collectors’ focus:
School of London
Emma Crichton-Miller
The School of London is a loosely associated group of painters, including Bacon, Freud, Hockney,
Auerbach and Kossoff, who share a painstaking figurative style.
In recent years, the market for their work has strengthened across the board
EMMA CRICHTON-MILLER | APOLLO | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | MONDAY 1 JUNE 2015
In 1976,
US painter R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) curated an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
entitled ‘The Human Clay’. There is a substantial School of London,’ Kitaj
announced, championing both British art and drawing from life. ‘If some of the
strange and fascinating personalities you may encounter here were given a
fraction of the international attention and encouragement reserved in this
barren time for provincial and orthodox vanguardism, a School of London might
become even more real than the one I have construed in my head.’
Kitaj’s identification of the School of London may still be applied to the most
prominent artists represented at the Hayward show: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud,
Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, David Hockney and indeed Kitaj
himself. In later years, Howard Hodgkin and Euan Uglow have both also broadly
been categorised as painters from the London School. Taken as a group,
these very different artists were part of a small circle working in the capital
that were seen to share a commitment to figurative painting.
They produced painstaking work focused on a few repeated subjects, during a period when conceptual art was the dominant trend. Dealer James Hyman is a School of London specialist. ‘Despite the reservations of the artists themselves, the idea of a School of London — however flawed — has had an enormous impact internationally in the promotion of their work,’ he says. It is telling that the price for the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction is that for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)--one School of London titan's unflinching, contorted portrayal of another — which achieved a staggering $142m in 2013.
Matthew Bradbury, director of the 20thcentury British department at Bonhams, has
witnessed the steady rise of the artists associated with the group. A turning
point was the sale of Frank Auerbach’s
(b. 1931) Head of E.O.W. III of 1961, which sold in 2010 for 860,000 [pounds
sterling] (Fig. 2). Leon Kossoff (b. 1926)
—
who
shares Auerbach’s
obsessive focus on London
—
is also
increasingly sought after; Bradbury describes him as ‘slightly in the shadow of
Frank Auerbach but his oil paintings are now regularly making six figures’.
Kossoff's auction record is 690,850 [pounds sterling], achieved in 2011 for A
Street in Willesden, an oil of 1985.
‘Collectors
of Kossoff tend to gravitate towards his London landscapes,’ says Lucy
Mitchell-Innes, his New York dealer, ‘but those who have studied Kossoff and
collect in depth enjoy his portraits and the drawings inspired by Old Master
paintings. What is interesting is how popular he is with Asian collectors.’
James Gould at Offer Waterman has noted increased international interest in the
British painter.
‘When we first showed Auerbach and Kossoff at TEFAF, we found that there wasn't as much awareness of them in Europe, but recognition has grown markedly every year.’ He currently has a characteristically dark charcoal and oil drawing of Dalston Junction, executed by the artist around 1973 and priced 120,000 [pounds sterling] (Fig. 3). Francis Bacon (1909-92), Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and David Hockney (b. 1937) are by no means exclusively categorised as School of London painters--indeed Hockney has spent many years living in California.
Bacon and
Freud have stronger ties to London, but Bradbury cautions that there is some
disagreement over who was ‘part of the group’.
Bacon and Hockney were already major international artists when the term was
coined, with Freud a latecomer to the international stage. Oliver Barker, deputy
chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, dates his arrival to 1992, when he was taken on by
Acquavella Galleries in New York.
‘Freud
was barely known in America,’
he says.
‘Bill
Acquavella changed all that.’
In 2008, Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) became the highest
priced work by a living artist at the time
—
bought
for $33.6m at Christie’s New York, reportedly by Roman Abramovich. One of four
large-format paintings of Sue Tilley, her mountainous body inspired a virtuoso
expression of Freud’s unsparing realism. The previous year he had painted the
magnificent Benefits Supervisor Resting (Fig. 1), which was displayed
at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2012 in its Freud retrospective. It
came to the block at Christie’s
New York on 13 May on an estimate of $30-$50m, the first great Freud painting to
come to auction since the artist’s death, and fetched $56.2m, a new auction
record for the artist.
According to dealer Pilar Ordovas, the market for School of London works was
bolstered by Christie’s dispersal of the collection of Valerie Beston, a
director at Marlborough Fine Art. ‘Traditionally the market for Freud and Bacon
had a British focus, but with this sale we saw the market becoming wider and
trickling down to other artists from the period.’ While still at
Christie’s
Ordovas also presided over its 2008 sale of Kitaj’s
collection, which included work by Bacon, Freud, Hockney, Kossoff, Auerbach and
Kitaj himself
—
further
cementing the reputation of the school. The market for these artists was
burgeoning. That same year, Michael Andrews’ (1928-95) monumental The
Cathedral, The North East Face/ Uluru (Ayers Rock) of 1985, sold for
937,250 [pounds sterling], and a matter of months later in 2009, Christie's New
York sold David Hockney’s portrait of US collector and philanthropist Betty
Freeman of 1966-67 for $7.9m--an auction record for the artist that still stands
today.
Since then Sotheby’s has sought to develop the market for School of London
works. Barker describes it as ‘a very rich market
—
a very
granular market, with many levels’. The Evill/ Frost sale at Sotheby’s
London in 2011 saw the dispersal of an outstanding collection of modern British
works and, Barker tells me, ‘changed everything for Freud’s market in works on
paper’. His Beach Scene with a Boat of 1945--an intense, luminous chalk
drawing
—
quadrupled expectations to sell for 2.6m [pounds sterling]. And last June,
Auerbach’s Primrose Hill, Summer (1968) soared above its top estimate
of 1.5m [pounds sterling] to achieve 2.3m [pounds sterling]. Although Auerbach’s
market is, according to Barker, ‘99.9 per cent’ British, last year’s
‘Rembrandt-Auerbach: Raw Truth’ at the Rijksmuseum may broaden his audience,
along with his retrospective opening at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in June and
travelling to Tate Britain in the autumn. ‘Early Auerbach seems to capture
attention
—
or the
late great landscapes,’
adds Barker.
And what of Kitaj
—
the man
who defined the School of London back in 1976? Sotheby’s Simon Hucker describes
him as ‘a complex artist, with a psychological penetration that the tag “Pop”
does not express, which makes his prices hard to predict’. This month the
auction house is offering two drawings by Kitaj in its Modern and Post-War
British sale
—
one of
which, a charcoal drawing, is estimated at a very appealing 4,000 [pounds
sterling]-6,000 [pounds sterling]. Dealer Ivor Braka concludes: “The School of
London would be a much bigger brand if a US museum could be persuaded to mount
an exhibition of the group’s work.”
Francis Bacon’s Dominant Figure:
Recent Theoretical and Archival Grapples
CATHERINE HOWE | REVIEWS | ART HISTORY | VOLUME 38 | ISSUE 3 | JUNE 2015
Le Crime et les Perversions Instinctives, Le Crapouillot, May 1938.
AMANDA GEITNER |
Wrinkles and folds
MATTHEW BOWN
Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon
TATE BRITAIN Until June 2016
MATTHEW BOWN | ARTS | THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT | MAY 29 2015
At Tate Britain, movement sensors delineate an exclusion zone around Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”. If you lean in too close, the alarms emit, or emote. This could almost be a soundtrack of whelps coming from the bed itself; but it is also frustrating because the bed, re-unmade by the artist for this showing, is enticing; if I were an aspiring performance artist, or two, I’d jump on it and have sex. And the installation as a whole asks for close examination: the little stool and long unHoovered royal-blue rug beside the bed are covered with a congeries of rubbish – or near rubbish-items – cigarette stubs in a saucer, an unopened packet of barbecue sauce, a faded Polaroid selfie, empty vodka bottles, a tube of K-Y Jelly, a Persona box, nail scissors, pills, loose change, a length of bandage – all of which, despite their general familiarity, one feels the need to scrutinize, like the small print to a big-deal contract.
The museumification of the work, widely if implausibly characterized as shocking, is complete. As installed at the Tate by the curators Elena Crippa and Leyla Fakhr, it sits between two big gilt-framed canvases by Francis Bacon. The bed-base is not some cheap flatpack number but resembles a plywood packing case, apiece of store-room inventory, inscribed “EMIN BED 831306”. This is an evolution Emin herself seems to have allowed for.
Bacon (the choice of artist was Emin’s) is an apt backdrop. “My Bed” evokes still other works of his, where messy figures enact scenes of love and/or hate on roiled bedlinen. Looking further back into British art, one is reminded of Walter Sickert’s iron-bedstead nudes and in particular of “The Camden Town Murder or, What Shall we do for Rent”; another drama of passion snuffed out in a small London room. In a broader context, one thinks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (1991), a billboard photograph of an empty bed installed across New York as a statement about the deaths from AIDS, which was accompanied by an installation of an empty bed at the Museum of Modern Art; of Robert Rauschenberg’s wall-hung “Bed” (1955), which, according to the critic Frank O’Hara, enabled both artist and viewer to “get ‘in’ the painting”; and also of the whole ethos of Abstract Expressionism which treated the canvas, in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase, as an “arena in which to act”.
Although parsable as sculpture, “My Bed’ comes out of the painterly tradition of expressionism. The bed surface is palimpsestic, in effect a canvas worked and reworked; the duvet is half in and half out of its cover, the sheet underneath is rucked back in places to reveal the mattress’s brown-stained ticking. The grubby linen is in umpteen shades of white, tastefully offset by pastel tones: eggshell-blue knickers, dull lime tights, a beige striped towel. The wrinkles and folds of the bedclothes offer infinite facture. The contrast of bed and base with the abutting rectangle of blue rug is fundamentally a colour statement.
Where “My Bed” departs from the figurative canvases of Bacon and Sickert is in the absence of its protagonists. They are present as a kind of ectoplasm in the staining of the linen – with semen, we are told, and also apparently by Emin herself – but there is no explicit drama. Next to the bed itself, outside the alarmed exclusion zone, are two suitcases, one a big Samsonite on wheels and another smaller, prettier one, which are bound together by both rope and chain – a part of the installation that feels like an addendum or footnote. Under what reallife circumstances would one chain and also rope two suitcases together? The vérité of the work as a whole is undermined here.
In preserving, or creating (we can’t really know), for gallery display the detailed site of her own personal break-up, Emin harks back to ancient installations – such as the Holy House of Loreto, Christ’s childhood home, transported by angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia in 1291 to save it from destruction by the Infidels. She also anticipated similar fetishes in contemporary art, such as the preservation of the entire contents of Bacon’s London studio in the Hugh Lane, Dublin. “My Bed” is an emanation of the confessional discourse on which Emin’s career is founded. But anyone who has lived the impoverished single life may have occupied a bed something like this: a stained landlord-provided mattress jammed into the corner of a small rented room, unmade for days or weeks on end because no one who matters is there to tut-tut, surrounded by the debris not only of sex but of the other stuff people do in bed when they can’t be bothered to get up: eat, smoke, drink, take tablets. The appeal of “My Bed” is not in its specificity as a trace of Emin, but rather in its universality.
REVIEW | ART & COLLECTING
| THE GOOD LIFE | SPEAR’S
| TUESDAY 28 APRIL
He was an artist once left trailing in the saleroom stakes by glitzy American painters such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock. But as wealthy collectors’ appetite for Francis Bacon’s work has sharpened, so the prices for his work have soared past his post-war rivals.
Now a canvas from Bacon’s most famous series of paintings, showing the distorted image of a seated pope, is to go on sale with an estimated value of £25m to £35m.
The first of six “pope” paintings that Bacon made in 1961 for a landmark show at the Tate, the work was bought in the same decade by the photographer and art collector Gunter Sachs, former husband of Brigitte Bardot, who held it for 40 years before selling in 2005. The Vatican itself holds another example from the same series in its museum in Rome.
Bacon was fixated by a 1650 painting of “Innocent X” by Diego Velázquez and used it as the inspiration for a series of canvases he worked and reworked in the 1950s and 1960s. His studio was covered with images of the Velázquez oil painting — alongside photographs of Goebbels and Himmler — although he famously decided not to see the original work when on a visit to Rome.
Oliver Barker, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, which is auctioning the painting in London on July 1, said Bacon deliberately painted most of his works “at arm’s length” from his subject matter, working from photographs of his sitters or reproductions of other paintings in books or on posters. “This enabled him not to get ‘crowded out’ by real life but allowed him to temper his painting with his own interpretations.”
Bacon is one of very few European post-war artists — others being Lucian Freud and Gerhard Richter — whose works regularly sell for £20m and above. He hit the headlines in 2013 when his “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”, a triptych of his close friend, became the most expensive artwork sold at auction, fetching $142.4m at Christie’s in New York (a record beaten last month by Pablo Picasso’s “Women of Algiers”).
When it last went under the hammer in 2005, “Study for a Pope I” (1961) fetched £10m — at the time a record for the artist. But a sale even at the lower end of the latest estimate range would equate to a rise in value of 150 per cent.
Post-war British artists more generally have come into vogue, with work by Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff — artists in the “school of London” who shunned the trend for the avant-garde in pursuit of figurative work — fetching higher prices.
“All of these British artists are gaining increasing international interest and the values of their works are rising,” Mr Barker said. Sotheby’s contemporary sale has works totalling an estimated £204m, 35 per cent of which is accounted for by British artists. In the equivalent sale in 2010, they made up 12 per cent of total value.
Mr Barker said part of the explanation for Bacon’s renewed popularity was that collectors in the past decade had become more willing to have difficult subject matter hanging on their walls. “Figurative art for a long time was unfashionable, and particularly art that was psychologically very challenging. These are powerful images to live with,” he said.
The market has simultaneously undergone a dramatic phase of globalisation. Ten years ago, bidders for works by Bacon came from around three countries on average, Sotheby’s said. Today they come from 18, with strong interest from Russia and China.
A gay, former Catholic atheist who had a difficult relationship with his father and authority figures in general, Bacon returned time and again to religious themes in his work. He once said: “I think that most people who have religious beliefs, who have the fear of God, are much more interesting than people who just live a kind of hedonistic and drafting life . . . I can’t help admiring but despising them . . . ”
The highest price paid for a single Bacon picture was £42.2m for “Portrait of George Dyer Talking”, sold last year in London by Christie’s.
Francis Bacon’s Seated Woman (1961) hammered at $25 million, and totalled $28.2 million with the buyer’s premium at Phillips Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Thursday, May 14.
It’s been a long week—a long two weeks—for the art world, and we’re not done yet. Tonight, collectors turned out at Phillips for its Contemporary Art Evening sale, which totalled $97.2 million, coming in on the low end of the presale estimate, with 80 percent of the 70 lots on offer sold. Not bad for arguably the busiest auction week of the year. Still, the sale didn’t meet high expectations, and many of its star lots under achieved, or worse, were passed on.
And in the middle of it all, at the critical moment in the sale when Francis Bacon’s Seated Woman (1961) came up to the block and the entire room was hushed in anticipation, a Phillips employee taking bids by phone collapsed to the floor. In the moments after, there was hurried confusion as staffers came to her aid, and the sale powered through. The Bacon, which was guaranteed, hammered at $25 million and totalled at $28.2 million with the buyer’s premium.
Any momentum that had been building up to that point was on shaky ground after the incident. Even in the lead up to the Bacon, there were signs that others in the room may have been feeling the burn of the week, which Phillips chairman and CEO Edward Dolman echoed to the press after the sale, though he emphasized that the house was very pleased with the sale results anyway.
simple but effective.
This was supposed to be a small but fascinating celebration of the 60th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s first exhibition at the ICA. Instead, the business of curating the show became for Gregor Muir, the ICA director, a mystery of the disappearing archive. “I had hoped to show installation shots, I had hoped to show photos of Bacon at the ICA, and I had hoped to present a room in which I could show what the exhibition looked like,” he explains, “but that was, in the end, impossible.”
For whatever reason, there is scarcely any documentation of the 1955 exhibition. Muir scoured the ICA archives from the time, now held at Tate, but all he could find was a test print of an invitation card (through sheer luck, he later chanced on an actual card in a nearby bookshop); the press release; a list of works; and one photograph of an ICA employee standing in front of one of the works, hanging in the then Dover Street Market premises.
So why persist in making a show out of, well, virtually nothing? It is not as if Bacon (1909-1992) was not already fairly well-known by 1955, not least following his participation, alongside Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud, in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale the preceding year. It was this, it seems, that triggered the ICA show: minutes from a meeting in 1954 note the news arriving that Tate was going to take the Bacon show from Venice and that there was, therefore, an opportunity for the ICA to do the retrospective-cum-first-solo-institutional-show. One of the ICA founders, Peter Watson, had long been a Bacon supporter so it was natural for him to be appointed curator. That Watson was gay might explain something of the show’s extraordinary nature.
Reviews in 1955 note a sense of Bacon’s work being provocative, but never delve into the subject matter of this provocation. The content is not talked about at all. The Architectural Review of April 1955, for example, focused instead on the “decorative value” of the paintings, which were deemed “effective as interior decoration”, “functional as space equivocators” and “useful wall objects”. Attention was also paid in the same review to the plate-glass against the black background, which drew the viewers in, capturing their reflections, lending “a rare, almost aristocratic poise by comparison with the uneasiness of the painted apparition”.
The key question for Muir, then, was how to fill the walls when he had but scant evidence of the original exhibition’s form. “All of this is a kind of search through the fact that we couldn’t find things,” Muir admits. “We were trying to find out why we couldn’t find those images. Whatever the reason being, it does, I hope, raise questions about certain things: about the identity of the artist, the identity of Soho, the identity of who it is who’s controlling this history.”
What Muir’s show does paint is a picture through a clouded glass of an almost unimaginably restrictive period. For gay men in the years before the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, life was a constant nightmare. Bacon seemed not to give a damn and, like a lot of the more outrageous gay men in the art world, he got away with it. Others didn’t. In 1954, Alan Turing killed himself, following his prosecution in 1952 for homosexual acts, when he accepted chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence. Also in 1954, journalist Peter Wildeblood, along with Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, was charged with “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons”. The trial gained significant press attention, resulting in Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood being sentenced to 18 months in jail. These – and further related news stories, including the setting up of the Wolfenden committee to establish whether or not homosexuality ought to be a crime – are documented in the vitrines of the reading room, underneath timelines detailing these events, events relating to the ICA and events in Bacon’s own life.
Francis Bacon and the Masters
Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich
REVIEW BY MICHAEL GLOVER
This exhibition represents a remarkable coup. It is a collaboration between an
institution on the campus of the University of East Anglia founded by those avid
collectors Robert and Lisa Sainsbury and the Hermitage, the world’s second
largest museum, and one understandably wary of lending from its own great
collections.
So we have public indemnity insurance to thank for the fact that of the 30 sculptures and paintings in this show from Russia, 95 per cent of them have never before been on display in the UK.
Why here, you may ask. As it happens, the Sainsburys were enthusiastic early patrons of Francis Bacon, and the collection includes 13 examples of his work. The idea behind the show is relatively simple. Francis Bacon, a self-taught painter, was known to have borrowed, scavenged and learnt his trade from a huge range of artists, from the distant past to the near present, from Egyptian antiquities to Henri Matisse. But never before has a show been mounted, are on display, which has shown quite so clearly to what extent he was influenced, and by which works specifically.
It begins in the mess of Bacon’s studio (represented by photographs of its foot-mashed, paint-bombed chaos). We see how he used images from monographs about Michelangelo (his favourite) to body-building magazines. Then comes the hard evidence, laid out forensically over two large, flexible gallery spaces.
There are several works by Michelangelo and, just behind, two paintings in which we we see exactly how he mimicked the sculptural contortions of Crouching Boy. Elsewhere, we see him learning and plundering from Bernini, Rodin, Matisse, Velasquez, Ingres, Picasso — and almost all of the objects to which he often refers are, amazingly, here in front of us.
To 26 July (01603 593199)
At home with history
‘Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ (1966) by Francis Bacon ‘A Young Lady’ (1909) by Pablo Picasso
FRANCIS BACON AND THE MASTER
PAUL BLACK AND CALVIN
WINNER | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES
Russia’s famous Hermitage Museum is hosting a major new UK exhibition of art by
Francis Bacon and the work of the classical masters that inspired the
Dublin-born figurative painter.
Thierry Morel Talks To Artlyst About Francis Bacon,
Influence, And Memory
Lord Sainsbury visits Francis Bacon exhibition in Norwich
The work of Francis Bacon and great masters of art who inspired him are soon to take centre-stage in the latest exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
Today Lord Sainsbury paid a visit to the gallery, based at the University of East Anglia, to see the finishing touches being made to the show.
His parents, Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury – who donated their entire art collection to the university in the 1970s – were friends of Bacon and began buying his work when he was an unknown artist. Bacon painted both their portraits and these feature in the new exhibition, placed alongside portraits of a man and a woman by Rembrandt.
Lord Sainsbury said the juxtaposition summed up the essence of the show, which is called Francis Bacon and the Masters
He said: “Francis Bacon was a man who was hugely influenced by the great masters but equally if you put his paintings alongside a great masterpiece, they look pretty good. You don’t say, ‘there’s an amateur and there’s Rembrandt’, you say, ‘here are two great painters’...
“There can be no greater test of a painter than to put his work alongside a couple of Rembrandts.”
Picasso, Van Gogh, and Matisse are among the other artists featured in the show alongside Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculpture.
Lord Sainsbury said his favourite moment was seeing a replica of a Michelangelo figure of a crouching boy – which he described as one of the greatest pieces of sculpture ever – displayed in front of a similar image painted by Bacon.
Francis Bacon and the Masters is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts from April 18 until July 26. The show was previously at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
Francis Bacon’s vision of the Crucifixion
Francis Bacon was obsessed with the art of the past, drawing elements of Rembrandt,
Titian and Cano into his macabre takes on Bible scenes. Thierry Morel, the curator of
a new show, explains why the works are best seen together
Francis Bacon never hid his fascination with the art of the past. His love of the work of the old masters was personal, but he also believed that the study of their art should be a prerequisite for all contemporary painters. Most artists have acknowledged an interest in the art of previous eras in one way or another. Few, though, have embraced it as unashamedly as Bacon: at times for him it became an inextinguishable obsession.
The selection of paintings and sculptures in the forthcoming exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, many of which have never before been shown in the UK, is taken almost exclusively from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and dates from ancient times to the 20th century. It includes a number of works that directly influenced Bacon, while others evoke the types of artwork he studied. The focus is less on the juxtaposition of works, and more on Bacon’s mysterious cycle of creation: his observation, interpretation and integration of the art of the past.
Bacon left many clues as to his uses of the art of the past, not just in interviews (notably those with David Sylvester) but also through the material found in his London studio, now in the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. The piles of books, hundreds of torn pages, stained photographs and press cuttings lying on the floor testify to a cultured and inquisitive mind at work. And here among the debris of the studio lie keys to unlocking Bacon’s highly individual art.
His biographers all refer to the significant impact on his early artistic development of pieces by other artists, whether in museums, exhibitions or books. During his three-month sojourn in France as a young man, he visited the fine collection of the duke of Aumale in Chantilly, as well as the Louvre and the Picasso exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg gallery. A few individual paintings made a lasting impression, and these occasionally reappear as references in his later work, for instance the echoes of Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents from Chantilly.
The earliest painting by Bacon in the exhibition, the Crucifixion of 1933, while typifying the artist’s fascination with the theme of Christ’s Passion, is evidence of his more general interest in morbid subjects. Although baptised and – at least in theory – educated as an Anglican, he always described himself as an agnostic. As he explained to Sylvester, he saw the Crucifixion not so much as a conventional religious subject, but as a theme that allowed for the expression of extreme human emotions: “Well, there have been so very many great pictures in European art of the Crucifixion that it’s a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feelings and sensations. You may think it’s a curious thing for a non-religious person to take the Crucifixion, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. The great Crucifixions that one knows of – one doesn’t know whether they were painted by men who had religious beliefs.”
Bacon’s first Crucifixion uses a rather sombre and restrained palette, mostly black and grey. It translates the mute nature of sorrow in a manner that brings to mind Alonso Canon’s painting on the same theme, in which the body of Christ appears in isolation, lost in the vastness of a dark and empty universe. By contrast, Bacon employed a very bright, almost blinding orange in the background of his 1944 triptych Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, focusing the mind of the viewer on the suffering and ambiguous nature of characters that are both human and bestial. Bacon often associated the Crucifixion with images of slaughterhouses and meat, referring to the “smell of death”. The triptych format that he used throughout his career is also, of course, a familiar religious idea borrowed from the art of the past: an allegory of the mystery of the Trinity.
Canon’s Crucifixion displayed opposite Bacon’s earliest treatment of the subject, exemplifies the severe and austere manner characteristic of the Sevillan school of painting of the first half of the 17th century. Cano (1601-67) was an exact contemporary of Velázquez (1599-1660) and shared the same painting teacher, Francisco Pacheco (although Cano was multi-faceted and also trained as an architect with his father, Miguel Cano, and as a sculptor with the famed baroque realist Juan Martínez Montañes). The similarity of their painting styles and their common frame of reference probably explain why, for a long time, the Hermitage Crucifixion was attributed to Velázquez.
Cano’s large painting was probably created as an altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria de la Oliva in Lebriia, where it was later replaced by a wooden sculpture of the same subject, also by Cano. By contrast, Bacon’s Crucifixion is small in scale, adopting the format of a cabinet picture. Both canvases are sculptural in effect, but in Cano’s painting the body of Christ is solid and well-developed in structure; whereas Bacon’s Christ is open in form, like an armature in metal. Cano’s Christ is sharply lit and the folds of Jesus’s white loincloth emerge in strong relief through highly skilled employment of chiaroscuro. The dark background is relieved only by the apocalyptic purplish glow above the low horizon. In Bacon’s painting, on the other hand, the subtly graded whites and greys impart a ghostly and phantasmagoric effect to the scene.
Bacon’s Crucifixion is probably the earliest of his paintings to have survived his destructive auto-censorship; it is a demonstration of the youthful painter’s remarkable and intuitive ability to create a three-dimensional image of great impact and symbolic resonance
Titian’s Christ Carrying the Cross, a masterpiece of his late years which is hung nearby in the show, is equally dramatic. It concentrates on the human tragedy of the Passion but achieves this less through a play of light and shade than through the contrast of colours and textures, with thinly painted areas set against vivacious impasto. The face of Titian’s Christ exudes pain and sorrow; tears are welling in his eyes and drops of blood from the thorn-pricks run down his forehead and temple, coaxing the viewer into immediate engagement with Jesus’s agony, which is as much psychological as physical. Visually and symbolically, the painting seems to be made of flesh and blood. Titian’s ability to lay bare a world of deep and raw emotion and suffering was a profound influence on Bacon and, despite his atheism, Christian symbolism is ever present in his oeuvre. Bacon would employ such images in a kind of desperation as allegories of mankind’s tragic and ineluctable fate, or would turn them into new artistic icons whose sublime nature paradoxically suggested an underlying belief in the eternal and divine nature of creation.
Bacon’s distortion of his subject was an essential element of his art. “I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance; I can’t paint them literally,” he said. Van Gogh, one of his favourite painters, provided him with a precedent. The Dutch artist “was able to be almost literal and the way he put on the paint gives you a marvellous vision of the reality of things”. Rembrandt, too, offered Bacon a model of a reality altered through miraculous technique, where textured flesh and contrasts of light and shade are created by a rich, sombre palette and extravagant impasto. Bacon’s paint has a dense Rembrandt-esque quality: “I work between thick and thin paint. Parts of it are very thin and parts of it are very thick. And it just becomes clogged, and then you start to put on illustrational paint.” What Bacon also observed and emulated in Rembrandt was the serialisation of images: portraits, and in particular self-portraits, representing the same sitters or the artist himself over time. “Oddly enough, if you take the great late self-portraits of Rembrandt, you will find that the whole contour of the face changes time after time; it’s a totally different face, although it has what is called a look of Rembrandt, and by this difference it involves you in different areas of feeling.”
With a characteristic touch of cynicism, Bacon described contemporary art as “entirely a game by which man distracts himself”. And while there is undoubtedly an element of game-playing in Bacon’s approach to the old masters, there is also, whether consciously or not, an element of respect for their belief that their art served a higher purpose – one that defied the limits not just of their individuality, but also of their own mortality.
Francis Bacon and the Masters is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, from 18 April to 26 July.
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RICHARD CORK
What is it like to interview an artist? Writer and broadcaster Richard Cork’s new book collects together his conversations with artists from Richard Hamilton to Tracey Emin.
Here he recounts some memorable encounters with one of the giants of British painting, Francis Bacon, ahead of a talk at Tate Britain.
The first time I did a recording with Francis Bacon was in [BBC] Broadcasting House. That was in the 1980s, for a radio interview. He didn’t like going in there at all, I could tell. He was very, very nervous and not at all at ease. It was very difficult to get anything out of him.
Some artists enjoy a big audience, but for someone like Francis, you absolutely needed to go to his pad. That’s where he felt at ease, he wouldn’t want to do it anywhere else.
Fortunately the interview I did with him which is now in the book was done in his studio in a mews in South Kensington in 1991.
You’d climb up a narrow staircase and there would be Francis at the top, greeting you. He was the most hospitable, jovial guy when he was on his own turf. Even at 10 in the morning, he’d crack open a bottle of champagne.
So it would be very easy to get drunk, even before lunch. Except Francis didn’t seem to get drunk – he was one of these people who seem to be able drink an extraordinary amount without getting smashed. I’m not like that, so I had to be very careful.
The producer and I had a nice chat with him. Then I said, ‘OK, Francis are you ready to do the interview?’ And he said, ‘What? What do you mean? What interview?
He looked aghast. Whether he was just having a bit of fun I don’t know. My heart sank and we thought he wasn’t going to do it.
And then suddenly he turned to me and said: ‘OK, an interview. But what’s the point?’ in this very vehement voice. So I had to explain that lots of people would be fascinated to hear what he thought about art and how he did it. And he gradually thought about it and came round to the idea.
Whether he was combating shyness or what I do not know. But once we got started, he was absolutely fascinating, because he was incredibly intelligent and articulate. And very honest too. I remember one point in the interview he said: ‘I can’t draw!’ I said, ‘Francis, what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I can’t, I never could!’ And that’s very interesting, because one rarely sees drawings by Francis, even though he’s a very linear painter.
The first time I interviewed him I was really rather young and hadn’t had much experience of going to artists. I was really rather scared. I imagined he would be this kind of naked figure, sitting in a chair, twisting and turning, with a naked lightbulb hanging over him!
In fact he turned out to be incredibly sweet. On that occasion we did the interview and he said, ‘Lunch?’ and I said, ‘OK, fine.’ Because we’d already had champagne
And he took me down to the Tube, which surprised me because I thought someone like Francis would just go: ‘Taxi!’ He said, ‘I love the Tube.’ He was really excited by this idea of this metal cylinder rushing through the darkness! We went to Soho as you might imagine and had lunch with far too much wine. And then he said: ‘Colony?’
The Colony Room Club was this place where people like Francis went ran by this extraordinary woman called Muriel Belcher. All sorts of extraordinary people went there – not just artists and writers but also gangsters, particularly from the East End.
We went up this circular staircase to this big room, and there was Muriel behind the bar. And she said, ‘Francis!’ And he said, ‘Champagne on the house!’ Before long the whole room filled up. It was just extraordinary. Although it was early afternoon the champagne flowed and flowed. Goodness knows what Francis’s bill was, but he didn’t seem to care. And how I made my way back down the circular metal staircase I do not know, because I was very, very drunk!
Richard Cork was talking to Lee Cheshire
Francis Bacon portraits to go on display for first time
BY SONIA ELKS | UK NEWS | THE TIMES | MONDAY 27 APRIL, 2015
Two Francis Bacon self-portraits are to be displayed in public for the first time after they were rediscovered by art experts in a private collection. The existence of the paintings has been known for years, but their whereabouts was a mystery after they were bought by an anonymous collector shortly after completion.
They re-emerged when the descendants of the original buyer decided to put them up for auction. They are expected to fetch around £15 million each.
Self-portrait (1975), and a triptych of studies, will go on show at Sotheby’s in London and New York before going under the hammer in July. Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s senior international specialist in contemporary art, described seeing the artworks for the first time as “a pretty extraordinary collecting moment”.
“We knew of the existence of the paintings but simply had no idea where they could be,” he said. “The first time I saw these paintings it was such a wonderful awakening. They’re both so luminous.”
Bacon, noted for his raw and often disturbing artworks, painted the self-portraits at the height of his career in the years following the suicide of his former lover George Dyer in 1971.
Art experts had seen pictures of both in a photographic archive, but the original works had been lost to the public for many years after they were bought up by the unidentified collector shortly after their completion around 40 years ago.
The 1975 self-portrait was painted when Bacon was in his sixties but looked much younger in the work. Obsessed with his physical appearance, he dyed his hair and wore make-up as he grew older. The triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980), shows the artist, who was then in his seventies and becoming increasingly haunted by the inevitability of death, with his eyes downcast.
Mr Barker said that the artist deliberately gave “himself film star-style looks, appearing as photogenic as possible while still being highly self-critical”.
“He paints himself with a much more youthful appearance,” he said. He said that the triptych had a “filmic quality”, with “the action unwinding in front of you across three different spaces”, and showed the artist’s “level of psychological angst and questioning”.
“Bacon throughout his life was really questioning human existence. Never is that more pivotal in his work than in his self-portraits”, he said.
A Bacon painting, featuring his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud, became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction when it fetched $142 million (£89 million) in New York in 2013.
Francis Bacon self-portraits expected to fetch £30m
Two works by the British artist are going on public display for the first time 40 years after they were painted
ART & DESIGN | THE GUARDIAN | MONDAY 27 APRIL, 2015
From St Petersburg, the masters who taught Bacon
Visual art Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Francis Bacon
and the Masters
Sainsbury Art Centre,
Norwich
RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSON | FIRST NIGHT | THE TIMES | FRIDAY APRIL 17 2015
Francis Bacon and the Masters is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, from April 18 to July 26.
Placed beside Picasso, Velázquez, Matisse, Rodin and others, Soho’s perverse
putdown master
JONATHAN JONES | THE GUARDIAN | TUESDAY, 14 APRIL, 2015
ERIK ODIN CATHCART
There is a new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work is on view at the Sainsbury
Centre at the University of East Anglia called Francis Bacon and the Masters. It
is clear without ever having to see the exhibition, that it is weakly veiled
attempt to place Bacon in the company of other master painters throughout time,
both an academic and deeply flawed curatorial concept.
In a recent article in The Guardian newspaper, 2009 Turner Prize jurist and art critic, Jonathan Jones proclaims a love lost for Bacon because of this exhibition. Jones is known other than his Guardian pieces for a series he did for the BBC called Private Life of a Masterpiece. In his brief expose regarding the Sainsbury exhibit, Jones reveals a sudden falling out of love for Bacon proclaiming, “After this exhibition, I don’t know if I can ever take Francis Bacon seriously again.” He goes on to say the exhibition is “a massacre, a cruel exposure, a debacle.” For Jones and I’m sure for many other art critics, this exhibition provides the gasoline for the proverbial fire of their unrepentant disregard for Bacon.
This type of dime store analysis is fraught from the beginning. It is the worst kind of curation, the kind formed out of a clear lack of knowledge of Francis Bacon and a sloppiness that mimics a social media mashup. Cézanne, the godfather of cubism and post-impressionist painter is a perfectly good example to push up against Bacon and see where there is influence and overlap. Unfortunately, the pairings at the Sainsbury are tragic in their lack of fair comparison. The Cézanne self-portrait reveals the artist’s rough brushstroke techniques, his ability to bleed the subject, in this case himself of emotion through it’s dark, unfeeling eyes and flaccid stare all the while framing the subject in a way that begins to dull the boundaries between background and foreground. The painting is a beautiful rendition of the then emergent sense of what paint could do to unify with flesh in a metaphysical way. It lays the groundwork for explorations by artists such as Soutine who followed and of course the Abstract Expressionists.
Tragically, the Bacon juxtaposed against this Cézanne is unquestionably one of Bacon’s lesser works and also a poor representation of the artist’s power in portraiture. Bacon’s self-portrait came at a time when the artist was in transition. In 1960 Bacon had not yet taken over his iconic studio at 7 Reece Mews and just a couple years’ earlier had signed on with the Marlboro Gallery. He was emerging from a period that focused on colour and texture. In the late 1950’s he broke from his persistent of ghostly figures set against blackish backgrounds by taking on Van Gogh himself. The experimentation although failed in its final representations, forever changed the way Bacon would paint for the rest of his life. So then, why show a self-portrait that isn’t representative of his mastery? A considerably better example would have been Bacon’s Self Portrait (1973) where the vernacular of Bacon is at it’s height and demonstrates clearly why he deserves recognition. It also would have held up against the Cézanne in a way that made it look tardy and tedious.
This is the problem with modern curation, it’s all about bells and whistles and little about what really makes painting great. Bacon’s 1933 Crucifixion is of course no match for the Alonso Cano 1601 work. Bacon probably would have destroyed that piece if he had the chance as he did with so many other of his early paintings before 1944. If Herbert Read hadn’t written it up I’m sure he would of. He was his own fiercest critic and it’s not secret he destroyed hundreds of his own works over his lifetime that he deemed unworthy of showing. You don’t have to be a fan of Francis Bacon to recognize a lousy curation when you see one. The Sainsbury exhibition has the stain of being more circus act than meaningful attempt to shed light on a master painter. In an age when Bjork exhibitions are mounted at MOMA as shill for driving the general public to pay admission fees, it is easy to see how likely well-intentioned curators could mount the Sainsbury exhibition in the hopes of doing the same. Unfortunately it results in doing more of disserve to both Francis Bacon and the important of great works because it rips them out of context and reorients them in a way that pretends to give a perspective that is impossible to give—that there has been enough time and distance with Bacon to properly assess his seat in the historical canon of art history.
Jones for his part should be shifted to writing about Lady Gaga instead of Francis Bacon. The cynic in me believes he thinks it a clever conceit to undermine the greatest British painter since J.M.W. Turner and that will sell more papers. In actuality I simply believe that Jones like so many other journalists of our time, have cobbled together a career based on hubris more than knowledge and qualifications and it’s times like these that is revealed. Jone’s flippant statement about abandoning Bacon’s work reveals more about Jones than it does about the artist. If it’s that easy to turn on Bacon than it’s clear he never really understood the artist’s work to begin with or why it should be included alongside Picasso as great works of modernism. It’s too easy to pull paintings from an artist’s oeuvre and use them to undermine their life’s work. That’s why carefully crafted retrospectives are mounted. A more meaningful and exciting exhibition for the Sainsbury would have been to put Bacon up against Warhol, rather than parade out a lot of dusty old master.
‘Francis Bacon? He was a nice, gossipy sort of man’
Francis Bacon and the Masters opens at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (01603 593199), on April 18
A strange bedfellow for Tracey
My Bed by Tracey Emin is back at the Tate for the first time since it was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999. To mark its long-term loan to the gallery, Emin has chosen two artworks to hang alongside her rumpled bedsheets, dirty knickers, and condoms etc. The lucky artist is Francis Bacon, specifically, his Reclining Woman (1961) and Study of a Dog (1952). That does not necessarily mean that Emin likes Bacon.
“To me [as a student], he was always a bit weird and macho — the drunken, boorish artist,” she told Simon Grant, editor of Tate Etc. It was Gregor Muir, now director of the ICA, who made her see the older artist’s worth.
“I don’t have an affinity with Bacon. I chose his work because there’s a dialogue. There’s friction going on — there’s something happening between us.” The two artists agree on one thing, though — the perils of celebrity. She is enjoying it “less and less,” she said. “I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before I disappear into obscurity.” Not likely.
HOWARD HAMILTON | | MONDAY 30 MARCH 2015
ADRIAN CLARK | ICA B | SUNDAY 29 MARCH 2015
Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon
One of Tracey Emin’s best known and most controversial works, My Bed, first made in 1998 and once in private hands, is now on long loan to Tate and on display at Tate Britain. To accompany its return to the gallery (it was first shown in the Turner Prize display in 1999), Emin has selected two of her favourite paintings by Francis Bacon, an artist she has long admired.
Simon Grant Why did you choose two works by Francis Bacon to show with My Bed?
Tracey Emin Nicholas Serota and I were talking about how to present My Bed. Some people suggested showing it at Tate Modern, but I wanted it to have a very different context, not with my contemporaries, or in a ‘best of British’ kind of selection. I wanted to make a statement with it, so I said I’d like to show it with Bacon, because I thought there would be a really good dialogue between the intensity and anger in his work and the way the bed has this sense of collapse and seems completely forlorn. And there’s also this kind of debauchery and craziness going on between both artists, but done in a completely different way.
SG So from all the Bacon works at Tate, you chose 1952’s Study of a Dog and 1961’s Reclining Woman...
TE When I saw Study of a Dog I said yes immediately. It has an insaneness about it. The whole thing is completely strange; this dog is trapped within a hexagon-like shape and spinning around in its own space as if wanting to escape. The background looks like Los Angeles or somewhere non-British. It’s a fantastic painting – the technique is so minimal. How did he know when to stop working on it? With Reclining Woman, I never knew Bacon would look at a woman, let alone paint one. It’s not what you’d expect at all. So maybe it was a man who he thought looked like a woman? I like the waves of the bed, the way it resembles a river. I like the blood red colour – it is so intense. It would have been too obvious for me to show one of his bed paintings. This isn’t obvious, because it has this landscape quality. With My Bed, its strength is getting the sense that someone has just got out of it. In the Bacon picture, if this figure were to get up, you’d actually see where she had been lying.
SG Is there something about the way that he focuses on the single figure that connects with a lot of your drawings?
TE Yes, but in a lot of his paintings, even if there’s one figure, it looks like two. They appear to be fighting or fucking, or there’s one coming out of another. I preferred Reclining Woman because it seemed to me to have much more of a connection with My Bed. We don’t need to see two figures fucking or fighting. With the bed, we can see the condoms, the stains on the sheets and all the detritus of love and sex. We don’t need to see that again in a Bacon painting. What we need to see with the bed is that someone lonely walked away from it.
SG Is that sense of loneliness something you see in the Bacon pictures?
TE Definitely, especially Study of a Dog. It is something that as an artist you always feel at some time. You can’t be everyone’s best friend and be a good artist – you’d be kidding yourself. Jackson Pollock? Who would want to have dinner with him?
SG Did you ever meet Bacon?
TE No. I only ever saw him once – on South Kensington tube station. We passed on the escalator. We didn’t make eye contact.
SG Was he on your radar when you were a student?
TE Yes, because I am a figurative painter. But to me then he was always a bit weird and macho – the drunken boorish artist. But after Gregor Muir [now director of the ICA] showed me his series of Pope paintings I saw the fecundity in his work that I hadn’t previously seen. I always thought he was a good painter, but I didn’t get it until I saw it through different eyes.
SG Through a man’s eyes?
TE Definitely. Not through a homosexual man’s eyes, but he showed me what was going on. Before, I’d always seen the pictures as this robust single figure. In a strange way, I still do. There may be two figures, but it looks like something in turmoil; like someone’s soul fighting.
SG So you feel an affinity with him in that respect?
TE Well, yeah, my soul fights, but I don’t have an affinity with Bacon. I chose his work because there’s a dialogue. It’s not an argument, but there’s friction going on – there’s something happening between us.
SG You’ve certainly chosen some interesting Bacons...
TE Maybe that’s because I’m a woman. There are lots of boy artists who really respond to his macho themes.
SG I always thought he seemed more vulnerable to the world than that.
TE No… well, maybe. It’s nice of you to say that. I think he came across as much more vulnerable after the film biopic of his life, Love is the Devil. After his death people saw him and his paintings in a very different way. He was openly homosexual at a time when it was still an imprisonable offence; he hid nothing from the world.
SG I guess you’re doing a similar thing – hiding nothing from the world.
TE Yeah, my emotions are right at the front of everything I do. It’s a bit old-fashioned. Bacon was also putting it out there, as were Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. What they did had nothing to do with any art movement, or with what was fashionable. They were working within their own psyches. If you look at Bacon’s work and think about what was fashionable in the 1950s, he was really unfashionable. He was an alcoholic and didn’t give a fuck about anybody – not a combination for success actually.
SG Well, he did all right. But he didn’t really enjoy his celebrity.
TE Yeah. I’m sure that when I’m his age, I won’t enjoy mine either.
SG Are you enjoying it at the moment?
TE Less and less. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before I disappear into obscurity.
SG Oh, I doubt that very much Tracey.
Tracey Emin’s My Bed and six drawings donated to Tate by the artist are on show with Francis Bacon’s Study of a Dog, presented by Eric Hall in 1952, and Reclining Woman, purchased in 1961, at Tate Britain.
Simon Grant is editor of Tate Etc.
ART NEWS | INDEPENDENT VOICE OF CONTEMPORARY ART | ARTLYST | THURSDAY 19 MARCH 2015
Francis Bacon, Study of a Portrait of Van Gogh I, 1956
Archival display of Francis Bacon’s show
held at ICA in 1955 opens in London
LONDON. – From 24 March – 17 May 2015 the ICA presents FB55, an archival display of Francis Bacon’s show held at its former premises on Dover Street in 1955. At the time it was Bacon’s first ever solo institutional exhibition in the UK. The presentation in the ICA Fox Reading Room will include a display of documents, installation photographs, press reviews, invitation cards and publications.
Having represented Britain at the Venice Biennale the previous year, alongside Reg Butler, Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson, surprisingly little is known of about Bacon’s 1955 ICA exhibition. It was organised with the help of philanthropist, collector and ICA founder Peter Watson – then the richest man in Britain whose death a year later was shrouded in mystery. An inspiration to a younger generation of artists, Bacon stood apart from the more youthful Independent Group (IG) whose direct use of photographic material would eventually become synonymous with the birth of Pop Art. That said, Lawrence Alloway – the leading critic of the day – would later cite Bacon, not Richard Hamilton, as the founding father of Pop Art; possibly in reference to Bacon’s dependence on the kind of photographic imagery derived from films, popular magazines and newspapers. Referring to his IG colleagues as 'mixed-media jackdaws', Bacon further distanced himself by claiming the photographs that littered his studio floor were useful to him in much the same way that a traditional painter might use a life model. As was his whim, Bacon often recontextualised these images, such as those found in scientific textbooks, allowing them to take on sexual connotations.
Given the hue and cry surrounding homosexuality at the time of the 1955 ICA show, Bacon and Watson risked presenting a display of works that was arguably ‘queer’ (as was their persuasion), leading to one visitor insisting that the police be required to examine Two Figures in the Grass (1954). Sourced from an early Eadweard Muybridge photograph, the police later concurred that the painting was merely a scene of two men wrestling. Thereafter, one can only speculate how images of the Pope played out alongside scenes of intimate male encounters produced around the time of Bacon’s stay at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames. In keeping with the ICA’s radical art and culture remit, this exhibition has been referred to as one of Bacon’s more confrontational shows, combining images of the Catholic state with Bacon’s gilded gutter life.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin on the 28th October 1909. The family’s first residence in Ireland was Cannycourt House near the Curragh, Co. Kildare, an area renowned for its horse breeding and racing. Bacon’s only prolonged experience of formal schooling was as at the Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where he boarded from 1924 to 1926. At the age of 23 Bacon painted his first truly original work entitled Crucifixion in 1933. In 1945 Bacon exhibited his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London.
In 1954 he exhibited with Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Bacon spent considerable periods of time in Paris during the 1970s. Over the course of the next fifteen years, solo exhibitions and retrospectives of Bacon’s work were held around the world. These spanned several continents, from Madrid and Barcelona in 1978 to Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagoya in 1983 and Washington D.C. in 1989. In 1985 Tate held a major retrospective with 125 works and the director’s statement described the artist as the ‘greatest living painter’.
Three years later a retrospective of just 22 works was held in the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was the first show by a major Western artist to be mounted in the Soviet Union. As Bacon entered his seventies his work continued to evolve. He met the challenge of landscape, which he had largely avoided since his Van Gogh works of 1957. During the 1980s, Bacon’s simplified his pictorial language, pairing it down to its essentials. The human body was savagely abbreviated to a stump and a pair of legs (Study of the Human Body, 1982) or starkly implied by its residue (Blood on the Floor–Painting, 1986).
His technique became, if anything, more nuanced and refined. His palette divided between paintings with searing red/orange backgrounds and those with a cooler tonality of greys, creams and pale blues. Among the most impressive achievements of his last decade were two portrait triptychs, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1984 and Study for Self-Portrait, Triptych, 1985-6. Both paintings conveyed a quality not often associated with the artist: an imposing sense of calm. Francis Bacon died in Madrid on 28th April 1992.
POPE HEAD: THE SECRET LIFE OF FRANCIS BACON
From a four square metre stage and using nothing but three pop-up banners to create a sense of time and space,
British character actor Garry Roost (‘East Enders’, ‘Black Books’) delivers his one-man show, ‘Pope Head’.
In this fast paced 60-minute show, the actor delves deep into the psyche and personality of the enigmatic, 20th Century master, who courted controversy with his lifestyle and refusal to abide by society’s norms.
In this challenging solo performance (written and produced by Roost) the actor becomes the brilliant artist, detailing his childhood, his journey into adulthood and his confused sexuality. He looks at his morals (or lack of them), his hedonistic approach to life, (which Bacon declared he found quite ordinary) and the anger burning within him as he fights his childhood memories and the resentment they bring.
As the performance gathers pace, Roost grows ever more playful and inventive in the role – challenging and questioning the value of life, art, society’s morals, and the philosophies of the man who turned the art world upside down.
We are quickly drawn into Roost’s well-crafted web as we follow the struggle of the young artist who realises that success and tragedy go hand-in-hand. Plagued by self-doubt but determined to make his mark, Bacon pursued his art with unrelenting passion and Roost conveys the desperation of a man caught between worlds.
Here we witness the power of a talented character actor, with real words that convey real passion; where the complexities of a talented artist are held up for scrutiny. Roost delivers in spades and every line is like a bullet. There is nothing superfluous with the script. It is paired back and concise. And at every opportunity we are reminded of the artist’s brilliant wit, devastating sarcasm and towering intellect.
As Bacon famously said, “champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”. It doesn’t get more intimate and revealing than this.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1976
Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World. By Rina Arya.
In this sumptuously produced and illustrated book, Rina Arya, who is Reader in Visual Communication in the University of Wolverhampton, moves the study of the art of the 20th-century Irish artist Francis Bacon on to new levels by her close attention to its complex religious dimensions. Although Bacon himself was a professed atheist, much of his work remains saturated in the central images of the European Christian tradition as dictated by the Church, above all the triptychs of the crucifixion and the horrifying images of the Pope, especially drawn from the art of Velázquez and his great Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon paints in a godless world, a world after the death of God as heralded by Hegel and Nietzsche, and in the 20th century joins with such radical and disturbing figures as Georges Bataille in a profound rethinking of the sense of the sacred and profane.
Though perhaps, in Francis Bacon’s case, this is not so much a rethinking as a revising of the depths of human sensibility in a new sense of what it is to be in the body in the modern world. Emerging from his unhappy childhood in Ireland, his homosexuality, his experience of the horrors of the Second World War, Bacon offers us an art of the body which is uncompromising, difficult and profoundly disturbing. Arya, with her training in art history, art theory and religious thought, guides the reader with assurance and learning through the roots and the significance of Bacon’s paintings. As we move, in chapter three, to a consideration of Bacon’s early and deeply disturbing images of crucifixion, dating back to 1933, Arya situates his work within the rich traditions of Western Christian art of the Cross, linking Bacon particularly with, among others, the painting of Mattias Grünewald and also with the near contemporary work of Graham Sutherland, especially his 1946 Crucifixion which was commissioned for St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton. But we are rightly reminded that if Sutherland frames his work theologically, Bacon does so anthropologically—and the difference is absolutely crucial. What happens to the power of religion in a world which is now, for Bacon, godless? And so we come back, inevitably, to the three great and still deeply shocking paintings of about 1944, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which draw attention away from the Cross itself to the ambiguous, fragmented and menacing figures that lurk in its shadow—not the sorrowing figures of Mary and the disciples of Christian tradition, but something more bestial, fragmented, inhumane and horrifying. Arya’s great achievement is to show us how to look at these figures without attempting to impose any final interpretations on them. We see how they lurk within not only the Christian tradition, but also the Greek and classical traditions of tragedy right up to the drama of T.S. Eliot (which Bacon saw)—Bacon confronting us with the darkest nightmares lying in the depths of our culture.
The next chapter moves on to a consideration of the figure of the Pope after Velázquez, and is especially noteworthy for its discussion of the scream in modern art (Munch) and cinema (Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin). Finally Arya returns us to that which is at the centre of all of Bacon’s art—the human body, as felt from within—distorted, bestial, fragmented and challenging the sacred with the profane. After Bacon and his ‘logic’ of sensation, his rejection of expressionism and abstract painting, and his arresting use of colour, the traditions of Western art returns afresh to the categories of the sacred and profane. In her final pages, Arya rightly takes us to a reflection on the Eucharist and the sense of the Real Presence—to the body and the blood of Christ and those visceral elements that lie at the very heart of all Bacon’s work. In his paintings, there is a transubstantiation of paint into flesh and thus, as Arya puts it, ‘we come face to face with the real and cannot hide behind the symbol or representation’ (151). Perhaps the most startling move is then made in the very last sentence in the book—that in a double turn, this art is not finally about the profane so much as a resacralizing of the Western tradition—or, at least, an invitation to reflect upon what that might mean for us through a contemplation of the body: ‘Bacon is consecrating symbols that have become profane through overuse and revives their religious significance by articulating the sacrality of the body on the Cross and the body of the Pope’ (151).
This is a learned and articulate book that makes a new and serious contribution to reflections upon art and religion.
DAVID JASPER University of Glasgow
The Dilly: A Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys
The Dilly is the first comprehensive examination of male prostitution at London’s Piccadilly Circus from the nineteenth century to the present day. On the fringes of Soho, Piccadilly has long been London’s principal location for the illicit sale of sex, and Jeremy Reed explores the history of rent boys from Oscar Wilde’s notorious attraction to the place to the painter Francis Bacon’s predilection for rough trade.
The book includes tales of Soho’s clandestine gay clubs from the days when homosexuality was illegal, the punters inexorably drawn to the area, the development of the secret slang known as Polari or Palare, as well as the Dilly’s influence on pop stars from the Rolling Stones to Morrissey.
The author examines the careers of a number of former male prostitutes who worked the infamous ‘Meat Rack’ and investigates what drew them to risk their lives. His study includes a chapter recording his friendship with Francis Bacon and concludes with an account of the demise of the Dilly trade, when male escorts booked online supplanted the boys hanging out on the neon-lit railings.
This is an exhilarating re-creation of the occupation of London’s tourist centre by lawless Dilly boys and a pioneering piece of countercultural history brought vividly to life through the author’s personal engagement – he himself worked as a rent boy in the early 1970s – as well as his strong sense of place, colourful imagery and poetic flair.
The Sohemian Society presents… Jeremy Reed at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, North Soho, W1 Wednesday March 18th, 7.30pm
Five Secrets You Never Knew About Francis Bacon
A dark comedic drama exploring the life, art, psyche and sexuality of Francis Bacon, ‘Pope Head’ is a powerful
portrait of the artist famously described by Margaret Thatcher as “that mad who paints those dreadful pictures.”
Starring Garry Roost (‘East Enders’,
‘Black Books’), in an acclaimed solo performance,
‘Pope Head: The Secret Life Of Francis Bacon’ follows the struggle of a young artist who eventually finds that
success and tragedy go hand-in-hand when you are determined to live life to the
full.
“But one must have chaos in one’s soul to be able
to give birth to a dancing star, as Nietzsche said. For me chaos breeds images.
I love living in chaos!” Fancis Bacon.
“Francis Bacon was an enigma, a maverick. During
the past three years while researching for the play, I have met many of Bacon’s
close friends and have been privileged to be given rare insights into his life,
which have helped shaped the storyline of
‘Pope Head’,” Garry says.
Caught wearing his mother’s stockings. Banished from the family home. Sent to Berlin with his father’s henchman. Transfixed by Picasso. On to the Colony Club. Champagne. Triptych. A tragic love life. These are just some of secrets exposed in 'The Secret Of Francis Bacon', and Garry Roost has ungrounded some more:
Eddie Gray (my composer and mentor) once told me the young Bacon owed a gambling debt and stole money from the safe of a wealthy female friend with whom he would enjoy breakfast most mornings. He of course replaced the full amount some weeks later without her realising. One morning his friend was aghast at the black boot polish marks left on her white carpet from Bacon as he navigated his way to the safe. In his young days, Bacon wore black boot polish to colour his hair. When confronted he remained silent, made his excuses and left the breakfast table in a hurry.
After a performance during Edinburgh 2014, an art historian who knew Bacon remarked “…you were so frighteningly like him at times. Bacon had a go at me just like that. I am sure he had some kind of personality disorder but was never formally diagnosed.” On my way home from the theatre I reflected on this comment and perhaps a touch of madness is what is required in all artists that allows us to shift our perspective.
Bacon always had notes in his pocket of things he might say during an interview. He would use the word ‘one’ this and ‘one’ that. This was his public persona. However a very close confidant insisted that she never, ever, heard him use the phrase ‘one’ in normal conversation. He was indeed as ordinary in his vocabulary as any other person. “Insecurity was always a problem for Francis,” she mused.
A lady who came to see the show remarked that she was fascinated by my portrayal as she had met Bacon as a young woman in Soho. The lady’s parents were pretty hip and used to travel into London with her and frequent the Colony room. As they all sat around chatting, Francis would shout her soft drinks so she felt included in the evening’s soirée.
In the later years of his life, some of his dear friends – once affluent – hit on hard times and ill health. Bacon was generous to those who were truly unfortunate and assisted financially by paying for their accommodation and settling bills.
FRANCIS BACON’S BEAUTIFUL FREAKS
Francis Bacon painted some of the most striking images of the 20th century and now a one-man show about his life is coming to Brisbane after winning critical acclaim in Edinburgh and London.
UK actor Garry Roost brings Pope Head — The Secret Life of Francis Bacon to the Judith Wright Centre for two performances in March.
Roost known from his work in East Enders, The Bill and Black Books, had been told repeatedly of his resemblance to Francis Bacon and it was these continued comparisons that first sparked his interest in the artist and led him to write the play.
Famously described by Margaret Thatcher as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”. Bacon drew on medical textbooks for his human studies that resemble at times butchery rather than human forms.
Pope Head, with its allusion to Bacon's famous painting of the “screaming pope”, is a dark comedic drama exploring the life, art, psyche and (homo)sexuality of this charismatic British artist,
Pope Head draws on the words and thoughts of Bacon himself, and is a look at a man who considered himself an outsider in a violent world and expressed that like no other artist.
Andrew Shaw
Pope Head — The Secret Life of Francis Bacon, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, 420 Brunswick St, Valley, March 13-14
A
Michael Parsons | The Irish Times | Saturday, February 21, 2015
Bacon and Bergson on Time and Motion
In Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993), Mark Antliff elucidates the pervasive impact of Bergson on modernism in Europe in such movements as Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism, particularly by focusing on the ‘formal innovation’ in these movements.10
Perhaps the most significant influence on Bacon’s execution of the serial image, particularly between 1949 and 1957, was the photography of Eadweard Muybridge.11 In his photographic experiments with humans and animals in motion, Muybridge explored motion by setting up a series of cameras with electro-shutters, which would be activated by movement, such as the action of a galloping horse. The camera would record the different movements of the horse – including lifting its four hooves off the ground simultaneously, an action that was previously unnoticed, or at least not recorded. The separate instantaneous images recorded were then displayed sequentially in a reconstitution of the consecutive phases of motion. The motion-sequence photography of Muybridge was significant for Bacon, who wanted to convey motion in a fluid way by increasing his repertory of figures in motion. Bacon acknowledged that these photographs were ‘a recording of human motion – a dictionary, in a sense’.12 The sequential and progressive nature of motion in Muybridge’s series may have influenced Bacon’s decision to depict a series rather than a single image. Where motion is construed as a series of successive phases or intervals by Muybridge, Bacon aimed to take this further by superimposing appearances that meld together into a seamless whole and ‘merges all the “frames” into a single composite image’.13 Unlike Muybridge’s images, Bacon’s lack a sense of progression. He thwarts the notion that in order to depict movement one has to show motion as an extensive phenomenon, and strives for an alternative interpretation of time and motion. Wieland Schmied argues that ‘Bacon’s figures are mobile, but they cannot move forwards. Their movements are in abeyance, as if they were revolving around their own axis … the movement … in Bacon’s pictures … [turns] back on itself and revolves around a hidden centre of gravity’.14 Daria Kolacka encapsulates a sense of this in her phrase ‘constant vibration’15 to describe Bacon’s approach to motion. These various configurations of the figure convey that while Muybridge’s works were indispensable for Bacon’s formulation of figures in motion, the latter’s interpretation involved a critique of the former’s instantaneous images rather than a development of them. In a sense, Bacon ended up subverting Muybridge’s representations by rupturing the discrete boundaries separating images and by showing how movement is not a linear progressive phenomenon but destroys the single viewpoint.
Through his philosophical analyses of time, Bergson was a major proponent in the paradigm shift from nineteenth-century positivism to the alternative models of science offered at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly in French philosophy. Bergson’s philosophy marks the transition from Cartesian dualism to a more embodied and intuitive understanding of perception. He believed that modern science failed to capture certain phenomena of which we are experientially aware. In particular, there is the existence of life and its actions, as opposed to the behaviour of mere matter under physical laws; there is also our experience of the passage of time. In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson sets up a distinction between the expression of time used by scientists (clock time), by which he is specifically referring to the mathematical, mechanical theories of time (correspondent with the Newtonian universe), and another conception, which escapes the limitations of mechanization.16 This other experience of time cannot be defined according to the same parameters; in short, it is how we actually experience time in our lives. In this article, I discuss the two versions of time separately; but Bergson discussed the two in conjunction, especially by highlighting the limitations of the scientific approach in sharp distinction to the liberating potential of real time.
The scientific analysis of time involves viewing the universe as a series of instantaneous snapshots. It entails analysing time as if it were an object, where it can be defined quantitatively (in hours, minutes, etc.,), spatially (when we speak of relations of ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’), and can be isolated (where a ‘moment’ can be abstracted from the flow of time). Various other adjectives are used to describe this homogeneous and impersonal notion of time, which is unaffected by subjective interpretations and continues as the backdrop of our lives. Bergson’s most pronounced denigration of this version of time is termed the ‘cinematographical method’, where he uses a term that encapsulates both its artifice and limitations. Martin Jay unpacks this descriptor effectively and explains how:
[t]he cinema served as a potent metaphor for the misleading cognition of temporality because it combines still images of immobile sections with the impersonal, abstract ‘becoming’ of the apparatus, integrating them to create a simulacrum of real time.17
In contrast, durée18 (real time) is time as we actually experience it in the course of our lives. For Gary Gutting, this is the lived ‘passage of time that pervades our lives’.19 The characteristics of this interpretation are diametrically opposed to Bergson’s definition of the scientific approach to time. In the latter, time is impersonal and reversible: ‘homogeneous and impersonal duration, the same for everything, which flows onward, indifferent and void, external to all that endures’;20 while in the former interpretation, time is interwoven into our lives and is influenced by memories. Hence it is irreversible: we can conceive of a present memory of an event experienced five years ago, and even though the memory may appear to be as vivid in the present as it was (in our memory) of first conceiving it, it is still in the past and the two (past and present) cannot change places. Coupled with that observation is the acknowledgement that the present is continually in the process of becoming past.
In the preceding explanation I have spoken of ‘past’ and ‘present’ as if they are discrete stages, which is contrary to how they are conceived in real time. Real time is heterogeneous; the artificial separation or distillation of time into ‘past’ and ‘present’ does not correspond to the way that we apprehend reality, where the past and present are actually contemporaneous. As Bergson explains, ‘in pure duration of which the flow is continuous … we pass insensibly from one state to another’.21 In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson states that ‘[m]y mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow’.22 This seamlessness or imperceptible transition is crucial to real time, but because the scientific interpretation of time is so embedded in our way of thinking it is not unusual to resort to delineating the characteristics of ‘real’ time with reference to what it is not. For Bergson, durée is ‘artificially decomposed for the greater convenience of customary knowledge’.23 The changeability of real time also makes it difficult to discuss in concrete terms. Though science would not dispute the notion of flux, scientists explain it by devising sophisticated systems that allow for minute changes in time. The interpretation of real time, however, depends upon a synthesis of perception and memory, where neither variable is stable since each of them is determined by flux. Our perceptions of the past and the future are relative to the present, whereas our perspective on the present is constantly changing. It stands to reason, then, that our perspectives on the past and the future are not stable either. One could argue that it is possible to hold a certain view about something, which therefore could be an argument to support the unchangeability of the present. Nonetheless, even if my commitment to an idea remains unwavering, the factor of change is constituted in the lapse of the temporal through which my commitment persists; and it is this lapse that denotes difference. In Creative Evolution, Bergson gives the example of the visual perception of a motionless external object. ‘The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other’24 – echoing the Heraclitean maxim that it is not possible to ‘step twice into the same river’.
To summarize then, the scientific interpretation of time is abstract, objective and unaffected by personal durée. Experienced time, however, has a different motivation. It is entirely entwined with the subjectivity of the individual. In his theory about duration, Bergson inverts erstwhile established paradigms of thought including Newtonian physics and Platonist philosophy. In Platonism the real realm is characterized by its unchanging Forms, where the Forms are situated outside space and time. In contrast to this lies the world of the shadows with their mutability and changeability. In Bergson’s philosophy, the real is not located in the realm of Forms but in that which is constantly changing.
The body as the agent of perception
Bergson and Bacon also shared a phenomenological approach to the body. Bergson challenged the ‘positivistic image of the body as an object to be analysed from the outside’25 and claimed that it was to be conceived as the ground of all perceptions. In Matter and Memory, he sought to liberate the body from the snares of idealism and materialism and to resituate it as the agent of perception.26 Our knowledge of the world, then, is mediated through the body. Bergson states, ‘I do not know it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body’.27 He claims that ‘My body, an object destined to move other objects, is then, a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation’.28 The switch from the view of the body as external image, where it was prey to objectification to an embodied understanding of perception, corresponds with the switch from the scientific view of time to an embrace of the experience of durée.
Bergson’s focus on the body as an active agent, as the ground of perceptions, makes for a very apt pairing with Bacon, who centralizes bodily experience of, and sees the body as the locus of, both sensations and perception. Van Alphen emphasizes the aesthetic and theoretical significance of the body in Bacon’s oeuvre:
The body, indeed, is where it all begins: as soon as one wonders what, where, or who one is, one looks to the body for the answer … the body may well be the central element for an aesthetic and philosophical understanding of Bacon’s painting.29
This shift constituted their respective understandings of ‘realism’. Bergson rejected a dualistic understanding of the body in favour of his philosophy of vitalism – his response to our organic condition. Bacon provides a parallel to this philosophy in his painting. He subverts many established practices in his art – including narrative – that attempt to fix duration, meaning and identity, and focuses instead on underscoring the vitality in and of the body.
Bacon’s anti-narrative stance
Bacon was vehemently opposed to the notion of narrative art, partly because he believed that it distracts from the aesthetic properties of artworks. In its basic form, a narrative is an account of connected events that is presented as a sequence that may involve the use of symbolism. This process is foundational to the history of Western art. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to religious and mythological painting from the fifth century onwards, these works were interpreted by examining the symbols and other visual clues in the works in order to construct narratives about their meanings. Works varied according to the structural complexity, some being easier to read than others. Bacon describes narrative reductively as being or involving ‘storytelling’, where the elements within the painting operate as visual clues that can be pieced together to give information about the figure(s) and context. He often selects subjects that lend themselves to a narrative treatment, such as the crucifixion and the papacy; but his depictions of these subjects are not conventional and do not adhere to commonly expressed narratives. So his crucifixion paintings do not convey the Christian narrative of Christ dying on the cross to save humankind. Bacon also moves away from figuration; his figures do not have a referent, apart from the painting. The artist objected to the figurative tendencies of painting, which he believed could reduce its impact. In a figurative portrayal the viewer’s immediate identification of the symbol of the pope, for example, may detract from (or minimize the effect of) paying close attention to the power of the aesthetic. Bacon’s figures are instead figural,30 which in its Deleuzian sense refers to a form that pertains to the figurative but is also abstract.31 Bacon’s popes are figural insofar as they resemble the symbol of the pope; but they are also unpopelike (in their representation), which renders them unfigurative. Bacon uses distortion to bring about the figural, which involves abstracting from the figure and distorting the figurative appearance of the photograph that he works from in the process of image-making. And so the portraits of named people, such as Isabel Rawsthorne, are of the figural transformation of the individual and not the figurative representation.
In spite of his deep reservations about traditional narratives, Bacon often teases the viewer by creating the guise of traditional narrative viewing – what van Alphen describes as ‘the illusions of narrativity’,32 such as the fact of two or more figures being placed in the same space or the presence of more than one panel in the triptych, which invites the possibilities of iconographic unity and temporal and/or spatial continuity. These illusions leave the viewer unstuck, however, and deflate the importance of the primacy of the visual. As noted, to Bergson, clock time is conceived of in spatial terms. The division of time into chronology implies a temporal division in space where each component – of past, present and future – is considered in a fixed relation to each other (of being before, simultaneous with, or after). Bacon thwarted the conventions of the visualization of space, believing it to lead to narrative banality. Space is rendered ambiguously in his paintings: we are not able to make out the spatial relationships between figures, nor even to anchor them in space. Curved walls are a typical feature of many paintings, contributing to the viewer’s sense of disorientation. In Triptych – Studies from the Human Body (1970), for instance, there are three panels with at least one figure in each and almost certainly two in the centre. It is not clear, however, whether the same figure is in each or whether there are three separate scenes. The orange background provides a sense of visual, but not narrative, continuity, as does the open door in the left- and right-hand panels. In a general comment on narrative in Bacon’s work, van Alphen observes how ‘all the deceptive certainties of the visual are challenged. Light and shadow, representation and reflection, substance and transparency’.33 This is certainly the case in this example. Taking each pair individually, regarding ‘light and shadow’, the light does not define the space in the room and perspective is lacking. There is little, if any, differentiation between where the walls end and where the floor begins. Moving on to ‘representation and reflection’, it is not clear whether the figures at the doorways in the right and left panels are actually figures or whether they are reflections. Finally, with ‘substance and transparency’, one would expect the shadows to be less substantial than the body itself but, in the cases of the figures in the left-and right-hand panels, the shadows are just as visceral and tangible – if not more so – than the body itself. They also fall at unexpected places, and it is not clear where the source of light is located. There is a noticeable lack of communication in the triptych and, apart from the couple in the central panel (who are plausibly engaged in the act of buggery), the other figures remain oblivious of one another. In spite of the use of narrative devices there is no formation of a narrative; the action is non-spatialized and non-chronological.
Before discussing how to read Bacon’s paintings, one needs to understand his objections to traditional narratives. Bacon was against this form of narrative because it was unimaginative and meant that viewers were more intent on piecing together the clues in the image, as one would a jigsaw puzzle, for example, rather than allowing the work to make a visceral impact on their senses. He wanted to heighten the intensity of his paintings by avoiding this seductive type of narrative (van Alphen describes how, ‘[s]tory-tellers are seducers, diverting the audience’s attention from what there is to see’34) and wanted to ‘give the sensation, without the boredom of conveyance’.35 Numerous metaphors have been employed by Bacon scholars to convey the sensory impact of his work, including Michel Leiris’s designation of the ‘real presence’ of the painting.36 Bacon himself talked about attempting ‘to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’.37 He also spoke about wanting to clear away some of the screens that we live behind,38 which spoke of a desire not to mask reality in its comfortable representations but to show the horror that prevails beneath this veneer.
Given that the conventions of narrative are misleading in his work, how are we meant to interpret his painting? And is there scope for an alternative narrative that does not compromise the impact of the sensation? Van Alphen displaces the ‘diegetic’ (where the narrative occurs across the picture plane) to an ‘apostrophic’ reading, where the narrative occurs between the figure and the viewer.39 In this reading we are implicated in the reading and we follow the painterly marks that are recorded traces of bodily activity, both the activity of the painted figures and also the traces of Bacon’s body in the production of the work. Importantly, given that his paintings are representations made by a body in process, the knowledge they themselves embody is something other than that of an object by a (separate) subject. Our immersion in the work is exacerbated by the viewing experience of the triptych format, which is spatially inclusive and physically enclosing or enveloping. Viewing is a dislocating and wounding experience because the figures do not confer wholeness on the viewer and because we react to the distortions of the figure.40 This occurs in Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne. Rawsthorn does not meet our gaze and furthermore, we are unable to stabilize her viewing position. In the ‘apostrophic’ reading the distortions of the figures are transferred to the viewer, so that we experience the painful flux of becoming, the instability of identity and the phenomenology of embodiment. In his theory of ‘affective narrative’, van Alphen merges the roles of figure and viewer: ‘[t]he figures are behaving like, as well as being engaged with, the viewer’.41 In a similar vein, Andrew Forge adds that ‘[i]t feels as if we are both in and out of the painting – being in and looking at it at the same time. Twisting, sliding, slicing are internal sensations’.42 The narrative here is created precisely in the interaction between the viewer and the figure and is not, as conventional narrative is, given to us an external phenomenon. To restate this very important point: we cannot separate the reading from the viewing, and viewing here is tantamount to a performance where narrative cannot be extrapolated from perception. Bacon presents a corrective to Bergson’s cinematographical method, which entails viewing ‘from the outside’ and hypostasizing representation:
Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificiality. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.43
In conventional narrative viewing, we ‘place ourselves outside’; but here, we ‘attach ourselves to the inner becoming of things’. We move from ‘narrative as product’ to ‘narrative as process’.44 We cannot separate reality into ‘snapshots’ and experience the continual flow of durée, which is characteristic of becoming. The narrative devices that are placed around us do not fulfil their functions and therefore we cannot rely on knowledge of the body from external sources. We only know the body from inside. If indeed we are stand-ins for the figures, then if the figures are twisted beyond their appearance to attain a ‘real presence’, we too experience this.
Becoming over being: The condition of life
Bacon portrays the body as it is in real life, which is in a sense of perpetual motion, in durée. We do not experience the external image of the body but instead create the experience of the sensation of the bodily. This can be interpreted metaphorically as an attempt to show the omnipresence of death, something that lurks within the human body. For Bacon, death should not be viewed solely as a state that occurs after life but is instead a condition inherent in the body. Bacon undermines the permanence of representation by exposing its artificiality and constructed nature; there is nothing outside representation,45 representation is all we have. The presentation of static representation in portraiture in the history of art can be viewed as an attempt to fix time and space, and to preserve the likeness of the sitter, as a way of memorializing and eternalizing their presence. Bacon subverts this trope and furthermore.
takes away the presence of the other in the room; his figures are not socially conscious and are subject to the crisis of identity that occurs when one is entirely alone: ‘[w]e 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’.46 The withdrawal of the certainties of the preservation of identity leads to an array of figures that disintegrate before our very eyes. And so we see popes who do not sit proud and aloof, but silently scream. Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is one of many examples that demonstrate Bacon’s disruption of fixity. Rawsthorne’s stance presents a challenge to the viewer because she resists the objectification to which the gaze subjects her; the vitality of her motion prevents her identity from being pinned down and fixed to a static image. The distortions that whip her face in all directions are directed to the viewer as a reminder that what Bacon is doing is distorting our understanding of the body and our subsequent predilection for objectifying and abstracting appearance (away from the vitalism of the body). In her frenzied motions, Rawsthorne wants to break out of the confines of space and exert her realism. With his goal of breaking the mould of historical portraiture, Bacon declared that his attempts to paint the figure in motion were motivated by his aspiration to record life rather than what is art, where art goes hand in hand with what is artificial. Bacon similarly uses other motifs in his work – such as the hypodermic syringe and, more commonly, the crucifixion – as representing the impossibility of pinning down the vital body,47 which twists and turns, resisting any effort to hold it in place
The artist’s integration of becoming and motion might be viewed as his idée fixe; Alexander Gosztonyi discusses how he ‘transposes the movement into the very form of the body’.48 The motion that Bacon’s figures exhibit cannot be reduced to discrete moments, but exemplifies the insensible flux of ‘becoming’ rather than the stable and permanent state of ‘being’. His figures not only exist in real time, but are also exemplars of real time. They are both inscrutable and impervious to the cinematographical gaze of the other, which in his paintings can be seen to be visually represented by the parallelepiped-type structures (and other architectonic devices) that unsuccessfully attempt to hone the image down. This resistance to the fixity of the image is crucial in Bacon’s oeuvre and also in relation to the parallel drawn with Bergson. In The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1934), Bergson claims that no image can represent duration because an image is immobile while duration is ‘pure mobility’.49 This resonates with Bacon’s philosophy. Bacon’s response is to disrupt the image by disfiguring and distorting it. What we are presented with is an articulation of the distortions. Part of the tension of viewing is created by this juxtaposition between the ‘immobile canvas’ and the painterly durée, and the effect of the juxtaposition is destabilizing. In his language of distortion, Bacon is able to effect the transition from the historical tradition of the Grand Manner to his countercultural aesthetic of violence.
Violence in Bacon
Bacon grew up against a background of war (the Irish Civil War and World War II) and lived through violent times. Nonetheless, this actual violence is to be distinguished from the violence in his work. Bacon is unswerving about this. In his biographical statement, he tells Sylvester,‘this violence of my life, the violence which I’ve lived amongst, I think it’s different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war’.50 Dawn Ades develops this distinction by describing the literal violence as ‘mirrored’51 violence, which stands apart from the violence that arose from the suggestions in his paintings. The violence that he is talking about has nothing to do with the violent application of paint, with ‘expressionist’ violence (such as in German Expressionism or Abstract Expressionism). Bacon’s violence comes out of an ability to transform the multitude of sensations surrounding a figure into paint. Deleuze states that ‘what directly interests him 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’.52 The violence is expressed through movement; and this movement often comes from within the body, such as the spasm of a sneeze or the ‘violence of a hiccup’ – what Van Alphen refers to as the ‘turmoil of sensation’.53 These forces, which stem from the inner turmoil of the body, are what Deleuze describes as ‘invisible forces that deform flesh’.54 When Bacon describes his work as violent, he is referring to exactly that: the invisible forces, invisible because they originate inside the body and subsequently go on to disrupt the boundaries of the body, which affects its overall stability The relation between duration and formlessness is explored in Bergson, who argues that ‘[i]n reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and reality is movement’.55 In short, the ‘inner’ – whether the sneeze, scream or vomiting – causes a rupture in the flesh, resulting in overflow. The overspill causes the dissolution of boundaries, thus blurring the relationship between what is inner and outer; and it is the momentum of the expulsion that irreversibly deforms the body. Once expelled, this matter does not dissolve into the background but persists in its ‘[i]nterminable presence’,56 which reinforces the instability of the body. Bacon’s language of distortion enables him to move beyond a simple representation of the homogeneous body, beyond the representation of its surface, so as to express what the body actually feels like – that is, the condition of embodiment. He uses distortion as a strategy of defiance against society’s conventional attitudes to representation. His distortions distort the distorted view that we have of the real.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson steers the body away from the fixed positions of representation to ensure that it itself becomes the focus of expression. He elaborates:
Our body occupies its center; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies. If matter, so far as extended in space, is to be defined (as we believe it must) as a present which is always beginning again, inversely, our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, and nothing else.57
The body, then, is the locus of sensations where we experience the flux of existence. In reclaiming the body from the legacy of dualism and reasserting an embodied theory of knowledge, Bergson was interpreting it through durée, where the experience of bodily sensation is entwined with the imperceptible flow of existence. The body cannot be referred to outside personal time; its movements cannot be measured as discrete moments. As Ben-Ami Scharfstein states, in Bergson ‘[w]e measure time through movement, which, as muscular sensation, is part of inner life’.58 Similarly, in Bacon time is revealed through sensation that distorts the body through motion. For example, in Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the sensation of horror causes the Pope to emit a scream that distorts his mouth. The turbulence of the body is not motivated by an external source, but comes from within. Dawn Ades observes that Bacon is not interested in movement in the manner of Futurism, but is trying to give ‘the muscular sensation of spasm or contraction; it is sight, touch, tension, orgasm, together’.59 Bacon was not concerned with portraying motion as an extensive phenomenon but in expressing motion as a counterpart to sensation. The body feels and expresses this sensation through motion. This motion manifests itself in numerous ways, as through the excretory channel, where the insides spill over into the outside. More commonly, motion is expressed through distortion – every movement distorts the preceding movement. In Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, the sitter’s head-movements, from right to left or left to right, continually distort the stability of one’s impression. In this instance, we do not experience motion in either an extensive or expansive way but as a mass of distortions that paralyse any aspirations to linear motion. The conflicting turns of right and left result in a sensation that can be described in an oxymoron: as vibrating inertia. To recapitulate an earlier point, Schmied astutely describes Bacon’s figures as mobile but revolving ‘around a hidden centre of gravity around their own axis’.60 Their potential immobility makes it impossible to measure their motion or temporality in a cinematographical sense.
Although Bacon does not explicitly discuss the significance of memory in his dialogues, it is possible to interpret what Schmied refers to as the ‘residual trace[s] or mark[s]’61 as memories. In Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne the subject’s presence cannot be captured in one static image but through her continual mobility; Bacon expresses the flux of sensation. There are no discernible differences between each of the impressions; they merge into a conglomerate. This reflects Bergson’s own views about the lack of sharp distinctions between the past, present and future. The residual traces aesthetically distort the possibility of a static image but simultaneously confer a plurality of sensations comparable to the emanations to which Bacon refers. Paradoxically then, we move further away from the likeness of the individual, Rawsthorne, in order to capture a greater intimacy because we are entering into her durée. In Creative Evolution Bergson states, ‘[t]he more duration marks the living being with its imprint, the more obviously the organism differs from a mere mechanism, over which duration glides without penetrating’.62 The confluence of the past, present and future is also used to haunting effect in Bacon’s Black Triptychs, especially in Triptych – August (1972) where we see the ‘spectral time of haunting and return’63 in the bat-like shadow that forecasts the doom awaiting Bacon’s lover George Dyer, who committed suicide two days before Bacon’s major retrospective was to open at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971.
Another parallel between Bergson and Bacon is the ontology of ‘becoming’ over ‘being’, where the former implies the overlap of past, present and future. Earlier I discussed the impossibility of stasis in ‘real’ time, which is governed by flux, and explained that, even if the only change is the lapse of the temporal, it still constitutes difference. The Baconian body is malleable. Kolacka suggests that his figures ‘are presented – like Ovid’s protagonist – in the moment of metamorphosis’.64 John Russell describes a Baconian figure as ‘wound round and round itself like barley sugar’.65 The process of change and becoming that the figures undergo through their bodily instability never reaches a point of stability, and the painterly smears and traces are reminders of this turmoil. They are always in the throes of convulsions that can be interpreted as metaphoric attempts to escape the body. Deleuze cites the example of Bacon’s Figure at a Washbasin (1976), adding the following commentary: ‘clinging to the oval of the washbasin, its hands clutching the faucets, the body-Figure exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the blackness of the drain’.66 This inability to stabilize the self can be viewed in a Bergsonian sense as the ‘developing synthesis within the ever-changing flux of duration’.67 I suggest that Bacon not only articulates that the body is in flux, but takes this one step further: the body is flux.
In his art, Bacon wanted to convey more than a naturalistic portrayal of a figure; he wanted to capture the ‘emanations’ and other non-tangible aspects of the person that he felt could only be conveyed through distortion. He moved beyond verisimilitude and articulated what Leiris refers to as a ‘real presence’, where his figures ‘exist more forcefully than any simple representation’.68 This coheres with Bergson’s attempt in Matter and Memory to restore the vital presence back to the body – what he terms élan vital, commonly translated as ‘the vital impulse’. Bacon’s real presence can be coupled with real time in Bergson, where real in both contexts implies that the perception cannot be extrapolated from the experience. Bacon once said, ‘I would like my pictures to loom 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’.69 His ‘screened existence’70 serves as a commensurate trope to Bergson’s cinematographical method. By ‘screened existence’, Bacon is referring to the tendency within art to organize and package reality in a way that does not penetrate the deeper questions, such as the condition of death in life. Bacon tackles themes such as this, with which other artists may be unwilling to engage. By clearing away the screens that we put in place to protect us from the darker side of life, Bacon aims to ‘unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently’.71
Conclusion
In this article I have argued for the commonalities between Bergson’s theories about duration and Bacon’s depiction of time and motion, but without relying on Deleuze’s interpretation. Although Deleuze’s monograph brought Bergsonian thinking to the fore in Bacon’s work, especially in relation to certain key concepts including duration, intuition and becoming, it is also invaluable to examine Bergson’s theories in their own right.72 It is also a reminder of the centrality that Bergson occupied in Europe (especially France) before World War I. One of his overarching objectives, to liberate thought and conceptual thinking from a mechanistic paradigm, chimes with Bacon’s desire to liberate painting from the stranglehold of figuration. Bacon depicted motion as something that is non-linear and that ruptures a single viewpoint. A contradiction that needs to be addressed in Bacon’s formulation is that, even though he disrupted the modes of painting through his subversion of narrative painting and his technique of distortion, he still had to withstand the limitations presented by the painted surface that was static and two dimensional (and often framed behind glass). The marks on a canvas (like those on a page) are fixed in a particular spatial-temporality. And so his pretence to the representation of durée in painting needs to be viewed analogically in relation to his interpretation of reality, rather than literally in his paintings. This qualification was in keeping with Bergson’s own attitude to art. In Time and Free Will (pp. 133–4), he talks about the ways in which an artist may give an illusion of representing reality as it actually is while acknowledging that the art is contained within homogeneous time and space.73 Even though Bergson valued durée over mechanized time in his intellectual outlook, he was able to recognize that mechanized time was an important restraint – a necessary fiction – in everyday reality, and hence one had to contend with its limitations
In spite of the synergy that exists between Bergson’s theory of duration and Bacon’s depiction of motion, a case can be made for the anti Bergsonian drive of Bacon. This was especially in respect to their worldviews. Bergson’s alternative metaphysics, which was anti-scientistic, proposed the idea of the élan vital, which translates approximately as the vital impulse and refers to Bergson’s understanding of the creative potential of evolution. In Creative Evolution Bergson proposed that evolution should not be viewed as mechanistic but was instead creative, and involved the continual development and generation of life. The élan vital, an integral part of Bergson’s philosophy of life, was a force that could not be analysed scientifically but which Bergson believed was responsible for the innumerable forms of life. The ultimate expression of this life force was witnessed in human life, which he believed was the most developed form of evolution, and which accounted for the intelligence of the human species. The theory of the élan vital coheres with Bergson’s ideas about duration. In his outlook, knowledge is not acquired by taking an external and abstract view of reality where entities have fixed positions; in the same way that a lived (rather than thought/intellectualized) conception of time does not involving examining it from the outside as mechanized time. Instead, we need to employ an inside-out and intuitive view where we are immersed in our environment and reality is presented to us as immediate experience, unfolding in real time.
Bacon’s view of life, as represented in his painting, was not about presenting static figures but rather was about depicting reality as mediated by the senses and the manifestation of how things appear – where the skin of the paint is equivalent to the skin of the figure. We can take from this that his paintings are not easy to read precisely because life is not simple (in the sense of being linear) and easy to read. His figures are not stabilized beings, but rather entities that are in the process of becoming and morphing from one form to another. And equally, narrative is constructed during viewing and is mediated between the viewer and the figure(s). Where Bergson sought to naturalize organic life, Bacon naturalizes the body. Van Alphen equates the bodily movement in Bacon’s figures with the identity of the ‘self’ and views the sense of growth and change as ‘uplifting’.74 However, it is remiss to ignore the more bleak and nihilistic interpretation of Bacon’s work. He could plausibly be seen to be presenting a negative portrayal of the human in the twentieth century, where the abject portrayal of amorphous bodies that leak and decompose is a commentary on the rootless and groundless sense of identity in contemporary life. His bonhomie in life is not matched by such vigour in his representations, and his painterly outlook does not celebrate humanity (in a Bergsonian vein) but rather debases the human to her animalism. With his shrunken heads, amalgams of human and animal forms, and disruption of visual primacy, Bacon does not value the head as being the seat of reason and instead treats the body as an integrated sense organ. A counterview could be that Bacon’s grotesque realism should be interpreted as metaphorical, and so his unsightly forms should be seen as ways of exploring the tumultuous processes of becoming where a human becomes animal-like and vice versa. Moreover, just as Bergson promulgated an experiential view of knowing, Bacon wanted viewers to feel the effects of his painting sensorially via their nervous systems rather than intellectually, and hence bypassed predictable ways of interpreting his works. Bacon was ensuring that his work was apprehended in terms of its sensory impact. This was a sentiment that would have chimed with Bergson’s own methods of truth telling. Bergson opposed the analytical nature of the intellect to intuition, which involved being attuned to durée in its multiple perspectives.
Notes
1 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 74.
2 Ibid., 175.
3 Deleuze, Bergsonism.
4 Deleuze, Francis Bacon.
5 Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream’, 70–71.
6 Michael Sadler, quoted in Geldzahler, Francis Bacon, 10.
7 Van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, 82.
8 Leiris, Francis Bacon, 3.
9 Boccioni, ‘Plastic Foundations’, 88.
10 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 6.
11 Hugh M. Davies identifies this period as being where the influence of Muybridge is most clearly seen in Bacon’s work; see Davies, Francis Bacon, 120.
12 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 30.
13 Schmied, Francis Bacon, 64.
14 Ibid.. 62.
15 Kolacka, ‘Image – Affect’, 211.
16 Bergson, Time and Free Will,18.
17 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 198. Bergson ‘argues that the cinema is implicated in homogeneous time but also demonstrates that a critique of homogeneous time must, perforce, contend with the cinema’. See Lim, Translating Time, 12.
18 Durée is not to be confused with the English word duration, which is a misleading translation of the French durée (Lindsay, Philosophy of Bergson, 114).
19 Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.56.
20 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 207.
21 Ibid., 186.
22 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4.
23 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 186.
24 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4. 25 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 192.
26 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 9–10.
27 Ibid., 17.
28 Ibid., 20. Italics removed from original quotation.
29 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 114.
30 Deleuze adopted the term ‘figural’ from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure (1971).
31 Ades, ‘Web of Images’, 9. See also Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream’,70–71.
32 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 23.
33 Ibid., 13.
34 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 21. Interestingly, that’s a charge that goes back to Plato’s Republic: he wanted storytellers banned from the Ideal State.
35 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 65.
36 Leiris, Francis Bacon, 6.
37 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 12.
38 Ibid., 82.
39 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 45.
40 A factor that inhibits immersion is the placement of the paintings behind glass, which Bacon insisted upon.
41 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 13.
42 Forge, ‘About Bacon’, 30.
43 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 332.
44 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 28.
45 Ibid., 14.
46 Russell, Francis Bacon, 38.
47 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 93.
48 Schmied, Francis Bacon, 62.
49 Bergson, Creative Mind, 138.
50 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 81
51 Ades, ‘Web of Images’, 8.
52 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, x.
53 Van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 82.
54 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, x.
55 Lim, Translating Time, 53.
56 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 51.
57 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 139.
58 Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson’s Philosophy, 42.
59 Ades, ‘Web of Images’, 22.
60 Schmied, Francis Bacon, 62.
61 Ibid., 62.
62 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 42.
63 Lim, Translating Time, 8.
64 Kolacka, ‘Image – Affect’, 211.
65 Russell, Francis Bacon, 97.
66 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 15.
67 Gutting, French Philosophy, 59.
68 Leiris, Francis Bacon, 6.
69 Ritchie, New Decade, 63.
70 Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, 82.
71 Ibid., 17.
72 It needs to be emphasized that in Bacon scholarship there is scope for further analysis of Bergsonian mediated concepts in Deleuze’s interpretation of Bacon, especially the Deleuzian notion of becoming.
73 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 18.
74 van Alphen, Francis Bacon, 190.
Bibliography
Ades, D., ‘Web of Images’, in Francis Bacon, ed. D. Ades and A. Forge, exh.cat., 8–23. London: Tate Gallery and Thames & Hudson, 1985.
Antliff, M., Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson, London: George Allen and Co., 1913 [1889] Ltd
Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1988 [1896]
Bergson, H., Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, New York: Random House, 1944 [1907]
Bergson, H., The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M.L. Andison, New York: Dover, 2007 [1934].
Boccioni, U., ‘The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting’, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. trans, R. Brain, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and C. Tisdall, 88–90. Boston: MFA Publications, 2001.
Davies, H.M., Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928–1958, New York: Garland, 1978.
Deleuze, G., Bergsonism, New York: Zone, 1988.
Deleuze, G., Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D.W. Smith, New York: Continuum, 2003.
Forge, A., ‘About Bacon’, in Francis Bacon, ed. D. Ades and A. Forge, 24–31. London: Tate Gallery and Thames & Hudson, 1985.
Geldzahler, H., Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968–1974. March 20–June 29, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.
Gutting, G., French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Jay, M., Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Though, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Lyotard, J-F., Discourse, Figure, trans. A. Hudek and M. Lydon, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 [1971].
Kolacka, D., ‘Image – Affect: Bacon, Stein and Eisenstein’, in Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, ed. A. Zweite in collaboration with Maria Muller, 202–12. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
Leiris, M., Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, trans. J. Weightman, London: Thames & Hudson, 1988.
Lim, B.C., Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Lindsay, A.D., The Philosophy of Bergson, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911.
Ritchie, A.C., The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955.
Russell, J., Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson, 1993.
Scharfstein, B., Roots of Bergson’s Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.
Schmied, W., Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict, trans. J. Ormrod, Munich: Prestel, 2006.
Sylvester, D., The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson,1993.
Van Alphen, E., Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London: Reaktion Books, 1992.
Zweite, A., ‘Bacon’s Scream’, in Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, ed. A. Zweite, 69–104. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
Double take:
Jack Malvern Arts Correspondent
JACK MALVERN | NEWS | THE TIMES | FRIDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2015
Francis Bacon had his career-defining moment not in his studios in South Kensington or Dublin but after a night at the roulette tables in Monaco, an authority on the artist has said.
Martin Harrison, editor of Bacon’s catalogue raisonée, feels that the artist made his biggest breakthrough as a figurative painter in 1949 when he was applying his risk-taking philosophy at both the easel and the Casino de Monte-Carlo. The scholar hopes to find further evidence for his theory at a new museum in the principality that will open to the public on March 30.
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, previously open only to researchers, is a collection of more than 2,300 items acquired by Majid Boustany, a property developer who has spent millions of pounds on the artist’s works.
When Bacon found himself £200 richer after selling a painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he took off for Monaco to spend the money, Mr Harrison said.
“In 1949 he became the painter of the human body. Everything prior to that was just leading up to that moment . . . . The mature Bacon germinated in Monaco . . . The key word is gambling. When he was at the roulette tables gambling on chance, for him it was the same thing as he was doing with paint. To him, the two were inextricable.”
Mr Harrison suspected that Monaco had been an important time when he went to Tate Britain and was able to inspect Head II, which Bacon painted in 1949 at the start of the figurative phase that would come to define him.
“The frame is stamped with the name of a frame-maker from Cannes . . . Why would that painting have been made in Cannes unless Bacon painted it in Monaco? I realised that Monaco is not just a relevant part of Bacon’s life but a crucial one.”
Bacon often referred to gambling as if it were his job, telling friends: “I’ve got to go and make some money — I’ve got to go to work.”
Mr Harrison, who described Bacon as a “binge painter” who tended to work hardest when presented with a deadline, said the artist would apply layer upon layer, especially on his subjects’ heads.
“To that extent, that was a gamble — because you could just slightly spoil it. You could put on too much paint with a one-inch brush. He would think, ‘I’ve ruined it’. It’s hard to retrieve. He would think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t fix that’, and rip it to bits.”
Bacon has become one of the most sought-after artists on the market. His Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1960) fetched $142.4 million (£89 million) at Christie’s in New York in 2013.
Mr Boustany said he wanted his foundation to foster a better understanding of Bacon and his work, with which he became obsessed while a student in London. He has spent the past five years acquiring objects, including items of furniture that Bacon designed, and ephemera.
Francis Bacon would frequently tear up work that he thought he’d ruined
Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction
SALE 10337 | LOT 17 | 11 February 2015 | London, King Street
Study for a Head
oil on canvas
40 x 30 1/8in. (101.7 x 76.5cm.)
Painted in 1955
These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary
Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also
payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. This VAT is
not shown separately on the invoice. When a buyer of such a lot has registered
an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another
EU country, he must advise Christie’s immediately after the auction.
Mrs. Brenda Bomford, Aldbourne.
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Lord and Lady Beaumont of Whitley, London.
Private Collection, Liege.
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London.
Private Collection, London (acquired from the above circa 1970).
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London (acquired from the above
circa 1988).
Onishi Museum, Osaka (acquired from the above circa 1990).
Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reed and Lefevre Ltd.), London (acquired from the above in
1999).
Ernst Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above circa 2000).
Acquired by the present owner in 2005.
R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, p. 95-96, no. 98 (illustrated, p.
199).
Nottingham, Nottingham University, Francis Bacon, 1961, p. 1, no. 12
(titled Head of a Cardinal with Glasses).
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, p. 38, no. 39 (incorrectly
dated, titled Pope). This exhibition later travelled to Mannheim, Städtische
Kunsthalle; Turin, Galleria Civica d’ Arte Moderna; Zurich, Kunsthaus and
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum.
London, The Lefevre Gallery, British Paintings 1900-1999, 1999, no. 2
(illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Valencia, IVAM - Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Francis Bacon. Lo Sagrado y
lo Profano, 2003-2004 (titled Study for a Head or Cardinal with Glasses,
illustrated in colour, p. 74). This exhibition later travelled to Paris,
Fondation Dina Vierny, Musée Maillol.
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, 2004,
p. 360, no. 8A (titled Study for a Head or Cardinal with Glasses,
illustrated in colour, p. 344).
Painting by Dublin-born artist
Rare Francis Bacon self-portrait expected to sell for £18million
A HAUNTING double self-portrait by Francis Bacon could fetch £18milion when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London next month.
Completed in 1977, the Two Studies for Self Portrait diptych is one of only three self-portraits created in this dual style by the painter throughout his career. Born to an English family in Dublin in 1909, Bacon grew up in County Kildare. In 1914, his father took the family to London and joined the Ministry of War.
This portrait was painted in Bacon's later life during the bleak years that followed the death of his lover George Dyer in 1971 and evokes the painter’s emotions at a time when he “became increasingly concerned with the dark psychological depths of his own psyche”, according to experts at Sotheby’s.
“Of
all the subjects he depicted, it is the self-portraits
“It’s this extraordinary intimacy and power, together with their rarity, that make Bacon's self-portraits so irresistible to collectors.”
Bacon’s self-portraits consistently fetch astronomical prices at auction, with a 1978 offering more than doubling its estimated price when it sold for £21.6m at Sotheby’s London in 2007. Elsewhere a 1969 example, also offered in 2007, at Sotheby’s New York, was bought for $33.1m.
Next month’s sale of Bacon’s dual format portrait, which is the first of such a style to come up for auction, is expected to continue the high sale trend and fetch an estimated £13-£18m. It will be auctioned within Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Sale in London on Tuesday, February 10.
Bacon’s portraits of his lover are similarly coveted by collectors, with the triptych Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer selling at Sotheby’s London for £26.7m in June 2014. Meanwhile Christie’s London auction house recently announced that their total annual global arts sales figure for 2014 (a substantial £5.1 billion) was largely bolstered by the sale of a Bacon lot.
The artist’s Portrait of George Dyer set a world record for a single canvas sale when it sold for £42.19million last February, contributing to Christie’s bumper year.
ART NEWS
The Hermitage museum brings to an end its 250th anniversary celebrations with Francis Bacon exhibitions in Russia
and the UK. Both show the artist’s work from UK collections alongside objects from the Hermitage that inspired him.
IRINA OSIPOVA | RUSSIA BEYOND THE HEADLINES | SUNDAY, JANUARY 11, 2015
Early work
Historic timeline
Eleanor Mills travelled to St Petersburg to visit the Hermitage museum’s revelatory Francis Bacon show,
and happened to come across a well-known river god too.
BY ELEANOR MILLS | RA MAGAZINE | WEDNESDAY, 17 DECEMBER, 2014
Eleanor Mills is Assistant Editor of RA Magazine.
A very British artist heads to the colds of Russia
This Francis Bacon show at the State Hermitage is a
shadowy triumph,says Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Exhibition
Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past at the
State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
BY RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON | TIMES 2 | THE TIMES | TUESDAY DECEMBER 9 2014
The River God is not the only cultural diplomat from this country to be
currently paying a visit to St Petersburg. Britain has sent another ambassador
in the form of Francis Bacon. This week the State Hermitage opens a major new
show to introduce our nation’s most important postwar painter to the people of
Russia. Arriving as the grand finale of the (admittedly, until now, largely
unremarked upon UK-Russia Year of Culture) it represents another groundbreaking
crux-point of cultural interchange.
Certainly Bacon would have been pleased to be travelling in the company of the
British Museum’s River God. The artist who mangled the human form, left it a
mess of twisted muscle and bruised flesh, understood the haunting power of such
broken relics. Commenting on the Elgin Marbles, he famously wondered “whether if
one had seen the whole image they would seem as poignant as they seem as
fragments”. And although the River God is not actually a part of the Bacon
display, the Hermitage contributes to this show its own inspirational equivalent
in the form of such antique masterworks as its languorous Sleeping Endymion—a Roman copy of a Greek original from around the same time.
Items from Ancient Egyptian artefacts, through Bernini’s baroque terracottas to
Chaim Soutine’s portrait of himself as the “peintre maudit” have been drawn from
the Hermitage’s collection, displayed in suggestive dialogue with canvases by
Bacon. These have come in large part from the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (home
to the eclectic bequest of Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury, Bacon’s earliest and
most loyal patrons) to which this show will travel next April.
Yet there are also significant works from other collections, not least among
them that of Damien Hirst who lends Bacon’s skeletal 1933 Crucifixion: a
shadowy, monochromatic image that, catching the eye of critic Herbert Read, was
probably the first picture to put the talent of this furniture designer turned
freshly to artist on the map.
The crucifixion hangs in haunting juxtaposition with Alonso Cano’s austerely
luminous canvas of the same subject and Titian’s intensely emotional Christ
Carrying the Cross. Bacon’s exceptional triptych of his model and muse Isabel
Rawsthorne is found engaging in deep conversation with a sombre old couple by
Rembrandt. Bacon’s profound admiration for Van Gogh is demonstrated through his
versions of a now lost canvas by the master. A resonant selection of paintings
by the latter are hung in the same space.
The hieratic masks of the ancient Egyptians, Rodin’s muscular forms emerging
from an unhewn matrix of rock, the smashed surface planes of a Cubist Picasso,
the stretching poses of Matisse — all find their counterparts, albeit almost
unconscious, in Bacon’s canvases. The viewer enters an art historical hall of
mirrors, a world of reflections and refractions, of distorted simulacrums and
fresh starting points. The display less pushes the point than puts forward
suggestions, backed up by archival material found in Bacon’s studio, in which
tattered and paint-spattered photographs of works by his art historical
predecessors were found.
At the heart of the exhibition hunches Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, a
star piece in the Hermitage’s collection. “I am sure that I have been influenced
by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic
arts,” the intellectually voracious and homosexually rapacious Bacon once
declared. The muscular energy of the Renaissance master’s squatting youth
explodes across the canvases of his later admirer. This is a show that should
appeal, perhaps more than anyone, to the practising artist. It captures that
moment when the art historical ideas that lie latent in the mind of any creator
converge with the forward thrusting power of his own trajectory.
The only pity is that the Bacon paintings sent on loan are too often far from
his best. The Tate may have lent a couple of pieces, among them its spectral
study of the life mask of William Blake (now displayed alongside the actual cast
that Bacon once owned), but it has not sent either of its vast triptychs, which
stand as crowning achievements. Only rarely are the Russians entering the arena
of this artist at his bravest, his most dramatic and his best.
Rather, the most impressive loan comes from Apsley House in London. Its
magnificent Velazquez Pope Innocent X joins two other Hermitage portraits
by this Spanish virtuoso to form an evocative ensemble along with another
significant loan. At a time when cultural exchanges between America and Russia
have for political reasons been put on hold, the Yale Center lends a
Velazquez-inspired screaming pope. It is particularly relevant in the context of
a Russian show in that its all-but-iconic image of a dark-throated howl finds
its source in Bacon’s memories of the blood-stained screaming nurse of Sergei
Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.
This exhibition, curated by Thierry Morel, the principle orchestrator of the
groundbreaking Houghton Revisited last year (a show for which paintings
acquired for St Petersburg by Catherine the Great returned to the Palladian home
in which their former owner, our first prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, had
once hung them) represents a triumph of cultural diplomacy.
Our art historical legacy belongs to all humanity, is the message, and not just the nation that happens at that moment to own the artefact. Who knows where this sort of relationship might lead politically? From an artistic perspective, however, we can be sure to get a lot back. All but the most fragile masterworks from the Hermitage have been promised when the show moves to Britain. And, now that the River God has performed his diplomatic mission, the Hermitage might even be persuaded to add the Michelangelo — fingers crossed.
Francis Bacon and the Art of the Past is at the State Hermitage Museum, St
Petersburg until March 8 and then at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts from
April 18 to July 26
Bacon and his inspiration at the Hermitage
See the conversation in Norwich exhibition next Spring
| EXHIBITIONS| | 1 DECEM
Despite diplomatic tensions between the UK and Russia over Ukraine, a major Bacon exhibition is going ahead, opening in St Petersburg and coming to Norwich next spring. The idea of the guest curator, Thierry Morel, is to present works by Bacon along with paintings (and a few sculptures) from the Hermitage by artists admired by the British master. The two sets of works will not be right next to each other; the related works will hang on separate walls from the Bacons. “We want to look at how Bacon looked at the art of the past, and how it inspired him and fuelled his creative energy,” Morel says.
The core works by Bacon will be all 13 of his paintings from the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, but there will be 15 more from other collections in the British Isles. Dublin City Gallery (Hugh Lane) will also be lending a wide range of documentary material from Bacon’s studio, including books, reproductions and correspondence.
From the Hermitage collection, Morel has selected 49 works by artists that inspired Bacon—including Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Rodin, Picasso and Matisse. Interestingly, Bacon was never particularly keen to see the original paintings, but took inspiration from reproductions. In a few cases, such as with Velázquez and Van Gogh, there are very direct relationships between Bacon’s paintings and those of earlier masters. To demonstrate the Velázquez link, the Hermitage is borrowing the Spanish artist’s Study for a Portrait of Innocent X, 1650, from Apsley House in London, to compare it with Bacon’s Study for Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII, 1955, from the Sainsbury Centre. But in most cases, the links between Bacon’s own work and the artists he admired are much more subtle.
Francis Bacon: Creating the Art, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 7 December-8 March 2015; Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich, 18 April-26 July 2015
Officers were called in to examine erotic study of two men wrestling
at artist’s first solo show at the ICA 60 years ago
VANESSA THORPE | NEWS | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY 23 NOVEMBER 2014
Bacon’s back in Monaco
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, Monaco
Francis Bacon’s p
Warts and All
Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho
Soho in the 1950s was a byword for vice. Its thriving sex industry encompassed “adult” cinemas, brothels, clip-joints, peep-shows, pornography and sex shops, and the police were known to turn a blind eye to certain goings-on in return for a small consideration. It was less famous as the birthplace of British modern jazz, rock ’n’ roll and skiffle music, while Carnaby Street was the fashion centre of Swinging London and Denmark Street the British Tin Pan Alley. Soho also was where that the finishing touches were applied to many of the classics of British cinema. Likewise, it is where London’s Chinatown is located. Former residents of renown include William Blake, William Hazlitt and Karl Marx, and, indeed, the principles of The Communist Manifesto were drafted in the Red Lion pub.
Soho also, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the stamping ground of photographer and sometime painter John Deakin, described by Robin Muir as a “cipher for the luckless, invariably impoverished, Soho ‘character’ of the early postwar years”. Mapping Soho in the introduction to Under the Influence, Muir writes:
The area inside its loosely defined boundaries, within the West End “circuses” of Piccadilly and Oxford, Cambridge and St Giles, as well as the hinterland north of Oxford Street that with its own fluid boundaries had constituted pre- and postwar “Fitzrovia”, was the backdrop for this creative and maverick figure, prodigal and careless with his talent. Both districts promoted a bohemianism that dismantled the barriers of class and nationality and ignored the prevailing sexual mores and strictures of the times.
Famously twice hired and fired by Vogue, Deakin was commissioned to shoot photographs of the celebrities of the day. Other subjects, shot for a Vogue feature on artists, were drawn from his Soho drinking companions. The photographer was not universally popular. George Melly said he was a “vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom”. Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton described him as “the second nastiest man I’ve ever met”. Some acquaintances found it hard to believe there was anyone nastier.
His physical appearance was ridiculed: he was said to have had the “gait of a midget wrestler”, “Mickey Mouse ears” and a pock-marked face “wrinkled like a bloodhound’s”. Striking a somewhat kinder note, poet Cedra Osborne remarked on “a sad comical face and a tongue like a file”. While Francis Bacon found him to be “very amusing”, he added that he needed drink “more than anything else”. A chronic alcoholic, Deakin, like Bacon, was regarded as notoriously difficult. Though the two had a fraught relationship, Bacon held Deakin’s work in high regard.
Born in 1912 on the Wirral peninsula, he was the elder son of John Henry Deakin, a machine minder for Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, and his wife, Elsie Mary Bond. Educated at Calday Grange grammar school in West Kirby, where he shone at swimming and diving, he was destined to follow his father into employment at Port Sunlight. However, he decided otherwise and at eighteen left the Wirral for Dublin, where he worked at various jobs, including one as a window dresser for a display company; he may also have painted backdrops for theatres.
Taking up art, around 1930 he travelled to Spain to paint the landscape. Returning to England after a few years he settled in London. Later, as companion to Arthur Jeffares, a wealthy American art collector, and later gallerist, he travelled the world and painted. His subsequent exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, London, in 1933 attracted some critical acclaim. A camera left behind after a party in a Paris apartment in 1939 sparked Deakin’s interest in photography. “It was a cheap camera and he’d never taken a picture before,” according to his friend, the poet Elizabeth Smart, “but his tyrannical eyes took over.”
For the next two decades Deakin concentrated on photography, and ceased painting. The fashion illustrator Christian Bérard introduced him to Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French Vogue. However, the Second World War intervened and Deakin was assigned to a British Army film unit. He served in Egypt, Malta and Syria and photographed the second Battle of El Alamein. By the time the war had ended he was an accomplished photographer, and in the immediate postwar years began to establish himself at magazines – Picture Post, Lilliput, Tatler, The Sketch and Harper’s Bazaar.
His most prolific years, and probably his most creative, were spent as a staff photographer for British Vogue in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was contracted to the magazine by editor Audrey Withers on de Brunhoff’s recommendation, and his sitters for Vogue included Maria Callas, John Huston, Pablo Picasso and Luchino Visconti. He also was obliged to undertake fashion shoots, for which he had little enthusiasm. Withers remained loyal to him despite his habit of losing, possibly pawning, valuable photographic equipment and other misdemeanours. Her patience exhausted, she fired him for a second and final time in 1954. Such was her regard for him, however, that she paid him off handsomely.
Deakin’s forte was portraiture; street photography was another interest. He was in his element, however, shooting portraits of friends, most of whom frequented the pubs and clubs of Soho, the lure of which, eventually, led him away from Vogue. He moved between the French House and The Colony Room (both on Dean Street), from where he was eventually barred. Subjects included the painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton and the “two Roberts”, Colquhoun and MacBryde, poets WS Graham and Paul Potts and Colony Room proprietor Muriel Belcher, infamous for her combination of high camp and exceptional rudeness.
His photographs made no concession to vanity: after pushing the contrast in his prints to its maximum, every pore and blemish was exposed in intimate close-up. His friend Daniel Farson wrote that he combined “the instant horror of a passport photo with a shock value all his own”, and his portraits were often deemed too unflattering for Vogue to publish. The art critic John Russell compared him to Bacon in his “ability to make a likeness in which truth came wrapped and unpackaged”. His approach, in its obvious lack of “style”, set him apart from his contemporaries and anticipated by at least a decade the stark portraiture of Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus
Much of Deakin’s work was recovered from the floor of Francis Bacon’s studio as it was being dismantled for shipment to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 1998. Dog-eared and splattered with paint, these were portraits of subjects Bacon wished to depict: he commissioned from Deakin photographs of Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer, among others, as aides-mémoires, since he was unwilling to paint from the live model.
Deakin wrote of his approach to photography:
Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I photograph it is to make a revelation about it. So my sitters become my victims. But I would like to add that it was only those with a daemon, however small and of whatever kind, whose faces lend themselves to being victimised at all. And the only complaints I have ever had from my victims have been from the bad ones, the vainies, the meanies.
His reluctance to flatter his sitters is obvious in his portrait of poet George Barker, whose high opinion of his looks Deakin did not share. “I stood him up against the biggest lavatory wall in London and shot it. He seemed delighted with it.” Less delighted was Henrietta Moraes, known as “Lady Brett of Soho”, when Deakin photographed her for Bacon. She complained about the invasive and pornographic poses she was asked to adopt, but Deakin insisted that he was following the artist’s instructions to the letter. (Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, based on photographs from the shoot, sold for £21.3 million in 2012.) Moraes never forgot her encounter with the “horrible little man”.
Bacon’s partner George Dyer had genuine cause to complain of Deakin’s portrait of him. A former petty thief, he was kitted out as a successful career criminal for the shoot and stood in front of a window of champagne bottles clearly at a loss to know where to put his hands. There was another side to Deakin, however, which is evident in his pictures of Paris, which were the subject of one of his two exhibitions of photographs. Muir writes that they “presented the city all but devoid of people; but where they appeared, he was particularly sympathetic to those on the margins, the clochards and lamplighters, travelling fairground workers and the stallholders of empty markets”.
Colin McInnes reviewed the exhibition for The Times:
The beauty of these photographs lies in the fund of affection, and at times of pity, that the artist clearly feels for his fellow mortals. [Many of his sitters] are creatures crushed by life, and the artist, quite without condescension or sentimentality, sees the poignancy of their desperate will to live in a world that has quite defeated them.
“These pictures take you by the scruff of the neck and insist that you see,” Elizabeth Smart wrote in the catalogue. “If you have never been to Paris, you will find it haunted when you arrive.”
Deakin returned to painting in the mid-1950s, adopting a naive style that won few admirers. Given the circles in which he moved, much conviction was required to produce any paintings at all, and the critical and commercial failure of these works obviously did little for his morale. He subsequently turned to collage and sculpture.
Although gay, in 1961 Deakin entered into a marriage of convenience with Anna, a stateless Hungarian refugee; in return for citizenship papers she financed a replacement for a mislaid Rolleiflex camera. Like many of his immediate circle, Deakin died before his time, in Brighton in 1972. His naming of Bacon as next of kin obliged the painter to formally identify the body. “It was the last dirty trick he played on me,” Bacon said.
John Deakin did not enjoy a successful career in the conventional sense, and never appreciated the full extent of his wayward talent. He struggled to make a living and was known as a sponger. Daniel Farson commented, “Deakin’s artistic career had one consistency: the moment success came near he veered off in another direction.” His friend and champion Bruce Bernard got to the heart of the matter:
Deakin unfortunately did not care much for what he did best and I’m sure he resented the fact that it was just that. Perhaps never believing in photography’s ultimate refinements gave him his cutting edge.
Robin Muir has done justice to his subject in a stylish and well-produced volume, published to coincide with an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery, London, earlier this year. It contains some outstanding photographs. Anyone with the slightest interest in photography should get their hands on a copy. If you can’t afford the £30 it costs, order it at your local library.
Under the Influence: John Deakin, Photography and the Lure of Soho, edited by Robin Muir, Art Books Publishing; 176 pp (illustrated) £29.99.
Conversations with Bacon: Marking Grey Gowrie’s
75th birthday with his poem on the artist
Gowrie, a former UK arts minister, art dealer and chair of Sotheby’s
and the Arts Council, is also a poet
BEN LUKE | THE ART NEWSPAPER | SATURDAY, 1 NOVEMBER, 2014
“Reece Mews: Conversation Piece”, one of two poems Grey Gowrie has written about Francis Bacon, is a collage of remembered conversations. “It’s not made up, everything was said, but it wasn’t, of course, a sequential conversation,” Gowrie says. “It’s a kind of bouillon of conversations over about eight years.”
It is about Bacon, but also the characters around him, many of them friends of Gowrie’s too. “I knew Francis fairly well in the last ten years of his life, but I didn’t know him in his prime,” Gowrie explains.
When the two men met in 1982, Gowrie was a minister in the Northern Ireland department of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and was soon to become the arts minister. Born Alexander Patrick Greysteil Ruthven in Ireland, and eventually becoming 2nd Earl of Gowrie, he was a hereditary peer, but his background was in poetry and academia, having taught at Harvard alongside the US poet Robert Lowell, as well as publishing poetry himself.
Poetry, politics and art
After returning to the UK and spending some time at UCL, he was “poached by government” and began to serve in Conservative administrations—first in Edward Heath’s government but most prominently under Thatcher. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, he was also an art dealer with Thomas Gibson Fine Art.
In 1979, after Thatcher’s election victory, he gained more senior government roles, first in employment, then in the Northern Ireland department and finally as arts minister from 1983 to 1985, a job he “wasn’t actually terribly keen on” because “I believe very strongly that politicians shouldn’t be involved in the arts,” he says. “What they should do is get the money and let the Arts Council do it.”
Despite this, he felt that he could do some good in “heritage issues, tax things, stately homes, stuff like that”, he says. Gowrie maintains that the perception of cuts to state subsidy of the arts under Thatcher was false. “We had this deal that I was to complain royally and whinge about money, but she’d smuggle me some. And we didn’t have great cuts; that’s all a myth.”
He first met Bacon through the critic David Sylvester, the great Bacon specialist—“we were great mates”, Gowrie says—but he admits he was “rather cautious” about meeting the artist
“Absolutely charming”
“I admired him very much, but I always thought he’d be a rather terrifying figure,” he says. In fact, “he was absolutely charming and easy” at that first dinner
He then saw Bacon fairly frequently. “He approved of me because he thought I had done him a great favour,” he adds. He can only dimly recall it now. “He was threatened with eviction from his studio and he was getting on—in 1983, Francis was 71 or 72 and so he didn’t want to move—and there was a proposed redevelopment. I can’t even terribly remember what I did; I made a few calls, and said something like: ‘Cool it for a bit, this is quite an elderly person.’”
That very studio, 7 Reece Mews, is the setting for the conversational episodes captured in this evocative poem, a series of memories of a friendship that lasted up until Bacon’s death in Madrid in 1992
“Reece Mews: Conversation Piece” is from Grey Gowrie’s book The Italian Visitor, published by Carcanet Press, 2013
*
“Miss Beeston”: Valerie Beston (1922-2005)
“Bacon’s friend and minder at Marlborough Fine Art”, as Gowrie describes her in the poem’s footnotes. As the poem says, she took a shine to Gowrie, something she did only rarely. “I was rather pleased that she liked me,” Gowrie says today. “It was very funny, Francis saying ‘she only likes me’ and she was a militant lesbian, so ‘I suppose a few women’. She liked me simply because she was Francis’s nanny, and she thought I was not on the make but taking care of him in some way.”
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Muriel Belcher (1908-79)
The proprietress of the Colony club, the infamous Soho drinking hole frequented by Bacon and many of his friends. “I used to be taken, it was really before I knew Francis, when I was a bachelor, in between marriages and I lived in Covent Garden,” Gowrie says. “I had a woman friend and she was a great friend of [photographer and Soho drinker] Bruce Bernard and she used to take me to the Colony club. It’s not my kind of scene, as I say; I’m a Tory peer, come on! Everyone was perfectly nice to me, but all this stuff like everyone being called Cunty, and so on, I thought it a bit much.”
*
Israel Citkowitz (1909-74)
One of the most powerful, and most Baconian, sequences in the poem is the description of the open-mouthed corpse of Citkowitz, a composer and musicologist, and acquaintance of Bacon’s. It begins with Gowrie and his wife waiting for Citkowitz at Wheeler’s restaurant in St James’s, central London, and ends with Gowrie climbing a fireman’s ladder and finding the body. “I haven’t seen many dead bodies, perhaps two, but Israel’s was the one I looked at for longest,” Gowrie recalls, “and the person has so left, it’s so mummified, it’s so sculptural that any elements that could be rather horrifying are more horrifying in language than in life.”
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George Embiricos (1920-2011)
A “great collector” from the Greek island of Andros who acquired major works by Bacon. “I never sold him anything, I never did business with him, but I was friendly with him,” Gowrie says. He introduced Embiricos to Bacon, and can vividly recall seeing a Bacon portrait of Henrietta Moraes amid the stunning collection that Embiricos had at his house in Lausanne, keeping illustrious company: a large Braque, a Pink Period Picasso, three Van Goghs, “an absolutely huge, wonderful jazz Kandinsky”, two Gauguins, “and then his star painting, which was a card players of Cézanne, and two late Picassos, but very strong and good ones. Just wonderful stuff everywhere.”
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David Sylvester (1924-2001)
Sylvester introduced Gowrie to Bacon and was a regular companion at their meetings. “I knew David very well from the 1980s to his death, and I was very close to him,” Gowrie says. “He was ill and recovered; I thought he was going to die, and then I was very ill—I had a heart transplant in 2000—and he came to see me in hospital. And then I only saw him for about a year after that as he died in 2001.” The poem “Gift” in Gowrie’s “The Domino Hymn” cycle—“13 poems about having a year in hospital”, as he describes them—is in memory of Sylvester.
*
Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
“There was no sense that I was a friend of Freud, but I was perfectly friendly with him,” Gowrie says. But he adds that Bacon “was very sad when I knew him, because he’d kind of broken up with Lucian, and I put that in the poem”. He, too, fell foul of Freud after writing an essay about his work, containing the idea expressed to Bacon in the poem: “I said you were an imagination, Lucian an eye.” After the essay, Gowrie says: “Lucian absolutely cut me dead whenever he saw me; I never got faintly acknowledged.” In the poem Gowrie mentions two Freud paintings that he covets. “What Lucian was very good at was beauty, and he was operating in an aesthetic, a culture which is suspicious of beauty,” he says.
*
Caroline Blackwood (1931-96)
Irish writer, and wife of Lucian Freud between 1953 and 1958, immortalised by him in works like Girl in Bed, 1952. “We were great, great friends”, Gowrie says. She witnessed the closeness of Freud and Bacon’s relationship in the 1950s. “Caroline had said of her marriage to Lucian: ‘I don’t think there were more than three dinners we didn’t have with Francis’,” he recalls. She later married Israel Citkowitz (see facing page) and Gowrie’s mentor Robert Lowell. Bacon’s reference to Memling in the poem reflects Gowrie’s own feelings about Freud’s portraits of his first wife. “I love the Memlingy Freuds,” he says. “I still think that that’s where his genius is. I also thought he had the wrong kind of penis envy of Francis; he wanted to shock and I don’t think he’s good at shocking.”
*
John Edwards (1950-2003)
Friend of Bacon’s and ultimately his heir. “He was very tender towards John; John was a surrogate son in a way,” Gowrie says. “And John was rather wonderful looking. Francis’s portraits of him are unbelievably Annigoni-like, as are his pictures of lots of people. They have a great feeling of likeness. He really did understand people’s faces or what the effect of them in a room was like.”
Gowrie with Bacon
Prince Albert Inaugurates Francis Bacon Foundation in Monaco
The project sheds new light on the artist’s life in the principality.
| | |
BY NATHALIE EGGS | THE
ART NEWSPAPER | WEDNESDAY,
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, housed at the Villa Elise in Monaco, was inaugurated by prince Albert on 28 October, the 105th anniversary of the artist’s birth. The non-profit organisation was established by the Swiss-Lebanese property developer Majid Boustany, a devotee of Bacon since encountering his enigmatic triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, at Tate Britain.
Francis Bacon institute opens in Monaco
A new institute dedicated to the work of Francis Bacon opens in Monaco
NATALIA RACHLIN | | | TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2014
Visceral, haunting, gripping, and grotesque are just a few of the words that are used to describe the work of the British painter Francis Bacon, arguably one of the more polarizing artists of the 20th century. Yesterday marked what would have been Bacon’s 105th birthday, so whether you love or hate his work, it seems particularly appropriate that the newly minted Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, a private nonprofit institute dedicated to the figurative artist, opens this week in Monaco.
Founded by property developer and devoted Bacon enthusiast and collector Majid Boustany, the foundation will place particular emphasis on the time when the British artist lived and worked in Monaco between 1946 and the early 1950s, drawing inspiration from the principality’s light, landscapes, and casinos.
Also in focus will be Bacon’s lesser-known early years, which he spent as an interior decorator in London, establishing himself as a furniture, rug, glass, wood, and mirror designer. "The geometry of some of his furniture and his experience with interior spaces and predilection for mirrors, tubular steel furniture, and curtain hangings never left him and filtered into his paintings," says Boustany, who notes that the foundation’s own interior palette was heavily influenced by the tonality used in the work Bacon executed during his stint in Monaco.
The foundation, housed in an elegant 19th-century villa, will showcase a number of rare items from Bacon’s furniture and rug design period, in addition to a unique photographic archive on the artist, a comprehensive collection of exhibition catalogues, a wide selection of the artist’s graphic works, and an array of working documents from Bacon’s various studios.
"An extensive library on Francis Bacon has been built in the foundation headquarters, offering an essential resource to scholars, and some of the items on display in the foundation have never been exhibited," says Boustany. "In the intimacy of this house, art historians, scholars, and the general public will be able to further the knowledge on Bacon’s work, life, and methodology."
Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, 21 Boulevard d’Italie, Monaco
FRANCES SPALDING | THE GUARDIAN | THURSDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2014
UK-Russia Bacon show goes on…
…but British government officially pulls out of joint Year of Culture
After the UK government decided in July to officially withdraw its support for the UK-Russia Year of Culture, it is unclear whether the remaining events in the programme will be affected. These include the long-awaited Francis Bacon exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which marks the end of the cultural exchange.
A spokeswoman for the UK government tells The Art Newspaper: “In light of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and continuing Russian support for the separatist destabilisation of eastern Ukraine, Her Majesty’s Government has withdrawn ministerial and senior official involvement in the Year of Culture.” The British Council, however, says it will continue to oversee the programme.
“Francis Bacon: the Process of Creation”, which is being organised independently of the British Council, is scheduled to run from 7 December to 8 March 2015. Key loans are due to come from the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, which has promised all of its 13 works by Bacon. These include studies for portraits of Van Gogh and Pope Pius XII and several portraits of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. Four loans have been agreed by the Tate, with archival material coming from the Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The idea is to draw on the Hermitage’s collection to present the artist in the context of earlier masters whom he admired, ranging from Rembrandt to Degas. The show is due to travel to Norwich next summer.
Before Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down on 17 July, Paul Greenhalgh, the director of the Sainsbury Centre, told us: “At this stage, the centre and the Hermitage are continuing with the preparatory organisation of the Bacon exhibition on the understanding that it will go ahead. We will let colleagues know if the situation changes.” Last month, Greenhalgh reiterated that this still stands; a further announcement is due to be made this month. The curator of the exhibition, Thierry Morel, says that the show is still “scheduled for December” and that some sponsorship has already been confirmed; a spokesman for the Hermitage also says that the show will go ahead.
Two UK-Russia shows that were originally due to open this month have been cancelled. These were the Young British Artists (YBAs) at the Ekaterina Foundation in Moscow and the Russian art collective AES+F at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There are hopes that the YBA show may be revived.
Meanwhile, the Polish government has cancelled the Poland-Russia Year of Culture 2015, in protest over developments in Ukraine. A statement issued by the Polish foreign ministry said that the decision was made by the council of ministers on 23 July because of “the deepening Russian-Ukrainian conflict, including the tragic downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17”.
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Moscow warns sponsor BP over sanctions
BP, the main sponsor of the UK-Russia Year of Culture, is facing the threat of seizure of its Russian investments. A source at the foreign ministry in Moscow told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that there would be retaliation against the UK if further European sanctions are imposed, pointedly adding that “BP and Shell have a lot of assets in Russia”. BP’s report to shareholders on 29 July warned that further Western sanctions “could have a material adverse impact” on its interests in Russia. The oil company is the founding sponsor of the UK-Russia Year of Culture. A spokesman for BP told us that he is “unaware of any changes” in its support for the cultural programme.
A neurological disorder presumably underlies painter
Francis Bacon distorted world perception
Avinoam B. Safran1,2*, Nicolae Sanda1,3 and José-Alain Sahel 1
1. Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR_S 968, Institut de la Vision, INSERM, U968, CNRS, UMR–7210, Paris, France
2. Neurosciences, Geneva University School of Medecine, Geneva, Switzerland
3. Neurology Department, Hôpital Foch, Paris, France
SAFRANI | SANDAI | SAHEL | FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE | VOLUME 8 | FRIDAY 29 AUGUST 2014
A commentary on The “Visual Shock” of Francis Bacon an essay in neuroesthetics by Zeki, S., and Ishizu, T. (2013). Front. Hum. Neurosci.
We read with interest the remarkable paper by Zeki and Ishizu (2013), on Francis Bacon’s subverted representation of the body. On that occasion, we wish to share the results of an observation we recently made on Bacon’s depicted deformities (Safran et al., 2012, ARVO poster,) that led us to consider Bacon’s paintings to be the reflexion of a rare central perception disorder called dysmorphopsia (Kölmel, 1993) (see Figure 1). This conclusion was supported by Bacon’s own detailed description of a perceptual phenomenon of dynamic distortion, progressively changing in magnitude and pattern, which he consistently experienced upon steady fixation.
Bacon’s comments on his perceptual experience are found in published interviews (Russell, 1979; Sylvester, 1980; Clair et al., 1996; Peppiatt, 2008). In his discussions with renown art critic Jean Clair, Bacon reportedly stated: “When I am watching you talking—I don’t know what it is—I see a kind of image, which constantly changes: the movement of your mouth, of the head, somehow; it keeps changing all the time. I attempted to trap this thing in the portraits.” (Clair et al., 1996, p 29). Another distinguished critic, David Sylvester, further quoted him as saying “[...] in my case, with this disruption all the time of the image—or distortion, or whatever you like to call it—it’s an elliptical way of coming to the appearance of that particular body... And it needs a sort of magic to coagulate color and form so that it gets the equivalent of appearance, the appearance that you see at any moment, because so-called appearance is only retrieved for one moment as that appearance. (Sylvester, 1980, pp. 116–117). Still according to Sylvester, Bacon also acknowledged “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” (Sylvester, 1980, p. 82).
Gross image distortion is a rare clinical manifestation of disordered higher visual function. It presents as episodes of dynamic, ever-changing deformities, a condition referred to as dysmorphopsia (Kölmel, 1993) or (central) metamorphopsia (Ffytche and Howard, 1999). Usually, the image initially appears normal but undergoes illusionary transformation if looked at for any length of time. Visages appear distorted, contracted or expanded, often in a dynamic manner (Kölmel, 1993; Ffytche and Howard, 1999); image may appear “cut up” and displaced (Ffytche and Howard, 1999). It was associated with occipito-parietal (Trojano et al., 2009) and callosal (Cho et al., 2011) lesions. Dysmorphopsia might represent a variant of the “thin man phenomenon” (Safran et al., 1999), a perceptual distortion phenomenon occurring around focal field defects (Mavrakanas et al., 2009), as suggested by Ganssauge et al. (2012).
Striking similarities to Bacon’s portraits are found in drawings produced by a patient with a parasagittal parietooccipital meningioma, and right inferior homonymous defect (Mooney et al., 1965). This patient also experienced abnormal percepts featuring persons who demonstrated continuously changing distortions, similar to those described by Bacon. He stated the following: “[...] everything was always moving [...]. The girl would start normal enough but rapidly her lips would get coarser, her mouth more open and her teeth long and pointed. [...] men’s faces going through similar contortions, very red and shiny under a fishlike eye, the lower part of the lid dragged down, showing a very bloodshot white” (Mooney et al., 1965).
Dysmorphic percepts apparently occurred over virtually the whole duration of his painting activities. With one exception, all 131 Bacon portraits assembled in the volume by Kundera (1996) were produced between 1961 and 1989, and showed consistent abnormalities in face depiction. Similar deformities were noted in other paintings, created from 1959 up to 1991 (Peppiatt, 2008). Previously (1949–1957), Bacon depicted distorted faces where salient abnormalities repeatedly consisted of frightening wide open mouth and large, pointed teeth (Russell, 1979; Sylvester, 1980; Kundera, 1996). Remarkably that specific deformity is one of the commonest features reported individual suffering from dysmorphopsia (Mooney et al., 1965; Ffytche and Howard, 1999). Over the years, deformities in Bacon’s portraits increased in forms and roughness.
The origin of Bacon’s visual percepts is unknown. Painter’s creativity has been ascribed to catalyzing effects of psychological disturbances generated by unhappy childhood (Peppiatt, 2008; Zeki and Ishizu, 2013). It is conceivable that cerebral injury had been caused during his childhood by violent blows reportedly inflicted by his father (Peppiatt, 2008). Moreover, Bacon suffered from asthma (Falliers, 1996). Cerebral hypoxicischemic lesions could have occurred during asthmatic attacks, which were reported to be “so severe that Bacon would lie in bed for days, blue in the face, struggling for each breath” (Peppiatt, 2008, p. 11). In addition, since Bacon has been prescribed morphine and stramonium to ease his bronchial spasms (Peppiatt, 2008), toxic factors (Vella-Brincat and Macleod, 2007; Glatstein et al., 2012) might be considered, although unlikely as not associated with pronounced systemic manifestations; in addition, distorted percepts upon sustained fixation consistently occurred over decades (Sylvester, 1980).
Influence on Bacon by fellow artists has been suggested (Sylvester, 1980, Peppiatt, 2008). Bacon was impressed by Picasso’s fluidity of lines and inventiveness, which he discovered in 1927 at Rosenberg’s Gallery. Bacon considered Picasso as the artist having come closer than anyone to “the core of what feeling is about”(Peppiatt, 2008, p. 46). Although most of works presented at Rosenberg’s gallery were classical in style, and included no cubist compositions, it is conceivable that Bacon saw in some of the forms elaborated by Picasso a resemblance to his own perceptions, as also did other subjects affected by dysmorphopsia (Mooney et al., 1965; Ffytche and Howard, 1999). He then felt that there was a way to transpose on canvas the reality—the very one reality that his senses presented him: “[...] I thought afterwards, well, perhaps I could draw as well” (Peppiatt, 2008, p. 46).
Bacon detailed description of distorted percepts point out the organic element in the grounds of his art. It might contribute to clarify Bacon’s “enigma” (Peppiatt, 2008), and assist art analysts to revisit foundations of Bacon’s major contribution to twentieth century painting. Furthermore, Bacon’s observational and artistic talents provide us with invaluable insights into the perceptual phenomena of dysmorphopsia.
REFERENCES
Cho, J. Y., Moon, S. Y., Hong, K. S., Cho, Y. J., Kim, S. C., Hwang, S. I., et al. (2011). Teaching neuroImages: unilateral prosopometamorphopsia as a dominant hemisphere-specific disconnection sign. Neurology 76, e110. doi: 10.1212
Clair, J., Eschapasse, M., Malchus, P. (1996). “Entretien avec Jean Clair, 1971,” in Francis Bacon: Entretiens (Paris: Ed. Carré), 25–40.
Ffytche, D. H., and Howard, R. J. (1999). The perceptual consequences of visual loss: ‘positive’ pathologies of vision. Brain 122, 1247–1260.
Falliers, C. J. (1996). Asthma in the life of a modern British painter. Francis Bacon (1909-1992). J. Asthma 33, 349–350.
Ganssauge, M., Papageorgiou, E., and Schiefer, U. (2012). Facial dysmorphopsia: a notable variant of the “thin man” phenomenon? Graefes Arch. Clin. Exp. Ophthalmol. 250, 1491–1497. : 10.1007/s00417-012-1958-z
Glatstein, M. M., Alabdulrazzaq, F., Garcia Bournissen, F., and Scolnik, D. (2012). Use of physostigmine for hallucinogenic plant poisoning in a teenager: case report and review of the literature. Am. J. Ther. 19, 384–388. doi: 10.1097
Kölmel, H. W. (1993). Visual illusions and hallucinations. Baillieres Clin. Neurol. 2, 243–264.
Kundera, M. (1996). Francis Bacon: Portraits et Autoportraits. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Mavrakanas, N. A., Dang-Burgener, N. P., Lorincz, E. N., Landis, T., and Safran, A. B. (2009). Perceptual distortion in homonymous paracentral scotomas. J. Neuroophthalmol. 29, 37–42. doi: 10.1097
Mooney, A. J., Carey, P., Ryan, M., and Bofin, P. (1965). Parasagittal parieto-occipital meningioma. With visual hallucinations. Am. J. Ophthalmol. 59, 197–205.
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Obituary
Michael Parkin
Gallery owner and dealer who was one of the most colourful
characters to inhabit the London art world
JAMES BEECHEY | OBITUARY | ART | THE GUARDIAN | MONDAY 18 AUGUST 2014
Throughout the last three decades of the 20th century Michael Parkin, who has died aged 82, was one of the most colourful fixtures of the London art world. Operating from a small, unprepossessing gallery in a quiet corner of Belgravia – its walls still clad in fading beige hessian long after the vogue for pristine white spaces had achieved ubiquity – he mounted a programme of exhibitions that made unexpected connections across the whole landscape of modern British art. Some of the most memorable were centred on his two artistic heroes, James McNeil Whistler and Walter Sickert, and their pupils. Almost single-handedly he rediscovered the work of the Grosvenor School of linocut artists from the 1930s, led by Claude Flight, bwhich was unseen for 40 years and now enjoys widespread critical and commercial acclaim.
He also devoted well-researched solo exhibitions to a number of underrated or overlooked painters, often from the bohemian fringes of modernism, including Jacob Kramer, Alvaro Guevaro, Nina Hamnett, William Roberts, Christopher Wood and John Minton, as well as to maverick spirits such as Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant. An elaborate host, a legendary luncher, sports car enthusiast and an irrepressible narrator of witty, scabrous and occasionally tall stories, he lived up to the exploits of his favourite fictional character, Toad of Toad Hall.
An only child, Parkin was brought up in Totteridge, north London. Neither of his parents was artistically inclined; but his aunt, the children's writer Dorothy Clewes, encouraged his interest in books, pictures and, above all, music, taking him to Myra Hess's wartime concerts at the National Gallery. As a schoolboy, Michael was a talented clarinettist, whose precocious technique, as well as his adolescent good looks, brought him to the attention of Benjamin Britten. Classical music and opera remained abiding passions, and one much-cherished later friendship was with the composer Michael Nyman, who wrote several short pieces to commemorate milestones in the lives of Parkin and his family
Polio, contracted at the age of eight, confined him to bed for a year and disrupted his early education. From 13, he attended the local public school, Mill Hill, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read law. Following national service in the Royal Irish Fusiliers he began his career with the Chicago-based market research firm AC Neilsen, before moving into television, first at Associated-Rediffusion, and then as general manager for Channel TV, the smallest of the ITV companies, broadcasting across the Channel Islands.
At a party in 1957 Michael met a flamboyant and seductive young Welsh painter, Molly Noyle Thomas, and within weeks, to the consternation of his parents but the delight of her family, they were married. After the marriage ended in the early 1960s, Molly Parkin found fame as fashion editor of Nova magazine, a television personality and the author of erotic fiction. Michael, meanwhile, was recruited by Jocelyn Stevens to join one of that decade's groundbreaking ventures, becoming sales director for Britain's first pirate station, Radio Caroline, in 1964. Three years later he started an offshoot company, Caroline Films, producing advertising and documentary films for cinema and television.
In his 40s, almost on a whim, Parkin decided to set up as an art dealer. He opened his first gallery in 1972 in Halkin Arcade, off Motcomb Street, and in 1974 moved a few hundred yards down the road to the premises he continued to occupy for the next quarter of a century. His innate showmanship was revealed in one of his earliest exhibitions, The Café Royalists (1972), a recreation of that quintessential Edwardian meeting-ground between Bohemia and the beau monde, that was shown, in part, in the venue it celebrated. The success of the opening party was guaranteed by the gift from Sir Charles Forte of 23 remaining bottles of pre-1914 absinthe from the Café Royal's cellars.
This set the tone for a series of exhibitions including Fitzrovia and the Road to York Minster (1973) – its catalogue, containing an evocative memoir of Fitzrovia and Soho in the 1950s by the poet Ruthven Todd, now a collectors' item – and Artists of the Colony Room Club (1982), a tribute to the Soho dive frequented by Francis Bacon and circle (of which, in 2012, Michael's daughter Sophie published the official history).
If his lack of art-historical training was sometimes betrayed in a disregard for inconvenient facts and dates, Michael was astute enough to call on relevant scholars when necessary and several of his exhibitions made valuable contributions to the history of 20th-century British art – notably a 1979 retrospective of The Seven and Five Society, the most progressive exhibiting group of the 30s. He was also a shrewder businessman than he let on; however long the lunches continued, and no matter how much was drunk, he never missed an opportunity to make a sale. Some of his more unsuspecting, or less robust, lunch guests realised they had bought a picture only on receipt of an invoice in the post the next morning, accompanied by a handwritten note emphasising that the price agreed represented a terrific bargain.
The gallery weathered two recessions that badly hit the art trade before eventually closing in 1999. Michael retired to Gunton Hall in Norfolk, the previously derelict Georgian mansion restored by his friend Kit Martin, of which he occupied one wing. Here, in increasingly poor health, he was lovingly and patiently cared for by Diana (nee Head), an artist, whom he married 1983.
He is survived by his two daughters, Sarah and Sophie, the writer and actor, from his marriage to Molly; and by Diana and their daughter, Zuleika.
Michael Robert Parkin, gallery owner, born 1 December 1931; died 4 August 2014.
Obituary
Michael Parkin
Michael Parkin was an entrepreneur who set sail with Radio Caroline
before dropping anchor in a Belgravia gallery
OBITUARY | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | FRIDAY 15 AUGUST 2014
Michael Parkin, who has died aged 82, was variously the founding manager of Radio Caroline, a Soho habitué, an exuberant gallerist and the erstwhile husband of the erotic author Molly Parkin.
A commercial television and radio pioneer turned art dealer, Parkin saw himself as the Mr Toad of London’s creative circles. His trademark greeting — “Poop poop! Big Kiss!” — would announce that a party was truly under way.
It was a role he embraced with relish, whether being treated to champagne by Francis Bacon in Soho’s Colony Room or selling the paintings of Peter Ustinov’s mother Nadia Benois. At the view for the latter Parkin insisted that Ustinov should stand in his gallery to pull in punters — the show was a sell-out.
Michael Parkin was born on December 1 1931 in Putney, south-west London, and educated at Mill Hill School before reading Law at Magdalen College, Oxford. His childhood was not entirely happy: he spent his ninth year confined to bed due to polio, and saw his parents go through a bitter divorce. The greatest influence on his early life was his paternal aunt, Dorothy Clewes, a children’s writer who introduced him to music, art and literature.
Parkin made a dashing captain in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and a handsome husband to the Welsh painter and writer Molly Noyle Thomas, whom he married in 1957. Both, however, proved temporary postings — his wife announced the end of their stormy marriage after five years by marching out of their Chelsea home with a can of spray paint, promptly deleting the “G” on a local “NO PARKING” sign.
After leaving the Army, Parkin joined the market research company AC Neilsen in Oxford. His move into broadcasting came in 1954 when, with the dawn of ITV, he went to London to work for Rediffusion. He then set up Channel Television in the Channel Islands and ran various film companies.
As the manager of the fledgling offshore pirate station Radio Caroline during the mid-Sixties, his first two staff appointments were the disc jockeys Simon Dee and Tony Blackburn. Parkin would later recall his fear at being winched aboard the pirate ship off Harwich. He also retained painful memories of the enterprise being banned by Labour ministers who included his former friend Tony Benn.
During his television career Parkin had been moved by the “collection of stories and circle of ghosts” uncovered by a documentary about a forgotten painter; and when he was seeking a new career he happily turned to the art world. Between 1971 and 1999 the Michael Parkin Gallery — first in Halkin Arcade and then in Motcomb Street — was a little corner of bohemia in Belgravia.
Parkin’s time as an art dealer “shot by in an aura of happiness, laughter, admiration and discovery”. He focused on 20th-century British art, revelling in the research required for selling works. “Like the Victorians,” stated Parkin, “I have always believed that every picture has a story to tell, but I was also convinced that most people didn’t inquire enough about the pictures they acquired. To me it seemed that satisfaction was to be earned from a non-stop inquiry into the history of British Art and its artists.”
Parkin exhibited a talent for promoting artists who had slipped into obscurity. He revealed the talent of Whistler’s acolyte Walter Greaves (the waterman-artist of Chelsea) and the comic genius of the cat painters Louis Wain and Kathleen Hale.
He was also a skilled networker. He tracked down the Twenties beauty Wendela Boreel, once Walter Sickert’s mistress, to the South of France and befriended her. And after a 200-mile taxi ride across British Columbia he located Sybil Andrews, the British Futurist printmaker whose linocuts are now prized.
He was also a skilled networker. He tracked down the Twenties beauty Wendela Boreel, once Walter Sickert’s mistress, to the South of France and befriended her. And after a 200-mile taxi ride across British Columbia he located Sybil Andrews, the British Futurist printmaker whose linocuts are now prized.
Parkin gave his exhibitions theatrical, suggestive and comical titles: “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”; “Three on Holiday in Rye”; “Models and Mistresses”; “Cats of Fame and Promise”; “Artists of Immodest Means” . He revelled in a show entitled “The Café Royalists”, for which he gave a grand party, styled in Edwardian splendour. “The generosity of Sir Charles Forte in providing 23 bottles of pre-1914 absinthe from the Café Royal cellars,” declared Parkin, “not only made for a great evening but caused several of mature age to think that they were going out into Regent Street with a hansom cab waiting.”
He frequented London’s eccentric drinking dens with Lucian Freud and other School of London artists; while at Reddish House, Cecil Beaton’s 18th-century Wiltshire manor, he joined Mick Jagger and David Hockney in entertaining the by then semi-paralysed photographer.
His many friends included Michael Nyman, who played the piano at Parkin’s wedding when, in 1983, he married his second wife, the textile designer Diana Head. Parkin’s Motcomb Street lease ended as the era of gentlemen dealers slipped away; however, he carried on dealing from his home in Norfolk, online and at London art fairs.
In recent years his wife nursed him devotedly through a long illness. She survives him with their daughter and two daughters of his first marriage.
Michael Parkin, born December 1 1931, died August 4 2014
Michael Parkin with Francis Bacon
Masters’ strokes bolster Christie’s
COMPANIES ROUND—UP | COMPANIES | FINANCIAL TIMES | THURSDAY JULY 17 2014
Works by modern masters Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol helped auction house Christie’s report a record first-half performance with sales of £2.7bn, write Mark Odell and Duncan Robinson.
The London auction house, owned by French billionaire Francois Pinault, said it had sold more works of art at the highest prices than its competitors with 51 pieces fetching more than $10m at auction in the six months to the end of June.
Christie's and rival Sotheby’s control an estimated 25 per cent of the global art market. Sotheby's also benefited from the booming art market, with its auction sales up by 22 per cent to $3.1bn, with growth in Asia driving its performance. Sales from auctions, Christie’s dominant sales channel, rose 13 per cent to £2.2bn up 23 per cent in dollar terms — while private sales grew 7 per cent to £498.9m.
“The art market is in a virtuous circle,” said Steven Murphy, Christie’s chief executive. “New buyers are buying at a level that is increasing prices, which is encouraging consignors to consign art, which is encouraging more buyers. ”
Christie's maintained its lead in the postwar and contemporary art market setting another record for the half year with sales of just less than £800m, a rise of a fifth. This included the two top-selling lots in the New York auction on May 13; “Black Fire I” (1961) by Barnett Newman, which sold for$84.16m, and “Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards” (1984) by Francis Bacon, which made $80.8m.
The best-selling lot in 1 Christie’s London auction room was another Francis Bacon work — “Portrait of George Dyer Talking” — which fetched £42.19m, in February. Andy Warhol’s “White Marilyn" (1962) went for $41m.
Mr Murphy dismissed the idea that a bubble was developing in the market. “The demand is from real people wishing to own the art and have it on their walls. The per cent of art sales that are a financial play is quite small.”
New York sales led the way, with sales up 20 per cent to £1.1bn (a 31 per cent rise to $1.76bn), while sales from Europe and the Middle East, including Russia and India, rose 12 per cent to £872m. The Asian market, which is dominated by China, saw sales slide 8 per cent to to £254.7m.
Sotheby’s reported a 47 per cent rise in Asian sales, to $490m for the first half of the year.
Artist Francis Bacon on the Role of Suffering
and Self-Knowledge in Creative Expression
BY MARIA POPOVA | INTERVIEWS | ART | THE MARGINALIAN | 10 JULY 2014
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer… his unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his spectacular 1946 treatise on the human search for meaning. We’re immersed in a great deal of cultural mythology regarding spiritual and psychoemotional suffering, but nowhere is it more dangerously romanticized than in the “tortured genius” myth of creative destiny — a myth whose patron saints include tragic heroes lik Vincent van Gogh, David Foster Wallace and Sylvia Plath. It’s a formulation of creative pathology that I’ve always found toxic, and yet beneath it lies a deeper conversation about the role of suffering in human life and creative expression.
From The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists by the prominent dance and art critic John Gruen — the magnificent out-of-print tome fifteen years in the making that also gave us Agnes Martin on art, happiness, pride and failure — comes a wide-ranging conversation with artist Francis Bacon (October 28, 1909–April 28, 1992), known for his highly graphic, emotionally charged imagery with strong undertones of anxiety, terror, and turmoil. Considered Britain’s greatest living painter at the time of the interview in 1972, Bacon was as reviled for his violent themes as he was revered for creative vision. In 2013, eleven years after his death, his painting Three Studies of Lucian Freud became the most expensive piece of art ever auctioned, amassing a formidable $142,405,000.
Bacon, whom Gruen describes as seemingly enveloped in a time vacuum, presenting “the image of an awkward teenager, aged 62,” reflects with remarkable self-awareness on what he calls his “gilded gutter life” and contemplates the broader role of suffering in the creative experience:
“I think that life is violent and most people turn away from that side of it in an attempt to live a life that is screened. But I think they are merely fooling themselves. I mean, the act of birth is a violent thing, and the act of death is a violent thing. And, as you surely have observed, the very act of living is violent. For example, there is self-violence in the fact that I drink much too much. But I feel ever so strongly that an artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or for the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility. ”
After offering Gruen another round of drink, Bacon revisits the subject of suffering, offering an alternative interpretation of — or, rather, a confound at the heart of — the “tortured genius” mythology:
“Of course I suffer. Who doesn’t? But I don’t feel I’ve become a better artist because of my suffering, but because of my willpower, and the way I worked on myself. There is a connection between one’s life and one’s work — and yet, at the same time, there isn’t. Because, after all, art is artifice, which one tends to forget. If one could make out of one’s life one’s work, then the connection has been achieved. In a sense, I could say that I have painted my own life. I’ve painted my own life’s story in my own work — but only in a sense. I think very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that the painting is an expression of the artist’s mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.”
This osmosis of suffering and creative flow, according to Bacon, is rooted in a deep and necessary self-knowledge:
“You must understand, life is nothing unless you make something of it. I’ve learned, as life progresses, to become more cunning. I know where I would automatically go wrong, which I wouldn’t have known when I was younger. Anyway, I’ve become more cunning both in my work and in my relationships. When I say cunning, perhaps it’s the wrong word. I think knowledgeable is a better word, because, in fact, I don’t like cunning people.”
Ultimately, the creative process itself springs from that self-knowledge and remains a private experience, independent of external validation:
“When one is right inside the work … it’s very stimulating and exciting, because that’s when you bring things nearer to the nervous system. you must understand that I don’t paint for anybody except myself. I’m always very surprised that anybody wants to have a picture of mine. I paint to excite myself, and make something for myself. I can’t tell you how amazed I was when my work started selling!”
The Artist Observed, should you be able to find a surviving copy, is a treasure trove in its entirety, featuring conversations with such creative icons as Saul Steinberg, Agnes Martin, and Roy Lichtenstein. For more archival interview goodness, see Jackson Pollock on art, labels, and morality and Frank Lloyd Wright on his famous peers, education, and New York City’s skyline.
Portrait of Francis Bacon by Irving Penn
BY HARRY MOUNT | NEWSWEEK | THURSDAY 3 JULY 2014
WHY FRANCIS BACON DESTROYED
HIS PORTRAIT OF CECIL BEATON
PAUL GALLAGHER | ARTICLE | DANGEROUS MINDS | WEDNESDAY 2 JULY 2014
‘This is Francis, and I’ve just destroyed your portrait.’
‘But why? You said you liked it? You thought it such a good work, and that’s all
that matters!’
‘No—I don’t like my friends to have something of mine they don’t like. And I
often destroy my work in any case; in fact, I’ve destroyed most of the pictures
for the Marlborough. Only I just wanted to let you know so that you needn’t pay
me.’
Study for Head of Lucian Freud, painted by Francis Bacon and owned
by Roald Dahl, is expected to fetch millions at Christie’s this week.
It’s worth every penny
JONATHAN JONES ON ART | CULTURE | THE GUARDIAN | TUESDAY,1 JULY, 2014
Artist’s Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). If the Artist’s Resale Right
Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount
equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake
to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist’s collection agent.
Study for Head of Lucian Freud
titled and dated 'Study for Head of Lucian Freud 1967’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
14 x 12in. (35.5 x 30.5cm.)
Painted in 1967
Roald Dahl, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire (acquired from the above in 1967).
And thence by descent to the present owner.
C. Domino, Francis Bacon. ‘Taking Reality by Surprise’, London 1997, p. 133
(illustrated in colour, p. 81).
C. Debray (ed.), Lucian Freud: L’Atelier, exh. cat., Paris, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 2010 (illustrated
in colour, p. 41).
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Francis Bacon,
1996, no. 51 (illustrated in colour, p. 166). This exhibition later travelled to
Munich, Haus der Kunst.
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery, Francis Bacon. Portraits and Heads,
2005-2006, no. 47 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This
exhibition later travelled to Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle (no. 38).
London, Tate Britain, 2009-2014 (on extended loan).
‘The
single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards the scene of some
of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an
after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their
ghosts within them’ (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 99).
‘That succulent ferocity which we find in the heads of the 1960s... the
turbulence of the paint in the face and neck is the more striking by contrast
with the flat calm of the background’ (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London
1993, p. 111).
‘I said rather tactlessly to Graham [Sutherland] ‘who do you think is the best
painter in England?’ he said ‘Oh, someone you’ve never heard of; he’s like a
cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most
extraordinary life; we sometimes go to dinner parties there’ (L. Freud, quoted
in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2002, p.
26).
‘The visual arts were an important and little understood aspect of Roald Dahl’s
life and formed a continuous counterpoise to his literary activities’ (D.
Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London 2011, p. 25).
‘After Pat and I had been married for a while, and when there was a bit more
money in the bank, I began buying pictures for keeps... I admired Francis
Bacon’s work enormously, and we bought seven of his paintings’ (R. Dahl,
‘Architectural Digest Visits: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal’, in Architectural
Digest, February 1981, p. 74).
‘Roald Dahl and Francis Bacon had much in common. Both were enigmatic outsiders,
both hard to pin down. Both liked to work in small, claustrophobic spaces. Both
aroused equal measures of controversy and fascination. They smoked, drank and
gambled – often to excess. Both could be generous, believing that money, like
muck, needed to be spread around. They had a taste for the high life, as well as
the low. Despite the fact that physically their paths crossed only occasionally,
there was a deep connection between the two men’ (D. Sturrock, 2014).
‘The writer’s stare is unblinking, and most of his tales are irritants,
provocations… they stick in the mind long after subtler ones have faded:
incredible (literally), unforgettable...’ (J. Treglown, ‘Introduction’, in R.
Dahl, Collected Stories, London 2006), p. ix).
‘All I can tell you about the work of Francis Bacon is that it stirs and excites
me emotionally. This is surely how the work of any painter should be judged. I
can see no other valid way of assessing a painting’s worth. No paintings stir
and excite me quite as much as those of Francis Bacon. I know that there are
some people who are not moved by them at all and to those unfortunates I would
simply say, “Jolly back luck. I can’t help you”’ (R. Dahl).
‘His work impressed me, his personality affected me. He talked a great deal
about the paint itself, carrying the form and imbuing the paint with this sort
of life. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke,
which amused and excited me the idea of paint having that power’ (L. Freud
quoted in W. Feaver, ‘Beyond Feeling’, Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Art
Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 13).
Having spent its entire life in the collection of Roald Dahl and subsequently in
the collection of his estate, Study for Head of Lucian Freud, 1967 is one
of only two single portrait heads that Francis Bacon executed of his friend and
sometime rival, the chronicler of the human condition, Lucian Freud. The essence
of Freud emerges from a sumptuously thick and complex surface comprised of
lustrous undulations of crisp white titanium mixed with sweeps of emerald, all
set against a velvety black void. His features appear and dissolve in the
alternating sweeps of gestured paint, with flecks of vermilion articulating
Freud’s existence all the more acutely. Darkly haloed by a thin trail of emerald
tracing the outline of Freud’s crown, there is more than representation on
display here – this is the individual presented as their very essence. It is
this very quality that made Study for Head of Lucian Freud so compelling
to Dahl, who was to acquire it in the same year as its execution. The work
brings together three titans of the arts from the 20th century at the height of
each of their artistic powers. Dahl, arguably the greatest children’s author of
the 20th century, was first recognized in the 1960s for his uncanny ability to
relate to children. His voice on the page was especially attuned to children’s
ears and he was able to speak to them like no other adult has, or perhaps ever
will. The last of four works, which Dahl acquired by Bacon during the 1960s,
Study for Head of Lucian Freud was most certainly chosen for its
extraordinary ability to capture the essence of Freud. Much like his masterful
triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969, Study for Head of Lucian
Freud is Bacon’s own raw and intense presentation of Freud. With each
masterful sweep of his brush, Bacon has created an emblem to the legendary
relationship, defend as much by the friendship as by the rivalry that existed
between these two titans of 20th century art. Bacon has animated his friend’s
visage, imbuing it with energy and attitude through impulsive, staccato dashes
of colour. Conveying the intimacy of their relationship, Bacon succeeds in
communicating a sense of Freud’s character, his inner resolve, pride and
vitality in paint.
Bacon and Freud became close friends towards the end of the Second World War
when they were introduced by painter Graham Sutherland in 1945. As Freud later
recounted, ‘I said rather tactlessly to Graham “who do you think is the best
painter in England?” he said “Oh, someone you’ve never heard of; he’s like a
cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown and he has the most
extraordinary life; we sometimes go to dinner parties there”’ (L. Freud, quoted
in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2002, p. 26).
Sutherland made arrangements for the painters to visit him and his wife in the
countryside in early 1945. The two travelled together from Victoria Station and
Freud recounted, ‘Once I met him, I saw him a lot’ (L. Freud, quoted in ‘Lucian
Freud on Francis Bacon: In conversation with Sebastian Smee’, in B. Bernard and
D. Dawson (eds.), Freud at Work: Lucian Freud in Conversation with Sebastian
Smee, London 2006, p. 26).
The pair immediately became firm friends and regular companions, imbibing the
spirit of post-War London through their shared fondness for Soho and the
newfound freedoms it afforded after the privations of wartime. In the 1950s, the
two were inseparable: Freud found great inspiration in Bacon’s spontaneity and
impulsive painterly skill while Bacon appreciated Freud’s quick wit, vitality
and consummate risk taking. Together they shared a fascination for the ‘human
comedy’, enjoying a garrulous exchange of gossip between games of roulette and
poker. Soho at the time provided a fertile ground for both men to enjoy their
vices at leisure, passing between the comfortable settings of Wheeler’s, the
Gargoyle and the Colony Room which, more so than any other, was the stage upon
which many of Bacon and Freud’s personal dramas unfolded. Meeting almost daily,
the two painters were completely ensconced in each other’s emotional trials and
tribulations – Freud’s faltering marriage with Lady Caroline Blackwood and
Bacon’s own tumultuous affair with Peter Lacy. As Caroline Blackwood recalled,
‘I had dinner with [Francis Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole
of my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch’ (C. Blackwood, quoted in M.
Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 192-193).
From as early as 1951, Freud and Bacon began to capture their friendship in
paint. Bacon’s Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951 (Whitworth Art Gallery,
Manchester) was the first portrait where he acknowledged the name of his sitter.
Freud’s first drawings of Bacon also date from 1951 and the following year he
carried out an intense portrait of Bacon in oil on a small copper plate.
Executed on a miniature scale, Freud and Bacon sat knee to knee for two or three
months until the painting was finished. The work conveys the intensity and
closeness that this working relationship afforded and it is now considered to be
one of Freud’s greatest works.
Following the first fertile years of paintings and drawings in 1951 and 1952,
Bacon and Freud did not paint each other again for another 12 years. Bacon
reinitiated the painterly repartee in 1964 with a double portrait of Freud and
Frank Auerbach and a large-scale triptych using Freud as his exclusive subject.
In comparison to the artist’s earlier work, these paintings were marked by an
increased confidence and strength of colour and line, becoming the hallmark for
Bacon’s most accomplished and important period. Freud’s portraits from 1964-1966
are equally marked out by their looser and impasto applications of paint. The
exactitude which defined his works from earlier in his practice is replaced by
an intense, physical use of medium for which he acknowledged the influence of
Bacon. At this point the two were seemingly intertwined once again, with Freud
painting Bacon’s beloved George Dyer on a couple of occasions and Bacon painting
Freud fourteen times between 1964 and 1971 in a mixture of two small panels (of
which Study for Head of Lucian Freud is one), four large panels (one
destroyed), two small triptychs, three large triptychs (one separated) and the
rest as part of larger compositions. The second work on this scale was executed
two years earlier in 1965. In contrast to the richly rendered and meditated
surface of Study for Head of Lucian Freud, Portrait of Lucian Freud,
1965 has a thinner quality due to Bacon’s use of a drier brush to articulate the
contours of Freud’s face and hair as his the incorporation of bare canvas to
convey the shirt. While these are all techniques particular to Bacon’s practice,
their utilization in Portrait of Lucian Freud would seem to indicate that
Bacon executed this work in a more immediate, and perhaps incomplete fashion,
than the very finished presentation he would offer in Study for Head of Lucian
Freud two years later.
Standing in contrast to Freud’s fastidious analysis of the human form, Bacon was
reluctant to paint his subjects from life, preferring instead to use photographs
as visual triggers, as ways to unfurl personal and poignant recollections. For
Bacon, his preference for the photograph or reproduced image was because a
friend before him in the studio inhibited his practice: ‘they inhibit me because
if I like them, I don’t want to practice before them the injury that I do to
them in my work. I would rather practice the injury in private by which I can
think I can record the fact of them more clearly’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D.
Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London,
1987, p. 41). His portraits of Freud carried out between 1964- 1973, of which
Study for Head of Lucian Freud is one, were all inspired by photographs that
Bacon commissioned from fellow Soho denizen John Deakin. Several series of Freud
by Deakin were found in Reece Mews, including thirteen images of Freud standing
outside a terrace of late eighteenth-century houses in Fitzroy Square and
nineteen photographs of Freud standing, seated and reclining across a bed in an
artist’s studio, presumably his own. It was during this period that Bacon turned
to a close coterie of friends, lovers, and confidants as the source for his art.
Deakin’s black and white images became the basis for the majority of Bacon’s
portraits throughout the sixties capture, not only Lucian Freud, but George
Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, Peter Lacy, Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes. From
1961 Bacon employed the fourteen by twelve inch canvas format exclusively for an
unprecedented portraiture cycle depicting a close coterie of friends, as well as
his own self-portraits, a format and subject that occupied him until the end of
his life. John Russell affirmed the central importance of these works within the
artist’s oeuvre when he stated: ‘The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was
from 1961 onwards the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations.
Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these
small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them’ (J. Russell, Francis
Bacon, London 1993, p. 99). For the painter who avidly read the Greek
tragedies, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, the philosophy of Paul Valéry and Jean-Paul
Sartre, he found that his friends were as ‘vivid and transmutable’ into art as
any great literary hero or heroine.
In Study for Head of Lucian Freud Bacon has captured the visceral quality
and physicality of Freud by ‘[bringing] the figurative thing up onto the nervous
system more violently and more poignantly’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 12).
With his prodigious use of rapid, impulsive brush marks, Bacon creates an
encrusted surface wrought from swirling rhythms of scumbled paint, giving the
sense of Freud’s life-force. The vitality of the image has been made real by the
chance-effect of fine vermilion paint that fecks Freud’s face, created through
the imprint of ribbed colour using the grain of corduroy or an old sweater. A
technique he would favour through the 1970s and 1980s, Bacon’s process of
coating the material with oil paint and then pressing it over his painted image
heightened the sense of life’s electric energy running through his sitter’s very
entity. Here, this unique and powerful formal device simultaneously obscures and
heightens the concentrated intensity of this both intimate and startlingly
animated portrait. Indeed it perfectly encompasses Bacon’s quest to ‘distort the
thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a
recording of the appearance’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality
of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1987, p. 40). This augments
the distortion already at play through the alternating sweeps of colour from
right and left which convey a sense of Freud’s head turning. John Russell could
have been speaking of Study for Head of Lucian Freud when he noted it has
‘that succulent ferocity which we find in the heads of the 1960s...the
turbulence of the paint in the face and neck is the more striking by contrast
with the fat calm of the background’ (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London
1993, p. 111).
Bacon’s ability, through rough impasto and gestural sweeps of green, white and
orange paint against a dark ground, to paradoxically efface the figurative
portrait of his friend Freud in order to more potently bring about the essence
of his nature was a quality that undoubtedly appealed to Dahl. Study for Head
of Lucian Freud most certainly struck a chord with Dahl as it seems to have
leapt off the pages of his short story, Skin, published in 1953. Situated
in the gritty bohemian streets of post-War Paris, the story typifies the
avant-garde city he experienced with Smith in 1946, and opens with a drunken
request by a man to have the artist Chaïm Soutine (who at the time in post-War
Britain was considered the foremost artist of the century) tattoo a painting of
his wife on his back. Some years later, the man chances on an exhibition of the
now dead artist’s work and enters the gallery where he is dismissed until he
exposes the work he owns, which subsequently elicits purchase offers. While the
story has a macabre ending that is in keeping with Dahl’s work at the time, it
also reflects his deep interest and understanding of the art world. In the story
he describes Soutine’s portrait-tattoo as, ‘quite alive; it contained much of
that twisted, tortured quality so characteristic of Soutine’s other work. It was
not a good likeness. It was a mood rather than a likeness, the model’s face
vague and tipsy, the background swirling around her head in a mass of dark-green
curling strokes’ (R. Dahl, ‘Skin’ in Someone Like You, 1953).
Indeed Bacon’s singular approach to representation in paint finds great sympathy
with Dahl’s own way with words. As Dahl described in one of his first short
stories: : ‘He wrote it not in the old man’s words, but in his own words,
painting it as a picture with the old man as a character in the picture, because
that was the best way to do it. He had never written a story before, and so
naturally there were mistakes. He did not know any of the tricks with words
which writers use, which they have to use just as painters have to use tricks
with paint, but when he had finished writing, when he put down his pencil and
went over to the airmen’s canteen for a pint of beer, he left behind him a rare
and powerful tale’ (R. Dahl, ‘An African Story’, Over to You, 1946).
Study for Head of Lucian Freud was
executed at a time of great professional satisfaction for Bacon: his paintings
were gaining international recognition and he was being offered exhibitions at
major museums around the world. His major retrospective at the Tate Gallery,
London in 1962 and subsequent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York
in 1963 were great triumphs and Bacon was gaining sudden traction and celebrity
within the contemporary art world. At the same time, Study for Head of Lucian
Freud was acquired of great contentment for Dahl. 1967 marked the fruition
of a series of Dahl’s professional triumphs. That year, Dahl achieved a coup
when he finally succeeded in obtaining a very lucrative deal with the UK
publishing house George Allen & Unwin for the publication of both James and
the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which had both
already been published to great acclaim in the United States some seven years
before. Perhaps surprisingly today, both bestselling books had been rejected by
no fewer than 11 UK publishers before George Allen & Unwin finally accepted
them. Within weeks of publication in the UK, both books sold out and a
subsequent reprint sold out as well. Dahl was also finding success in Hollywood,
where he had been sought after to adapt screenplays of his peer Ian Fleming’s
work. This included the latest 007 film, You Only Live Twice and
Fleming’s children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was in this
ebullient atmosphere that Dahl found himself able to act in earnest on his
appreciation for art, and specifically for Bacon.
Dahl first became familiar with Bacon’s work through his friend, the artist
Matthew Smith. Dahl and Smith first met in the autumn of 1941 when Dahl returned
home to London following injury in Palestine while serving with the RAF. Dahl
was particularly struck by Smith’s work, which he saw in the window of Arthur
Tooth and Son’s Gallery during an afternoon walking around Mayfair. Determined
to express his admiration for the artist, Dahl sought out Smith at a hotel on
Piccadilly where he found him mourning the recent loss of his sons who had died
in RAF service. Despite their age difference of some forty years, the two struck
up a close friendship based on their mutual passion for the arts, which they
cultivated on jaunts through London and Paris. It was through this close
connection that Dahl became acquainted with Bacon when his work was shown
alongside Smith’s and Victor Pasmore’s in the spring of 1958, in a touring
exhibition put on by the Arts Council entitled Three Masters of British
Painting. Ever the connoisseur, Dahl was immediately impressed by what he saw as
the ’blend of economy and profound emotion in [Bacon’s] painting’, and
immediately named him as a ‘giant of his time’ (N. Crosland in conversations
with D. Sturrock and R. Dahl, Letter to Claude Gallimard, 29th October,
1971, in D. Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, London 2011,
p. 440).
As Dahl professed, ‘I myself had become an enthusiastic collector of pictures as
soon as World War II ended, in 1945. Each time I sold a short story, I would buy
a picture when there was a bit more money in the bank I began buying pictures
for keeps. I admired Francis Bacon’s work enormously, and we bought seven of his
paintings’ (R. Dahl, ‘Architectural Digest Visits: Roald Dahl and Patricia
Neal’, in Architectural Digest, February 1981, p. 74). Buoyed by the
triumphant professional and financial success of the publication of James and
the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and with the
screenplay of You Only Live Twice, Dahl actually bought four Bacon
canvases between the years 1964–68. Dahl enthused over the pages
of Architectural Digest about his ownership of seven Bacon’s paintings; a boyish
exaggeration made on more than one occasion, which his biographer Donald
Sturrock regarded as typical of Dahl’s character and a reiteration of the high
esteem in which he held Bacon’s work.
Between 1964 and 1967, Dahl chose through
great care and his exacting eye four singular works from Bacon’s oeuvre:
Landscape at Malabata (1963), Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963), Portrait
of Henrietta Moraes on White (1964) and Study for a Head of Lucian Freud (1967). While
Landscape at Malabata is a rare work by Bacon in its absence of a figure,
it is as Ernst van Alphen aptly describes, a ‘bodily landscape’, where the
landscape takes on corporeal qualities in order to visually convey something of
the soul. Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer is Bacon’s first
triptych of his great love and muse and radiates with ‘the inmost nature of
human behaviour’ (J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 100). Portrait
of Henrietta Moraes on White is an unusual representation of Bacon’s close
friend where he has mirrored the contours of her body with an intricate weave of
cool lavenders and charcoals all set against a white background. Indeed Sturrock
recalls seeing these works when he met Dahl for the first time at Gipsy house:
‘On one wall a triptych of distorted Francis Bacon heads glared out at me
alarmingly, reminding me that for years, Dahl’s adult publishers had dubbed him
“the Master of the Macabre”. On an adjacent wall, another Bacon head – this one
a distorted swirl of green and white – returned my gaze’ (D. Sturrock, Storyteller:
The Life of Roald Dahl, London 2011, p. 5). By the 1980s, Dahl’s collection
would also include avant-garde Russian artists Malevich, Ermilov, Goncharova and
Popova, 16th century Dutch still-lifes, 17th century religious panels, Winston
Churchill seascapes and Matisse drawings.
Although he subsequently sold the other three works by Bacon, it is of no great
surprise that Study for Head of Lucian Freud immediately captivated Dahl
when he saw it in 1967 and that it retained its undisputed place in his
collection and subsequently in his family after his death in 1990. Dahl firmly
believed that ‘You cannot begin to appreciate any work of art in the true sense
until you have studied the personalities involved and the struggles they had’
(R. Dahl, ‘Architectural Digest Visits: Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal’, in
Architectural Digest, February 1981, p. 75). He certainly practiced this
where Bacon was concerned, maintaining a close friendship with the artist for
many years, often having him over for dinner at Gipsy House in the 1970s and
1980s. The two undoubtedly bonded over such high-brow interests as their mutual
admiration for the work of van Gogh, an artist that both regarded as their
favourite, as well as their more pedestrian pursuits in Soho. Like Bacon, Dahl
was a consummate gambler, who after finding much pleasure at greyhound races as
a young man and at diplomatic poker tables in Washington D.C., had settled quite
comfortably at the Blackjack table at the Curzon House Club.
By DAVID NG
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A t
Sotheby’s said the work was the subject of a telephone bidding skirmish, which appeared to have helped elevate the selling price above the high-end estimate. The paintings were considered highly coveted because they were created in the early days of Bacon’s relationship with Dyer.
The buyer of the triptych was not identified, but the New York Times reported that Helena Newman, the chairwoman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department in Europe, took the winning bid, beating out three other rivals.
A Francis Bacon small-format triptych of his lover George Dyer made what Sotheby’s called a “landmark” price of £26.7 million (€33.4 million) yesterday in a contemporary art sale that surpassed estimates and set records for some artists.
The Bacon, a 1967 work which Sotheby’s said was one of about 40 such triptychs that the artist painted in a format of 11 by 14 inches for each of the three frames, was the star of the show for a packed auction in London that netted a total of £93.15 million(€116.4 million).
Even with eight of 59 lots unsold, the total topped the pre-auction top-end estimate of £89 million.
The previous top price for a similar Bacon triptych was £23 million (€28.7 million), Sotheby’s said, while the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction was the sale by rival Christie’s of a large format Bacon triptych in New York last November for just over $142 million (€103.7 million).
“The driving force tonight was passion,” Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of Sotheby’s contemporary art department, said.
“The Bacon was bought by collectors who truly wanted to own it. It was a completely private market that came from virtually every side of the world and people wanted to own this wonderful piece and they bought it.”
Westphal declined to identify the geographic region of the winning buyer but noted that the losing bidder in the tense 10-minute-long battle in which the price for the Bacon soared well above the £20 million top guide price had been handled by Patti Wong, Sotheby’s chairman in Asia.
The sales event set an auction record price of £8.5 million pounds for Scottish artist Peter Doig for his “Country-rock (wing mirror) of 1999”, though this was slightly below the "in the region of £9 million" that Sotheby's had guided for the enormous oil painting.
There also were some surprise prices for works by younger artists, among them Romanian Adrian Ghenie’s “The Fake Rothko”. It went for £1.43 million, or roughly four times its top guide price and six times the highest price previously paid for the artist at auction.
A real Mark Rothko “No. 10” from 1949 also sold for much more than the top guide price of £800,000, going instead for more than £2.5 million.
Other major works sold at the night auction of the two-day event that continues with a day auction today included an Andy Warhol “Nine Multicoloured Marilyns" that went for £4.6 million, a Bacon “Study for Portrait of P.L. ” that sold for just under £4.5 million and a Warhol “Dollar Sign (Yellow) ” which went for £4 million.
Rare Francis Bacon triptych sells for €33.2m
A rare triptych of Irish-born Francis Bacon's muse and lover George Dyer has sold for a landmark €33.2m.
The triptych entitled 'Three Studies for portrait of George Dyer', attracted major attention when it was offered up as part of Sotheby's evening sale of contemporary art in London.
Sotheby’s described it as a “new record for a small scale triptych by the artist”. The hammer fell at a landmark STG £26,682,500 (€33.2m)
The last record for small-scale triptych by Bacon is €28m for a 1964 portrait of Lucian Freud.
The three pieces have rarely been seen in public.
Dyer and Bacon became romantically involved after Bacon caught the East End petty criminal breaking into his South Kensington mews in the middle of the night.
Dyer battled with paranoia and addiction and tragically died from an overdose in Paris in 1971 – just hours before the opening of a major retrospective of Bacon's work at the Grand Palais.
Some 129 photographs of Dyer were found in the studio of Bacon after his death. Visitors to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin can see a reconstruction of Bacon’s studio which was donated to the gallery.
Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer
Small Francis Bacon
Triptych Sells for $45 Million at Sotheby
The estate of Roald Dahl
Roald gold
A financial bonanza to mark the author’s centenary
BOOK
ROALD DAHL’S Marvellous Children’s Charity (previously the Roald Dahl Foundation), which gives away over £500,000 ($850,000) a year, may raise wobbly smiles from sick British children with its sing-a-long-a-Willy-Wonka evenings or its Oompa-Loompa skydiving leaps. But it sits on a swishwifflingly scrumdiddlyumptious base, thanks to a regular gift from the Dahl family of 5% of the author’s worldwide royalties from books, films and stage performances. (More than 50,000 people see a Dahlinspired stage musical each month.)
Now Marvellous will receive a series of further gifts in the run-up to the centenary of Dahl’s birth in 2016. The first will come from the sale at Christie’s on July 1st of the author’s last remaining Francis Bacon painting, the swirling green study of Lucian Freud (pictured) that Dahl bought in 1967 with the proceeds of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Purchased for £2,850, it is now estimated to sell for £8m-i2m. The Dahl centenary should also help the charity consider extending its giving beyond Britain.
Celebratory plans include an American tour of the popular West End musical, “Matilda”, the development of a family of Dahl apps, two big festivals—in London and Cardiff, in honour of Dahl’s roots-and the release in 2016 of Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG”. Phizz-whizzing!
CULTURE DESK
BY NICOLAS NIARCHOS | THE NEW YORKER | JUNE 27 2014
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