Francis Bacon News Archive 

 

 

                                                                                                 

                                                                                                     Francis Bacon in London 1979 by Dmitri Kasterine

Francis Bacon is arguably the greatest visual exponent of existentialism. He sought to capture, on canvas, the violence, the energy, the futility and the alienation at the heart of human existence.Though he shared something of Nietzsche's 'strong pessimism', he qualified it by saying, 'You can be optimistic and totally without hope. One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff.'

Bacon always insisted that all he wanted to do was make images, that people could read into them whatever they chose. 'We live, we die, and that is all.' But in his paintings the body became conflated with images of both the Crucifixion and the abattoir. His source material ran from Greek myth to Rembrandt's celebrated painting of The Slaughtered Ox, from the screaming nanny in the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, to Velasquez's popes and Eadweard Muybridge's photographs from the 1880s of the human figure in motion. And, of course, he painted his lovers: next month, Christie's is auctioning Francis Bacon's Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror (1967). It is estimated that it will fetch between pounds 2.5m and pounds 3.5m.

Bacon never made any secret of his homosexuality. He preferred to refer to himself as 'queer' rather than 'gay'. A young man from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, he ran away from home after his brutal father discovered his overdeveloped interest in his mother's clothes and the stable grooms. He was always attracted to 'rough trade', to what was butch and masculine.

The meeting between him and George Dyer has become the stuff of art-world legend. Bacon relished telling how they met when Dyer was robbing his flat " though it is much more likely that they actually met in a bar in Soho. Dyer was to become one of Bacon's most important muses. The large portraits done in the 1960s and 1970s are some of Bacon's greatest and most visceral works. Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, in which he wears a suit in the style favoured by the Krays, shows his unmistakable features reflected from two angles. He sits on a sort of swivel desk-chair, and his disembodied face is split into two halves. One is splashed with semen-like white paint, while the mirroring device serves to heighten a sense of alienation and emphasises the essential loneliness at the heart of all human relationships.

Bacon saw his own life as having been punctuated by violence, whether it was childhood whippings, Republican attacks in Ireland, the Second World War, or his own sado-masochistic sexual predilections. He distorted his images, smearing and battering his figures into submission, as if violence and virility might mirror their opposites " the poignancy and pity of what it means to be alive. Dyer was to commit suicide the night before the opening of Bacon's major 1971 Paris retrospective at the Grand Palais. He had been unhappy for years, feeling both a failure as a thief and uncomfortable among Bacon's glittery, witty friends.

Ten years earlier, another lover, Peter Lacy, had died during the opening of Bacon's Tate retrospective. Bacon had met Lacy, a handsome test-pilot who had flown combat missions during the Battle of Britain, in Tangier in 1952, where Lacy played piano in Dean's Bar. Their obsessive relationship was a disaster from the start, fuelled by drink, cruelty and infidelity. Bacon's Three Studies of the Human Head (1953) depict Lacy as a suited figure, his face distorted by anger and pain, and with a wailing, open mouth.

The Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984) show the man who was to become Bacon's companion until the painter's death in 1992. Bacon first met the barman John Edwards in 1974. Although, like Dyer, Edwards came from the East End, this was to be a very different relationship from the earlier, doomed, romance. Although much younger than Bacon, Edwards stood up to him with directness and honesty.

The triptych shows Edwards seated on a stool, in an empty studio, against a grey-blue ground, and captures something of his straightforward character. There is a lack of the violent distortion that characterises Bacon's other, more angst-ridden portraits. The triptych borrows something from the language of film-making, with a static subject frozen into a cinematic sequence.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bacon painted his close friend Isabel Rawsthorne, who was also part of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' of Soho Bohemianism. He once boasted in Paris Match that, 'You know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend.' Given Bacon's lifelong penchant for men, that seems rather unlikely. But, as she had been the lover of many famous artists, as well as a friend of Epstein, Giacometti and Picasso, he perhaps liked to dramatise their association. The fact that he obviously knew her very well undoubtedly allowed him to express her raw, powerful individuality in the Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, painted in 1966.

Picasso once said: 'My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life.' The same might be said of Bacon. For him, being 'queer' was the essence of who he was. His twisted, tortured bodies speak of both physical and emotional turmoil, of brutal and deep, visceral emotions.

But they also reveal, as in the raw cruelty of Greek drama, something profound about what it means to be a living, breathing, sentient human being.

Copyright 2005 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 BLOODY SLICE OF BACON

  Rachel Campbell Johnston gets a taste of raw artistry

  The Times, 19th March, 2005

 

   

 

“We are born and we die, that’s how it is” Bacon’s philosophy of life was blunt “But in between,” he declared, “we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.” These are the drives the passions, lusts and obsessions that Bacon lays bare in his life and his work. He poured his talent into both. And that is why Bacon’s painting, more than that of any other artist of his generation, can be illuminated by biography.

Tonight (Saturday), Arena leads the viewer into the middle of Bacon’s life BBC Two is the only broadcaster since Bacon’s death in 1992 to have been granted unlimited access to his work and to previously unseen archive footage, as well as interviews with family and friends.

His life can be a bloodthirsty place, as the opening footage makes plain. A big black Spanish bull knocks a matador to the sand and gores him, as the programme cuts to footage of Bacon standing, contemplatively, in his studio, the smoke of a cigarette curling around him, the disturbed roar of the crowd still reverberating in his head.

As he attacked and brutalised the human appearance, mashing and twisting it into bruised hues, Bacon fought to escape illustrational aspects of the image and evoke instead “the brutality of fact”. This is the raw truth that this programme constantly seeks, switching again and again from scenes of butchery and bullfighting to a pot of lusciously stirred blood red paint.

It follows the trajectory of Bacon’s life from his childhood in Ireland, the son of a racehorse trainer who kicked him out of the house at 16 disgusted that his son should like wearing women’s knickers, through a decadent year as a young man in Berlin and onto London, where he embarked on a career as a furniture designer before he began to paint.

His artistic career is mapped through his succession of lovers, from Roy de Maistre, who encouraged his talents, through a respectable Tory alderman, a sexually sadistic former fighter pilot, a neurotic East End bruiser and John Edwards, his sole heir, who gets very good press.

The spectator sees the chaos of the studio. We see Bacon’s sources of inspiration and snippets from interviews with David Sylvester, the typescripts of which surely count among the greatest art documents of the postwar era.

But a more intimate picture is to be found in the details: his sister lanthe talking about his formative life; the brother of Dyer, the lover who committed suicide; the words of the Marlene Dietrich song that the painter used to play repeatedly “Men flock around me! Like moths around a flame/ And If their wings burn/ I know I’m not to blame.”

This documentary captures Bacon in most moods: taunting, teasing, brilliant, ebullient, drunk But we never see him painting. Painting seems to have been an act far more intimate, more secret than sex. And in the end it’s through the paintings that this documentary speaks. As the lens wanders across them to the haunting accompaniment of music commissioned from Brian Eno, we see deep into those masterpieces that were made to “unlock the valves of feeling” and return the onlooker even more violently to life not just to Bacon’s life, but to the viewer’s own.

Arena: Francis Bacon’s Arena, Saturday, BBC Two. 9.10 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The magic of paint

Andrew O'Hagan 

 

A shark has to keep moving to stay alive, so it did not come as any kind of shock this week to discover that British artist Damien Hirst has been painting for the first time in years. He's very versatile, Damien Hirst, and very good at titles, but my heart slightly sank when I noticed that some of what he was painting derived from advertising and was copied from posters in the coarsest way.

I'm sure it's a very worthwhile commentary on corporate identity and this and that, but I have a fantasy that painting might stand apart from mass-produced imagery, that it might ignore the message of Andy Warhol and just obey its properties as a species of individuality. I like the sculptural business of paint, the way it sits on the canvas and can't be repeated, and it seems a shame when people just slap it about as image-making gunk, with no regard for its actual qualities.

Not that painting ever stands outside of cultural influences. The history of painting itself, for one thing, is always present, but people nowadays always want to see the contemporary relevance. Many, for instance, who have gone to see Caravaggio at the National Gallery have compared those late paintings to movie stills - seeing the darkness of them as relating to a style of cinematic film noir we're very used to. Of course, no one is saying that Caravaggio somehow saw the movies of John Huston, but people find it useful to read art in accordance with their own stock of images and their own lives' narratives.

But painting is more than just image. It is form and shape, structure and design, and I find it depressing that all children ever learn about nowadays is content - what something is, never how it is - when style is often just as interesting, if not more so. I was in Rome the other day and I went to what I think is the nicest gallery in the world, the Doria Pamphilj, a series of rooms with natural light falling on painted ceilings and work by Raphael, Titian, Bernini, and a host of lesser-knowns. The great thing about the gallery is that it has windows. It always amazes me that nearly every British gallery (and all the main international galleries) shows painting in artificial lighting, when paint is so responsive to natural light.

Anyway, in a corner they have Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in 1650. The picture is famous for two reasons: firstly, and most deservingly, because of the sitter's facial expression, which is cruel and vain and somehow egotistical all at once. The paint is layered on the canvas in such a penetrating way - there is such movement and such a play of light on the whites and reds of the vestments - that you feel the portrait is hardly a work of art at all, but something formed in nature and beyond the intelligence of a single man. It is a very supreme example of what painting genius is all about: the ability to mix paints and push them around a surface until the condition of the paint amplifies life.

But the second reason for the painting's fame - and the thing that brings it to life for most modern viewers - is that it served as the inspiration for Francis Bacon's shocking work Study After Velázquez, 1950, more commonly known as his Screaming Pope. Of all his 20th-century contemporaries, Bacon was the artist most interested in paint, and he kept having another go at the Velázquez studies, over 14 years producing no fewer than 45 different versions.

Strangely, though, Bacon never saw the original. He was in Rome for three months in 1954, but he avoided the Galleria Pamphilj, as if a real encounter with the painting would only harm his mental image of it. "I became obsessed by this painting," Bacon said, "and I bought photograph after photograph of it. I think really that was my first subject." In the paintings he produced, Bacon distilled the aggression and anger he saw in the face of the original sitter, and he expressed that anger in terms of colour and design.

Rather like Damien Hirst now, with his reproductions, and like the people who see Caravaggios in terms of film noir, Bacon wasn't at all interested in the original spontaneity of the works he admired. He was interested in what they looked like repeated. A handsome new book is published this week by Thames and Hudson; it was written by Martin Harrison and is called In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting. The book shows many of the artefacts that directly influenced Bacon, and we see four of the many reproductions he had of the Velázquez painting, torn and daubed with paint.

Harrison's book is a revelation. It shows that Bacon in Britain (just as Warhol in America) set up a dialogue in his work with photography and cinema and advertising that today's artists both take for granted and can't get away from. I wasn't disappointed at seeing Damien Hirst follow a pattern established by Bacon half a century ago; it was the fact that the material stolen for the new paintings is so tawdry and uninteresting. They are shocking in terms of content, but have nothing to convey in terms of form. With Bacon, it was always form - he loved the shapes of things.

Bacon tore out magazine pictures of stills from a film of Edweard Muybridge's, just to learn something about sequence and about the shape of male bodies in a wrestling match. He tore leaves out of a boxing book and overpainted them, obviously seeing the ropes around the ring as a framing device for human figures. Bacon was interested in curtains, so among the mountain of things on his studio floor was a ripped-out advertisement for Silk Cut, showing a purple curtain.

There is a story about painting in all this. Bacon was the high priest of second-hand imagery, but he used it to form shapes and emotions, and his paintings were never anything less than themselves. They are works in paint. The new Hirst paintings show a different kind of borrowing, the borrowing of content and meaning, and show a strict interest in what the image can say as opposed to what the paint can do. Hirst may have caused another fuss by turning to paintings, but they might as well be photocopies for all the interest he shows in the magic of paint.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: lost and found

 

Martin Harrison analyses the information that has recently come to light about paintings that Bacon destroyed, mutilated or radically altered. What do such incidents reveal about Bacon's attitude to his art?

 

Apollo Magazine March 2005

Six months after Bacon's death, his paintings were hung together with Picasso's Crucifixion (1930), and some of the Crucifixion drawings Picasso made in Boisgeloup in 1932, in the exhibition 'The Body on the Cross' at the Muse Picasso, Paris. Intrigued and delighted at the prospect of sharing a space with the artist who, more than sixty years earlier, had inspired him to take up painting, Bacon agreed to be interviewed by Jean Clair for the catalogue of the exhibition. He told Clair of the profound impression made on him in 1971 when Valerie Eliot published her late husband's The Waste Land alongside the extensive corrections and deletions made by Ezra Pound to the original text. Although Bacon remained staunchly independent of any established literary or artistic circles, next to Picasso the poetry of Aeschylus and of T.S. Eliot inspired more of his paintings than the work of any artist. 'Pound made it ten times better', (1) commented Bacon on the excisions and alterations to Eliot's poem; he frequently reiterated his regret at not having a comparable guru figure to tell him what to discard, although he admitted that: 'Of course, it's true there are a very, very few people who could help me by their criticism'. (2)

It is hard to imagine Bacon being even remotely receptive to such trenchant advice, however distinguished its author. On the other hand, he was a ruthless self-editor, at least as hard on his own efforts as on those of his contemporaries. He was as scathing in condemnation of his widely-admired 'Popes', for example, as he was about the paintings of Jackson Pollock ('that dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace') or Mark Rothko ('rather dismal variations on colour'); (3) even when praising the masters he most admired -Velazquez, Rembrandt, Seurat - he seldom omitted to qualify his approbation.

Dissatisfaction with his own paintings usually resulted in their destruction. Indeed, he was so ruthless that from the first fifteen years of his career, between 1929 and 1944, only fourteen paintings and drawings survive. Subsequently, as Bacon came under increased pressure from his dealers to fulfil scheduled exhibition dates, it is probable that he jettisoned proportionately less of his work, but even towards the end of his life either he, or more usually a friend, maintained the ritual slashing with a knife-blade of rejected canvases.

Today, notwithstanding these depredations, Bacon's oeuvre comprises nearly six hundred paintings--sufficient, it might be thought, to represent a great artist. How, then, could the urge be justified to resurrect works that Bacon presumably wished to remain buried? Firstly, Bacon, unlike most artists, did not make preliminary drawings, although, consistent with the stimulation he found in literature, he frequently compiled hand-written lists of ideas for paintings. Apart from his mass-media source imagery and a handful of vigorous but fairly schematic compositional sketches dating from around 1960, (4) there is scant surviving material that might elucidate the evolution of his paintings. Secondly, even Bacon himself regretted having destroyed certain paintings, in particular one of his earliest 'Popes', Study after Velazquez (1950). He had intended to send the painting to the Festival of Britain exhibition '60 Paintings for 51', but withdrew it and - or so he misremembered later--destroyed it. Included in John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley's 1964 catalogue raisonne of Bacon as a 'destroyed picture', it was in fact removed from its stretcher and stored away at the Chelsea artists' suppliers Bacon used. It was not until 1996 that it was rediscovered.

David Sylvester both confirmed the genuineness of Bacon's expressions of regret at losing the painting, and gave his own opinion that it was the 'finest "Pope" ever', (5) Bacon's dealers, Hanover Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art, arranged as a matter of course for his completed paintings to be photographed, but those he abandoned were, understandably, seldom recorded. Study after Velazquez was an exception, no doubt reflecting Bacon's ambivalence about the painting. But fortunately, a few of the definitely lost works were captured, partly fortuitously, by the camera, and in somewhat different circumstances.

In 1962, the first of two Tate retrospectives held in Bacon's lifetime substantially raised his public profile. Gregarious as a mainly nocturnal drinker and gambler, by day he was reclusive and solitary as a painter. There was an increasing demand for him to be photographed and filmed in his studio, but he always took the precaution of turning the painted side of his canvases away from the lens. Among his circle of friends, however, were several accomplished photographers, notably his fellow Soho-ites Dan Farson and John Deakin. After 1962 Bacon rarely painted from life. Instead he commissioned John Deakin to document the friends who became the models for many of his portraits during the next two decades--Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne. Probably operating under Bacon's direction, Deakin used a Rolleiflex rollfilm camera attached to a tripod. Other photographers had evolved a modus operandi with hand-held 35mm cameras that was more rapid, informal and relatively non-intrusive: having been photographed by the doyen of this technique, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and photojournalists such as Larry Burrows, Bacon was accustomed to the quick fire of the miniature format camera shutter. The wildlife photographer Peter Beard, whom Bacon met in 1966, became a close friend and the subject of more than twenty of Bacon's paintings between 1975 and 1980. He provided most of the self-portrait photographs of his head from which Bacon painted his portraits, and he in turn photographed Bacon constantly.

On his frequent visits to London, Beard's diaristic camera became a natural accompaniment to their socialising, and evidently Bacon was relaxed enough to allow Beard to continue photographing while his paintings remained visible. At least two of the paintings that can be observed in the backgrounds of Beard's photographs were, it transpired, eventually destroyed by Bacon. Beard's black and white images are, therefore, the sole visual evidence of two compelling, but in several respects atypical, paintings.

The first of these paintings, George Dyer with camera, is visible in Figure 5. Painted c. 1969, it depicts Dyer, Bacon's lover and muse, apparently metamorphosing into an organic version of a bulky, primitive, large-format bellows camera which is supported by a rather perfunctory tripod. This early example of Bacon's referencing of photographic equipment was an overt indication that photography was, by this time, established at the core of his practice; in the right-hand panel of the triptych Studies from the human body (1970), Bacon depicted himself as the voyeuristic operator of elaborate photographic paraphernalia. The attitude of the squatting figure in George Dyer with camera was almost certainly developed from the conflation of two (or more) of John Deakin's photographs of George Dyer: a profile head-shot taken in Soho (Fig. 3) and a seated, cross-legged semi-nude done in the Reece Mews studio (Fig. 4). A striking variant of this pose can be seen in the left-hand panel of Two figures lying on a bed with attendants (1968), the painting recently acquired by Tate Britain on extended loan from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Bacon continued to explore this configuration until at least 1988, latterly transposing John Edwards's head for Dyer's, with Edwards's portrait identified as the nominal subject. In most of the paintings in which Dyer's identity is reliably established he is represented as naked, child-like and vulnerable; yet despite him wearing a collar and tie in George Dyer with camera (a typically Baconic 'reversal' tactic) the treatment was, on this occasion, among the most visceral and animalistic of the series based on this pose, and the paint is applied with a bravura violence and spontaneity in slashing, sweeping brushstrokes.

Since Bacon is unlikely to have been dissatisfied with the dynamic painting of the figure in George Dyer with camera, it could, therefore, be conjectured that there was a formal aspect of the painting that, in his judgment, had failed to coalesce. Given that the painting appears to have been conceived in his standard 78 x 58 inches (198.1 x 142.3 cm) format, and considering the shape and position of the arcing 'board' device on which the figure was supported, it is likely to have been intended as the left-hand panel of a planned triptych; it is comparable with the two outer wings of Triptych in memory of George Dyer (1971), which develops similar imagery and may represent the further development of a related composition, or alternatively Bacon's resolution of the original idea of 1969.

By comparison, The last man on earth (c. 1974), a painting recorded in several of Peter Beard's photographs of Bacon moving around the studio (Fig. 6), appears to have been both formally and conceptually completely resolved. The lone figure is loosely based on Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of a man throwing a discus, although Bacon's quoting of pictorial sources was seldom straightforward and he may also have had in mind a classical discobolus (he would have known the copies in the British Museum and the Terme Museum, Rome) and Rodin's bronze La grande ombre. Since the man's pose resembles that of the figure in the centre panel of Triptych March 1974, the painting may be another instance of a panel that was ultimately rejected from a triptych.

Another factor in Bacon's rejection of The last man on earth may have been that he considered the depiction of existential isolation, of Nietzschean solipsism, too literal in its poignancy. Apparently the painting (was this also an instance of the older pictorial sources having been conflated with a modern image of a cricketer about to field the ball?) evoked for observers either the Apollo space mission's moon landing, or a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which case it would have approached dangerously closely to what Bacon professed was his greatest aversion, to illustration. He often demeaned paintings that illustrated a passage from a literary text, citing, for example, Fuseli's scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Bacon strove to avoid the kind of excessive pictorial data that threatened to impose a linear narrative on his paintings, although the extent to which he achieved the elimination of narrativity has recently become a matter of debate among art historians. (6) Nevertheless, his optical blurring, his strategies of spatial and temporal disjunction, tended to represent an action that was out of time, that had no before and no after.

The painting now known as Portrait of a dwarf (1975, private collection, Australia) is, uniquely, in a narrow upright format, the result of Bacon having eliminated two-thirds of the original canvas (Figs. 7 and 8). Formerly, the dwarf occupied the role of what Bacon called an 'attendant'; these attendants were either voyeuristic, or paradoxically disengaged, witnesses of a horrifying spectacle, or of sexual intercourse. In Portrait of a dwarf, the homunculus stares back implacably at the viewer, returning our gaze while apparently indifferent to the upturned, writhing nude male in a glass cage to his left.

 

 

 

Francis Bacon’s passion for the camera
This is the first study of the painter’s use of photography

The Art Newspaper  May, 2005

Richard Calvocoressi

 

We probably know more now about Francis Bacon (1909¬92) than almost any other 20th century artist. This is ironic, given how carefully Bacon controlled and edited his part, but the painstaking reconstruction of his studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and the meticulous cataloguing of its contents (some 7,500 items) have given us an insight into his subject matter, source material and techniques that he would never have dreamed possible or, perhaps, desirable.

In his lifetime Bacon was notorious for suppressing books and catalogues about his work that he did not like. Quite what he would have made of Martin Harrison’s richly illustrated study of his pictorial sources, much of it based on material in the Hugh Lane archive, we will never know. Dr Hanison (quoting Dennis Parr) tells the tantalising story of Bacon’s reaction to a request from “an archive” (presumably the Tate) to bequeath it his working documents: “he swept up ‘all the photographs and press cuttings that littered the studio floor, bundled them into two plastic sacks, and made a bonfire of them”. Nevertheless, countless photographic images seem to have survived this cull, and in his analysis of their relationship to Bacon’s paintings, Dr Harrison has enhanced our understanding of Bacon’s deeply ambiguous iconography.

Bacon’s use of photographs and film stills was first noticed in the early 1950s, not long after their imprint began to appear in his work. In his conversations with David Sylvester from the 1960s onwards, Bacon readily acknowledged the influence of a small number of crucial sources: Muybridge’s photographs of humans and animals in motion, stills from Eisenstein’s Battleship Poteinkin, and reproductions of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, a picture he claimed never to have seen in the original. Bacon’s appropriation of the photograph was, in fact, far more indiscriminate and voracious than this respectable shortlist suggests. Dr Harrison uncovers a whole layer of “low art” material which interested Bacon and which his friend, the painter and photographer Peter Rose Pulham, described as “bad press photographs reproduced through a coarse screen on bad paper”.

What particularly intrigued Bacon about the news photograph, apart from its real life subject matter, was its instantaneous and accidental characters qualities he tried to achieve in his own painting. From the 1960s, as his output of portraits increased, he used specially commissioned portrait photographs by John Deakin as a substitute for the actual presence of his subjects invariably lovers and close friends in the studio. In their sharpness and detail, however, Deakin’s photographs are a far cry from the blurred and smudged press images that Bacon liked to tear out of newspapers and magazines. Dr Harrison points out that Bacon only partly relied on Deakin’s photographs. His portraits, and especially the series of slightly under life size heads that Bacon began paintings in 1962 (on canvases 14 × 12 inches, not 24 × 20 as Dr Harrison states) introduce a note of dissolution and flux that is absent from Deakin’s more factual records.

Any assessment of Bacon’s use of photography must take into account the extent to which he assimilated and transformed his sources. One of the most esoteric of these was a publication on spiritualism, Phenomena of materialisation (1920) by a certain Baron von Schrenck Notzing. Bacon never mentioned this book, although a well thumbed and paint spattered copy was found in the studio after his death. Dr Harrison shows first how the head of the biomorphic figure in the left hand panel of Bacon’s seminal Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion (1944) is an almost literal transcription of a close up detail from one of Schrenck Noming’s faked photographs of a séance. He then relates Bacon’s interest in psychic phenomena to a wider “predilection for photographs that penetrated the skin”, such as X rays and pathological or scientific photographs of raw flesh. (Bacon owned a copy of K.C. Clark’s extensively illustrated Positioning in radiography, as well as a book on diseases of the mouth.) Dr Harrison further speculated that, for Bacon, “Manifestations of ectoplasm were probably.. consonant with the chronophotographs of Etienne Jules Marey”, given Bacon’s fascination with the effects of light on exposed photographs. Since Bacon once described himself as “a medium for accident and chance” and talked about the difficulty of conveying his subject’s “emanation” when painting a portrait, I find it perfectly conceivable that he should have been interested in the irrational.

Dr Harrison’s title, In camera, is, in fact, a wordplay that not only alludes to Bacon’s secretiveness, but also allows him to discuss the photographic influences on Bacon, and also the representation of space in his paintings. Dr Harrison argues that Bacon was profoundly affected by the anonymous rooms he occupied and that these are often reflected in the bleak interiors which his figures inhabit. In camera presumably refers also to the English translation of Sartre’s play Huis clos, in which three people are forever trapped in a room, a “hell” of their own making. Other comparatively neglected themes touched on by Dr Harrison include the impact on Bacon’s painting of his little known stay at St Ives in 1959, and the example of Rodin’s bronze sculptures in encouraging him to achieve greater volume and plasticity in his treatment of the human form.

Such reflections, however illuminating, might seem irrelevant to an analysis of Bacon’s debt to photography, and it is true that they give the book a rather amorphous feel. Nevertheless, In camera is an indispensable work of reference for anyone wishing to follow the protracted dialogue that Bacon conducted with photography and through photography with the art of the past, his own work, and real life.

Richard Calvocoressi
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World of Bacon

 By Graham Reid   

The Zealand Herald   24.02.05

 

      

Three Furies: Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon, has won wide acclaim in Australia.

 

As the critic Robert Hughes said, some art is wallpaper but the work of British painter Francis Bacon is flypaper. Claims stick to it, praise and condemnation are attracted in equal measure.

Bacon (1909-92) was a muscular, uncompromising painter whose screaming popes and businessmen are raw nerve-endings, emblems of the horrors of life and yet utterly compelling.

"I think he was an extremist in his life," says Australian playwright and film-maker Stephen Sewell. "He wanted to be at that place where the world was coming at him like a bullet through the eye. He lived it too. He didn’t paint horrible pictures then go home to potter in the garden."

Sewell’s play, Three Furies: Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon, has already won wide acclaim in his homeland (‘a startlingly inventive, austere vaudeville and drama’, said the Sydney Morning Herald) and is dark cabaret about Bacon’s uncompromising life and philosophies.

Yet with songs by Basil Hogios and direction by Jim Sharman (who also directed the Rocky Horror film, and stage productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar), Three Furies is an emotionally engaging 90 minutes of theatre that explores Bacon’s existential nature but also uses ancient story-telling forms and a sense of domestic drama.

"The whole point of my theatre," says Sewell, "is it is available to a wide audience. The dominant theatrical form at the moment is a kind of television realism where people have a cup of tea and a good long talk. I find that boring and dishonest to life as I know it. I want to re-embrace the stage that the Elizabethans occupied, to have a stage which is an entire world occupied by half a dozen people."

The genesis of the Bacon play began with an earlier work, The Secret Death of Salvador Dali, in which Sewell wanted the audience to have a dramatic experience which was surrealistic.

"Here I wanted to give the audience the experience of the mind of Bacon so I used similar techniques to the Dali, although the characters are very different.

"Dali’s spirit was like a child’s, and like a child he could be cruel and selfish but he also had the child’s energy and curiosity. But Bacon is a man, and the world I initially created was a dark, heavy world, which I thought people would find difficult to deal with.

"When Jim Sharman came on board he loved the work of Bacon and saw in the script some very exciting elements. He suggested we put some songs in and as soon as he said that I realised that was the extra bit that was needed to make it easier to follow, and as a structural element to lift the play into the realm I wanted it to be in.

"The thing that is often said about Bacon’s work is that it is confronting, existential, that it’s the emotional world that followed TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and the horrors of the two world wars.

"But when people see the play they see there is also longing, and the longing for love, in Bacon’s work. That is clear through the songs."

Sewell was drawn to Bacon as a kindred soul. "I’m known as a challenging writer prepared to go into the dark places so there was a philosophical affinity. The world he saw and experienced is one with which I had some sympathy, and his world of violence and horror was something I am familiar with. So the work spoke to me as it speaks to many people.

"As I got closer to him through the play I realised there were fascinating things about him as a man and how he lived his life, they had to do with being a person who lived his philosophy.

"I find his life and work bracing and inspiring, there is no sentiment left in his work. The images are shocking and he embraced our ape-like nature and didn’t sentimentalise us as different from other creatures.

"The way I see my art, and where I see it having power like Bacon’s, is in my role as a truth teller. Everyone can see or speak the truth, but it is a special responsibility of artists to do that if we can. Bacon always spoke and lived the truth." 

* What: Three Furies: Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon

* Who: By Stephen Sewell. Score by Basil Hogios. Directed by Jim Sharman. Produced by Performing Lines. Starring Simon Burke, Socratis Otto, Paula Arundell

* When: Wednesday, March 2, 7.30pm

Thursday, March 3, 7.30pm

Friday, March 4, 6pm and 9pm

Saturday, March 5, 6pm and 9pm

 

 

 

 

During the last six months of his life, Francis Bacon collaborated with the Parisian photographer Francis Giacobetti on one final project. The resulting series of portraits provides a fitting testament to the life of an outstanding artist, his talent and his menace.

Rather like many of his subjects, Bacon exuded a palpable sense of danger, as if the only thing you could rely on him for was his unpredictability. Giacobetti's prints capture a sense of his subject's intensity, prompting you to wonder what it is he is thinking or planning.

While some of the images are more conventionally set up, there are, perhaps inevitably, a number that resemble Bacon's paintings. In a peach-washed print, he is reduced to an out-of-focus figure in the middle of a storm of consciousness. Is he howling, raging against the dying of the light? He seems to be contorted, bending forward and clutching at himself. In another, black- and-white shot, he leans forward in a chair, wary and tense, as if anticipating Giacobetti's next move.

University Gallery, Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle upon Tyne (0191-227 4424) to 2 Dec

 

 

 

 

Face to face with Bacon

Francis Bacon and Henri Cartier-Bresson both have new exhibitions in Edinburgh, but it is the former who understood the possibilities of photography best, says Gaby Wood

   

 

 

 Unshown Bacon portrait exported from Iran

 

   By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent, The Independent, Thursday, 2 June 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Alan Mellor: Image maker

Chris Arnot meets David Alan Mellor, the man who caused a stir by daring to redefine the visual arts

The Guardian, Tuesday March 1, 2005

 

Much has changed in academia and the art world since 1987, when he caused a stir at the Barbican by mingling film, photography and painting through his exhibition Paradise Lost: The New Romantic Imagination in Britain. "It was the dawn of yuppiedom," he recalls. "And I remember the yuppies parting, as they might for royalty, when Francis Bacon arrived on the first night. I had one of his paintings on one wall, a Michael Powell film on another and a picture of a barn owl by the photographer Eric Hosking nearby. Bacon was very excited. For him there was never a problem in mixing art forms. If you want to understand his work, you have to take that on board. Some of the yuppies, on the other hand, left rather quickly, shaking their heads."

David Alan Mellor has written extensively on Francis Bacon and contemporary art.  Mellor is professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex. He lives in Brighton, England.

 

 

 

 

 New York Arts Magazine March 2004

 

Letter From Valencia: Francis Bacon

Ginger Danto

 

                                                                              

Fragment of a Crucifixion 1950 Francis Bacon          “I’m like a grinding machine. I’ve looked at everything and everything I’ve seen has gone in and been ground up very fine. Images breed images in me.”  - Francis Bacon (in conversation*) Francis Bacon famously worked amid chaos. From the knee-deep detritus of his studio, photographed with archeological keenness by celebrated witnesses, came a pictorial universe of pristine, pastel-toned spaces reminiscent of nowhere on earth. Modernist interiors, revelatory of Bacon’s early employ as decorator, cast in the utopic range of the Nabis palette: lavenders, pinks, oranges, field greens and velvet blues. Beguiling hues, which barely offset the shrill subject of flesh. For within these seductive enclosures, often delineated by some architectural prop – a wall, door or vestige of furniture such as table or even toilet, or just geometric lines roughed out in painterly chalk – some corporeal presence struggles with its own battered anatomy. A man, sometimes a dog, more pathetically a paralytic child or mere body part – and obsessively, through a certain period, the iconic semblance of a Cardinal or Pope. It may be hard to reconcile, regarding the artist’s working environment and the spartan world Bacon cast upon preferably large canvases, such discrepancy of painterly vision. But then, any glance at the protagonists – variously disfigured, dismembered, eviscerated, or silently screaming – affords such a glossary of private torment, that it becomes evident such figures are borne of somewhere chaos reigns.                       The paradoxical spectre of Bacon’s oeuvre – the beauty of the composition versus the hideous suffering depicted – challenged both the public and critics well into the artist’s career. But as the power of art to shock has been mediated by a world exponentially more shocking, an acceptance has come of Bacon’s aesthetic prophecy of what is now everywhere around us. And people close to the artist – reportedly a difficult man embattled by asthma, alcoholism and issues of identity – have led the way in our appreciation. Among them is Michael Peppiatt, a British critic and collector whose 30 year friendship with Bacon yielded a major biography, scores of articles and, most recently, the curating of the exhibit The Sacred and the Profane at IVAM, the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain. The original premise of the show, and its raison d’etre for inaugurating in Spain, was to present Bacon’s Pope series in its entirety: over 40 paintings inspired by Diego Velazquez’ 1640 Portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted between 1949 and 1971 to understand, if not fully why, to what extent Bacon was consumed by this single and slightly sinister image. Image of another time, another country, even a culture defined by everything Bacon denied, namely meaning and religiosity and hierarchy before an uncertain God. Moreover, Bacon may never have seen the actual painting, but worked off reproductions papered across his studio. Doubtless for practical reasons, the show’s focus shifted to a wider but no less relevant theme of The Sacred and the Profane. Relevant because this premise highlights a duality that applies to everything Bacon accomplished, from the matter of his daily existence – maintaining a high-wire lifestyle alongside a disciplined work ethic – to the disturbing dichotomy in his oeuvre, where horror occupies a handsome setting. And indeed, as Peppiat notes in his catalogue essay, alongside depictions of often sacred subject matter, Bacon celebrated the most profane acts of man. Anchoring the exhibit is the 1640 Portrait of Pope Innocent X, courtesy of the National Gallery in Washington, and attributed to Velazquez’ circle. Its subject casts a wary eye without, and serves as a template for Bacon’s interpretations – nine gathered altogether on the papal theme. Here is a Pope cloaked in white, (Study for a Pope III, 1961), with a red mantle and profile almost animal-like in its deformity. As if the man inside the symbol of the man has usurped the physical features. Here is another Pope, visibly aggressive, with mouth wide and teeth bared in some perversion of papal dignity (Pope II, 1951.) It is as if the subject expresses, albeit silently, a mime of outrage surely unavailable to the public figure. This conflating of private and public self touches some essence of Bacon’s call: to express the violent stuff within man, no matter his station. Such directive could explain the show’s three versions of Bacon’s Crucifixions, including the perennially powerful Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) [see above] where the scaffold of a white cross is riven, not unlike a piece of wood beset by termites, by imaginary fragments of the artist’s making: nebulous naked bodies, a gaping mouth, pale blood. The imagery easily shocks, for all its cryptic sketchiness: viewers at the IVAM opening were said to avoid it. Beyond these plays on ‘sacred’ subject, Peppiatt’s exhibit, drawn from major international collections, surveys the more generically transgressive emblems of Bacon’s oeuvre: a solitary dog caught in some inexpressible anguish (Study of a Dog, 1952), with a man’s face surreptitiously emerging from the wolf’s, and a naked man on all fours, not un-dog like, bent down in the spiky grass (Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952). Both offer, along with the surreal Man with Dog (1953) casting two bodies indecipherable in a lunar blue, a vivid portrait of ‘the beast within.’ Even, or especially when portraying himself, Bacon was not exempt from some representational torment. The serenely seated figure in Study for a Self-Portrait (1963) has the visage of a monster. It thus shows a kinship with other models in Bacon’s gallery of portraits, including George Dyer, Henrietta Moras or Isabel Rawsthorne, each more gruesome than the next. Bacon favoured triptychs, perhaps for their magisterial quality. Within the three consecutive panels the artist could compose a narrative, while calling on the viewer’s imagination to complete it. The final gallery, with several such triptychs, almost feels like a sacred place, or its opposite, some form of hell, so potent are the disturbing images. These include Triptych inspired by the Orestia of Aeshylus (1981), one of several homages to Antiquity. Hung on the central wall, but perceived from the entry like a beacon, with its riveting colours, is one Triptych (1987.) It shows a leg injury, not unlike the sort matadors suffer, when they are gored by a bull. A bull’s horned head depicted in the third panel corroborates such simple theory. And the blood orange background, composed with an animal-hide gray, is every bullring in Spain suffused with an evening sun. There may be no better place to address such a theme than Spain, which is also one of the deeply religious western countries, where citizens seek a balance between inculcated sacred ideals and ever-present evidence of a wayward world. And of all the Spanish cities, with perhaps the exception of Seville, the most appropriate may be Valencia, where day-long church services are held honouring the various saints. Among the most popular is the Virgin of the Desparados, surely the saint to whom Bacon’s subjects would pray, if they had the means. The artist died in 1992 in Madrid, having sojourned for some time in a country where his life and art came fragilely together. * From Peppiatt’s essay, Francis Bacon: The Sacred and the Profane in the IVAM catalogue. Francis Bacon: Lo Sagrado y Lo Profano (The Sacred and the Profane) will be at IVAM, the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia, through March 21, 2004.

 

 

 

 

FALSE FRIEND

 

 

By John Banville,, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine  27 February 2005

 

 

For Francis Bacon the camera wasn’t a threat to painterly creation but the perfect means to an end. A fascinating new book reveals how the artist used the ‘significant falsehood’ of photography to expose brutally even those he loved most.

All art is touched with the prophetic, and none more darkly so than the art of Francis Bacon. There are two particularly uncanny instances of Bacon’s involuntary ability to foretell the future in his paintings. In Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963), a study based on a series of photographs of Bacon’s friend Henrietta Moraes, the syringe was added only because, the artist said, he wanted the effect of a nailing of the flesh onto the bed’. Years later, however, Moraes, on her own admission, did become addicted to drugs.

A more startling, and for Bacon surely a more harrowing, case of artistic divination occurs in the triptych Three Figures in a room, the left-hand panel of which depicts a broad backed naked man, seen from behind, sitting on a lavatory. The painting was done in 1964, the year that Bacon began an affair with George Dyer, an East Ender who moved on the fringes of the criminal underworld. Dyer, a handsome, stocky, silkily brutal looking man with an exciting edge of danger to him, became a rich source of images for Bacon images which are among the most powerful in the Bacon oeuvre.

The figure in the triptych is most likely Dyer, for it bears a strong resemblance to the subjects of other paintings of male nudes in which Dyer is the named sitter. In October 1971, seven years after Three Figures and barely 36 hours 1971 before one of the high points of Bacon’s career, the opening in Paris of a huge retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide in the room he and Bacon were sharing at a hotel on the rue des Saints Pères. The dead man was discovered slumped on the lavatory, a scene hauntingly commemorated in the stark but beautiful Triptych May June, 1973.

In the early 1930s, at the very start of Bacon’s career as an artist, there was another, subtler presagement when the collector Sir Michael Sadler, having purchased, by telegram, Bacon’s early Crucifixion (1933) after seeing a photograph of it in an art magazine, went on to commission a portrait from the young artist. He sent an X ray of his own skull as the model. The result was another crucifixion scene, incorporating a representation of the transparent skull; it was an apt image for a depiction of the agony on Golgotha the place of the skull’ a subject to which Bacon returned often in the early years of his career, and traces of which persist throughout his work.

This was the first occasion on which Bacon transferred an image straight from the camera on to the canvas; it was not to be the last. Indeed, from the early 1960s onwards he would paint portraits only from photographs taken by specially commissioned professionals, especially the Vogue photographer John Deakin, whose portrait studies Bacon considered ‘the best since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron’. Bacon adopted this method at least partly out of regard for his sitters, whose features he would distort to the point of turning them into grotesques. ‘If I like them,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to practise the injury that I do them in my work before them. I would rather practise the injury in private…’

Bacon’s use of photography, either as a stimulus for inspiration or as a source of subject matter, was not as extensive as that of, for instance, Picasso, among whose effects after his death were discovered several thousand photographs, many taken by the artist himself. But Bacon did leave many photographs strewn about his studio in Reece Mews, Kensington, the contents of which were donated to the city of Dublin by Bacon’s heir, John Edwards; the studio, lovingly recreated in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, is a Baconian room within a room, a kind of camera lucida that is viewed from the back through spy holes fitted with lenses.

Amid the dense clutter of painting materials in the studio bristling pots of brushes recall the patch of thorns into which the agonised figure in the right side panel of the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is thrusting its hand there are countless smudged and scribbled on photographs, including studies of Bacon himself by John Deakin, Peter Beard, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. Bacon drew on photographs literally, in many cases as a means of capturing the world and people at moments of physical contingency and stress. He frequently incorporated photographic images directly into his paintings, most famously stills of the nurse’s face in the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, and colour reproductions of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X.

The Velázquez picture was one to which Bacon returned repeatedly, and which he made the basis of what are perhaps his most famous works, the ‘Screaming Popes’ series done at various stages from the 1950s through to the early 1970s. He said of Pope Innocent X, ‘I became obsessed by this painting and I bought photograph after photograph of it. I think really that was my first subject.’

In light of this, it is an indication of his preference for reproductions over originals that during a three month visit to Rome in 1954, after parting from his lover Peter Lacy and when he had time on his hands, he did not bother to go to see the Velazquez portrait, which he could easily have done, since it is housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. This omission was not unusual; there are many accounts of Bacon on his travels being urged by the curators of this or that great gallery to come and view their treasures always in vain. (It is surely not incidental to his preference for reproductions over originals that Bacon’s own pictures, even the biggest and most complex of them, retain a remarkable vividness and clarity of composition even when reproduced in quite small photographs, as can clearly be seen in a new study of his work, In Camera, Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, by Martin Harrison.)

A central source of images for Bacon in his early years as a painter was the weekly illustrated news magazine Picture Post. There are some telling working documents in the Bacon archives showing images clipped from Picture Post, notably, for instance, two shots of Goering and Goebbels, both of them haranguing their supporters with mouth agape and an arm uplifted, a pose which is endemic in Bacon’s work.

Bacon also kept by him throughout his working life a small number of key books with photographic illustrations. One was a volume on diseases of the mouth, with hand tinted plates, bought from a Paris bookstall in the 1930s. Another was Positioning in Radiography by KC Clark, published in 1939, showing the correct ways in which to situate patients undergoing X ray investigation. The artist plundered both these books for working material. A further important source of images was the splendidly named Baron Albert von Schrenck Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation, published in English in 1920. It is a photograph from this last, of the medium Eva Carrière apparently producing from her head an ectoplasmic image of a woman’s face, which is a direct model for the figure in the left-hand panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the breakthrough work for Bacon and the one he considered his first real painting.

Bacon was nonetheless indifferent to photography as an art form and does not seem to have had any great interest in taking pictures himself, although Triptych March 1974 is directly modelled on a Polaroid self portrait shot in a mirror. The few of his own photographs that survive are surprisingly conventional; the portrait of his cousin Diana Watson taken in the late 1930s, for example, and the pictures of his sister lanthe Knott that he took in the 1960s. Yet in the triptych Studies from the Human Body (1970) the camera itself makes an appearance, a wonderfully bug eyed, minatory monster that is a sort of parody of the human head.

It is Bacon’s revolutionary treatment of the head that is his greatest overall achievement. No one, not even Picasso, had dared to twist and mould the skull and the face as Bacon does, smearing them, scooping great hollows out of them, turning them inside out, and yet always retaining a likeness which, as in the case especially of George Dyer and Henrietta Moraes, becomes more compelling and unmistakable the more violent the distortion. He took his inspiration in this area from a wide variety of sources the scream of the mother in Poussin’s Massacre of the innocents he described as the greatest human cry in art’ and even from antiquity. Consider, for instance, the striking echoes of another of Bacon’s working documents, a photograph of an early Egyptian bust of Pthames, in the Sketch for Portrait of Lisa (1955). Bacon’s picture, bathed in an uncharacteristic stillness, is a profound, post-Freudian study which yet retains the classical poise of the ancient head or at least the reproduction of that ancient head that was in part its inspiration.

Before 1962 Bacon used only trouvailles, the bits and scraps chanced upon in illustrated books, or clipped from magazines, or in the action studies of Eadweard Muybridge, or found in film stills. After 1962 he began to commission photographs of models ‘to conform,’ according to Martin Harrison, ‘with preconceived ideas for a painting.’ Important instances of such commissioning are John Deakin’s pictures of Henrietta Moraes, Muriel Belcher and George Dyer Deakin’s photograph of Dyer with his head turned violently to the left, as if flinching from a blow or from the sight of something terrible, recurs throughout the series of memorial pictures Bacon painted of his dead lover in the 1970s, pictures which are perhaps the pinnacle of Bacon’s art. Bacon always deplored the interpretation of his pictures as testaments of philosophical angst, despite the extremities into which he forces his human subjects. What he was after was the actual, and his people, no matter how physically deformed they may be in his representation of them, are real human beings.

Bacon may be considered to have set out specifically to answer the confrontational question which many painters in the 19th century thought photography to pose: what is the best means of representing quotidian reality? The advent of photography led some artists to despair. The painter Paul Delaroche declared, as early as 1839, From today painting is dead.’ Even an eminence as lofty as Turner observed mournfully: ‘This is the end of Art. lam glad I have had my day.’ They were wrong, of course, as Bacon among others was to prove. True, painting lost to the camera something of its pre eminence, particularly in documentary terms, and it was that something that Bacon was determined to recoup. In that endeavour he utilised the photograph itself, but only, in the critic John Russell’s fine phrase, as a ‘significant falsehood’.

Bacon himself expressed his position with his usual candour and eloquence: ‘I think of myself as a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed media jackdaws who use photographs etc more or less literally or cut them up and rearrange them. The literalness of photographs so used even if they are only fragments will prevent the emergence of real images, because the literalness of the appearance has not been sufficiently digested and transformed. In my case the photographs become a sort of compost out of which images emerge from time to time. Those images may be partly conditioned by the mood of the material which has gone into the pulveriser.’

It was the real that Bacon was after, and he concentrated his quest in a lifelong interrogation of the human form. What is remarkable in Bacon’s work is not the deformities he inflicts upon his subjects or the sense of desperation and violence they express, but the extraordinary sense of human presence that he achieves. These people, twisted, as it might seem, almost out of recognition, are fleshy, palpable not nude but stark naked and graspable in the extreme painterly quality of their appearance. ‘Bacon’s version of realism,’ Harrison writes, ‘depended on live, full pigment. He did not paint simulacra of photographs, but he appropriated their transformative charge to disrupt European cultural traditions, to dissolve past into present.’ That dissolution is a large part of Bacon’s greatness, the alchemical process which makes him one of the quintessential artists of our desolated and blood boltered time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I MEET David Edwards outside a Tube station in west London.

He's waiting for his son to finish work and says I can wait with him. The only reason he's agreed to see me, he says, is because he wants to put a few things straight about his brother, John, the man who, it was suggested yesterday, had frittered away £10 million of the fortune left to him by Francis Bacon, widely regarded as the greatest British painter of the 20th century. "John was a really good bloke," says David, but then he would say that, wouldn't he?

John died of lung cancer aged 53 in a Bangkok hospital in March 2003.

After liabilities, his estate was worth less than Pounds 800,000 but there is speculation that Bacon's bequest could have been worth Pounds 30million by the time Edwards died and rumours that he sold some of Bacon's paintings through galleries in London and New York. So what has happened to Bacon's legacy?

To say the least, the art world was startled when Bacon, who died of a heart attack in 1992, left his fortune to Edwards, an uneducated former barman and son of an East End docker nearly 40 years his junior. But Edwards wasn't.

Bacon, whom he referred to in his Cockney slang style as "Eggs", had told him several years before he would inherit everything.

"Francis Bacon was madly in love with John," says David Edwards, a trim and youthful 56-year-old dressed in shades of grey, from his short, silvery hair to his sweater and shiny trousers. "He was obsessed with him. If you walked into a bar and Francis was there but John wasn't, he'd be agitated. As soon as John appeared, he'd calm down.

"But Francis knew John had a partner and after a while he realised ... well, it was a crush and when that had gone, there was something on a much deeper level between them. If you saw them together, you could see their bond was strong."

Bacon painted 30 portraits or more of Edwards during their 18- year friendship (David insists they were never lovers; John had a partner of 27 years, Philip Mordue, a fellow Eastender with his own colourful past).

The relationship between the volatile, irascible artist and his muse and confidant, although improbable, was intense and Bacon thought Edwards his "one true friend". In fact, says David, it was closer to a "father-son relationship".

They met in 1974 at the Colony Club, the Soho drinking den where artists and misfits mingled with royalty, gangsters and barrow boys.

David Edwards had, in fact, met Bacon several times before his younger brother did. He was running three pubs in the East End and was friends with Muriel Belcher, the Colony's owner.

"I liked Francis straight away," recalls David. "He was generous and witty.

I had no idea who he was or what he'd done, he just seemed like an amazing nutcase. He would walk into a bar, order a bottle of Cristal champagne and before the barman had a chance to serve it, he would announce: 'I'm fed up with this place, let's go somewhere else.'" Muriel Belcher wanted to take Bacon to one of Edwards's pubs and asked David to lay on some champagne which, of course, he was left trying to sell to his unimpressed punters because the mercurial Bacon didn't show up.

When John Edwards, who managed one of the pubs, was introduced to Bacon a few weeks later, he gave the artist "some stick". More used to being fawned over, Bacon was enchanted by this plucky, handsome young man. That he appeared to have a complete lack of education (Edwards, who was dyslexic, left school at 15 and could barely read or write) seemed to make him even more compelling.

"It was obvious he was taken with John," says David. "John didn't bow down to him - he wasn't intimidated by Bacon's money or influence. Later, when they became friends, John was always very truthful to him and they used to have the odd fight but John wasn't scared of him."

David says he shared this strong character with his brother. They would have needed it - John and David Edwards were both gay and it would not have been easy for them growing up in working-class Wapping.

Bacon, on the other hand, was the son of a wealthy middleclass family.

The Edwards brothers' father worked at the docks, their mother worked in a delicatessen in Hackney and they had two older brothers and two sisters.

"Both my older brother and my father were champion amateur boxers so it didn't go down too well to have two poofs in the family," says David. His father found this difficult to accept at first. But the brothers were successful publicans - "If we had been gay and poor, it would have been a problem. Fortunately, we both made good money and with that came respectability."

Although David refuses to say whether his younger brother had any relationships with women, his own love life was muddled. David got married at the age of 26. "I said 'I do' when I should have said 'I don't'," he remembers with a wry smile.

The marriage lasted just three months - it broke down because his wife found out he was having an affair with a woman who was six months pregnant.

 

 

 

Boyfriend of artist Bacon spent £10m in 10 years

By David Sapsted,  The Daily Telegraph 31/08/2004

 

Most of the £11 million fortune left by Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century's most acclaimed artists, was frittered away by his male companion in little more than a decade. Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 at the age of 82 and, in a shock to the art world, left his entire estate to John Edwards, the uneducated son of a London docker, who was half the artist's age. Mr Edwards died of cancer in Thailand last year and there was speculation that the Bacon fortune had grown to £30 million. But details of the will show that Mr Edwards, a former barman, spent most of the money on high living and on gifts for friends and relatives, leaving him with a net estate worth less than £800,000. Mr Edwards, 53, was Bacon's companion for 16 years and featured in 30 of his paintings. Although both were homosexual, Mr Edwards denied in an interview a year before his death that they had been lovers. After Bacon's death, he moved first to the Florida Keys before spending the last nine years of his life living with Philip Mordue, his boyfriend of 27 years and a fellow Cockney nicknamed "Phil the Till", in a penthouse apartment in the seaside town of Pattaya south of the Thai capital, Bangkok. There were reports at the time of Mr Edwards's death in March last year that he had made Mr Mordue the main beneficiary in his will.. But probate records show that the estate - worth £3,125,704 gross but reduced to £786,702 after liabilities - was left mainly to the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, a trust set up by Mr Edwards a year before his death to promote Bacon's work. Mr Edwards also stipulated that £50,000 was to be spent on a party for his family and friends at the Harrington Club in Kensington, west London. The principal drink was to be Krug champagne. After inheriting the Bacon estate, Mr Edwards is believed to have bought properties for his parents and other members of his family in Suffolk. He is also believed to have sold some of the paintings left to him by Bacon, primarily later works which were less well regarded by critics, through galleries in London and New York. The will stated that Mr Edwards wanted his ashes scattered at a farm near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, which he bought after Bacon's death. His bequests included Bacon's 1962 Sketch for Seated Figure, which he left to Tony Shafrazi, the owner of a New York art gallery. John Eastman, Mr Edwards's lawyer and the brother of the late Linda McCartney, was left a silver plate and certificate presented to Mr Edwards by the lord mayor of Dublin in 2001 after he presented Bacon's studio to the city.

 

 

 

 

  Friend who inherited Bacon's £11m fortune went on 11-year spending spree

  Sam Jones

  The Guardian, Tuesday August 31, 2004

 

  

                              Philip Mordue with Dave Courtney

Records show that Edwards, who died of lung cancer in a Bangkok hospital, left an estate with a gross value of £3,125,704. After liabilities, that figure comes down to £786,702.

Although Edwards was Bacon's closest friend for 16 years, the art world raised its collective eyebrow when the artist bequeathed his entire estate - including his shabby studio in South Kensington and several of his paintings - to a man summed up by his friends as "a typical East End diamond geezer".

Their suspicions may have been confirmed when rumours circulated that he had sold some of Bacon's paintings in London and New York. However, the art he inherited was mainly made up of late Bacon works which were less well regarded by critics.

There is also speculation that his legacy, which could have risen to £30m by the time he died, may have been left to Philip Mordue, his boyfriend of 27 years.

He and Mordue - a fellow east Londoner nicknamed Phil the Till - lived together in a luxury penthouse in Pattaya, Thailand, for the last nine years of Edwards' life.

His will stated that the bulk of his estate should be left in trust, with his trustees having the power to distribute it to any charity or individual.

But Edwards also specified that £50,000 should be spent on a funeral party for his family and friends at the exclusive Harrington Club in London.

And, in a final flourish worthy of his old friend, he decreed that Krug champagne should be served to those gathered.

 

 

 

 

 

  Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, June 18 2004

 

  

 

 

 

 

  £9.5m required to save the 'lost' Bacon

     By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

     The Times, May 28, 2004

 

      

            Study after Velasquez  1950  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Bringing home the Bacon

 

    By Luke Leitch, Evening Standard London 17.06.04

 

 

     

        Bacon's triptych Two Figures Lying On A Bed With Attendants has its first public showing after 30 years hidden away in Iran

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Bacon's rare portraits of a female lover go to auction

 

Paintings by Francis Bacon of one of his two known female lovers were forecast yesterday to fetch £1.5m to £2m at auction in London this month.

They are of the friend about whom the famously homosexual painter bragged to the magazine Paris Match: "You know, I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and George Bataille's girlfriend."

Isabel Rawsthorne was one of the strikingly independent, good-looking people of her time, with a warm and distinguished face. Yet her fate - as model and mistress to several great 20th-century artists - was to be shown in strange ways by her lovers and admirers.

Picasso gave her wild hair and a vertical mouth. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti based some of his stick people on her. And Bacon's canvases, titled Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, make her look lion-faced, with a nose and cheeks which appear to have had skin flayed from them.

Raised in east London and herself a painter, Rawsthorne was one of Bacon's closest friends and more frequent models in the Soho milieu they moved in, centred round the Colony club. In his book about the artist, Michael Peppiatt says Bacon respected and to some extent looked up to her.

She had the "surprised expression of someone who has just heard a marvellous joke and wishes to share it", according to the journalist Daniel Farson, another club regular.

When she met Bacon in the early 1960s, Rawsthorne was 48 and most of her artists were behind her. By the age of 22 she had had a child by the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Living with the painter André Derain in Paris introduced her to Giacometti, who drank at the same brasserie as Picasso.

"Picasso used to sit at the table opposite and one day, after staring at me particularly hard, he jumped up and said to Alberto: 'Now I know how to do it,'" she told Farson. "He dashed back to his studio to paint my portrait - with little red eyes, wild hair and a vertical mouth - one of five he painted from memory."

She married the composer Constant Lambert and, after his death, the conductor and composer Alan Rawsthorne. She died in 1992.

Bacon's only other known excursion into heterosexuality came while he was a young man, according to Peppiatt.

This was with a prostitute who, Bacon said, ate chips while he attempted intercourse.

The three paintings are being sold by an unnamed collector by Christie's on June 24. The record price for a Bacon canvas is £4.6m for Studies of the Human Body, paid in 2001.

 

 

 

 

 

INSIDE ART  A Loan From Tehran

 

For the first time since arriving in Iran 36 years ago, Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants, a 1968 triptych by Francis Bacon, is to be exhibited publicly. But not in Iran: it will be the centerpiece of a small exhibition of Bacon's work at Tate Britain in London in April.

''Obviously it's very exciting,'' said Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain. ''The chance to bring a work by Bacon completely new to the British public animates our existing collection.'' While the Tate has important holdings of Bacon, it doesn't have a 1960's triptych, which makes the loan particularly interesting.

The Marlborough Gallery in New York sold the painting to the Shah of Iran the year it was made. Since then it has mostly been in storage at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, along with works by other masters like Picasso, de Kooning and Warhol that have not been considered suitable for display for political and cultural reasons.

Although so much of the collection has gone unseen, museums and collectors worldwide have known about it and have coveted some of what it has in storage. Last fall the museum turned down a staggering $105-million offer from an unidentified collector for a single painting: a rare and exceptional 1950 de Kooning drip painting from its collection.

Even though none of its holdings are for sale, the museum will readily lend works. Three paintings - a Picasso, an Ernst and a de Kooning - just came come off the walls of Le Scuderie Papali al Quirinale in Rome, where they were part of a show called ''Metafisica,'' which ended on Tuesday and centered around de Chirico and his followers.

''We are going to send the Bacon in two or three months,'' said Ali Reza Semiazar, director of the museum in Iran. ''They asked for it unofficially a year and a half ago.''

In exchange the British Council has organized ''British Sculpture in the 20th Century,'' scheduled to open next month at the Tehran museum. The show is to include works by Henry Moore, Anthony Caro, Damien Hirst and Bill Woodrow. Tate Britain is among the show's lenders. Still, Mr. Semiazar stressed, the sculpture show isn't the reason for the loan. ''The Tate Gallery has one of the best collections of Bacon,'' he said.

Asked if officials at the Tate were concerned about the safety of artworks being sent to Iran, Sir Nicholas Serota, director of all the Tate galleries, said, ''As the British Council is the cultural arm of the Foreign Office, we are happy to be advised by them concerning security and safety issues.''

 

 

 

 

Bacon triptych saved from ayatollahs

Lost masterpiece surfaces in Teheran vault, writes Nigel Reynolds

The Daily Telegraph 18/06/2004

 

Few modern paintings have a history quite like it.

Tate Britain put on show yesterday a virtually unknown homo-erotic triptych painted by the late Francis Bacon in 1968.

Improbably, the piece is owned by the Iranian state and, for obvious reasons, it has never been displayed.

Experts in the West had lost track of the work, titled Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, and regarded it as a lost masterpiece.

It is thought that it would fetch at least £5 million on the open market.

For 30 years, the risque triptych was squirrelled away in the vaults of Teheran's Museum of Contemporary Art, out of sight and out of mind, made safe from the disapproving eyes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeni.

Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, stumbled on it on a family holiday to Iran in 2001.

Making a courtesy call on Dr Sami Azar, the director of the Teheran museum, he was led to the storerooms and the treasure was unwrapped before him.

Dr Deuchar said yesterday: "I didn't even know of its existence. I was astonished to see it and was exhilarated by its quality.

"Quite rapidly, I decided that I might broach the idea of it coming on loan to Tate Britain.

"I don't think that it is surprising that it hasn't been seen in Teheran but in the context of Bacon's work as a whole it's not remarkable for its homo-eroticism so much as its quality."

Bacon, a Soho high-lifer and promiscuous homosexual, was probably not, it is safe to assume, one of the favourite Western artists of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants was, in fact, bought for the country in 1975 in the dying days of the Peacock Throne, by the ruling Pahlavi dynasty, whose pro-Western policies - and rigorous secret services - fanned the revolution in 1979.

Through a foundation that she controlled, Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the last Shah of Iran, quietly built up a small but significant collection of Western art for the museum.

When the Shah was deposed, works by Henry Moore, Renoir, Picasso, Warhol and Dali joined the Bacon in the museum's strongrooms.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants was last seen in Europe in 1972 at an exhibition in Dusseldorf. In the catalogue for a big Bacon retrospective at the Tate a decade ago, its whereabouts were listed as unknown.

It is on loan to this country for six months, joining nearly a dozen other pictures by the artist owned by Tate Britain.

Dr Azar, who must still walk a the tightrope as reformers and traditionalists struggle for ascendancy in Iran, finally plans to show it in Teheran on its return, Dr Deuchar said yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN AUTUMN 1991 the Corsican photographer Francis Giacobetti began an extraordinary series of portraits of Francis Bacon. He was introduced to Bacon, a famously reluctant photographic subject, by the artist's close friend, Michel Archimbaud. The two got along famously. "Why didn't you introduce me before?" said Bacon. They met 11 times over the next few months, for lunch or dinner, or for the extensive portrait sessions which took place in suites in two London hotels - 11 Cadogan Gardens and Browns - and a rented studio.

Bacon seems to have warmed to Giacobetti's fluid, low-tech approach. "I had no lights. In the studio I found a strip of neon and I shot a lot of portraits using just that." Giacobetti was inspired by Bacon's paintings, and many of the portraits echo familiar motifs - meat on a hook, a single lightbulb - and colours from the artist's palette. There are triptychs and diptychs, and a fascinating sequence of Bacon painting. And while Giacobetti worked, they talked. In the end they decided to capture their interview on video; some of it is reproduced here.

According to Giacobetti, "Bacon enjoyed the process very much. Usually he hated to pose. He told me, 'I'm very shy. I hate myself. I'm like an owl.' And he was so sharp. I've photographed everyone - Picasso, the Dalai Lama, Yehudi Menuhin, Einstein ... But I never saw anyone so clever."

The two met for the last time in early 1992. Bacon died that April in Madrid. It was 11 years before Giacobetti was finally able to realise the work and produce the prints, which are currently being shown for the first time at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Time has done nothing to dilute their impact, or the stark honesty of the artist's words.

Francis Giacobetti: Tell me about your childhood.

Francis Bacon: I remember my shyness above all. I didn't feel good about myself. People frightened me. I felt like I wasn't normal. The fact that I was asthmatic prevented me from going to school; I spent all my time with family and the priest who gave me my schooling. So I didn't have any friends, I was very alone. I remember crying a lot. When I think of my childhood, I see something very heavy, very cold, like a block of ice. I think I was unhappy as a child. I only ever had one view: that of emerging from it. Added to this was my shyness ... it was like an illness. It was unbearable. Later on, I thought that a shy old man is ridiculous, so I tried to change. But it didn't work.

Even though financially we didn't really have any problems (we had a few but not a great deal), I still have the memory of a miserable childhood, as my parents were bourgeois. I am inclined to say that I got the wrong family. I don't think it suited me.

My father didn't love me, that's for sure. I think he hated me. He didn't want to spend money on me. He was always looking for an excuse to get his servants to beat me. He was a difficult man, very vindictive. He lost his temper with everyone, he didn't have any friends. He was aggressive ... an old bastard. When I was about 15 years old, I got laid by the grooms that worked for him. He was a racehorse trainer, a failed trainer. That's definitely the reason why I have never painted horses. I think it's a very beautiful animal but my childhood memories are quite negative and the horse brings back a distant anguish. And besides, I don't like the smell of horse dung, but I find it sexually arousing, like urine. It's very real, it's very virile. But it's also the reminder of my father, who was an emotionally disturbed person. He didn't love me and I didn't love him either. It was very ambiguous though, because I was sexually attracted to him. At the time, I didn't know how to explain my feelings. I only understood afterwards, by sleeping with his servants.

FG What role did photography play in your work?

FB I have always been very interested in photography. I've looked at photos much more than paintings. Because they are more real than reality itself. When we witness an event, we are often unable to explain the details. In police inquiries, every witness has a different view of the event. When you look at an image that symbolises the event, you can browse through the snapshot of it and experience it in a much stronger way, and embrace it with more intensity. Photography, in my case, reflects the event in a clearer, more direct way. Contemplation allows me to imagine my version of the truth and the image that I have of this truth leads me to discover other ideas, and so on ... My work becomes a chain of ideas created by various images that I look at and that I have often registered with contradictory subjects. I look for the suggestion of an image in comparison to another.

I enjoy looking at images since my obsession is painting in a representational manner, so I need to see forms and representational spaces. That gives me momentum but I don't copy photographs apart from a few [Eadweard] Muybridge characters that I have integrated into paintings such as L'Enfant paralytique or Les Lutteurs. It's like cooking. (I was once a chef in a restaurant.) You mix the vegetables, you know the taste of each thing individually, but the blending with herbs and meat, the mixture of different molecules, produces another completely different taste. Every art needs to use images, except for, I think, music.

There are reproductions of my paintings all around my kitchen but I no longer see them. Those that are in the studio help me to imagine details of other images. There are also heaps of illustrated books, magazines, photos. I call it my imagination material. I need to visualise things that lead me to other forms, that lead me to visualise forms that lead me to other forms or subjects, details, images that influence my nervous system and transform the basic idea. It's the same with books or films that I see. I think it's often like that for artists. Picasso was a sponge, he made use of everything. Me, I'm like an albatross: I take in thousands of images like fish, then I spit them out on the canvas.

My principal source of visual information is Muybridge, the photographer of the last [19th] century who photographed human and animal movement. It's a work of unbelievable precision. He created a visual dictionary on movement, an animated dictionary. Everything is there, recorded, untalented, without staging, like a sequenced encyclopedia on the possibilities of human and animal movement. For me, who doesn't have any models, it's an unbelievable source of inspiration. The images help me just as much to find ideas as to create them. I look at a lot of very different images, very contradictory and I take in details a bit like those people who eat off other people's plates. When I paint, I have the desire to paint an image that I am imagining, and this image transforms itself. I have also asked a photographer friend to do men fighting but that didn't work. People have always believed that I painted movement directly from photos, but that's completely wrong. I invent what I paint. Besides, it's very often the opposite of natural movement. I have also painted men making love according to Muybridge's images by using images of man fighting. And I have used pornographic images as well. At the time, it interested me. There weren't porno magazines and films like there are now. But I have always been interested in pornography. A painter is alone in front of his canvas; it's his imagination that creates, and sexuality f needs to feed on images that you see or invent. By imagining, you transgress all taboos, anything is possible. And pornography helps. I have seen books of [Robert] Mapplethorpe. It's interesting but too graphic, too plastic. You lose the excitement that only comes from a crude image. Beauty is the enemy of sex.

FG Picasso once admitted to me that nothing aroused him more than drawing female genitals. When you paint men's bodies, is there a physical arousal?

FB When I paint two men buggering, it's not by chance, it's because I feel some kind of need to do it. A physical need. It's more primitive than crucifixions. Painting is very physical as it is, painting scenes of men in action gives me a great pleasure. It's one of the aspects of human behaviour that most interests me. It's instinct, and it's my instinct to paint it. Men's bodies sexually arouse me so I paint men's bodies very often, it makes up almost all of my works. I have also painted women's bodies, but I have destroyed a lot of the canvases. I've kept very few of them, if any. Henrietta Moraes is perhaps the most successful, the one that has the best market I think.

Hence I've also done very crude canvases, very pornographic, but I destroyed them. I found it too easy. For a painter, moments of sexual fantasy can lead to paintings that are often very banal, and when the arousal fades, you realise that it hasn't done anything. It's like drugs. When you are on a high, the result of your work is rarely something of quality: too many things are exterior. And too many exterior things have disrupted your nervous system, and the result is often disappointing.

FG  What do you believe in?

FB I believe in being selfish. I have only myself to think of. I have hardly any family left and very few friends that are still alive. And a painter works with his human material, not with colours and paintbrushes. It's his thoughts that enter the painting. But I don't expect any certainty in life, I don't believe in anything, not in God, not in morality, not in social success ... I just believe in the present moment if it has genius - in the spinning roulette ball or in the emotions that I experience when what I transmit on to the canvas works. I am completely amoral and atheist, and if I hadn't painted, I would have been a thief or a criminal. My paintings are a lot less violent than me. Perhaps if my childhood had been happier, I would have painted bouquets of flowers.

FG  Many think that you stand with Picasso as the most important painter of this century.

FB Celebrity bullshit! We die famous instead of being the unknown soldier. And we always talk rubbish in the small world of art. Perhaps what we have in common is the fact that we like life above all. But Picasso invented everything. After him, we can no longer paint without thinking of him. Fame is of no importance but it is important because one needs to live and sell one's paintings. And there is always, in every one of us, the concept of being the best. Hence, it's vanity and also egoism, because your work is you. It's you who sells yourself: your talent, your instinct, your techniques. There are thousands of painters, but very few are the chosen ones. Even if one defends oneself, one still always wants to leave something that will enter the history of art. That is vanity, the driving force of artists. Artists are very vain. We always think we are making the painting that will revolutionise all painting, and that's why we keep going. You never retire from being vain.

FG You hate conventions?

FB I have never made concessions. Not to fashion, not to constraints, not to anything. I've been lucky enough not to have to, but it's in my character to refuse social life, obligations, and to prefer simple people to sophisticated people. And luck has had it that I haven't needed to compromise myself in any way. Perhaps, since I haven't been to school like other people, I have invented my own rules which please me and which above all are more suited to me.

I also think that I have a difficult character. I'm a pain. I say the truth even if it hurts. I have the excuse of liking wine, and when I'm drunk, I talk a lot of nonsense; but, as I have f an excuse, I make the most of it. We are all prisoners, we are all prisoners of love, one's family, one's childhood, profession. Man's universe is the opposite of freedom, and the older we get, the more this becomes true. I am a desperate optimist. Optimist, because I live from day to day as if I am never going to die. Desperate because I don't have a very high opinion of the human being and of me in particular.

FG What is your vision of the world?

FB Since the beginning of time, we have had countless examples of human violence even in our very civilised century. We have even created bombs capable of blowing up the planet a thousand times over. An artist instinctively takes all this into account. He can't do otherwise. I am a painter of the 20th century: during my childhood I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein, and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps, and daily violence that I've experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers ... But that's not my thing. The only things that interest me are people, their folly, their ways, their anguish, this unbelievable, purely accidental intelligence which has shattered the planet, and which maybe, one day, will destroy it. I am not a pessimist. My temperament is strangely optimistic. But I am lucid.

FG Is death an obsession?

FB Yes, terribly so. One day, when I was 15 or 16 years old, I saw a dog having a crap and I realised at that moment that I was going to die. I think there is a difficult moment in the life of a man. The moment when he discovers that youth is not eternal. On this day I realised this. I thought about death and since then, I think about death every day. But that doesn't stop me from looking at men even of my age, as if everything is still to play for, as if life could have a fresh start and often when I go out in the evenings, I flirt as if I was 50. You should be able to change the motor. That is the privilege of artists, they don't have an age. Passion lasts and passion and freedom is seductive. When I paint, I no longer have an age, just the pleasure or difficulty in painting.

FG How would you like to die?

FB Quickly. 

Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti is at Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albermarle Street, London W1 (020-7629 5161), until 5 July. A signed, limited edition large-format book containing 150 of Bacon's paintings and 250 of Giacobetti's photographs, edited by Olivier Binst, will be published in 2004, priced EUR4,850; contact turner.turner@wanadoo.fr

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

PANDORA

Even friends aren't safe from the Bacon slicer

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent  June 12th, 2003

 

From beyond the grave Francis Bacon has launched an astonishing attack on the late David Sylvester, considered by many to have been Britain's greatest post-war critic and curator of modern art. In a hitherto unpublished interview given to the photographer Francis Giacobetti only two months before he died, the painter said of Sylvester: "I don't think he has a genuine feeling for painting because in the book he wrote with me he mentioned all sorts of frightful people, all these painters whom he loved and admired. I think he has no critical sense." The comments in the interview, reproduced in The Art Newspaper, are all the more surprising given that the two were friends, and the artist was the subject of Sylvester's last book, Looking Back at Bacon. But it seems that the public amity concealed Bacon's low opinion of the critic. James Birch, a friend of Bacon, confirms this view. "Francis thought that he had no taste," Birch tells me. "He often said that Sylvester had no idea about art at all."

 

 

 

The screen painters

The Daily Telegraph   22/05/2003

 

When asked by an interviewer in 1982 if his images were a little macabre and disturbing, Francis Bacon retorts, "What could I paint that is more violent than human nature?"

Then there is the story of unseen, uncut footage of Francis Bacon and William Burroughs in conversation in New York - which lay in a vault for 20 years. Its soundtrack has just been rediscovered by chance, a reminder of the fragility of film history.

The next series is at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival this month, where Anthony Wall, of Arena, will premier his Bacon-Burroughs rediscovery, and Melvyn Bragg, Alan Yentob, and Gerald Fox with Marc Quinn will screen and discuss their work.

 

 

      

                Francis Bacon and William Burroughs in London in 1989   John Minihan

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and John Edwards

East End History.com  March 2003

 

The death last week of John Edwards, barman, photographer, dyslexic illiterate, and multi-millionaire, severs one of the last ties between the East End and post-war Soho. It was a time that saw millionaire painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud rubbing shoulders with journalists such as Daniel Farson, Graham Mason and Jeffrey Bernard; and with East Enders like the Krays, petty crook George Dyer, and Edwards himself.

Edwards’ last days, as a millionaire ex-pat, sipping pink champagne at Le Café Royale in Pattaya, Thailand, were a long way from his East End roots. Born one of six children to a family of dockers turned publicans, his inability to read was no barrier to work in the family pubs. And the strange chain of events that led to him becoming Francis Bacon’s friend, minder and muse began one day in 1974 at one of the family pubs, the Swan, where John was working for his brother. Muriel Belcher, owner of infamous Soho club The Colony Room, used to come to the East End to meet her friend, Joan Littlewood, driving force between the Theatre Royal, Stratford. Belcher told Edwards to order up some champagne, as she would be visiting with Littlewood and Bacon. The group never showed, and a furious John descended on the Dean Street club, to berate Bacon for lumbering him with an unsaleable bottle of bubbly.

Bacon might, by then, have been Britain’s most famous and expensive painter, but he wasn’t likely to be deterred or offended by Edwards’ directness. Art critic Richard Cork described the Colony Room of the time as ‘a mixture of Soho bohemians, often with plummy public school accents, and an East End contingent, with broken noses, looking thuggish, but quite often gay … the whole mixture which fascinated Francis’. And Bacon had been a regular at the Colony since its opening in 1948, entertaining the mixed company with his spiky, often cruel wit. Bacon immediately offered to buy Edwards dinner at Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street. The surprised barman ordered caviar and the two became immediate friends.

They may have seemed an unlikely couple: Edwards was 22, Bacon 41 years older, both were gay, though they maintained that their friendship was platonic. But John’s lack of reverence for Bacon, initially knowing nothing of his art, was refreshing for a man who, though his paintings sold for millions, did his work in a squalid studio/flat, lit by bare bulbs and strewn with rubbish. It was a sometimes chaotic life: Bacon had met his longtime lover and subject George Dyer when he caught the East End crook attempting to burgle his flat in 1964. The two were together for eight turbulent years before Dyer died, overdosed on alcohol and drugs on the eve of one of Bacon’s shows. But though Bacon and his friends consumed enormous amounts of booze, the painter was always at work in his studio at 7am; over the next years he was to paint many studies of his new friend John.

There were trips to the East End too, especially to the Waterman's Arms, the Isle of Dogs pub started by journalist and photographer Daniel Farson (himself to write a biography of the painter The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon and a biography of Spitalfields-based artists Gilbert and George).

Bacon died in 1992, leaving the bulk of his estate, nearly £11m, to Edwards. And though the years after were beset by legal wrangles with Bacon’s London gallery, the money allowed John to live well. He escaped the attention of the London newspapers by decamping first to Florida then to Thailand, where he lived in drunken splendour with Philip Mordue, an ex-convict also from the East End. He also arranged for the painstaking dismantling and reconstruction of Bacon’s chaotic South Kensington studio, which was reassembled as a museum piece in the painter’s native Dublin. And a year ago he set up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, to advance studies of the artist. For the painter, who was so careless of money and his legacy that he gave away flats and kept no inventory of his priceless paintings, his old friend was ensuring that his work would endure.

 

 

 

 

John John Edwards, 53, Francis Bacon Confidant

Brian Clarke, a London artist and the executor of the Bacon estate who was with Mr. Edwards when he died, told The Daily Telegraph last year that Mr. Edwards's attraction to Bacon was that he was always frank.

''John was the only person in London who treated Francis as an absolute equal,'' Mr. Clarke was quoted as saying. He added: ''John is a totally honest man. He would be very rude to Francis, which was a very enjoyable thing to see because nobody else had license to do that. He'd give it to him straight and Francis appreciated that. Even in the Colony Room, Francis was the king of Soho. But to John, he was just 'My Francis.' ''

 

John Edwards Obituary The Daily Telegraph  06/03/2003   John Edwards, who died on Wednesday aged 53, was Francis Bacon's closest friend for 18 years, and inherited the artist's £11 million estate. There were those who considered it a curious friendship. Although both men were homosexuals, Edwards maintained that they were never lovers. Furthermore, Edwards had never learned to read or write, and knew nothing of art or books. None of this, however, appeared to matter to Bacon. "I think he felt very free with me, because I was a bit different from most people he knew," Edwards once said. "I wasn't asking him about his painting or anything like that . . . I asked him once, 'what do you see in me?' And he laughed and said, 'You're not boring like most people'." Edwards, one of the six children of an East End docker, was born in London on September 10 1949. At the time of his first meeting with Francis Bacon, in 1974, he was working in Stratford East as a barman at The Swan, one of three pubs run by his two older brothers. Among The Swan's customers was Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room in Soho, and a friend of Edwards's brother David. She asked John Edwards to lay in some champagne as she was planning to bring her "famous painter friend" to the East End. In the event, she and Bacon never turned up, leaving the pub with an expensive consignment of champagne in which their regular customers had no interest. Some weeks later, Edwards was taken to the Colony Room, where he was introduced to Bacon. He was soon asking the painter, "Why don't you turn up when you are supposed to turn up for this f***ing champagne?" Bacon, enchanted, invited the young East Ender to lunch at the fish restaurant Wheeler's, where Edwards ordered caviar. Two months later, when visiting the artist's studio, Edwards was astonished to see a portrait of himself by Bacon. Not long after they became friends, Bacon took Edwards to Charlie Chester's casino, one of the artist's favourite haunts. When Edwards was presented with a membership form, he confessed that he could neither read nor write. He later recalled: "Francis said, 'God, that must be marvellous', because he hated filling in forms or anything like that." If Bacon wrote to Edwards, he would do so using large printed characters. The artist and his young friend became almost inseparable. At about 9am Bacon would telephone Edwards to announce that he was ready for breakfast, and Edwards would come to Bacon's studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington. Bacon would produce a fried egg, the painter eating only the white, Edwards the yolk. Then John Edwards would sit and talk with Bacon while he painted. Later they would often visit the Colony Room, where Edwards's favourite tipples were champagne and whisky, then perhaps a casino and a nightclub. Bacon would take his friend to dine at places such as Green's, the Connaught, or the Ritz. Edwards was protective of his famous friend. When Bacon played roulette Edwards would be careful to preserve some of the artist's chips so that he would always leave with something in his pocket. "There were always lots of people around Francis on the cadge," he said. "But they wouldn't do it when I was around." Although Edwards said he never sat for Bacon, the artist produced some 30 paintings of his friend. Among them is Portrait of John Edwards, 1986-87, which shows the subject seated cross-legged in a chair, dressed only in a pair of white underpants. The measure of Bacon's trust in Edwards was demonstrated in 1988, when an exhibition of Bacon's work was held in Moscow. The artist did not attend, but was represented by Edwards. The gallery-owner Roy Miles arrived at the airport in Moscow at the same time as Edwards, and recalled: "As I struggled with my luggage, I saw the Russian dignitaries bowing and scraping to that young man and I was furious! And do you know, he handled it superbly." A study of Edwards painted for this exhibition was adopted by the French to grace their five-franc postage stamp. When Bacon died from a heart attack in April 1992, Edwards was devastated. He inherited Bacon's house and studio, cash and an unknown number of paintings worth a total of just under £11 million. By this time Edwards was living in the Suffolk village of Hartest, in a Georgian farmhouse bought for him by Bacon. The grounds boasted an artificial lake guarded by a stone heron; a portrait of Edwards by Bacon covered an entire wall, from wall to ceiling. Although he kept on the studio in London, Edwards gave its contents to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, a gesture for which he was awarded the Lord Mayor's Medal by the city of Dublin. In 1999 the Bacon estate brought a case against the Marlborough Gallery, which had represented the artist for most of his career, alleging that Bacon had been "wrongfully exploited", and seeking a "proper accounting" of his affairs. The action was withdrawn in 2002, both sides paying their own costs. After Bacon's death, Edwards moved to the Florida Keys. In the mid-1990s he went to Thailand, where he lived in a house on the beach. He indulged his taste for drinking Krug champagne, and - continuing to use the rhyming slang with which he had been brought up - referred to a cigar as a "lah-di-dah". John Edwards died of cancer in Thailand, where he lived with his companion, Philip Mordue, known locally as "Phil the Till".

 

 

 

 

 

 An Artful Passing

 

When John Edwards succumbed to lung cancer two weeks ago at the age of 53, his acquaintances in the sleazy Thai beach resort of Pattaya remembered him fondly. "John Edwards was down to earth, genuine and loyal to his friends," says Ian Read, owner of Le Café Royale, a piano bar in a Pattaya strip known as Boyz Town where Edwards was well known.

But what the British art community wants to know is: How loyal was he? Edwards, a barely literate bartender from London's East End, was a longtime companion and muse of Francis Bacon, one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. When Bacon died in 1992, he bequeathed his celebrated works and $18.05 million estate to Edwards, the subject of more than 30 of the artist's portraits. Stuffy collectors and museum curators were incensed that a common Cockney cocktail-slinger had made off with the crown jewels of modern British art.

With Edwards gone, the media, seeking the next heirs to the Bacon fortune, has descended on Pattaya, where he moved in the mid-1990s. The top candidates: Edwards' 22-year-old gay Thai lover and Philip Mordue, Edwards' roommate after Bacon's death. Mordue could not be reached at his penthouse in Pattaya. But last week, Edwards' boyfriend, who asked to be identified as "Jack," was drinking coffee in a Pattaya bar and pondering his strange fortune. Just 16 when he first met Edwards, Jack says his benefactor left him something (he won't say what) and a last request: don't blow the inheritance by opening a gay bar.

But what of the rest of Bacon's riches, which the British tabloids claim were squandered on a profligate life of drink and young boys? Edwards' London lawyers say his will is to remain a secret indefinitely. His Pattaya friends insist that Edwards protected Bacon's legacy.

The artist's paintings and portraits, noteworthy for their distortions bordering on the macabre, will likely remain under the control of the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, a trust he established several years ago. Meanwhile, Jack is planning to travel and perhaps complete his education. "[Edwards] gave me a future," he says. What are friends for?

 

 

 

 

Bacon's extraordinary legacy

 

By Jonathan Cooper,  Evening Standard  London  07.03.03

 

  

  Francis Bacon: An irascible charmer

 

 

 

 

FOCUS: Bacon: a mystery in the East

 

Ten years after his death, the legacy of Francis Bacon remains as complicated as his work. His heir died last week and no one knows what will now happen to the estate. Mike Bygrave in London and Jan McGirk in Thailand investigate

The Independent on Sunday, 9th March, 2003. 

 

 

His favourite pink champagne is still on ice at Le Cafe Royale in Pattaya but John Edwards will not be going back to drink it. "Mr John" died from lung cancer in a Bangkok hospital on Wednesday, leaving close friends to grieve and the art world to wonder what became of the paintings and the millions of pounds he inherited from the late and indisputably great artist Francis Bacon.

Edwards was his companion and muse for 18 years, and the dyslexic son of a pub owner from the East End of London acquired Bacon's taste for bubbly. He liked his Jouet Chandon to match the pink silk shirts worn by waiters in white hotpants at Le Cafe Royale, a bar on Boyz Town, the most flamboyant nightclub strip in Thailand. But he would always chase the champagne down with J&B whisky, said the barman there yesterday.

Edwards' body will be cremated in the next few days, then flown back to Britain, where his relationship with Bacon has inspired gossip, intrigue and lawsuits over the years. He is again the subject of the kind of envious attention he fled to Thailand to avoid, after the death of Francis Bacon in 1992. The gay-friendly resort has catered for foreign divas and dudes ever since the Vietnam war. Edwards lived with his friend and sometime lover Philip Mordue in an immaculate penthouse on the 14th floor of a tower in the Royal Cliff resort, where stars and royals take their holidays. From the wrap- around balcony you can see expensive speedboats cut through the turquoise Gulf of Thailand and the lights of Pattaya's gogo bars twinkle beyond Buddha Hill. There is an old-fashioned jukebox in the sitting room, and 10 reproductions of Bacon's paintings hang on the walls.

Edwards' personal assistant, a slender 22-year-old Thai who did not want his name in print, has grown to admire the arresting art. "I was too young to understand it at first," he said. "I thought it was crazy painting. But John taught me to see that it is beautiful."

The young man, who was at his friend's deathbed on Wednesday, once proposed opening a bar in Pattaya. Edwards would have none of it. "Mr John said better not. Best to travel, and to take computer studies at university. He made me promise to give up smoking too," he said. "There was no one better. He could only whisper at the end, but he never stopped laughing. He was young at heart."

The manager of the resort next to his home said: "Towards the end of his illness, he knew life was short. He'd insist on going to chemotherapy by helicopter instead of wasting two hours on the road. We have a helipad."

Drinking mates said Edwards used to chat animatedly about his friendship with Bacon and said they were fond friends, but denied they were lovers. "He was not a bit of rough trade, but more like a brother to the artist," said one. "John amused him because he was never in awe of his posh friend." Mr Mordue, on the other hand, "certainly talked rough", and even had a scar where a bullet had whistled clean through his throat during one pre-dawn bar crawl.

"Mordue was his personal secretary," said Ian Read, owner of a gay piano bar which Edwards frequented three times a week. "He never had a formal education and writing got all jumbled up for him. But he was very smart." Friends recalled how Edwards would manage his money carefully. He threw home-cooked dinner parties of steak and kidney pies in his lavish flat, rather than eat out at spicy restaurants. "Once he discovered Pattaya, this became his home," Read continued. "He came here for the sun and the freedom."

Bacon and Edwards had been the art world's odd couple. The artist, arguably the greatest British painter of modern times, whose screaming popes and distorted human figures became 20th-century icons, was 40 years older; but after the two men met in 1974 at the Colony Room, the legendary Soho drinking club which was Bacon's favourite hangout, they became inseparable. Both Bacon and Edwards were gay but always maintained that their relationship was platonic.

As famous for his drinking and gambling as for his disciplined working habits, Bacon lived in Reece Mews, South Kensington, in a tiny house lit by bare bulbs where he painted in a studio as cluttered as a municipal rubbish dump. Every morning, he woke around 6am, worked until 9am, then phoned Edwards who lived nearby (in a flat Bacon had bought for him) with Philip Mordue. Edwards would come round to Reece Mews where Bacon, who prided himself on his culinary skills, cooked them a fry-up (a devotee of cockney rhyming slang, his nickname for Bacon was "Eggs"). Then Edwards would sit in Bacon's studio while the master painted - a rare privilege since Bacon was notoriously secretive about his work. During their friendship, Bacon painted Edwards 30 or more times.

The art historian and Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt says: "John, as he himself said, had something of a father-son relationship with Bacon, who was capable of enormous affection and generosity. He was always there for people he liked and John was someone he was extremely fond of."

Gallery owner James Birch, who knew both men well, says "Bacon quite liked the fact that John was uneducated. I think Francis got fed-up with talking about art. And John was just a regular bloke, very chatty, easy to get on with."

In the only interview he ever gave, Edwards himself said, "[Francis] liked the way I didn't care who he was supposed to be."

Edwards was one of six children from an extended East End family of dockers turned licensees and he worked behind the bar in family pubs until he met Bacon - after which, according to James Birch, "he would say he was Francis's photographer". The art critic Richard Cork describes the Colony Room of the period as "a mixture of Soho bohemians, often with these plummy public school accents, and an East End contingent, with broken noses, looking thuggish, but quite often gay, you know, the whole mixture which fascinated Francis." The same peculiarly British nexus of toffs and "diamond geezers", artists, aristocrats and gangsters, embraced the Kray twins in their day and was dramatised in the film Performance.

The quasi-domestic idyll ended abruptly in 1992 when Bacon died of a heart attack aged 82 on holiday in Spain. Edwards was the sole heir to Bacon's pounds 11.4m estate. The resulting press furore unnerved Edwards - a friend described him opening the curtains at Reece Mews and seeing the street full of press photographers - and he left the country in search of a quiet life, first and briefly for Florida, then to Thailand with Mr Mordue.

"A great artist leaves deep traces," says Michael Peppiatt. "Francis is as much alive after his death as he was when he was here. He was a transforming person. If you met him and spent time with him, you couldn't help but be changed, and this effect goes on. I think that's one of the signs of great genius, a person who actually transforms the lives around him."

He certainly left his mark on the courts. Three years after the artist's death, Edwards felt he had still not received a "full accounting" from Marlborough Fine Arts, the gallery that had represented Bacon since 1958. The potential sums involved were huge. Bacon himself had little interest in money and gave or gambled it away. He once said his life consisted of "going from bar to bar and drinking and that kind of thing". However, he is estimated to have earned pounds 14m from his art in his lifetime. In 1989, he became the world's most expensive living artist when a triptych sold at Sotheby's New York for pounds 3.53m, later topped by pounds 4.6m for a portrait of a previous lover, Greg Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971. There is no definitive catalogue of Bacon's work and no one knows exactly how many paintings are out there.

Confused, Edwards turned for help to another old friend, the architectural artist Professor Brian Clarke, granting Clarke his power of attorney. In a series of dramatic moves orchestrated by Clarke, Bacon's work was withdrawn from Marlborough and reassigned to other galleries. In 1998 a High Court judge dismissed the trustees of Bacon's estate and replaced them with Clarke. There followed a full- scale lawsuit against the Marlborough, claiming it had exercised "undue influence" over Bacon, charged too much commission, undervalued work and resold it for higher prices, and failed to account for 33 paintings. The overall value of the action was estimated at pounds 100m. Marlborough denied all wrongdoing and promised to "vigorously contest" the suit.

Meanwhile, there was more controversy, this time over the Reece Mews studio which John Edwards said he would leave "to the nation". Like everything else about Bacon's legacy, the outcome was mysterious. Either the Tate refused the gift or wasn't given enough time to consider it. Instead, Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery benefited, sending 14 archaeologists and conser- vators to London to disassemble the studio and remove over 7,000 items including 2,000 pots of paint, 570 books, numerous loose pages, 100 slashed canvases (Bacon was meticulous about destroying work he wasn't happy with) and pairs of Marks & Spencer corduroy trousers the artist cut up and used as painting tools. Shipped to Dublin, the studio was reconstructed in minute detail, then put on public display.

Suddenly last year the case against Marlborough was aborted in a so-called "drop hands settlement" with each side paying their own legal costs. The Bacon estate announced that Edwards had just been diagnosed with cancer, implying that was the main reason they withdrew their action. Marlborough claimed victory, meanwhile, saying the case had been "without foundation and totally unsustainable".

Whatever the truth - and there is a middle position suggesting that the passage of time made gathering evidence difficult for both sides - leading members of the London art world describe themselves as "traumatised" by the whole experience. There are stories of subpoenas being threatened and of lawyers arriving on people's doorsteps to search their private archives. One potential witness, who insisted on anonymity, said: "It will take a long time for anyone to be able to talk perceptively about the whole thing because I don't think it's all come out in the open yet. It's a very murky and in many ways inexplicable business."

The person who would be best placed to explain is Professor Clarke, who was also by Edwards' bed when he died. Clarke is variously regarded as the powerful eminence grise or the altruistic white knight of the Bacon story. Clarke always insisted his overriding aim in bringing the lawsuit was not financial but to establish Bacon's legacy for future scholars. When the suit was dropped a year ago, Clarke said work would begin on a catalogue raisonne and setting up a John Edwards Charitable Foundation to advance Bacon studies. As yet, there's no public evidence either development took place, though Barbara Dawson of the Hugh Lane Gallery says the estate has funded research deriving from the preservation of his studio and has "always been very professional".

Nobody knows who will inherit from Edwards, although most of those who knew him expect it to be Mordue. Some of the Bacon legacy was spent on turning Reece Mews into a luxury home, and some of it on the good life in Thailand. It is thought Edwards bought property for his family in Suffolk. Suggestions that Edwards arranged for the sale of paintings have not been backed by firm evidence.

The story of Francis Bacon's legacy is full of contradictions and confusions that echo his work and the reactions to it. Some critics see the paintings as a profound commentary on mortality and the human condition. Others dismiss them as the products of a kinky mind, obsessed with images of death, disease and decay, of butchers' shops and 1950s gay porn that Bacon collected. To Michael Peppiatt, Bacon was an "enormously complex and enormously intelligent and vital man who tried to make himself simple. He tried to bring the two extreme sides of his personality into some kind of liveable equilibrium. He was everything and its opposite - vital, warm and caring at times and at other times very analytical, very cutting, very devastating. He could light up the day and he could send it into darkness when you were with him. He could be a tremendous force for joy or for despair."

Some of those who knew Bacon describe him as amoral, disloyal and vicious; others say he was great company, an open-handed man who loved to talk. "The champagne would come out almost immediately," they say. After the death of John Edwards it must remain on ice, for the moment, until the mystery of Francis Bacon's legacy is resolved.

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

    Bacon's legacy in doubt after heir dies

       Colin Blackstock   The Guardian  Thursday March 6, 2003

 

         

                           John Edwards

 

The artist Francis Bacon's long-time companion and muse, John Edwards, died yesterday in Thailand, throwing the ownership of the dozens of paintings he inherited after Bacon's death into uncertainty.

    Mr Edwards was the sole heir to Bacon's tangled fortune and was left an £11m estate after the artist died in 1992.

    Mr Edwards, 53, died after a long battle with lung cancer. It is thought he may have left part or all of the inheritance to his boyfriend of 27 years, Philip Mordue, who like Mr Edwards is from east London.

    The two men have lived in a luxury penthouse in Pattaya for the past nine years. Although the size of the inheritance is now unknown, reports have it ranging from as much as £30m to very little.

    Mr Edwards struck up a friendship with Bacon and would visit the artist's South Kensington mews house to make him breakfast every morning and sit with him while he painted. Bacon had described Mr Edwards as the only true friend he had. Both men were gay, but Mr Edwards said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph a year ago that they were never lovers.

    Whether much of the inheritance remains is unclear. Mr Edwards is understood to have bought properties in Suffolk for his parents and other family members, and he is also believed to have sold some paintings through galleries in New York and London.

An administrator of the Francis Bacon estate refused to comment on the question of the inheritance yesterday.

    Mr Edwards is understood to have moved to Thailand with Mr Mordue after Bacon's death to get away from the press. Reports in Thailand said that Mr Mordue, nicknamed "Phil the Till" in Thailand, was shot in a bar on Pattaya's main sex-bar strip in 1997. He was in hospital for four days after a bullet passed through his neck.

    Mr Edwards was taken to Bumrumgrad hospital in Bangkok and was with Brian Clarke, a friend and Bacon's executor, when he died, according to the Daily Telegraph.

    Prof Clarke, the British architectural artist, said: "He showed no self-pity and joked with friends to the last." The body will be flown to London for a private service

 

 

An insightful view into an artist’s world

Francis Bacon Studio at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

 

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

By Jackson Ellis
5 February 2003  

 

The almost life-long art studio and residence of Francis Bacon (1909-92) was recently donated and transported from 7 Reece Mews, London and placed on permanent exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. John Edwards, Bacon’s sole heir, made the donation; the most significant since Hugh Lane was established in 1908. The relocation was carried out with all the care of a major archaeological dig, with each and every item—some several thousand in all—catalogued and exactly repositioned in the Dublin gallery.

 

The expense and energy required for the project created some controversy. Relocation and reconstruction cost in the vicinity of IE£1.5 million ($US2.02 million), partly provided by the National Millennium Committee, a state-funded body. An entrance fee of IE£6 ($US8) for over-18s also generated some debate because public art institutions in Ireland are generally free of charge. Some critics raised concerns about the dedication of permanent space to the studio because the Hugh Lane Gallery is quite limited in size; others suggested that the exhibit was not a work of art and therefore had no right to be located in the gallery.

 

These objections, however, do not alter the fact that the exhibit, which has attracted considerable interest and large crowds since opening in May 2001, provides a rich and meaningful insight into the work and life of this significant 20th century artist.

Despite its limited size, the Reece Mews studio was where Bacon was most at home. He had tried working in other, more practical studios but could not warm to them. More importantly, it constitutes the most extensive collection of visual reference material that inspired his work.

 

Physical access to Bacon’s principal place of work, therefore, is extremely helpful for anyone who wants to understand the makeup, methods and origins of his art. Along with the studio, the exhibit contains an interview with Bacon by Melvin Bragg, several new paintings, including his final unfinished piece, and a lush, complex interactive multimedia presentation establishing the context of many items in the studio.

 

Francis Bacon, one of five children, was born in Dublin on October 28, 1909, to English parents, Edward Anthony Mortimer Bacon and Christine Winifred Firth. Bacon’s parents were of wealthy, land-owning descent and remained in Ireland until World War I, whereafter they moved between England and Ireland.

Bacon was born into a world undergoing tremendous upheaval. The Irish Republican Movement was torching English-owned properties in a campaign aimed at ending British rule, and Europe was beset with increasing tensions between Britain, Germany and France. At the same time, science and industry were making great advances and large numbers of working people were demanding a new political order with real improvements in their social existence.

 

Bacon, who was said to have been closest to his mother, was a frail child and frequently ill. His father, an austere, puritanical figure, regarded his son as weak and reacted with horror against the young man’s homosexual tendencies. (Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at this time and severely punished.) Shortly after the 17-year-old Francis was discovered dressed in his mother’s clothes in 1926 his father forced him out of the family home. Over the next few years he spent time in Berlin, Paris and other European cities, a period that defined his personal and artistic development.

The bohemian and more open post-WWI Berlin and Paris were dramatically different to the highly repressed and conservative Irish social life with which Bacon was familiar. His visits to these cities were defining experiences and he spent time passionately sketching in the transvestite bars of Berlin and on busy summer evenings in Paris’ Montparnasse district.

 

It was during a visit to Paris in 1927 that the 18-year-old Bacon saw Picasso’s drawings at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery. He later explained that these works had made a great impression. In fact, Bacon was to name Picasso as the most significant influence on his work. Michael Peppiatt, the art critic and author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, described Picasso as a “father figure” to Bacon.

 

Although not as prolific or artistically varied as Picasso, one can see the connection between Bacon’s explorations of the figure and Picasso’s—for example, Bacon’s attempts to represent and capture far more of a person than the mere conventionally representable. But the similarities end there. Picasso was full of passion and the joy of life and simply could not stop creating. A dynamic and playful artist and person, he created in a multi-dimensional way. Bacon, by contrast, was far more introverted in his approach and his work radiates pain, confusion and uncertainty.

  Visual inspiration

Bacon, who held his first solo exhibition in 1934, drew on many and varied sources of inspiration. He chose not to paint from life, but rather from memory and an eclectic collection of visual images. His portraits—even of close friends, whom he painted frequently—were derived from photographs. The aim of this practice, he said, was to “deform his portraits back into appearance,” because the presence of sitters in his studio would “disturb the deformation.”

The Reece Mews studio contains all the recognisable visual influences in his work: reproductions of Diego de Silva Velázquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X; the screaming woman from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; and photographs of Bacon’s lover and long-time partner George Dyer.

 

But working through the maze of Bacon’s studio one comes into contact with an extraordinary range of images—virtually everything the 20th century had to offer. There are black-and-white reproductions torn from books and medical journals; x-rays and film stills; phonograph recordings; and images given to him from photographer friends John Deakin and Peter Beard. Bacon was also captivated with the carnal and the animal and the studio contains pictures of animals screaming in aggression and pain and includes many images from the great African plains and the predators found there. One can imagine him randomly drawing on these pictures in times of difficulty and low motivation.

Bacon, who had many dark sides to his imagination, was obsessively focused on the human figure and painted it in a compelling and complex style. This darkness was indicated by his fixation with disease, particularly of the mouth and skin, and manifest in one of his best-known works—Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)—an unsettling picture of a screaming, inhuman, blood-spattered pope.

 

One long-standing and debatable habit of Bacon’s has blocked greater access to his artistic work. A passionate and explosive man, he would often erupt in anger and destroy any painting that displeased him or fell short of the mark. When asked by his friend, the writer and curator David Sylvester, about this practice, Bacon said he “liked to find accidents in the image and would often ruin a found image in the course of attempting to explore and develop it further”. While Bacon ruined many pieces, particularly those from the 1930s and early 1940s, he later regretted the destruction of some works, particularly an important early painting, Wound for a Crucifixion.

 

Although Bacon spoke at length about his work, he refused to discuss its significance or meaning. He did not adhere to any social, political or religious belief, at least not publicly, and shunned literal readings of his work, claiming they were unexplainable products of his sub-conscious. He once declared: “Talking about painting is like reading a bad translation from a foreign language. The images are there and they are the things that talk, not anything you can say about it.”

 

This approach, however, suggests that art cannot be understood by examining the social context in which it is produced. Notwithstanding this false assertion, Bacon’s artistic vision developed in specific political conditions and on the foundations created by the Dadaists, Surrealist movement and Sigmund Freud’s explorations into the subconscious.

 

By the time Bacon had reached “artistic maturity” and created his own unique and longstanding style in the mid- to late-1940s, he had lived through two world wars, the Great Depression and numerous betrayals of the Soviet and international working class by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Although it is not clear how much Bacon understood of these events—he largely isolated himself from other artists, both physically and ideologically—his work seems to be an intuitive but pessimistic and acquiescent response to them, a vision of humanity that is bleak and disturbing.

 

The Hugh Lane Gallery studio reconstruction certainly deepens one’s understanding of Bacon and his work. In fact, the dark negativity in his art seems to prefigure the present social and political climate and can serve to remind us that the background to his harrowing images—the onset of war and imperialist conflict—is in danger of being repeated.

     

 

      Bacon and Caro

            The Daily Telegraph  11/11/2002

 

·         An exhibition of works by Francis Bacon, which opened last week at the Marlborough Gallery on West 57th Street, New York, marks the end of a turbulent chapter in the company's history. Marlborough represented Bacon from 1958 until after his death 10 years ago. But in 2000, Marlborough was sued by Bacon's estate, which claimed that the gallery had financially exploited him.

Marlborough strongly denied the allegations and the estate eventually withdrew the case earlier this year. However, while the dispute was in progress Marlborough could not mount any exhibitions from its holding of works bought from Bacon in his lifetime.

"During the lawsuit, which lasted about two and a half years, our lawyers' advice was not to market the pictures that we owned and not to exhibit them," says Gilbert Lloyd, son of the gallery's founder Frank Lloyd. Once the case was concluded, Marlborough dipped its toes back into the water by showing a few Bacons at Art Basel in June, but the exhibition that opened in New York last Monday is the first on its own premises.

Nine major works by Bacon, including three triptychs, are on show until December 7 at prices ranging from £2.2 million to £6.4 million. "The reason we chose November in New York," says Lloyd, "was to coincide with the auctions, as most of the art world comes to the city at that time."

Marlborough is planning to loan some Bacons to museum exhibitions and will also hold more shows of its own.

 The New York Times  February 2, 2002

 

On the eve of what could have been one of the art world's nastiest trials, the estate of Francis Bacon and the artist's dealer mutually agreed to withdraw a two-year-old case in England over whether the dealer had fraudulently earned tens of millions of dollars by consistently undervaluing many of Mr. Bacon's paintings.

Under their agreement, the estate and the dealer, Marlborough U.K. and Marlborough International, will each bear its own legal costs and be spared the risk of losing a bruising case and having to pay both sides' legal fees, which could have come to more than $15 million.

Also adding to the estate's decision not to go to trial was the fact that John Edwards, the sole heir, was recently found to have lung cancer.

''It was going to be a long, tough case,'' said John Eastman, one of the estate's lawyers. He said the estate's executor chose to conclude the case with the uncertain outcome among the uppermost things in his mind.

Mr. Bacon, who died in 1992, left his estate to Mr. Edwards, a reclusive character with whom he had a filial relationship. Over the years Mr. Bacon's paintings of distorted, anguished figures brought as much as $6 million at auction and made him one of Britain's most celebrated postwar artists.

The suit contended that Marlborough controlled the most minute aspects of Mr. Bacon's financial and personal life - to the point of paying his laundry bills and handing him spending money - and so could buy paintings from him at greatly reduced rates and quickly resell them for substantially higher prices.

Stanley Bergman, a lawyer for Marlborough, called the charges baseless, saying the estate ''realized it was without merit.''

Mr. Eastman said that the executor, Brian Clarke, is completing plans to set up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation for the study of Francis Bacon and his work

 

 

 

 

Three Bacon paintings up for auction

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday January 10, 2002

 

 

 

The New York Times  April 26, 2002

Tony Shafrazi
119 Wooster Street, SoHo
Through May 18

 

If you were depressed by the joyless art of Gerhard Richter at the Museum of Modern Art, you might not think a visit with Francis Bacon would be much help. Bacon is popularly thought of as the pontiff of existential horror, his most famous image being of a screaming Pope Innocent X based on a portrait by Velázquez. What Bacon produced, however, was more a kind of black comedy; increasingly as time passed he realized it in suavely designed, vibrantly hued, generously spacious compositions.

Far from depressing, the late paintings in this show combine the sensuous and the visionary to exhilarating effect. All of the large canvases from the 1980's feature the painter's familiar iconography of smeary lumps of humanity - or, in one case, a dangling, plucked chicken - in empty rooms. They are like updates of Christian altar paintings. The largest work, a triptych in which a vignetted male pelvis has wounded areas circled or pointed to by a small graphic arrow, refers unmistakably to the Passion, even as the third panel with the silhouetted head of a bull adds pagan resonance.

In anyone else's hands such imagery would be unbearably heavy. But Bacon managed his traumatic vision with a light, almost Pop-style touch. He paints the space around his deftly distorted figures with the hedonistic delight of a Colour Field painter. In the triptych and two related paintings, broad fields of scrumptious Creamsicle-orange are balanced by windows of sweet sky blue. The ultimate effect is of a zany and voluptuous beauty.  KEN JOHNSON

 

 

 

 

ARTS ABROAD; A Dublin Diorama Reveals A Very Untidy Francis Bacon

By BRIAN LAVERY

 

The New York Times  August 16, 2001

 

There were a few excited gasps when the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery here unveiled its most significant and most hyped acquisition recently. But most just stared and said, ''What a mess!''

Admittedly, it is a very big, very impressive mess, and it was made by the artist Francis Bacon. That didn't stop the typically irreverent Irish press from looking in on Bacon's famous studio, which has been reconstructed at the Hugh Lane, and comparing it to a sloppy teenager's bedroom, or what's left of an apartment after a nightmare tenant moves out.

Bacon painted in the small London studio, which measures about 345 square feet, from 1961 until his death in 1992. It holds 7,500 carefully catalogued objects, including 100 slashed canvases, some dating back to 1946, and more than 70 drawings that Bacon never admitted making while he was alive. It's difficult to focus on those refined items, though, because they are buried under crumpled scraps of newspaper and empty Champagne packing boxes, cut-up corduroy pants and marked-up photographs, dirty brushes and paint cans filled with water, all scattered in random piles as if by a whirlwind.

Visitors to the exhibit enter a small glass-enclosed area one at a time, as if Bacon let them step over the threshold and no further. It feels like walking into a room immediately after a madman on amphetamines has made a violent exit. Only a plaster bust of William Blake and a large round mirror seem intentionally placed. The floor is just barely visible in front of the easel, where Bacon stood while he painted. Instead of palettes, Bacon used the walls and the door; paint is smeared everywhere.

The studio opened its brightly splattered door in May, after more than two years of painstaking and costly archaeological work. John Edwards, Bacon's heir, donated it in its entirety to the Hugh Lane Gallery, in the heart of Dublin, but the process of removing the room - floor, walls, beams, trash and all - from its home in the South Kensington section of London ran up a bill of about $2 million, and involved a few tricky procedures.

Since the walls had been plastered twice, first in 1850 and again in 1930, the move threatened to split the two layers of plaster and ruin Bacon's impromptu colour palettes. So the conservation team securely packed the walls from front and back and cut them into chunks that were not unlike bricks of peat, said Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane.

Even clumps of dust were photographed, numbered and stored before being shipped across the Irish Sea and replaced in identical positions.

As expected with a project of its scope, the studio has earned high praise and has also raised skeptical eyebrows. Many critics have asked whether having the studio justifies the expense of moving it, when resources are already scarce. The Hugh Lane is a municipal gallery, they say, that should support local artists instead of blockbuster attractions. Up-and-coming Irish artists are typically forced to exhibit their work in commercial galleries, or even in accommodating pubs, because of the lack of public space.

Others take issue with the studio's entrance fee of six Irish pounds (about $6.90), when almost all other Dublin museums are free, including the Hugh Lane's permanent collection.

Ms. Dawson defended the fee. ''We need to build up a financial resource for the gallery in order to bring in the world-class exhibitions that Dublin people seem to enjoy,'' she said. ''It's not the norm yet. But neither are world-class exhibitions the norm.'' She pointed to the gallery's phenomenally successful exhibition of Bacon's work last year, which drew unprecedented crowds to the gallery and increased the public's awareness of Bacon before the studio was opened this spring.

The more searching question, however, is whether Francis Bacon belongs here at all. He was born in Dublin in 1909, and grew up outside the city in rural County Kildare. But when he was 16, Bacon fled Ireland, like so many of this country's artists and writers. He has always been called a British artist. He did not come back to Ireland when the Hugh Lane exhibited his work in 1965. And he predicted - jokingly, but somewhat accurately - that he would return to Ireland only after his death.

Is Bacon's reconstructed studio, then, yet another instance of Ireland reclaiming one of the many sons and daughters it sent into exile, a habit some call the height of hypocrisy? Or is that exile, and Bacon's sense of being an outsider, exactly what makes him Irish?

''One of the things I have always thought about Bacon is that he is a literary artist,'' said Brian Clarke, the executor of the Bacon estate. Bacon was an avid reader, and his shelves were stocked with Eliot, Yeats, Shakespeare and Aeschylus, not to mention textbooks on medicine and the supernatural. ''I think that his formative years in Ireland nurtured his love of spoken English, and in that sense, he is very much an Irish artist,'' Mr. Clarke said.

The years leading up to 1926, when Bacon moved to London, were a traumatic time to be in Ireland. A rebellion against British rule in 1916 was brutally put down. The struggle for Irish independence finally succeeded in 1921, but was followed by a civil war. Bacon's childhood home once needed sandbagged defenses in case of attack, Ms. Dawson said.

In addition to being part of an Anglo-Irish ruling class whose power was crumbling, Bacon would have felt alienated from Irish society by his homosexuality, which he realized as a teenager. Noel Sheridan, director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, pointed out that other outsiders - like Yeats, a Protestant, and Joyce, another exile - became the voices for Irish culture of the time.

''Very often, it is within your isolation that you get the deepest insight,'' Mr. Sheridan said.

Even its critics acknowledge that bringing the studio to Dublin was a bold move, and it has earned Ms. Dawson respect from all quarters. Mr. Edwards and Mr. Clarke talked to the Tate Gallery in London about housing the studio, and offers came in from museums in Paris, Berlin, Washington and Tokyo. But Ms. Dawson's ambitious approach and direct promises about how the studio would be treated won them over, Mr. Clarke said.

Now, Dublin's art community is hopeful that other institutions will take similarly aggressive and innovative decisions. ''I think Ireland, in all honesty, if you look back, hasn't been a country that valued its artists,'' Mr. Sheridan said.

The Hugh Lane's treatment of Bacon seems to overturn that trend. Besides the studio, the gallery owns only one Bacon work, an unfinished self-portrait. But it has obtained 14 major Bacon works on long-term loan and is currently exhibiting Perry Ogden's large-scale photographs of Bacon's London studio and apartment at 7 Reece Mews.

Mr. Ogden said that he approached the task with ''a very forensic sensibility'' - and the immense prints are nearly scientific in their precision. They do, however, offer a warmth and intimacy that the glassed-in studio lacks. (An American-edition book of the photographs will be published by Thames & Hudson this fall.)

The Irish viewers who liken Bacon's studio to that teenager's bedroom might be doing him a favour, by humanizing him.

''Bacon is seen globally today as an old master, almost,'' Mr. Clarke said. ''The Irish don't turn him into an icon. They just say, 'There's a very interesting bloke.' And that gives him back some of his real power.''

 

 

 

 Francis Bacon

  Millennium Galleries Sheffield
   Rating: ****

  Robert Clark
   The Guardian, Monday July 23, 2001

 

    

        Second Version of Triptych 1944, (1988) 

 

This selection from the artist's work looks its best set off against the gallery's polished marble floors, elegant scalloped ceilings and subtle, blind-filtered daylight.

Bacon was such an idiosyncratic painter that one can easily develop a tolerance to his initially breathtaking images. Yet it is an undeniable fact that he created some of the most memorable figurative pictures of the 20th century. And, in this setting, the formal transgressions of his images are easily as evident as their tendency towards expressionist sensationalism.

The flicks and slurs of white pigment that obliquely distort his portraits might be based on cum-shot porno stills, but they also serve to set off the delicate and vulnerable bloom of the pinkness of his unfortunate subjects' all too bruisable flesh. His Study of a Dog is a giant of entrapped wildness, spinning endlessly on its roundabout pedestal as miniature cars flash by in the distant background. The 1944 Crucifixion triptych, together with the Second Version remake of 1988, is perhaps the only really serious and convincing image on a Christian theme created in any medium over the past 100 years.

It's true that Bacon might not have finally achieved his ambition of equalling the transvestite grandeur of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X. His rabid dog might not approach the poignant quicksand of loneliness into which Goya's Black Period dog eternally sinks. Yet give Bacon his due: what other painter of our times could we even begin to compare to such epoch-defining names?

Until 23 September. Details: 0114 278 2600.

 

 

 

 Christie's  

   London - 2001

 

Lot 13 : Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards left panel: signed, titled, inscribed and dated '3 Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 left panel' (on the reverse) centre panel: signed, titled, inscribed and dated '3 Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 centre panel' (on the reverse) right panel: signed, titled, inscribed and dated '3 Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 right panel' (on the reverse) oil on canvas Each: 781/8 x 581/4in. (198.3 x 148cm.) Painted in 1984 

 

PROVENANCE  Marlborough Gallery, New York. 

 

EXHIBITION 

London, Tate Gallery Francis Bacon, May 1985-March 1986, no. 125 (illustrated in colour). This exhibition later travelled to Stuttgart, Staatsgallerie, and Berlin, Nationalgalerie. New York, Marlborough Gallery, Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, November-December 1986, no. 2 (illustrated in colour). New York, Marlborough Gallery, Francis Bacon, Paintings of the Eighties, May-July 1987, pp. 26-27, no. 5 (illustrated in colour). Paris, Galerie Lelong, Francis Bacon, Peintures Recentes, September-November 1987, no. 1 (illustrated in colour). Moscow, Central House of the Union of Artists, Francis Bacon Paintings, September-November 1988, no. 16 (illustrated in colour). Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, March-May 1993, no. 56 (illustrated, pp. 119 and 161, illustrated in colour pp. 120-123). Zaragoza, Palacio de la Monja, Despu‚s de Goya-Una Mirada Subjectiva, November 1996-January 1997, no. 167 (illustrated in colour, pp. 337 and 339-341). Sao Paulo, XXIV Bienal de Sao Paolo, Nacleo Hist¢rico-Antropofagia de Canibalismos, October-December 1998 (illustrated in colour, pp. 418-419). New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor; and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, January-October, 1999, no. XX (illustrated in colour). 

 

NOTES 

John Edwards first met Francis Bacon in 1974 and became his companion until the artist's death in 1992. Edwards was, like Bacon's former lover, George Dyer, an East End boy much younger than the artist, but from the outset his relationship with Bacon differed fundamentally from that earlier traumatic romance, which had ended tragically in 1971 with Dyer's suicide. Edwards, however, was not destined to be swallowed and destroyed by the love of the great artist in the way that both Dyer and Dyer's predecessor, Peter Lacy had been. Indeed, Edwards is known to have stood up to Bacon and this forthright quality along with his directness and honesty greatly endeared him to the artist who reportedly grew to dote on the young man. According to longtime friend Ian Board - the owner of the infamous Soho drinking club the Colony Room - Bacon was "riddled with love" for Edwards and became increasingly protective of him coming to regard him less as a lover and more as an adoptive son. 

Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards is a rare and important triptych from the 1980s that in many ways reflects the different nature of Bacon's relationship with Edwards. A major work that attempts to capture the essence of the straightforward and forthright character of the artist's young companion, this three-paneled portrait was chosen by Bacon to be the final work of his second retrospective exhibition. Bacon's first retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962 had begun with his first triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944 and ended with his great reworking of this painting, the 1962 Crucifixion triptych. The second Tate retrospective paid even more attention to Bacon's great triptych paintings and beginning with the same 1944 painting, it culminated with the Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards which had been painted one year earlier. As the emphasis of the Tate retrospectives show, Bacon's triptychs are widely recognised as being his finest works. 

Yet, as Bacon himself often observed, these paintings were in essence not triptychs in the traditional sense of the word but, like a progression of film stills, a sequence of paintings that aimed to capture the essence of its subject by conveying a sense of having captured its animated motion and frozen it into a cinematic sequece of static form. "In the series one picture reflects on the other continuously," Bacon observed, "and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately... one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more" (Quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1990, p. 22). 

Furthermore, the artist once warned Michael Archibaud, "I don't know that I should talk about a triptych in my case. Of course, there are three canvases, and you can link that to a long-standing tradition. The primitives often used the triptych format, but as far as my work is concerned, a triptych corresponds more to the idea of a succession of images on film. There are frequently three canvases, but there is no reason why I couldn't continue and add more. Why shouldn't there be more than three? What I do know is that I need these canvases to be separated from one another. That's why I was so annoyed with the way the Guggenheim mounted the three panels of its Crucifixion all in one frame. It was absurd. I wanted them to be separate, and this is also the case for the canvases of the other triptychs... One image, another, then another with the frame adding a certain rhythm to the progression of images" (F. Bacon quoted in In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, London, 1993, p. 165). This separation was essential for Bacon because he saw "every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences" and through the sequential portrait he was able to take "what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point" ( Op. cit., Sylvester, p. 21). 

In Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards this shifting sequential viewpoint is exemplified by the work consisting of three alternate and yet seemingly simultaneous views of Edwards seated on a stool in an empty studio space. The use of a calm grey-blue coloured background and the relative lack of violent distortion in the features of the sitter clearly distinguishes this portrait from those of the angst-ridden Peter Lacy or the sado-masochistic George Dyer portraits. Although pulling no punches in the raw expression of Edwards' pale Anglo-Saxon features and his muscular physicality, there is a tenderness expressed in this work that captures a sense of Edwards' innocence and simple honesty; features which some commentators on Bacon have declared the artist was incapable of expressing. 

The relative lack of grotesque smears and distortion in the features of his sitters was a noticeable trend in much of Bacon's work of the 1980s but this is particularly evident in Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards where Edwards' features have been sharply delineated and in two of the panels are still clearly recognisable beneath the gestural smudges of Bacon's paint. Framed in the left and right hand panels by a geometric structure that lends a unity to the three paintings and seems through the magic of perspective to have partially disappeared in the central panel, Edwards is presented as if he were being observed through the two-way mirror of a police viewing room. 

Exposing his innate humanity and charming ordinariness, the three panels, like a sequence of slides present Edwards seated on a swivel stool as if he were an interesting organism under the objective eye of the microscope. The victim of the artist's harsh dispassionate gaze, Bacon has also surrounded Edwards in the left and right hand panels by a circular chrome ring which recalls some of his early furniture design. In doing this Bacon appears to have wanted to enclose and fix permanently the shifting images of the object of his affection by framing them with perspectival lines and the enclosing metal armature and at the same time pinning Edwards' figure to the floor with the thin one-legged stool. It appears in this work as if in doing so, he hoped he could in someway contain and possess the image of his companion, hold onto it and protect it as indeed he sought to do in life.

 

 

 

 

 Bacon triptych goes for £3m at auction

  By Will Bennett, Art Sales Correspondent

 The Daily Telegraph 19/06/2001

 

   

                 Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards  1984 

 

A SERIES of three paintings by Francis Bacon of his long-time companion John Edwards sold for more than £3 million at Christie's in London last night.

The triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an anonymous collector at a sale of post-war art. Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie's international director, said: "It is a piece that Bacon himself identified as being of museum quality."

Bacon met Edwards, who was a barman, in 1974 and their relationship lasted until the artist's death in 1992. The triptych shows Edwards seated on a stool in an empty studio space.

 

 

 

  Posters beg Berliners to bring back the Bacon

     

 

 

 

 

 

Bringing home the Bacon

It's not just a stolen portrait that Lucian Freud wants back, says Jonathan Jones. It's his much-missed friend

The Guardian, Saturday June 23, 2001

 

When a great artist does a portrait of another, there is usually more at stake than meets the eye. Friendship, rivalry, alliances of ideas and sympathies - down the centuries, artists have expressed these things by exchanging portraits. So when Francis Bacon, the supreme painter of scenes of modern horror, and Lucian Freud, the heir to Courbet and Degas in his depiction of the human body, sealed their friendship by painting each other's portraits at the beginning of the 1950s, it was a significant moment.

 

 

 

  Artist 'mourns' missing work in photographs

  The Daily Telegraph  25/06/2001

 

 

      

               Portrait of Francis Bacon  Lucian Freud 1951

 

UNTIL now, Lucian Freud's only acknowledgement of the theft of his portrait of Francis Bacon has been in the way he has allowed photographs of the work to be used.

 

"Partly because there was no decent colour reproduction, partly as a kind of mourning, I've only allowed it to be reproduced in monochrome," he told The Telegraph yesterday, the first time he has spoken about the theft. "In fact the painting is quite near monochrome - so it comes out quite well, and I thought it was a rather jokey equivalent to a black arm band. You know - there it isn't!"

 

The theft was very unusual. Most art thefts are committed by criminal gangs who use them as negotiable assets in underworld deals. Generally, sooner or later, feelers are put out for a ransom deal. But in this case, the little picture has disappeared into a void. Nothing, not a whisper, not a rumour, has been heard of its whereabouts.

 

Freud speculates that it might have been taken by a Francis Bacon fan, since Bacon is highly regarded in Germany. "I wonder whether it was taken by a student because it was stolen when the gallery was full of students. Also, for a student to take a small picture is not that odd, is it?"

 

He remembers painting the portrait, nearly half a century ago. "I saw a lot of him at that time and we were very friendly, so it was natural for me to paint him." Freud and Bacon are to be seen in close conversation, for example, in Michael Andrews's group portrait at the famous Soho drinking club the Colony Room, painted in 1962 (which will be included in the Michael Andrews exhibition at the Tate, opening next month). "But of course," he adds, "I was pleased that he agreed to sit."

Freud's working methods are notoriously slow, often involving sittings for many months. At that time, he was employing a painstaking, almost miniaturist technique. "In those days I worked with the painting on my knees rather than standing at an easel, as I do now. I always take a long time to paint a picture, but I don't remember the Bacon portrait taking particularly long.

"Bacon complained a lot about sitting - which he always did about everything - but not to me at all. I heard about it, you know, from people in the pub. Really, he was very good about it."

In any case, the result was a remarkable study in suppressed tension. The art critic Robert Hughes has compared Bacon's face to a grenade a fraction of a second before it explodes. Freud, less extravagantly, notes that "I was pleased with it, and he seemed to like it as well". Bacon also painted Freud, but his portraits, less demandingly, were almost all done from photographs.

The idea for the poster comes from Freud himself. "I did a rough sketch. The idea is to have a monochrome reproduction of the painting, with the word 'Wanted' in red, and the reward in red. Then simply the telephone number, to make it absolutely plain, like those posters in Westerns which I've always liked very much."

By a minor historical irony, Freud, a painter now so much associated with London, spent the first 10 years of his life in Berlin. The Freud family (his father Ernst, an architect, was the son of Sigmund) lived near the Tiergarten until they fled to England in 1933. Many of his early memories concern the very area of Berlin from which his picture later disappeared.

He recalls swapping cigarette cards with dealers around the Potsdamer Platz - "certain cards were rare, you could swap three Marlene Dietrichs for one Johnny Weissmuller, that kind of thing" - and falling through the ice while skating in the Tiergarten ("it was very exciting"). He also remembers how he loved the pavement pillars on which advertisements were posted (100 large Wanted posters will be placed on their modern-day equivalents).

So, all that remains to be seen is whether the picture will turn up. Freud would very much like to see it included in the big show at Tate Britain scheduled for his 80th birthday year next year. Some auguries are good. Under German law, prosecutions can no longer be brought after 12 years - so the thief has little to fear.

The reward is generous. And, if all else fails, Freud suggests that a highly unusual proposal might be made to the robber. Would, he wondered, the thief be prepared at least to lend the picture to the Tate exhibition? In an art world that has seen practically everything, that would almost certainly be a first.

   

 

 

Freud designs poster to save his Bacon

By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent

The Daily Telegraph   27 June 2001

 

IT is a happy marriage of conceptual and figurative art. They would even have got the point in the Wild West.

Lucian Freud, Britain's Grand Old Man of figurative painting, has taken the unusual step of designing a Wanted poster appealing for the return of one of his most famous pictures, a rare portrait of his sometime friend, the artist Francis Bacon who died in 1992.

The tiny portrait was stolen in Berlin 13 years ago. It was ripped off a gallery wall and has never been heard of since. Measuring just seven inches by five, it was painted 50 years ago, is worth well over £1 million and is of great historical significance.

Neither artist was well known at the time but they went on to become the dominant figures of British 20th-century painting. Bacon has been called the greatest British artist since Turner and the work of both men now sells for millions of pounds.

It was Freud's first portrait of a known person and is also one of only two known portraits of Bacon - the other is considered of little importance. Freud's was done as the two men sat almost knee-to-knee at Freud's home in St John's Wood, north London, for several sittings over three months in 1951 and 1952.

William Feaver, Freud's biographer, yesterday called the painting "the greatest smallest portrait of the 20th century" and an icon of the age. The critic Robert Hughes has said of it: "Bacon's pear-shaped face has the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off."

In the hope that the thief can be flushed out, 2,500 of Freud's posters will be plastered on hoardings and kiosks in the German capital today, offering a bounty of almost £100,000 for its return.

The poster is based on a sketch sent by Freud, now 79, to the British Council. The portrait is owned by the Tate Gallery in London - it paid just a few hundred pounds for it soon after it was finished - but the council organised the exhibition of Freud's work at the Neue Nationalsgalerie in Berlin from which the painting disappeared on May 27 1988.

The portrait, oil on copper, is in colour but Freud has insisted that it appear in black and white on his poster because it remains "a ghost" until it is found and because he says he is in mourning for its loss. Though the theft was many years ago, there are reasons for the timing of the appeal.

Next year, Tate Britain is holding a huge retrospective for Freud - it will perhaps be the last in his lifetime - with 140 of his paintings. His Francis Bacon is badly wanted. Also, a statute of limitation in Germany means that when 12 years have passed after a theft, the criminal cannot be charged. It is hoped that this will make the thief feel more secure about returning the picture.

Andrea Rose, director of the council's visual arts unit, said yesterday that the painting had vanished into thin air: "Generally, after two or three years there is a ransom call or some sightings somewhere but in this case there has been nothing. It is very unusual. We have nothing to go on and we don't even know if it is in Berlin. It's no bigger than a postcard and it seems it virtually disappeared in someone's pocket."

The reward money has been put up by a prominent British arts philanthropist who has asked to remain anonymous. The rarity of a new work by Freud does raise one worry. The British Council is concerned that the posters - in a strictly limited edition - may be ripped down and taken home by Berlin's art lovers before they achieve their goal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Sylvester

 

The Daily Telegraph  20the June 2001

 

DAVID SYLVESTER, who has died aged 76, was generally reckoned to be the greatest critic of modern art writing in English.

A notable scholar and organiser of exhibitions, Sylvester was also the author of the Magritte catalogue raisonne, which was to occupy him for more than a quarter of a century, and of the standard monograph on Giacometti. He was a leading authority on Francis Bacon and on Henry Moore.

Sylvester's extraordinarily smooth voice and polished literary style belied a waspish temperament. He could be as devastatingly critical about people as he was shrewd in his judgments on art. This led him into memorable confrontations, such as when Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, spat at him and then burst into tears following an altercation over the hanging of the American Art in the 20th Century exhibition in 1993 - which Sylvester had condemned as "scandalous".

A man who provoked violent dislikes in some whom he crossed, Sylvester was also capable of inspiring great loyalty in those who worked alongside him. They admired his dedication and utter perfectionism and respected his formidable eye. A large bearlike man with a great presence, he could be a charming and witty companion, and, despite his rather prickly nature, an inspiring teacher at the Royal College of Art from 1960-70, the Slade (where he was Visiting Lecturer from 1953-57), and Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania (1967-68).

A writer who could turn his hand to film reviewing or sports commentary, Sylvester had the gift, rare among art critics, of being able to explain the most difficult modern art in the most down-to-earth, comprehensible language.

One article which illustrated this vividly was Art of the Coke Culture which first appeared in 1963 in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine and was republished in his anthology of collected essays, About Modern Art (1996). Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs, wine and Coca-Cola, were brilliantly contrasted to highlight differences between contemporary European and American art, between the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and what Sylvester called the "folk" art of Peter Blake.

Anthony David Bernard Sylvester was born on September 21 1924 into a family of Russian-Jewish silver dealers. He was educated at University College School, where a fellow pupil was Alan Bowness, later Director of the Tate Gallery.

Sylvester's interest in art was awakened at the age of 17, by the discovery of a black and white illustration of Matisse's La Danse which gave him "an awareness of the music of form" and showed him that art did not always have to tell a story. Following this Damascene conversion, Sylvester tried his hand at painting, but, discouraged by his efforts, turned instead to writing about it. In a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph's Martin Gayford, Sylvester claimed that the critical impulse had come even earlier. "I went to see a football match when I was 10 or 11, Arsenal v West Bromwich Albion at Highbury," he recalled. "I came home and I wrote a report on it."

His first review appeared in November 1942 in Tribune. For three years he enjoyed a charmed life as a regular reviewer for the literary pages edited by John Atkins and, later, George Orwell, but he was to fall foul of the editor, Aneurin Bevan. His swan-song - ironically, in view of his later fame as an authority on the sculptor - was a review of a picture book about Henry Moore which appeared in 1945.

When Sylvester telephoned to complain that he had been paid so poorly for the article, he was told, tartly, that how much he earned depended upon how good the article was. However, Moore clearly liked the article even if the magazine's editor did not, because Sylvester was invited to visit Moore's studio in Hertfordshire and later spent a few months as Moore's part-time secretary.

The working relationship was terminated, according to Sylvester, "because we spent too much time arguing about art" and his secretarial input would seem to have been minimal, given that there is no surviving written evidence of his tenure in the otherwise very extensive Henry Moore archives.

Having turned down a place at Cambridge to read Moral Sciences, Sylvester set out for Paris in 1947, supporting himself through reviews and translation work while frequenting the studios of Brancusi, Leger and, above all, Giacometti, for whom he sat and who came to represent to the young critic "the saintly knight without armour who had come to redeem art from facility and commercialism."

Another beacon of inspiration was the work of Paul Klee, whose major retrospective in Paris Sylvester reviewed for Sartre's existentialist monthly, Les Temps Modernes. But, despite his admiration for Klee, Sylvester at this period had little sympathy for abstract art which he regarded as "incomplete art", or for the work of the American Abstract Expressionists whom he was later to admire.

When he returned to figurative painting, it was in particular to the work of Francis Bacon, with whom he was to conduct a series of memorable television interviews culminating in his book Interviews with Francis Bacon (1975). While embracing Bacon's brutal realism, Sylvester was careful to dissociate himself from what he regarded as the banality of artists such as John Bratby, memorably branded as "The Kitchen Sink School", and from the ideas of the critic John Berger, who championed their work but "was too much of a boy scout not to find Bacon a monster of depravity".

In a lecture given at the Royal College of Art in 1951, Sylvester called upon the students to embrace a new, more subjective type of realism, reflecting the fact that "modern man occurs in the consciousness of each individual". It was his own ability to put these sensations so vividly into words which made him such a sensitive critic of Bacon's work.

The return to England had brought a revival of his interest in Henry Moore, culminating in the first of a series of major exhibitions on the sculptor organised by Sylvester at the Tate Gallery in 1951. Further exhibitions were to follow in 1968, also at the Tate (with Joanna Drew), and in 1978 at the Serpentine Gallery, very shortly before Moore's death. The Tate also played host to important shows which Sylvester organised on Soutine (1963), Giacometti (1965) and Magritte (1969).

The Magritte exhibition led to the most taxing undertaking of Sylvester's career when he was invited to write the catalogue raisonne of the artist, which was published in 1992. It was a project which was to occupy him for a quarter of a century and which he was later to regret, partly because it diverted him from other areas of criticism, and partly because, despite his unrivalled knowledge of Magritte, he was not wholeheartedly in sympathy with his subject.

"The fact is," he later wrote, "that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my type." Despite this, he wrote about Magritte with great insight, concluding one memorable essay with an inveterate analysis of art: "If one looks at anything with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer looking at the thing itself."

His involvement with Magritte made him also a natural choice to curate the 1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition Dada and Surrealism, but, despite his interest in Magritte, he had little respect for that other pillar of surrealism, Salvador Dali, comparing the experience of looking at his work to attending a performance by Liberace - "one of the unhappy few squirming in the midst of an audience revelling in this oily message".

Despite his lifelong admiration for Moore and Bacon, Sylvester was otherwise rather out of sympathy with most 20th-century British art, which he saw as bedevilled by vagueness and a tendency to compromise.

Sickert was one artist who attracted Sylvester's most vitriolic criticisms, and he also wrote a brilliantly acerbic essay on that genteel establishment painter Sir William Coldstream, which contains passages reminiscent of Lytton Strachey. "A list of the honorary positions he held reads like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan," he wrote. "As some people are accident prone, so is he prone to attract official handles." The article concludes: "Looking at what was painted during the hours between committee meetings, one is at a loss to know whether, had he painted more, the gain would be more than quantitative." Surprisingly, Sylvester remained on good terms with the painter.

Sylvester was also an expert and avid collector of oriental art, particularly Islamic carpets. This bore fruit in the exhibition The Eastern Carpet in the Western World at the Hayward Gallery in 1983.

Other great enthusiasms were music - particularly jazz - films and cricket. He captained a team called The Eclectics and wrote cricketing articles for the Observer, where fellow contributors were A J Ayer and John Sparrow. His film criticism, which he started to write first for the magazine Encounter, was sufficiently distinguished to earn him the Golden Lion of Venice award in 1993.

Among his many official duties he was a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation and the Tate Gallery, an adviser to the Arts Council and a member of the Commission d'Acquisitions at the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris.

Perhaps the remark which best sums up his career was that which he himself made in a brilliantly illuminating essay about Matisse, the painter who first kindled his interest in modern painting. "He was a dandy amongst painters . . . one who took infinite pains to get a casual look." Sylvester was also a dandy by this definition, one who took infinite pains to get a casual look and his gift was to make the most difficult art seem easy and accessible.

He was appointed CBE in 1983. Sylvester married, in 1950, Pamela Briddon; they had three daughters. The marriage was dissolved. He also had a daughter with the novelist Shena Mackay.

 

 

 

  Obituary: David Sylvester

    Liz Jobey,  The Guardian June 20, 2001

 

     

 

A brilliant art critic, his work deepened our understanding of Matisse, Picasso, Magritte, Giacometti, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon

 

David Sylvester, who has died aged 76, was one of the finest writers on art in the second half of the 20th century. His clarity of expression and his adherence to the discipline of looking, as a route to understanding the power of a work of art, set him in a class apart. He wrote predominantly - whether in his journalism, in catalogue essays or books - about modern art, from Cézanne and Matisse up to mature artists of today. He was also a skilled maker of exhibitions. He curated his first Henry Moore show in 1951, and contributed many major shows to British and foreign museums and galleries.

    His exhibition schedule was particularly frantic during the 1990s, after he finished the catalogue raisonné of René Magritte, which had taken, "with interruptions", 25 years. Though his writing was marked by its simplicity of style (he cautioned editors that he used shorter words than most critics, so if his pieces did not make the required column length, that did not mean he had not supplied - or should not be paid - the agreed amount), it never came easily or quickly. It was also marked by his analogies - accurate, but unexpected - drawn as easily from sex or football as from art history and psychology.

    In the 1950s and 1960s, when he was at his most prolific as a journalist, Sylvester also wrote about football and cricket for the Observer, ran a cricket team called the Eclectics, and reviewed films wherever he could, introducing sci-fi films and musicals to the readers of Encounter.

    His expertise in modern art was matched by a love of Islamic, Indian and Oriental - as well as Egyptian and tribal - art, and he collected throughout his adult life. He revolved this personal collection with obsessive frequency, and unsuspecting visitors to his house might find themselves up a stepladder, hanging on to a Picasso drawing or a 16th-century Chinese carpet, while he fretfully solicited their views on this latest domestic rehang.

    Sylvester had begun listening to jazz as a schoolboy in the 1930s, and still had the buff's ability to identify time, place and line-up of a session on CD without recourse to the sleeve notes. He also owned an enviable collection of art-house videos, which he reordered with Desert Island avidity; David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film was his indispensable volume of choice. He was an inveterate compiler of lists. Eliot was his favourite poet; L'Age D'Or and Ai No Corrida vied for his favourite film; Manchester United was his team; and Mike Brearley, one of his favourite cricketers, was among his closest friends.

    As for his favourite painter, the artists he championed changed over the years. "I started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948," he explains in his book of essays, About Modern Art (1996). And not until 40 years later did he feel nearer to "accepting [Picasso's] genius, rather than resenting it". It was a tug of love that underpinned his development as a critic, and only the thoroughness with which he tested his early champion, Giacometti - in essays, collected in Looking At Giacometti (1994), exhibitions (1951 and 1981), and on film (1967) - gives some measure of how prolonged and painful such a shift could be.

    The question of Picasso dominated Sylvester's career as a writer. "It is not even the question of Picasso versus Matisse," he wrote, "for even at those times when Matisse seems the greater, Picasso himself is still the question, probably because Matisse is a great artist in the same sort of way as many great artists of the past, whereas Picasso is a kind of artist who could not have existed before this century, since his art is a celebration of this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the practice of art.

    "Picasso is the issue, Picasso is the one to beat, Picasso is the fastest gun in the west, the one every budding gunfighter has to beat to the draw in order to prove himself . . . The young critic cuts his teeth on Picasso. He proves his manhood by putting down Picasso, which is quite easy, because he is so flawed an artist, is such a colossal figure that he has several parts that are clay, probably including his feet, but not his balls."

    Sylvester was born in London, the son of a Russian-Jewish antiques dealer, and went to University College School, which he left at the age of 16. He enjoyed a brief career as a dealer himself before turning to painting at 17, inspired by a black and white reproduction of Matisse's La Danse. Until then, he said, he thought of art as "telling a story".

    Matisse changed all that. It was not its narrative qualities that enthralled him, but its abstract ones; he understood the rhythms and tensions in its series of curves. By his own account, Sylvester was not a good painter, and decided he might be better at writing about it than making it.

    While still in his teens, he had an article about drawing accepted by Tribune. He wrote another, after which the literary editor, George Orwell, gave him some book reviews. There were few wartime art exhibitions to write about, but the National gallery put on monthly shows, and some commercial galleries exhibited British artists. In this way, Sylvester was introduced to the works of Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Matthew Smith, while he met a younger generation of London artists, including Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.

    His stint with Tribune ended in 1945. As Sylvester remembered, its then editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too "heavy with Latinisms". In any case, he was soon redeployed: his last piece for the magazine, on Henry Moore, elicited an invitation to the sculptor's studio, and a job as Moore's part-time secretary. The chance to study an artist's work in depth led to Sylvester's first exhibition installation, and, in 1968, his first book, on Moore.

   In 1947, he turned down a place to read moral sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went to Paris, finding work editing and translating. In 1948, after seeing the work of Paul Klee, he wrote a piece about him for a New York magazine, Tiger's Eye, which the critical review Les Temps Modernes then wanted to publish in translation. Sylvester asked for time to rework it; it finally appeared two years later.

    The time-lag testified to the kind of deliberations of which those who knew him subsequently would find nothing surprising. In conversation, he was a master of the grand pause, the prolonged silence broken by heavy breathing, then a sudden intake of breath that heralded the dramatic response. Lord Snowdon liked to tell the story of how, driving with Sylvester to Brighton, Snowdon asked a question at Reigate, and saw the domes of the Brighton pavilion appear before a voice from the back seat answered deeply, "Yes".

    It was through Picasso's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, that Sylvester, then 24, met Giacometti. After that, he visited Giacometti's studio regularly, and began to write about his work. In 1960, he sat for Giacometti, and the resulting painting finally graced the cover of his collected pieces 35 years later, to critical praise.

    Sylvester's first glimpse of American abstract expressionism, in 1950, left him unimpressed. He was, at this point, anti-American and pro-figurative, and more interested in Bacon, whom he had identified as the most outstanding of contemporary British artists. During the 1950s and 1960s, he became a personal friend of Bacon's, and, in 1975, when their collected conversations on art were published, the book was recognised as one of the great additions to the study of late 20th-century art. It made Sylvester's reputation, and has been revised, extended and republished in several editions.

    Sylvester's support for figurative (though not necessarily realist) painting embroiled him in an early battle with the critic John Berger, conducted in essays and reviews, particularly on the pages of Encounter. A byproduct of this was a piece that coined a new title for a group of British and French contemporary realist painters - the kitchen-sink school. Taken up by the media, and applied wholesale to literature, theatre and film, it added a new genre to the decade.

    In 1960, Sylvester took over from Berger at the New Statesman. Two years later, he resigned, having discovered that the column was too short for his good ideas, and came around too frequently to avoid his bad ones. His career as a broadcaster, however, blossomed. He took up a visiting lectureship at the Royal College of Art in 1960 (he had been a visiting lecturer at the Slade from 1953-57), and, in the same year, the US state department invited him to spend two months in America, during which he interviewed American artists for BBC radio.

    It took Sylvester most of the decade to make up his mind about contemporary American art. He was warming to Pollock by the mid-1950s, and, after a touring show at the Tate - and the US trip - had given him a more detailed chance to see it at first-hand, he was finally converted. Then came Pop. He introduced it, in a 1963 essay, Coke Culture, in the Sunday Times magazine, which he had joined as an art writer and adviser.

    In the 1960s, his career took off in several directions at once. He was making a series of films, Ten Modern Artists, for the BBC, curating at least one major show a year, writing two books - Henry Moore (1968) and Magritte (1969) - and taking on an escalating number of public appointments. He liked being asked to sit on committees and accept trusteeships - something he put down to being an outsider and a Jew.

    Having accepted them, however, they did not always last. He resigned as a Tate trustee after two years, and gave up the British Film Institute production board after three. But he kept up his membership of the art panel of the Arts Council for almost two decades, and, though not a very politicised bureaucrat, he did bring about some fundamental changes. He got the rates for visiting curators raised, and revised the way works were bought for the Arts Council collection - to prevent people pushing their favourites through. Towards the end of his life, he was a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation, on the board of the Serpentine gallery and, in 1997, became a governor of the South Bank Centre.

In 1950, Sylvester had married a student teacher, Pamela Briddon, with whom he had three daughters, Catherine, Naomi and Xanthe. He later had a fourth daughter, Cecily Brown, with Shena Mackay; all four daughters survive him. When the marriage broke up, he moved back to their old flat in Wimbledon, south London, and filled the two large rooms with pieces of art. Most visitors complied with his rule that they remove their shoes at the door, though the artist Joseph Beuys is supposed, famously, to have refused, and been sent packing into the night. At the end of the 1980s, Sylvester moved to a townhouse in Notting Hill, where, for more than a decade, his then partner, the art critic and curator Sarah Whitfield, lived next door. It was there that he finished editing his work on Magritte.

    The commission had been offered by the art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil in 1967, initially as a four-year contract. What was originally intended to be one book finished up as a five-volume catalogue raisonné, a critical biography and a touring exhibition. In retrospect, Sylvester occasionally wondered if he had made the right decision; he was given to periods of self-doubt, and regretted giving up the opportunity to develop more films and interviews for television.

    As it was, Magritte took over his professional life. In 1982, he gave up what had been his most prominent public position to date, his seat on the Arts Council, and vowed to do nothing else until Magritte was finished. In 1983, he was awarded a CBE for his public services to art.

    In fact, his period of abstinence did not last long. The following year, he accepted a place on the acquisitions board of the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, and, in 1988, heralded his return with a show of Late Picasso at the Centre Pompidou. His catalogue essay was a tribute from an old adversary who recognised, in the works of the ageing Picasso, the loss not of artistic but of sexual potency.

    The culmination of the Magritte period came in 1992: the first volume of the catalogue raisonné was published, and the exhibition opened at the Hayward gallery, and travelled to New York, Houston and Chicago. After this, one volume appeared every year until 1996. After 25 years with Magritte, Sylvester felt it to have been too long: "I still love the work," he wrote, "but the fact remains that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my type."

    When the de Menils' support came to an end, Sylvester worried that, both economically and professionally, he might not be able to hold his own. He had always been anxious about money. In the 1950s, he had thought he might be able to finance his life by gambling, as Bacon and Freud did, but he had none of their success. Considering his reputation, some people regarded his fears as false modesty, but he was not immune to depression and insecurity. There was a side to his nature that needed praise, and he was genuinely pleased when he received it. But by this time people expected him to be grand.

    The word "panjandrum" was often chosen to describe him, partly because of his reputation, partly in reaction to his imposing physical presence. Although he played on the grandeur when necessary, he could also undercut it. His injection of a slangy word or phrase could refocus the reader's engagement with a difficult piece; when lecturing he could inspire a kind of dinner-table intimacy. And his intimacy, and stamina, on the telephone was legendary among his friends: his late- night conversations took in everything from share prices to the impossibility of resolving the demands of love and morality.

    As for returning to a freelance career, Sylvester was soon engulfed by commitments, and, in the last five years of the century, travelled constantly, particularly to the United States. He was writing prolifically - catalogue essays and introductions, reviews, particularly for the London Review of Books, and shorter pieces for the national press.

    By now, many of his old friends were in positions of power. Nicholas Serota, whom Sylvester had known since he was a young director at the Whitechapel gallery, was now director of the Tate. Lord Gowrie, who deemed Sylvester his "best friend among the generation immediately preceding my own", was head of the Arts Council. Sir Ian Bancroft and Joanna Drew, for whom he had curated exhibitions at the Hayward, were among his many close friends.

    He had been a connoisseur of love affairs for most of his life, and he encountered fem- ale friends with a gaze that could match his pauses of speech in length. It was his very own mirada fuerta, the look Picasso used to seduce and shock. In Sylvester's case, it was described, with fond exasperation, by a habitual recipient as "one of those long, sideways, admir ing, get-your-clothes-off kind of stares" that often heralded "a brief, platonic love affair".

    Of the artists within his field of expertise, Bacon was the first, and the one he will be remembered for as both champion and major critic. In 1993, a year after Bacon's death, Sylvester curated a show of paintings at the Museo Correr, for the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion, the first time it had been given to a critic rather than an artist. Three years later, by which time the French had made him an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, he curated another Bacon show at the Pompidou, which he said looked even better. And in the spring of 1998, he made a relatively small selection of Bacon paintings, on the theme of the human body, for the Hayward gallery, which showed how his familiarity with the work could produce a subtle show that pleased critics and the public alike.

    Last year, he published his own study of Bacon, Looking Back At Francis Bacon, and installed a show at the Hugh Lane municipal gallery, in Dublin, which preceded the installation of the reconstructed interior of Bacon's studio dismantled from Reece Mews, South Kensington.

    At the end of the 90s, Sylvester had become embroiled in the fuss over the discovery of a clutch of badly executed oil sketches, allegedly disproving what Bacon had told him - that he never did preliminary drawings. Though this provided art historians with a new area of research, Sylvester made his own definitive response last March, during a debate at the Barbican, when he reminded the audience that, whether by Bacon or not, everybody accepted that the drawings were bad, and therefore an intensive study of them was pointless; much better to spend the time studying the paintings, which were, uncontroversially, Bacon's masterpieces.

    By this time, Sylvester was ill. But though he complained about growing old, mentally he never seemed it. His experience of life, combined with his intellect, made him an unshockable, unjudgmental and, when the occasion demanded it, candid, adviser and friend. He could be irritable and demanding. But he was delicate, kind and never lost the appetites that made him appear more alive in his senses than most people around him, and which made his writing about art as visceral as it was analytic.

    Sylvester will be remembered as one of the great 20th-century critics, on a level with Michel Leiris, the one he probably admired most. During his lifetime, the art world of 1950s Soho, of which he had been part, became mythologised, almost an art-world soap opera. The art world itself became ever more deeply involved with and dependent upon the media, in need of new sensations to keep it in the public eye.

    Sylvester was still a key personality in all this. He was consulted by Charles Saatchi and Nick Serota; he was asked to write on contemporary work, as well as his more characteristic areas of expertise. One of the things that most excited him was the prospect of a long interview about film with the young Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, which he realised shortly before his death.

    He was part of the contemporary art world, and yet he was also set apart from it. He understood the game of art, and his writing deepened our understanding of it.

Anthony David Bernard Sylvester, art critic and curator, born September 21 1924; died June 19 2001

 

 

 

 

   Obituary: David Sylvester

 
      Christopher Green, The Independent, 25 June, 2001

 

 

    Anthony David Bernard Sylvester, writer, art critic and exhibition curator: born London 21 September 1924; Chairman, Art Panel, Arts Council of Great Britain 1980-82; CBE 1983; married 1950 Pamela Briddon (three daughters; marriage dissolved), (one daughter by Shena Mackay); died London 19 June 2001.

"The dignity of an old man's acceptance of approaching death is touched by absurdity in so far as he is already dead as a man. For a woman, the horror of ageing resides in no longer attracting; for a man, in no longer acting." This was how David Sylvester began his essay for the Centre Pompidou's exhibition of the "late Picasso" in 1988. In his words, the subject of "late Picasso" was "loss of manhood, loss of face, loss of everything but the ambivalent pleasures of voyeurism". Sylvester, a critic and curator who made a real difference to the art of his time, died aged 76 last week.

    Those sentences on Picasso and old age say a lot about David Sylvester. They are all pith; not a shred of waste has been allowed to remain. Clarity and cogency were what he wanted and usually got from his writing.

    When he wrote on "late Picasso" he was in his mid-sixties and still agonising over every word in every phrase, though his status as a writer on art was already assured. On the threshold himself of old age, he writes about his own fears as well as about Picasso. His engagement with art and artists was personal in the fullest of senses; when he looked at art he wanted to find out about himself as well as what he saw, and he could be devastatingly honest about both.

    Sylvester's cogency as a writer can be misleading, as can his status at the end of his career. He was not as decisive as his usually unequivocal judgements can make him seem Đ he was always willing to re-examine the most firmly held opinions; and he never felt security even at the heart of the cultural establishment. As a person, he communicated anxiety as much as force Đ a great deal of both.

    He became, incontrovertibly, a sacred monster of the Establishment. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he was a member of the Arts Council. He was appointed CBE in 1983 when he stepped down as Chairman of the Arts Panel, having been a dominant presence on the panel for nearly 20 years. He had already served as a trustee of the Tate, and later became a member of the purchasing committee of the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris (one of very few foreigners to be asked). In 1993, in Italy, he was the first art critic to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale; in 1995, in France, he became a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; in England there was an honorary fellowship from the Royal Academy too.

    He was loaded with honours, and his advice was sought by the directors of museums of modern art world-wide. Yet, the pleasure he undoubtedly took in his establishment status went with dislike of everything repressive about institutional authority, and a strong sense of himself as an outsider who could never be sure of acceptance.

    His early life and career might have been designed to produce such contradictions. His upbringing was solidly bourgeois, in a successful London Jewish trading family. His father moved from fish to the family silver business in Chancery Lane. His mother kept a kosher kitchen. He had security within the Jewish community, but as a young child in his private school he was often the outsider Jew, mocked for his tradesman father "in fish", and unable to play games because of observance of the Sabbath.

    He escaped from all that: thrown out of the house for contemplating conversion to Roman Catholicism in his teens, and expelled from University College School for truancy. He never went back to orthodox religious belief of any kind or to the education system (in 1947 he chose Paris rather than a place to read Moral Sciences at Cambridge), but he never lost the taste and talent for trading his family gave him.

    His beginnings as an art writer producing copy for George Orwell at Tribune between 1942 and 1945 were supported by dealing in silver. He started on a small scale, but told the story that in the end his father actually paid him for his client list. He also gambled, having been introduced to racing by a favourite uncle; not so successfully. His independence was a feature of every aspect of his life, material as well as intellectual. Later he became a collector rather than a trader, but he never lost his respect for commerce, something which aroused suspicion among the great and the good, even when the importance of his contribution demanded recognition.

The foundations of David Sylvester's convictions as a writer on art and a curator were laid in the mid-to-late 1940s; at the heart of them was an uncompromising belief in personal experience and independence of judgement. They were laid among writers, thinkers and above all artists in London and Paris; he believed it crucial to be responsive to artists as well as art. In London contact with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon was formative; in Paris so was contact with the heroes of the pre-war vanguard, among them Léger, Masson, Brancusi and Giacometti. Time with Giacometti especially mattered to him. He might have decided not to read Moral Sciences at university, but he loved ideas, and in Paris, in the milieux of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Michel Leiris, he deepened his commitment to art as the way to intensified individual experience and self-knowledge. For Sylvester, art and ideas were not optional extras; he was an intellectual in the French sense of that word.

    Yet, as a critic Sylvester belongs in a distinctly English empirical lineage. Another major influence on him was A.J. Ayer, and, though he was never a believer in Clive Bell's "significant form", his insistence on the primacy of direct encounters with works of art, and his willingness to treat each encounter as a new experiment open to new conclusions, marks him out as the most important English heir to Roger Fry in 20th-century art criticism. Sylvester was plural in the passions he wrote about: football and cricket (for The Observer in the 1950s and 1960s), film (for Encounter, The New Statesman, etc) as well as art; but art remained at the centre for him, an obsession as well as a passion.

    His profile as a public figure was probably at its highest in the 1960s, when he became a ubiquitous presence in cultural broadcasting, and in the 1990s, when the press gave him space for his views on Gilbert and George as well as Picasso, and when he was one of the engines powering the international rise of the modern and contemporary art exhibition. Yet, he should be remembered as much perhaps for the dynamism and long-term impact of his contributions to the cultural debates of the 1950s in England.

    Sylvester always took abstract art seriously. He had positive things to say as much about Barnett Newman as about Mondrian, and came to consider the radically non-figurative sculptors Donald Judd and Richard Serra among the most important artists of the 20th century. But from the late 1940s through the 1950s he was most deeply committed to figurative art, and it was as the champion of a figuration whose power came from the artist's personal engagement with appearances that he took sides against John Berger's championship of "Social Realism" in England: on the side of Giacometti, Masson, and Picasso, along with Moore, Sutherland, Auerbach and, especially, Francis Bacon.

    He had worked as Moore's private secretary between 1948 and 1951, and from 1949 developed a close relationship with Bacon. His coining of the catch-phrase "kitchen-sink" in 1954 for the "realism" of such as Bratby, Middleditch and Jack Smith was derogatory. He rejected utterly the idea that art by merely representing things "as they are" could have value as an instrument of social change. Of Bacon he wrote, also in 1954: he "has mastered the essential problem of painting, of trapping a reality without naming it".

    Much later, in 1975, he would publish his Interviews with Francis Bacon (enlarged as Brutality of Fact: interviews with Francis Bacon, 1987), one of the most far-reaching explorations of the creative process ever achieved with the co-operation of a major artist. It will remain essential reading for any one interested in the possible ways in which a painter can relate to the visible world.

    The debate with John Berger was conducted most publicly in exhibitions (Sylvester's curating began with Moore at the Tate in 1951) and journals (Sylvester writing especially in Encounter, Berger in The New Statesman). Neither Sylvester nor Berger won their duel in the 1950s Đ they were each too strong as advocates to be "beaten" Đ but Sylvester's pugnacious yet always nuanced defence of art as an arena for individual experience prepared the way for American Abstract Expressionism in England.

    The Berger-Sylvester duel was a worthy successor to Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry's earlier in the century (Berger, it is worth recalling, was an admirer of Lewis). But, where Lewis marginalised himself and Fry closed the door against the most vital continental developments of the 1920s, Sylvester remained at the centre and opened things up. He had actually opposed Clement Greenberg's promotion of Pollock on Greenberg's own turf in the New York periodical The Nation in 1950, but when the Americans were shown in London in 1956 he was convinced. Some of his most acute later writings are on the Abstract Expressionists, and among his most prized possessions later were three remarkable drawings by de Kooning. He was open to younger American artists too, especially Jasper Johns.

    The phase in David Sylvester's career that tends most to be underplayed is the Magritte phase. In 1969 he staged Magritte's work in a labyrinth of white passages and compartments in the Tate Gallery. The impact on the Houston collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil was such that they commissioned him to write a catalogue raisonné of Magritte. Never academically trained, Sylvester became a scholar.

    His approach was not merely to accumulate data, but to question the very form and function of the oeuvre catalogue. Every aspect of the genre was debated at seminar-like sessions in his Walpole Street office or in nearby Chelsea restaurants (especially Chinese). It took him and a team which included Elizabeth Cowling, Michael Raeburn and Sarah Whitfield until 1992 before the first of the five volumes of René Magritte: catalogue raisonné appeared (he continued throughout to publish elsewhere and to curate). He wrote a companion critical study, Magritte: the silence of the world (1992), and was co-author of three of the volumes (with Sarah Whitfield), but his template shaped them all, and, characteristically, he worried about every word they contained.

    Concluded in 1997, the catalogue is a major art-historical contribution. It not only maps Magritte's work with immaculate precision, but also offers original and highly effective solutions to problems which every scholar confronted with the task of mapping an oeuvre has to overcome.

    David Sylvester was as much a self-made scholar as he was a self-made intellectual. He was immensely proud of his great-aunt "Madame Fanny Waxman", a star of the Yiddish theatre. He became a star too. The pleasure he took in institutional recognition was a performer's pleasure in applause. In the end, however, he needed institutions much less than they needed him.

 

 

 

VISUAL ART: Take a peep - it's a voyeur's dream

 

Charles Darwent, The Independent, May 27, 2001

 

To say that Francis Bacon is missing from his newly-reconstructed studio in Dublin sounds dim, even by the demanding standards of British journalism. The Master of the Screaming Pope died in 1992, after all: his attendance at the studio's official opening last Tuesday would have been taking the Baconian grand guignol thing a little far. Still, you can't help feeling Bacon's sulphurous presence in the Hugh Lane Gallery's new annexe, and wondering just where the old devil has hidden himself.

Which is a measure of the project's triumph. When the idea of disassembling Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, shipping its 7,200 pieces of slashed canvas, torn paper and truncated corduroy trouser-leg across to Dublin, and then re-assembling the lot with archaeological accuracy, was first mooted in the late 1990s, reactions in Britain ranged from mild annoyance to white fury. David Sylvester, Bacon's ailing hagiographer and friend, pointed out that the artist had always hated Ireland. (The son of a horsey ex-army officer, Bacon skipped to England at 17 having been caught being buggered by a groom, and never went back.) The Tate Gallery - which, it is said, was offered the studio by Bacon's last boyfriend, John Edwards, and lost it for being too blase - was predictably tight- lipped about the project.

Of deeper worry, though, was the sense that preserving Reece Mews as a shrineful of Bacon relics went against the artist's habit of ruthless self-editing. Bacon proudly maintained that he had destroyed his best pictures, evidence of which was provided by the dozens of slashed and overpainted canvases found in his studio when he died. (A similar shadow was cast by Barry Joule, the one-time handyman accused by devout Baconians of removing incunabula from St Francis' studio against his wishes.) Bacon's mystique rests in part on the belief that his genius sprang from his brush fully-formed, without the need for bourgeois interventions like drawings. Being able to see the hundreds of worked-over photographs and magazine pages that had littered the floor of his Reece Mews studio might dim the public's awe.

Speaking as a member of that public, it doesn't. Bacon's studio was more than a coincidental space in which to paint. As Margarita Cappock, manager of the project, notes, pretty well the only thing not unearthed at Reece Mews in the course of its removal was a palette. Instead, Bacon used his studio's walls and doors to experiment with texture and colour, mixing his paints on them and scuffing away at the results with odd bits of paper and trouser-leg. (Remember those stripes in Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail)? Corduroy.) The studio - perhaps uniquely in art - was also an artwork, giving it a value that Brancusi's sterile atelier, rebuilt at the Pompidou Centre, does not have.

And 7 Reece Mews was more than that, too. The project's architect, David Chipperfield, has included a quotation from Bacon on the wall of the free- standing bunker in which he has encased the artist's studio: "The mess around here [ie., at Reece Mews] is rather like my mind: it may be a good image of what goes on inside me." Far from denying the intrusion of ogling Bacon's sanctum, Chipperfield has made a fetish of it, exploiting a quality in his design - voyeurism - which Bacon, always open to such things, would doubtless have enjoyed.

Step into the glass box that provides your first view of the studio, and you have the embarrassing sense of being somewhere you shouldn't be. On the opposite wall, two steel tendrils sprout like motifs from a Bacon anthro-machine. These hold lenses giving specific views of painted wall and door, emphasising the studio-as-palette idea but also stressing the illicitness of what you're doing: turning the installation into a What the Painter Saw machine, visitors into voyeurs. (You half-expect Bacon's bloodshot eye to peer dolefully back at you.) Chipperfield plays his third variation on the voyeurism theme on the final wall, his spiral walkway allowing you to look down through the studio windows like an old-fashioned Peeping Tom.

Circulation is important here. On the one hand, the fact that you approach the studio in one of two ways - through a room hung with unfinished canvases from Reece Mews or via another of finished Bacons - means that the new annexe integrates itself into the Hugh Lane Gallery's William Chambers core. ("Bacon thought of his portraits as being like Gainsborough's," notes the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson. "It's not inapt.") At the same time, the bunkerish look of Chipperfield's annexe tells you this is a place where you have, at best, a dubious right to be. It's a dangerous feeling, and a useful one.

For the clever thing about Chipperfield's design is that it celebrates criticisms of the project rather than denying them. There's no questioning the extraordinariness of it all: the team of archaeologists that plotted the position of every last ball of paper and fluff on Bacon's floor; Cappock's computer database, which allows each of the objects to be pulled up, interrogated and cross- referenced on screen; Perry Ogden's photographic archive which, inexplicably, recorded slight changes in the disposition of these objects when the archaeologists came to do their stuff. ("Very Francis," sighs Dawson.)

But the question remains: would Francis have approved? "John [Edwards] says he would have roared with laughter," says Barbara Dawson, "and he was with Bacon for the last 16 years of his life." And when he'd finished laughing, you feel that Bacon would have enjoyed the illicitness of it all, and the spying.

Francis Bacon Studio: Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903); Perry Ogden's project photographs, to 28 October. 

7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio is published by Thames & Hudson, pounds 14.95

 

 

 

  Francis Bacon studio recreated in Dublin

     By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent

 

  The Daily Telegraph  05/06/2001  

 

 

DUSTY newspapers attest to the authenticity of the studio of the late Francis Bacon, which was opened yesterday in Dublin after it was dismantled and shipped from London. The artist was born in Dublin but did not regard himself as Irish. He spent all of his most creative years at his studio in south Kensington. The arrival of the entire contents of his studio, all painstakingly catalogued before being moved, has created an air of bemusement in Dublin's artistic community which has shown as much interest in Bacon as he did in Ireland. An art critic said: "If you went into an Irish bookshop and asked for something on Bacon they would point you to the Elizabethan history section." After Bacon's death the studio's contents were given by his companion and sole heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin's Parnell Square. More than 7,000 items, including books, floor and roof timbers, tubes of paint, a dressing gown and discarded boxes of champagne, feature in the recreation of the artist's habitat. Even the dust which had accumulated at No 7 Reece Mews studio was swept up and scattered over the Dublin display. Barbara Dawson, the Hugh Lane Gallery director, said: "The acquisition of Francis Bacon's studio was a great coup. The gallery's innovative approach to retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Bacon's work." An exhibition of unfinished paintings will accompany the studio. Mr Edwards described the studio as a dump. When he tidied it up he found bundles of banknotes that had been hidden, some of which were so old they were out of date.

 

 

 

 

Bacon discovery excites art world

The Daily Telegraph  Sunday 7 January 2001

By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent

 

 

THREE portraits by Francis Bacon of his homosexual lover have surfaced on the London art market nearly nine years after the artist's death. The portraits, which are expected to fetch a record price at Christie's auctioneers next month, are of John Edwards, who was Bacon's companion for the last 18 years of his life. When Bacon died he left his £61 million estate to Mr Edwards, a dyslexic recluse who now lives in Thailand. The portraits, of the subject seated on a stool, are thought to be Bacon's own favourites and once hung in his studio. They were sold during his lifetime to an "unnamed European collector" who is now selling them for an estimated £4 million. Jussi Pylkkanen, head of the 20th-century art department at Christie's, which is selling the paintings on February 8, said: "They are works that Bacon himself identified of being museum quality." Mr Pylkkanen said: "Rather than creating a single portrait, he wanted to capture every single element in terms of colour, form and texture. It is exciting to see something of this importance on the market at a time when Bacon's true worth is officially being recognised by international collectors." The grotesque smears and distortion of the features that distinguished Bacon's work in the 1970s appear to be less obvious in his portraits of John Edwards, which were painted in 1984 and in which the features are sharply delineated. In two of the panels the features are clearly recognisable beneath the smudges of Bacon's paint. Mr Pylkkanen said: "His later paintings were not quite so enraged and butchered, but these pictures may have been particularly harmonious because they are of his lover." Mr Edwards met Bacon in 1974. Like George Dyer, the artist's former lover, John Edwards was from London's East End and was considerably younger than the artist. Bacon, who has been acclaimed as the greatest British artist since Turner, was born in Dublin in 1909, went to London at the age of 16 and travelled shortly afterwards to Berlin and Paris. Self-taught, he did not begin to paint seriously until the 1930s. He lived in London during the Blitz, when he undertook the first important painting of his career, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now in the Tate Modern gallery.

 

 

 

7 REECE MEWS: FRANCIS BACON'S STUDIO

A precious collection of debris

Perry Ogden, Foreword by John Edwards
Thames & Hudson, 120pp, £14.95, ISBN 0500510342
 

Patrick Skene Catling

The Spectator, Saturday, 19th May 2001

 

John Edwards, Francis Bacon's heir, donated Bacon's South Kensington studio, the whole room and all its contents, to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, his birthplace, thus submitting the compost of the artist's memorabilia to archaeologists, curators, art critics, psychoanalysts and, from 23 May, the public.

 

The laborious 1998 dismantling, shipment and exact reassembly of the detritus of 30 years of what Bacon called his 'exhilarated despair' will give his admirers and detractors clues to the creative processes of a gambling, alcoholic, homosexual, atheistic genius. In the intimately enlightened opinion of Edwards, companion to Bacon for the last 20 of his 82 years, the act of transferring this complex of chaotic artistic fecundity to Dublin, a wonderful coals-to-Newcastle operation, 'would have made him roar with laughter, his own special laugh, full of warmth and joy'.

Though Bacon would rarely have been able - or have cared - to pass a breathalyser test, he was passionately serious about working at his easel in the morning, no matter what he had been doing until late the night before. He was a man of prodigious stamina, recuperative power, prolificity, and eventual wealth. He told David Sylvester, the foremost authority on Bacon, 'I really like highly disciplined painting, although I don't use highly disciplined methods of constructing it.' He depended on receiving images from his subconscious by fortuitous accidents. His paintings sometimes evolved as he painted them, as if having lives of their own.

He depicted people as meat, flayed, twisted and corrupted, as though portraying mortality might exorcise his fear of loss. He dreaded abandonment and impermanence: long relationships ended in death. He was gregarious but valued contemplative solitude. He said he was an optimist, but regularly exposed himself to the risks of roulette, rough trade and drunken oblivion. In Tangiers, according to the late Daniel Farson, a long-time, on-and-off friend of Bacon's, the British consul general impressed on the local chief of police that

Francis was a very distinguished painter and kept getting mugged. A few days later, the chief of police returned, patently embarrassed: 'Pardon, mais le peintre adore Œa!'

Dreading the end of life, Bacon seemed to be in a hurry to get it over, while at the same time relying on attentive doctors to prolong it. He deplored the term gay; he said he was queer. He enjoyed his circumstances of 'gilded squalor'.

I knew him only at times of post-meridian frivolity in Soho, presiding with intellectual fervour and flamboyant charm over long lunches and consequent sessions in the Colony Room club, the beloved, bile-green vortex known as Muriel's. Muriel Belcher greatly encouraged him. Those festivities were the early stages of his daily routine transmogrification from Jekyll to Hyde. 'Champagne for our real friends!' was his favourite toast, 'and real pain for our sham friends!' As he ordered bottle after bottle, he was closely surrounded by friends of both kinds. He was an insistent host, generous to a fault, usually tolerant of hangers-on, but ruthlessly critical of other artists, especially abstractionists.

Before the studio was transported to Dublin, Perry Ogden spent several days photographing every part of 7 Reece Mews as it was when Bacon lived there - the orderly bedsitting room, the kitchen/bathroom (he was a good cook and carefully ablutionary), and the steep wooden stairs down to the studio, which looked as if his id had run amok in it.

Bacon was an autodidact all his life. Ogden's close-ups of bookshelves reveal the wide range of his reading, such as biographies of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Freud, Ezra Pound, Rothschild and Seurat and at least three of Velazquez. (He said he thought Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X was 'one of the greatest paintings in the world and I've had a crush on it'.) Among the numerous other books were The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, Spender's Journals, Greek Made Easy, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet - and Larousse Gastronomique. On a shelf near his bed, there were snapshots of lovers and a plaster-cast mask of William Blake.

At first glance, the studio looks like the devastation caused by an explosion in a rubbish tip. However, the gallery's team of archaeologists catalogued over 7,000 items, including 80 'works on paper', 1,500 photographs and many slashed canvases. According to Barbara Dawson, the director of the gallery, there is now 'a definitive archive É a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Francis Bacon's work'. A 'Micro Gallery' will give visitors access to 'highlights of this archive.'

In the meantime, Ogden's elegant photographs provide an opportunity to scrutinise a lot of significant Baconian debris - a page from Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion (his nude male wrestlers became Bacon's amorous meat on an unmade bed), glimpses of Michelangelo, Rodin and the late George Dyer in his underwear, and pages from a book on forensic pathology, displaying skin diseases, hundreds of discarded brushes and paint-pots, and empty cartons that once held bottles of Vat 69 and vintage Krug.

Bacon found day-dreaming in chaos richly productive. John Russell, in his excellent biography of Bacon, considers Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of 'unconscious scanning' and Edward de Bono's 'lateral thinking' as explications of Bacon's artistic creativity. Russell later quotes Bacon on his mysterious procedure: 'I think of myself as a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed.'

Ogden's and Edwards' book is a fascinating survey of the sorts of material that Bacon pulverised. The fascination easily quells any reluctance to pry into a dead man's privacy. And, after all, with his real friends Francis Bacon found everything in his tortured existence absolutely hilarious.

 

 

 

Bacon estate action against ex-agents goes on

By Maev Kennedy  The Guardian, Wednesday May 16, 2001

Years of legal argument over the tangled affairs of Francis Bacon lie ahead after a judge refused to block a legal action by the artist's estate against his former agents.

The life of the man acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, which was ended by a heart attack in 1992, was notoriously chaotic, and his afterlife is proving to be just as bumpy.

The stakes are enormous. The assets in dispute could be worth up to £100m. In his life time Bacon was one of a handful of British painters whose works broke the £1m price tag.

Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar. Last week in New York a world record was set at Sotheby's, where just under £6m was paid for a triptych.

His estate is suing the galleries that promoted his work for 34 years, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art, which is based in Liechtenstein, alleging "undue influence" over the painter.

As a result of yesterday's judgment, after three weeks of legal argument by Marlborough trying to have the case thrown out, the main action will go ahead. It is expected to take months, and will probably not begin before January.

Marlborough said it would "vigorously" defend the case. It described its relations with Bacon as "frank, close and mutually beneficial".

The high court was told that a representative of Marlborough acted almost as a minder, removing paintings from Bacon's studio - which was sometimes knee deep in rubbish, newspaper articles, old photographs and scraps of magazines - "as soon as the paint was dry".

When he died at 82, he was worth an estimated £10m, and left his fortune to his much younger friend, John Edwards, a former east London barman who now lives in Thailand.

The main legal action was instigated by the estate's executor, Brian Clarke. It is demanding a full statement of the galleries' dealing with the artist, claiming that they retained up to 70% of the sale value of his paintings when a third would have been fair, and that Marlborough has not demonstrated that it paid for all the paintings received.

Marlborough strenuously denies the allegations. Yesterday Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied there was "at least an arguable case". The trial would have to examine in detail Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough. While one of the greatest 20th century artists "both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate".

 

 

 

 

Bacon triptych sets sale record

Anonymous bidder pays $8.6m in New York auction of works of modern artists

 

  Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent

  The Guardian, Thursday May 10, 2001

 

 

  

 

 

A record price for the work of Francis Bacon has been set at a Sotheby's sale in New York, where a vast 1979 triptych sold for $8.6m (£6m), way above the estimate.

Studies of the Human Body (above), a typically grim Bacon view of life and love, was the star of an extraordinary collection of contemporary art built up by Stanley J Seeger, a millionaire American collector.

It had been estimated at $4m-$6m but reached the $8.6m in a phone bid from an anonymous buyer. The previous record for a Bacon was $6.6m, paid three years ago for another triptych.

There was frantic bidding at the sale on Tuesday night for another Bacon, the 1980 Study for a Self-portrait, a painting on paper. It was finally sold for $1.8m (£1.23m) - four times the estimate.

Several other record prices were reached on the first night of the two day sale, including those for works by Max Beckmann and Hans Hofmann, and for works on paper by Beckmann and Joan Miro. The pictures already sold have realised $54m, against an estimate for the entire sale of $39.9m.

The collection was regarded as one of the most important still in private hands. Charles Moffett, chairman of Sotheby's worldwide modern art department, said Seeger had bought his art out of love, and the market had responded to the quality and excitement of the works he had collected.

Some of the paintings, including the Bacon triptych, had once hung at Sutton Place, a Tudor mansion in Surrey which has been owned, but scarcely occupied, by a procession of art loving American millionaires, including John Paul Getty.

The sale has been a coup for Sotheby's in New York, after a bruising week that saw a US government indictment against its owner and former chairman, Alfred Taubman, and the former chairman of Christie's, Anthony Tennant, for alleged colluding in price fixing.

Records are expected to be broken again today, when an iconic 20th century painting by Beckmann, Self-portrait with Horn - made in 1938 when the Jewish artist was on the Nazis' banned list of "degenerate artists" - is on offer.

It is being sold by the estate of his friend and patron, Stephan Lackner. Sotheby's has described it as "certainly the most important German painting to come up for auction in living memory", and it is estimated at up to £7m.

 

 

 

Bacon estate 'trying it on', court is told

 

By Paul Peachey  The Independent  27 April 2001

 

A multimillion-pound legal action brought by the estate of Francis Bacon against his former gallery was a "try on" and "ill-founded", a High Court judge was told yesterday.

The case brought by Bacon's estate was described as "muddled and confusing" by counsel for the gallery when it sought to have the claim, potentially £100m, thrown out.

Bacon, one of Britain's greatest 20th-century artists, was represented by the international Marlborough gallery from 1958 until his death in Spain in 1992, aged 82.

Professor Brian Clarke, the executor of Bacon's estate, launched a unique claim against the gallery and Marlborough International Fine Art (Mifa), based in Liechtenstein, alleging breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence".

The estate says it wants proper accounts to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon.

In a statement, Marlborough said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist.

On the second day of preliminary hearings in London, Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, for Mifa, said: "We say this action is a try on. What the claimant wants to do is achieve a living action and he doesn't care how he does it."

The estate claims that instead of taking fair commission of one third, Marlborough kept up to 70 per cent of the paintings' value and had not demonstrated it paid for all the Bacon paintings it received.

 

 

 

 

BACON ESTATE LAUNCHES £100M CIVIL SUIT AGAINST MARLBOROUGH

 

  Antiques Trade Gazette 10 May 2001

 

 

UK: Preliminary proceedings have begun at the High Court in a £100m claim by the estate of Francis Bacon against Marlborough Fine Art (London) and Lichtenstein-registered Marlborough International Fine Art. The estate claims the galleries were in breach of fiduciary duty and exerted “undue influence” in their dealings with the artist.

The estate accuses Marlborough Fine Art, who were Bacon’s dealers from 1958 until his death in 1992 aged 82, of taking an unfair commission rate of up to 70 per cent on the artist’s paintings, of issuing 47 series of lithographic prints valued at £25-30m, for which the artist received a flat fee of $40,000, and of not satisfactorily demonstrating payment for up to 33 paintings by Bacon. The estate questions the role of Valerie Beston, a Marlborough director who, according to Geoffrey Vos QC, acting for the claimants, could be described as Bacon’s “keeper or minder” and was responsible for “the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry”.

Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, representing Marlborough, who were seeking to have the case thrown out, told Mr Justice Patten: “This action is a try-on. What the claimant wants to do is achieve a living action and he doesn’t care how he does it.” In an official statement, Marlborough Fine Art described their relationship with Francis Bacon as “frank, close and mutually beneficial”.

If the judge allows the case to proceed, it will provide a highly revealing insight into what Vos described as the “relationship between Britain’s greatest 20th century artist and his dealer”.

The claim, scheduled to be heard in January, is estimated to run as high as £100m. The beneficiary of the estate is John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom Bacon befriended “like a son” during the last 18 years of his life and to whom he left £10m. Mr Edwards now lives in Thailand.

 

 

 Artist's estate takes gallery to court

 

  BBC News Wednesday, 25 April, 2001

 

  

             Bacon (left) often used lover John Edwards in his work

 

A multi-million pound legal action has been launched by the estate of artist Francis Bacon against the gallery which represented him.

From 1958 to his death in 1992, Bacon exclusively used Marlborough Fine Art to show his work. But his estate is alleging "undue influence" and breach of duty in a claim which could be worth £100m.

The defendants, who's headquarters are in Liechtenstein, are contesting the allegations as "unfounded".

Bacon's work on lover John Edwards were sold at auction

The value of Bacon's work can be gauged by the sale of three paintings of his long-time partner John Edwards which sold for £3m.

Geoffrey Vos QC, representing the estate, told Mr Justice Patten that Marlborough UK director Valerie Beston "organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.

"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry - in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best interests'."

'Fair'

Bacon's estate is alleging that, subject to a fair allowance for the work it did, Marlborough should not have been keeping up to 70% of the value of Bacon's paintings.

The estate believes a fair amount would be a third of the total value.

It wants to see "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon."

Mr Justice Patten was listening to the outline of the arguments to decide on a timetable for the case which is scheduled for January 2002.

 

 

 

Bacon's 'Michelangelo' triptych fetches a record £6m

By Will Bennett in New York

The Daily Telegraph  10/05/2001 

 

 

 

ART belonging to a reclusive multi-millionaire living in Londonhas been sold for more than £37 million in New York with a triptych by the British artist Francis Bacon fetching a record £6 million.

The collection of 20th century art built up by Stanley Seeger attracted vigorous, sometimes frantic, bidding from dealers and collectors at Sotheby's on Tuesday evening.

Mr Seeger, who began collecting in the 1950s, is the American-born heir to a family fortune made mostly from petroleum and timber. He used to own Sutton Place, near Guildford, Surrey, one of Britain's finest Tudor mansions but now lives in the West End of London.

He became even richer after Tuesday's auction in New York at which 59 of the 63 lots sold, many for far more than he paid for them. An anonymous telephone bidder paid £6 million for Bacon's Studies of the Human Body, a three panel oil painting which the artist said had been influenced by Michelangelo.

The price for the painting, which Mr Seeger bought for an undisclosed sum from a dealer more than 20 years ago, far exceeded the previous record of £4.6 million for one of Bacon's works set only last year.

 

 

 

 

 Sotheby's

  The Eye of the Collector 

  Works from the Collection of Stanley J. Seeger

   New York May 8, 2001 (Lots 1 - 62) 

 

     

           Studies of the Human Body 1979 Francis Bacon 

 

Lot 14: Studies of the Human Body, 1979, Francis Bacon

Description:

Francis Bacon 1909-1992
Studies of the Human Body
Signed, titled and dated 1979 on the reverse of each panel
Oil on canvas
Triptych
each: 78 by 58 in. 198.1 by 147.3 cm.

Sold:  $8,585,750

Provenance: 

Marlborough Gallery Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on October 1, 1980

Exhibited: New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Francis Bacon, 1980; London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, no. 107

Literature: Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and in Profile, New York, 1983, no. 123, illustrated; Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 119, illustrated; Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 82, illustrated pp. 82-83; David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London, 1987, illustrated pp. 156-57
Francis Bacon, (exhibition catalogue), Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1996-97, illustrated p. 47

"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... I am sure that I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous nudes in the plastic arts." (Quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1988, p. 115).

Executed in 1979, Triptych - Studies of the Human Body sees the confluence of two of Bacon's greatest inspirations, Eadweard Muybridge and Michelangelo in one of his most beautiful and erotically charged compositions. Through its slight ambiguity of content, this work teems with sexual energy and tension, born of Bacon's deep instinctual understanding of the painterly language which he so uniquely manipulated. Having spent most of the seventies gradually purifying his images and narrowing his focus, this work is a distinct development from works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Gallery, London) and seems like the affirmation of a refined and mature style, in which vast blocks of joyous colour hold court to brief, extraordinary bursts of painterly energy. In this sense these three meditations on the male nude form confront the viewer in a manner unique to the art of Francis Bacon: unnerving the viewer, challenging his or her sensibilities and perception, yet still declaring a masterful poise and precision.

Seemingly inspired by Matisse's Atelier rouge of 1911 Bacon has cast his performers on a huge blocked orange expanse, which fills all three panels, representing both the walls and floor of separated blank interiors. Against this calm and spare background, the players fidget and buzz with energy. 

The familiar nudes in the central panel are derived from Muybridge's sequential still depictions of naked wrestlers in motion, grappling for the upper hand (see fig. 2). Here, they have been transformed into two lovers locked in the ecstasy of sexual congress and virtually morphing into one as they violently battle for each other's bodily affections. Backed onto a yawning void of darkness, the howling grimace on the face of one of the perpetrators bears witness to the struggle, the fully exposed ape-like teeth and the slash of blue next to the face are testament to his agitated movement.

Michelangelo's figures of Giorno (day) and Crepuscolo (Twilight) that face each other on the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici in the Medici chapel, Florence, are the direct inspiration for the two figures in the left and right hand panels (see figs. 3 and 4). Here these two toweringly masculine Guardians whose every muscle and sinew has been meticulously and inflexibly cast in stone, have been transferred from their imperious plinths and set onto the hard straight lines of makeshift surgical tables where they have been re-moulded as bold yet vulnerable objects of study. Bacon has referred to the 'voluptuousness' of Michelangelo's figures and here he has lovingly accentuated this feature, every rounded curve heightened, every ridge emphasized with a dash of pure Titanium white. Yet still these figures seem insecure and restless, their clean white garments serving only as if to underline the fact that they are samples for the viewer's gaze.

Bacon frames his figures as if in a spectacle: we are watching them and they seem to know it. They are cognizant of our attention, the left-hand figure turns away to bare the gash on his back whilst the right-hand figure turns toward us to flex his biceps. The triptych format seems to hint at a narrative between the panels, but that narrative remains ambiguous. The title is knowingly non-committal. Are the figures in the left and right panels the same as those in the central panel or are they merely guardians, or even voyeurs? Is this a before and after scenario, or a freeze frame? This is a classic device which Bacon used to revel in, allowing his imagination to run wild. In 1979, he stated "Triptychs are the thing I like doing most and I think this may be related to the thought I've sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases. So far as my work has any quality, I often feel it is the triptychs that have the best quality." (Quoted in David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 232).

Triptych - Studies of the Human Body represents a grand tour through the great traditions of Art History, beginning with its most historic subject, the Nude and moving through the sculpted forms of Michelangelo, the obsessive recorded photography of Muybridge, the renowned Cubist device of fragmented perspective and the sublime stripes of Barnett Newman to arrive at an entirely individual and unique composition which questions the very nature of appearance, artistic or otherwise. Here the nature of the human form, which has been mediated through a number of representative media is adapted through Bacon's mind and hand to be at once amorphous, yet totally real. Through moments of magic, Bacon coagulates colour and form to achieve a heightened sense of figurative reality, which leaves the viewer thrilling to the sensations of his subjects. This is nowhere more dramatic than in the present composition.

 

 

 

 

  Sotheby's  

      New York May 8, 2001 (Lots 1 - 62) 

 

 

         

 

                 Study for Self Portrait 1980 Francis Bacon

 

 

 

Lot 9: Francis Bacon Study for Self Portrait

 

Estimate:  $350,000 to $450,000. 

Sold:  $1,765,750.

 

Description:

Francis Bacon 1909-1992
Study for Self-Portrait
Signed, titled and dated 1980 on the reverse
Oil on canvas
14 by 12 in. 35.6 by 30.5 cm.

Provenance: Marlborough Gallery Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on October 2, 1980.

Exhibited: London, Marlborough Gallery Ltd., Francis Bacon, Small Portrait Studies, 1993, no. 28; Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ich ist etwas Anderes.  Kunst am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2000, no.6.

Litrature: Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and In Profile, New York, 1983, no. 132, illustrated;
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 125, illustrated; Milan Kundera and France Borel, Bacon, Portraits et Autoportraits, Paris, 1996, illustrated p. 164.

 

"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." (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 99).

As part of the constant questioning of his ability to transcend mere representation in his work, to record the self beyond the expression, Bacon's small portrait studies became the lifeblood of his oeuvre. In his unbounded quest for the ultimate immediacy of depiction, the intimate size and proportions of these canvases allowed him to experiment endlessly with the potency of his brilliant painterly gesture. Bacon would paint, re-paint and discard these pieces until he found the core of his subject's being. It is therefore not surprising that relatively few of these self-portrait studies survived. The ones that did, however, such as the present work, provide some of the most compelling images of his painterly genius.

For a few chosen subjects, including himself, Bacon's constant social and professional dedication to their appearance, his repeated observation of their mannerisms and movements provided the key to their existence on his canvases. As he wined, dined and conversed his life away, the one driving force behind his art was the desire to understand the sensation of existence. In the age of photography, Bacon felt that traditional portraiture lacked depth and mere appearance was not enough to capture the essence of life. For him, the outcome of his art depended on a direct opposition between a kind of visual intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His portraits strove not to tell the story of someone's life, but to clamp themselves to the viewer's nervous system and offer as he put it "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." A history of observation could be conveyed in the cast of a gesture and that was where the painting stood or, as most of the time, fell.

Consequently, Bacon's art depended on the complete immersion in his subjects, a fact which was often left exposed to the vagaries of life. His paintings clung to the fragile social relationships he built, the regularity with which he saw his friends and, as time went on, the permanence of life itself.

For Bacon the seventies were marked at each end by the deaths of two of his closest friends. In 1971 George Dyer, his greatest confidant and lover, committed suicide in Paris and at the end of the decade Muriel Belcher, the owner of his beloved Colony Room drinking club in Soho, and one of his few female subjects, died. Bacon was gradually becoming the one remaining constant subject throughout his oeuvre. As such, the few self-portraits that Bacon retained during his working process show not only the evolution of his exterior form, but also the development of his inner painterly reaction to the extreme joys and tragedies that life was throwing at him.

"I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It's true to say... One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." (Quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London 1975, p. 133).

Study for Self-Portrait shows Bacon emerging from the shadowed depths of a limitless darkness at the beginning of the 1980s. Dressed in a formal white collar, the sheer jet black emptiness which surrounds his features only serves to heighten the haunted, blurred presence which emanates from the canvas. In the present work the confident, bold swathes of color and exaggerated form of Bacon's paintings during the sixties and seventies have become knowingly clarified and subtly calmed (see fig. 1). Yet within there is a poignancy to the haze which enshrouds his face. Over-brushed and scumbled, the ambiguity explored in this work brings a heightened reality to the image, a fact which is at once accentuated and governed by the slippage of the form. His head smears softly sideways into view, the exactness of the two faint white swirls surrounding his face indicating a rotation, not necessarily in the Cubist manner, but as though it has endured some terminal rearrangement by a form of painterly manipulation.

As Bacon stares at his image reflected in the paint-splattered mirror of his studio (see fig. 2), the image he finds is fraught with contrasts; life versus death, self versus other, psychology versus physiognomy, together compounding to generate an image of immense raw energy which unites an exterior presence with an interiorized power. Outside, the shape retains an obstinate and familiar integrity, the precise result of a sudden movement. Within, the sheer concentration on his face transfixes the viewer. Behind the veil, the pensive sorrow in the piercing concentration of the eyes conveys a hidden turmoil and suffering which is at the heart of Bacon's genius.

 

 

 

Record £6m for Bacon

 From Susan Moore in New York       

 The Evening Standard  London  9 May 2001               

 

FRANCIS BACON'S erotically  charged and tortured triptych, Studies of the Human Body, doubled expectations to establish a new world auction record for the artist when it was sold for almost £6 million at Sotheby's New York. It proved the star of the auction house's highly successful offering of Part 1 of the Seeger collection last night, a sale which realised 37 million - almost double its enticingly conservative pre-sale estimate - and saw only three works fail to find new owners. Until recently, the almost two-metre wide Bacon lined the bedroom of London-based American collector Stanley J Seeger. Before that it had graced the hall of Sutton Place, the Tudor House in Surrey that Mr. Seeger acquired in 1980 from another art-loving American, J Paul Getty. 

The highly ambiguous work, painted in 1977 by Bacon, reveals the artist's response to both Michelangelo, the creator of what he described as "the most voluptuous nudes in the plastic arts" and to the obsessive early photography of Edward Muybridge. He looked at Muybridge's sequence of images of naked wrestlers grappling for the upper hand and transformed them into two lovers locked in violent sexual congress, the face of one reduced to a bestial, howling grimace. To unnerve us still further, he sets all four figures against a flat block of joyous orange. It is up to the viewer to consider what to make of that, and of the relationship, if any, between the flanking youths on their surgical slabs and the demonic lovers.

 

 

SHOULD IT STAY OR SHOULD IT GO..... 

Art Review  May 2001

                                    

The relocation of Francis Bacon’s studio from London to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin has divided the critics. Peter FitzGerald says that it is a valuable resource for Ireland, while William Feaver argues that the significance of Bacon’s studio died with the artist.

First, the more general question: why preserve the Francis Bacon studio at all? Some of the most important reasons are close to the best ones for not doing so. On the positive side, when we see the studio, we see at one remove the process of making works of art. It is a sort of externalization of inner conflicts all mixed up with the practicalities of testing out paint colours, sorting through source material, slicing up failed canvases – standard studio stuff. It’s a demystification: the paintings become process and not just finished works. Problem is, it’s also a mythification and mystification: so much attention devoted to one person and you’re in genius territory, with all the concomitant notions of superhuman talent.

There’s probably no more harmful nor widespread belief about “great art” than that it is the product of genius. So a strong reason for preserving the studio proves a double-edged sword. There are many more pros and cons. Would Bacon have wanted it? Even if he were opposed, it might still have been worth doing. But it would be unwise to skim over the apparent appropriation of Bacon by the Irish, as in the oft-repeated headline “Bringing Home the Bacon”. Irish by birth, but scarcely by identification, Bacon would not seem very fertile ground for repossession, were it not for a conjunction of factors. 

In Ireland at the moment there is a sense of the end of history: the Good Friday Agreement separated us from our partisan past at a time when many old certainties were collapsing. We find ourselves with unaccustomed wealth and a feeling the sun never sets on the Irish diaspora, however tenuous the links. It’s become a time to bring things home, metaphorically and literally: mull them over, see if we can make head or tail of them.

Bacon’s studio is a prime example. Schadenfreude makes it sweeter for some – word has it that it was swiped from under the nose of the Tate. But the studio is also part of a remarkable upsurge in the visual arts in Ireland. Although funding is still tight, because of infrastructural changes the major institutions are much more assertive and competitive. If it’s there, they may grab it. That’s the wider context – what of the practical level? The studio has peepholes through the walls – tubes with wide-angle lenses at the end. It will be voyeuristic in the extreme, resonating in a disturbing fashion with the once-taboo nature of Bacon’s sexuality. Were he there in the studio, what would he be doing, with whom? And will it be like approaching a mausoleum, a sacred relic, or like approaching just another art installation, a work of art in itself? 

So there are worries connected with the studio’s coming to Dublin, but also challenges. It’s an important experiment. It will be a new phenomenon, a new way of viewing art and artists in Ireland, but also an expression of the new ways in which we are coming to view ourselves and others. Bacon’s studio is coming to Dublin because of his fame. But the really interesting aspect, and the best reason for the move, is the way it will function within society and within the visual arts in Ireland at a crucial time. It will be high culture and Disney and hype and archaeological feat and sincere fascination. It promises to shift awareness about art, and our ways of dealing with art. It’s a leap in the dark, but it’s worth the risk .   

By Peter FitzGerald
                                                         
Creatively spotlit, Van Gogh steps back from the easel: another masterpiece completed in record time. The dimple on the chin that Kirk Douglas brought to the role complements the dimples pitting the center of each sunflower. 

Thirty-five years on, in another studio, with a lower budget this time and slightly less sweaty with artistic urge, Francis Bacon ponders a moment, then advances on the easel and, using a dustbin lid as a template, inscribes a near-perfect circle. Another self-portrait has begun. Derek Jacobi, immersed in the exercise of camping it up while sploshing it down in Love is the Devil, had art director Christina Moore and set-dresser Phillipa Hart to thank for furnishing him with so convincing a replica of 7 Reece Mews. It was all there: circular mirror, paint rags, bottles and brushes, wastepaper, books, the naked light bulb. In Love is the Devil, as in Lust for Life, the studio set serves as a mindset. Here is the stuff that gets genius going; here, if you look carefully, you may spot the very things that made it into the paintings. Here, therefore, you may gain a unique insight into the workings of art.

Romanticism overlaid with sentimentality is indiscriminate, and superstition amplified by publicity machines is voracious. Forget the art, visit the location. I dare say those responsible for relocating the first floor of 7 Reece Mews, London SW7 to Parnell Square North, Dublin 1, where the Hugh Lane Gallery stands, have been at pains to get the chaos right. Walls have been dirtied, painterly dabs transferred, VAT69 cardboard box correctly placed between orange box and Chelsea boot on a heap of kitchen rolls and fetid documentation. The director of the Hugh Lane argues that the studio contents are an archive. She describes the gift as a “cornerstone of the Gallery’s collection” If so, it’s a structural liability. No accessible archive in the normal sense, all you can do is gawp at it, compare it to the photographs of the original state he left it in nearly nine years ago and wonder at the contrast between the mess he made and the conspicuously tidy shop window-style triptychs he produced there in his later years. You will note reproductions of triptychs stuck up for reference, books on boxing and Velazquez, brushes stuffed in a Maxwell House jar and a Leach pottery mug: cultural references crowned by the paint squished like a flattened wreath around the circular mirror.

Picasso filled one house after another with stuff that he had made or simply not thrown away. When he died the executors and the taxmen went through it all, disentangling art from memorabilia from refuse. The Musée Picasso has no studio reconstruction. A chair caked in paint, yes, but this is presented as a sort of sculpture, a fetish almost. In Paris, several artists’ studios – among them Rodin’s and Gustave Moreau’s – have been preserved. But these, unlike 7 Reece Mews, were always intended as showrooms, as were those of Lord Leighton in London, and Duke Fildos, and indeed every successful portrait painter.

When Giacometti died they stripped the plaster off the walls of his studio in the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron in order to preserve the sketches scratched on them. Yet Brassaï’s photographs of them in situ had more to them somehow. Equally Brancusi’s own photographs of his studio are more informative and atmospheric than the sanitized reconstruction stuck next door to the Centre Pompidou.

A studio in use is a den of practicalities. Most have comfy armchair, radio, postcards pinned up, stashes of failures or potential failures. The tubes and tubs of paint, bags of plaster, blowtorches, wipes and solvents are there for a purpose. Once that purpose has died away the materials are redundant. That leaves romanticism, spliced with voyeurism, as the motive for preserving the studio.

The export of his studio to Ireland, the country he loathed and left at 16, is an affront to Bacon’s memory. Particularly as he was a keen one for bonfires of anything that he feared might be classified as “archive”. Bacon knew, as every artist does, that only the work counts, so only the works themselves need remain .

By William Feaver

Francis Bacon’s studio opens at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903) on 24 May.

7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio is published by Thames & Hudson on 23 May, priced £14.95. To order your copy for £12.95 (incl UK p&p), call Lisa Thompson on 020 7246 3370.

 

 

 

 

Bacon's cottage industry

 by Brian Sewell 

 The Evening Standard  16.02.01

The director of the Barbican Art Gallery has been brave enough to step into a snake pit with his latest exhibition.

 

It is of pictures torn from newspapers and magazines, collaged photographs and reproductions of old masters, scratched, folded, stained and scribbled on with paint, selected from almost a thousand of such fragments, together with pages from an album of what, at first glance, could be taken as preliminary sketches, all of which come from the studio of Francis Bacon.

There has been, and still is, some argument as to what part these have played in Bacon's work and as to whether the painted adjustments superimposed on them are by Bacon himself. When they first appeared in 1996, four years after the painter's death, David Sylvester, eminent art critic and Bacon's close friend - Boswell to his Johnson, indeed - was inclined to accept the interventions and disturbances as Bacon's and published a small number of them in public lectures at the Tate Gallery, but seems since to have changed his mind. I too, concurrently, published a few of them in ES Magazine (15 November 1996), and have not since changed my mind, but the album, which I had not seen before, to which the Barbican exhibition gives such prominence, causes me grave misgiving.

Bacon promoted several myths about himself and his work, of which the most relevant in this context is that he did not draw, had no facility for drawing, made no particular preparation for any work and that his ideal method of painting a picture "would really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there" - it is interesting that he said portrait rather than image or subject. The myth was sustained without question until after his death, and then drawings began to emerge. Angus Stewart was first into the field with a small exhibition at Olympia in February 1996 and his revelations could not be denied, for he had discussed drawing with Bacon himself (whose definition of drawing was as narrow as Clinton's definition of sex) and, knowing the painter's family well, had secured drawings of impeccable provenance. It was this exhibition that drew from obscurity the collection that is now at the Barbican, the property of Barry Joule, Bacon's near neighbour in South Kensington and for many years his cup-of-sugar and errand-running friend, given him by the old and ailing artist a few days before his fatal heart attack.

Dealers in Bacon's pictures have been pretty sniffy about what we must now call the Joule Archive and Bacon's executors apparently think that it should be part of the artist's estate; unpleasant rumours have been circulated from unknown sources, among them that the archive is a hoax or fake, and that the whole of it is by some feeble imitator working in Bacon's studio.

These are unacceptable hypotheses. To have produced so much, another presence in the studio would have been noticed by Bacon's courtiers and sycophants, and to have forged the archive posthumously required access to English and French magazine and newspaper material from the later 1940s into the early 1960s - virtually impossible.

We have so fixed an idea of Bacon as an immaculate painter whose canvases offer little evidence of revision and much of the well-practised sweep, the brush loaded with just the right quantity of paint of just the right consistency, that we have great difficulty accommodating the idea of an early stage of fumbling incompetence.

When the Tate bought 40 sketches from old friends of Bacon and exhibited them in 1999, it was immediately evident that, apart from two sheets that are revisions of printed illustrations, these are infinitely more accomplished than any in the Joule Archive, assured in line, deft in the application of oil paint, immediate in execution, and so distilled in idea that they are evidently a long way into the working process and have become presentation drawings rather than preliminary sketches, small paintings on paper, finished as far as they will go, and as habitual in touch and cypher as the cartoons of Fougasse. The two exceptions, however, prove the point that the amended scraps in the Joule Archive must be taken seriously as by Bacon.

There is further supporting evidence: an American art historian, Sam Hunter (a serious and diligent sort of bloke) saw, in 1950, a collection of material such as this in Bacon's studio, then in Cromwell Place; and in 1998, Bacon's old and very long-term friend, Denis Wirth-Miller, recalled that in Bacon's studio he had seen suitcases packed with scraps and photographs that formed a core archive of iconography - he must also have seen their contents.

At this point I must make it clear that the Barbican curators' selection from the archive does as much to cast doubt on Bacon's authorship as to reinforce it. Too much of the material is too slight to be of relevance in any argument, the painted stains the business of brush-cleaning and drying rather than of intelligent revision, the choice dictated by the power of the printed image rather than any perceptible purpose in Bacon's intervention, and thus misleading; of this, the clear-est example is the face of the nurse from Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, the slight touches of colour irrelevant to form or structure or emotion, making no sense other than as casual stains, though the section torn away below her nose has the same deliberately damaging effect as the wanton splashes - sloshes, indeed - of white paint with which the mature Bacon occasionally disrupted, pointlessly, his formal, finished, images.

The half dozen of us who have leafed through every single scrap must be influenced in our conclusion by the better things that are not on view at the Barbican.

These represent the first glimmerings of ideas, some of which were developed, more still-born, some perhaps standing in their own right as the ephemera of Surrealism. In the best, the underlying image is intelligently revised, by a variety of means, to alter its literal meaning and lift it from the flatness of illustration into the dimension of painting; in others, his intervention is no more than the effect of creases on a filched image folded to fit into his pocket - as with Joe Orton, no book was safe from him. The ineptitude of so much of it, the inaccurate fury of the scratchings and the hesitant uncertainty of the brush, make the Tate's sketches seem wonderfully resolved, but we look in vain for something of their quality in the dis-bound sheets from the album in the Joule Archive.

In the Barbican catalogue this album is given (without certainty) a date in the early 1960s, and in the exhibition it has undue prominence; it is largely the product of a faltering hand entirely without skill and of a tentative mind's eye, the level of accomplishment unconvinced and unconvincing, ugly in incompetence, the predilection for the erect penis the tiresome nonsense of the obsessed adolescent. The album's stiff cover I believe to have been removed by Bacon (ripped off, more likely) and used for two heads boldly sketched in oil. Of these, one is clearly connected with the finished painting of 1955, Study for a Portrait II, based on the life mask of William Blake, and with the kindred study of a mask pinned to the wall of Bacon's studio, documented by a photo-graph taken by Douglas Glass in

1957. The second head is an early stage in the development of Bacon's interest in reaching an abstract image of emotion by reinventing, through distortion, a given face without entirely abandoning its recognisable features - something that he was well able to do by 1959.

The pages of the album are a different matter. The quality of the paper is poor and the edges brittle; many corners had broken away before the pages were painted, other peripheral losses have occurred since; no serious artist would have committed his work to so fragile a support. Some of the images are so feebly conceived and executed that, though they may have an iconographic link with Bacon's work, they cannot be by him. The application of paint is in the stiff short strokes of a rigid wrist and hand entirely without a painter's flexibility, the brush far too dry for a painter with Bacon's early relish for fat paint. Some pages, were they isolated from the context of the album, could never have been attributed to Bacon; others, very close indeed to Bacon's imagery, prove that these pages are not by him. One is a feeble variant of the crouching figure with an umbrella that we know as Figure Study II, another virtually a copy of Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh II; the hints of drawing in both are identical, the handling of paint in both identical, too, with even the palette shared - though this is very different in the finished pictures, of which the first was painted in 1945-6, the second in 1957. It is impossible that preparatory sketches for pictures painted more than a decade apart, and so dissimilar in every respect, should be so much the same; these wretched drawings are copies by a worthless hand.

Was Bacon indulging some adolescent rent-boy who, having performed his duty with whip and cigarette stubs, then uttered such whimsy as: "I've always wanted to be an artist - can I have a go?" Did Bacon toss him the wreckage of the album and a book of reproductions of his own work and say: "Copy those." The only thing to be said for these contemptible sheets is that, no matter which of his mates and rent-boys did them, Bacon could not resist a helpful intervention now and then and to the heads his touch of paint occasionally gives a power and purpose wholly lacking in the figures.

Why did Bacon keep the Joule Archive, carrying it from studio to studio for the decade between leaving Cromwell Place in 1951 and settling in Reece Mews in 1961, where it must have lain unused for 30 years, playing no part in his creative processes, the suitcases a Pandora's Box ready to deny his myth of immaculate conception, ready to reveal proof of trial and error and the early roots of his imagination? Was it nostalgia? Was it the vice common in old women of never throwing anything away? Or was it always his intention to let the truth be known, but not yet, not yet, to make fools of the fawning experts on whom his fame so much depended, for whom he early became a cottage industry?

 

Barbican Gallery until 16 April. Admission £5. Opening times Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday 10-6pm, Wednesday 10-8pm, Sunday/Bank Holidays 12-6pm.

 

 

 

 

The Born again Dubliner

The artist Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, but took good care not to return. He would have found it a laugh, his old friends reckon, that his studio should be lovingly moved, lock, stock and diabolical mess, to a gallery there. 

By Sally Vincent

The Guardian, Saturday May 12, 2001

Chaos is where it all began; the natural order of things, neither good nor bad, just immutable. Philosophers banged on about it before things got written down, trying to get their heads round the enormity of the great, primeval mess, determined not to come over all feeble and judgmental, and so limit their chances of coming up with something wonderful to say about life and associated matters. Order - the convenience of orderliness is the imposition of squeamishness upon reality, practised by the sort of control freaks whose imaginative shortfall leads towards dreary stuff like certainty and guilt. You haven't got to like chaos, was the idea, but you have to try to respect it, give it its due.

I don't suppose Francis Bacon was especially enamoured of chaos, he simply knew he had to have it in order to function. It was, he used to say, what he tapped into for his imagery. He wasn't squeamish and since it is acknowledged that he was the greatest British painter of the 20th century, it follows that the British are either not particularly squeamish when they look at what Margaret Thatcher described as "those dreadful paintings", or they recognise raw, violent, foolhardy nature when they see it and choose to stand round applauding as though it might be the lightning conductor that keeps them safe from God's chaotic wrath.

Anyone visiting the sky-lit studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, where Bacon worked for the last 30 years of his life and from whence sprang all those crucified monsters and screaming Popes, might be forgiven for wondering if the original Big Bang hadn't happened right there behind the closed door.

It was, he'd say, a bit of a dump, but then he was used to it. To anybody else, it was knee-high detritus caused by a cosmic explosion, and presided over by a man who'd rather die than relinquish a crumb of it.

In what has to be the most bizarre enterprise in the history of art, this incredible pile of rubbish has been solemnly transported across the Irish Sea and reassembled in Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, where it will be entombed in glass like a Bacon portrait and offered to the art-loving public as a kind of peep-show. They've been at it for the past few years or so, a team of respectable archaeologists and conservators, scrupulously annotating and boxing up Bacon's working environment: old newspapers, dried-up pots of paint, photographs, booze cartons, empty bottles of L'Oréal hair tint (Naples black), pudding basins, broken spectacles, slashed canvases, horse whips, old socks, the fly-blown mirror, a table with a drawer containing a snap of Giacometti and a tablespoon, bits of corduroy trouser, the plaster off the walls, the staircase, the old greasy rope that served as its banister.

The last thing a nice lady called Mary did at the London end was to sweep up the dust and mouse dirt from the floor and place them reverently in a plastic bag with a Stick-It label on the side, upon which she had written "Bacon dust". When the transference is over and the Lord Mayor is on his way to the Grand Opening, she plans to shake it out over the reconstruction in a final flourish of authenticity, for the use of posterity. So far as the more partisan members of the Republic are concerned, Mr Bacon will have come home to roost. "It is," said someone in authority and a soft Dublin accent, "a legendary space."

I don't know what Francis Bacon would have made of all this. He was always rather reticent about the geography of his birth. He'd say things were "a bit Irish" if they were quaint or fanciful or up a gum tree of some kind. But he was certainly born in a Dublin nursing home and lived with his family at 63 Lower Baggot Street until he was 16 and his father caught him trying on his mother's knickers and booted him out. So the story goes. And he almost certainly never returned.

In fact, the very idea of visiting Ireland exacerbated his asthma. He'd clutch his collar and make noises like seagulls wheeling about in a snowstorm if anyone suggested it. But a short pilgrimage in a taxi to number 63 seemed appropriate. What with the traffic and the wind and bluster, we couldn't hang about, but it's a large and elegant Georgian pile with a current market value, according to the taxi driver, of well over two million. It also has a spanking new blue plaque gracing its facade. The driver craned out of his window and managed to read the name. Francis Bacon. "Who was that?" he said. "What did she do?" Which would have amused Bacon no end, for he and his friends found ceaseless amusement in the game of gender transference.

Needless to say, this is where the dreadful happened. You tend not to grow up to be a creative genius unless a) you've been marked for life by something unspeakable befalling you before the age of seven, and b) you not only speak about it but embrace it as part of your make-up. It seems that when Mr and Mrs Bacon went out for an evening, the young lady who baby-sat had her soldier boyfriend over for rumpy-pumpy on the sofa. In order not to be interrupted by obstreperous four-year-olds, she always took the precaution of locking Francis up in the cupboard at the top of the stairs and leaving him to scream his lungs out in the dark until her coitus was achieved.

The pragmatic way he told this "anecdote" somehow implies that the whole thing was reasonable to him in retrospect, if not some kind of privilege. He had been a spectacularly demanding child, a bloody nuisance, in fact. Of course she locked him up. Of course he screamed his head off. But the important thing was that he had experienced the pit and that the depth of the reality of the violence was something he treasured. Like someone who turns round in the middle of his worst nightmare and discovers the monster behind him is only his own shadow, he knew where fear really comes from. Knowing this, the Irish Troubles seething through his adolescence were mere banalities.

He was never, he used to say without chagrin, close to either of his parents. Or, when feeling particularly perky with a glass of Bollinger in his hand, he'd say that his father was just a "silly old cunt". He couldn't cope with an effete, asthmatic son who clearly had no intention of being furtive about his homosexuality or his artistic proclivities. Of course the silly old cunt tried to make a man of the wretched boy by laying about him with a horsewhip, but the child was father to the man and he stepped up his pain threshold with a true masochist's relish, rather than relinquish or repress any part of his nature.

There are several versions of the Irish exodus. One is that his father nominated a trusted friend to take Francis to Europe and make a man of him there. The other is Bacon's own account: he was sent away with a small income from his mother at the age of 16, and taken to Berlin by a man who picked him up in a bar. It would be more hilarious to think the paradise he found there was innocently instigated by his homophobic father, but more likely that he fell into five-star decadence and the whole Christopher Isherwood ambience of prewar Berlin because his luck was in.

There, apart from learning the aesthetics of gourmandising, which stayed with him forever, he spent a lot of time designing Bauhaus-inspired furniture and rugs with geometric patterns on them - and still more time thereafter re-collecting them and destroying them. He wasn't yet ready to be defined by his work. He hardly ever was.

Francis Bacon spoke to me once. Come to think of it, it was nearly as exciting as when Samuel Beckett smiled at me in the bar next door to the Royal Court in Chelsea, but not as nice. I was in the French House pub in Dean Street awaiting the arrival of some Soho visionary - Jeffrey Bernard, most probably - just standing there by myself, incandescent with youth, when I became aware that the beady eyes of a small man in a leather bomber jacket were boring into me. It gave me quite a frisson because I knew who he was and I was never averse to the odd contact with the famous.

"I suppose," he said, "you think you're very beautiful." The way he pronounced "you" - yieeeew - the sour sneer of it, put me on the flinch and in the time it took him to draw breath I knew he wasn't about to ask me to pose for him. "Well," he said, "you're not." And slouched off. Had I had the wit, I'd have called Jealous Sod after him.

"The young have a better time of it," he used to say. "People are much nicer to you when you're young." And famously he'd mix light and dark tan boot polish on the back of his hand and scrub it through his greying hair with a shoe brush. He wasn't averse to a bit of peach foundation, either, or a dab of lippy, and there was never any secret about cleaning his teeth with scouring powder. I remember the first time I saw him laugh across a crowded Colony Room. His face transformed like Queen Victoria's when he smiled, only his teeth were better than hers. His teeth were splendid.

It always amazed me, after that first mean encounter, how relaxed and merry he seemed in the company of his friends and how much affection flowed between them, for they were a surly bunch left to their own devices. Daniel Farson, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, you wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift with any of them. Sometimes, when the champagne (his treat, invariably) was flowing, you'd hear their shrieks of merriment bouncing off the walls of Wheeler's and wonder what you'd done to be excluded from their mutual festivity, and what the hell it could be that was so funny. The only clue I ever eavesdropped was seeing Francis Bacon pat his lips with a fine damask napkin and remark that what he'd like now was a good tying up. It was years before I realised what he was talking about. It's hard to fathom, even now, what it must have been like to grow up homosexual when homosexual activity was a criminal offence, but small wonder the homosexual brethren - or sorority - of Soho exuded this bitter, outraged and outrageous flamboyance.

It wasn't that they were proud of themselves; I mean, I doubt any one of them longed to stick a feather up his bum and go on a Gay Pride parade. They had nothing to be ashamed of and, by the same token, nothing to be proud of, either. So far as Francis Bacon was concerned, his homosexuality protected him from the distractions, responsibilities and controlled domestic life of a heterosexual man. It went with his chosen territory, like voting Tory because he felt socialism was too idealistic to tangle with, too much a drain on his thought processes. I once heard him greet Bobby Hunt, the painter-turned-designer, in Old Compton Street. "Hallo," he cried, stepping neatly through the traffic, "come and have lunch with me. How are all those women and children of yours?" You could hear it spelled out between the lines: Dear old Bobby, such early promise, heterosexed into the commercial world. Heigh ho.

Much of the apocrypha that circles in Bacon's name is centred on bog-standard heterosexual man's misconception that he is somehow potential prey to the predatory queer. Kingsley Amis used to tell a thumping good story about meeting Francis Bacon with Daniel Farson in a restaurant in Cardiff, which culminated in poor young Kingsley legging it desperately up a length of dried-out dockland to escape the priapic attentions of Francis Bacon. He wrote about it in his memoirs. How Farson had absented himself after an afternoon's lavish lunching and Bacon had whipped out a set of porny pictures of young men in states of undress doing rude things to each other. Farson, we are meant to infer, was literally pimping for his friend. Tut, tut.

Yet with benefit of hindsight, there is something absurdly mendacious about this story. Young married men were simply not Bacon's type. Nor were middle-class, educated, literary, clever men. All his life he practised a sort of serial monogamy with what used to be called rough trade: young, swarthy, dangerous-looking blokes who kept themselves fit and were uneducated, semi-literate and queer as coots. Plus, if the "porn" he left behind is anything to go by, Bacon liked those 50s magazines devoted to portraits of body-builders and advertisements for exercise regimes guaranteed to turn seven-stone weaklings into Tarzans so as to stop bullies kicking sand in their faces.

In short, Bacon was too modest, too self-mocking and too expert a gambler to chance his arm on such long odds. As a young man teaching himself to paint through the simple expedient of looking at paintings, he never believed that one day he might be successful enough to give up the day job. It seemed perfectly reasonable to him that he must find employment in order to buy time to paint. To this effect, he worked for years as a gentleman's gentleman, doing a little light valeting, running the odd bath and cooking dainty dinners, at which he was famously adept. Thereafter he worked as a sort of tout/master of ceremonies at Muriel Belcher's Colony Club, which began its life as a hang-out for homosexuals seeking refuge from entrapment officers in public lavatories. In this endeavour he was assisted by his old nanny from Dublin days, the oldest hat-check girl in the history of nightlife. For any further funding, he would trot along to the Gargoyle club and the roulette tables. If he was ever short of money, he must have kept it strictly to himself, because to this day Soho habitués old enough to have been there marvel at the way "Eggs" splashed it around.

When it became apparent that he no longer needed a day job, he couldn't believe his luck. The late and deeply lamented Bruce Bernard could occasionally be prevailed upon to describe a moment from those heady days of Bacon's celebrity. They'd been gently debauching themselves around Soho from bar to restaurant to club and back again for what seemed like a week, having a splendid time, culminating in Bacon tripping up on a kerb, falling in the gutter and finding himself unequal to the task of getting up again. As he lay there, a police constable approached and viewed the scene in a rather censorious fashion; at which point Bacon announced: "I'm a very Famous Pynter." Talking with old acquaintances in old stamping grounds, I noticed how often they found difficulty in giving an account of what Bacon was like for them; how self-deprecating, how ironic, how camp he could be with the odd inflection or accent. His words didn't say it. You had to have been there.

Bobby Hunt remembers the day he thought he had solved the mystery of Bacon's style. Sitting on a tube train watching his reflection in the window as the stations moved past. That was it! The transience, the time lapse, the still yet moving image. He took his discovery to Bacon, who smiled benignly and ordered a bottle of champagne.

He was neither pleased nor irritated by critical attention. When one well-meaning interpretative wizard wrote that the violent and distressing images he had lately unleashed upon the world were Bacon's "condemnation of man's inhumanity to man", he replied tartly, "Well he would say that, wouldn't he?" And, "Nothing was further from my mind." Later, following still more unleashings of violence and distress, the Daily Telegraph's arbiter of taste wrote that Bacon had now gone beyond the realms of despair and entered the arena of all that is "vicious" and "evil". Farson telephoned Bacon at home to give him the news, taking care to accentuate the vicious and evil bits. Bacon listened attentively, then said in his most offhand yet gracious way, "Oh really? I thought they were rather nice."

Like a lot of serious painters, Bacon found it tiresome to discuss his work, on the grounds that if he talked about it he wouldn't have to fucking well paint it, would he? Yet he was entirely candid about the obsessions and preoccupations that fuelled his tireless attempts to come to terms with what he described as "the vulnerability of the human form". From childhood he had been fascinated by butcher's shops. The dead meat, the colour of blood. He wanted to make a painting of flesh and blood as thrilling as a Monet sunset. Mouths obsessed him.

And diseases of the mouth. And mutilated corpses. And young men in underpants. In a series of conversations taped by David Sylvester, a lifelong friend and the one art critic he had any time for, Bacon confided some of his less arcane motivating forces. Sylvester concedes that in transcription the tapes lack reality, miss the expression behind the tone of voice. It would be too easy to read a kind of atheistic nihilism into his sentiments, because he says the universe is an accident and humanity is an accident and you can stuff immortality. "We are meat," he says. When he dies you can put him in a bin liner and chuck him on the cart. But you would miss the yearning. Talking one day about Bacon's passion for roulette, Sylvester asked him if he thought it was true that what inveterate gamblers like himself truly wanted was to lose. Bacon replied that, no, he wanted to win. Winning is the big buzz. It was the same, he said, as painting. You're waiting for the right image. All his life he'd been trying to "distort the human figure into reality".

That's what it's all about. Waiting for the big win. There was one time, though, when Bacon was prepared to expose himself verbally. He was to meet Giacometti, who, along with Velázquez, Picasso, Monet and Degas, had the power to impress him. He looked forward mightily to the encounter - a little too mightily in the event. Having primed himself for the great moment with an excessive intake of alcohol, he was frankly quite drunk when they sat down together. Undeterred, he held forth wildly on his deeply held views of the existential nature of the universe, making absolutely no sense whatsoever. And all the while he was fiddling with the table-top, lifting it inch by inch until the whole lot, plates, knives, forks, glasses, food, bottles, napkins, went cascading to the floor. There was an awful crash followed by a terrible silence. Then Giacometti burst into laughter. The chaos was eloquence enough. Point made. Point taken.

 

 

 

Old colonials 

 

Martin Gayford

The Independent,  July 22 2001

 

The time is probably about four in the afternoon. This small room, sunk in subaqueous gloom, is crowded with people. Most are holding drinks. Almost all seem to be talking intently to one another. This is The Colony Room 1, a painting by Michael Andrews, which is included in the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain. It is at once a record of a celebrated Soho drinking club, a group portrait, a memorial to an era, and a painting about a certain frame of mind.

If Soho is London's Left Bank, the Colony Room at 41 Dean Street is the closest equivalent to those Parisian cafes where painters met to drink and gossip. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon's biographer, described it as "a smallish dingy room reached by an evil-smelling staircase flanked by dustbins". One's overwhelming impression on entering is of seediness. Yet, in the 1950s and 1960s, this was headquarters to Francis Bacon and other notable London artists, and in the 1990s it was a centre for a number of Young British Artists, for whom Bacon was a cult figure.

The Colony Room was dominated, indeed, created, by two personalities - Bacon's and that of its owner and founder, Muriel Belcher (the place was also known as Muriel's). Belcher, who died in 1979, came from a wealthy Jewish family - her parents ran Birmingham's Alexandra Theatre. She opened the Colony Room in 1948 and Bacon was one of her first customers.

By all accounts, she had remarkable presence. Paul Potts, the malodorous and penurious Soho poet, called her "a kind of non- ecclesiastical cardinal or a delinquent saint". The writer Daniel Farson, another habitue, described her favourite position, "poised like an imperious eagle on her stool by the door, able to observe the antics of her members, quick to repel strangers with an outraged squawk of 'Members only!' "

Belcher's conversation was outrageous, witty and obscene. Men were invariably referred to as "she", or as "Lottie" or "Clara". Bacon, uniquely, was "daughter". The tight-fisted or boring were banished, but she could take the lame ducks under a kindly wing. The Colony, Potts said, was "the sort of place where you can't get much for 10 bob but you can get an awful lot for nothing. Once you're in, you're in... But if she does not like you, you've had it."

Belcher instantly took to Bacon, and vice-versa. Spotting his potential as a social catalyst, she offered him pounds 10 a week plus free drinks if he would bring in customers. "She said, 'Bring in people you like,' " Bacon once recalled. "I loved Muriel enormously, and for some reason we both got on very well, and so I went in there a lot. I could drink in there for nothing, which was marvellous of course."

So, with Bacon, came his painter friends, who included Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and also Michael Andrews. However, the Colony was not exclusively an artists' hangout. On the contrary, according to Farson, "[Muriel's] special genius as a club owner lay in creating her own territory so that the Colony was not typed like the other afternoon clubs, which catered exclusively to queers, gamblers, police or villains, or `resting' actors."

The Colony seemed, many people noted, more like a party than a bar. (The painter John Minton, another regular in the 1950s, found it even more intimate, "like being in bed with drinks".) And Andrews's 1962 painting shows a party in full swing.

Most people identify the figure sitting at the bar on the right as Bacon (though Farson insisted that it was himself, and Andrews, when questioned, was evasive). Next, at the other end of the bar, comes Belcher, and to the left of her, Lucian Freud, followed by the photographer and critic Bruce Bernard. Bernard noted that Andrews had "at first shocked my humility by making me virtually the central figure, then shocked my vanity by bringing in Henrietta Moraes [the artist/ model, who posed for Bacon among others] to obstruct the view" - although Farson thought the female figure to be another regular, Virginia Law. She is talking to the photographer John Deakin.

Precise portraiture was not Andrews's point, however. The Colony Room 1 was one of a number of works he painted on the subject of parties - which, he observed, are times when people "allow themselves to be and are judged. They perform. They succeed or fail. They increase in stature or flop. They put themselves to the test."

That was certainly the case at the Colony, where the unsuccessful might be ejected ignominiously by Muriel. This happened to the novelist John Braine, who, Farson related, was dismissed with the words, "On your way, Lottie, or you'll get a fourpenny one."

Andrews frequented the Colony Room from 1954 onwards, drinking with his wife, June. Bernard remembered him as being "socially quite manic, drinking and socialising with an engaging and, of course, entirely sensitive recklessness". Later, Andrews moved to the country and became quite reclusive where he died in 1995. In a wonderful series of paintings, he took balloons floating over landscape as a metaphor for the fragile envelope of the ego. But, in The Colony Room 1, he painted egos engaged closer to the Earth, in the curtained dark of a Soho afternoon. 

'Michael Andrews' is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, tel 020 7887 8000, until 7 October

 

 

 

 

360º of Francis Bacon

RTE Interactive Ireland  24 05 2001
Cristín Leach

 

There is something compellingly voyeuristic about standing in a glass case smaller than a telephone box just one step inside the door of the studio in which one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century worked. The fact that you have queued for more than ten minutes to reach this unique vantage point does not relieve the guilt of spending two minutes trying to absorb the chaos before tearing yourself away – behind you the queue has grown so long that people will now wait more than twenty minutes for a glimpse at the source of genius.

 

The opening of Francis Bacon's reconstructed London studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Wednesday 23 May was an opening like no other. An estimated 1,300 people turned up, each determined to actually see the studio, the work and the other items on display. The excitement was palpable, with an almost religious feel to the queuing and silent gazing at what already seems like a shrine.

 

Just outside the viewing booth your feet hover over a glass panel in the floor. Down there, preserved forever, are the steep, bare wooden stairs that led up to the studio. There's the rope he used to pull himself up and the light switch marked by his dirty fingerprints. You imagine descending to open the door at the bottom and finding yourself in London outside the real 7 Reese Mews.

 

Much has been written about the 1998 donation of the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery by John Edwards, Bacon's sole heir. More has been written about the mammoth operation of transporting it, along with its contents, from London to Ireland. Even the dust from the room was collected and re-scattered over the carefully replaced objects. Standing in the glass viewing booth, you see crates and boxes from bottles of alcohol, a dressing gown, photographs, scraps of paper, shopping bags, books, catalogues, paintbrushes and most of all paint. These items fill every corner of the 4x8 metre room. The paint is everywhere, in tins and tubes, on small canvases and on the walls and door - no artist's pallet was found in the studio. There is an illogical feeling that even the air, sealed behind the glass, could be the very air he breathed - so complete is the illusion.

 

Walking around the outside of the studio you come to two peep-holes with wide angle lenses that allow you to focus on the paint blobs on the far wall and give a view of brushes in pots on a table. Around another corner you stand looking through the windows of the studio. From here the eye is led to the large, round mirror at the end of the room, but not before you are distracted by old shoes, a soft guitar cover, a 'Bally' shoe bag and the cardboard box packaging from an electric food mixer – Magimix 2000.

 

Francis Bacon once said, "I cannot work in places that are too tidy." He compared this incredibly cluttered room, where he worked from 1961 until his death in 1992, to the inside of his mind. Those who like to examine abstract modern art and proclaim, "my two-year-old could do that", may now change their tune to boast about the artistic state of their teenagers' bedrooms - but it has to be said, it would take some 14-year-old to make a mess like this.

 

The reconstructed studio features the original door, walls, floors, ceiling and shelves. Every item found in the gallery – there were more than 7,000 – has been catalogued on a specially designed database before being replaced. It is this unique information bank that will allow for further study of the artist and how he worked. The accompanying Micro Gallery features touch-screen audiovisual displays with highlights of the database as well as information on the artist, his life and his work. After listening for a while, you feel compelled to return to the studio to gaze again on the jumble, the paint, the books and the brushes. It's uplifting and intriguing.

 

Beyond the studio and the Micro Gallery, the Exhibition Gallery boasts a collection of unfinished paintings on display to accompany the launch. The door at the end leads you back around to the front of the Hugh Lane. As the queues continue to form, stretching back almost to the thronged gallery's entrance, it is clear that this curiosity will become our capital's cultural must-see, maybe even surpassing the Book of Kells. Congratulations Hugh Lane Gallery - Ireland has got its own Mona Lisa.

 

The Hugh Lane Gallery is open Tuesday - Thursday 9.30 - 6.00, Friday and Saturday 9.30 - 5.00, Sunday 11.00 - 5.00, closed Monday. Admission to the Francis Bacon Studio £6; £3 concession, £2 for 12-18 year olds and under 12s free. For further information on Francis Bacon and the studio go to www.hughlane.ie

 

 

 

 

 Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon   

  by Steve Boggan 

  The Independent  26 April 2001 

 

A £100m court battle over works by the painter Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of the most bitter art wrangles in decades.

Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.

The gallery, which denies the allegations, is seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial will begin in earnest early next year.

Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."

Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82 from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.

But the estate alleges that instead of taking a "fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work, valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for only one series ­ a flat fee of $40,000.

The estate has questioned the role of one of Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly from the arrangement.

Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.

"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry ­ in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best interests'."

The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended "like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last 18 years of his life.

The trustees complain they have been unable to examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so. Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the gallery in 1958.

"The trustees have not been able to get a full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate. "Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of the paintings thought to have been painted by him.

"But what is also annoying is that we can't get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate mail.

"If nothing else, we hope to have these released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest 20th-century painter."

During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter. In 1989, his Triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.

He is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest painters ­ if not the pre-eminent British painter ­ of the last century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.

His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among others.

His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were among his friends.

His stature, therefore, has made the alleged failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between 1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts. You could be looking at £5m for each of them.

"The figure of £100m was raised during an interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out there, we don't know how much could be at stake."

A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said: "We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the claims."

It is understood the gallery will argue that Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance of his bank account.

One of his friends said: "He needed money for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than that, it meant nothing to him."

During the case, it will be pointed out that Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?

Part of the reason might have been because of Ms Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely to give evidence.

The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m for some works.

The questions the court must answer are: Were those prices enough, and did Bacon care?

 

 

 

 

Bacon triptych goes for £3m at auction

 

The Daily Telegraph

Friday 9 February 2001

By Will Bennett, Art Sales Correspondent


A SERIES of three paintings by Francis Bacon of his long-time companion John Edwards sold for more than £3 million at Christie's in London last night.

The triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an anonymous collector at a sale of post-war art. Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie's international director, said: "It is a piece that Bacon himself identified as being of museum quality."

Bacon met Edwards, who was a barman, in 1974 and their relationship lasted until the artist's death in 1992. The triptych shows Edwards seated on a stool in an empty studio space.

 

 

 

Dealer 'snatched Bacon paintings away'

John Ezard  

The Guardian,  Thursday April 26, 2001

 

An art dealer acted as the painter Francis Bacon's "keeper or minder", removing his paintings to her gallery "as soon as the paint was dry", a high court judge was told yesterday.

This was said to be one of the principal roles of Valerie Beston, who organised the artist's life for more than 30 years.

The allegations were made by Geoffrey Vos QC, who called Bacon Britain's greatest 20th century artist. He was acting for Bacon's estate in a claim which could run as high as £100m. The estate is suing Marlborough Fine Art (London) and the Liechtenstein-based Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment for breach of duty and undue influence over Bacon.

Mr Vos was speaking at a preliminary procedural hearing of a complex case which is expected to bring the dead painter's often desperate life back into the limelight when it is fully argued in January.

Mr Vos told Mr Justice Patten: "The relationship which is at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th century artist and his dealer. This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run of the mill about it."

The Marlborough gallery exclusively represented Bacon from 1958 - shortly before he became celebrated and was sometimes getting only a few hundred pounds for a canvas - until he died in 1992 as the world's highest-priced living artist.

Marlborough are contesting the claims of the estate, of which Brian Clarke was appointed executor in 1998. It is urging the judge to strike out the case this week.

The estate accuses the gallery of retaining up to 70% of the sale value of Bacon's paintings. It says a fair share of the proceeds would have been about a third. It alleges Marlborough has not yet demonstrated that it has paid for all the paintings it received. The estate is demanding a full accounting of the gallery's role to show that a fair balance was struck between its interests and those of Bacon. It also alleges that Marlborough have failed to account for the proceeds of a sale of 47 series of Bacon lithographs.

Mr Vos told the court Ms Beston could be described "as the defendants would have it, as Bacon's assistant", or "as one might say, his keeper or minder".

"But what is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK at all times material to the case, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.

"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry".

Outside court, the estate said in a statement: "It is right that the truth about the UK's pre-eminent artist and the treatment of his work be established and not buried."

Bacon left his £10m fortune to his longstanding friend John Edwards, 51, an illiterate east Londoner who now lives in Thailand.  The case continues.

 

 

 

 

		All your own work, Bacon?   The Daily Telegraph  22 February 2001
	The pictures in a new exhibition come from the studio of Francis Bacon. But, asks Richard Dorment, are they all by him?   THE Barbican Gallery's exhibition of the Barry Joule archive of works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon consists of more than 900 items, including 68 original works on paper and what the gallery calls "working documents" - images from newspapers, books and magazines that have been worked over in ink and crayon. Leading the field: one of many painted-over photographs that are attributed to Bacon Bacon claimed that he never made preparatory studies for his paintings, but worked directly on the canvas, relying on chance and visceral instinct to arrive at those strange, compelling images of screaming heads, disintegrating bodies and animalistic copulation. We know, from a collection of sketches that came to light after the artist's death, that this is not an entirely accurate description of the way in which he worked. Nevertheless, if authentic, the Joule cache both enhances our knowledge of Bacon's sources of inspiration and transforms our understanding of his creative process. But, if a large number of the works are deemed to be doubtful, then the uncritical exhibition of this material will muddy our comprehension of Bacon's achievement. What is at stake is Bacon's artistic identity. For, until you first determine what is and what is not by an artist's own hand, you cannot say anything else meaningful about him. The provenance of this material is not in question. No one doubts that everything on view came from Bacon's studio, or that Bacon handed it over to his friend, handyman and chauffeur Barry Joule just before his death in April 1992. What is at issue is whether the original drawings, and the graphic work on top of the photographs and newsprint, are by Bacon himself. Several respected figures in the art world have accepted that everything on view is authentic. The problem is that a number of equally distinguished voices, including that of Bacon's friend and interpreter David Sylvester, are unhappy with the attribution of the archive to the artist. It must be said at once that the Barbican never quite claims that the works are indisputably by Bacon. Virtually every work is labelled "attributed to Francis Bacon", and a somewhat muddled catalogue essay doesn't quite rule out the involvement of other hands in the creation of the original drawings. What is more, admitting that the collection "has yet to be officially recognised as the work of the artist", the Barbican has quite properly borrowed from the Tate Gallery a selection of the working drawings that surprised even experts on Bacon's work when they were discovered and whose authenticity is not in doubt. This enables us to study the verified material alongside the controversial work in the Joule archive. Most of the undisputed material in the Tate consists of magazine and newspaper images over which Bacon has drawn. In every one, we have the sense that Bacon looked long and hard at each image, then brought his own idiosyncratic visual intelligence to bear on it. We become familiar not only with the calligraphy of Bacon's draughtsmanship, but also begin to understand how his mind worked, what interested him about each image, and how he interacted with it. In one newspaper photograph, showing the boxer Jack Dempsey standing in the ring, for example, Bacon draws a spindly, cartoon-like "opponent" in black ink. The dark knots of the drawn torso against the boxer's white flesh animate an otherwise static image. The way Bacon in his imagination "enters" the photograph serves to illustrate the powerful element of fantasy - and even eroticism - that he brought to the act of looking. In another sheet, he draws a "frame" around the image of a fallen boxer with four swift lines, then adds a second, smaller frame within the first to locate the figure in deep receding space. In undisputed works like these, you sense that Bacon possessed tunnel vision: his eyes zoomed in on the area of an image that intrigued him, isolating it from everything around it. He uses his pen or crayon unhesitatingly, as though thinking with them, instinctively working out how a figure moves or stands in the way it does, cropping it to see whether it would make a picture in its own right. It's not so much the aesthetic quality of the Tate material that is significant, but that you feel Bacon's searching intelligence at work in every line he draws. Turning from the Tate's holdings to the so-called X Album of drawings and collages - one part of the Joule collection on show, which has been unbound for display - the difference is startling. In these drawings, the figures are without shape, direction or volume, there is little sense of recessional depth, no reason for many of the lines. What is more, the collages and drawings feel precious, self consciously "aesthetic". These works are certainly not preparatory studies. My impression is that they were created by someone who already knew the famous painted images, but who didn't understand the anatomical or spatial complexities of the originals. Try though I might to sense Bacon's hand in a drawing of two nude figures lying against a green field, or of a prelate in a transparent box, or of a screaming pope, they feel flabby, flat, weak. My strong instinct is that these works are not by Bacon. Now turn to the hundreds of photographs, magazine, and newspaper images also lent by Joule for this show. Again, no one doubts that these items were in Bacon's studio where they were probably stepped upon, spattered with paint or used to test pigment and wipe brushes: the question is, how much of the graphic work on them is by Bacon himself? For me, the answer is that, in a number of cases at least, Bacon did work over these images. A few examples will have to do. Bacon doctors a black and white photograph of a corner of Picasso's apartment in the rue des Grands Augustins in a way that would have amused Picasso himself. In the photo, there's a Picasso portrait hanging on a wall and a pair of slippers on the floor. Outlining the rectangular portrait in black ink, Bacon turns it into a "head" connected by a wiry torso to the slippers, or "feet" on the floor. Compare the knotty line in this torso to the figure in the Tate's re-worked photograph of Jack Dempsey, and it is instantly clear that we are dealing with the same hand. What's more, the element of wit and invention suggests that this is the same mind as well. Sheet from 'The X Album': assume nothing and decide the authenticity of these works for yourself  Or, to take another example, Bacon uses purple crayon to draw over a reproduction of a Degas painting showing a nude sponging herself in the bath. Bacon reinforces the long line of the subject's back, as though trying to understand her anatomy, then frames the figure, as though by isolating it he can see it more clearly. The way the pressure on the crayon varies from heavy to very light gives the line something of the same kind of energy we see in the Tate's material. Often in photos of athletes he does the same thing - separates individual figures, emphasises the "line" in their movements, reinforces the areas of their bodies that interest him, whether it be a punching arm, an open mouth, or a crotch. In many cases, however, someone has scribbled over the image or enhanced a photograph in a way that feels purely cosmetic. I suppose these could be by Bacon, but much more work needs to be done before we can say this for sure. So there are two questions here. The first is who is responsible for the X Album? The short catalogue essay seems to hint that it might have some connection with Bacon's lover in the Fifties, Peter Lacy, and goodness knows that Bacon moved in a world where any number of people might have tried their hand at imitating his work. The second question is whether the Joule material other than the X Album is authentic. Some of it certainly is, but doubts still linger over much of it. A photo of Bacon and Joule exhibited in this show which has been extensively worked over in ink by photographer Peter Beard proves that those in Bacon's circle did alter images in precisely the way they are enhanced in the archive. The only way to reach a conclusion about all this is through old-fashioned connoisseurship. Each image has to be looked at individually by a panel of experts on Bacon's work, who must compare it with undisputed drawings. Bacon should be treated as though he were a Michelangelo or Raphael. What worries me about the way this material has been presented at the Barbican is that doubts such as those I've just raised have been minimised. Though briefly referred to in the catalogue and wall labels, nowhere are we given a sustained argument against the authenticity of this material. This could have been stronger exhibition had it been called "Francis Bacon, true or false?" and used as a platform to air these issues and perhaps make some progress in resolving them. As it is, the exhibition is in its own way fascinating, but you should go to it armed with the shield of scepticism. Look at everything, assume nothing, decide for yourself. 'Bacon's Eye - Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon from the Barry Joule Archive' until April 16. Also at the Barbican is 'Robin and Lucienne Day Pioneers of Contemporary Design' until April 15.

 

MESS IS MORE.

Art Forum   May, 2001

RICHARD SHONE ON THE FRANCIS BACON STUDIO

 

There are immaculate studios and there are messy studios. There are private ones that are no-go areas for housekeeper and dealer alike. And there are those that show signs not just of working but of living--an easy chair, bookshelves, even a put-up bed. Francis Bacon's last studio was notoriously messy and pretty private, entered only by close friends and the occasional photographer. It was exclusively for work-a small, skylit, fairly cheerless space within his almost pretentiously modest flat up a steep flight of stairs in South Kensington. Its simplicity stood in marked contrast to earlier studios. 

In the 1930s, for example, when Bacon was both painter and modernist interior designer, his workspace was all neo-Bauhaus, fitted out with glass, steel, and abstract rugs. Later he lived and worked in the palatial but bomb-damaged studio occupied in the nineteenth century by John Everett Millais. It was in 1961 that Bacon took 7 Reece Mews--bed-sitting-room, studio, and kitchen-cum-bathroom--remaining there until his death in 1992. Although he could have afforded a substantial London property, that was not his style; nor did he gather good or interesting furniture or works of art around him. 

People often commented, "Francis has no taste," and of course, Walter Sickert was right when he said that "taste is the death of the painter." But, as with so much else in his life, Bacon took tastelessness to an extreme: Photographs of his bedroom record possessions of unadulterated utility. Upon scrutiny, some details of this visual desert--certain clothes, a Marlboro pack-suggest the presence of John Edwards, Bacon's friend and sole beneficiary.

Inheriting the property, Edwards was obviously in a tight spot. He wanted to use the flat without being responsible for destroying the studio's unique look. After lengthy negotiations and the removal of Bacon's estate from his longtime gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, the studio--its walls, floor, and contents (over 7,000 items)--was given over in whole to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, in Dublin, the city of Bacon's birth. 

Reconstructed there to scale, and with a flotilla of attendant displays designed by architect David Chipperfield, the studio opens to the public May 24. A lecture by David Sylvester and publication of the picture book 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio (Thames & Hudson) will mark the occasion. With its paint-smeared walls and piles of rubbish, its interesting photos and books, and its slashed canvases, the studio will be a ghoulish showpiece, but it remains to be seen whether the public availability of its contents will be useful in authenticating the master's disputed pieces, particularly a group of works on paper "attributed to Bacon," recently on view in Dublin and London.

Richard Shone is associate editor of the Burlington Magazine.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

 

  

 

The vulnerability of the human body

Gay News  

February 27 2001 

Francis Bacon (1909-1992), one of the giants of modern art, will be honoured in Holland for the first time with a retrospective. In the Haags Gemeentemuseum in, you guessed right, The Hague, you can see all the important works by the painter, whose main source of inspiration was the vulnerability of the (human) body, especially since 1945 (how come, one wonders!?). Up till then Bacon got little to no recognition - critics unanimously wrote down his work, while Bacon himself did little to help matters by destroying most of it. But in 1944 he caught some eyes with a triptych and from then on his career spread giant wings. Bacon became one of the most successful postwar artists.



Gay News is not the periodical to vex you with a long, art historically correct analysis of his work and gladly leaves that dirty job to those who claim to know all about that. We prefer to take a closer look at the man's homosexuality, his preference for men, which influenced his work so dramatically.

Francis Bacon grows up near Dublin, where his father owns a racing stable. His love-hate relationship with his father, a retired army officer, sets the tone for his childhood. He feels sexually attracted to his father. As the weakest child he doesn't get the love he yearns for, but, to toughen him up, the whip. When at fifteen Francis begins striking up sexual affairs with the stable hands, he and his bullying dad get into such a blazing row, that he decides to move to London. In a last attempt to turn his son into a real man, his father sends him off to Berlin under the supervision of a chaperone. And indeed Bacon learns a lot in Berlin's decadent nightlife, though not exactly what his dad had in mind.

In 1929 Bacon meets the Maecenas Eric Hall, a married businessman with two kids, who educates him culturally. For more than fifteen years they also keep up a sexual relationship. Another homosexual friend helps him to further his artistic career as well. And the Australian painter Roy de Maistre teaches him more about painting, while also enlightening him on further tricks of the sexual trade.

Breakthrough

Upon his artistic breakthrough Bacon finds himself in a world of champagne, posh limousines and big bucks. In 1952 he meets the retired air pilot, Peter Lacy, who works in Tangier as a bar pianist to support himself and pay off his boozing and gambling debts. Bacon rents an apartment in the city, in those days a meeting place for many homosexual writers (Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood and others stayed there for big parts of the year). Bacon falls in love for the first time. Given his background it's not surprising he's attracted to men who in the long run turn out to be neurotic and hysterical. Like Lacy, a man who, next to his humour, in his fits of rage has a penchant for getting violent.

In 1962 the boozing eventually catches up with Lacy and destroys him - just before the opening of his retrospective in the London Tate Gallery, Bacon receives word Lacy died.

In 1964 Bacon meets George Dyer, a rough-neck with a criminal record. Dyer becomes Bacon's muse and models in the nude for several of his most beautiful paintings. But he also takes refuge in booze and several suicide attempts. Another love affair which nearly destroys Bacon's successful career. History has a knack for repeating itself and two days prior to the opening of a big exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer, having overdosed on pills and alcohol, kicks the bucket. In memory of his lover Bacon creates his best work, including three triptyches with an undisguished homosexual theme.

Working class boy

In the mid-Seventies a new lover walks into Bacon's life, John Edwards, a dark, handsome and illiterate working-class boy, who, for the next sixteen years, has a puer-senex love affair with Bacon. That we're speaking of true love here is made clear by the fact that Bacon makes Edwards his heir of his entire capital, assessed at 11 million pounds. When on April 28, 1992 in Madrid, Bacon, at 82, dies of a heart attack in the home of his latest flame, a young, attractive and educated Spaniard, Bacon's body is cremated and his ashes are scattered in England.

Till recently Bacon's London studio was left untouched. His heirs offered the complete atelier to the main London museums of modern art. But their bureaucratic mills turn slowly, and eventually Bacon's heirs decided to dismantle the entire studio in the dead of night and ship its contents to Dublin. Everything was meticulously planned in advance, so the legendary studio could be rebuild in detail in Ireland. The English art world just missed out!

Retrospective

The retrospective in the Haags Gemeentemuseum (41 Stadhouderslaan, Den Haag) is from January 27 till May 13. With it comes a full-colour catalogue of 144 pages. About the love affair of Bacon with Dyer a movie has come out, called Love is the Devil, directed by John Maybury, with Derek Jacobi in the role of Bacon and Daniel Craig playing Dyer. The movie gives a marvelous idea of Bacon's work, without showing any of his works, since his heirs didn't grant permission. Maybury nevertheless manages to portray Bacon in visually powerful images.

 

 

 

 

Disputed Bacon art works go on display

 

Huge exhibition of previously unknown paintings and photographs opens but doubt surrounds their authenticity

 

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent

The Guardian,  Thursday February 8, 2001

 

A huge exhibition of works attributed to the late Francis Bacon opens today at the Barbican Gallery in London despite fears of a last minute injunction from the artist's estate.

Before yesterday's preview, representatives of the estate, which jealously defends the copyright and reputation of the artist, visited the exhibition of works whose ownership and authenticity have been bitterly contested .

The estate's lawyers, Payne Hicks Beach, said last night they had no comment to make.

The archive has been the subject of a simmering row since Mr Bacon, regarded as one of the major painters of the 20th century, died in 1992.

Both the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the then Tate Gallery considered exhibiting the archive, but backed off in the face of the unresolved dispute.

Although the Barbican exhibition is peppered with the word "attributed", Tate Modern has given it some credibility by lending Bacon sketches, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, which it bought two years ago.

A spokeswoman for Tate Modern said: "We have lent six works on paper, totally authentic and not in any way disputed, which allow an interesting comparison to be made. Beyond that we cannot comment on the exhibition."

John Hoole, director of the Barbican Gallery, said he has "no doubt that the vast majority of the works must be by Bacon".

When Mr Bacon died of a heart attack, aged 82, the sole heir of his estimated £11m estate was John Edwards, an East End barman who was his companion for many years. The inheritance included the contents of his chaotic studio, which has now been reconstructed in a gallery in Dublin, the artist's birthplace.

But boxes of papers were allegedly given, just four days before his death, to Barry Joule, a Canadian who was his neighbour in London and later a friend. Mr Joule said yesterday that when Mr Bacon gave him the papers, he said: "You know what to do with it", and that this was familiar code for a gift.

Part of the Bacon mythology is that his genius poured straight on to the canvas, without any preparatory work.

The hundreds of sheets of paper in the archive include hoarded photographs, clippings, pages torn from magazines and books, the medical text book illustrations which fascinated him and scribbled sketches.

The photographs include images which recur in his finished work, including the screaming nurse from the Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin.

Album X is an old photograph album given him by his nanny, from which the photos were torn and replaced with heavily worked collages and overdrawn photographs.

The authenticity of the archive has been questioned by David Sylvester, a leading expert on Bacon. He concedes that the sheets of paper must have come from Bacon's studio, but doubts that the overpainting and sketches are in the artist's hand.

Mr Joule has been accused by other sources of betraying his friend's intentions. It has been suggested both that he tampered with the papers and that if he was indeed given them by Bacon, the intention was that they should be destroyed.

Mr Joule said that he has frequently felt crushed by the bitterness of the row.

"I think that there's an element of jealousy. I'm not an artist or a scholar - I'm a carpenter, so why the hell should I have this stuff?" he said.

"Then there's the gay thing. They claim him as their own and I happen to be a straight man.

"But there's no doubt in my mind, he gave them to me to keep, and I kept them. If he'd come back and asked for them back, I'd have given them back. But he didn't come back. He died and I had to decide what to do with them."

He added: "I have highs and lows. Exhibitions are a high, so this is a good day."

 

 

 

 

A portrait of the artist as a man inspired by clutter 

The Irish Times,  Wednesday, May 23rd 2001 

Francis Bacon's reconstructed studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery could give more than one teenager an idea or two about tidiness, writes Frank McNally.

The new exhibition at Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery should carry a parental discretion warning.

Younger children can probably view it safely enough. But impressionable teenagers could be seriously damaged by the sight of Francis Bacon's reconstructed London studio, and particularly its subliminal message that you do not have to tidy your room to be a success.

The studio is a mess, to put it mildly. Its 4 x 8 metre space contains more clutter than a crack team of first-year university students could ever dream of creating. This ranges from some 2,000 samples of painting material; slashed canvasses; old newspapers and articles of clothing to such artistic accessories as a cardboard box, formerly the home of a crate of VAT 69 Scotch whisky.

One of the few artist's conveniences not found amid the chaos is a palette. But then, Bacon didn't need one. When mixing paint, he preferred to use the walls, both sides of the studio door, and anything else that was handy. It doesn't say so in the gallery programme, but one has to presume he wasn't renting.

The exhibition opens to the public today, three years after the dramatic news that the studio's contents had been donated to Dublin by the artist's partner and heir, John Edwards.

The intervening period has seen the completion of an epic task, beginning with the making of a 360-degree photographic record of the flat in Reece Mews, London, and the cataloguing of its more than 7,000 items, and ending with the meticulous recreation of the whole mess in a specially designed space in the Parnell Square gallery.

Even the original dust was preserved, removed in bags and sprinkled back on the exhibits before the room was resealed.

Gallery visitors can view the interior through the glassed-off door and two windows. To complete the voyeur experience, the steep stairway to the first-floor flat has also been recreated, sunk in the floor, under glass. The project cost £1.5 million, a burden shared by Dublin Corporation, the Department of the Arts, the Millennium Commission, and the Ireland Funds.

Mr Edwards joined Lord Mayor Maurice Ahern and others to admire the finished work on Monday. But, notoriously shy, he confined himself to saying he thought Bacon would have "enjoyed this". Born in Dublin in 1909, the painter left Ireland in 1925 and never returned, later joking, with prescience, that he could only go back after his death.

Nine years after the last-mentioned event, the artist's archive, complemented by a collection of paintings on long-term loan, is considered the most important addition to the Hugh Lane since its establishment in 1908. Admission to the gallery is free, but there will be a charge for the exhibition: £6 for adults, £3 concessions and under 12s free.

Last night, Mr Edwards was presented with a Lord Mayor's award in recognition of his generosity to the city. On Saturday, RTÉ's Network 2 screens a documentary on Bacon, which includes an account of the studio's relocation.

 

 

 

 FRANCIS BACON STUDIO AT THE HUGH LANE GALLERY, DUBLIN

 Local Ireland 

 Opening 24 May 2001, until 28 October

 

"I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me. And in any case I just love living in chaos."
Francis Bacon on 7 Reece Mews

Francis Bacon's 7 Reece Mews studio reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery will be the definitive archive of one of the finest figurative artists ever and one of the greatest European painters of the twentieth century. The database of over 7000 items is the most detailed and technically advanced archive of any artist's studio in the world.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was born in Dublin and is celebrated as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London was the artist's home and legendary working space for the last thirty years of his life and it was here that Bacon produced some of his best work.

The Hugh Lane has now reconstructed the studio in Dublin in new spaces designed by leading British architect David Chipperfield. The studio is supported by an Audio Visual room, an Exhibition Gallery and a Micro Gallery.

This exceptional and undisputed archive of Francis Bacon comprises over 7000 items including 80 works on paper, approximately 1,500 photographs by John Deakin, Peter Beard and Henri Cartier-Bresson among others, books and slashed canvases.

This archival material has been entered on a specially designed database. The Micro Gallery provides the visitor unique access to highlights of this archive. In the Exhibition Gallery a remarkable exhibition of unfinished paintings will accompany the launch of the studio. Their unfinished state provides a singular insight into the artist's process and technique.

The Hugh Lane Gallery appointed a team of archaeologists and conservators to painstakingly catalogue and remove the entire studio contents. The reconstructed studio features the original walls, floor, ceiling and shelves as well as the famous wooden staircase. "The acquisition of Francis Bacon's studio was a great coup and its retrieval and documentation has confirmed our suspicions ­ we have the definitive archive on Francis Bacon. The Gallery's innovative approach to retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Francis Bacon's work", says Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery.

7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio with photographs by Perry Ogden and with foreword by John Edwards, will also be launched by the Lord Mayor the same evening. Published by Thames and Hudson the book features Perry Ogden's extraordinary photographs of the studio and living space at 7 Reece Mews, taken before the studio was dismantled by the Hugh Lane Gallery. These photographs will go on exhibition at the Gallery on 24 May until 28 October 2001.

For further information please contact:
Jessica O'Donnell or Ruth Dowling, Hugh Lane Gallery, tel. 00353 1 8741903
email jodonnell@hughlane.ie
Kate Burvill, Thames and Hudson, tel. 0044 207 8455019 email k.burvill@thameshudson.co.uk

Published by: Local Ireland
Year written: 2001
Copyright owned by: Hugh Lane Gallery

links to related sites:
http://www.hughlane.ie/

 

 

 

Francis Bacon, Much Wanted

The New York Times

 

 CAROL VOGEL   June 29, 2001

 

More than 2,500 ''Wanted'' posters have been plastered on billboards and kiosks all over Berlin. But the face is not that of a criminal. Rather, it is the image of the British artist Francis Bacon as portrayed by another master British painter, Lucian Freud, in 1951, when he was 42 and Bacon was 31.

The tiny image, an oil on copper only 5 by 7 inches and based on a photograph of Kafka, depicts Bacon with brooding eyes and tousled hair. It was stolen from a traveling exhibition when it was at the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin in 1988 and was never recovered. Now, with a major retrospective of Mr. Freud's work opening at Tate Britain in London next year to celebrate the artist's 90th birthday, Mr. Freud is desperate to recover the stolen portrait - so desperate, in fact, that he designed the poster himself.

In a written statement released to the press last week, Mr. Freud sent the thief a message: ''Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition next June?'' The British Council, which organized the exhibition from which the painting was stolen, began the campaign to recover it. An anonymous donor, believed to be Sir Jacob Rothschild, is offering a $140,000 reward for its return.

When the painting was stolen there were no security cameras in the National Gallery in Berlin. The portrait, which had been screwed to the wall, was taken in the middle of the day. The statute of limitations for theft in Germany is 12 years, which means that the criminal could not be jailed if he came forward now. Andrea Rose, the British Council's director of visual arts, said she hoped this would make the thief feel more comfortable about confessing.

Bacon painted Mr. Freud several times, but this is Mr. Freud's only known portrait of Bacon. It is considered of great historical importance and thought to be irreplaceable, since Bacon died in 1992. Art experts say it is worth well over $1.5 million. William Feaver, Mr. Freud's biographer and the curator of the Tate show, called it ''the most important small portrait of the 20th century'' and ''one of the three crucial paintings of Freud's early career.'' The Tate bought it in 1952.

In Berlin ''there is enormous interested both in Freud, who was born there and lived a stone's throw from the museum, and in Bacon, who spent his formative years in Berlin,'' Ms. Rose said. The poster has made such an impact, Ms. Rose added, that people have been spotted trying to steal it. Since the posters were designed by Mr. Freud, many of his greatest admirers consider them collector's items.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon studio recreated in Dublin

By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent

The Daily Telegraph  Wednesday 23 May 2001

 

DUSTY newspapers attest to the authenticity of the studio of the late Francis Bacon, which was opened yesterday in Dublin after it was dismantled and shipped from London.

The artist was born in Dublin but did not regard himself as Irish. He spent all of his most creative years at his studio in south Kensington. The arrival of the entire contents of his studio, all painstakingly catalogued before being moved, has created an air of bemusement in Dublin's artistic community which has shown as much interest in Bacon as he did in Ireland.

An art critic said: "If you went into an Irish bookshop and asked for something on Bacon they would point you to the Elizabethan history section." After Bacon's death the studio's contents were given by his companion and sole heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin's Parnell Square.

More than 7,000 items, including books, floor and roof timbers, tubes of paint, a dressing gown and discarded boxes of champagne, feature in the recreation of the artist's habitat. Even the dust which had accumulated at No 7 Reece Mews studio was swept up and scattered over the Dublin display.

Barbara Dawson, the Hugh Lane Gallery director, said: "The acquisition of Francis Bacon's studio was a great coup. The gallery's innovative approach to retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Bacon's work."

An exhibition of unfinished paintings will accompany the studio. Mr Edwards described the studio as a dump. When he tidied it up he found bundles of banknotes that had been hidden, some of which were so old they were out of date.

 

 

16 September 2000

Not for Sale   Comment   The Daily Telegraph 04/02/2001 IN his article on Francis Bacon, Andrew Graham-Dixon referred to a "series of now classic interviews" with Bacon "conducted by the critic and dealer David Sylvester" (Magazine, January 28). I was appalled to see myself falsely described as a dealer. Art dealing can be an honourable profession; nevertheless, for obvious reasons, it is not easily compatible with being an honourable critic.

 

 

 

 

Bacon art payments case can go to trial, judge rules

 

By Steve Boggan The Independent, 16 May 2001

 

A legal contest between the estate of Francis Bacon and his former gallery, involving up to £100m in claims, should go ahead, probably next year, a High Court judge ruled yesterday. Mr Justice Patten refused an application by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art to have the case, brought by Bacon's trustees, thrown out before a full hearing.

Marlborough insists the estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence" are unfounded. But the estate, headed by the executor, Bacon's friend, Professor Brian Clarke, claims the painter was underpaid for works, some of which, it alleges, remain unaccounted for. From 1958 until his death from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, aged 82, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery.

The estate says it is seeking "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon". In a statement, Marlborough has said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years after Bacon approached the gallery with the request to represent him.

The full trial is expected to last 12 weeks and may begin next January. Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied on the material presented to him that "there is at least an arguable case" that a fiduciary relationship existed between Bacon and the gallery from 1964.

The question of whether such a relationship existed would depend on a detailed examination at trial of Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough both before and after that date.

"It is, I think, beyond dispute that Bacon was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century but both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate," the judge said.     

 

 

 

 

 Bacon judge gives trial go-ahead

 

   BBC News, Tuesday, 15 May, 2001

Francis Bacon photographed in 1970   A High Court judge has refused to halt a legal action brought by the estate of Francis Bacon against his former gallery today. The estate is bringing a suit against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), based in Liechtenstein. The gallery contested the action, urging Mr Justice Patten to halt the action - which could be worth as much as £100m - before it reaches the courts, probably in January 2002. The defendants claimed that the estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence" were unfounded, and urged Mr Justice Patten to "strike out" the action before it got to court. 'Mutually beneficial' Marlborough has said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years. Bacon approached the gallery with the request to represent him in 1958, and it exhibited his work exclusively until his death from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, aged 82. The estate says it is seeking a "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon". More specifically, Bacon's estate believes Marlborough International is only entitled to a third of the total value of Bacon's work. It is currently believed to own around 70%. High value Bacon's work is highly valued. In February of this year, three paintings of his partner John Edwards were sold for £3m. On 9 May a new record for his work was set when his 1977 triptych, Studies of the Human Body, was sold at auction for £6m. Marlborough had paid Bacon £70,000 for the work in 1983. The judge gave his ruling after earlier preliminary proceedings to organise the timetable of the case. On Monday, further court sessions will take place to determine the start of the trial proper, the earliest expected date being January 2002.

 

 

 

Bacon sale hits world record   BBC NewsWednesday, 9 May, 2001

     

         Study of the Human Body  Francis Bacon

An auction of the Francis Bacon painting Studies of the Human Body has set a new world record price for the artist of £6m in New York.

The sale price of the triptych doubled expectations and proved the major draw at the auction of the Stanley J Seeger collection at Sotheby's.

The 1977 work is seen as his response to Michelangelo's nudes and the early photography of Eadweard Muybridge. Until recently the Bacon work was hung in the bedroom of the London-based American collector.

It was bought by Mr Seeger when he acquired Sutton Place, a Tudor house in Surrey, from J Paul Getty.

Self portrait

Francis Bacon's Study for a Self-Portrait from 1980 sold for $1.8m (£1.2m), four times higher than the estimate.

Works from the Mr Seeger's collection sold for a total $54m (£37m), surpassing a pre-sale estimate of $39.9m (£28m).

Charles Moffett, co-chairman of Sotheby's impressionist and modern art department worldwide, said: "The marketplace responded to the quality and excitement of the works in his collection.

"There was a tremendous depth in the bidding we saw this evening across a range of collectors and dealers, both European and American, and included a museum in the competition."

 

 

 

 

Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon   

 

By Steve Boggan  The Independent  26 April 2001 

 

A £100m court battle over works by the painter Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of the most bitter art wrangles in decades.

Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.

The gallery, which denies the allegations, is seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial will begin in earnest early next year.

Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."

Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82 from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.

But the estate alleges that instead of taking a "fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work, valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for only one series ­ a flat fee of $40,000.

The estate has questioned the role of one of Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly from the arrangement.

Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.

"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry ­ in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best interests'."

The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended "like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last 18 years of his life.

The trustees complain they have been unable to examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so. Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the gallery in 1958.

"The trustees have not been able to get a full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate. "Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of the paintings thought to have been painted by him.

"But what is also annoying is that we can't get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate mail.

"If nothing else, we hope to have these released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest 20th-century painter."

During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter. In 1989, his triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.

He is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest painters ­ if not the pre-eminent British painter ­ of the last century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.

His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among others.

His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.

A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were among his friends.

His stature, therefore, has made the alleged failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between 1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts. You could be looking at £5m for each of them.

"The figure of £100m was raised during an interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out there, we don't know how much could be at stake."

A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said: "We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the claims."

It is understood the gallery will argue that Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance of his bank account.

One of his friends said: "He needed money for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than that, it meant nothing to him."

During the case, it will be pointed out that Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?

Part of the reason might have been because of Ms Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely to give evidence.

The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m for some works.

The questions the court must answer are: Were those prices enough, and did Bacon care?

 

 

 

 

 

A side of Bacon

 

Athletes, pop-stars, defaced dictators: the doctored photographs and febrile sketches Francis Bacon gave his former driver reveal the sources of the artist's inspiration. 

Andrew Graham-Dixon reports on a new exhibition Graham-Dixon reports on a new exhibition

The Daily Telegraph  February 2001 

 

ON the subject of sketches and other forms of preparatory work, Francis Bacon was adamant. He had little talent and even less inclination for drawing, he said. What happened on the canvas was the only thing that mattered. He thought of painting as a rather mysterious process that was liable to be ruined by too much premeditation. His most arresting pictures, he believed, were those in which he had responded to 'accidental' marks in a work-in-progress and gone on to create something unexpected. The most celebrated (and best remunerated) British painter of the 20th century explained all this and more in a series of now classic interviews conducted in the Sixties and Seventies with the critic and dealer David Sylvester: 'The hopelessness in one's working will make one take paint and just do almost anything to get out of the formula of making a kind of illustrative image - I mean, I just wipe it all over with a rag or use a brush or rub it with something or anything or throw turpentine and paint and everything else on to the thing to try to break the willed articulation of the image, so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own structure, and not my structure. Afterwards, your sense of what you want comes into play, so that you begin to work on the hazard that has been left to you on the canvas. And out of all that, possibly, a more organic image arises than if it was a willed image.' So there it was: the painter of screaming popes, deformed children, copulating men, prowling monkeys, people with faces like open wounds and an inverted crucifixion designed to make Christ resemble 'a worm crawling down the cross' did not draw or otherwise prepare himself before springing into action in the studio. But after Bacon's death in 1992 it turned out that, in fact, he did. And the evidence was not only there in his studio, but elsewhere. The art market being what it is, and the prices for Bacon's work being at the level that they are, it did not take long for quantities of studies and drawings by the painter to emerge from various attics and safety-deposit boxes. In 1996 the Tate Gallery paid an undisclosed sum for approximately 40 Bacon sketches which the artist had given at different times to his friends Paul Danquah, Peter Pollock and the poet Stephen Spender. David Sylvester, perhaps regretting his own failure to have extracted anything in the same line from the artist, wrote a wry article in which he described drawing as 'Bacon's secret vice' and admitted that the painter had pulled the wool over his eyes in all those interviews 30 years before. Meanwhile, expert opinion on the sketches remains somewhat divided. Accusations of fakery have been made and subsequently retracted; the current critical consensus is that almost all of the works in question are indeed by Bacon and that, although they are not necessarily masterpieces, they shed considerable light on the sources of his inspiration and his creative processes. Just last year, yet more miscellaneous examples of Baconiana emerged from the so-called 'Joule Archive'. Barry Joule was the artist's driver, handyman and general factotum during his last years. Their relationship appears to have been close but, like most of Bacon's relationships, somewhat uneasy. One of Joule's many allotted tasks was to slash and burn works deemed failures by the painter. On one occasion, following some unreliably boozy instructions issued to him by Bacon in an all-night drinking club, 'Trasher' Joule went off and Stanley-knifed the wrong painting. The artist did not speak to him for several months but eventually relented and rehired him. By Joule's own account, a few days before Bacon died he entrusted his faithful retainer with a bundle of papers comprising approximately 1,000 separate items, saying only, 'You know what to do with this.' Joule claims that this enigmatic pronouncement was Bacon's coded way of indicating a gift. Anyway, perhaps recalling the incident of the wrong picture destroyed, he put the bundle in a safe place. Now, this mass of more or less dodgy Bacons - having, so to speak, fallen off the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine - has been edited down to form the body of a striking and intriguing exhibition curated by Mark Sladen. (Bacon's Eye may well turn out to be that rare event: an exhibition at the Barbican Gallery actually worth visiting.) The Joule Archive material, all of which seems to date from around 1955 to 1963, can be divided into two types. First, there are works entirely by Bacon's own hand, generally done in pencil or oil on paper. These include a number of recognisable sketches for extant paintings, including studies for a screaming pope picture, for a painting of a monkey sitting in the crook of the branches of a tree, and for a portrait of Van Gogh - an artist who meant much to Bacon - trudging down a dusty road in the south of France. Aside from scotching the myth of Bacon's soi-disant 'spontaneity', such sketches are of little intrinsic merit. The second type of imagery in the Joule Archive takes the form of doctored photographs, most of them apparently dating from the same period as the sketches. Bacon collected pictures from newspapers and magazines, and cut images from books and hoarded postcards. He also drew and scribbled on them - often with palpable vehemence. When Richard Hamilton, the founder and first describer of British Pop Art, saw these works, he commented that they show how close Bacon was to other artists of the time who came under the spell of mass media imagery - an interesting connection, and one seldom made, Bacon generally being placed in Old Masterly juxtaposition to the Pop Artists. The photographs form an index of Bacon's preoccupations and a kind of encyclopaedia of the iconography of his paintings. Although they do not, necessarily, explain his pictures, they do show the sort of thing he was thinking about when he was painting them: handsome young men - predictably enough - who might be members of the Kennedy clan, or boxers in action, or Elvis Presley singing; monkeys; people suffering from diseases of the skin or mouth; assassinations; Nazis and other murderers; paintings from the past that Bacon found moving. Often Bacon's alterations to such pictures seem merely camp and mischievous - he gives the Kennedys a botched make-up job, smearing paint on their faces like poorly applied cosmetics, and he draws lines or arrows pointing at the genitals of sportsmen - but in other cases they seem more serious in character. A photograph of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X has been almost obliterated by a grid or cage scratched into it by the artist; a photograph of Hitler has been eloquently defaced, slashed vertically on the axis of the Fuhrer's pencil moustache. It would be tempting to read some revelation of meaning into these relics - Bacon confessing his hatred of authority figures, revealing his abhorrence of genocidal tyrants - but it would be as well to bear the artist's own caution against literary or over-literal interpretation of his work. Bacon lived through a bloody century, registering his deep-rooted sense of its many atrocities in his art. But he also loved violence and depravity, and revelled nihilistically in his own perceptions of a world where the natural order of things seemed - in permanent spirit of carnival - to have been turned on its head. He was repelled but also excited by the sight of blood. He liked his boyfriends to tie him up and beat him. It is not easy to sum up such a man, with any degree of accuracy, using the familiar clichés of 20th-century art history - 'painter of existential doubt', for instance - which is just as Bacon himself would have wanted it. Nothing, in that sense, is changed by the discovery of new material from the artist's studio floor. The meaning of his studies, sketches, doodles, mementoes - quite what he would have called them is unknown - is just as clouded as the meaning of the paintings that they helped him in various ways to create. So Bacon need not have feared the effect that public exhibition of his leavings might have on perceptions of his art. Perhaps, as Barry Joule maintains, Bacon would not in the end have particularly objected to the preservation of these works. I suspect that the artist gave them away not because he wanted them destroyed, but because he could no longer bear to look at them. Having subsided into the truly execrable painter that he was in his later years, a purveyor of smooth and fatuously anodyne compositions principally inspired by the work of Knightsbridge's slickest window-dressers, the last thing that he wanted to be reminded of was the vitality of his youth. Bacon's Eye is at the Barbican Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) from 8 February to 16 April

 

 

 

 

Slices of Bacon sell for £3m BBC News  Friday, 9 February, 2001

    

              Francis Bacon and his partner John Edwards

A series of three paintings by the late Francis Bacon of his long-time partner John Edwards have sold for £3m at an auction at Christie's in London.

The triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an anonymous collector of post-war art.

 

One of the three parts of the triptych showing John Edwards

The works show Edwards, who was a barman when he met Bacon in 1972, sitting on a stool in an empty studio space from three different perspectives.

Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie's international director, said: "It is a piece that Bacon himself identified as being of museum quality."

Finest works

The paintings were done in the 80s and Bacon's triptychs are widely recognised as being his finest works.

Bacon was one of the last century's most commercially successful artists, earning about £14m from his paintings before his death.

He dealt with themes of death and decay and his style has often been described as existentialist.

The artist once said: "I don't know that I should talk about a triptych in my case.

"Of course, there are three canvases, and you can link that to a long-standing tradition. The primitives often used the triptych format, but as far as my work is concerned, a triptych corresponds more to the idea of a succession of images on film."

 

 

 

 

My brushes with Bacon

Art critic David Sylvester was friends with Francis Bacon for 40 years. During that time, he recorded many of their conversations. Here, he introduces a selection of the artist's previously unpublished thoughts - about sex, about God, and about cricket...

The Observer, Sunday May 21, 2000

I 'm not sure whether I was Francis Bacon's concierge or his butler, but intrusive strangers certainly believed that I had the entrée to his domain. I used to get calls from famous photographers saying that they were great fans of my writing and could they take my picture. I knew what was coming if I didn't speedily decline. 'Would it by any chance be possible to photograph you in Francis Bacon's studio and then perhaps do the two of you together if he happens to be there at the time?' The comedy of being importuned in this way was a nice bonus for having done a book called Interviews with Francis Bacon, which had been widely translated.

My relationship with Bacon began in 1942, when I was 17 and had just become interested in painting. One of the books I absorbed was Herbert Read's Art Now, a veritable bible first published in 1933. It reproduced a Crucifixion, painted that year by a young artist with the name of the great Elizabethan writer, and this painting therefore stayed in my mind, although the artist had disappeared from view. But at the end of the war, new works by him started to appear in galleries. They were sensationally disturbing and widely considered worthy of the Chamber of Horrors.

It was in 1949 that I realised he was not only an arresting image-maker but very much a painter, and I started saying so in print. I also met him by chance and was soon seeing a good deal of him. In 1951, I was asked to give a talk about his art for the BBC's Third Programme , my first substantial radio talk. I described him as the most important living painter, by which I didn't mean he was the greatest, but the most relevant to the age. I was told afterwards that Harman Grisewood, head of the Third Programme , swore that it would be a long time before I did another talk for them.

Bacon and I became quite close friends. We drank and dined together, went dog racing together and shared off-course bets on horses. I also sat for him a few times, helped him to write a short piece in praise of an older artist, Matthew Smith, and acted as his agent in selling works to dealers behind his accredited dealer's back when he urgently needed cash. I idolised him as a man - this never stopped - and until 1956, I loved his work unreservedly. But I thought it then took a wrong turn and I became rather alienated from his current production. I was also put off by the way he jeered at the work of abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock: my own pantheon had plenty of room for them both.

So between 1957 and 1962 I stopped writing about him; nor did we see much of each other. In 1962 he had a retrospective at the Tate, and as art critic of the New Statesman , I had to review it at length. I wrote with admiration but reservations and dismissed the work of the past few years, but concluded that he had returned to form in his latest piece, a big Crucifixion triptych.

Shortly after, the BBC radio Talks producer, Leonie Cohn, who had commissioned that 1951 talk and had lately got me to do interviews with several American Abstract Expressionists and also with Stanley Kubrick, asked me to interview Bacon. I said I wasn't sure whether Bacon would agree, as he didn't readily give interviews and may not have liked my review of his show. But he did agree, and the result was brilliant, producing passages endlessly quoted since, such as: 'What is fascinating now is that it's going to be much more difficult for the artist, because he must deepen the game to be any good at all.'

Four years later I was asked by Michael Gill to interview Bacon in a BBC TV film he was making. This time we were quite aggressive at moments. I asked tougher questions than last time and he accused me of liking abstract art because I was a slave to fashion. But we were now seeing a lot of each other again and we were both saying that it would be interesting to do more interviews, especially if we could talk as we did among friends, without having to think of a lay audience. So we did some private recordings at my flat and then we decided to publish a book of interviews. This happened in 1975, and Graham Greene wrote that it was 'an exciting document which can rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin'.

We went on recording interviews, some for ourselves, some for TV, one for an audio company. We published an enlarged edition of the book in 1980 and a further enlarged one in 1987. Meanwhile, they got translated into about 10 languages; I don't know whether any of the translators managed to create an equivalent for the amazing vividness and rhythmic power of Bacon's talk. The reason we went on doing interviews for about 25 years was that Bacon loved getting involved in theoretical talk about art. This is a rare thing in English artists, who tend to poke fun at a custom so French. And it's a key aspect of Bacon's personality which is not sufficiently emphasised in most accounts of the man.

His love of talking about art made the recordings easy. The hard part was the editing. Interviews with artists, even when they have Bacon's turn of phrase, tend to sprawl and repeat themselves; I wanted the printed version to be economical in exposition and coherent in structure. I therefore did most of the editing in collaboration with Shena Mackay, whose work as a fiction writer suggested that she was the ideal person to help to achieve that.

Now, if one is aiming for structural coherence, a lot of the best things said are not going to fit in anywhere; so they get left, so to speak, on the cutting-room floor. I was always aware how much was being lost in this way and had it in mind to return to the transcripts, retrieve some of the best rejected bits and publish them torn from their context as fragments of talk. The ones that follow are The Observer 's selection from my selection.

Bacon on Bacon

Francis Bacon I love watching the idiocy of other people, and of myself. And they can watch my idiocy. David Sylvester People you know and people you don't know, passing people? FB Yes. I love passing people. I love going to towns and places where I know nobody at all but very quickly talk to them. It's so easy to talk to them. DS You can't really imagine living outside of town, can you? FB I can't imagine lying on the seashore, for instance, for hours, like people can do, with the dumb satisfaction that the sun is shining on them. That I couldn't do at all. DS And what about, say, moving to the country to work? FB That would be impossible for me. DS Why's that? FB Because I like crowds. I mean, I'd rather be in a station than in the country. [1975]

DS Do you at all enjoy the kind of star quality which you have always had when moving among people? FB That's a thing that you are not conscious of yourself at all. I have no idea of what impression I make on other people. DS You have not been conscious that, when you come into a bar, you immediately become the centre of attention? That is something I have seen happen ever since I have known you, which means before you became famous as a painter, so it wasn't influenced by that. FB Perhaps I was drunk and garrulous, had a lot to say. I think it can only be for that reason. I certainly am not conscious of those things. This is not false modesty; I am just not conscious of it. [1984]

DS Did you go to the theatre when you were younger? FB I drifted from bar to bar. DS And when did you start gambling seriously? FB Well, I have always been brought up with it, because when we were very young, we used to be sent to the local post office to put on bets. So, as I was brought up in that sort of atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that that influenced me. I don't know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case. [1984]

DS It's often said about you by hostile critics that your work reflects a feeling of disgust about human beings and of self-disgust. FB Well, I may have, I may very often be very discontented and loathe myself but I'm not trying to bring that out. In any way whatsoever. Nor have I a disgust with life. Life is all we have. I mean, here we are for a moment. [1984]

Bacon on religion

FB Of course one knows how very potent some of the images of Christianity have been and how they must have played very deeply on one's sensibility. And after all, one believes in the ethics of Christianity, or a great number of them, without actually believing in the practice of the Church. DS You believe in the ethics of Christianity? FB Well, I think that they are a carry-over of Greek ethics really, and I think that so far a better code of ethics for the Western world hasn't yet been found, though of course the religious side of it is something I can't accept. DS But then at the heart of Christianity is the idea of salvation and of a life after this life in which one gets punishment or reward for what one has done here. FB I think you can accept the ethics without believing that the good you do will be rewarded or the evil you do will be punished. [1966]

Bacon on work

FB The only thing that really keeps me going on is that I want to work - but work, I may say, for no reason. I just work; it still excites me to work. You see, unless you have religious feelings or something of that kind, how can you not think that life is totally futile - and becomes more so with age, because it hasn't got the pleasures of youth? Probably the only thing, although I know it has no meaning, is that I like working. I like the possibilities of invention and the possibilities of something happening. Not because I think they've got any value, but because they excite me. [1979]

FB I know that teaching is one of the methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a period when there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your own attitude. The only thing that I can understand for art schools would be for them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are striving to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems with... But many people have to teach because they can't make the money out of their work. In my own case, even when I could earn no money, I never taught. Except that once a friend went to the West Indies and he asked me to take his job for three months at the Royal College of Art, which I did. It's true to say that I did it very badly. I didn't often go there; there was nothing I could teach them whatsoever. DS And what effect did that have upon your own work? Did you feel it was just using energy which you needed for your own work, or...? FB Not especially, because it was only for three months. Otherwise I would never have done it. I'd rather go out and just do a job working. After all, I can cook, I can clean floors, I can earn my money that way. It would use physical energy, which would be so much more interesting than mental energy. Because I've got plenty of mental energy, because I never stop thinking, myself. After all, I think about painting. Not that I think thinking finally helps, and yet it does. [1975]

Bacon on books

DS What are you mostly reading nowadays? FB Well, you know, I read generally the same thing over and over again. I very often read translations of Aeschylus; I read Proust; I read anything that comes to my hand. Or any rubbish as well. DS What rubbish do you read? FB Well, most things are rubbish. So I can't tell you exactly what rubbish. There are piles of rubbish and very little stuff that is any good. DS Do you read Shakespeare a lot? FB I read a certain amount, yes. I'll tell you what I really read: things which bring up images for me. And I find that this happens very much with the translations of Aeschylus, and with Eliot. For some reason I read them, and when I read them another time, a different image comes up. I mean, I don't say that these images are really to do with the poems of Eliot or even with the plays of Shakespeare, but they open up the valves of sensation for me and so images drop in like that from reading those things. It could happen just as easily from reading any of the trash. So it doesn't really make much difference. Except that I'm less bored by those than I am by the trash. DS In the same way that you can be influenced by a news photograph or you can be influenced by Velazquez? FB Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [1984]

Bacon on Michelangelo

FB Do you think Michelangelo was an erotic artist or not? DS Very. But almost embarrassingly. I find the Slaves almost embarrassing in the longing they conveyed for these boys. FB He was, after the Greeks, the great male voluptuary, wasn't he? He made the male body really voluptuous. DS But with the Greeks, you feel that the artist has had these boys, and with Michelangelo, that he'd just longed for them. And that's one reason why I find there's a morbid quality in Michelangelo which doesn't stop him from being the greatest artist of our civilisation. FB I think that Michelangelo, from what one knows about all of his history, had a deeply morbid side to him. But it's more voluptuous than the Greeks. Because I think in those Slaves the longing is more poignant than anything you find in Greek art. [1973]

Bacon on cricket

DS As to working from documentary photographs, one interesting case of this was your recent use of a photograph of David Gower batting: you translated the pads to the legs of a headless male nude. FB Well, I have often seen cricket, and cricket is such an important game in this country, I am very conscious of it. When I did this image I suddenly said: 'Well, I don't know why, but I think that it's going to strengthen it very much and make it look very much more real if it has cricket pads on it.' I can't tell you why. DS The painting is in Paris, and some French people I know, while very much admiring it, have been extremely puzzled by what the figure had on its legs. Some of them thought they might be bits of Etruscan armour. FB Don't the French have games in which they use pads? They're deformed cricket pads, in any case. DS I take it that your attitude to bringing in the cricket pads was rather like the attitude you took about 20 years ago when you brought that armband with a swastika into a Crucifixion triptych. When I asked you whether the presence of the swastika had a meaning for you and also whether you were concerned that people might take it to have a meaning, you said the swastika was there simply because the armband had been in the photograph you'd used and you'd put it in without thinking about how it might be interpreted. Did you have the same attitude to bringing in the cricket pads? FB It wasn't quite the same. You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all these people, and they all had armbands on with the swastikas on them, and I wanted that in this image: it was stupid to put in the swastika, but there it is. I didn't think about it, I didn't think that people would interpret it all the different ways they have. But with the cricket pads, I didn't put them in because I am particularly interested in cricket; I did so because it made the image more real. [1982]

 

 

 

Take a peep - it's a voyeur's dream

 

Charles Darwent, Culture; The Independent on Sunday, May 27, 2001

 

 

To say that Francis Bacon is missing from his newly-reconstructed studio in Dublin sounds dim, even by the demanding standards of British journalism. The Master of the Screaming Pope died in 1992, after all: his attendance at the studio's official opening last Tuesday would have been taking the Baconian grand guignol thing a little far. Still, you can't help feeling Bacon's sulphurous presence in the Hugh Lane Gallery's new annexe, and wondering just where the old devil has hidden himself.

 

Which is a measure of the project's triumph. When the idea of disassembling Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, shipping its 7,200 pieces of slashed canvas, torn paper and truncated corduroy trouser-leg across to Dublin, and then re-assembling the lot with archaeological accuracy, was first mooted in the late 1990s, reactions in Britain ranged from mild annoyance to white fury. David Sylvester, Bacon's ailing hagiographer and friend, pointed out that the artist had always hated Ireland. (The son of a horsey ex-army officer, Bacon skipped to England at 17 having been caught being buggered by a groom, and never went back.) The Tate Gallery - which, it is said, was offered the studio by Bacon's last boyfriend, John Edwards, and lost it for being too blase - was predictably tight- lipped about the project.

Of deeper worry, though, was the sense that preserving Reece Mews as a shrineful of Bacon relics went against the artist's habit of ruthless self-editing. Bacon proudly maintained that he had destroyed his best pictures, evidence of which was provided by the dozens of slashed and overpainted canvases found in his studio when he died. (A similar shadow was cast by Barry Joule, the one-time handyman accused by devout Baconians of removing incunabula from St Francis' studio against his wishes.) Bacon's mystique rests in part on the belief that his genius sprang from his brush fully-formed, without the need for bourgeois interventions like drawings. Being able to see the hundreds of worked-over photographs and magazine pages that had littered the floor of his Reece Mews studio might dim the public's awe.

Speaking as a member of that public, it doesn't. Bacon's studio was more than a coincidental space in which to paint. As Margarita Cappock, manager of the project, notes, pretty well the only thing not unearthed at Reece Mews in the course of its removal was a palette. Instead, Bacon used his studio's walls and doors to experiment with texture and colour, mixing his paints on them and scuffing away at the results with odd bits of paper and trouser-leg. (Remember those stripes in Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail)? Corduroy.) The studio - perhaps uniquely in art - was also an artwork, giving it a value that Brancusi's sterile atelier, rebuilt at the Pompidou Centre, does not have.

And 7 Reece Mews was more than that, too. The project's architect, David Chipperfield, has included a quotation from Bacon on the wall of the free- standing bunker in which he has encased the artist's studio: "The mess around here [ie., at Reece Mews] is rather like my mind: it may be a good image of what goes on inside me." Far from denying the intrusion of ogling Bacon's sanctum, Chipperfield has made a fetish of it, exploiting a quality in his design - voyeurism - which Bacon, always open to such things, would doubtless have enjoyed.

Step into the glass box that provides your first view of the studio, and you have the embarrassing sense of being somewhere you shouldn't be. On the opposite wall, two steel tendrils sprout like motifs from a Bacon anthro-machine. These hold lenses giving specific views of painted wall and door, emphasising the studio-as-palette idea but also stressing the illicitness of what you're doing: turning the installation into a What the Painter Saw machine, visitors into voyeurs. (You half-expect Bacon's bloodshot eye to peer dolefully back at you.) Chipperfield plays his third variation on the voyeurism theme on the final wall, his spiral walkway allowing you to look down through the studio windows like an old-fashioned Peeping Tom.

Circulation is important here. On the one hand, the fact that you approach the studio in one of two ways - through a room hung with unfinished canvases from Reece Mews or via another of finished Bacons - means that the new annexe integrates itself into the Hugh Lane Gallery's William Chambers core. ("Bacon thought of his portraits as being like Gainsborough's," notes the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson. "It's not inapt.") At the same time, the bunkerish look of Chipperfield's annexe tells you this is a place where you have, at best, a dubious right to be. It's a dangerous feeling, and a useful one.

For the clever thing about Chipperfield's design is that it celebrates criticisms of the project rather than denying them. There's no questioning the extraordinariness of it all: the team of archaeologists that plotted the position of every last ball of paper and fluff on Bacon's floor; Cappock's computer database, which allows each of the objects to be pulled up, interrogated and cross- referenced on screen; Perry Ogden's photographic archive which, inexplicably, recorded slight changes in the disposition of these objects when the archaeologists came to do their stuff. ("Very Francis," sighs Dawson.)

But the question remains: would Francis have approved? "John [Edwards] says he would have roared with laughter," says Barbara Dawson, "and he was with Bacon for the last 16 years of his life." And when he'd finished laughing, you feel that Bacon would have enjoyed the illicitness of it all, and the spying.

Francis Bacon Studio: Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903); Perry Ogden's project photographs, to 28 October.

 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio is published by Thames & Hudson, pounds 14.95

 

 

 

A precious collection of debris

Patrick Skene Catling, The Spectator, May 27, 2001

 

7 REECE MEWS: FRANCIS BACON'S STUDIO Photographs by Perry Ogden, Foreword by John Edwards Thames & Hudson, L14.95, pp. 120, ISBN 0500510342

John Edwards, Francis Bacon's heir, donated Bacon's South Kensington studio, the whole room and all its contents, to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, his birthplace, thus submitting the compost of the artist's memorabilia to archaeologists, curators, art critics, psychoanalysts and, from 23 May, the public.

The laborious 1998 dismantling, shipment and exact reassembly of the detritus of 30 years of what Bacon called his 'exhilarated despair' will give his admirers and detractors clues to the creative processes of a gambling, alcoholic, homosexual, atheistic genius. In the intimately enlightened opinion of Edwards, companion to Bacon for the last 20 of his 82 years, the act of transferring this complex of chaotic artistic fecundity to Dublin, a wonderful coals-to- Newcastle operation, 'would have made him roar with laughter, his own special laugh, full of warmth and joy'.

Though Bacon would rarely have been able - or have cared - to pass a breathalyser test, he was passionately serious about working at his easel in the morning, no matter what he had been doing until late the night before. He was a man of prodigious stamina, recuperative power, prolificity, and eventual wealth. He told David Sylvester, the foremost authority on Bacon, 'I really like highly disciplined painting, although I don't use highly disciplined methods of constructing it.' He depended on receiving images from his subconscious by fortuitous accidents. His paintings sometimes evolved as he painted them, as if having lives of their own.

He depicted people as meat, flayed, twisted and corrupted, as though portraying mortality might exorcise his fear of loss. He dreaded abandonment and impermanence: long relationships ended in death. He was gregarious but valued contemplative solitude. He said he was an optimist, but regularly exposed himself to the risks of roulette, rough trade and drunken oblivion. In Tangiers, according to the late Daniel Farson, a long-time, on-and-off friend of Bacon's, the British consul general impressed on the local chief of police that

Francis was a very distinguished painter and kept getting mugged. A few days later, the chief of police returned, patently embarrassed: 'Pardon, mais le peintre adore ca!'

Dreading the end of life, Bacon seemed to be in a hurry to get it over, while at the same time relying on attentive doctors to prolong it. He deplored the term gay; he said he was queer. He enjoyed his circumstances of 'gilded squalor'.

I knew him only at times of post-meridian frivolity in Soho, presiding with intellectual fervour and flamboyant charm over long lunches and consequent sessions in the Colony Room club, the beloved, bilegreen vortex known as Muriel's. Muriel Belcher greatly encouraged him. Those festivities were the early stages of his daily routine transmogrification from Jekyll to Hyde. 'Champagne for our real friends!' was his favourite toast, 'and real pain for our sham friends!' As he ordered bottle after bottle, he was closely surrounded by friends of both kinds. He was an insistent host, generous to a fault, usually tolerant of hangers-on, but ruthlessly critical of other artists, especially abstractionists.

Before the studio was transported to Dublin, Perry Ogden spent several days photographing every part of 7 Reece Mews as it was when Bacon lived there - the orderly bedsitting room, the kitchen/bathroom (he was a good cook and carefully ablutionary), and the steep wooden stairs down to the studio, which looked as if his id had run amok in it.

Bacon was an autodidact all his life. Ogden's close-ups of bookshelves reveal the wide range of his reading, such as biographies of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Freud, Ezra Pound, Rothschild and Seurat and at least three of Velazquez. (He said he thought Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X was `one of the greatest paintings in the world and I've had a crush on it'.) Among the numerous other books were The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, Spender's Journals, Greek Made Easy, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet - and Larousse Gastronomique. On a shelf near his bed, there were snapshots of lovers and a plaster-cast mask of William Blake.

At first glance, the studio looks like the devastation caused by an explosion in a rubbish tip. However, the gallery's team of archaeologists catalogued over 7,000 items, including 80 'works on paper', 1,500 photographs and many slashed canvases. According to Barbara Dawson, the director of the gallery, there is now 'a definitive archive ... a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Francis Bacon's work'. A 'Micro Gallery' will give visitors access to 'highlights of this archive.'

In the meantime, Ogden's elegant photographs provide an opportunity to scrutinise a lot of significant Baconian debris a page from Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion (his nude male wrestlers became Bacon's amorous meat on an unmade bed), glimpses of Michelangelo, Rodin and the late George Dyer in his underwear, and pages from a book on forensic pathology, displaying skin diseases, hundreds of discarded brushes and paint - pots, and empty cartons that once held bottles of Vat 69 and vintage Krug.

Bacon found day-dreaming in chaos richly productive. John Russell, in his excellent biography of Bacon, considers Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of 'unconscious scanning' and Edward de Bono's 'lateral thinking' as explications of Bacon's artistic creativity. Russell later quotes Bacon on his mysterious procedure: 'I think of myself as a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed.'

Ogden's and Edwards' book is a fascinating survey of the sorts of material that Bacon pulverised. The fascination easily quells any reluctance to pry into a dead man's privacy. And, after all, with his real friends Francis Bacon found everything in his tortured existence absolutely hilarious.

 

 

 

 

Bacon's beloved muddle recreated

 

Louise Jury

The Independent, May 23rd, 2001

 

 

THE PAPERS, books, photographs, brushes, paint and scrap material used by Francis Bacon go on display today after being moved piece by piece to rebuild his London studio in the artist's native Ireland.

The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin has reconstructed the walls, floor and ceiling of Bacon's workspace and added more than 7,000 items discovered there when he died in 1992.

Conservationists and archaeologists photographed and logged every section of the studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington before it was moved. They found more than 7,000 items including 80 works on paper and roughly 1,500 photographs, with some by Henri Cartier- Bresson and John Deakin, as well as books and slashed canvases.

The studio was donated by Bacon's long-term companion John Edwards and was moved with funding from bodies including the Dublin Corporation and the Department of Arts in Ireland.

Mr Edwards said Bacon "loved it in that little room", which was so messy that they would discover wads of banknotes that Bacon had lost between the canvases. He added that he believed Bacon would have roared with laughter that it was now all in Dublin.

 

 

 

 

 CHRISTIE’S POST-WAR 

 

  NEW YORK, ROCKEFELLER PLAZA | 15 NOVEMBER 2000

 

  Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

   Portrait of George Dyer Talking

 

     

              Portrait of George Dyer Talking 1966 Francis Bacon

 

Price Realized

$6,606,000

Price includes buyer's premium

Estimate

$3,500,000 - $4,500,000

 

Sale Information

Lot 29 / Sale 9576
post-war
15 November 2000
New York, Rockefeller Plaza

 

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Portrait of George Dyer Talking
titled and dated 'Portrait of George Dyer Talking 1966' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
78 x 58 in. (198.2 x 147.3 cm.)
Painted in 1966

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Galerie Maeght, Paris.
Dr. Israel J. Rosefsky, Binghampton, New York.
Dr. Israel J. Rosefsky, sale; Christie's, New York, 5 May 1987, lot 85. Acquired at the above sale by the previous owner.

Literature

Maeght, A. ed., Derrière Le Miroir: Francis Bacon, no. 162, Paris, November 1966 (illustrated in colour on the cover and p. 19).
L. Trucchi, Francis Bacon, New York, 1975, no. 109 (illustrated).
M. Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and in Profile, New York, 1983, no. 44 (illustrated in colour).
J. M. Faerna, ed., Bacon, Barcelona, 1994, p. 19 (illustrated in colour).
C. Domino, Francis Bacon, Taking Reality by Surprise, London, 1997 (illustrated in colour, p. 98).

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Francis Bacon, November 1966-January 1967.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon Recent Paintings, March-April 1967, no. 8 (illustrated in colour).
Paris, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grand Palais and Düsseldorf, Städtische, October 1971-May 1972, Francis Bacon, no. 65 (illustrated in colour, p. 77).
Caracas, Bogota, Montevideo, Buenois Aires, and Rio de Janeiro Four Contemporary Masters: Bacon, Dubuffet, Giacometti, De Kooning, April-October 1973.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honour, and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, January-October 1999 (illustrated in colour).

Lot Notes

In his early career, Bacon executed paintings after well-known works of art, such as papal portraits by Velazquez and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, but during the 1960s his paintings often featured individuals to whom he had deep personal attachments. His portraits of these years included those from his intimate circle, such as Lucian Freud, John Edwards, and Isabel Rawsthorne, but George Dyer was the friend who appeared most frequently in Bacon's paintings, as the subject of works in three series between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s.

The artist met Dyer in the fall of 1963 while drinking in a public house in London's Soho district. Dyer was an uneducated, petty thief who lived in the East End and is often thought to have appealed to Bacon's darker side. The two were intimate companions for the rest of the decade, and during this time, Dyer was a fixture in Bacon's paintings. He died in 1971, committing suicide in a Paris hotel on the occasion of Bacon's first major retrospective in France.

The present painting includes an early example of Bacon's use of the full-length, turning figure in his paintings. While the present work clearly positions its sitter at the center of a brightly-coloured and oddly-shaped room, it also generates multiple ambiguities as the violent distortions and displacements in the human figure are echoed in the symmetrical, though seemingly precarious, curvatures of both floor and walls. Moreover, even the primary articulation of the room is unclear: the aperture which frames Dyer's head may be either a window or a door, or as suggested by a related painting of the same year, Portrait of George Dyer Staring at a Blind Cord, a photograph pinned against the back wall. The ominous lightbulb suspended above Dyer's head heightens the pervasive feeling of instability in this interior.

Bacon always executed his portraits from photographs or from memory, even when he had direct access to his subjects. Bacon stated, "Even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I've had photographs taken because I prefer working from them. It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room. . . . What I want to do is to distort the thing beyond appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance" (Quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1980, pp. 38).

The present painting, in fact, twists tradition in multiple, provocative ways. Bacon was influenced deeply by Edward Muybridge's famous studies of human locomotion. In most images of Dyer, Bacon offers several views at once of this figure, providing an additional suggestion of movement through multiplication, either by literal doubling or mirror reflections. The present painting indicates motion more conceptually and confines any activity to the figure's violated anatomy; the only other movement rests in the pile of papers, scattered perhaps by the revolution of Dyer's stool.

The colors in the present painting seem to reflect the bright colours of 1960s fashion and interior design (Bacon's first choice of profession was interior and furniture design), but the composition and central figure suggest a return to art-historical sources, specifically works of the Italian Renaissance. There are echoes of paintings such as Piero della Francesco's famous Madonna in the Pinacoteca Brera in Milan in which an egg hangs from the cupola above the virgin's head. However, even more forceful is Bacon's portrayal of Dyer's twisted and contorted form: his pose, through its insistent torsion, recalls the restrained torsion of Michelangelo's slaves. This visual connection relates to John Russell's description of Dyer: "A compact and chunky force of nature, with a vivid and highly unparsonical turn of phrase, he 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, op. cit., p. 160).

(fig. 1) Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913.

(fig. 2) Dyer in Bacon's Studio. Photograph by John Deakin.

 

 

 

     Christie's Post War Sale

 

    Sale 9576  November 15, 2000

    Art Auctions, The City Review, November 2000

 

 

    

             Portrait of George Dyer Talking1966 Francis Bacon

 

Lot 29, Portrait of George Dyer Talking, a 78-by-58-inch oil on canvas by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is perhaps the auction's most painterly work.

Painted in 1966, it has an estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000 and is a classic Bacon, eerie and terrifying and fascinating. It sold for $6,606,000 breaking the artist's world auction record of $6,270,000 that had been set May 2, 1989 at Sotheby's. Dyer, according to the catalogue, met Bacon in a public house in the SoHo district of London in 1963 and they became "intimate companions for the rest of the decade…He died in 1971, committing suicide in a Paris Hotel on the occasion of Bacon's first major retrospective in France."

"While the present work clearly positions its sitter at the center of a brightly-colored and oddly-shaped room, it also generates multiple ambiguities as the violent distortions and displacements in the human figure are echoed in the symmetrical, though seemingly precarious, curvatures of both floor and walls…The ominous lightbulb suspended above Dyer's head heightens the pervasive feeling of instability in this interior….The present painting indicates motion more conceptually and confines any activity to the figure's violated anatomy; the only other movement rests in the pile of papers, scattered perhaps by the revolution of Dyer's stool," the catalogue continued, adding that Dwyer's twisted form "recalls the restrained torsion of Michelangelo's slaves."

This is a striking and unusual composition and the relatively realistic treatment of everything but Dyer's figure is brilliant and forces the viewer to concentrate on the figure, which is painted in a way that emphasizes muscularity and motion. In forcing concentration on the horrific figure, Bacon combines the centrifugal energy of Munch with the devilishness of Bosch.

 

 

 

 

6 Records Set at Christie's First Auction of Postwar Art

 

By Carol Vogel  

The New York Times  November 16, 2000

 

 

''The generation now buying art is the generation that relates to postwar material,'' the Manhattan dealer Abigail Asher said at Christie's last night. ''They're selective, but they'll spend big, big money.''

And spend they did at the company's sale of postwar art. Six records were broken for artists like Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Ellsworth Kelly.

Another surprise was the huge price for an important work by Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966). One of the artist's twisted images of a subject posed in an empty room with just a naked light bulb overhead, it was expected to bring $3.5 million to $4.5 million. Again the bidding got down to two telephones, and the painting finally sold for $6.6 million, another record.

(Final prices include Christie's commission, 17.5 percent of the first $80,000 plus 10 percent of any amount above that. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

 

 

 

Chaos transfer    

 

Mick Brown on archaeology and the artist

 

The Sydney Morning Herald,  26/08/2000

 

Method in the madness ... Francis Bacon's work space and its contents, including a Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait of the artist that was stuck to a wall, are being painstakingly transplanted from his London studio to Dublin.

In April 1992, Francis Bacon, the greatest British painter of the 20th century, walked out of his home and studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, for the last time. Against the advice of his doctor, Bacon was travelling to Spain, for an assignation with a lover. It was there, in Madrid, that he was to die a few days later, at the age of 82, from a heart attack.

More than a studio, the small, cramped quarters at Reece Mews had, for the previous 31 years, been the epicentre of Bacon's life. He lived in almost monastic simplicity. His small sitting room on the first floor, accessed by a narrow set of stairs with rope for a banister, contained only a bed, a table and a battered sofa, and was lit by four bare light bulbs. Its fastidious neatness was in stark contrast to the studio, in an adjacent room.

There, Bacon had assembled around him the impedimenta of his life and work, a detritus of papers, books, photographs, rags, paint pots, scraps of material, some of it piled in boxes, most scattered haphazardly about the room, a mind-boggling tide of clutter that covered every available surface, spread ankle deep across the floor and lapped against the walls, threatening at any moment, it seemed, to drown the artist himself.

For six years after Bacon's death, this extraordinary spectacle remained undisturbed, save for a fine patina of dust gathering on its surfaces. Then in 1998, a team of archaeologists and conservators moved in and set to work. In a remarkable feat of conservation and reconstruction, the entire studio and its contents have been removed and transported to Dublin, Bacon's birthplace, where it is being reassembled as a permanent exhibit at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and opens in November.

Walls, doors, light fittings, radiators, shelves, cabinets, the mosquito netting that Bacon used as curtains and every one of the 12,000 items that littered the studio, down to the last scrap of tissue paper, have been removed from Reece Mews, annotated, photographed and committed to a comprehensive computer database. What was superficially a mess has turned out to be a treasure trove, offering an unparalleled insight into the painter's life and work.

Bacon became the world's most expensive living artist in 1989 when his triptych May-June 1973 sold at Sotheby's New York for POUNDSTE3.53 million. The son of a British Army major who had retired to train horses and hunt, Bacon was born in Dublin and grew up in Co. Kildare. His poor constitution and his unusual enthusiasms were the despair of his father. He was eventually banished from the family home at the age of 16 after a string of sexual liaisons with the stable boys and being discovered dressing in his mother's underclothes.

Bacon came late to painting and had no formal training. He spent his teenage years drifting around Europe. He worked as "a gentleman's gentleman" and designed fashionable furniture and rugs before being inspired to take up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso's work in Paris. By the time he occupied the studio in Reece Mews in 1961, his stature as a painter was already assured. He would later recall, "The moment I saw this place, I knew I could work here."

Bacon relished the apparent chaos in which he worked: indeed, he suggested that chaos was the only environment in which he could work. "The mess here around us is rather like my mind," he told the visiting French art critic Michel Archimbaud. "It may be a good image of what goes on inside me; that's what it's like, my life is like that."

"I believe that 7 Reece Mews was in itself a conscious work of art," says Brian Clarke, executor of Bacon's estate. "Francis consciously and painstakingly left it as it was for all those years; he added to the object, but very rarely took away from it. And he was proud of it. He didn't want it disturbed; and he didn't want people in there except on his terms." Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, says that walking into the studio for the first time in 1997, she was reminded of "a latter-day Egyptian tomb. The environment was excellent. The studio was above a garage so the air circulated. It wasn't damp or smelly. It was completely undisturbed, as if it had been frozen in time."

Standing on the easel was the self-portrait that Bacon had been working on the day he left the studio for the last time. A drawer, its surface thick with congealed paint, was pulled open, as if the artist had been rummaging in it only a moment earlier, perhaps studying the photographs of Giacommetti and John Edwards which were visible inside.

A row of slashed canvases was racked against one wall, awaiting removal. There were a dressing gown thrown on a wicker chair, a pair of Chelsea boots, an old sock. Scattered among the detritus on the floor were books on the painter Velazquez and on Scottish dance; a scrap of corduroy that Bacon used to create texture on paint; Winsor & Newton and Dulux paint pots cluttered the shelves, along with a bristling nest of dirty paintbrushes, stuck in tin cans that once contained Libby's orange juice and Batchelors beans.

Yet what was immediately apparent, says Dawson, was that there was a pattern in this chaos and that in their groupings and proximity to each other the artifacts provided a unique series of "maps" of Bacon's thinking and working processes. "My feeling was that the studio should be approached as an archaeological dig. You couldn't just go in and take out all the books, for example, and list them. It wasn't just the fact that the books were there; it was how close they were to the canvas, what relation they had to his work. He was working on a self-portrait at the time of his death (which will be on display at the Hugh Lane) and there was a book on diseases of the mouth, near the easel, and a magazine article about how George Michael would only be photographed from the left side. You could see there was a kind of arc which described his thought processes."

Working under the gallery's consultant conservator, Mary McGrath, a team of 15 archaeologists and conservators from the Courtauld Institute spent 10 days in the studio, methodically excavating, photographing and recording its contents. Every item was numbered, with a record of its precise location, its relation to other objects, its north-south orientation, its height from the floor; so if F14 was the surface of a table, F14,1 was the book on top on it; F14,2 a photograph directly beneath that, F14,3 a scrap of paper with a lunch date, and so on.

Each item was carefully wrapped and boxed for removal. Even the paint-smeared walls and doors, which Bacon used as a mixing palette, have been removed. McGrath's final act as she left the empty studio was to sweep up all the dust, which is in a bag labelled "Bacon dust". "I've said that the last thing I'll do as I back out of the reconstruction is scatter it all over everything. We don't want it too pristine."

Perhaps the most remarkable items are the photographs and illustrations which Bacon used as his source material. Hostile to the idea of painting from life, Bacon used photographs for reference and inspiration, a template for gestures and expressions "triggers of ideas", as he put it.

Among the hundreds of images found in the studio are the photographs that he commissioned from John Deakin of his friends and subjects Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne providing a vivid evocation of the bohemian milieu in which Bacon moved. There are studies of wrestlers, again commissioned by Bacon, in the style of the 19th-century anatomical photographer Edward Muybridge; a trove of Muybridge's own photographs, torn from books and scattered liberally around; images of Nazi rallies and of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; film stills and pictures of pop and movie stars such as Elvis Presley, Catherine Deneuve and Buster Keaton.

The contents are often macabre, disturbing: a book of gruesome mortuary photographs shows victims of gunshot and knifing wounds; there are books on forensic pathology, on diseases of the mouth. Defending the unremittingly bleak vision of his paintings man as meat, devoid of spirit Bacon described himself as "a realist". "You can't be more horrific than life itself," he once remarked. "What horror could I make to compete with the horror that is going on every single day?"

And yet, extraordinary as this exercise in archaeology and archivism may be, it begs one question. Is it telling us more than we need to know about Bacon's life and work? In explaining the processes behind his art so thoroughly, are we not also demystifying it?

McGrath thinks not. "Francis Bacon was a very clever man. And his art reflected only as much about himself as he wanted to show. What's interesting to me is how his mind worked and how he assimilated all that information, and created the art that he created; and I don't think that mystery will ever be solved by anything we're doing. The nuts and bolts of somebody's life is not the secret of their art. It doesn't explain their genius. It never could."

 

 

 

 

Murky Bacon

Circa  Issue 92, Summer 2000

 

Did Francis Bacon do preparatory sketches or not? Do you care? Certainly the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, and the Bacon estate care a good deal. A show of sketches on photographs, possibly by Bacon, opened to the public at IMMA on March 30. According to a report in the Sunday Times, however, leading Bacon expert David Sylvester has “described the drawings as ‘crummy’…and said they were ‘almost certainly not Bacon.’” The sketches owner, Barry Joule, “has promised to donate 90% of his entire collection to the [Hugh Lane] gallery if the works are authenticated.”

There was much discussion on just this topic at the opening of IMMA’s new galleries, in the former Deputy Master’s House. If the praise of the new galleries, seting, and Jim Buckley’s complementing outdoor fibre-optic artworks were universal, doubts about the authenticity of the Bacon works on show was not uncommon. The pieces, painstakingly displayed, are painted-on, scribbled-on, scrached-over, generally abused images from books and the popular press. A few thoughts cast by viewers in their direction included: why did he always seem to be using the same colour of paint on so many of the images?; why no fingerprints?; why no sign of skill? Others, including some experts on Bacon, and IMMA itself, seem a bit surer of their provenance. IMMA’s press release says that “The use of news and sports images, as well as art images and the annotation of books, demonstrates not only Bacon’s knowledge of art of the period (late 1950s and early ‘60s) and of art history in general but also his awareness of and involvement with popular culture and the mass media.” Not, of course, if Bacon didn’t do them.

IMMA’s Director, Declan McGonagle, hedges somewhat, but he is quoted in the presss release as saying that “Both exhibitions [there is also a Picasso works-on-paper show] represent a transformation of the ordinary and commonplace into the extraordinary, revealing something of each artist’s thinking and decision-making process.” Again, not if Bacon didn’t do them.

Meanwhile, we have two important Bacon-related articles in this issue: Mary McGrath describes the ‘archaeology’ of moving Bacon’s studio to Dublin, and Mick Wilson comments on the logic of the exercise. See pages 20-26.

 

 

 

 

 Leading artist 'was tax dodger'

  Ronan McGreevy,  The Evening  Standard,  4 July 2000       

 

Francis Bacon, one of the foremost British artists of the 20th century, was a tax dodger, it has been alleged. 

Vanity Fair magazine is to publish details that Bacon, who died in 1992 aged 82, is alleged to have avoided paying tax in Britain by failing to declare payments made by his dealers Marlborough Fine Art to a Swiss bank account. 

The payments, made through the gallery's worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art, based in Liechtenstein, were legal but Bacon's failure to inform the Inland Revenue was not, according to the article to be published in this month's edition of the US magazine. 

Bacon's tax affairs have come to light because of a legal wrangle between his estate and the gallery. Bacon's estate is alleging that the gallery exercised "undue influence" over the artist in a 30-year association. 

The estate identified 30 works of arts for which it claimed Bacon received no payment. The gallery claims that all the paintings have been accounted for because Bacon either sold them privately or gave them away. 

Bacon left his entire £11 million to his companion John Edwards, an East End publican. Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell says that Bacon's relationship with the Marlborough gallery was a constant compromise and that he preferred to be in their hands than those of an "incompetent honest man". 

He added: "What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he got if he went with anyone else." 

Vanity Fair alleges that just before his death, Bacon put £4.2million from the sale of his paintings into a Swiss bank account, but asked for £1.6million of it back when he realised he would have to pay tax on his earnings.

 

 

 

 

Digging in the dirt.

 

 

What lay behind the brutal visions of Francis Bacon? Lynn Barber ventures into the twilight world of a father-fixated, homosexual sado-masochist

 

Lynn Barber
New Statesman  Issue: June 12, 2000

LOOKING BACK AT FRANCIS BACON   David Sylvester Thames & Hudson, 272pp, [pounds]29.95

 

Are we ready to look back at Francis Bacon? It is only eight years since he died, and most of the posthumous attention has focused on his Soho social life rather than his work. In any case, artists' reputations after their deaths often seem to go through a curious period of suspension, like those cartoon characters who go on running horizontally off the edge of a cliff until eventually they plummet. British artists usually do plummet Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Graham Sutherland are currently out of sight beneath the waves, although perhaps they will bob up again.

Francis Bacon is still pedalling in midair, not yet assigned to oblivion or apotheosis. He is an awkward case, because his work is easy to admire, but difficult to like. His power to shock has already lasted much longer than that of the "Sensation" shockers - 30 years against three -- but shock alone is never enough to ensure survival. And the question remains: do his paintings really describe the human condition or merely the sado-masochistic gay condition? There was a line from Aeschylus beloved - "The reek of human blood smiles out at me". Perhaps these blokes on beds doing nasty things are just blokes on beds getting their jollies; perhaps the screams are screams of pleasure. It doesn't make him a less brilliant painter, but it makes him a less universal one.

David Sylvester is well equipped to look back at Francis Bacon because he and Bacon go back half a century. Sylvester first noticed Bacon's name when, as a schoolboy, he saw his 1933 Crucifixion reproduced in Herbert Read's Art Now. But Bacon then completely disappeared until after the war, when he emerged with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Sylvester started writing about him in 1948, and got to know him in 1950. There after they were friends, and Sylvester served variously as Bacon's gatekeeper, critic, promoter, curator, illicit dealer and occasional model (although Sylvester was upset to notice that, when he sat for Bacon in 1953, the, painter kept consulting a photograph of a rhinoceros - he said it was helpful for depicting the texture of the skin).

But Sylvester's most valuable role was as Bacon's Boswell. From 1962 to 1986, he recorded the great series of radio, television and print interviews that, in their final book form (Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1987), provide one of the richest, most fascinating insights into an artist's mind ever published. The present book is, by comparison, mere jots and titles, recycled catalogue notes and fragments of conversation that were omitted from the published Interviews. A typical fragment goes as follows:

"FB: I was thinking about your bedroom -that just to have Holland blinds would be better aesthetically, but that curtains make sex more comforting.

DS: Well, I'm sure curtains go very well with sex because they're there so often in pictures of sexual scenes. You yourself used to have curtains in your earliest pictures of having sex, but now the backgrounds are starker and the sex seems just as good.

FB: Yes, but in the more recent pictures it's pure sex. You know, I don't really like the billing and cooing of sex; I just like the sex itself. Do you think that's a homosexual thing?

DS: No. I think it can go right across the board."

If you like this sort of thing, there is a lot of it in Looking Back at Francis Bacon. It often strikes me that art books operate with different rules to normal books. There is absolutely no guarantee that a "new" art book contains any new text or even new thought; authors are allowed to recycle and plagiarise themselves, provided they have a new packaging. Looking Back is not as bad as some, but I would estimate that less than a quarter of the text is new, and what is new is often nugatory, as above. However, Sylvester's writing is always charming, even on its second or third outing, and the cover price is justified by the excellent illustrations, including 12 triptych fold-outs.

I was hoping, however, that this book would elucidate the mystery of the unknown, uncatalogued Bacons that have emerged since his death in 1992. It absolutely doesn't. Sylvester seems to accept them as genuine and includes a few in the illustrations, but offers no opinion on their quality and no explanation of their provenance. This is naughty-particularly when one of them is captioned "David Sylvester walking, c1954". Including the picture is tantamount to authenticating it, but Sylvester's only comment is that he knew nothing about it until several years after Bacon's death. Why not? In 1954, they were seeing each other frequently - surely Bacon would have shown it to him, or at least mentioned it? And Sylvester must have some opinion on whether the figure resembles him, or how it could have been mislaid all these years. He hints ominously that "there is reason to believe that a number of other unknown canvases are going to emerge". What makes him believe this? We ought to know; he ought to tell us.

Sylvester would be perfectly equipped to write the definitive biography of Bacon, but unfortunately he shows no signs of doing so. Nevertheless, the biographical note at the end of this book, with its very full and chatty footnotes, provides some fascinating glimpses. Daniel Farson was good on the gilded gutter life - the drinking, the gambling, the rent boys, the whole Soho galere - but Sylvester knew Bacon better at home, and knew a better man. He records Bacon's kindness to his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who lived with him until her death in 1951, and to a friend of Nanny Lightfoot's whom he continued to visit once a week until her death many years later. Bacon remarked in 1987 that "I've only taken on morality because I've had the money to do so", but Sylvester says firmly that "this was not true". Sylvester is observant and astute about Bacon's psychology. He notes that Bacon's lavish generosity was a "means of control", a way of avoiding obligation and dominating any social transaction, but he also suggests that it derived from a cynicism rooted in low self-esteem: "He believed he had to buy his way through life... He could be quite confused if people were utterly kind, asking for nothing in return. He expected them to behave badly and was rather relieved, it often seemed, when they did."

Nor is Sylvester afraid to risk Pseuds' Corner by delving into Freudian depths. He suggests that Bacon's Popes - Il Papa - were inspired by his father, of whom he said in the Interviews: "I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with, that I realised that it was a sexual thing towards my father." He also notes that two of the screaming faces that haunted Bacon - the nurse from The Battleship Potemkin and the mother from Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents - are "induced by the same situation: the threat of infanticide by soldiery"; and he goes on to remind us that "Bacon was the son of an army captain, who was himself the son of a captain and the grandson of a general. He grew up in fear of his father, who despised him as a weakling. He had a lifelong devotion to his nanny... [who] was around when he was painting those cries." So this makes t he screaming Popes - what? A conflation of his father attacking him as a child and his nanny defending him? It seems farfetched. But then, can you think of a near-fetched explanation for screaming Popes? I feel that Sylvester has earned the right to be trusted for his intuition, even, or perhaps especially, when it seems completely off the wall. But as for a final judgement... we are still waiting.

COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.

 

 

 

  Sotheby's

 

      

 

              Self Portrait  1980  Francis Bacon

 

 

Francis Bacon: Self-Portrait, Lot 9.  Estimate of $350,000 to $450,000. Sold for $1,765,750.

Provenance: Marlborough Gallery Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on October 2, 1980.

Exhibited: London, Marlborough Gallery Ltd., Francis Bacon, Small Portrait Studies, 1993, no. 28; Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ich ist etwas Anderes.  Kunst am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2000, no.6.

Litrature: Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and In Profile, New York, 1983, no. 132, illustrated;
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 125, illustrated; Milan Kundera and France Borel, Bacon, Portraits et Autoportraits, Paris, 1996, illustrated p. 164.

                                                             

                                                     Francis Bacon with Study for Self-Portrait  1980  Edward Quinn Archive

 

"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." (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 99).

As part of the constant questioning of his ability to transcend mere representation in his work, to record the self beyond the expression, Bacon's small portrait studies became the lifeblood of his oeuvre. In his unbounded quest for the ultimate immediacy of depiction, the intimate size and proportions of these canvases allowed him to experiment endlessly with the potency of his brilliant painterly gesture. Bacon would paint, re-paint and discard these pieces until he found the core of his subject's being. It is therefore not surprising that relatively few of these self-portrait studies survived. The ones that did, however, such as the present work, provide some of the most compelling images of his painterly genius.

For a few chosen subjects, including himself, Bacon's constant social and professional dedication to their appearance, his repeated observation of their mannerisms and movements provided the key to their existence on his canvases. As he wined, dined and conversed his life away, the one driving force behind his art was the desire to understand the sensation of existence. In the age of photography, Bacon felt that traditional portraiture lacked depth and mere appearance was not enough to capture the essence of life. For him, the outcome of his art depended on a direct opposition between a kind of visual intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His portraits strove not to tell the story of someone's life, but to clamp themselves to the viewer's nervous system and offer as he put it "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." A history of observation could be conveyed in the cast of a gesture and that was where the painting stood or, as most of the time, fell.

Consequently, Bacon's art depended on the complete immersion in his subjects, a fact which was often left exposed to the vagaries of life. His paintings clung to the fragile social relationships he built, the regularity with which he saw his friends and, as time went on, the permanence of life itself.

For Bacon the seventies were marked at each end by the deaths of two of his closest friends. In 1971 George Dyer, his greatest confidant and lover, committed suicide in Paris and at the end of the decade Muriel Belcher, the owner of his beloved Colony Room drinking club in Soho, and one of his few female subjects, died. Bacon was gradually becoming the one remaining constant subject throughout his oeuvre. As such, the few self-portraits that Bacon retained during his working process show not only the evolution of his exterior form, but also the development of his inner painterly reaction to the extreme joys and tragedies that life was throwing at him.

"I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It's true to say ... One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." (Quoted in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London 1975, p. 133).

Study for Self-Portrait shows Bacon emerging from the shadowed depths of a limitless darkness at the beginning of the 1980s. Dressed in a formal white collar, the sheer jet black emptiness which surrounds his features only serves to heighten the haunted, blurred presence which emanates from the canvas. In the present work the confident, bold swathes of color and exaggerated form of Bacon's paintings during the sixties and seventies have become knowingly clarified and subtly calmed (see fig. 1). Yet within there is a poignancy to the haze which enshrouds his face. Over-brushed and scumbled, the ambiguity explored in this work brings a heightened reality to the image, a fact which is at once accentuated and governed by the slippage of the form. His head smears softly sideways into view, the exactness of the two faint white swirls surrounding his face indicating a rotation, not necessarily in the Cubist manner, but as though it has endured some terminal rearrangement by a form of painterly manipulation.

As Bacon stares at his image reflected in the paint-splattered mirror of his studio (see fig. 2), the image he finds is fraught with contrasts; life versus death, self versus other, psychology versus physiognomy, together compounding to generate an image of immense raw energy which unites an exterior presence with an interiorized power. Outside, the shape retains an obstinate and familiar integrity, the precise result of a sudden movement. Within, the sheer concentration on his face transfixes the viewer. Behind the veil, the pensive sorrow in the piercing concentration of the eyes conveys a hidden turmoil and suffering which is at the heart of Bacon's genius.

 

 

 

 

A furnace fuelled by drink and despair!

Nigel Richardson

The Daily Telegraph  16 September 2000

 

Fifties Soho was a far darker place than its popular image suggests, says Nigel Richardson 

 

    'IF I described a Soho type of person, it would be someone who enjoyed drink and food and conversation and laughter, who would never cash a cheque at a bank but always with a friend or pub or shop, who'd probably cry quite a lot and enjoy it, and would miss the train back home if a party was going on." So said the photojournalist and Soho habitué Daniel Farson in a 1991 radio interview.

    It makes Soho sound raffish and enviably bohemian, and that is the picture of Soho that has persisted in the public mind. But Farson's Identikit Soho person says more about his self-image than it does about the real place. The true Soho was a darker, crueller place. Thanks principally to Farson, its story has remained largely untold.

    Farson appointed himself the chronicler and mouthpiece of Soho in its pomp, the 1950s. It was in this decade that the confluence of people and ideas in this square mile of central London reached the ripeness of a golden age, producing such memorable figures as the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the columnist and professional drunk Jeffrey Bernard and the artist's model and muse Henrietta Moraes.

    Farson, who died in 1997, appropriated such people and painted a relentlessly picaresque picture of their lives, turning Soho into a lucrative cottage industry with a flood of books, articles and interviews. But Farson told only part of the story. "He was interested in success and publicity and so on," says Oliver Bernard, the elder brother of Jeffrey. "He ignored most of the people that I cared for in Soho, which did irritate me, really, considerably."

    Farson played down the pain and self-destructiveness that was all around. You could erect a memorial tablet in the French Pub to the victims of Fifties Soho. Some of the names engraved there you might recognise, such as the brilliant painter Johnny Minton, who committed suicide in 1957, or the Edwardian beauty Nina Hamnett, a gifted artist who had modelled for Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska and ended up an incontinent wreck on a Soho barstool. Some, such as Josh Avery, the subject of my semi-fictionalised book Dog Days in Soho, were sidekicks and hangers-on who fed the Soho furnace.

    Norman Bowler, the actor who starred in the Seventies television series Softly Softly, knew all about the darker side - he had been a close friend of Minton and was briefly married to Moraes. Farson's version of Soho left a good deal out, Norman said. "It was a very painful place to be. You know, people weren't getting drunk and abusing each other out of fun. It was pain."

    Perhaps Farson played down the dark side of Soho because he couldn't face his own pain. "Dan had a sort of despair, I think," George Melly recalled. "It didn't kill him for a long time, but the fact is that at a certain point in the evening he turned from being the very charming man he was into a werewolf."

    It's a metaphor for Soho itself. Shade, as well as light, has been the essence of the place. For too long Farson's determinedly bibulous, wink-wink version has held sway. It's time we acknowledged the deeper recesses.

 

 

Sacred monster, national treasure

 

The Guardian Profile: David Sylvester

He is the most influential critic of the past 50 years and a champion of modern art. But he hates his own writing, would rather set up exhibitions and wishes the public would stay away from galleries. Nicholas Wroe on the iconoclast who is an unashamed elitist

The Guardian, Saturday July 1, 2000

 

David Sylvester's influence on the post-war British art world is unparalleled, as art critic, installer and curator of exhibitions, and as an administrator. He wrote his first article about drawing for Tribune in 1942 when he was only 18. Now aged 75 - think Orson Welles for both his profile and effortless projection of rumbling gravitas - he has just published the definitive account of his friend Francis Bacon's career and staged an exhibition of his work in Dublin.

n the intervening years his role as confidant, adviser, interpreter and arbiter of taste has made Sylvester's contribution to shaping the artistic landscape unique. Because of his efforts the Tate has in its collection whole swathes of work that it could not possibly afford to buy today. It was he who almost singlehandedly alerted a hostile British artistic establishment to the importance of post-war American artists. He has sat for Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon and worked for Henry Moore. If anyone prepared the ground for the explosion of interest in contemporary art over the last decade it was David Sylvester.

"David is the only sacred monster that has ever existed in the English art world," says the artist Howard Hodgkin. "He has that kind of grandeur." Tate director Nicholas Serota first met him in the early 70s and says they have remained close. "He was a powerful influence in making me think internationally and has been enormously encouraging in terms of trying to acquire work for the collection. He is an incredible treasure for Britain."

The usually tight-lipped collector and gallery owner Charles Saatchi makes an exception for Sylvester and throws the dictionary at him. "David Sylvester is charming, crotchety, effusive, enigmatic, opinionated, receptive, vivacious, languid, sharp, romantic, perceptive and cuddly. He is the finest installer of art exhibitions in the land and his writing is so delicious he should be doing cook books."

With the recent opening of Tate Modern - categorised as Britain at last making its peace with modern art - this should be Sylvester's moment. For long periods his has been a lonely voice speaking up for the merits of modern and contemporary art. Now is his vindication. But far from celebrating the acceptance of contemporary art into the mainstream of British cultural life, Sylvester finds himself made gloomy by the prospect. "One really doesn't want to be in a gallery with more than a few people. This is the great problem with art. A big audience is no good for it."

His friends speak of an Eeyore-like temperament, edging towards melancholy. Added to this, in recent years his health has not been good. He had a heart attack in the early 90s and was diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 1998, for which he has recently undergone surgery. He also has diabetes.

But his glomy outlook and objections to the ongoing art boom come from neither physical nor psychological motivations. Sylvester's vision of what art is for, and its place in the culture, simply has nothing to do with latterday notions of Cool Britannia, people's art galleries or the veneration of "access". Last month he launched a devastating attack on the recent thematic hanging of the collection in Tate Britain - "like serving up a dish in which roast beef is side by side with grilled sole" - and he is appalled at the thought of the one-out-one-in admission system recently needed to regulate the massive crowds at the 19,000-capacity Tate Modern on London's Bankside.

"At these huge exhibitions, like the Monet in London, or the Vermeer in the Hague, they are so packed there is no pleasure in going to them." But what about the benefits of being exposed to great art? "The whole education argument is crap." Encouraging a new generation of art lovers? "I hate museums cluttered up with children. I was turned onto art by a simple black and white reproduction and that was enough," he continues. "I am all in favour of taking films and reproductions of art into schools and of decent television programmes. But one doesn't necessarily have to sit in front of masterpieces."

Fellow art critic Richard Dorment says this is typical of Sylvester. "David would have loved to celebrate unambiguously the opening of the Tate but he says what he thinks needs to be said. He is in nobody's pocket and the fact that he doesn't like the new Tate gallery is an example because he deeply likes and admires its director Nicholas Serota." Serota acknowledges that he doesn't pull his punches. "But friends like that you always need. He is always refreshing to talk to. He constantly questions what artists are doing and his own judgment."

Sylvester's stance is that the most effective way for a society to consume its fine art is not through better access to galleries but through diffusion via the applied arts. "I don't think it matters a fuck whether people go and look at Mondrian or not, because they live among furniture and wallpaper and cars and everything else that has been influenced by an earlier moment in the fine arts. Even if fine art has a tiny audience of rich people, ultimately it affects the whole of society, and that is where it really validates itself socially." Television commercials are a prime example. "They are unbelievably brilliant and exciting and they come out of avant garde film making. You just do not need millions of people going to museums. You already have many more millions living in environments created by the followers of the artists in the museums. That is the role of art in society."

Sylvester was born in 1924 in Hackney. His parents owned an antique shop in Chancery Lane and another shop selling silver. He and his younger sister were mostly brought up by nannies, although during the 1930s the family struggled financially and "the maid's room suddenly became the lodger's". He recalls his father as a rather conventional man, while his mother was a more hedonistic figure who went to the ballet and the theatre and was a ballroom dancer of professional standard. "She liked her fun and would go off to Paris for a few days whenever she felt like it."

The family had originated in Russia and Poland, and when David was a child "like many Jewish families" in London they left the east end for north west London. His father was a prominent Zionist - Sylvester himself now has an increasingly rabbinical appearance and demeanour - although he preferred spending his time with gentiles. Near the end of their lives Sylvester's mother said to him that "your father's tragedy was that he was an anti-Semite".

The art dealer Leslie Waddington compares Sylvester to Isaiah Berlin: "he has one of those wonderful Jewish renaissance minds. It is a rarity in English life." Sylvester says he was "dragged along " by his parents' Judaism but did not engage with it. In his early 20s he was on the verge of converting to Catholicism but pulled back at the last moment. "It still seems a very civilised thing to be," he says. "I admit I have broken two or three noses in my time but I don't really believe in revenge. The idea of turning the other cheek as given in the Sermon on the Mount still seems a notion of extraordinary beauty."

His first school was Vernon House prep in Brondesbury, London. At 13 he went on to University College School in Hampstead whose alumni include four-minute miler Roger Bannister, former Tate director Alan Bowness, and Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail . "Vernon House was where I received all my education," he says. "UCS was just masturbation." At 15 he was asked to leave, before he had taken his school certificate. He spent a year buying and selling gold and silver to jewellers. "I made more money than I ever have since."

Coming from a family that dictated if he wasn't top of the class it was a disgrace, he cultivated his ambitions elsewhere. First he wanted to be a cricketer. When he realised he wouldn't be good enough he turned to jazz. "I wanted to be a composer and arranger. I listened to records in school, starting in 1934. I missed Duke Ellington at the London Palladium but did see Coleman Hawkins at the Phoenix Theatre." His introduction to art came at 17 when he saw a black and white reproduction of Matisse's La Danse. Jazz was put to one side as he painted 10 hours a day for a year before he realised, "I was no good at it".

Then, at 18, he submitted on spec an article on drawing to Tribune. It was published and soon after they asked him to review a French painting on loan to the National Gallery. He began to write regularly for the magazine under the mentorship of the literary editor George Orwell, although the editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too "heavy with Latinisms".

He had now embarked on a writing career, but it was war-time and the services called. He failed a medical for the army and became a teacher instead. "It was absolutely 'Decline and Fall'. I didn't even have the school certificate but they were desperate for masters. I loved teaching. I knew the mistakes made by people who taught me so I tried to be more understanding."

He started writing a book about the psychology of art and after the war nearly reactivated his academic career when he won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge to read moral sciences - philosophy and psychology. He chose the college because Wittgenstein was still teaching there, but before Sylvester even started he knew it was another career that was beyond him, and he didn't take up his place. He did think he could write about art, however. Over the next half century he produced a stream of art journalism and broadcasting, wrote about sport and films, and produced key books on Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, René Magritte and Giacometti. He is the only non-artist to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale but still admits to a lack of confidence about writing.

His friend Grey Gowrie, the former arts minister, says he can spend hours on the phone agonising over a single word or phrase. "If I didn't know better I would think I had a heavy breather," says Gowrie. "There can be what seems like 20 minute silence before he declares, 'it's David'. You assume he is going to announce imminent bankruptcy or news of a death, but it's usually a prelude to a fascinating discussion."

Sylvester has had two abortive sessions of analysis and says he has "wept on the couch at things that have been done to my writing by American editors. They have totally destroyed the rhythm of the prose and changed the meaning." Precise meaning is everything in a critical approach that is based on a scrupulous, obsessive attention to the work at hand. The art historian Frances Spalding has noted his, "dogged examination of his own sensations in front of art. Though he is often acute on the relationship between a work and the period in which it was made, he is less interested in history than physical presence; it is the impact a painting or sculpture makes on us that he tries to catch - how it affects the head, heart and guts."

Sylvester says his "fate was sealed" after watching Arsenal versus West Bromwich Albion in 1935. Arsenal won 4-1 and he went home and wrote a report on it. "That's been my life; seeing aesthetic experiences, other people doing the work, and then completing the experience by writing about it. The way I write is a bit like St Teresa of Avila writing about being fucked by God. I do try to describe the actual experience of looking at the work. "

A piece written about an installation by the American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra at the Tate in 1992 typifies this approach. The work consisted of two large steel blocks and Sylvester describes his experience as he approaches the work. He first thinks that the blocks are the same height and then, as he gets closer, he realises that this is an illusion. But how many other critics would then point out that what he had described only applied to people between five foot six and six feet tall? This is not mere pedantry but part of an intriguing observation about the subjectivity of our response to art. Serra says Sylvester has the ability to ask questions that other people don't.

Sylvester has maintained close links with artists ever since he visited Paris in 1948, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's dealer. Kahnweiler secured him an introduction to Giacometti whose work was then, "the one thing that seemed to matter". Sylvester became close to Giacometti and started writing about him. It is a sign of his assiduousness/prevarication that a book did not actually appear until 1994.

He briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a dealer himself because he so much admired Kahnweiler, but abandoned it when he realised that when a dealer sells something to a customer for a profit, "he genuinely feels he has done the customer a favour. I, on the other hand, felt as if I was somehow taking advantage of the buyer. But I suppose my primary emotion about every thing is guilt." He says he really would have liked to work for a rich person with a small private museum where he could do all the buying and installing. "I love using my eye to choose things and to install things. And I think it would have been rather good for anyone who asked me to do it as well."

In 1950 he met his wife-to-be, Pamela Briddon, a schoolteacher who was then a student at London University. They had three daughters, Catherine, who has two children and who Sylvester describes as, "a very good potter"; Naomi, who works as a publicist for a publisher; and Xanthe, who has one child and is a freelance sub-editor who worked for many years for Time Out. Pamela enjoyed art but was not as keen on contemporary work as her husband. They lived in a flat in Putney where Sylvester was a keen gardener, cultivating roses particularly. The three girls had to share a bedroom and Pamela, increasingly fed up with the lack of space, would take the children off on month-long camping holidays to Spain. When Sylvester bought a larger house in Wandsworth he kept the flat as his office. The marriage gradually came to an end over a period of years, with minimal trauma, say his children, as he spent more and more time at the flat and less in the new house. They eventually divorced in the early 80s.

He also has a daughter from a relationship with the novelist Shena Mackay, conducted while she was married to someone else. Cecily Brown was born in 1969 and now lives in New York where she is an acclaimed artist.

Sylvester says he is "neurotically preoccupied" with his daughters and is proud that he has good relationships with them. He had first met Mackay when she worked in his parents' shop. Cecily didn't know he was her father until she was 22. She used to see a lot of him but when they started going to art galleries together and she called him her best friend he began to feel uncomfortable. "I went to an analyst with Shena to discuss how to tell the family. We didn't want it to be too much of a shock to her sisters or to my daughters. I do most things wrong in my life but with regard to the timing of telling Cecily I think I did quite well."

From the mid 80s until late 90s his partner was the art historian Sarah Whitfield. He is still close to Whitfield and says he was virtually a step-father to her daughters Saskia and Sophie. "But now I'm just a lonely old bachelor," he says. "Sarah says it suits me."

His career as installer of exhibitions came about because of his relationship with Henry Moore, about whom he had written a couple of articles for the Burlington magazine. Moore asked to meet him and Sylvester became his secretary, but says, "it didn't work too well because while there was a pile of letters to be answered we would get involved in some aesthetic discussion". In 1951 the Tate staged a Moore exhibition which he was invited to curate. He had visited Wakefield with Moore, who had shared some ideas as to how sculpture should be shown. "Choosing and installing that exhibition excited me more than anything and it remains to this day the thing I like doing best." Sylvester's reputation as an installer extends beyond painting and sculpture. He has also been acclaimed for exhibiting Islamic carpets. "I don't feel I have a talent for writing, but when installing I feel at home in the way that someone who drives racing cars feels at home behind the wheel."

His approach hasn't changed much over 50 years. He likes to provide lots of space around works and acknowledges a tendency towards symmetry. It was once pointed out to him that at two separate sculpture shows he had, unconsciously, used exactly the same configuration. "This was my natural rhythm. I don't like my prose style but I do like my installations. If you're writing you see your own personality crystallised on paper and it is a horrible sight. But with an installation there is somebody else's great work and you don't look at the installation but at the work itself. But that work is combined with your rhythms."

He made his name as a writer in the 1950s and says one of his prime motivations was to counter the influence of John Berger, who was then setting the art critical agenda in the New Statesman.

"He was a brilliant writer, a compelling personality and a great force. I always envied his writing but I felt he was wrong," says Sylvester. Berger says now that they were "very fierce opponents", but while Sylvester didn't have an artist's eye, "he did have a collector's eye, and was one of the first people to realise what was new about very many artists and to explain it".

Sylvester objected to what he saw as Berger's promotion of a popular but "retrogressive" movement by some painters and sculptors as "back to the figure". In a satirical article Sylvester postulated a "Kitchen Sink School" of painters, noting that "the graveyard of artistic reputations is littered with the ruins of expressionistic painters whose youthful outpourings once took the world by storm." The label was almost instantly co-opted to describe the groundbreaking drama and fiction of the period.

Speaking up for modern art then was hazardous. Sylvester faced editorial pressure but says what sustained him was the force of his own physical experiences with art. "It was as if people were attacking fucking but you knew you enjoyed fucking. It was as simple as that. I got the most tremendous physical excitement from looking at modern art."

His habitual self-criticism and insistence on treating work on its merits as he sees it has meant he has never become boxed into critical positions. It was only in the 1980s that he changed his mind and decided that Picasso was a greater artist than Matisse. Howard Hodgkin once recalls him writing about a sculptor in the early 60s. "David said he was 'probably a very great artist'. A little while later he wrote about his next exhibition saying 'I thought he was the greatest English sculptor under 35 with red hair, but I was wrong'. The man's career never recovered. It might be completely apocryphal but it's still true somehow."

Alongside Sylvester's distaste for what he sees as recent populist developments in art he retains a faith in strong centralised institutions. "The BBC was a very enlightened patron of modern art. My talks with American artists in the 60s are invaluable documents. The interviews with Francis Bacon came from the BBC. We even did an interview with Giacometti in French. The treatment of art on television is now at a much lower intellectual level than it was in the 1950s." He dismisses anti-elitist arguments and complains that delegating power to the Arts Council regions has weakened arts administration. "There is an elite. But it is not rooted in class or wealth or privilege. At any one time there are only five or six people who can really spend public money well, be they right, left or centre."

Sylvester's politics were formed in the aftermath of the second world war. "I was to the left of the Labour Party but that changed after Czechoslovakia in 1948 [when the communists took control]. I didn't even wait for Hungary in '56. I saw that you can't get into bed with the communists without getting clap." He has since voted Labour, Liberal and Conservative, and briefly even had high hopes for the SDP. He says he is probably still a Gaitskellite because he maintains a belief in nationalisation, but Grey Gowrie sees him as a singular sort of floating voter.

"At the last election he said, 'I'm in an absolute rage. They've redrawn the boundaries and I don't want to vote Tory but I suppose I'm going to have to vote for Al Clark.' I said to him that it was a human right not to vote for Al Clark but David said, 'the problem is he is such a fucking good writer.' He might not have done it in the end but he did make me laugh."

Sylvester admits to voting Conservative in the 60s, when he lived in Putney, just to stop a man who would have been arts minister in a Labour government. But his politics and artistic leanings had been exploited some years earlier when he had been invited on a State Department-sponsored trip to America in 1960. In an odd sideshow to the cold war the CIA was covertly sponsoring the cultural magazine Encounter and promoting abstract expressionism as an example of western freedom. Sylvester is untroubled that he might have been used. "Jolly good for them. But no-one ever told me what to write or say."

His introduction to the American art scene coincided with his arrival in Paris. After going to a jazz club to see Charlie Mingus he was introduced to Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston. He later made contact with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He says that, broadly speaking, over the last 40 years his primary interest has been contemporary American art.

He is currently editing his interviews with artists over this period. He has at the same time managed to produce, with Sarah Whitfield, the definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné of Magritte, not an artist you would normally associate him with. It was a monumental project and while he says he does love the work, "the fact remains that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my type".

Someone who very much was his type was Francis Bacon. Sylvester first wrote about Bacon in the late 1940s and they soon became friends. Sylvester was his self-appointed Boswell and undertook a series of landmark interviews in the 50s and 60s. The show currently on in Dublin is the fifth he has staged of Bacon's work. His new book about Bacon is dedicated to the composer Harrison Birtwistle who says that Sylvester's conversations with Bacon are among the most interesting things written on creativity. Birtwistle has dedicated a piece of music to Sylvester and says he is having a, "sort of intellectual love affair with David. Dedicating a piece to him was a way of describing our friendship." Sylvester has asked Birtwistle to read the cricket poem "At Lords" by Francis Thompson at his funeral.

Although he never staged a Bacon show during the artist's lifetime, every show since has taught Sylvester something new about the artist. The biggest revelation has been in Dublin. "I think the pictures look like 18th-century portraits in English country houses. And that is very true to Bacon's background. He had a typical upper-class background and grew up in Irish country houses. In Dublin, in these neo-classical rooms, the pictures look wonderful, they look like their true selves. Seeing them there it as if he has come home."

In his 1996 collection of critical essays, About Modern Art, Sylvester regretted the exclusion of artists born after 1945 on the same basis that he regrets, "becoming useless at tennis". But this is no slight to the BritArt generation. He says there are, "some seriously talented artists. I think Damien Hirst is pretty hot. Rachel Whiteread is a very good artist. Jenny Saville [who is painting him for the National Portrait Gallery] is very good, as is Douglas Gordon."

But whatever their strengths, Sylvester is adamant that encouraging queues of people to see their work is not the way forward. "Of course it is nice to see artists making some money," he explains. "So many of the artists from my generation struggled. But I think there is a price to be paid for it. I'm a bit ashamed of being the subject of a piece like this. It's a symptom of a bad state of affairs. You are only coming to see me because art is so popular but I wish there was less interest. Perhaps the answer is for art to become unfashionable and un-loved again."

• Francis Bacon in Dublin is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, until August 31 Looking Back At Francis Bacon is published by Thames & Hudson at £29.95

 

 

 

Artist Bacon 'had a Swiss account to dodge income tax'  

Hugh Davies 

The Daily Telegraph  Tuesday 4th July 2000

FRANCIS BACON, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th century artist, allegedly kept a Swiss bank account to shelter large chunks of his income from tax. 

The claim surfaced when details of payments made to Bacon by his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, were sent to the English lawyers of his estate, according to an article to be published in the magazine Vanity Fair. The estate is in the throes of a legal battle with the gallery, claiming that it wrongfully exploited him over more than 30 years. 

Bacon died in 1992, aged 82, leaving his £11 million estate to his closest friend, John Edwards, 50, an illiterate east Londoner and his constant companion for the last 18 years of his life. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of Britain's most prestigious galleries with its worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed to have exercised "undue influence" over the artist, who died from a heart attack in Spain. 

It identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, worth as much as £30 million, that allegedly do not feature in the gallery's accounts. Michael Shnayerson, the author, said that the gallery's "partial payments" to the Geneva bank were legal for its Liechtenstein branch. It was also above board for Bacon to establish the account. But failing to declare the payments to the Inland Revenue as taxable income broke the law. 

The magazine suggests that a reason why Bacon never left Marlborough was that he feared no other gallery would agree to the arrangement. An old friend of the painter high in the art world is quoted as saying: "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed." Did he feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it." The art critic Brian Sewell said that Bacon once told him that he would rather be in the hands of Marlborough than in those of "an incompetent honest man. 

"What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he'd got if he went with anyone else." Mr Sewell dismissed the idea that Bacon was naive and being taken for a ride: "Francis was no fool." 

The Vanity Fair article, to be published in Friday's edition, quoted sources which appear to be close to the gallery, as saying that Bacon was hardly naive about what Marlborough was making from his work, or how his finances were handled. According to the magazine, in 1992 Bacon "got himself mixed up" and had all of his money from paintings - "the full £4.2 million" - sent to Switzerland, then, realising he needed to show some income in the UK, he asked for a portion to be sent back. 

He allegedly had his Swiss banker return £1.6 million to Marlborough. The sum was then forwarded to his British account. A Marlborough source claimed that as for the missing paintings, they had all been identified. In most cases Bacon gave them away or sold them himself. Liz Beatty, a representative of the estate, said last night that she would have no immediate comment on the claims. 

 

 

 

 

FRANCIS BACON, TAX DODGER? Artnet News 7/6/2000

Francis Bacon failed to declare millions in earnings that he kept in a Swiss bank account, an article in this month's issue of Vanity Fair alleges. The magazine reports that the British painter deposited at least £4.2 million in payments from the Liechtenstein branch of Marlborough Fine Art into the secret account, but then had the bank return £1.6 million when he realized he would have to show some income in the U.K. The payments made by Marlborough were legal, but Bacon's failure to declare them was not.  The shady doings have come to light due to the ongoing legal struggle in which the artist's estate accuses the gallery of systematically defrauding the late painter and of being unable to account for the whereabouts of 33 works worth as much as £30 million. Marlborough claims that Bacon sold or gave away the missing works himself.

 

 

 

 

Books: A critic saves his Bacon

 

The Independent, June 18, 2000

 

David Sylvester began writing and broadcasting about his friend Francis Bacon as long ago as 1948, so his new book is at the end of a long series and is, among other things, a significant part of the history of radio. There were no fewer than 18 recorded interviews between the two men. Of course, we are now given matter that we have heard and read before. None the less, this is surely the best of the critic's studies of the artist.

It's personal, retrospective and gloomy, combining art criticism with biography. The use of conversation is interesting, though the chats were far too grave, at least when Bacon and Sylvester were on the air. There's a simple reason for the over-pompous tone. Sylvester has always believed that he was privileged to have the friendship of a man who, because he was a genius, uttered profound truths. A difference in age may have affected Sylvester's respectful attitude. The painter was born in 1909, the critic in 1924. So Bacon was the senior figure by a decade and a half and must have been an influence on Sylvester's understanding of the world.

Though not of the same generation, they did have past experience in common. Both had known Hitler's war and grew up in the art world when Picasso was in full production. They had smelt the smoke and seen the lurid light of the bombing, and then learnt of European atrocities. Subsequently, in peacetime London, magazine reproduction showed them new things by the master painter of the century, a European whose terror and tenderness came along with incomparable technical gifts.

As Sylvester says, Picasso was Bacon's first master. He cannot say that, by comparison, Bacon was uninventive, nor that he was a wretched draughtsman who was maladroit with a paintbrush. Picasso gave Bacon a hint or two rather than lessons. Then the Anglo-Irish painter fashioned his terribilita from numerous personal troubles. Bacon's truly telling paintings, belonging to the late 1940s and early 1950s, are in a profound sense post-war works. They are given eloquence, but are also deformed and stunted, by the destruction of life and culture in the years before they were painted.

This helps to explain Bacon's desire, even compulsion, to distance himself from his subjects. From the first, he insisted that his paintings should be glazed. The glass kept a barrier between the work and its spectator. Even though a model was posing in the studio Bacon would prefer to look at a photograph rather than the person he was painting. He was more inspired by reproductions of art than by art itself. Many of his images were taken from magazines, film stills or pornographic photos.

And then he tried to paint like an old master. I have mixed feelings before the paintings because of Bacon's ambition to be grandiloquent. This coincided with agonies of failure and dissatisfaction he could scarcely control. Sylvester has excellent comments about the way that Bacon destroyed successful as well as botched canvases. He has a first-rate visual memory and describes paintings he once saw and which then disappeared, either because Bacon burnt them, or because they were spirited into the criminal world that their creator so liked, or because they were covertly sold (with Sylvester's assistance) to pay gambling debts.

Big debts went with big prices for the pictures. Bacon had elevated views about his art and his position within world painting culture. His slurred egotism has been inherited by Sylvester's commentary. In this book, without much explanation, Bacon is compared with Picasso, Matisse, Titian, Velzquez and Michelangelo as though he naturally belonged in their company. He did not. This fact is apparent to nearly everyone who studies the history of art, or who looks at paintings side by side. It is less easy to say anything definite about Bacon's intellect. When he writes about his friend's painting, Sylvester invokes the old masters. When he describes the painter's knowledge of books there is a similar litany of greatness. Aeschylus is mentioned, often, and Shakespeare, Racine and TS Eliot. I don't query - what would be the point? - whether Bacon studied the work of such writers, or dipped into them, or remembered a quotation. But I believe that Bacon's mind did not rise to their level.

Sylvester avoids the often-told tales of life in Soho. One doubts whether a good book about Soho can ever be written, for bohemians are never intellectuals, though intellectuals sometimes have bohemian characteristics. Nobody from Bacon's Soho world, though they were often nice, or rather loveable people, ever engaged with the life of the mind. Once you stepped over the threshold of Muriel Belcher's Colony Club you could feel your intelligence draining from you by the second. The place smelled of death and its habitues seemed to be at a permanent wake.

Sylvester has been to some drinking clubs in his time but is genuinely an intellectual, with a more interesting mind than Bacon's. Thus his book is frustrating. We are more curious about its author than its subject. The effect of reading Sylvester on Bacon is to make one long for Sylvester's autobiography. We can't have a biography. No one would dare to set about the task. Sylvester likes to keep secrets and lacks small talk. His silences are as intimidating as Harold Pinter's, whose background and press-day tastes he partly shares, and his confidences are as suggestive as a poet's. Which poet? I don't know, but it wouldn't be an English one.

Bacon and Sylvester have been very foreign Londoners. Bacon thought, until his death, that Paris was the centre of world art. The post-war Sylvester could have become a French writer, if Paris had provided the right outlets. But he found a home for his voice in London. Sylvester's expression, to this day, is based on the culture of the early Encounter (whose first, best years in the 1950s coincided with Bacon's rise to fame) and the BBC's Third Programme. A 20-minute talk in a concert interval was a space in which no inte- llectual or artist could justify or explain an opinion. There wasn't time. But the tone was always high and the listener was beguiled by the spea-ker's voice, the vocal suggestion of personality.

The book as a whole has the flavour of the Third Programme, which is to its advantage. Most of the old intellectuals of the Third Programme have now departed to more elevated airwaves. Sylvester's mind is as lively as ever it was, and his writing perhaps more eloquent. I guess that the thought of Bacon's early paintings gives him a vital link to his young manhood.

However, those "early" paintings after 1947 were done when Bacon was in his thirties. He had been robbed of the pleasure of being a young artist by the war, and also by some of his characteristics. Bacon dealt in rough- trade at a time when homosexuality was illegal. He was an alcoholic and a helpless gambler. These traits are evident in his prematurely aged painting, with its slovenly love of danger and risk-taking. Sylvester is good about sexual and personal matters. He hazarded that Bacon's series of screaming Popes were really portraits of Bacon's father. The artist didn't say yes to this conjecture, but neither did he say no.

Bacon disliked his father but was sexually attracted to him. It's certain that some of the agonies of his personal life are represented in Bacon's art. We know some of the often squalid details. In Paris, the petty thief who was Bacon's lover dies while sitting on the lavatory. In London a wicked woman, once beautiful, expertly squeezes a syringe to get more heroin into her veins. Other things are obscure. Little is known of Bacon's gambling addiction. His activities in Africa have never been explained or chronicled.

Since he is a good art historian, Sylvester always returns us to Bacon's paintings. In his book are photographs of paintings that haven't previously been reproduced. He says that "lost" or unknown paintings keep turning up. Indeed they do. A rent boy steals a painting from Bacon when the artist is drunk. He gets scared the first time he tries to sell the picture and gives it to another boy to "look after". Then the second boy's mother finds, say, a rolled- up screaming Pope under her son's bed and gets into a panic, for she twigs what it is. Quite a long book could be written about Bacon and crime. I was surprised to learn that he didn't like Genet. Sylvester should have told Bacon to persevere with this wonderful writer.

Looking Back at Francis Bacon is about crime, both the petty and the metaphysical varieties. On the petty side, Sylvester is anxious about lost paintings. We can't understand Bacon without a full catalogue. On the metaphysical side, Sylvester states that Bacon was an "old-fashioned militant atheist"

What does he mean by "old- fashioned" in this context? Bacon was not a rational humanitarian in the line of Wells or Huxley. I thought that he believed in the existence of God, and that God is a criminal. Does not this view accord with the spirit of his paintings?

 

 

 

  CHRISTIE’S 

 

   20th Century Art

    London, King Street | 28 June 2000

 

   Francis Bacon (1909-1992) Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming)

 

      

           Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) 1952 Francis Bacon

 

 

Estimate £1,400,000 - £1,800,000 ($2,104,200 - $2,705,400)

Price Realized £2,973,750 ($4,469,546)

•  

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming)
oil on canvas
24 x 20in. (61 x 51cm.)
Painted in the autumn of 1952

Special Notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Provenance

Beaux Arts Gallery, London.
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.
Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago (405-B).
Mr & Mrs Edwin E. Hokin, Chicago.
Galerie Krugier, Geneva.

Literature

Architectural Review, CXV, February 1954 (detail illustrated p. 133).
The Sphere, 27 February 1954, p. 299.
R. Alley, Francis Bacon, catalogue raisonné, London 1964, no. 52, p. 65.

Exhibited

London, Beaux Arts Gallery, New Paintings by Francis Bacon, November-December 1953.
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Hepworth, Scott, Bacon, October-November 1954, no. 20 (titled and dated 'Man Screaming 1953'). Chicago, Richard Feigen Gallery, Francis Bacon, 12 Paintings 1947-1958, July-August 1959, no. 5 (dated '1953').
Los Angeles, Art Galleries of the University of California at Los Angeles, Francis Bacon - Hyman Bloom, October-December 1960, no. 2.

Lot Notes

"On great occasions human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth, anger makes one clench one's teeth, terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth the organ of tearing cries." (Georges Bataille, reproduced in Documents, no. 5, Paris 1930, pp. 299-300).

Bacon often claimed that his paintings, which to many seemed macabre distortions of reality, were purely the result of his "trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can". Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) clearly illustrates that Bacon was evidently a more sensitive and responsive to the raw end of his 'nervous system' than most. In a remarkable piece of understatement, Bacon once explained that Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) was part of a series, "done of somebody who was always in a state of unease," and that, "in attempting to trap this image, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the paintings."(Francis Bacon, reproduced in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 82).

"I've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can,' Bacon told David Sylvester, "and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly people feel that that is horrific. Because, if you say something very directly to somebody, they're sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth." (ibid. p. 82).

The present work is one of the most powerful examples from an important series of portrait heads that Bacon painted in the early 1950s. A dramatic and intense depiction of a tormented and almost bestial man screaming into the face of the viewer, it is a remarkable painting that conjures a unique vision of a man at his most primal and, Bacon would probably have argued, at his most real.

With its paint smeared, scrawled, smudged and pasted into a striking and surprising unity, this work is also a haunting expression of the 'heart of darkness' that lay at the centre of Bacon's own psyche. For as well as being an evocative and powerful portrait, Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) also coordinates many of the artist's key obsessions into one concentrated image.

Chief among these obsessions is the image of an almost autonomous screaming mouth, which here forms an eerie kind of vortex at the centre of the painting. For Bacon, the screaming mouth was an image of peculiar and disturbingly sensual beauty. "I've always been very moved by the movements of the mouth," he recalled. "People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth, and perhaps I have lost that obsession now, but it was very strong at one time. I like, you may say, the glitter and the 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." (ibid. pp. 48-50).

As a young man he had been mesmerized by a book on diseases of the mouth in which there were a number of detailed hand-coloured illustrations. These obsessed him for many years. Similarly, he also became fixated on the mouth of the screaming nurse shot through the face in Sergei Eisenstein's epic film Battleship Potemkin. This particular image was, for Bacon, the ultimate expression of the human scream and one that in the early 1950s, along with Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, he directly sought to emulate by using as source for his own work.

Begun in 1951, his famous series of screaming Popes were an attempt at combining these two obsessions into one united and 'true' expression of humanity. In Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming), the figure of a Pope has been transplanted by that of a suited businessman. For Bacon, the two figures were interchangeable; each an impressive symbol of authority, power and worldly distinction who in Bacon's hands was brutally reduced to a raw and base animality. At the heart of all these works is the scream, which in the present work is evoked so powerfully that it seems almost audible. With the shimmering grey veil of the painting's curtain-like background acting as a visual echo, the piercing resonance of this man's silent scream seems to vibrate everything around it, save the cold, impersonal and solid metal armature of his papal-like throne.

The radiating flicker of this grey vibrating enclosure creates a sense of transience and motion reminiscent of ghosting effects found in photographs and X-rays - both of which were another obsession and important source in Bacon's art. Photography, had a shadow-like quality that for Bacon, often revealed the essence of an image - a trace of the subject's 'aliveness' that struck at the true reality of his sitter far more closely than any outward feature. "I think it is (photography's) slight remove from fact which returns me onto the fact more violently", Bacon once observed.

Working indirectly from photographs of his subjects, rather than from directly within their presence was normal practice for Bacon. His aim in portraiture was to capture the enigma of the raw and violent essence that he saw resonating at the heart of his subjects. "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail," he told David Sylvester, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime...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 screens." (op. cit, p. 82).

The ambiguous curtain-like enclosure which seems to flicker and resonate from the scream of the tormented man in Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) is like a literal realisation of the screens that Bacon mentions "clearing away". Yet in this work, as in many of his portraits of screaming Popes, these transparent screens which may originate with Titian's Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto seem to enclose and imprison the figure at the very same time that they reveal him in his true state of being. Like hospital curtains from some Orwellian isolation chamber they are the sterile and impersonal apparatus of a terrifying mental landscape of fear and anguish.

Using thick strokes of black paint that pass both in front of and behind the figure whose features also seem blurred by the shimmering motion of this veil-like curtain, Bacon stresses the spatial ambiguity of the scene and adds to the psychological power of the painting. For, while the tormented animation and quivering flesh of the man are deliberately contrasted with the inanimate stillness and cold impersonal emptiness of his surroundings, as a whole, the surface of the painting seems to have been activated by the scream into a corrugated wave that threatens to penetrate even the viewer's space.

Huddled and shaken on his golden throne, seemingly trapped within the painting and sealed off from all possibility of communication, this authoritarian figure crouches in a dark alienatory space emitting a terrifyingly primal scream. In one of his most unforgettable images Bacon captures a full range of human emotions that combine a sense of anger, fear, violence, and erotic intensity into a single haunting portrayal of a human scream which through the magic of Bacon's artistry seems to have actually burned itself onto the canvas to reveal the tormented essence of one human life.

 

 

 

 

     

 

    Study for Portrait (Man Screaming): Unseen for 40 years

A portrait by Francis Bacon, which was lost to the public for 40 years, is expected to fetch £1.8m at auction next month.

The picture, entitled Study for Portrait (Man Screaming), has not been seen in public since it vanished into a private collection in 1962.

The remarkable work portrays a tormented, almost bestial man screaming into the face of the viewer

Brett Gorvy Christie's spokesman

It was painted as part of Bacon's celebrated series of portrait heads 10 years earlier.

"This is a tremendously exciting work last seen by the public some 40 years ago," said Christie's spokesman Brett Gorvy, whose 20th Century Art team tracked down the painting.

"The remarkable work portrays a tormented, almost bestial man screaming into the face of the viewer."

 

Previous sales

Until recently, the privately-owned work was known to collectors only in the form of a black and white photograph published in the artist's catalogue raisonne, which is available in high street shops.

It is expected to go under the hammer at Christie's in London on 28 June, nearly a year after the auction house sold three self-portraits by the artist for £1,871,500.

 

Bacon: Mouth disease obsession

Bacon was one of the 20th century's most commercially successful artists, earning about £14m from his paintings before he died in 1992.

He dealt with themes of death and decay and his style has often been called existentialist.

The portrait study was painted at the height of Bacon's famous Pope series of works, which alternated between presenting images of the Roman Catholic pontiff and an anonymous politician/business figure.

It embodies many of Bacon's key obsessions in the image of a screaming mouth at its centre.

This powerful concept is known to have affected the artist earlier in his life when he became transfixed by a book about diseases in the mouth.

 

 

 

Life works

The Sunday Times  May 28  2000

Critic ANTHONY CRONIN looks back on the art and attitudes to life and death of his friend Francis Bacon before a keynote exhibition in Dublin

 

    The Irishness of other people is always a subject of great interest to the Irish. It is not always of equivalent interest to the people themselves.

    Francis Bacon displayed little interest in whatever degree of Irishness he may have had, and he was certainly not overly conscious of it. Indeed, so oblivious was he of such a strain in himself that he might even use a phrase such as "you Irish" when something one said or did amused him.

    When, after he died, I read an obituary in which Paul Johnson claimed his painting reflected "an Irish fear of death", I remembered such an occasion. He had unexpectedly arrived at my flat in Battersea one afternoon with the Indian poet Dom Moraes. Possibly because Dom had just been reporting on the Chinese invasion of Tibet and had said he had seen people die, the conversation turned to death in general.

    Bacon chose to regard what he saw as my reluctance to let go of some sort of belief in the afterlife as particularly Irish, and he was greatly amused by it. His own attitude, as expressed over the gin at the kitchen table that far-off afternoon, was succinct and simple: "When you're dead, you're dead."

    Which does not mean Johnson was not, in some sense, right, though it is worth remarking that Bacon is one of those painters who, rightly or wrongly, tempt critics into seeing their work as always being "about" something large and important, whether that be "the human condition", loneliness, sex, existentialism, death or despair.

    Most of his titles for paintings are quite exact and humble. I distinctly remember the paintings now famous as "the Popes" or "the Cardinals" being originally called simply "Six Studies after Velazquez". And this is what they are, variations on the theme of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, a painting that would lend itself to just as much discourse about the human condition, or the weakness and terror of the rich and powerful, as Bacon's works do - though it does not perhaps reveal the terror or expose the weakness of the supposedly great as much as Titian's portrait of Pope Paul III with his nephews, or even Raphael's unshaven Leo X with cardinals de' Medici and de' Rossi.

    But the modernist Bacon was, incidentally, the last to deny the greatness of certain old masters, though he always spoke of them in painterly terms. Neither was he one of those painters who affect to believe that their art cannot be talked about and that other people (and writers particularly) cannot understand it.

    He came into the French pub in Dean Street one forenoon, fresh from a morning's work and, as usual, entirely free of hangover, and told me he had just that morning "discovered the secret" of painting. A cautious Irishman, ready at all stages for temporising smalltalk, I was astonished at the directness and sincerity with which this information was imparted, but at this distance of time I cannot, alas, say in so many words what the secret was, only that it had something to do with Frans Hals and his way of painting lace.

    Whether his painting was unconsciously or on some other level influenced by anything that may be called "an Irish fear of death", he, of course, made no secret of the fact that he was born in Ireland (at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, where there is a commemorative plaque) and that, apart from an interval in London during the first world war when his father worked for the War Office, he was brought up here, not leaving until he was about 16.

    Perhaps the most revealing story I remember him telling about his early childhood in Ireland concerned a maid or nanny - I had the impression of a sort of Irish mother's help - who was left in charge of him for long periods when his parents were absent from the house. She had a soldier boyfriend who came visiting at these times and, of course, the couple wanted to be alone.

    But Francis was a jealous and endlessly demanding little boy who would constantly interrupt their lovemaking on one pretext or another. As a result, she took to locking him in a cupboard at the top of the stairs when her boyfriend arrived. Confined in the darkness of this cupboard, Francis would scream - perhaps for several hours at a time - but, as he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, in vain.

    He claimed he owed a great deal to that cupboard, and when I quoted WH Auden's recipe for the upbringing of poets - "As much neurosis as the child can bear" - he was intrigued and delighted. It might be over-solemn and stretching interpretation a bit to derive particular works from these experiences, but his paintings are frequently about people confined, trapped one could say, in some strange box or limited space, some of them evidently screaming.

    Although there is a temptation to see these and other Bacon works as narrative, to invest them with a circumstance, a story and even a moral, what makes them unforgettable are the pictorial terms in which the predicaments of his people are conveyed. Our response is governed by the curved brushstrokes that create those curious concavities in the faces of his subjects and by the inexplicable effect of the almost dry brush dragging paint across an unsized canvas.

    In the years in which I had some acquaintance with him, the late 1950s and early 1960s, he gave the impression that he had come to terms with life and was determined to enjoy it. Despite his determination and ability to enjoy himself, however, there is no doubt that his work takes a bleak and, to use the fashionable phrase, "disturbing" view of the human condition.

    More than almost any other significant artist of the 20th century, he lived in his time, and his time was post-war. His work of those years is contemporary with Samuel Beckett's, with the atom bomb and with the knowledge of the holocaust, a time when illusions were stripped away and reality was confronted as perhaps never before (or since?).

    Francis told the American photographer Peter Beard: "I haven't any morals to preach. I just work as closely to my nerves as I can." A gambler and, in his youth, a man frequently dependent on rich homosexuals, he had lived on his wits and, doubtless, his nerves for long periods. He continued to do this as a painter, pushing each work as far as it would go, and destroying it if it did not succeed.

    In a way I find entirely admirable, he was a gambler through and through, always prepared to cut his losses. He had a gambler's readiness for the worst, and, it is hardly necessary to say, a gambler's zest for it too.

 

 

 

My brushes with Bacon

Art critic David Sylvester was friends with Francis Bacon for 40 years. During that time, he recorded many of their conversations. Here, he introduces a selection of the artist's previously unpublished thoughts - about sex, about God, and about cricket...

The Observer,  Sunday May 21, 2000

I 'm not sure whether I was Francis Bacon's concierge or his butler, but intrusive strangers certainly believed that I had the entrée to his domain. I used to get calls from famous photographers saying that they were great fans of my writing and could they take my picture. I knew what was coming if I didn't speedily decline. 'Would it by any chance be possible to photograph you in Francis Bacon's studio and then perhaps do the two of you together if he happens to be there at the time?' The comedy of being importuned in this way was a nice bonus for having done a book called Interviews with Francis Bacon, which had been widely translated.

My relationship with Bacon began in 1942, when I was 17 and had just become interested in painting. One of the books I absorbed was Herbert Read's Art Now , a veritable bible first published in 1933. It reproduced a Crucifixion, painted that year by a young artist with the name of the great Elizabethan writer, and this painting therefore stayed in my mind, although the artist had disappeared from view. But at the end of the war, new works by him started to appear in galleries. They were sensationally disturbing and widely considered worthy of the Chamber of Horrors.

It was in 1949 that I realised he was not only an arresting image-maker but very much a painter, and I started saying so in print. I also met him by chance and was soon seeing a good deal of him. In 1951, I was asked to give a talk about his art for the BBC's Third Programme , my first substantial radio talk. I described him as the most important living painter, by which I didn't mean he was the greatest, but the most relevant to the age. I was told afterwards that Harman Grisewood, head of the Third Programme , swore that it would be a long time before I did another talk for them.

Bacon and I became quite close friends. We drank and dined together, went dog racing together and shared off-course bets on horses. I also sat for him a few times, helped him to write a short piece in praise of an older artist, Matthew Smith, and acted as his agent in selling works to dealers behind his accredited dealer's back when he urgently needed cash. I idolised him as a man - this never stopped - and until 1956, I loved his work unreservedly. But I thought it then took a wrong turn and I became rather alienated from his current production. I was also put off by the way he jeered at the work of abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock: my own pantheon had plenty of room for them both.

So between 1957 and 1962 I stopped writing about him; nor did we see much of each other. In 1962 he had a retrospective at the Tate, and as art critic of the New Statesman , I had to review it at length. I wrote with admiration but reservations and dismissed the work of the past few years, but concluded that he had returned to form in his latest piece, a big Crucifixion triptych.

Shortly after, the BBC radio Talks producer, Leonie Cohn, who had commissioned that 1951 talk and had lately got me to do interviews with several American Abstract Expressionists and also with Stanley Kubrick, asked me to interview Bacon. I said I wasn't sure whether Bacon would agree, as he didn't readily give interviews and may not have liked my review of his show. But he did agree, and the result was brilliant, producing passages endlessly quoted since, such as: 'What is fascinating now is that it's going to be much more difficult for the artist, because he must deepen the game to be any good at all.'

Four years later I was asked by Michael Gill to interview Bacon in a BBC TV film he was making. This time we were quite aggressive at moments. I asked tougher questions than last time and he accused me of liking abstract art because I was a slave to fashion. But we were now seeing a lot of each other again and we were both saying that it would be interesting to do more interviews, especially if we could talk as we did among friends, without having to think of a lay audience. So we did some private recordings at my flat and then we decided to publish a book of interviews. This happened in 1975, and Graham Greene wrote that it was 'an exciting document which can rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin'.

We went on recording interviews, some for ourselves, some for TV, one for an audio company. We published an enlarged edition of the book in 1980 and a further enlarged one in 1987. Meanwhile, they got translated into about 10 languages; I don't know whether any of the translators managed to create an equivalent for the amazing vividness and rhythmic power of Bacon's talk. The reason we went on doing interviews for about 25 years was that Bacon loved getting involved in theoretical talk about art. This is a rare thing in English artists, who tend to poke fun at a custom so French. And it's a key aspect of Bacon's personality which is not sufficiently emphasised in most accounts of the man.

His love of talking about art made the recordings easy. The hard part was the editing. Interviews with artists, even when they have Bacon's turn of phrase, tend to sprawl and repeat themselves; I wanted the printed version to be economical in exposition and coherent in structure. I therefore did most of the editing in collaboration with Shena Mackay, whose work as a fiction writer suggested that she was the ideal person to help to achieve that.

Now, if one is aiming for structural coherence, a lot of the best things said are not going to fit in anywhere; so they get left, so to speak, on the cutting-room floor. I was always aware how much was being lost in this way and had it in mind to return to the transcripts, retrieve some of the best rejected bits and publish them torn from their context as fragments of talk. The ones that follow are The Observer 's selection from my selection.

Bacon on Bacon

Francis Bacon I love watching the idiocy of other people, and of myself. And they can watch my idiocy. David Sylvester People you know and people you don't know, passing people? FB Yes. I love passing people. I love going to towns and places where I know nobody at all but very quickly talk to them. It's so easy to talk to them. DS You can't really imagine living outside of town, can you? FB I can't imagine lying on the seashore, for instance, for hours, like people can do, with the dumb satisfaction that the sun is shining on them. That I couldn't do at all. DS And what about, say, moving to the country to work? FB That would be impossible for me. DS Why's that? FB Because I like crowds. I mean, I'd rather be in a station than in the country. [1975]

DS Do you at all enjoy the kind of star quality which you have always had when moving among people? FB That's a thing that you are not conscious of yourself at all. I have no idea of what impression I make on other people. DS You have not been conscious that, when you come into a bar, you immediately become the centre of attention? That is something I have seen happen ever since I have known you, which means before you became famous as a painter, so it wasn't influenced by that. FB Perhaps I was drunk and garrulous, had a lot to say. I think it can only be for that reason. I certainly am not conscious of those things. This is not false modesty; I am just not conscious of it. [1984]

DS Did you go to the theatre when you were younger? FB I drifted from bar to bar. DS And when did you start gambling seriously? FB Well, I have always been brought up with it, because when we were very young, we used to be sent to the local post office to put on bets. So, as I was brought up in that sort of atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that that influenced me. I don't know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case. [1984]

DS It's often said about you by hostile critics that your work reflects a feeling of disgust about human beings and of self-disgust. FB Well, I may have, I may very often be very discontented and loathe myself but I'm not trying to bring that out. In any way whatsoever. Nor have I a disgust with life. Life is all we have. I mean, here we are for a moment. [1984]

Bacon on religion

FB Of course one knows how very potent some of the images of Christianity have been and how they must have played very deeply on one's sensibility. And after all, one believes in the ethics of Christianity, or a great number of them, without actually believing in the practice of the Church. DS You believe in the ethics of Christianity? FB Well, I think that they are a carry-over of Greek ethics really, and I think that so far a better code of ethics for the Western world hasn't yet been found, though of course the religious side of it is something I can't accept. DS But then at the heart of Christianity is the idea of salvation and of a life after this life in which one gets punishment or reward for what one has done here. FB I think you can accept the ethics without believing that the good you do will be rewarded or the evil you do will be punished. [1966]

Bacon on work

FB The only thing that really keeps me going on is that I want to work - but work, I may say, for no reason. I just work; it still excites me to work. You see, unless you have religious feelings or something of that kind, how can you not think that life is totally futile - and becomes more so with age, because it hasn't got the pleasures of youth? Probably the only thing, although I know it has no meaning, is that I like working. I like the possibilities of invention and the possibilities of something happening. Not because I think they've got any value, but because they excite me. [1979]

FB I know that teaching is one of the methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a period when there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your own attitude. The only thing that I can understand for art schools would be for them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are striving to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems with... But many people have to teach because they can't make the money out of their work. In my own case, even when I could earn no money, I never taught. Except that once a friend went to the West Indies and he asked me to take his job for three months at the Royal College of Art, which I did. It's true to say that I did it very badly. I didn't often go there; there was nothing I could teach them whatsoever. DS And what effect did that have upon your own work? Did you feel it was just using energy which you needed for your own work, or...? FB Not especially, because it was only for three months. Otherwise I would never have done it. I'd rather go out and just do a job working. After all, I can cook, I can clean floors, I can earn my money that way. It would use physical energy, which would be so much more interesting than mental energy. Because I've got plenty of mental energy, because I never stop thinking, myself. After all, I think about painting. Not that I think thinking finally helps, and yet it does. [1975]

Bacon on books

DS What are you mostly reading nowadays? FB Well, you know, I read generally the same thing over and over again. I very often read translations of Aeschylus; I read Proust; I read anything that comes to my hand. Or any rubbish as well. DS What rubbish do you read? FB Well, most things are rubbish. So I can't tell you exactly what rubbish. There are piles of rubbish and very little stuff that is any good. DS Do you read Shakespeare a lot? FB I read a certain amount, yes. I'll tell you what I really read: things which bring up images for me. And I find that this happens very much with the translations of Aeschylus, and with Eliot. For some reason I read them, and when I read them another time, a different image comes up. I mean, I don't say that these images are really to do with the poems of Eliot or even with the plays of Shakespeare, but they open up the valves of sensation for me and so images drop in like that from reading those things. It could happen just as easily from reading any of the trash. So it doesn't really make much difference. Except that I'm less bored by those than I am by the trash. DS In the same way that you can be influenced by a news photograph or you can be influenced by Velazquez? FB Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [1984]

Bacon on Michelangelo

FB Do you think Michelangelo was an erotic artist or not? DS Very. But almost embarrassingly. I find the Slaves almost embarrassing in the longing they conveyed for these boys. FB He was, after the Greeks, the great male voluptuary, wasn't he? He made the male body really voluptuous. DS But with the Greeks, you feel that the artist has had these boys, and with Michelangelo, that he'd just longed for them. And that's one reason why I find there's a morbid quality in Michelangelo which doesn't stop him from being the greatest artist of our civilisation. FB I think that Michelangelo, from what one knows about all of his history, had a deeply morbid side to him. But it's more voluptuous than the Greeks. Because I think in those Slaves the longing is more poignant than anything you find in Greek art. [1973]

Bacon on cricket

DS As to working from documentary photographs, one interesting case of this was your recent use of a photograph of David Gower batting: you translated the pads to the legs of a headless male nude. FB Well, I have often seen cricket, and cricket is such an important game in this country, I am very conscious of it. When I did this image I suddenly said: 'Well, I don't know why, but I think that it's going to strengthen it very much and make it look very much more real if it has cricket pads on it.' I can't tell you why. DS The painting is in Paris, and some French people I know, while very much admiring it, have been extremely puzzled by what the figure had on its legs. Some of them thought they might be bits of Etruscan armour. FB Don't the French have games in which they use pads? They're deformed cricket pads, in any case. DS I take it that your attitude to bringing in the cricket pads was rather like the attitude you took about 20 years ago when you brought that armband with a swastika into a Crucifixion triptych. When I asked you whether the presence of the swastika had a meaning for you and also whether you were concerned that people might take it to have a meaning, you said the swastika was there simply because the armband had been in the photograph you'd used and you'd put it in without thinking about how it might be interpreted. Did you have the same attitude to bringing in the cricket pads? FB It wasn't quite the same. You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all these people, and they all had armbands on with the swastikas on them, and I wanted that in this image: it was stupid to put in the swastika, but there it is. I didn't think about it, I didn't think that people would interpret it all the different ways they have. But with the cricket pads, I didn't put them in because I am particularly interested in cricket; I did so because it made the image more real. [1982]

 

 

 

Sir Robert Sainsbury Obituary 

The Daily Telegraph   Saturday 8 April 2000

 

Sir Robert Sainsbury, Supporter of modern art, (who helped his brother take the family firm of grocers into the supermarket era) is dead

 

SIR ROBERT SAINSBURY, who has died aged 93, was joint president of the Sainsbury grocery chain, and a notable patron of modern art. 

"Mr RJ," as he was known within the firm, worked for 30 years in a close and complementary partnership with his elder brother, Alan, who became Lord Sainsbury in 1962. Alan, the more outgoing and combative of the two, took charge of trading and became a champion of consumer rights, while Robert, with his meticulous eye for detail, was responsible for all aspects of administration, and developed the company's tradition of generous treatment of staff. 

Together the brothers presided over an era of modernisation and growth which made Sainsbury's Britain's leading grocery chain and the family Britain's richest business dynasty. Robert Sainsbury began collecting art in his twenties. He bought works by Jacob Epstein, and in 1933, after meeting Henry Moore at a party, acquired a Mother and Child in Hornton stone from him for £160 - then half a year's income for the sculptor. 

In 1938, Sainsbury was asked by J B Manson, the anti-modernist director of the Tate, whether the gallery might borrow from him a study of Eve by the French sculptor Charles Despiau. "Yes," Sainsbury replied, "providing you also show the Mother and Child of my friend Henry Moore." "Over my dead body," came Manson's reply. 

Later, Sainsbury supported Francis Bacon, guaranteeing his bank account for several years before the artist found a ready market for his work. He was also one of the earliest British patrons of Alberto Giacometti (the first two Giacometti drawings he bought cost £5 each), and a connoisseur of primitive art. 

For many years Sainsbury and his wife limited themselves to an annual budget of £1,000 for art purchases, a sum which proved sufficient to fund an outstanding collection. In 1935, for example, they purchased a sketch by Picasso for £85; in 1937 a Degas for £1,000; and in 1955 Robert was able to commission Francis Bacon to paint his portrait for £450. "Thirteen Bacons cost us about £8,000," he reckoned. 

Nevertheless, the Sainsburys insisted, they never bought art as an investment. For himself, Sir Robert applied a simple test: "I look at a work, and my stomach tells me I want to have it. Nothing else." For other people, he counselled: "Don't buy if you can't afford to buy. And don't take any notice of what other people tell you." 

The Sainsburys also sternly denied any suggestion that they were interested in art as a status symbol. In Britain, Lady Sainsbury pointed out in 1997, "you'd do much better to buy half a horse. Or a football team". 

In 1973, Robert Sainsbury gave nearly the whole of his collection - 600 works of art - to the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. Robert Sainsbury and his son David then drove around England searching for the right architect to build a gallery to house the gift. Norman Foster's Olsen Line terminal in London's docklands finally caught Robert's eye, and Foster was commissioned to design the building, now the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts. 

Robert James Sainsbury was born on October 24 1906. He was the second son of John Benjamin Sainsbury by his wife Mabel, née Van den Bergh, whose family, of Dutch Jewish origins, had made a fortune from the manufacture of margarine. 

John Benjamin (known as "Mr John") was in turn the eldest son of John James and Mary Ann Sainsbury, whose wedding day, April 20 1869, is regarded by the firm as its official foundation date - though their first shop, selling butter, eggs and milk at 173 Drury Lane, London, had opened for business some months earlier. 

"Mr John," under whose leadership the business grew into a chain of 250 shops, was chairman of Sainsbury's from his father's death in 1928 until his own in 1956. Robert James Sainsbury was educated at Haileybury and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Having trained as an accountant before entering the family business in 1930, he specialised in finance, personnel and administration. 

One of his first decisions was to recommend that the firm could no longer afford to offer free delivery for orders over 15 shillings. He also served as company secretary, joining the board in 1934. Four years later his father yielded executive power after suffering a minor heart attack, and Robert and his brother found themselves thrown in at the deep end as joint general managers. Robert and Alan inherited from their father a strong concern for the welfare of their employees. In December 1942, they publicly expressed their support for the Beveridge Report, which outlined plans for the post-war welfare state. 

Their business overcame the difficulties of the war years - which included food shortages, drastically reduced sales and bombed-out stores - and afterwards began to flourish with the adoption of the American concept of self-service shopping, which Sainsbury's first introduced at their Croydon branch in 1950. By 1957, supermarkets had revolutionised the grocery trade, and the firm's remaining traditional outlets, with their characteristic tiled walls and marble counters, seemed very old-fashioned. The brothers took the painful decision to close 173 Drury Line. 

"We decided that it was not for us to indulge in the primitive custom of ancestor worship," Robert said, "and that we could best show our respect for our forebears by trying to take care of the future." Although deputy chairman of the company from 1956, Robert retained the title of joint general manager until he and Alan were able to start delegating day-to-day responsibility to a fourth generation. This was led by Alan's oldest son John ("Mr JD"), now Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, who was joined in 1963 by Robert's only son, David, now Lord Sainsbury of Turville and a minister at the Department of Trade and Industry. In 1967, Robert succeeded Alan as chairman, and two years later he retired, becoming honorary joint president with his brother. The bulk of Robert's shareholding was eventually passed to David, who was chairman of the family firm from 1992 until 1998. 

Robert Sainsbury was chairman of the trustees of the Tate Gallery, a member of the management committee of the Courtauld Institute and a member of the Art Panel of the Arts Council. He was also a governor of St Thomas's hospital. 

He was knighted for services to the arts in 1967. 

He married, in 1937, his second cousin Lisa Ingeborg, née Van den Bergh. Besides their son David, they had three daughters, one of whom predeceased him.