Francis Bacon in London 1979 by Dmitri Kasterine
Heaven and hell
Andrew Lambirth, The Spectator, December 2, 2006
Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, until 10 December Stanley Spencer: Painting Paradise Reading Museum, Town Hall, Blagrave Street, Reading, until 22 April 2007 Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Francis Bacon (1909-92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements may be said to embody diametric opposites - the heaven on earth of Spencer's beloved Cookham, and the 'hell is others' Grand Guignol of Bacon.
Distinguished by a taste for physical deformity and duress, Bacon's art is obsessed with brute facts. Spencer - who memorably wrote in his notebooks: 'If I am called upon to worship. . . then I will begin with the lavatory seat' - had an equally earthy approach to the human animal, but saw him as capable of redemption. An emphatically religious man - if rather broad in his personal interpretation of Christianity - Spencer sought 'redemption from ugliness, meaninglessness' through his art. If Bacon greeted the world with 'exhilarated despair', Spencer was perhaps more optimistic. Certainly his art is. In their different ways both artists revitalised the realist tradition and offered fresh ways of seeing the world.
The writer and curator Michael Peppiatt, doyen of Bacon studies, is responsible for the latest focus on the master of the macabre, and has settled upon the 1950s as quintessential to Bacon's art: 'the most fertile single decade of his career' in which he 'located his great themes'. Peppiatt the biographer (author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 1996) describes it as 'the period when he was at his wildest and most tormented', when the artist was suffering 'the confusion of extreme pleasure and extreme pain'. Art, as it has so often done before, offered catharsis. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble, but it can give rise to powerful artistic expression, and in this case it undoubtedly did. The Norwich exhibition demonstrates that.
It becomes more and more difficult to organise a top-quality Bacon exhibition as demand for his work around the world increases. (This display, for instance, is in direct competition with a general Bacon retrospective at Dusseldorf. ) Peppiatt must be congratulated for achieving a remarkable selection which effectively balances the necessary well-known images with unfamiliar paintings. Bacon himself established the canonical picture selection with his overseeing of the 1985 Tate retrospective. Intriguingly, Peppiatt now offers us alternatives. Thus in the first room of this elegant installation are such unusual works as Figure with Monkey and Elephant Fording a River, both from private collections, animal paintings with a difference which reinforce better-known images such as Man with Dog, borrowed from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Here, too, is the memorably snout-faced Homage to van Gogh from Sweden. Man and beast are discovered bellowing in the same stall.
In the second room is Study for a Portrait III (after Life Mask of William Blake) and the Spanish-looking Head III, both private loans, and Head in Grey, from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In these pictures we see the compelling mixture of assurance and doubt which characterises Bacon's work of this period, the hesitation and the unfettered imaginative power - both of which stem from being self-taught. Are these figures victims of unspeakable horror? Their distortions are often taken to imply this.
Certainly Bacon was intent on confronting the viewer of his paintings with extremes of emotion, but so battle-scarred and weary with atrocity are we in the early 21st century that some insulation against the electricity of his shock tactics is inevitable.
Instead, I found myself concentrating on the beauties of the paintwork, on the gleaming yellow-gold swerve in Screaming Man of 1952 in the third room, rather than on the fact that he was screaming; or on the sheer oddness of the railway image in End of the Line (1953).
End of the Line 1953 Francis Bacon
As would be expected, the 13 Bacon paintings from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, gifted to the University of East Anglia in the 1970s, form the nucleus of this exhibition. The Sainsburys met Bacon in 1955, and became friends, patrons and stalwart supporters.
Bacon began eight portraits of Lisa Sainsbury, of which five were destroyed in bouts of the artist's typically savage selfcriticism - an excellent habit he later relaxed. The Sainsburys did manage to salvage one canvas from the razor: Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII).
Bacon started slashing it up in front of them, but they begged to be allowed to take it home, and it was duly restored.
Most of the Sainsbury pictures are in the lower gallery downstairs, along with a 1984 triptych which looks very out of place. This relatively small exhibition, which will travel to Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin (29 January to 15 April 2007), and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (5 May to 30 July 2007), has many wonderful things in it, not least the Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa (1955), which contains an unexpected echo of Stanley Spencer's early self-portrait of 1914 in the Tate.
The Bacon industry is in full swing. On the heels of his successful 2005 study of the master, Martin Harrison has undertaken the immense task of rationalising the Bacon oeuvre into a catalogue raisonné.
Meanwhile to accompany UEA's excellent show Yale has published a substantial and rather beautiful volume Francis Bacon in the 1950s by Michael Peppiatt, which doubles as a catalogue, appearing simultaneously in hardback and paperback. (Priced £29.99 and £25 respectively. ) By comparison, Spencer has not been the object of so much attention, since the last major exhibition (at the Tate in 2001) and the publication of his letters and writings. Spencer's work does not command the same sort of financial clout as Bacon's, nor the aura of chic. It has become fashionable to wallow in the steely despairing ambience of screaming popes and self-destructive businessmen. Bacon still titillates the jaded palates of the sensation-surfeited in a way that the fundamentally innocent vision of Spencer cannot hope to achieve.
Of course, this is a tribute to the particular qualities of both artists, and makes the work of both essential viewing.
Junk shock
After Francis Bacon died, hundreds of unfinished works were found littering a studio that resembled a dump. Now the detritus is revealing the darkest secrets of this intensely private artist.
Report by Deirdre Fernand
The Sunday Times, November 13, 2005
The few friends lucky enough to be invited home would climb a steep, narrow staircase with the help of a rope banister. At the top they would feel despair. It was an unbelievable mess. There were discarded baked-bean tins and empty bottles of Krug, paint rollers, Dulux colour cards, brushes in pots, cardboard boxes, passport photos, slashed paintings, hundreds of scribbled-on photographs, books and bits of cloth. He confided weakly to his closest friend, John Edwards: 'I've been meaning to tidy up in here for a long time... but never seem to get round to it.' He would live and work there profitably for over three decades without ever clearing up.
In the event the job was done for him - but in a way he could never have foreseen. At a cost of £1.5m, curators and archeologists moved the studio in its entirety to Ireland, the land of his birth. Bacon's fascinating chaos is now preserved for ever. Painstakingly, they dismantled the room and put it together again in Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery. The whereabouts of every newspaper cutting, photo, brush, daub and splodge was noted and re-created. Never has such spontaneity been so deliberately reproduced. One table in his studio had so many items piled on it that it took eight weeks to deconstruct and rebuild it in Dublin. Even the dirt from the studio was carefully swept up, labelled 'Bacon dust' and sent across the Irish Sea. Such was the care involved, the Hugh Lane team could surely have put Humpty Dumpty together again.
The gallery opened to the public four years ago and quickly became a shrine. The French, who revere Bacon as a master, come en masse, as do the Italians and the Spanish. The exhibit has already had over 100,000 visitors. Now, in a new book by Margarita Cappock, head of collections at Hugh Lane, the contents of the studio are finally revealed in full. Cappock has spent more than six years with Bacon, unpacking the crates as they arrived. 'I often felt as if I was intruding, ' she says.
Weaving a web of deceit about his work, Bacon never wanted people to know what was going on behind the scenes. Too bad, because Cappock takes us there.
'He cultivated a myth of spontaneity,' she says. Bacon always maintained that he drew very little, preferring to paint directly onto canvas.
He liked people to think he just sprang into action, boom, on the canvas. But Cappock found photographs, studies and sketches that prove otherwise. Whether it was a likeness of a lover, or a commissioned portrait of Mick Jagger, Bacon sweated over his work. Like a detective matching fingerprint to crime, Cappock has linked images found in his studio with his finished paintings.
Not all the items here pertain to his art. He left his leather jacket, the one he was photographed in so often, and his record collection. Not much classical, but lots of Edith Piaf and Ella Fitzgerald.
By the time he died, leaving more than £11m to his companion Edwards, he stood for bankable blockbuster British art. His stark, bloody images with distorted faces are instantly recognisable.
He revelled in the money he made, quaffing Krug and making stock with Château Pétrus. He would stuff wads of banknotes into his canvases. Despite the riches that came his way, Bacon never stopped looking at the competition. Cappock has been given a revealing letter that he wrote to the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy, praising the work of Damien Hirst. 'It was written just weeks before he died, which shows how much he was still engaged with his craft,' she says. He had visited the Saatchi collection and had been impressed by Hirst's dead cow. 'In the second part [of the installation] they breed the flies which swarm around the cows [sic] head,' he wrote, 'it really works.' Bacon must have seen the connection: a preoccupation with meat and carcasses is common to both artists.
Bacon discovered Reece Mews in 1961 and never left. 'For some reason the moment I saw this place I knew that I could work here,' he once said. Lovers came and went (or died), but his relationship with his studio was permanent: 'I feel at home in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me. And in any case I just love living in chaos.' He said the mess was 'rather like my mind'. To visit Dublin and peer at his studio is to appreciate the creativity of a self-taught man. He didn't attend life-drawing classes: he cut things out from Picture Post. He didn't study sculpture: he looked at books on Michelangelo. After he dispensed with sitters early in his career, all his visual references for his figurative painting came from books, magazines and photographs - or 'compost', as he once put it.
He developed his own idiosyncratic techniques, using Marks & Spencer corduroy trousers to add texture to the paint. Combs, scrubbing brushes and brooms were also co-opted. He chose his colours from Dulux cards. Sometimes he used an artist's palette, but often he just used the door. He painted with knives, forks and old socks. If dissatisfied with his work, he would destroy it. But some of his earlier pictures are now destroying themselves, Bacon having failed to achieve the right proportions of oil and turpentine.
Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon had a troubled childhood. The son of Anglo-Irish gentry, he was expected to like hunting, but he was asthmatic and horses made him wheeze. The story goes that when he was discovered as a teenager trying on his mother's underwear, his father threw him out of the house. He arrived in Berlin in the late 1920s in time for the last years of the Weimar Republic, then travelled to Paris. It was here in 1927, he later recalled, that he saw Picasso's work and resolved to become an artist.
Returning to London, he toyed with furniture design (early Bacon work is highly collectable) before painting the first of the many crucifixions that would bring him fame. The French honoured him with a show in 1971, and in 1989 he became the world's most expensive living artist when his triptych May-June 1973 sold at Sotheby's New York for £3.53m.
His private life, with a series of homosexual affairs, brought him fame of a different kind. A politician, failing to recognise him at a formal reception, once asked Bacon what he did. 'I'm an old poof,' he replied. He was perhaps made to inhabit London's Soho, where he hung out at the Colony Room drinking club. He rose at 6am, painted until lunchtime and spent the rest of the day drinking. Yet the next morning he was up again early in his studio. 'I am always surprised when I wake up in the morning,' he said.
In Soho's bars and clubs he cut an odd figure. He wore foundation, dyed his hair with Kiwi shoe polish and brushed his teeth with Vim. One of his circle described him as 'bringing home boys who were bad news'. Bacon talked openly about his sexual tastes, including sadomasochism. An early lover who indulged that preference was Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot.
Few of Bacon's relationships lasted, some ending in tragedy. On the eve of his Tate retrospective, he received a telegram telling him that Lacy was dead. Then, nine years later, on the day before his exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, he found his lover George Dyer sitting dead on the lavatory, having overdosed on barbiturates. Bacon had to carry on with the reception and dinners in his honour. It wasn't until he met John Edwards, his closest and most enduring companion, who died in 2003, that he found a semblance of stability.
Bacon could see cruelty everywhere, both in nature and in people. It had come from his father, whom he despised, and from the lovers he chose. If there is one idea that one takes away from contemplating his studio, it is violence. Studies in pinks and reds, his canvases often depict raw meat. They reveal tortured faces, their mouths gaping in torment. His series of screaming popes, based on a painting by Velazquez of Pope Innocent X, are some of his best-known images. 'Well, of course we are meat,' he once said. 'We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.'
Cappock and her team unearthed more than 570 books, 200 magazines, 400 newspapers and 1,300 leaves torn from various sources. There are books about diseases of the mouth and radiography. None of them make for happy bedtime reading. He was preoccupied not just by death, but by violent death. Cappock found magazines featuring the assassination of Trotsky, showing the murder scene in Mexico City, and President Kennedy's fateful motorcade through Dallas. There are plenty of wartime photographs, including many of atrocities, and a great deal of material about Hitler. But, for all the clipped articles, there is no evidence that Trotsky, Kennedy or Hitler ever made it to the canvas.
All is not unrelieved gloom, however. As well as art books about his revered Michelangelo and Ingres, Bacon left several illustrated weeklies, including more than 20 issues of The Sunday Times Magazine. When he appeared in our 100 Makers of the 20th Century, on June 15, 1969, he cut his entry out and pasted it on a board.
Though lionised early on, Bacon faced constant criticism throughout his career. Why was his vision so bleak? 'I am a painter of the 20th century,' was his rejoinder.
'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...'
There are no pink flowers in 7 Reece Mews, or in its transplanted state in Dublin. Just the chaos and the compost. And what might Bacon have made of returning to the land of his birth like this? John Edwards said: 'I think it would have made him roar with laughter...'
Francis Bacon's Studio, by Margarita Cappock, is published tomorrow by Merrell, price £35. It is available from The Sunday Times BooksFirst for £31.50, including p&p. tel: 0870 165 8585.
The Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin is closed for refurbishment, and will reopen in March 2006
Bringing home Bacon:
the dark, twisted paintings of out Irish artist Francis Bacon hang in museums around the world, but it's the art he left at home that gets the attention in a fascinating new book
Justin Scott and Angie J. Han The Advocate, October 25, 2005
This handsome book, filled with color photos, vividly conveys the turbulent process behind Bacon's contorted canvases. Cappock, the head of the Bacon collection, provides discussion of the over 7,500 objects Bacon left in his chaotic and cluttered studio, including books, photographs, and even handwritten notes by the artist himself. "He rarely painted from life," Cappock tells The Advocate. "[His studio]'s heaps of torn photographs, fragments of illustrations, and artists catalogs provided nearly all of his graphic sources."
Lifting the veil
The finest collection of 20th-century western art outside Europe and America has been gathering dust in storage. Why? Because it's owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran. But now, Christopher de Bellaigue reports, these spectacular works are finally being displayed in Tehran
The Guardian, Friday October 7, 2005
Modern masters ... an Iranian woman looks at a Francis Bacon painting displayed at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Everyone agrees that the collection's later works are not its best. For every luscious Bacon (the collection has two, though one is currently on loan) or teeming Dubuffet, there are half a dozen modish duds. The collection takes us up to 1977. And then there is silence - a silence that is, for all Iranians, filled with screaming, convulsive politics. The 1979 revolution and the shah's flight; the US embassy hostage crisis; eight years of war with Saddam and his backers in Europe and America; for many Iranians, these events seemed to augur permanent conflict between them and the west. And this was reflected in attitudes towards western art and its champions. In the eyes of the revolutionaries, the deposed queen - who had fled into exile - symbolised a kind of moral sickness, masquerading as culture.
Francis Bacon and Henri Cartier-Bresson
Cartier-Bresson might have been the master of the decisive moment, but it is Francis Bacon’s small, intimate portraits that reward a long, hard look. Frank Whitford finds he can’t stop staring
The Times, August 14, 2005
How does this extraordinary effect happen? In Study for Head of George Dyer (1967), for instance, it has something to do with the paint that is speedily applied and varies from creamy impasto to thin smears and scrapings. Dyer’s head seems to be in motion, as though struck by a powerful blow. The result is a blurring of the nose, mouth and chin so as to show them simultaneously from several viewpoints. Perhaps this is what Bacon meant when he said he was “always hoping to deform people into appearance”. The paint and its application convey ambiguous, contradictory or insufficient information. But they are evocative enough to help you supply the rest.
This portrait of Dyer, and the other, mostly intimate and obviously personal paintings here, are more approachable than Bacon’s bigger, more theatrical compositions. Those can intimidate and overwhelm. They can also seem gratuitously grand, or, when they include cricket pads and swastikas, simply ridiculous. But the portraits and heads can make you think that you’re finally seeing the point of Bacon, and that you’re now on more intimate terms with him.
This impression has something to do with the scale. Quite a few of the works are on canvases of the same, modest format (14in x 12in). Most of them are a little less than life-size and observed in close-up. Bacon was certainly on close terms with the sitters, and sometimes you’re made aware of the strong feelings they provoked in him. These aren’t commissioned portraits, of course, but paintings of people with whom the artist was intimately involved, sexually or otherwise. Fellow artists Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach put in a variety of appearances, while the much-married Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes, heroic drinkers as well as models, are among the friends most often painted. Bruce Bernard, sometime picture editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, is seen just once. Bacon’s lovers include the fighter pilot Peter Lacy, the burglar George Dyer and an anonymous man in a blue suit picked up in a hotel in Henley-on-Thames. Bacon repeatedly paints himself, too, becoming increasingly wraith-like as he approaches death. (In life, he never seemed to age, thanks in part to the shoe polish with which he blackened his hair.) Since Bacon’s heads and portraits betray a great deal about his fluctuating emotions, it’s surprising that there’s never been an exhibition quite like this in Britain before. It starts with a pastel done in 1931 (one of the rare survivors of Bacon’s iconoclastic rage in 1944, when he destroyed as much of his work he could lay his hands on). It finishes with a 1989 study for a portrait of John Edwards, the illiterate barman from Stepney to whom Bacon left everything after his death in 1992, in Madrid, visiting another lover.
In all there are some 50 paintings, grouped according to subject, judiciously selected and skilfully hung. Many of the pictures are unfamiliar because they are borrowed from private collections, or, in one noteworthy case — the virtually unknown Reclining Man with Sculpture (1960-1) — from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran. They may give us an intimate glimpse of Bacon, but they don’t make his art any easier to like. Human beings endure unidentifiable horrors even on this small scale. The head of Miss Muriel Belcher (1959) looks as though it’s been beaten to a bloody pulp. (Its subject is, of course, the foul-mouthed lesbian owner of the cramped and seedy Colony Room, the notorious Soho club where Bacon regularly whetted the edge of his razor-sharp tongue.) In one of the few large canvases here, Isabel Rawsthorne is depicted as walking wounded in Soho, the survivor of an accident caused, perhaps, by the unseen driver of the sinister car in the background.
Squeamish though I am, I nevertheless find it difficult to get Bacon’s paintings out of my head. They have an urgency that commands attention whenever you look at them. The reason they sustain repeated attention is probably in part due to his desire to put “everything into a single picture that makes all other pictures unnecessary”. The goal is unattainable. But the aim is enough to make paintings like these reward repeated scrutiny — unlike even the greatest photographs.
You will find great photographs across the road in the Dean Gallery, where there is the biggest exhibition ever in Britain of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s works. Many of the images are very familiar, perhaps excessively so. Most depict what Cartier-Bresson called “decisive moments”. Most add something to our vision of the world. Most also fit his own definition of what makes a great photograph – “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organisation of forms which gives that event its proper expression”.
You already know many of these pictures. There’s the overweight working-class family, seen from the back, picnicking on a steep bank above the Marne. There’s the shadowy silhouette of a man who appears to levitate as he leaps across a huge puddle outside the Gare Saint-Lazare. Once seen, never forgotten, it’s true, but it’s also no great loss if you never see them again. Take the picture of a street divided by the Berlin Wall. A border guard holding a machinegun walks away from us. Passing him from the opposite direction is a one-legged man, obviously a war victim, with two walking sticks. It’s a remarkable photograph and it makes a powerful point. But it has more staying power in the mind than on the wall or page.
This photograph demonstrates Cartier-Bresson’s matchless gifts as a photojournalist, and countless other pictures do the same. But there are portraits, too, and these also show his rare ability to notice and preserve something tellingly characteristic. Here, appropriately enough, is Francis Bacon in 1971, scratching his forehead while gazing out of the picture looking both nervous and haunted. The portrait of a Giacometti arranging his own sculptures in an exhibition is even better because the figure of the artist, blurred but recognisable, has the force of a metaphor. The series of pictures, taken in 1944, of the old, infirm Matisse at his home in Venice is fascinating because it allows us to observe and draw conclusions from the private and domestic while watching him at work.
The question of whether these photographs are art is irrelevant. But it is surely significant that Cartier-Bresson eventually gave up taking them. During the last years of life — he died a year ago — he preferred to draw, a much slower activity that demands a more intense engagement with the subject. This is made clear by the small selection of his drawings, many of which come close to having a concentration and strength worthy of Giacometti.
The photographer swapped his camera for a pencil and pen. The painter relied heavily on photographs as source material. In the end it was the painter who produced the more powerful images. These impressive exhibitions help you understand why.
Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until Sept 4; Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until Oct 23
War artists
Richard Cork
New Statesman, 20 June 2005
Bacon and
Sutherland
Martin Hammer
Yale
University Press, 272pp, £25
ISBN 030010796X
During the Second World War, Graham Sutherland became a widely acclaimed artist, supported by Kenneth Clark and sought after by collectors. Francis Bacon, by contrast, was still unknown outside his immediate circle and restlessly destroyed most of the pictures he produced. But the great merit of Martin Hammer's fascinating book lies in the author's ability to make us understand why these two men managed, at least for a while, to forge a close friendship.
Hammer's book displays much evid-ence of wide reading and hard looking. All the letters written by Bacon to Sutherland are reproduced in an appendix, and they show just how dissatisfied the artist felt about his early work. "I am sick to death of everything I've ever done in the past," he wrote to Sutherland from a Monte Carlo hotel in 1946, "but continue to think like a child or a fool that I'm on the edge of doing a good painting."
These men were brought together by the struggle against Hitler's abomi-nations. Bacon wrote his earliest extant letter to Sutherland in 1943, telling him "how much I like some of your paintings in the National Gallery". The show in question concentrated on recent work by the official war artists. Until this point, Sutherland's success as a landscape painter had far outshone Bacon's painfully protracted struggle to define his ambitions as a figure painter.
That Bacon exhibited nothing between 1937 and spring 1945, when his first nightmarish triptych was displayed at the Lefevre Gallery, must have made Hammer's task extremely difficult. Yet the author succeeds in establishing links between the two artists, both on a technical level and in terms of their mutual search for "a metamorphic art encapsulating the pathos of wartime life".
He points to their shared fascination with Marius Maxwell's photographs of animals in equatorial Africa, and suggests that the new boldness of colour in Sutherland's 1944 work might have been given impetus by Bacon. He, in turn, was helped by Sutherland to reacquire his sense of artistic identity. Hammer is especially searching in his discussion of Sutherland's Crucifixion altarpiece, and how it may have been affected by Bacon's great 1946 painting of a crucified meat carcass slung behind a man grinning under an umbrella. He also shows how Sutherland introduced Bacon to influential collectors, and how the two artists developed an obsession with gambling in Riviera casinos.
Only in the 1950s did their relation- ship become unbalanced, by which point Bacon was pursuing a powerfully single-minded course, while Sutherland was becoming increasingly erratic. By the mid-1960s they had stopped seeing each other altogether. Yet Hammer, who has also curated the new exhibition of Sutherland's art at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, is right to claim that they played a shaping part in the development of each other's work during the war, and that this was instrumental in the making of both Bacon and Sutherland as artists.
Four paperbacks of Richard Cork's writings on modern artists, including Bacon, are published by Yale
A fresh side of BaconThe Daily Telegraph 22/06/2005 
Head master: works in the Bacon show include this self-portrait of 1974 |
|
A new exhibition of portraits fascinatingly reveals Francis Bacon's technique as well as the affection and hatred he felt for his sitters, while a small show of work by Graham Sutherland celebrates his passion for landscape. By Richard Dorment
|
A corking show of Francis Bacon's portraits and heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, organised in association with the British Council, reveals a side of Bacon's work we've never seen before.
Instead of the histrionics of the large triptychs and the screaming popes, it focuses on Bacon's most intimate work - his studies of his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, of friends Muriel Belcher and Isabel Rawsthorne, and of fellow painters Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.
This is Bacon the private and complex man, capable of surprising tenderness and affection as well as of cruelty and spiked wit. Above all, the narrow focus of the exhibition allows us to concentrate on the way Bacon actually lays paint on the canvas, and not, as is so often the case when looking at his work, on the existential subject matter.
Whether or not he painted directly from the model, Bacon normally based his portraits on photographs. In display cases placed along the corridor linking the galleries, photos of his sitters reveal that no matter how he distorts a face, Bacon was usually able to capture a remarkable likeness.
But, instead of covering his faces with an epidermis of flesh, he excavates parts of them, using concave sweeps of brilliant colour to define the planes of cheekbones and forehead, while filling in other parts with a single stroke of the brush for a nose or a chin. In some of the heads, his technique is almost like that of a cubist, in others he reminded me of a sculptor working soft clay with his thumbs.
And what a range of emotion Bacon can achieve within a limited format! When he paints George Dyer, the face comes out bruised and swollen, like a prizefighter after a match, as though, for Bacon, the act of painting were a substitute for what he would otherwise do with his fists.
But in a portrait of Peter Lacy sleeping there is a sweetness and protectiveness that you don't find elsewhere in Bacon's work. In general, the more handsome the man, the more viciously Bacon treats him. In a double portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, the poor artists come out looking like the masked women in the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
What is Bacon doing in these portraits? One answer is that he is searching for the essence of the person, that elusive and constantly changing element that is an individual's identity. But it is more complicated than that. The way paint is dragged in striations across the faces in certain portraits could also be a way of suggesting physical movement, or it might evoke the idea of a doubly-exposed photograph.
And for every brushstroke that builds up form, another seems to shatter it, as though the portrait were the arena in which Bacon can work out his conflicting feelings of affection and hatred for the person he is painting.
These heads are painted directly on the canvas without preliminary drawing, so that the image and the technique are inseparable. In Bacon's own words, "the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in".
In his portrait Miss Muriel Belcher he applies paint with a loaded brush to create a surface as richly impastoed as in a Rubens sketch, dipping his brush in more than one colour, then dragging it in short, striated strokes of green mixed with pink. He then stains the background with two tones of thinned green paint to suggest the space in which Belcher exists.
In these small-scale works, Bacon had no difficulty sustaining the interest of the painted surface from edge to edge as I feel is often the case in the large-scale subject pictures. This show reveals a Bacon that I, for one, didn't know at all. See it if you possibly can.
The Bacon show coincides with a small exhibition of the work of his friend Graham Sutherland at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
After his death in 1980, the reputation of a man once considered one of this country's pre-eminent painters sank like a stone. There were two reasons for this, and both were unfair: we tended to judge him by his later work, and also to compare him with contemporaries who worked in the international modernist style - with Bacon, of course, but also with Picasso and Giacometti.
I, too, sneered at Sutherland until I saw an exhibition at the Barbican in 1987 that placed him in another context - that of Neo-Romanticism in Britain. Suddenly, he came into his own. Once you stop to look at his work from the viewpoint of Paris or New York, you see that it belongs in a uniquely British tradition of painting characterised by a visionary love of the English landscape and a profound symbolist orientation.
'Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads' is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (0131 624 6200) until Sept 4.
Bacon portrait of lover fetches record £4.9m
By Harvey McGavin
The Independent, Friday, 24
June 2005
Portrait of George Dyer Staring Into A Mirror
A portrait by Francis Bacon of his one-time lover has been sold for £4.9m at auction, a record price for a painting by the artist.
Bacon's 1967 work, Portrait of George Dyer Staring Into A Mirror, fetched £500,000 more than the previous most expensive Bacon - a portrait of Henrietta Moraes sold in New York three years ago.
It also fetched considerably more than its advance estimate of £2.5m-£3.5m.
The successful, unnamed bidder on Lot 24 in the Post War and Contemporary Art Sale at Christie's in London, has bought what many critics believe to be among Bacon's best works, and which documents of one of his most tempestuous relationships.
The meeting between Bacon and Dyer in 1964 has passed into art folklore. The Dublin-born artist liked to say he first encountered the small-time criminal as he caught him red-handed in the act of burgling his studio. Bacon reputedly said "Take all your clothes off and get into bed with me. Then you can have all you want." Another, more prosaic, version has it that Dyer approached Bacon and his friends during a night of drunken revelry in Soho.
Their meeting marked the beginning of an intense friendship, during which Dyer became Bacon's lover and muse through much of the 1960s.
Portrait of George Dyer Staring Into Mirror shows him sitting cross-legged, dressed in a boxy suit of the kind favoured by the Krays, glancing sidelong into a mirror. Like many of Bacon's portraits - especially those of his lovers - the sitter's features are distorted and smeared. It was one of many paintings Bacon made of Dyer during the late 1960s.
Dyer, a drifter with a speech impediment who had spent time in prison before he met Bacon, was unhappy for much of their time together and felt inadequate among Bacon's erudite social circle, committed suicide in 1971. After his death Bacon painted two triptychs in his memory.
"His stealing at least gave him a raison d'être, even though he wasn't very successful at it and was always in and out of prison" Bacon once said. "It gave him something to think about ... I thought I was helping him when I took him out of that life. I knew the next time he was caught he'd get a heavy sentence.
"And I thought, well, life's too short to spend half of it in prison. But I was wrong, of course. He'd have been in and out of prison, but at least he'd have been alive."
Love for sale
Many portraits by Francis Bacon were heartfelt records of his personal relationships. Now, one of the most celebrated examples could fetch up to pounds 3.5m at auction.
Sue Hubbard
The Independent, May 17th, 2005
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
ME AND MY HOME
MICHAEL WOJAS: Life in a rogues' gallery
Sian Pattenden The Independent, May 11, 2005
Michael has been the proprietor of the Colony Room Club in Soho, central London, since 1994. Comprising just one room, the bar was infamous in the 1950s as artist Francis Bacon's favoured watering hole. In the early '90s Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin were regulars. Now the likes of Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss all like to whet their whistle here.
I consider this room to be my front room; a front room with a bar in it. I came here to work as a barman in 1981, after finishing a chemistry degree at Nottingham University. My then-girlfriend's mother was an old friend of Muriel Belcher, who set up the Colony Room in 1948, and they needed some help.
I thought I'd work for a couple of months before I figured out exactly what I want to do " that was 24 years ago. I didn't realise at first that I'd found my home. I spend more time here than I do in my flat.
The bar was originally made of bamboo, there were plants hanging behind and the bar stools were mock leopardskin. Muriel's girlfriend Carmel was Jamaican so that's how the 'colony' theme came about. The only bit of bamboo left frames the mirror over the fireplace. The walls were cream- coloured but in the mid-50s they went green and stayed green.
Five years ago I took it up one shade and lightened it, which freaked out all the older members, but I told them all the younger people really liked it. Everything's painted gloss " the nicotine would stain otherwise.
Part of the initial attraction for members was the afternoon opening and Muriel's colourful personality. The first week it opened, someone brought Francis Bacon here. Muriel didn't have art connections, she knew fuck all about art, but those two hit it off. Francis used to call her 'mother' and she used to call him 'daughter'.
Francis was like a pied piper, everyone followed him. The old story was that Muriel offered him either drinks or money, or both, to bring his friends. It attracted a mixture of people from Lord and Lady Muck to the barrow boys from the market where Muriel bought her vegetables.
Muriel died in 1979, 14 months before I arrived, and Ian Board had taken her place. There's a bust of him in the corner and his ashes are inside, so he's still watching over us. I had led quite a sheltered upbringing, coming from a scientific background, and I was fascinated by the range of crazy extroverts here. Ian perhaps being the maddest.
I know every nook and cranny of the place, because for the first couple of years Ian would hide the takings from the till every night, when he was drunk. The next day we'd spend an hour trying to find them. You'd have to take a shelf off, dismantle the piano. He thought I was going to nick the money. It took him two years before he realised I was going to stay and he started to trust me. He drove a lot of people away " Muriel could be rude to people and get money out of them, but if Ian called someone a wanker, it made them want to hit him.
It's a perfect space; it's very well worked out. Muriel would sit by the bar in her special seat. If you keep the mirrors clear you can see what's going on behind you without having to twist your neck round. You can talk to people at the bar and you're in contact with whoever's behind the bar. You're also right by the door just in case someone you don't want comes walking in. You don't want the music too loud, you need to hear everything. Given the amount of alcohol consumed here, it's very rare to have anything resembling a fight. I'm always ready to diffuse a situation between people even before they know they're going to have a row.
There's never been a clock in here, because if there was people would always thinking about the train they've got to catch. We close at 11. There was a temptation to extend the license until one o'clock but Muriel always said that by 11 the punters are pissed and skint and we've had the best from them. Send them on their way and let someone else cope with them. I call myself the caretaker. It's only been Muriel, Ian and myself over 57 years and that is quite something.
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 tail wags the gods
Two shows about Bacon and Picasso have opened simultaneously in different parts of the same Paris museum. Why?
The Bacon/Picasso show, which opened today at the Picasso Museum in Paris, is radically different from the one which it had planned — because of a dark, unexpected intervention by the Francis Bacon estate in London.
It is not the first time the estate has indulged in fisticuffs with the art world. In 2002 a long-running and acrimonious dispute between the estate and Marlborough Fine Art, Bacon’s dealer for 34 years, was brought to an abrupt end, with Marlborough claiming victory.
This time the dispute is over authenticity of material, and the extent to which any museum has a right to be in charge of the staging and promotion of its own exhibition — if that exhibition happens to include works by Francis Bacon, at any rate.
The saga began last October, when the Picasso Museum was given a suitcase full of miscellaneous images and books from Bacon’s studio at Reece Mews in South Kensington. This was material from the Barry Joule archive, the greater part of which had been donated to the Tate Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
An examination of these documents by experts at the Paris museum demonstrated once again how obsessed Bacon had been by the person and the work of Picasso. Here were images of Picasso and his works, many torn out of magazines, on which Bacon had drawn, painted and scribbled. The gift also included books owned by him, such as a hardback edition of Brassaï’s Picasso and Company, published by Thames and Hudson. The book is full of Bacon’s feverish tamperings — he cut out and superimposed one image upon another; he modified photographs; he annotated.
The museum’s intention was to embed some of these Picasso-related objects into the show, and to publish a catalogue which would knit together its exhibition of original works by Bacon and Picasso with its own research into the material from the studio.
Then, according to a Picasso Museum spokesman, who asked to remain anonymous, “about two months ago” the Francis Bacon estate forbade them to do so. The Joule material could not be shown alongside Bacon’s paintings because, argued the estate, it had not been properly authenticated by experts from the Tate Gallery in London. Until that happened, it should not be shown at all. Other works by Bacon in the show come from a variety of sources: the Tate, the Pompidou Centre, Marlborough International Fine Art and various private collections. The fact that they were owned by these institutions meant that the estate had no power to prevent their being loaned out to other museums.
The ruling meant that the catalogue could no longer be published in the form that the museum had planned, because it now had to exclude all the research into its own archival material. But after The Times contacted the Bacon estate it relented on two important issues; first it scrapped its insistence that the museum must publish the catalogue only in French — now English is also deemed acceptable — and then it revoked a decision to ban the publication of all Bacon images from the show alongside reviews.
Nonetheless, in what could be a financially damaging move, the museum is forbidden to sell its catalogue anywhere other than in its own bookshop.
Although the estate, for which the sole executor is Professor Brian Clarke, cannot prevent a museum such as the Tate lending its works to another museum, it can intervene when visual representations of those same works is involved, such as in the production of a catalogue.
So the Picasso Museum fought a rearguard action. It went ahead with the official catalogue of the exhibition, but it also produced a second catalogue about its own Barry Joule archive. Instead of abandoning all plans to display the Barry Joule material, it decided to devote a room to it in the basement, a long way from the temporary exhibition devoted to Bacon and Picasso. So two shows about Bacon and Picasso have opened simultaneously in the same museum.
And why has the estate behaved in this way? A spokesman close to the Picasso Museum alleges that it is all, ultimately, down to power and money. If the estate flexes its muscles in this way, lenders will ultimately be intimidated into feeling that all Bacon-related transactions will need to go through the estate in order to obtain some kind of official approval.
Olivier Lorquin, director of the Musée Maillol in Paris, which last year staged an exhibition of Bacon’s works called The Sacred and the Profane, has had similar problems with the estate recently. “The estate made life very difficult for me,” he says. “They refused to let me do a co-edition of the catalogue. They wanted me to print only 2,000 copies — I eventually was able to do 6,000 — and at first they would let me sell it only in my own museum bookshop. They also have the right to dictate in what language the catalogue appears. All this is quite contrary to the wishes of Bacon himself, in my opinion. I had to go to London and be very diplomatic. I guess I was lucky too. It was très douloureux. I do think that it is a question of power and greed ...”
The Bacon estate was first approached for an explanation of its alleged behaviour. Why was there no Barry Joule material in the show at the Picasso Museum? The public had been led to believe — see this month’s Art Newspaper, for example — that it would be a part of the show. An estate spokeswoman had no comment. And why was the catalogue available in French only? Again, no comment.
What else could be at issue here? Close scrutiny of the show, painting by painting, print by print, reveals to what an extraordinary extent Bacon was influenced by Picasso — at times you are more than tempted to describe the work as derivative. Could this be an unspoken reason for all this unwelcome intervention? Would Bacon himself be less bankable if it became more commonly known that he owed quite so much to a greater master than himself?
- Bacon and Picasso: La vie des images, Musée National Picasso, rue de Thorigny, Paris until May 30
Thanks Pablo, that'll do nicely
The Independent on Sunday, March 13, 2005
There are moments in a gallery-goer's life when the urge to cheer is overwhelming. One of them comes as you pass between two rooms in Bacon Picasso: The Life of Images.
In the first of these is an early painting by Francis Bacon: a messy thing, done in 1935 and called Interior of a Room. Eight years earlier, Bacon had had an epiphany via the works at the start of this show, A Hundred Drawings by Picasso exhibited at the Paul Rosenberg gallery in 1927. The 18-year-old Bacon, then an interior designer, saw these on a visit to Paris and was converted. Henceforth, he would be a painter.
Interior of a Room is one of the tyro artist's earliest surviving works. You look at it and at the picture next to it - Picasso's 1929 La demoiselle (Tete) - and you humph. Picasso's Demoiselle is an elegant working-through of all kinds of things: planar cubist figures, surrealist nightmare objects, Matissean wall patterns. Bacon's picture, too, is synthetic, although what it is synthesising is Picasso. There are the too-slavish wallpaper, the stylised branches, the oneric feel, the softened angles. If the aim of this show is to demonstrate Bacon's debt to Picasso, then the point is made.
What happens next, though, is in its way as epiphanic as Bacon's visit to the Rosenberg show. Moving to the next room, you pass a wall text: the description by Bacon of a work by Picasso, probably seen in Cahiers d'Art. "There was a marvellous figure which opened a sort of door on a beach," Bacon wrote. "For me, this was among Picasso's most exciting works ... more humane, closer to the heart of things." And here, through this door, is the picture he was talking about: Baigneuse ouvrant une cabine, one of Picasso's 1928 studies of bathers.
For us, as for Bacon, it's a revelation. It's easy to find Picasso in Bacon's work. There are enough literal borrowings to make the Irishman's debt to the Spaniard clear. Bacon's Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer contains several of of these liftings. The shadow portrait in the triptych's central panel is a direct quotation from Picasso's self-portrait in L'Atelier of 1929, Bacon here not just borrowing from Picasso but borrowing Picasso. The key and half-open door in the same panel are from the Baigneuses a la cabine of the same year. But you suddenly see, as you turn from Picasso's apparently light-hearted beach scene to Bacon's doomed canvas, that these indicators of borrowing aren't the whole story, or even the main part of it.
What the Baigneuses series and the Dyer triptych actually have in common is something else entirely: the humanity that Bacon was talking about in the neighbouring wall-text, a shared sense of isolation in the midst of life. The keys and shadow-portraits aren't imitative of Picasso but signs of an engagement with him. Although Bacon's triptych is infinitely more accomplished than his Interior of a Room, it is painted in the same voice. The purple curtains, the contorted animal forms, the scratchy brushwork of the 1971 work are already established by 1935. Picasso isn't integrated into this recipe: he's kept separate from it, put in evident quotation marks. What's going on in the Dyer triptych isn't a monologue but a dialogue, and to find out what it's about you have to go down to the Picasso Museum's basement.
Bacon's estate has been racked by controversy since his death in 1992. Among its more sulphurous aspects has been the so-called Barry Joule Archive: a collection of incunabula - scraps of paper torn from magazines, allegedly by Bacon himself - removed from the artist's London studio under disputed circumstances. A large proportion of these scraps have to do with Picasso. There are reproductions of his paintings, photographs of Picasso with his wives and children, all of them added to or effaced.
Thanks to pressure from Bacon legatees, the Picasso Museum was prevented from showing these scraps alongside the artist's paintings. Until now, debate about them has centred on whether their additions and effacements were actually by Bacon. (It seems to me they clearly are.) The real question - and one addressed brilliantly here - is what the bits of paper mean.
The catalogue to this exhibition ends with the suggestion that Bacon viewed Picasso with the same ambiguous eye as Oedipus saw Laius; that his love for Picasso was tinged with something like hate. And here you see what this ambiguity meant: a creative fury in which Picasso was robbed and adored by his son in art. It's a complete revelation about Bacon, and oddly revealing about Picasso, too. This is an excellent and important show, well worth a trip.
Musee National Picasso, Paris 3 (00 33 1 42 71 25 21), to 30 May
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.
Bacon's cavalier cropping of canvases is evidence of his uninhibited attitude towards the picture field, another aspect of his technique that is paralleled in photography, in the facile enframings associated with the camera and with the darkroom. When questioned about his ubiquitous 'cages', the internal frameworks he placed around many of his figures, Bacon liked to pass them off simply as devices for seeing 'the image' more clearly. Critics have essayed more profound interpretations, but they bear a close resemblance to the Chinagraph markings that photographers employ on their contact prints to indicate the precise area of the negative that requires enlargement. On a visit to Bacon's studio in 1955, his patrons Robert and Lisa Sainsbury found him about to destroy a 'Pope' painting with which he was dissatisfied: when they remonstrated he produced a razor blade, cut out the central portion of the canvas (evidently he thought the head not unsuccessful), and presented it to them; as Study (Imaginary portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955, it is now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
A neccesarily approximate demarcation can be imposed in Bacon's oeuvre around 1968, after which date he sought to pare down his paintings, rationalising their spatial organisation and working with a more concise vocabulary of forms. It is probably not coincidental that this transition occurred at a time when Minimalism occupied a central position in art practice and critical theory; the acceptance at face value of Bacon's protestations of cultural isolation has belatedly come under question, and rightly so, since at no time were his paintings created in an ahistorical vacuum. The broadly applied and thickly impasted paint of his 'Van Gogh' homages in the 1950s invite comparison with the bold painterliness of his friend Karel Appel (and another contemporary, Asger Jorn) as much as that of Chaim Soutine, whose techniques Bacon is known to have revered. Similarly, in the 1970s, the densely absorbent black grounds he adopted for his posthumous tributes to George Dyer may well have been indebted to the looming negative swathes of paint in Robert Motherwell's Spanish elegies.
When Bacon embarked on a new painting, he generally had a rough idea of its overall structure in mind: his method was to paint the 'image' first - that is, the human form(s) - and the ground afterwards. While the success of the 'image' depended, for him, primarily on chance elements related to the application of paint, the flat backgrounds, ostensibly at least, presented less of a challenge. Bacon's deprecation of abstract art lends support to this, yet there is abundant evidence that he regarded the symbiosis of image and ground as important, and devoted considerable attention to the problem: he needed his 'chaos' to be 'deeply ordered'. Among the ceaseless modifying and perfecting of these 'abstract' backgrounds, a typical example is the small triptych Three studies of George Dyer (1969, private collection), the grounds of which were yellow in their first state but were altered soon after to dark blue, before Bacon finally rendered them in their present mauve-pink.
Bacon's elimination of superfluous pictorial elements can be observed in the history of a triptych he painted in 1974, its panoramic sweep and high horizon line inspired by Degas's Beach scene (?c. 1876, National Gallery, London). In the first version of the centre panel of the triptych, Bacon incorporated an unsettling, confrontational figure that peered back imperiously at the viewer through schematic binoculars. This image again reversed the role of his attendants or witnesses; each of the three panels represents a back view of the naked George Dyer, Bacon's then recently deceased lover, and the viewer's gaze was implicated in the act of voyeurism. Whether Bacon regarded the figure with binoculars as triggering an unwanted narrative, or as formally extraneous, after pondering the question for three years he