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                                                                                                                     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

 

     

 
'People think I live grandly, you know,' said one of the richest painters of the 20th century, 'but in fact I live in a dump.' The dump was 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, and the painter was the late Francis Bacon, revered as one of the greatest names in post-war British art.

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

 

Destroying your own works of art might be a practice best suited to the privacy of your own home--and that's exactly what famed British painter Francis Bacon did. His London studio, which was found filled with 100 slashed canvases after his death in 1992, is exhaustively documented in Margarita Cappock's new photo book, Francis Bacon's Studio (Merrell, $59.95). After his death, Bacon's partner, John Edwards, donated the artist's studio intact to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Clutter and all, it has been on display to the public since 2001. 

This handsome book, filled with colour 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 catalogues provided nearly all of his graphic sources."

 

 

 

 

 Picasso is hiding in Iran

 

     By Kim Murphy

  The Los Angeles Times   September 19, 2007

 

 

    

              Francis Bacon's Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants

 

Habibollah Sadeghi looks vaguely irritated to see me: not surprised, seeing as he has spent the last 10 days evading my phone calls, letters and polite appeals delivered through intermediaries. He knows I want to see his Picassos. He doesn’t want to show them to me.

 

But Iranian hospitality being what it is, Sadeghi is forced to invite me into his office for tea. “I got your letter,” he says. Frankly, I was somewhat offended that you seem to think our paintings are like some big nuclear secret. They are not a secret at all.” 

 

I know,” I reply. “That’s why I came to see them.”

 

We are not talking about the paintings on the wall at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which Sadeghi directs. Those are, at the moment, a stylish if bland collection of Iranian textile and costume design for the fashion-conscious and appropriately modest Iranian woman.

 

No, we’re talking about the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos – the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S.

 

Ruled by one of the most vehemently anti-Western governments in the world, Iran is, by many assessments, home to the most extensive collection of late 19th and 20th century Western art outside the West. It is a treasure trove of masters that is all but forgotten outside knowledgeable art circles because, for all but a few of the last 30 years, it has been virtually unseen.

 

Assembled during the waning years of the shah’s regime, when the oil boom of the 1970s rendered the country flush with cash, the collection debuted two years before the Islamic Revolution. Except for occasional international loans, a pair of small-scale shows and a daring exhibition two years ago during the administration of reform-minded President Mohammad Khatami, it disappeared from view thereafter.

 

After authorities saw Francis Bacon’s triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants, they issued an order to remove the central panel because of its purported homosexual overtones. Samiazar demanded the order in writing.

 

I can’t dismantle a very important painting based on a telephone call,” he said.

The written order came the next day.

 

Samiazar knew the exhibition would be his last act as museum director. His mission, he said, was to get the paintings before the eyes of the world, to publish a catalogue to ensure that everyone knew, forever, just what was in the basement. So no one would forget.

 

I immunized it,” he said. “People came because they knew there may be no other chance of seeing the collection again, at least for the time being. And over the last two years, it has proved they were right. I don’t think with the way things are going now they can have any chance in the future to see them again.”

 

It was also personal, he acknowledged.

 

It was kind of a goodbye party,” he said. I knew after the presidential elections I would be leaving the museum, but thanks God I had a chance to open this show. I didn’t want to leave the museum without this magnificent event.”

We make our way through the highlights of the collection and sample the best of the Iranian pieces. Then we smile and take our leave, with much less urgency than our greeting. I repair upstairs, where the women’s clothing exhibit continues its run, largely undisturbed by visitors.

 

(abridged version)

 

 

 

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. 

 

It is hard to decide what to marvel at - the Picasso, or the fact that it hangs here, in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, part of a big show of modern western art. In Tehran, any big exhibition is scrutinised before it begins, by censors from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. What, you wonder, did they make of the Picasso? Are the model's breasts too removed from conventional anatomy and her genitalia, paraphrased by an inky sliver, too figurative for her to be considered a proper (and therefore impermissible) nude? Perhaps they were flummoxed by the phallic limb protruding from her side? Whatever the reason, they let the Picasso through but acted decisively when they came to Francis Bacon's Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendant, a few rooms further on. The censors have shorn this triptych, whose gorgeous passages of paint evoke a terrible solitude, of its central panel. That panel - as visitors to Tate Britain, where it was on loan until the summer, will recall - depicts two naked men lying on a bed. It was deemed too gay for the Islamic Republic. (A little bit gay is too gay for the Islamic republic). The Bacon is now a diptych partitioned by a phantasmal smudge.

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

 
When you’re looking at a portrait by Francis Bacon, something extraordinary will happen. In a flash you’ll realise who the sitter is. A violently contorted face will suddenly and sharply come into focus, turning into Bacon himself or one of his friends. This almost magical flash of recognition occurs repeatedly in the exhibition of mostly small portraits and heads currently on show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

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 Bacon 


The 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?

 

NEVER mind The Da Vinci Code, the shenanigans behind the scenes of a new exhibition which makes connections between the work of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso make Dan Brown’s thriller look as intricate as Enid Blyton.

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

 

Charles Darwent, Visual arts

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 

The Daily TelegraphG21/03/2005

 


 

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

 

 

When Francis Bacon died, in 1992, the floor of his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington, was left in the state that had already become sedimented in the Bacon mythology, strewn with tattered magazines and books, and creased, torn and paint-spattered photographs (Fig. 1). Painstakingly excavated and transferred in its entirety in 1998 to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the city of Bacon's birth, Dublin, the studio is now preserved for study, and the cataloguing of its contents is enabling some of the obfuscation surrounding the relationship between Bacon's source material and his painting procedures to be penetrated.
 
Elsewhere, further previously unidentified artefacts continue to emerge. Among these documents is a handful of photographs that recorded, sometimes incidentally, paintings that Bacon subsequently either altered or destroyed: these, too, are proving to be invaluable in illuminating certain unresearched aspects of Bacon's practice.

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.

It is interesting to speculate on Bacon's motives for excising the caged figure. He could have envisaged the achondroplastic man as representing Pygmalion and the convulsive figure as (an albeit distinctively Baconic) Galatea: if so, again he possibly considered the allusion to the Greek myth as too specific, too illustrational. He had notoriously inverted Cimabue's Crucifixion, and may have been performing a similar rotation in a regendering of the figure of Galatea in Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, c. 1890). The dwarf's seated, cross-legged pose recalls both Velazquez's A dwarf sitting on the floor (c. 1645, Prado Museum, Madrid) (Fig. 9) and the ancient Egyptian statue of Seneb, the chief of the palace dwarves, in the National Museum, Cairo; Bacon, who considered Egyptian art to have been mankind's highest cultural achievement, had visited Cairo in 1951 and is likely to have seen the figure.

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 recalled the central panel to his studio and painted out the figure, leaving uninterrupted the 'abstract' foreground across all three panels. Completed as Triptych 1974-77, the painting has remained in this simplified form (Figs. 10 and 11).

The figure eventually painted out from Triptych 1974-77 was probably based on Eadweard Muybridge's photographs Man falling prone and aiming rifle; considering Bacon's interest in avifauna, especially birds of prey, an image of a stalking birdwatcher may also have been in play. Manifestly, Bacon's intervention into the Degas painting transcends its sources, but typically, besides the borrowing from Degas, the triptych also referenced images he had kept in his archive--possibly since the 1930s--from Amedee Ozenfant's Foundations of Modern Art and Baron von Schrenck Notzings's Phenomena of Materialization. In Schrenck Notzing's book, the spectral images of seances that fascinated him are comparable with the vaporous effects present in many of Bacon's paintings, and of the traces of figures in movement through space and time. In the photographic darkroom, one can imagine he was intrigued (he would have been familiar with this process, if not at first hand then from its popular appropriation in movies) by the gradual revelation of the latent image in the developing tray. In a sense, he brought about a reversal of this process when he trapped the likeness of a 'sitter', only to deface it by smearing off the paint he had applied. Appearances are established then denied: Bacon the atheist was not about to offer either hope or closure.

One way in which Bacon demonstrated his receptiveness to the operation of chance was by his alertness to the way photographs would emerge from the chaotic piles of studio detritus, like organisms with an independent existence. An habitual gambler, no doubt he appreciated the way in which these suggestively accreted documents would reappear, transformed and reordered like a shuffled pack of playing-cards. In the background of the left-hand panel of Three portraits: Posthumous portrait of George Dyer; Self-portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973) he painted, as though it were pinned to the wall, a tightly cropped black and white photograph of his own head. The source photograph he used (Fig. 12) was only rediscovered recently, complete with pinholes and random flecks of paint, in colours corresponding exactly to the palette of the 1973 triptych. Fifteen years later, in Study from the human body and portrait (1988) (Fig. 13), Bacon reused this photo-portrait of himself, and on this occasion embraced the accidental marks that he had made on the original source photograph. Thus the studio floor is revealed as his personal genizah, an archive of talismanic images that on the one hand he allowed (or encouraged) to become worn and distressed, while on the other he preserved as bearers of the marks of time.

Bacon's synthesising of 'lens-based' imagery has been public knowledge for more than fifty years. It is important to recognise, however, that throughout the first half of his career (that is, until 1962) the images that suggested ideas for paintings were seldom 'original' photographic prints but almost invariably mechanical reproductions he encountered in books or magazines. Long before photography's acceptance as an art form, and its penetration of Britain's museums and art galleries, Bacon acknowledged that photographs (including photographic reproductions of works of art) had informed some of his decisive paintings. He came to regret this openness, however, believing it had caused his aims to be misapprehended. His cautiousness was not without justification: only six years ago, when the Barbican Arts Centre staged 'Picasso and Photography', the survey was greeted by sensational headlines such as 'Picasso Exposed', (7) as though a fraud had been uncovered.

Like Picasso, Bacon sought neither photorealism nor photographic verisimilitude, nor were his paintings merely the sum of their sources. Latterly, therefore, he ensured that a much tighter control was kept over the identity of the stimuli he was prepared to divulge. Since he also disliked appending fanciful titles to his paintings, most were kept deliberately vague and non-specific; a rare exception was Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1967, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), but despite the fact that the scenes in the outer panels clearly refer to the poem, Bacon insisted that the title was imposed by the Marlborough Gallery and pretended there was no connection with Eliot's text. He effectively censured, too, the iconological study of his paintings, initially by denying their iconographies. Most critics acquiesced in this denial of content, and those who transgressed risked his non-cooperation regarding reproduction rights; their enforced collaboration in this information clamp-down helped to ensure that Bacon's paintings, and his procedures, were investigated and understood largely on the terms he dictated, or of which he approved.

Bacon described his paintings of the human body as a balance of order and chaos, of preconception and chance. Yet his unique path through figuration in the twentieth century failed to resonate with the guru of American Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg, who perceived it as embodying 'an affliction of the English ... the Grand Manner'. (8) Greenberg appears to have wilfully misread the interventions onto works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Ingres, as though Bacon had slavishly emulated these masters. On the contrary, Bacon's view of the hopelessness of the human condition precluded the aspiration to anything as uncomplicatedly elevated or ennobling as grandeur. He aimed to subvert as much as to celebrate art-historical traditions, and sought to redefine issues of representation of the human form. Although the specifics of his image sources are ultimately secondary to the syntheses Bacon performed on them, and should not be over-stressed, the essential modernity and rich complexity of his figurative idiom depended to a considerable extent on its mutable dialogue with photography's engagement with transience, mortality and memory.

 

(1) Jean Clair, 'Pathos and Death', in G.Regnier et al. (ed.), The Body on the Cross, exh. cat., Musee Picasso, Paris, 1992, p. 136.

(2) David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1997, p. 20.

(3) David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 246.

(4) Most of the surviving sketches are in Tate; see: Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, London, 1999.

(5) Sylvester, op. cit. in note 3 above, p. 44.

(6) See especially Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1998.

(7) The Sunday Times: Culture, 7 February 1999 (front cover).

(8) Clement Greenberg, 'Autonomies of Art', in The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society Newsletter, vol. III, issue 2, 1996.

 

Martin Harrison is the author of In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, published by Thames and Hudson this month.

 

 

 


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

 

 

 

 

Artist's 'lie' over meeting gay lover

Anthony Barnes, The Independent on Sunday, March 13, 2005

 

It is one of the most celebrated meetings in 20th-century art. But new testimony casts doubt on the mythical first encounter between Francis Bacon and his young lover George Dyer, who was the subject of dozens of his works of art.

Bacon himself claimed he caught Dyer burgling his apartment in the early 1960s, a version of events related in the Bacon biopic Love is the Devil starring Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig. Not so, says Dyer's brother Lee, who broke his silence in an interview for a major examination of Bacon's life to be screened on BBC2 on Saturday. They were more likely to have met in a gay club, but the burglar story was concocted to protect Dyer's mother from the truth.

Lee Dyer said: "I think personally he may have made that story up because he didn't want to say to my mother how he'dmet him. I was told a little while ago that he met him in a club."

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

ART: PRIVATE VIEW - Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti to 2 Dec

Peter Chapman  The Independent  November 5, 2005

 

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

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Dean Gallery

The Observer, Sunday August 7, 2005

 

'I want to do very specific things, like portraits,' Francis Bacon told his friend David Sylvester in the early 1960s, 'and they will be portraits of the people, but, when you come to analyse them, you just won't know - or it would be very hard to see - how the image is made up at all'.

The exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is the first to focus specifically on Bacon's portraits, and offers in turn a portrait of Bacon - a genuinely thrilling impression of a mind at work. Arranged chronologically and in rooms, broadly speaking, according to the sitter - Bacon's lovers, Peter Lacy and George Dyer; his friends, Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne; himself - the 50 or so works show faces disintegrating and asserting themselves simultaneously, progressing from a shadowy Modigliani-indebted pastel of 1931 to a faintly blood-spattered self-portrait in 1987.

The exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is the first to focus specifically on Bacon's portraits, and offers in turn a portrait of Bacon - a genuinely thrilling impression of a mind at work. Arranged chronologically and in rooms, broadly speaking, according to the sitter - Bacon's lovers, Peter Lacy and George Dyer; his friends, Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne; himself - the 50 or so works show faces disintegrating and asserting themselves simultaneously, progressing from a shadowy Modigliani-indebted pastel of 1931 to a faintly blood-spattered self-portrait in 1987.
One room brings together four full-length canvases from the Man in Blue series (1954). Against a ground the colour of night, a man stands in an ethereal 1950s bar. In the least abstracted version, the stripes that form the back of the bar - decoration or lighting - are gently superimposed on to his face. It seems like a trick of the light, a result of the optical illusion known as the persistence of vision. But in other paintings, it's the impersistence of vision that prevails - the figure begins to disappear, to grow faint like a memory or rot like the dead.

This is what you see up close: the tussle between the art of deconstructing and that of decomposing, one a purely aesthetic challenge, the other an inevitable human decline. How does it begin? In one, Man in Blue V, the right side of the face is a ghostly blur from afar, but almost eaten up when seen in detail: a worm-like mark burrows into the nose, faint blots resemble mould. Step back again and the face recedes, smeared, in motion. You can't tell if what's shown is a way of seeing or a way of being - whose state of mind is portrayed?

'I'm always hoping to deform people into appearance,' Bacon told Sylvester, 'I can't paint them literally.' Here is his masterly Study for Portrait II, based on the death mask of William Blake; both solid and spectral, it floats in black as if mutilated into being, strokes of bloodless paint slashing or sealing up the eyes and mouth. There is a Head of Man (1959), swishing back and sideways, as if slapped in slow motion. A triptych of heads, all of Dyer (1963), is a celebration of what he called 'this great beauty of the colour of meat'. Bacon saw that 'we are potential carcasses', and once said: 'If I go into a butcher's shop, I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.'

If Bacon brought his subjects to ravaged life, it was because he was able to articulate within it their death. Dissolution might be a better word than disintegration - his subjects, and his gaze, are both dissolving and dissolute. Though he questioned whether 'the distortions which I think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage', he spoke of 'the injury that I do to them [his subjects] in my work'. It was because of this that he felt inhibited by the subject's physical presence in the room and preferred to work from photographs..

Perhaps the most intriguing Bacon-related objects - second only to the paintings themselves - are the photographic materials found on his studio floor, crumpled, trampled, torn and painted over. There has already been a book devoted to the photos taken for him by his friend John Deakin, and Martin Harrison's sumptuous In Camera, published this year, shows sheaves torn from books on Velázquez and Hitler, films stills, X-ray manuals and the locomotion experiments of Eadweard Muybridge.

One striking image here is an unattributed photograph of Dyer. He sits in his Y-fronts in the middle of Bacon's famously chaotic studio, doubly exposed: both sitting still and crossing one leg, cocking his head to smile.

The double exposure renders everything unstable - the paints, papers, brushes, canvases leaning against the wall: everything seems to be falling, about to submerge Dyer in its disorder.

Then there is a strangely emotional Baconian intervention. As if traced around a tin can, a swish of black ink cradles the ghostlier of Dyer's two faces - it is on its way to being a painting, and also almost a caress.

Because of the way Bacon worked, this exhibition arguably shows not only the possibilities of paint, but also those of photography. Bacon told Sylvester: 'Ninety-nine per cent of the time I find that photographs are very much more interesting than abstract or figurative painting. I've always been haunted by them.' You might say, in fact, that Bacon understood photography's potential in a way Henri Cartier-Bresson never did.

One of the founders of Magnum, and, as Paris-Match said, 'the most celebrated image-chaser of our time', Cartier-Bresson is considered such a god it's virtual sacrilege to suggest that his photographs were anything less than the best ever taken. But now that they are shown at the Dean Gallery, directly opposite the Bacon exhibition, the first thing that strikes you is how dull they are.

To an extent, this is Cartier-Bresson's great achievement - to have written, almost single-handedly, the language of cliche: to have trained our eyes so that the prostitutes in Mexico, the man jumping over his own reflection in a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, the couple lying back on the banks of the Seine are images embedded in the unconscious of anyone who has ever bought a postcard.

Cartier-Bresson was not, generally speaking, doing anything particularly inventive within any one frame (his drawings and paintings, also on show here, are exceptionally conservative). He was a gentle portraitist and brilliant photo-journalist. His pictures of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp chuckling over chess, of Matisse painting a voluptuous model, of Alberto Giacometti dashing around his studio like one of his own sculptures in flight, are arrestingly warm. His reportage offers an exhilarating glimpse of a moment in history, not just a snapshot in time, so that what he has seen - the Ivory Coast in 1931, the coronation of George VI, the death of Gandhi, the beginnings of the Berlin wall - is perhaps more impressive than how he has seen it.

The curators cannot be faulted: each image they have chosen to magnify is one of Cartier-Bresson's best. Yet, if we accorded his photographs respect as documents, without singling them out or aiming to elevate them, they would fare better. His scrapbooks are infinitely more interesting than these hallowed frames; his contact sheets no doubt would be too. Each time a sequence has been shown here, and then one of them enlarged, the individual frame pales in comparison.

One of the most energetic portraits is a photograph of Francis Bacon. He leans forward, mid-speech, hand brushing away his hair, a genteel cup of tea on a table before him. Inspired by the idea of this meeting, of two men born a year apart, one wonders what this show would have been like had Bacon curated it. More scrambled, less reverential: the 20th century's most iconic images as seen by its greatest iconoclast.

   

 

 

 Unshown Bacon portrait exported from Iran

 

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

 

 

       

              Reclining Man with Sculpture, 1960-1961

 

For 25 years, it has languished in the vaults of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. But a striking portrait by Francis Bacon, which is thought never previously to have gone on public display, is being rushed to Britain as a highlight of a new exhibition of the artist's works.

The deal with Iran was clinched after months of negotiations - although there is still a question mark over whether the work will arrive in time for this weekend's opening of Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

The show is the last scheduled to take place for four years after the Bacon estate decided on a moratorium on loans pending the centenary of the artist's birth in 2009.

Reclining Man with Sculpture, 1960-1961 was owned by the British collector, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, but was sold to the wife of the late Shah of Iran in the 1970s who founded her own gallery. But many of the Western paintings in her extraordinary collection ended up in storage when the fundamentalists seized power in 1979 and took control of what became known as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Andrea Rose, director of visual arts at the British Council, spotted this portrait in the museum's vaults when she was visiting Iran two years ago.

The portrait is thought to be of Peter Lacy, a former RAF pilot who was Bacon's lover. They had a tense and violent relationship, although Lacy is often described as the love of Bacon's life.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

The lover who blew Bacon's millions

 

Francis Bacon left his barman boyfriend £11m: last week there was almost nothing left. Andrew Sinclair, who knew them both, on a spectacular spending spree

 

The Times, September 5, 2004

 

Francis Bacon was the most famous British painter of his age. His horrific pictures changed the face of art and sold for millions of pounds. But one day in 1988, instead of going to Moscow for a show of his paintings he joined me at the Groucho club in London’s Soho.

Four hours and four bottles of champagne later, I was legless. His last words to me were: “Andrew, unless I leave to see a lawyer, £3m will go to my sister in South Africa. Have you got a bad cause?” “What about yourself, Francis?” I said.

He laughed and left. He was looking, at about 80 years old, like a pantomime Prince Charming, jaunty in high boots, teeth washed in Persil and short slick hair rubbed down with brown boot polish.

I do not know if he got to his lawyer that day. But eventually he did — and left his entire £11m fortune to his final lover, a docker’s son named John Edwards, when he died in 1992.

Edwards died last year and last week his will was published. In 12 years he had managed to squander virtually the whole of his famous friend’s wealth. After tax and other deductions, Edwards’s estate was worth just £786,702.

He was Francis’s last great love. Not least due to their age difference — Bacon was nearly 40 years older than Edwards — the painter and his companion have been described as the art world’s odd couple. Publicly they denied being lovers — homosexuals in that era often did — but I have no doubt they were. What is indisputable is that the two were together for the last 15 years of the painter’s life, and Edwards featured in 30 of Bacon’s works.

They met in the mid-1980s. Edwards, a dark and handsome East Ender with a square jaw and a brooding presence, was working in a pub when Francis first saw him. Living in the seedy area of Cable Street with his five brothers, Edwards wanted to get away from the East End — and the patronage of his new friend was just the ticket.

Bacon set up the Edwards family in the antiques business, bought houses for them and enabled them to enjoy lives that bore no resemblance to their former existence.

Francis and Edwards would meet after breakfast at Bacon’s jammed and cluttered studio at Reece Mews in South Kensington. The artist would often paint Edwards, but his lover recalled that he always made painting into a drama, “as if he was fighting with the canvas”. When Francis slashed up his pictures with a Stanley knife, sometimes John saved the bits and pieces. But he was a minder in real life, not just in art.

The painter needed protection from the swarms of raffish young men around him, looking for a free lunch and more. All rich gays need a warning system in Soho and elsewhere. Bacon realised this. It was for this reason he left his cash and the contents of his studio to Edwards.

So where did the money go? After Bacon’s death, Edwards lived on the Florida Keys and later Thailand.

A sizable portion of the Bacon estate was lost in an extremely foolish legal battle with Marlborough Fine Arts, the gallery, headed by the Duke of Beaufort, through which Bacon had sold his works. A £100m lawsuit claimed the Marlborough had exercised “undue influence” over Bacon, charged too much commission and failed to account for 33 paintings. The gallery rightly denied any wrongdoing — indeed I was lined up as an expert witness in its support.

Then, suddenly, Edwards dropped the case after years of legal wrangling, leaving him lumbered with a bill that ran into millions.

The Bacon money also went to finance Edwards’s life in Thailand with his lover, Philip Mordue — better known in the London underworld as Thailand Phil or Phil the Till — where it was invested in bars and brothels in the über-seedy resort of Pattaya. Does it matter that the money was frittered away? Such things did not matter to Francis Bacon, who never cared about money or whether he was poor or rich.

The Marlborough Gallery used to give him £10,000 every Monday in a roll of £50 notes. Some of these he used to pay for our champagne at the Groucho club. Otherwise he would gamble what he still had at the weekend, playing roulette at the Soho casino of Charlie Chester. The rest he gave to his companions.

Francis moved the Edwards brothers to the Suffolk village of Long Melford. Pamela Firth Matthews, his first cousin, lived there at Cavendish Hall and was the lady of the manor. Long ago at a local dance, the young Francis had shocked everybody by dressing in women’s clothes as a 1920s flapper and declaring his preferences.

Francis bought a gamekeeper’s cottage and then the headmaster’s house at the rear of the village school. The aged Edwards parents would end up living there in green retirement far from Wapping. Later, a pub was bought and two large houses.

Fortunes and the fortunate climb the ladder of success, as Mae West said, wrong by wrong. The Edwards family became the largest landowners in the village and were richer than the Firths. With the help of Bacon, whose family had come from the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, the cockney lads would do better than landed aristocrats from Kildare. This was pure Bacon. His disasters and his pleasures lay in trying to bring opposites together.

In the words of Caroline Blackwood, once married to Bacon’s friend, the painter Lucian Freud: “Francis had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique. I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the royal family in a private house.”

That was the late Princess Margaret, who had made the mistake of trying to sing in front of him.

He never booed John Edwards in the 15 years they were together. Edwards, like nobody else, always treated him like a good mate from the pub.

Andrew Sinclair has written a biography of Francis Bacon. His recent book is An Anatomy of Terror (Pan-Macmillan)

 

 

 

  So where are Bacon's 'missing millions'?

 

   by Emine Sane, The Evening Standard, September 1st, 2004

 

 

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


Despite a reputation for being difficult, Francis Bacon did - in death at least - live up to his celebrated toast of "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends".

So it's hard to know what the artist would have made of the behaviour of John Edwards, the man to whom he left his £11m fortune when he died in 1992.

It appears that Edwards, a former cockney barman once described by Bacon as his "only true friend", spent most of his inheritance before he died last year - mostly on homes in Suffolk for his family.

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.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon, le sacré et le profane

 

Jusqu’au 15 août, Francis Bacon s’expose au musée Maillol, à Paris. «Le sacré et le profane sont les deux pôles entre lesquels tient tout l'oeuvre de Bacon» selon le commissaire à l’exposition, Michel Peppiatt.

 

RFI - Aug 15, 2004

 

Commissaire de l’exposition, et ami de Francis Bacon pendant près de trente ans, Michel Peppiatt explique: «Athée virulent, faisant de l’athéisme sa religion», Francis Bacon a exalté la chair pour mieux rappeler que l’homme n’est pas uniquement un être pensant. Derrière sa peinture, violente et dérangeante, la démarche est philosophique et spirituelle: «Bacon est un lutteur spirituel, dit Michel Peppiatt, c’est un peintre religieux car il pose les questions de la vie et de la mort». C’est la chair qui fait, chez Bacon, l’objet d’un sentiment de révérence religieuse, et si les silhouettes sont torturées c’est en quelque sorte pour mieux rappeler que le sang est au coeur même de la vie.

 

Le musée Maillol accueille l’oeuvre de Bacon des «années 50, période pendant laquelle le peintre se cherchait encore. Il faisait beaucoup de tentatives et détruisait beaucoup» à la différence des années 70 où, selon Michel Peppiatt, «il atteint une maîtrise quasiment parfaite, mais en même temps, il n’y a plus cette lutte avec le sujet, avec la matière». L’espace a le mérite d’être à la fois intimiste et suffisamment aéré pour ne pas surenchérir l’enfermement obsessionnel du peintre dans un univers sans espoir. C’est une grande toile sombre de chauve-souris vampire crucifiée qui ouvre l’exposition, faisant partie d’une des «deux crucifixions rarement montrées que Bacon a peintes très tôt», en 1933 et 1950. Puis, «côté papes, on verra ceux de la National Gallery du Canada, et du Stedelijk Museum à Gand, et d’autres venant de collections du monde entier. La National Gallery de Washington nous a prêté également une version du portrait d’Innocent X de Vélasquez qui a déclenché la série de Papes de Bacon».

 

Pourquoi ce titre, le sacré et le profane ? Parce qu’il y a «une contradiction profonde entre l'oeuvre de Bacon et le coeur de l’homme. C’était un athée virulent (…) mais en même temps il a connu deux obsessions au début de sa carrière, le Pape et la Crucifixion (…) une contradiction très féconde». Chacun peut avoir sa propre lecture de l’oeuvre de Bacon mais cela ne restera jamais qu’une lecture parmi tant d’autres possibles: ici voit-on une chauve-souris écartelée sur la croix, là un condamné à mort sur le fauteuil papal, hurlant de douleur, drapé dans de majestueux vêtements sacerdotaux et exhibant des dents acérées, ou là encore un amas de muscles déchirés noués qui pivotent sur eux-mêmes. Mais, au final, chacun ne fait qu’assembler des images et des interprétations. Il n’y a «aucune narration chez Bacon, c’était un créateur d’images» qui tendait à offrir, à travers la blessure, une «vision sacralisée de l’humain» soulignant que «la vie et la mort vont bras dessus dessous». La vie est considérée comme une guerre farouche menée contre la menace de mort -«derrière le vernis de la civilisation, Bacon souhaite démasquer l’effroi et la bestialité» explique Michel Peppiatt- et, face à cette violence, le peintre «se fait médium», opposant une sorte de bras de fer entre l’art et la vie: «je pense que la vie n’a pas de sens mais nous lui en donnons un pendant que nous existons». En somme, entre la naissance et la mort nous vivons; tant qu’il y a de la vie, il y a de la chair, après il ne reste que de la poussière, aussi Bacon exalte-t-il «l’obscénité des corps promis à la décomposition».

 

Ecrasés et tordus, épinglés et étirés, les visages, les amas de muscles, les bouts de corps arc-boutés sont comme autant de témoins d’une vie sans illusion, et si longtemps le public a vu dans ses toiles quelque chose de désespéré, de torturé et d’insupportable, Francis Bacon s’en est expliqué: «Si quelque chose est fort, les gens pensent que c’est douloureux. En fait, je ne crois pas que mes tableaux aient quelque chose à voir avec la douleur. Mais ils n’ont surtout rien à voir avec la séduction. La réalité émeut, fascine, effraie, émerveille ou excite, mais elle ne séduit pas». Aucune complaisance donc pour ménager la réalité d’une condition humaine sans issue: on pense à Beckett «Oh les beaux jours!». Métaphore de cette condition humaine, la toile ne présente aucune issue non plus: les portes ouvrent sur nulle part, les sujets sont encagés dans des box vitrés et il n’existe pas de sortie. Bacon peint un monde clos dont personne ne peut s’évader, même la toile, très structurée, est encadrée et sous verre. Le peintre tenait à ce verre: en même temps qu’il souligne la vanité de la séparation puisque l’oeil franchit, et que le visiteur se trouve inéluctablement piégé dans le reflet. Quant à la vitre peinte, elle contribue à «épaissir l‘énigme et le mystère».

 

«Ma peinture est le reflet de ma vie»

 

«Ma peinture est le reflet de ma vie» disait le peintre. Et dans la biographie Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma, parue à Londres en 1996, Michel Peppiatt propose l’hypothèse selon laquelle la Crucifixion constituait pour Bacon une sorte d’autoportrait. Rappelons que Bacon fut chassé de la maison à l’âge de 16 ans par son père, lequel, dans un même temps, réprouve l’homosexualité de son fils et ses ambitions de devenir peintre. Bacon se retrouve alors en rupture de ban avec sa famille et la société de l’époque: la croix n’est-elle pas alors le meilleur «symbole de la mort, de la souffrance, de la renaissance, de la cruauté de l’homme envers l’homme» et «bien sûr il y avait aussi l’idée que le corps humain n’est que de la viande. Le corps crucifié est donc une carcasse écartelée, pensez au Boeuf écorché de Rembrandt». La thématique du Pape, récurrente dans l’oeuvre de Bacon, peut aussi être mise en lien avec le vécu de l’artiste dont le père aurait eu des ressemblances physiques avec le Pape Innocent X peint par Vélasquez -qui a tant marqué Francis Bacon. Or, Michel Peppiatt d’ajouter: «Il en a fait un pantin, un homme habillé en femme, avec cris et ricanements. Peut-être voulait-il le faire descendre de son trône (…) Bacon se révoltait contre l’autorité religieuse certes, mais aussi contre l’autorité paternelle». Subversive donc, transgressive des interdits, sa peinture exprime indéniablement la souffrance de l’être. Mais Bacon échappe toujours: «c’était un hors-la-loi», une sorte de passe-muraille «qui a toujours brouillé les pistes. Très secret, sa vie avait plusieurs compartiments. Il était capable de sortir d’une bagarre avec son ami pour retrouver l’épouse d’un collectionneur et l’inviter à boire un verre au Ritz, quitter cette dernière et aller se faire tabasser à Soho par une bande de mauvais garçons, ou bien encore jouer sa fortune au casino» rapporte son biographe et ami, Michel Peppiatt auquel l’artiste confiait «il faut être discipliné en tout, même dans la frivolité, surtout dans la frivolité». Folie, excès, maîtrise.

 

Il est tout aussi intéressant et éloquent d’aborder ce «reflet» dont parle le peintre sous l’angle même de la peinture. L’exposition qui nous est offerte vaut aussi pour la réflexion qu’elle suscite car les toiles sont également, aussi structurées qu’accidentées: «à partir de ce qu’il obtenait par accident, il procédait à une manipulation consciente de la matière picturale» explique Michel Peppiatt (…) «il buvait excessivement mais savait en même temps maintenir une discipline de fer dans son travail». Autodidacte, extrêmement cultivé, pétri de références en philosophie et en histoire de l’art, la peinture était pour Francis Bacon «une forme de la pensée, en même temps qu’une expression la plus instinctive possible de la sensation, du désir, de l’effroi». Dans le film proposé à l’exposition, le peintre insiste sur le fait qu’«il regarde et observe tout»: tout percevoir, tout recevoir pour mieux libérer, telle était sa démarche pour mieux réfléchir dans la toile ce qu’il avait perçu avec acuité. Il explique aussi, verre à la main, qu’il ne pouvait travailler que dans l’euphorie. Jamais saoul, «l’alcool, plus qu’un vice, était le prolongement de son tempérament» explique son biographe, celui d’un écorché vif, sensible et secret, réceptif à tout ce qui se passait autour de lui, mais pour transgresser. «Aujourd’hui un peintre ne peut plus être un illustrateur, la photo et le cinéma suffisent amplement. Le peintre doit donc donner de la réalité une autre image». Ainsi, en toute liberté, et bouleversant les logiques, le peintre sollicite les hasards.

 

Menant une vie d’errance, friand de tensions de toutes sortes, Bacon épiait en quelque sorte tous les instants du quotidien pour mieux percevoir la réalité dans ses contradictions et ses accidents qu’il traduisait ensuite en peinture par des distorsions. L’acte même de peindre devait se soumettre à cette loi de l’accident de parcours. C’est ainsi que tout en appartenant à la grande famille des peintres classiques, fidèle à l’art figuratif, et défiant l’abstraction, Francis Bacon a expliqué sa démarche, «Il est fréquent que la tension soit complètement changée rien que de la façon dont va un coup de pinceau. Il engendre une forme autre que la forme que vous êtes en train de faire, voilà pourquoi les tableaux seront toujours des échecs soumis au hasard et à la chance, à l’accident, à l’inconscient. Il s’agit alors de l’accepter ou de le refuser. Une nouvelle vérité, insoutenable, surgit: nous sommes libres». Ainsi, tous ces corps nus hermétiques, anonymes, enroulés sur eux-mêmes sont traités à coup de touches larges, de grands coups de pinceaux. La toile, parfois rêche et rugueuse, est furieusement éclaboussée de giclées de couleurs sanguinolentes, la pâte sèche épaisse est quelquefois additionnée de coton ou de poussière pour donner plus d’épaisseur encore à la matière. Là encore il ne s’agit pas de plaire ou de séduire, mais de «partir à l’aventure de l’art jusque dans ses ruptures» en restant le plus instinctif possible.

 

Francis Bacon, «le sacré et le profane»

Musée Maillol jusqu’au 15 août 2004.

 

 

 

 Bacon triptych emerges from Tehran storeroom

 

  Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, June 18 2004

 

  

   Bedside manner: Francis Bacon's Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, with two Tate Britain attendants. Photo: Graham Turner

 

A major triptych by Francis Bacon is about to see the light after languishing for more than 30 years in the store of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants (1968) was bought, having been shown in Europe in 1972, by the wife of the last shah of Iran. It became part of the collection of the Tehran museum, but it is thought to have been on display there only once in 30 years.

Then, in 2001, Tate Britain's director, Stephen Deuchar, holidayed in Iran. He stopped off at the Tehran museum, asked to meet the director, Ali Reza Sami Azar, and was shown the gallery's reserve collection.

"Even under the fluorescent lighting of the store we could see it was a strong work," Dr Deuchar said yesterday. "An idea of exchanging works emerged - we recently lent them a Bill Woodrow sculpture for a British Council exhibition in the Tehran museum."

The triptych is on loan to Tate Britain for six months, where it forms the centrepiece of a new Bacon room.

The work did not remain in store merely because of its overtly sexual content, though that may have been a factor. "Dr Sami Azar did acknowledge the need for caution over one or two female nudes in the collection," Dr Deuchar said, "but he would say that it was as difficult finding a proper context for the Bacon's display - the revolution brought to an end collecting of contemporary art."

The work is one of a number of vast triptychs that Bacon produced. The left and right panels mirror each other, with a seated figure nude on the left and clothed on the right. It is possible that this represents George Dyer, Bacon's lover who died alone of drink and drugs on their hotel lavatory in Paris in 1971.

The central panel shows two male figures, with simian facial features, in bed. The bed is identifiably that which Bacon used in Morocco and on which he received many beatings by lovers.

 

 

 

 

 Too risque for Iran, Bacon's 'lost' painting goes on show

 

  Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent,,The Independent, June 18, 2004

 

 

FOR THE past quarter of a century, a major painting by Francis Bacon has languished in a storeroom in Iran, its eroticism deemed too inflammatory for public display.

But now British art lovers are to get the chance to see the work which has been kept from Iranians. Tomorrow the extraordinary triptych Two figures lying on a bed goes on display after years of negotiations by the Tate.

The work is owned by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, an institution originally founded by the wife of the last Shah of Iran and the holder of an extraordinary collection of Western paintings.

But it was one of dozens of depictions of nudes consigned to storage after the fundamentalists seized power in the 1979 revolution.

Like most younger Western academics, Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, knew the work only through reproduction. So when he was on holiday in Iran in 2001, he naturally asked to take a look.

Even under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the underground store, it was striking. He asked whether he could borrow it. And the Iranian Ministry of Culture finally agreed.

Surveying the work on the walls of Tate Britain yesterday where it is the highlight of a new temporary Bacon display, he said that it was even more striking seen properly.

"When you saw it under the fluorescent lighting in the store, you could tell it was a strong work, but it looks very vibrant here. The lilac background is very surprising," he said.

Toby Treves, who has curated the display, said the work, which was painted in 1968 not long before it was sold to the Shah's wife, clearly showed a homoerotic strand of Bacon's work that was largely ignored.

"At the beginning of his fame after the war, there was a concentration on the existential aspect of the work, but not much discussion of the quite frank eroticism in many of the paintings," he said. "This triptych is probably the most overtly erotic of the paintings in this room."

The work shows figures in two flanking panels who appear to spy on two naked men lying on a bed in the central panel, with a splatter of white paint flung across them. "It is deeply ambiguous and deliberately so," Mr Treves said.

The Iranian loan is hung alongside another celebrated triptych, his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, dating from 1944, and a work apparently based on photographs of the former cricketer David Gower. Bacon triptychs now command as much as pounds 6m at auction.

The generosity of the Iranian museum and its director, Dr Ali Reza Sami Azar, was returned earlier this year when the Tate lent a Bill Woodrow to an exhibition of British sculpture organised by the British Council.

And extraordinarily, it now looks as if the Bacon may even be seen in Tehran itself. Dr Sami Azar is hoping to include Two figures lying on a bed in an exhibition provisionally entitled Figurative Tendencies in Western Art when it is returned to Iran in the autumn.

 

 

 

  £9.5m required to save the 'lost' Bacon

     The Times, May 28, 2004

 

 

      

            Study after Velasquez  1950  Francis Bacon

 

 

BRITAIN has three months to raise £9.5 million and prevent the export of a “lost” masterpiece by Francis Bacon, considered to be the greatest British painter since Turner.

Estelle Morris, the Arts Minister, yesterday placed a temporary stop on the owner’s attempt to send to America an important painting that was rediscovered after the artist’s death in 1992.

Bacon went to his grave bitterly regretting his decision to ask a colleague to get rid of Study after Velasquez more than half a century ago. He never knew that his instructions had been ignored.

Painted in 1950, Study after Velasquez is from his seminal “Pope” series of more than 45 paintings, reflecting an obsession with Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The 1650 Spanish masterpiece inspired Bacon’s own intense exploration of the human condition.

Bacon had the painting withdrawn from exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1950 and again from the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951. He sent it to his art materials supplier with instructions that it be removed from its stretcher.

Later, assuming that the painting had been destroyed, Bacon often expressed regret at its fate.

The artist was famous for destroying works, taking a knife to even his finest pictures. One of the duties of Barry Joule, a Canadian who became Bacon’s chauffeur, handyman and friend, was to destroy works with which Bacon was not satisfied. The artist could not simply throw them away because members of the public used to search through his dustbins for valuable “souvenirs”.

But in 2002 several masterpieces that he claimed to have ruined beyond repair were found preserved among the mountain of books, papers and photographs scattered around his chaotic studio. More than 200 drawings refuted Bacon’s boast that he never sketched some of his most celebrated creations before committing them to canvas.

Study after Velasquez, one of his most ambitious works, is being sold by the Bacon estate, which declined to comment yesterday on the sale.

The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, which advised the minister on the export decision, noted the painting’s outstanding aesthetic quality and its significance for study as Bacon’s first completed full-length Pope portrait. It said: “While Velasquez’s Innocent X is alert powerful and tense, Bacon’s Pope explodes snarling out of the canvas. The strong vertical lines that run down the picture like bars complete the sense of imprisonment. This device, often referred to as ‘shuttering’ or ‘veiling’, is common to several of Bacon’s early paintings, but here for the first time he lets it slice right through the head and body of the figure, thus intensifying the feeling of bodily violation.”

The £9.5 million must be raised by July 27, with the possibility of an extension to November 27 if there is “a serious intention” to meet the target.

 

 

 

 

 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

 

 

A long-lost "major" work by Francis Bacon has returned to London after an extraordinary 30 years spent hidden in Iran.

The triptych, entitled Two Figures Lying On A Bed With Attendants, has never been seen publicly in London before today, when it is unveiled at Tate Britain.

The last time it was shown anywhere was at an exhibition in Dusseldorf in 1972. The Bacon, which would fetch over £5 million at auction, was painted in 1968. Its central panel shows two men naked on a bed, while the side panels show two lone figures.

It was sold in 1975, via a French art dealer to an Iranian art foundation funded by oil revenues and controlled by Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the last Shah of Iran. It was given to the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, although given its slightly risqué nature it is thought that it was never exhibited.

In 1979, when the fundamentalist ayatollahs violently ousted the Shah, the painting - along with works by Henry Moore, Renoir, Picasso, Warhol, Dali and Picasso - was seized and placed in storage.

Its return is thanks to Tate Britain director Dr Stephen Deuchar, who paid a speculative visit to his Iranian counterpart, Dr Sami Azar, during a family holiday three years ago.

Dr Deuchar told the Standard: "I did know that they had a collection of American and European art, and I knew they had another work by Bacon which I had seen reproduced. But I was only dimly aware of this triptych. It was amazing to see this piece that had evidently been in storage for 30 years."

The Bacon, said Dr Deuchar, "was considered one of his most important works of the late 1960s. And it seems to us, as we introduce it to the Tate, to be a very powerful work indeed."

The painting is not back for good. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has loaned the work in what could prove the start of a fruitful friendship.

Relations between Britain and Iran have warmed considerably, and attitudes to works of art previously thought too risqué to show have shifted.

The Bacon will be part of a new Tate Britain display opening to the public on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

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

 

J    John Ezard, arts correspondent,  The Guardian  Tuesday June 8 2004

 

                                     

                                                       Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne

 

 

Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, which are expected to fetch £1.5m to £2m when they go under the hammer at Christie's this month

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

 

 The New York Times  January 9, 2004


 

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.

 

 

 

 

Prophet of a pitiless world

 



John Berger used to think Francis Bacon painted only to shock and his appeal would soon wear thin. But at a new show in Paris, he realised the painter's personal preoccupations have become terrifyingly relevant



     The Guardian, Saturday May 29, 2004

 



  

       Bacon (photo: Jane Bown) repeatedly painted the human body in discomfort or want or agony


 

Visit the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Maillol Museum in Paris. Read Susan Sontag's latest book, Regarding the Pain of Others. The exhibition, despite the stupid subtitle of Sacred and Profane, represents succinctly a long life's work. The book is a remarkably probing meditation about war, physical mutilation and the effect of war photographs. Somewhere in my mind the book and exhibition refer to one another. I'm not yet sure how.

As a figurative painter, Bacon had the cunning of a Fragonard. (The comparison would have amused him, and both were accomplished painters of physical sensation - one of pleasure and the other of pain.) Bacon's cunning has understandably intrigued and challenged at least two generations of painters.

If, during 50 years, I have been critical of Bacon's work, it is because I was convinced he painted in order to shock, both himself and others. And such a motive, I believed, would wear thin with time. Last week, as I walked backwards and forwards before the paintings in the Rue des Grenelles, I perceived something I'd not understood before, and I felt a sudden gratitude to a painter whose work I'd questioned for such a long while.

Bacon's vision from the late 1930s to his death in 1992 was of a pitiless world. He repeatedly painted the human body or parts of the body in discomfort or want or agony. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical. Bacon consciously played with his name to create a myth, and he succeeded in this. He claimed descent from his namesake, the 16th-century English empiricist philosopher, and he painted human flesh as if it were a rasher of bacon (tranche du lard fumé).

Yet it is not this that makes his world more pitiless than any painted before. European art is full of assassinations, executions and martyrs. In Goya, the first artist of the 20th century (20th, yes), one listens to the artist's own outrage. What is different in Bacon's vision is that there are no witnesses and there is no grief. Nobody painted by him notices what is happening to somebody else painted by him. Such ubiquitous indifference is crueller than any mutilation.

In addition, there is the muteness of the settings in which he places his figures. This muteness is like the coldness of a freezer which remains constant whatever is deposited in it. Bacon's theatre, unlike Artaud's, has little to do with ritual, because no space around his figures receives their gestures. Every enacted calamity is presented as a mere collateral accident.

During his lifetime, such a vision was nourished and haunted by the melodramas of a very provincial bohemian circle, within which nobody gave a fuck about what was happening elsewhere. And yet ... and yet the pitiless world Bacon conjured up and tried to exorcise has turned out to be prophetic. It can happen that the personal drama of an artist reflects within half a century the crisis of an entire civilisation. How? Mysteriously.

Has not the world always been pitiless? Today's pitilessness is perhaps more unremitting, pervasive and continuous. It spares neither the planet itself, nor anyone living on it anywhere. Abstract because, deriving from the sole logic of the pursuit of profit (as cold as the freezer), it threatens to make obsolete all other sets of belief, along with their traditions of facing the cruelty of life with dignity and some flashes of hope.

Return to Bacon and what his work reveals. He obsessively used the pictorial language and thematic references of some earlier painters - such as Velásquez, Michelangelo, Ingres or Van Gogh. This "continuity" makes the devastation of his vision more complete.

The Renaissance idealisation of the naked human body, the church's promise of redemption, the Classical notion of heroism, or Van Gogh's ardent 19th-century belief in democracy - these are revealed within his vision to be in tatters, powerless before the pitilessness. Bacon picks up the shreds and uses them as swabs. This is what I had not taken in before. Here was the revelation.

A revelation that confirms an insight: to engage today with the traditional vocabulary, as employed by the powerful and their media, only adds to the surrounding murkiness and devastation. There are a number of words and cliches, filched from the past, whose currency has now to be categorically refused. Liberty, terrorism, security, democratic, fanatic, anti-semitic, etc are terms that have been reduced to rags in order to camouflage the new ruling pitilessness.

This does not necessarily mean silence. It means choosing the voices one wishes to join. The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.

On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.

The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.

On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.

On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.


   "When my words were wheat
   I was earth. When my words were anger
   I was storm.
    When my words were rock
   I was river.
   When my words turned honey
   Flies covered my lips".
   - Mahmoud Darweesh

Bacon painted the muteness fearlessly, and in this was he not closer to those on the other side, for whom the walls are one more obstacle to get around, even if it involves risking their lives for those following? It could be ...

· Francis Bacon: Sacred and Profane is at the Maillol Museum, Paris, until June 30. Details: 00 33 1 42 22 59 58.

 

 

 

Bacon reigns in Spain

 

by Sue Hubbard, The Independent, 5th March, 2004

 

Madrid has the Prado, Bilbao the Guggenheim, Barcelona the Picasso Museum but Valencia, as Spain's third city, is less likely to be on the art lover's map. In fact, the Institut Valencia d'Art Modern - opened in 1989 and built by the architects Emilio Gimenez and Carlos Salvadores - is an elegant modern geometric building that houses the most comprehensive collection of the Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez, the work of the Valencian artist Igancio Pinazo and a significant collection of contemporary art. And it also puts on exhibitions by artists of international reputation.

Francis Bacon is one such and is an inspired choice to show in Spain. All the previous major shows of Bacon's works have been retrospectives; the Tate Gallery in 1962, the Grand Palais in 1971- 72 and the Metropolitan Museum in 1975. But Bacon is one of the great existential painters of the 20th century - his are the big themes of life and death, love and art, meaning and existence - and this exhibition, The Sacred and The Profane, reflects his essentially nihilistic yet humanistic view of the world through the mirror of his religious-tinted paintings. Bacon never visited Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, yet continually bought copies of it. He was, he said, "afraid to see the reality of Velazquez after I'd been manipulating it so atrociously."

Eight of Bacon's Popes are on show in the first gallery here, gathered from as far a field as Canada, Britain and Australia, hanging alongside the Velazquez, shut in their glass boxes screaming their silent screams like Eisenstein's Nanny in Battleship Potemkin. Both photography and film were potent influences on Bacon. But photography had covered so much. For a painting to be worth its salts the image, he said, had to be "twisted" if it was "to make a renewed assault on the nervous system". Bacon wanted to recreate certain kinds of experience, to reveal their poignancy and their intensity. For him "abstract art is free fancy about nothing. Nothing comes from nothing". Man is haunted by the mystery of his existence and, therefore, obsessed with remaking and recording his own image as a way of unlocking perception about the human condition.

Seeing Bacon in Spain one realises what a very un-English painter he really is. Though he has long been associated with the London School, he was born in Dublin of English parents. His unconventional upbringing in rural Ireland, which ended when his authoritarian father threw him out of the house on discovering his son's predilection for his mother's underwear, and his passionate homosexuality connect him back to the raw sensibility of Greek tragedy rather than to the mannered, drab post-war world of London that he inhabited as a young man. His strong, bold colours seem to grow straight out of the Spanish tradition and it is not difficult to see his repeated paintings of the Pope - the father - as psychoanalytic workings through of his relationship with his own dominant paterfamilias.

But it is man's vulnerability that Bacon illustrates with such perception in his paintings of his lover, George Dyer, or Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours (from Muyerbridge), 1961, and Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952, where a naked figure snuffles on all fours, perhaps urinating or throwing up in the grass like a wild beast. Here Bacon reveals the very pity and terror both at the heart of Christianity and of human existence.

The exhibition concludes with a triptych from 1987 - that religious form found above the altar of so many a Spanish church. The two left-hand paintings are of legs against an orange background. Legs on what looks like a mortician's table, legs covered with band aids and dripping blood from stigmata-like wounds. In the right hand painting is the head of a bull; we are invited to think of the bulls of Mycenae, the bull as carcass, as meat and as Christ-like victim. Seeing this great English painter in a Spanish context is to revitalise him, for it connects him back not only to Velazquez and Catholic art, to the ancient rituals of bull fighting and the myths and tragedies Greece, but also to the existentialist questions embedded deep within the mysteries and paradoxes of faith.

Institut Valencia D'Art Modern, Guillem de Castro 118, 46003, Valencia, Spain, to 21 March

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art 

Titian – Velázquez – Rembrandt – Goya – 

van Gogh – Picasso – Giacometti – Eisenstein

  

Riehen (BS): 8 February to 20 June 2004

The Fondation Beyeler is presenting the first large museum exhibition in Switzerland to be devoted to Francis Bacon, who was born in Dublin in 1909 and lived in London until his death in 1992. Rather than being a conventional retrospective, the exhibition places Bacon’s oeuvre for the first time in the context of its links with earlier art, from the Old Masters down to the twentieth century.

 

  Fondation Beyeler
  Baselstrasse 101
  4125 Riehen
  Tel. (061) 645 97 00

   Press Release Fondation Beyeler

 

  

         Giacometti and Bacon on display in the Beyeler Foundation Beyeler 

 

Bacon was one of the most significant objective painters of the twentieth century. Until the last he devoted himself to the drama of human existence as a central theme of art – and to the human body as its perfect projection screen. In this regard he followed Picasso, whose obsession with the painterly tradition is likewise legendary.

The exhibition comprises about forty works by Bacon, and about the same number by other artists, including Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas, Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, as well as films by Eisenstein and Buñuel. It also includes a premiere presentation of photographic material and sketches by the artist which he kept in his studio and which served him as sources of inspiration for his paintings. Since 1998 this material has been in the possession of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, where Bacon’s London studio was also reinstalled after his death. Examples have been selected from this storehouse of imagery – reproductions from art books and magazines – which shed light on the relationship between Bacon’s art and its sources.

This studio material on which Bacon relied for his paintings enables us to form a better idea of the way he dealt with tradition. For instance, he often purposely employed torn, tattered or characteristically reworked reproductions of classical art. Apparently these banal, mistreated images offered a better point of departure for a final transformation into painting. These documents in the exhibition form an eloquent link between the sublime horror of Bacon’s own imagery and the often complex, ambiguous beauty of the works of those artists he accepted as his idols.

The exhibition sheds light on the following thematic areas: The tradition of the papal portrait; Bacon’s portraits of popes; the motif of the scream in Bacon; the motif of the cage; Bacon and Surrealism; Bacon and van Gogh; the triptych as a painting genre; Bacon’s representation of the human figure by reference to Ingres and Velázquez; portrait and self-portrait; and the motif of the mirror in Bacon’s work.

Major works in the exhibition include several of Bacon’s famous triptychs (e.g. Three Portraits: Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self-Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1973), in which the artist infused new expressive life into this time-honored genre of art. In addition to several key versions of the screaming pope, variations on a mutilated self-portrait by van Gogh are on view.

Works by other artists include Titian’s Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (1551-62), from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Portrait of Pope Paul III (1546), from the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Also on view are Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx (1826-27), from the National Gallery in London, a direct model for Bacon’s version of the subject. Pastels by Edgar Degas give an idea of why Bacon was so profoundly impressed by this artist’s approach. For the first time, drawings by Picasso from the late 1920s are confronted with Bacon’s surrealistic drawings from the early 1930s, when his artistic activity began. Also on display are major works by Rembrandt, Velázquez and van Gogh. In addition, there will be screenings of an excerpt from the film Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein, and of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s short film An Andalusian Dog, individual scenes and still photos from which Bacon adapted for his compositions.

The idea for the exhibition came from Wilfried Seipel, Director General of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, where the show was previously on view. The conception, relating to the tradition of art and Bacon’s oeuvre, and its scholarly realization were the responsibility of Barbara Steffen, freelance curator. As guest curator she conceived and curated the exhibition, organized jointly with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, for both venues.

The two organizing museums present an interesting contrast. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Bacon was a modern guest in a collection of Old Masters. At the Fondation Beyeler – which harbours a significant group of Bacon works – the situation is just the opposite, with Old Masters such as Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt making guest appearances in a museum of Classical Modernism. Incidentally, the present exhibition belongs to a proven type of project at the Fondation. Yet unlike Cézanne and Modernism (1999) and Claude Monet ... to Digitial Impressionism (2002), here the focus is on the influences to which the principal artist in the exhibition was subjected, rather than on the influence he exerted on others.

The catalogue, edited by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, is published in a bilingual German and English edition, by Skira, Milan. It contains essays by Barbara Steffen, Norman Bryson, Ernst von Alphen, Olivier Berggruen, Margarita Cappock and Michael Peppiatt. Approx. 380 pages with approx. 210 full-colour reproductions (CHF 58.00).


Date: 7.2.2004

 

 

Digging for sources of inspiration

Exhibit shines light on painter Francis Bacon

 

CNN  Friday, February 27, 2004

 

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) 

Archaeologists had to retrieve the more than 7,000 objects cluttering the late artist's London studio.

They collected countless brushes, empty tubes, rags and tin cans encrusted with paint. They also picked up many crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books. And they cataloged close to 1,500 photos, often in poor condition.

Chaos seems an understatement in describing the place where Francis Bacon lived and worked for his last three decades until his death in 1992 at the age of 82. But the studio, since reconstructed to its original, messy state at The Hugh Lane gallery in his native Dublin, was a treasure trove for art historians seeking a deeper insight into the enigmatic painter's disturbing and distorted imagery.

Showcases with some 65 newspaper clippings, photos, book leafs and other samples from this "studio material" are for the first time part of a unique exhibition on the artist. Titled Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, it focuses on his main sources of inspiration by confronting some 40 of his paintings with an equal number by old masters and other artists. They are on loan from museums and private collectors in the United States and Europe. The show runs through June 20.

For Barbara Steffen, curator of the show at the Beyeler Foundation museum in suburban Riehen, Switzerland, the studio material presents the missing link between the "the sublime horror of Bacon's own imagery and the often complex, ambiguous beauty of the artists he accepted as his idols."

Among the paintings, special prominence is given to Bacon's interpretations of an austere 17th-century portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez, which fascinated him for many years. Some of Bacon's images, which are up to 78 inches high, suggest the papal throne, supposedly a symbol of power, holding an anguished, isolated figure.

They include versions of his "screaming pope" shown together with the still of a terrified victim taken from film director Sergey Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," the 1925 silent film about the Russian revolution. Confronting them are sketches of a weeping woman by Picasso. The close-up still, his source for the pope's stunned features, was found in Bacon's studio as were numerous color and black-and-white reproductions of the Velazquez original, which he never saw.

Distance from subjects

Also on view are other examples of how Bacon merged several sources from his studio collection in his paintings, sometimes with absurd results. In two versions for "Study for Bullfight," shown along with Goyaesque prints on the same theme, Bacon has introduced a section of a Nazi party rally, presumably inspired by a newspaper photo.

"The arena doubles as a place for mass rallies where violence on a broader scale can be fomented," comments Margarita Cappock, co-author of the 400-page exhibition catalog.

Bacon became interested in bullfights during visits to Spain and southern France. Cappock notes he once told an interviewer that "bullfighting is like boxing -- a marvelous aperitif to sex."

Bacon was a flamboyant gay whose lurid sex life began long before 1967 when homosexuality ceased to be a criminal offense in Britain. In 1953, a painting suggestively showing two men on a bed caused a scandal when it was exhibited at London's Hanover Gallery. The painting was based on photographs of wrestlers by Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century American pioneer of photographic art.

Bacon kept several copies of Muybridge's book The Human Figure in Motion in his studio. Several leaves from the book allow visitors to see how Bacon used them in depicting overtly homosexual themes through most of his artistic career.

A deeply shocking Bacon triptych displayed at the Beyeler Foundation museum recounts the 1971 suicide of George Dyer, an almost illiterate one-time petty thief and Bacon's lover for eight years, who became addicted to drugs and drinking. On the eve of a large Bacon retrospective in Paris' Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead on the toilet in a Paris hotel where they had shared a room.

Bacon almost never painted from life. Even portraits of his closest friends were based on photos he had ordered for the purpose; sometimes they were based on pictures of other people. He repeatedly said he felt inhibited by the presence of models and that he needed a distance from what he was painting. His many self-portraits, shown with some of the Rembrandts he admired, also were done from photos, including some taken in automatic photo booths.

No palette was found in his studio. Walls, doors and abandoned canvases served Bacon as substitutes. Sometimes, he left brushes aside and used his hand or rags to apply the paint.

Bacon died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992, during a visit to Madrid. Long before his death, he had amassed a fortune but never changed his lifestyle, continuing to live in his tiny apartment and studio above a garage in Kensington. His sole heir was his last lover, John Edwards, who died of lung cancer last year at age 53. He once said in an interview that despite his seeming flamboyance, Bacon was actually "a lonely and shy man."

Three years before Bacon's death, the disturbing Dyer suicide triptych was sold at a New York auction for $6.27 million, believed to be an all-time record for a Bacon work. And there still seems to be a good market for his papal portraits although he did more than 45 of them in a span of 20 years. One, dated 1963, fetched $5.43 million at a recent London sale.

 

 

 

Exposition.

Bacon, le cri et la viande

À Bâle (1), la Fondation Beyeler a rassemblé quarante toiles du peintre britannique pour une rencontre avec les tableaux et les images qui ont nourri une ouvre d’une quotidienne étrangeté.

Bâle (Suisse), envoyé spécial.

 

Maurice Ulrich  l'Humanité - Feb 21, 2004

 

Dans l’incroyable entassement de papiers, vieux pinceaux, tubes de couleurs séchées, bouteilles de whisky, cette véritable décharge privée qu’était l’atelier de Francis Bacon, on a retrouvé, entre autres, maculée de peinture, déchirée sans précaution, une reproduction du Bain turc, d’Ingres. Ce tableau rond - un tondo - que Paul Claudel, en évoquant les entrelacs des corps féminins alanguis dans ce fantasme de gynécée, surnommait " l’assiette d’asticots ". Ingres et Bacon. Singulier compagnonnage.

La Fondation Beyeler, à Bâle, en réunissant quelques quarante toiles de l’un des peintres les plus singuliers de la seconde partie du XXe siècle, l’un des plus grands, mais aussi des toiles de Vel zquez, Picasso, Ingres précisément, Rembrandt, Géricault, Degas, Titien, Van Gogh, Füssli, Egon Schiele, Soutine, Munch, a choisi non pas seulement de donner à voir des toiles de Bacon rarement réunies en nombre aussi important car dispersées dans les musées et les collections du monde, mais de rendre sensible, manifeste, matériel, son travail dans ses liens - c’est le sous-titre de l’expo -, avec  La tradition de l’art . La tradition de l’art, mais aussi, d’une manière plus vaste et plus précise encore, avec des images emblématiques que Bacon gardait auprès de lui en permanence, photos prises dans des magazines, froissées, en lambeaux rassemblés avec des trombones, tachées, comme ses reproductions de peintures. Ingres, on l’a dit, mais aussi, par exemple, les portraits par Velazquez de l’infante Margarita Teresa ou du petit prince Felipe Prosper, bambin de deux ans, peint engoncé dans ses vêtements d’apparat et mort un an après. Images aussi du mouvement du corps humain, images de viande, de carcasses sanglantes, images enfin du Cuirassé Potemkine, le film d’Eisenstein.

Ce n’est certes pas une totale découverte. Il y a quatre ans, à la Galerie Lelong, à Paris, une exposition de dix toiles inconnues de Bacon avait déjà permis d’approcher ce que l’on pourrait appeler sa méthode, et son univers. En 1996, quatre ans après sa mort, une rétrospective au Centre Pompidou avait donné un panorama sans précédent de son ouvre et, pour une large part, de ses sources, comme de ce qu’il a inspiré à des écrivains comme Michel Leiris, Gilles Deleuze, et bien d’autres.

Mais l’exposition de la Fondation Beleyer, en consacrant une place essentielle à ces sources, va plus loin. Ainsi, avec les extraits, projetés sur un grand écran, du Cuirassé Potemkine, donc. Deux extraits emblématiques. Le refus, des marins du navire, de manger la viande avariée qu’on leur présente, avec l’inoubliable gros plan sur un quartier de viande grouillant de ver - d’asticots. La charge des soldats tsaristes, descendant au pas cadencé et baïonnette au canon, l’escalier d’Odessa, avec bien évidemment la fameuse image du landau dévalant ce même escalier, et un gros plan sur le cri d’une femme, la nourrice peut-être.

Ainsi semblent donnés d’emblée deux pôles de l’ouvre de Bacon. La terreur, le cri et la viande. La viande que nous sommes, promise aux vers.

La peinture de Bacon n’est pas faite pour plaire. Elle suscite parfois même le malaise. Il ne s’agit pas, selon les mots de Max Ernst, de séduire mais de faire hurler. On sait que Bacon a peint des papes, en série, ne dissimulant en rien sa fascination pour le portrait d’Innocent X par Vel zquez, ou l’inspiration directe du portrait, par le Titien, du cardinal Filippo Archinto, au visage singulièrement voilé en partie par une draperie semi-transparente. Bacon reprend la draperie, brosse à grands traits, comme le Titien, le vêtement du cardinal qu’il transforme en pape, hurlant bouche grande ouverte. Le cri du Potemkine.

On a pu gloser à bon droit sur l’empreinte, chez Bacon, de son enfance irlandaise, et du poids de la religion dans l’île. De son exclusion de la maison familiale par un père qui l’aurait découvert habillé de dessous féminins, " jouant " avec les palefreniers. Pape, père, jugement de Dieu. Bacon lui-même, précisément interrogé sur ce rapprochement par le critique David Sylvester, ne le rejetait pas mais ne le niait pas non plus, évoquant de surcroît une véritable attirance sexuelle pour son propre père, dérivée sur les palefreniers. Mais on peut aussi se poser la question, pourquoi un pape hurle-t-il ? Et risquer une réponse. Parce que le représentant de Dieu sur la terre, mieux que tout autre sans doute, sait peut-être qu’il n’existe pas et sait, en tout cas, qu’il va mourir sans la belle et tranquille certitude des âmes simples. Un de ses autres papes hurle encore, encadré par deux quartiers de viande.

C’est en 1953, mais, en 1949, Bacon a peint sans doute l’une de ses toutes premières bouches hurlantes. Elle est environnée, à la Fondation Beyeler, du Cri, de Munch, de différentes esquisses de Picasso, femme pleurant et criant, en particulier pour Guernica, mais aussi par un des célèbres portraits de Dora Maar. La toile de Bacon est épouvantable. On ne peut qu’y distinguer au centre d’une matière sombre et comme brûlée, une bouche ouverte et des dents, la forme vague d’un oil. Ce qu’il a peint là, c’est la projection de son propre corps en décomposition. C’est aussi, ne l’oublions pas, quatre ans seulement après la découverte des camps de la mort, des masses de cadavres. Des abattoirs pour humains.

Trois ans plus tôt, il a peint une autre bouche ouverte, montrant les dents devant, déjà, des quartiers de viande. L’angoisse, le cri, le corps dans son obscénité de chose promise à la décomposition. Mais est-ce bien le corps qui est obscène, et ne serait-ce pas plutôt la mort ?

Voilà ce que peint Bacon, ou voilà plutôt dans ses grandes lignes autour de quoi il peint, indissociable de comment il le peint. Le choc, pour lui, il l’a dit, fut Picasso. Sans doute parce que Bacon avait assez immédiatement compris que la peinture de Picasso, avant d’être figurative, ou abstraite ou cubiste ou quoi que ce soit, n’était pas cela. La peinture de Picasso est ailleurs, elle est philosophique, une forme de la pensée, de la sensation, du désir. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, qu’il peint en 1907, sont une rupture plastique sans précédent et un manifeste. Ingres avait enfermé les femmes dans la prison circulaire du bain turc, non sans y inscrire toutefois la pesante lassitude et l’ennui de celles qui n’ont rien à attendre d’autre que le plaisir du prince dans un temps arrêté à jamais. Picasso en cassant les formes, casse le bordel de ses " demoiselles ". Ce n’est pas un massacre, ou une vivisection, mais une libération. Bacon peint comme Picasso. Non pas à la manière de Picasso. Quoi de plus différent de Guernica que ses crucifixions, à différentes époques. Et pourtant à y regarder mieux, c’est le même tableau. C’est de Guernica que viennent ses formes. Absolument différentes et les mêmes. Comme Picasso, parce que sa peinture est aussi de la philosophie, de la pensée et de la sensation en chair. Ainsi quand il s’en prend, à son tour, au Bain turc en retenant, en 1970, les rondeurs des corps mais en supprimant les têtes. En ont-elles besoin ? La culture de Bacon est absolument considérable. Artistique, bien sûr, littéraire et, précisément, philosophique. D’une certaine manière il ne laisse rien au hasard, même si ce qu’il peint donnera sa place au hasard. Il est fascinant de voir comment, par exemple, telle tache blanche sur la robe d’une de ses amies dont il peint le portrait correspond très exactement à une éraflure sur la photo dont il s’est inspiré. Comment les taches blanches semblables, que l’on retrouve sous les roues de vélo de l’un de ses coureurs cyclistes quand il se met en tête de peindre des coureurs, sont celles sur la photo, des rayures d’un passage pour piétons. Il procède par observation, citations, allusions, métaphores pour faire de toute chose peinture. Il fait le détour par une déconstruction, avec le couteau du boucher, et une re-création. Bacon, au fond, n’est pas abstrait ou figuratif mais parfaitement réaliste et classique. Il ne laisse rien échapper d’une réalité avec laquelle on ne peut tricher. Le corps, la nudité, la chair et la viande, la terreur, et ce qu’il désigne de nous-mêmes en utilisant les cages qui entourent ses personnages, les flèches et les ronds comme des cibles ou un trait qui souligne. D’où son étrange quotidienneté. Le miroir tendu de nous-mêmes ne déforme pas, il réfléchit la mort et le vif.

Maurice Ulrich

Fondation Beyeler, jusqu’au 20 juin.

Site Internet : www.beleyer.com

 

 

 

Francis Bacon und die Bildtradition
Ausstellung stellt Werke Bacons Vorbildern aus der Kunstgeschichte gegenüber
 

Von Oliver Seppelfrick   Deutschland Radio Berlin  4.2.2004

 


Die Fondation Beyeler in Basel vereinigt in einer Sonderausstellung rund 40 Werke des englischen Malers Francis Bacon mit ebenso vielen Originalen jener Künstler, die für ihn Quellen der Inspiration darstellten. Die Spanne reicht von Tizian über Velázquez und Rembrandt bis hin zu Künstlern des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts und macht deutlich, wie sehr Bacon aus der europäischen Kunstgeschichte schöpfte.


Man fragt sich, warum es diese Ausstellung nicht schon früher gegeben hat! Warum man bis heute warten musste, um die Bedeutung der großen alten Meister für den Maler Francis Bacon einmal genau und im Bild zu untersuchen. War es doch schon lange klar, dass Francis Bacon, der ein völliger Autodidakt war und nie eine Akademie besucht hatte, sich zeit seines Lebens an den Großen der Kunstgeschichte abarbeitete. Er war ein Sisyphos am Berg der Kunst, ein Rebell und gleichzeitig einer ihrer treuesten Erfüllungsgehilfen. Christoph Vitali, der Direktor der Fondation Beyeler:

Bacon hat ein Leben lang immer wieder die großen Meister von Tizian über Velasquez bis Goya studiert, hat oft die Originale nicht angeguckt, weil er sie nicht brauchte. Sein Atelier war voll von zerfetzten, zerrissenen Abbildungen von diesen Bildern. Und wir wollen versuchen, zum ersten Mal seine Versionen der Themen oder seine inspirierten, von den großen Meistern inspirierten Bilder mit den Originalen zusammenzufahren.

Francis Bacon arbeitete wie ein Besessener. Das Atelier des Malers war vollgestopft mit Postkarten und Filmfotos, mit aus Büchern herausgerissenen Blättern, Reproduktionen von anderen Kunstwerken zumeist, auf dem Fußboden lagen Pinsel und Farbtöpfe und dieselben "Vorlagen" aus der Kunstgeschichte, zum Teil übermalt, gefaltet, zerknittert, einfach "bearbeitet". Das ganze Atelier war ein einziges Laboratorium. Eine Brutstätte bildlicher Anregungen. Christoph Vitali, der Direktor der Fondation Beyeler:

Er brauchte einfach den Kram, sag ich jetzt mal abfällig, um sich herum. Er musste diese Spuren haben, um sie immer, ich sag noch mal, er hat sich nie um die Originale gekümmert, das Original war ihm überhaupt nix, das hat ihn überhaupt nicht interessiert. Es hat ihn nur die Inspirationsquelle daran interessiert.

100 Bilder und Skulpturen, dazu 50 Blatt Studienmaterial bietet die Ausstellung in der Fondation Beyeler in Riehen bei Basel auf, um dem Thema gerecht zu werden. Darunter die großen Namen der etwas älteren Kunstgeschichte, Michelangelo, Tizian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, jene, die sich wie Bacon auch dem menschlichen Porträt verschrieben hatten, dann - mit einem Sprung in die Moderne - van Gogh, Degas, Picasso - und man kann sehen, wie Francis Bacon sich an den Errungenschaften der Großen gerieben hat. Wie er sie fortführte und radikalisierte.

Besonders deutlich ist dies bei den Bildern, die Bacon am berühmtesten machen sollten, seinen Papstporträts. Hatte Velázquez, den Bacon innig bewunderte, seine Päpste noch am Rande der Menschlichkeit gemalt, einsam und kalt, so reißt Francis Bacon ihnen die Münder auf, malt Geistliche wie Hyänen, die bedrohliche und verschlingende Macht der Kirche, an denen ihr Personal selber leidet, schauerlich!

Er war Katholik, das wissen wir natürlich, er war ja Ire. Und es war sicherlich diese Mischung von Gläubigkeit und Verhöhnung der Religion, die ihn bewegt hat, mit dem Papst als Figur sich so intensiv auseinanderzusetzen. Also als Protestant kann ich mir nicht vorstellen, dass er den Papst zu einer solchen idée fixe seines Schaffens gemacht hat.

Francis Bacon hat aber nicht nur die Kunstgeschichte bearbeitet, er hat sie auch umgedeutet. Hatte Ingres, den Bacon nur mäßig schätzte, seinen Ödipus vor der Sphinx noch ganz nach dem antiken Mythos gemalt als Triumphator, so kehrt Bacon das Verhältnis um: Hier zieht sich Ödipus mit seinem verletzten Fuß vor der Sphinx zurück, die siegt. Das menschliche Leiden unterliegt.

Verletzungen waren das andere große Thema Francis Bacons: Wie kann man bei all den Verletzungen der Moderne, durch die beschleunigten menschlichen und gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse, in denen nichts anhält, noch man selbst bleiben? Wie kann man eine Identität in den Zeiten des permanenten Umbruchs erreichen? In Zeiten, in denen das Individuum selbst kaum noch den Eindruck von einer Einheit hat?

Bacons radikalste Antwort darauf ist der Gang unter die Haut, an das Innerste des Menschen heran, an seine Nervenbahnen, und: der Schrei. Blätter aus medizinischen Werken bedeckten Wände und Boden des Ateliers, Studien von aufgerissenen Mündern, an denen sich Bacon Anregungen holte für seine Auffassung vom modernen Menschen, wenn nicht vom Menschsein überhaupt: Der Mensch ist ausgesetzt in der Welt, ein Fremdling, ein Leidender. Das große Thema der Kunstgeschichte!

Und so läßt die großartige Schau in der Fondation Beyeler nur einen Schluss zu: Francis Bacon war bei aller Ablehnung und Umarbeitung der Tradition nichts anderes als einer ihrer größten Bewahrer! Faszinierend!

Er ist eine in seltsamer Weise in Tragisches und überlegen Humoristisches gespaltene Persönlichkeit. Er zeigte sich oft als ausgesprochen umgänglich, hat viele Freunde gehabt, hat mit den Freunden getrunken, er hat sie alle gefunden immer wieder. Aber er war natürlich in Wirklichkeit ein verzweifelter Mensch gleichzeitig. Und das merkt man, wenn man die Kunst zur Kenntnis nimmt, sehr gut. Und das ist, was wir mit der Ausstellung auch zeigen wollen.

Service:
Die Ausstellung Francis Bacon und die Bildtradition ist vom 8. Februar bis zum 20. Juni 2004 in der Fondation Beyerler in Riehen bei Basel zu sehen.

Öffnungszeiten:
Täglich von 10.00 - 18.00 Uhr
Mittwochs bis 20.00 Uh

 

 

 

Tate acquires contents of a legendary atelier

  • Tuesday January 20 2004

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent

The Guardian, Tuesday January 20 2004

 

The Tate announced yesterday it had acquired what looks less like a national treasure than the sweepings of a studio floor - which is exactly what it is, but from the studio floor of a genius.

The 1,200 items were once part of the legendary chaos of Francis Bacon's studio at Reece Mews in south Kensington, where the artist was known to work knee-deep in a litter of scraps of paper, paint rags, old envelopes and newspaper clippings.

The Tate said the acquisition was "the generous gift of Barry Joule, a friend of the artist", neatly sidestepping a decade of controversy.

The Francis Bacon estate stressed yesterday that the Tate's acceptance of the archive did not constitute an authentication, and said much work remained to be done on the contents.

It will take experts years to work through the hoard to see exactly what they have been given by Mr Joule, the artist's friend, chauffeur and handyman.

Art world legend insists that when Bacon died in 1992 the Tate was offered the studio by his heir and last companion, John Edwards, who died in Thailand last year.

The gallery is said to have rejected the offer and the room, with every scrap of paper and cigarette stub forensically recorded, went to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it is a popular exhibit.

The history of the material donated to the Tate is as eccentric as the artist.

Mr Joule, a Canadian living in London, met Bacon in 1978 when he saw a head sticking out of an upstairs window of the neighbouring house. It turned out to be the artist, worrying his television aerial had blown off in a storm. Mr Joule offered to replace it, and the men became friends.

He says Bacon asked him to take away sackloads of rubbish from his studio before he died. The circumstances of the removal have been disputed ever since. The donation to the Tate ends bitter controversy over the archive.

Some of the scraps of paper are drawn over, many with images recognisable from Bacon's work. One sheet is a map showing the shortest route between Reece Mews and the Colony Club, Bacon's favourite drinking place in Soho.

There have two very successful exhibitions of part of the Joule archive: one in 2001 at the Barbican Gallery in London and the other in Dublin.

Mr Joule, who has homes in England and France, has kept some items, but has promised to bequeath them to the Tate.

The gallery said yesterday it could be three years before the material was displayed.

 

 

 

 

Tate brings home a £20m Bacon collection

 

Art lovers will be the main benefactors of a selfless act that ends a 12-year legal dispute

 

By Dalya Alberge, The Times, January 19, 2004

 

 

A FRIEND of Francis Bacon has given the Tate Gallery more than 1,200 sketches by the Irish-born 20th-century master.

Estimated to be worth £20 million, it is one of the most generous donations in the Tate’s 107-year history.

Barry Joule, 49, a Canadian who became Bacon’s chauffeur, handyman and friend for 14 years after he had repaired the artist’s television aerial, told The Times yesterday that this was his way of giving something back to London, his home since 1978. The two men lived next door to one another in South Kensington.

Seeing the sketches piled up in boxes at the Tate yesterday, Mr Joule said: “It’s painful to part with, in a way. But I love London. It’s been good to me. Francis was a London painter, not an Irish painter, and he liked coming to the Tate.”

The collection offers a unique insight into a self-taught painter who captured the pain of human existence. It includes paint-splattered photographs and sketchcovered clippings from magazines, and the images range from oil studies for known compositions to the briefest of rehearsed outlines for figures.Bacon repeatedly worked over photographs to capture an action or movement, or the expression on a face — “ things that caught his eye”, Mr Joule said.

The pieces offer crucial evidence of how Bacon drew and prepared his compositions, despite his repeated insistence that he never did so. Most of the sketches have never been seen publicly before. Mr Joule, who is now writing a book about life with the artist, has kept them in a bank vault since Bacon’s death in 1992.

The Tate’s acceptance of his gift marks the end of a bitter 12-year legal battle with Bacon’s estate. Until now, the estate had repeatedly refused to authenticate the works, let alone accept Mr Joule’s ownership of the collection. “At one point they said I’d stolen it,” he said yesterday.

The estate also prevented the Barbican Centre in London from showing reproductions of Bacon’s paintings in 2001, disputing Mr Joule’s ownership.

Days before he died, Bacon handed the works to Mr Joule with the words: “You know what to do with them.”

One of Mr Joule’s duties had been to destroy works with which Bacon was not satisfied, slashing a picture to shreds with a Stanley knife and burning it. The artist could not simply throw them away because members of the public used to search through his dustbins for valuable “souvenirs”.

But in the case of this collection, Mr Joule does not believe that Bacon wanted it destroyed. “Definitely not. He meant to keep it,” he said.

In earlier years Bacon had given Mr Joule works which he later wanted returned, and others as gifts to keep. But without the blessing of Bacon’s estate, the collection remained in limbo, dividing the art world over the works’ authenticity. Some even suggested that the sketches could be fakes.

Although the collection includes images that relate to known paintings, such as his study for the death mask of William Blake in the Tate, along with the seminal Pope series and his portrait of George Dyer, his early lover, the doubters were concerned because it contradicted Bacon’s claim that he never drew. In interviews, both with Bacon scholars and in a series of taped conversations with Mr Joule himself, he repeated the denial, saying that his imagination was sparked by literature, poetry, films and life events.

The climate changed after the death last year of John Edwards, Bacon’s former boyfriend, who headed the estate. Mr Joule said: “John Edwards was like a son to Francis. He wanted 100 per cent of Francis and there was little room for someone else.”

Yesterday, in a statement, the estate of Francis Bacon said: “It is right that these items should be studied and we are happy Tate and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin (which has other material from Bacon’s studio) will be able to join their scholarly forces in this endeavour.”

Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate, said: “Barry Joule’s generous gift will provide a fascinating insight into Bacon’s working practices.”

Such is the scale of the mat-erial that the gallery estimates that it will take as long as three years to study it properly. Only then will it go on display to the public.

 

 

 

 

Too risque for Iran, Bacon's nudes could be shown in London

 

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent


The Independent, Thursday, 8 January 2004

 

With its startling central nudes, a Francis Bacon triptych bought by the last Shah of Iran and displayed in his wife's dazzling museum of modern art was never going to amuse the country's hard-line ayatollahs.

With its startling central nudes, a Francis Bacon triptych bought by the last Shah of Iran and displayed in his wife's dazzling museum of modern art was never going to amuse the country's hard-line ayatollahs.

So when the fundamentalists seized power in the 1979 revolution, the work, Two figures lying on a bed with attendants, was one of dozens seized and sent to storage.

It has languished unseen for nearly a quarter of a century since, a victim of the sensitivities surrounding depictions of flesh, which are still regarded as indecent by today's conservatives.

But now negotiations are under way for the work, painted in 1968, to be lent to Tate Britain for display in the UK for the first time. It would form the centrepiece of a small Bacon exhibition for six months from this summer.

With Bacon triptychs now commanding as much as £6m, the show would give British art-lovers a chance to see a valuable work most will never even have heard of.

But if the loan application to Iran's Ministry of Culture succeeds, it would also be the next step in a gradual but intriguing cultural détente between Britain and a country many would regard as hostile.

Just as the American hospital erected in Bam in the wake of its catastrophic earthquake suggested hopes of a thaw in the enmity between those two countries, the potential loan of the Bacon is part of a developing relationship between Iran and the UK.

In 2001, the Barbican led the way with a season of Iranian film and an exhibition of art including works lent by the Tehran museum which it had never dared display. Last year, as part of a British Council initiative, Dundee Repertory became the first British theatre company to perform in Iran since Derek Jacobi starred in Hamlet in 1977.

Next month the British Council will open an exhibition of British sculpture at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by the late Shah's wife. And next year the British Museum hopes to stage the first major UK show of treasures from ancient Persia, including some of the greatest relics in Iran.

Relations can still be tricky. The Dundee actors found their performance thoroughly vetted by both the hard-liners and the liberals, with strict restrictions on men and women touching.

The sculpture exhibition was originally due to take place last year but fell foul of political sensitivities when Argentina lodged extradition proceedings against a former Iranian ambassador in Britain accused of terrorism.

But Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain who visited Tehran last month for talks, said it was clear the political climate was "conducive" to greater contact.

The groundwork for the current discussions was laid two years ago when Dr Deuchar visited the modern art museum while on a family holiday and was made warmly welcome by its director, Dr Sami Azar.

"They have got a core collection of Western art which includes some important British work - Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and two Bacons," Dr Deuchar said. "[Dr Azar] kindly showed me this Bacon in the store and I thought it would be rather great to see it in this country in the context of some other Bacons. I hadn't even seen this one reproduced before.

"It hasn't been exhibited in this country and I don't believe it was exhibited in America apart from when it was in the Marlborough Gallery [in New York] for sale." It was in "very good condition", he added.

The work was sold shortly after it was painted in 1968 and is understood to have been in Iran by the early 1970s. Tony Shafrazi, a well-known New York art dealer, was buying works for the Shah at that time and is likely to be asked for details of how it came into the Shah's collection and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

The museum was founded with money from the country's immense oil revenues by Farah Pahlavi, the widow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Housing Iranian art alongside works by Picasso, Monet, Dali and Warhol, it opened in 1977 with great fanfare and a guest list including Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller.

But when the royal family was deposed, the collection was seized and the more controversial works were consigned to a vault, known since then as "The Treasure".

However, some relaxation of attitudes is emerging. An exhibition of Impressionist paintings at the museum three years ago included a Renoir previously regarded as too risqué for public viewing.

Graham Sheffield, the Barbican's artistic director, who has visited Iran, said the artistic scene was thriving and artists could get "the odd erotic moment" past the censors if they were subtle enough. But Bacon's nudes were "probably a bit challenging", he said.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Images - Vienna - Kunsthistorisches Museum

by Richard Shone

ArtForum, September, 2003

by Richard Shone

 

KUNSTHISTORISCHES MUSEUM

 

Francis Bacon's work is riddled with references to the old masters, from Duccio to Degas. He was also very good at talking about them, as we know from his interviews with David Sylvester. This exhibition, organized by freelance curator Barbara Steffens, brings together a sizable group of Bacon's paintings, particularly his triptychs, and juxtaposes them with pertinent works by Velazquez, Titian, Ingres, Degas, and Picasso. Relying on the archive held by the Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery in Dublin, the show in turn looks at the other side of the coin of Bacon's high-art tastes and examines his relation to films, photos, and magazines by exhibiting ephemera not publicly shown before. Oct. 15-Jan. 6; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Feb. 7, 2004-June 20, 2004.

 

 

 

  Figure in a Landscape, Francis Bacon (1945)

    Jonathan Jones
    The Guardian, Saturday June 28, 2003

 

 

    

                Figure in a Landscape 1945  Francis Bacon

 

Artist: Francis Bacon (1909-1992) revolutionised painting by dragging it backwards into its own visceral, bloody, expressive history. Bacon was once an acolyte of the international style, the smooth, stylish modernism of the interwar years. It was a style he aspired to in his abortive career as an interior designer: the bizarre circular furniture that props up this Figure is very like the glass and tubular steel objects the young Bacon created.

However, Bacon's originality was to mine the traditional in painting, to return, in the 1940s, to the apparently bankrupt genres of the portrait, the landscape, even the religious altarpiece. No one could accuse him of seeking comfort in the past. What he found there was horror, and a language to speak of horror.

In Velázquez he found alienation, in Rembrandt death, in Christian iconography sadism. The potentially kitsch qualities of representational art become, in Bacon, tragicomic, the luxury of painting - and his painting is nothing if not luxurious - a disillusioned debauch in a closed room. By revealing that "traditional" art in a gilded frame could be more sick, hideous and, therefore, contemporary than avant-garde experiment, Bacon resurrected painting, albeit as mutant zombie.

Subject: Bacon based this painting on a photograph of his friend Eric Hall in Hyde Park.

Distinguishing features: This painting fixes you with its hauteur. On the white wall at Tate Modern, it is old-fashioned and archaic, a portrait on the scale and with the grandeur of an Old Master. It has that kind of authority, and the sense that you are looking at a sad, noble thing. It is imposing. But it is a trick. Accepting it as real, you are pulled into its paradox: a body that is not a body, a person who is not there. It is a gothic nightmare.

Look at the suit, that stereotyped garment designed as a uniform for civilians. Bacon paints it with orthodox realism. It is a real suit, but its legs fade into nothing. The jacket is a sheltering darkness, a funnel, a haunted house. Inside is no one. The man who sits here has no heart, no eyes and no head. Someone has sliced away almost all of him. Horribly, there is still flesh and there is still a person, or as the surrealists would say, a personage.

The blue and purple, meaty hand protrudes from the right sleeve as if there were a human being in this portrait. What emerges from the left sleeve is worse. Bloody, gory and undefined, a mess of powdered colour, his left hand explodes before our eyes into a violet cloud. We are looking at an abomination, a body without consciousness and without structure.

This painting is what portraiture might look like after the end of humanity: the ghost of the portrait. It is a travesty of the relationship between human beings and nature that painting once richly explored. TS Eliot is surely a reference point. Eliot's wasteland, where life itself, its continuation, is chilling - tubers from the death earth - is matched in the jagged grass and icy blue sky of this desolate park. Bacon's nature, while melancholy, is alive. It is the man who doesn't belong here.

But finally there is pity. This is a Frankensteinian thing, a wretched, friendless nobody, someone who wears a suit but cannot fill it, not a personality but a bit of shapeless flesh, a hollow man.

Inspirations and influences: Bizarrely, but unmistakably, Bacon's painterly parkland recalls the lovingly flicked foliage in which the 18th-century portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough nestled his subjects.

Where is it? Tate Modern, London, SE1 (020-7887 8000).

 

 

 

CHRISTIE'S 

POST-WAR & CONTEMPORARY EVENING SALE

 

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) Study for a Portrait

 

SALE 6692  London, King Street  |  5 February 2003 

 

 

                  Study for a Portrait 1979 Francis Bacon

 

Estimate £400,000 - £500,000 ($661,200 - $826,500)

Price Realized £556,650 ($920,142)

Estimate

Lot Description: Study for a Portrait signed, titled and dated 'Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1979' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 14 x 12in. (35.6 x 30.5cm.) Painted in 1979

Pre-Lot Text  PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

 

 

 

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Gallery, New York. Private collection, United States. Anon. sale; Christie's New York, 20 November 1996, lot 22. Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.

 

 

EXHIBITION: London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Small Portrait Studies: Loan Exhibition, October-December 1993, no. 3 (illustrated in colour). London, Olympia Exhibition Halls, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, February-March 1996.

 

 

NOTES: Just as the people around Francis Bacon formed the backbone of his life, so their portraits formed the backbone of his work. Although Bacon painted animals and landscapes in some of his works, it was the host of characters from his daily life who provided his main source of inspiration and fuelled his works. Many of these paintings featured his friends and lovers, be they dead or alive, and Study for a Portrait, executed in 1979, is marked with notable similarities to the pictures Bacon painted of his partner John Edwards, whom he had first met in 1974. Even through the haze of Bacon's hallmark distortions, these features are visible. Meanwhile, the arching shape of the heavy eyebrow in particular is echoed throughout Bacon's portraits of Edwards. This was also a feature of Bacon's own physiognomy, as seen in his self-portraits, meaning that Study for a Portrait appears as a strange and haunting fusion of the two men. 

 

 

In fact, the distortions in Bacon's art lend the faces and flesh of his subjects an extra intensity. Bacon does not merely paint a portrait, he manages to smear life itself across his canvas. "The living quality is what you have to get," he explained. "In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person... Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a sort of colour photograph of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves really trapped and caught. The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation... There are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people's are stronger than others." (F. Bacon, 1982-84, in: D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact. Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, pp. 172-74.) 

 

It is these emanations that mark Study for a Portrait. They seem to blur the face, to bruise it as though Bacon's rendering a portrait is in itself some act of violence, some assault. However, Bacon was a master of rendering flesh and character, and this work condenses both into an almost coagulated mass of humanity. 

 

 

Bacon's early works were clearly influenced by Surrealism, and its legacy remained visible in his work throughout his career. Instead of merely representing the world and people around him, he tried to displace everything, to rip it out of context so that it could be examined in a new and stark light. This functioned on several levels: in Study for a Portrait, the facial features appear to have been dragged and blurred, for instance the nose which seems to have little connection to the face. At the same time, Bacon's means of framing the work with bands of orange creates a palpable sense of placing and display, as though the head were in a cabinet. The blue and beige background increase this effect, giving no clues as to the location of the sitter and yet adding a sense of dirt, a bruised darkness whose texture throws the flesh into contrast and thrusts it into the viewer's space.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: The Last Interview

 

The Independent, June 14th 2003

 

 

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

Published: March 7, 2003
The New York Timesarc March 7, 2003

h 7, 2003

 

John Edwards, an illiterate former barman from the East End of London who was the artist Francis Bacon's closest friend in the last 16 years of his life and the sole heir to his paintings and properties, died on Tuesday in Bangkok. He was 53.

The cause was lung cancer, lawyers for the estate said.

Mr. Edwards, who was the model for at least 30 of Bacon's late portraits, met the painter in 1976 at the Colony Room, a drinking club in the Soho district of London that had long been popular with artists. Although the men were gay, Mr. Edwards always said that he had no sexual relationship with Bacon, who was 40 years his senior and at the time one of the most celebrated painters in Britain.

''Francis was a real, true father to me,'' Mr. Edwards told The Daily Telegraph of London in a rare interview a year ago. ''I was close to my own father. But Francis gave me all the guidance I needed, and we laughed a lot. And I think he liked me because I didn't want anything from him.''

After Bacon's death in April 1992 at 82, Mr. Edwards was distraught to find himself the center of news media attention, friends said, and he moved briefly to Florida. In 1994 he settled in the Thai resort of Pattaya with his partner, Philip Mordue. London newspapers speculated today that Mr. Mordue, 43, was the likely beneficiary of Mr. Edwards's estate.

The value of the estate that Bacon left to Mr. Edwards had a net worth of nearly $17 million. In 1999, however, the estate sued Marlborough U.K. and Marlborough International, which had long managed Bacon's affairs, charging that they had ''wrongfully exploited'' him. The suit was dropped early last year when both sides agreed to pay their own costs and Marlborough released all its documents about Bacon .

In 1998 Mr. Edwards gave the contents of Bacon's famously disordered studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it has been reconstructed down to the tiniest detail, including remnants of canvases that Bacon destroyed. The gift also included photographs, drawings, books, artists' material and furniture.

Mr. Edwards, the son of an East End longshoreman, was born in 1950 within the sound of the bells of St. Mary le Bow Church, which made him a true Cockney. He had dyslexia and never learned to read or write. He was working in a pub in Wapping, a London neighborhood, when he met Bacon. The next day, Mr. Edwards recounted, he was invited to Bacon's studio and was surprised to discover that the artist had already sketched his portrait.

''Terrible mess, it was,'' Mr. Edwards later said of the studio. ''I remember the first time I saw it, I said to Francis, 'How can you work here?' But he said it was how he liked it. He couldn't be bothered to clear it up. All he wanted was to have the peace and quiet to paint.''

The men soon became inseparable, with Bacon summoning Mr. Edwards to breakfast most days and having him accompany him on his frequent nighttime drinking and gambling binges. One of his jobs, Mr. Edwards later said, was to make sure that Bacon did not spend all his money. But, invited to keep Bacon company while he painted, Mr. Edwards also became a rare witness to the artist at work.

''When Francis painted, there was always a drama,'' he once recalled of the tortured forms that Bacon produced. ''It always seemed to me as if he was fighting with the canvas.''

On occasions, Mr. Edwards was also recruited to destroy unsatisfactory works, sometimes by slashing them with a knife.

In his interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Edwards discussed the relationship further. ''We'd talk about everything,'' he said. ''He was a beautiful man; you'd be hypnotized by him. He'd talk to you and you'd just want him to talk more. Everything he talked about - his posh mates, the people he knew in the art world - it was all so clear.''

As for his own appeal to Bacon, he offered an explanation: ''I think he felt very free with me because I was a bit different from most people he knew. I wasn't asking him about his painting or anything like that. Most people around Francis looked up to him and he didn't like that. I asked him once, 'What do you see in me?,' and he laughed and said, 'You're not boring like most people.' ''

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".

 

 

 

 Obituary: John Edwards 

  The Independent, 14th March, 2003

 

JOHN EDWARDS was the painter Francis Bacon's last "protracted love", replacing "the fading image of George Dyer" as a blurred icon of East End authenticity in Bacon's work. His Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, painted in 1980 and 1984, showed Edwards "with his crossed and lifted leg seated on a stool, his dark quiff of hair, his sweeping jawline and his heavily handsome face", said the writer Andrew Sinclair: "Yet there was . . . a certain brooding stillness that bespoke a touch of respect and even fear in the painter."

Edwards's father was a London docker who lived in Cable Street. John, one of six children, was aged 22 and working for his two elder brothers in one of three East End pubs they owned when, in 1974, Muriel Belcher, the enchantingly foul-mouthed maitresse of the Colony Room, brought Bacon to the Swan. Ian Board, Belcher's successor, said, "John was hypnotised."

Bacon was equally impressed. Although he said, "You don't want an old boiler like me", he seduced John Edwards, taking him gambling in casinos and cavorting in night-clubs. Bacon was by then Britain's most famous living artist, and a millionaire; Edwards was dyslexic and illiterate but, as one friend remarked cattily, "He learned to write his name quickly enough, as soon as he got a chequebook." Sinclair wrote, "As with Dyer, Bacon entered in his lengthy relationship with Edwards into the Pinteresque world of the play The Homecoming, where a refined menace pervades throughout."

Edwards recalled his "amazement" when he walked into Bacon's studio in Reece Mews and found a portrait of himself, although he had not by then sat for the artist. The studies of Edwards displayed a tenderness which militated against Bacon's aesthetic of violence and mortality. He was "depicting the man most close to him without wavering or exaggeration," according to Sinclair. "It was reality; it was the fact."

And it was Edwards's sense of reality which appealed to Bacon. "John told him exactly what he thought," recalled his brother David. "He was always ringing John up for advice on things." As for the Edwards family, they were pleased by the relationship. "Mum? Delighted!" said David Edwards. The Sohoite chronicler Dan Farson also approved: "Francis fussed over John with the beady eye of a mother hen, allowing nothing and no one to distract"; yet, "Because he was so fond of John, he was more irritable with other people, as if his possessiveness made him nervous."

When Bacon stayed with his cousin Pamela Firth at Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, the extended Edwards clan came too, buying property on the proceeds "of the sale of a Bacon painting or two". Replacing the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy of his descent, Bacon lived with his new "cockney family" in "a barricaded house . . . surrounded by gates and walls and signs of `GUARD DOGS - WARNING'. Particularly assertive were a Rolls-Royce and Land Rover and a Bentley with the numberplate BOY 1."

At dinner Bacon's friends would find themselves seated next to convicted burglars. But some appreciated Edwards's charms. Stephen Spender told Bacon,

I think that, if I knew him well, I would become obsessed by him, and I can well understand loving him. Of course, it is seriously marvellous to be untainted by what is called education. It means he moves among real things, and not newspaper things.

"Steve was a lovely bloke," declared Edwards.

But even for Bacon the scene became too much, and he would escape to Europe and a new love, a Spanish banker. The influence of the Edwards family had made him grow away from friends such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Farson claims Edwards tried to reconcile Bacon and Freud in 1984, "but by then it was too late to matter". When Bacon died in Spain on 28 April 1992, Edwards inherited his estate, valued at pounds 11,370,244.

On hearing of Bacon's death, Edwards - who lived in a nearby flat (bought by Bacon) with his own lover, an ex-convict named Philip Mordue - removed all the valuables from his friend's house for safe- keeping. He said

I am going to keep the house and studio exactly as it is. I am going to live in it until I die and then donate it to the nation. When I pop off, then it's up to them what they do with it.

In fact, he donated the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it was painstakingly reconstructed; and entered a dispute with Marlborough Fine Art in London over Bacon's paintings.

Edwards recalled his "amazement" when he walked into Bacon's studio in Reece Mews and found a portrait of himself, although he had not by then sat for the artist. The studies of Edwards displayed a tenderness which militated against Bacon's aesthetic of violence and mortality. He was "depicting the man most close to him without wavering or exaggeration," according to Sinclair. "It was reality; it was the fact."

And it was Edwards's sense of reality which appealed to Bacon. "John told him exactly what he thought," recalled his brother David. "He was always ringing John up for advice on things." As for the Edwards family, they were pleased by the relationship. "Mum? Delighted!" said David Edwards. The Sohoite chronicler Dan Farson also approved: "Francis fussed over John with the beady eye of a mother hen, allowing nothing and no one to distract"; yet, "Because he was so fond of John, he was more irritable with other people, as if his possessiveness made him nervous."

When Bacon stayed with his cousin Pamela Firth at Cavendish Hall in Suffolk, the extended Edwards clan came too, buying property on the proceeds "of the sale of a Bacon painting or two". Replacing the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy of his descent, Bacon lived with his new "cockney family" in "a barricaded house . . . surrounded by gates and walls and signs of `GUARD DOGS - WARNING'. Particularly assertive were a Rolls-Royce and Land Rover and a Bentley with the number plate BOY 1."

At dinner Bacon's friends would find themselves seated next to convicted burglars. But some appreciated Edwards's charms. Stephen Spender told Bacon,

I think that, if I knew him well, I would become obsessed by him, and I can well understand loving him. Of course, it is seriously marvellous to be untainted by what is called education. It means he moves among real things, and not newspaper things.

"Steve was a lovely bloke," declared Edwards.

But even for Bacon the scene became too much, and he would escape to Europe and a new love, a Spanish banker. The influence of the Edwards family had made him grow away from friends such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Farson claims Edwards tried to reconcile Bacon and Freud in 1984, "but by then it was too late to matter". When Bacon died in Spain on 28 April 1992, Edwards inherited his estate, valued at pounds 11,370,244.

On hearing of Bacon's death, Edwards - who lived in a nearby flat (bought by Bacon) with his own lover, an ex-convict named Philip Mordue - removed all the valuables from his friend's house for safe- keeping. He said

I am going to keep the house and studio exactly as it is. I am going to live in it until I die and then donate it to the nation. When I pop off, then it's up to them what they do with it.

In fact, he donated the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it was painstakingly reconstructed; and entered a dispute with Marlborough Fine Art in London over Bacon's paintings.

Dan Farson criticised friends such as Bruce Bernard for not giving Edwards credit "as model for some of Francis's finest paintings in this final stage - quite apart from his value as a friend". Edwards spent his legacy on pink champagne in a Thai resort, surrounded by Bacon reproductions that mystified the locals. It is reported that what is left of Bacon's estate will go to Philip Mordue.

John Edwards, barman: born London 10 September 1949; died Bangkok 5 March 2003.

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

Dan Farson criticised friends such as Bruce Bernard for not giving Edwards credit "as model for some of Francis's finest paintings in this final stage - quite apart from his value as a friend". Edwards spent his legacy on pink champagne in a Thai resort, surrounded by Bacon reproductions that mystified the locals. It is reported that what is left of Bacon's estate will go to Philip Mordue.

John Edwards, barman: born London 10 September 1949; died Bangkok 5 March 2003.

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

 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

 

With a suicide, some petty criminals, a brilliant artist, his homosexual lover and a mysterious shooting, the only element missing seems to be murder. It is the story of the legacy of Francis Bacon and it all begins with a death.

Not the 1992 death of Bacon, the brilliant artist in question - the Soho bohemian, irascible charmer and ill-tempered drunk, a sadomasochistic homosexual who could move from gentleman to boor in the downing of glass.

And not even the death of his longtime friend and sole beneficiary of his £11 million will, John Edwards, who died of lung-cancer in a Thai hospital this week and opened a whole new mystery into the ownership of Bacon's paintings and the worth of his estate.

The death that starts this whole tale is the suicide of Bacon's lover George Dyer, sitting on a lavatory bowl with blood coming out of his nose and mouth, having swallowed fistfuls of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel room in 1971.

Dyer was a small-time criminal when he met Bacon, and the artist delighted in telling the story of their first meeting. As he told it, Dyer was at work, burglarising Bacon's studio, which then was on Narrow Street in the East End. But he hadn't realised the artist was in residence and asleep.

Bacon said that he woke up, saw the burglar and immediately said: "Take all your clothes off and get into bed with me. Then you can have all you want."

Less imaginatively, and perhaps with a greater degree of truth, Bacon also said they met when he was drinking in a Soho pub with the photographer John Deakin and Dyer came over, saying: "You all seem to be having a good time. Can I buy you a drink?"

Either way they ended up as lovers. That was in 1964. Dyer had been in jail, in Pentonville as well as Borstal, but Bacon was unconcerned. He said that "I think in a way he was simply too nice to be a crook. Anyway he was always being caught".

Dyer was more complicated than just nice. He was a drifter with a speech impediment, he was withdrawn and often sullen. Terribly unsure of himself before he actually killed himself, he had attempted suicide at least twice before.

He was also the subject of some of Bacon's greatest work. Bacon could not get enough of Dyer onto canvas. In 1968, for example, three of his works were Portrait Of George Dyer In A Mirror, Two Studies Of George Dyer With A Dog and Two Studies For A Portrait Of George Dyer.

Earlier works included George Dyer Crouching and George Dyer Talking. After his death there was the triptych In Memory Of George Dyer, and Triptych August 1972.

But the relationship between master and muse was a destructive one, as the suicide attempts bear out. Bacon tried to physically distance himself from his lover, buying him a cottage in Kent, but physical distance could not destroy their symbiotic attachment.

At its worst, two years before he killed himself, Dyer had even planted drugs in Bacon's studio - now moved from Narrow Street to Reece Mews in South Kensington, - and then tipped off the police, who promptly arrived led by a female detective and a sniffer dog called Colonel.

At the subsequent trial, Bacon was found not guilty. As an asthmatic, he said, he would have found it difficult to smoke anything, let alone drugs, and he was forgiving of his lover.

And so he took him to Paris in October 1971 for a huge retrospective in the Grand Palais and the most significant show in Bacon's career as an artist.

Returning to the Hotel des Saints-Peres that night, 24 October, the story goes that Bacon was told of his lover's suicide by the concierge and showed no emotion. "Eh bien," he said. "And where is the body?"

James Birch is a Soho art dealer and collector whose gallery was below the Colony Room, the drinking club on Dean Street founded by Bacon's friend Muriel Belcher, a lesbian dominatrix who brought together artists and writers, prostitutes and gangsters, snakes and charmers, politicians too, to indulge themselves in whatever their fancy fetched.

Speaking yesterday, Birch - who became friends with Bacon when he organised the artist's first and only show in Moscow in 1988 - said: "When George Dyer died, he felt so guilty about it and was guilty about it for the rest of his life. And when he met John Edwards a few years later he made sure the relationship wasn't going to be anything like the same.

"Francis would throw a lot of money at George, and George would then pretend to be Francis Bacon or emulate him at least. He would buy drinks for everyone, which didn't really work if you didn't have the kind of panache that Francis had.

"He treated John very differently. Francis felt John was like a surrogate son in a way and he wanted to make sure John was secure for the rest of his life."

Edwards was 53 when he died in the Bumrungrad, a modern state of the art hospital in Bangkok - recognised for its quality even by American organisations - and he was indeed secure.

He had homes in Suffolk, where he also bought properties for his parents, and in New York. But he moved to Thailand nine years ago, settling in Pattaya, a resort some 100 miles east of the capital, and is said to have enjoyed an easy life, walking on the picture-postcard beaches or fishing.

But Pattaya has another side. International gangsters, child abusers, pornographers and prostitutes all sit side by side in the seedy go-go bars - one is called The Dog's Bollocks - as the police turn a blind eye.

A few years ago 1,000 of Thailand's finest were despatched to clean up this "Cowboy town", as it was described, and the only result was a droll tale about a detective who had picked up and then been robbed by a prostitute. British gangsters treat the place like a second Costa del Sol.

Six years ago, the police concluded that a Briton called Geoffrey Chapman, found drowned in the sea, had committed suicide. But others wondered how he could have when his legs were tied to his waist and then to a rock.

That same year, an Englishman called Philip Mordue was shot in the neck in a bar on the main sex-drag. He survived.

Mordue, from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, was in fact Edwards's lover and - despite Francis Bacon - had been for 30 years. With Edwards's death, the legacy of Francis Bacon will almost certainly pass on to Mordue.

About two years after George Dyer's death, Bacon met Edwards, who - from the East End, with an inf liction, in his case severe dyslexia, and homosexual - was not unlike Dyer. Where he differed was his attitude to life, positive where Dyer was negative, and helped fill the void left by Dyer's death. By all accounts Edwards, who was 40 years the artist's junior, and Bacon (Edwards nicknamed him "Eggs") did not become lovers. But, on Bacon's death in 1992, Edwards was made the chief beneficiary of his will, some £11 million worth. And, all the while Edwards was posing in his underpants for Bacon, his true lover was Mordue.

In recent days Mordue has been dubbed Thailand Phil and Phil the Till, and his name has been attached to the seamier side of town, where it is said that he frequented both gay and girlie bars in between occasional gigs as an amateur DJ.

But yesterday friends who know him were eager to paint a different type of character. James Birch, for example, thinks that Edwards and Mordue went to Thailand for tax, and not sex, reasons.

Dave Courtney, the celebrity criminal who was a friend of the Krays, shared a cell with Mordue in Coldingly Prison near Woking in 1980.

He told the Standard: "Phil is a lovely fellow. He is not a criminal. I know people are saying he is an ex-con but the only thing he was ever in for was some driving offence.

"He is very, very much into art. I've seen a lot of him since we were inside together and he has obviously been cultured by John.

"He is what you would call public school material. The reason he is called Thailand Phil is because in my phone book ... How many Phils do I know? About 300. I have got Fat Phil, Ginger Phil, Skinny Phil, Funny Phil and Thailand Phil. The only criminal thing he has done I know about is I think he was done for driving while disqualified or something like that.

"He's a bit of a comedian. He will get on with any circle of people you put him in with. He's a Champagne Charlie when need be, can rub shoulders with the premier league naughty men when need be, and he can also be very knowledgeable with the art world."

Birch says: "He looks a bit like Robbie Williams and likes a laugh."

Neither man has an explanation why someone would want to put a bullet into someone so innocent as Mordue.

The exact inheritance coming Mordue's way is also mysterious. When he died, Bacon was rumoured to be worth up to £60 million. Over the years paintings have been sold for as much as £5.5 million, there were problems with the Inland Revenue and it wasn't until 1999 that a costly and long-running dispute between the estate and the Marlborough Gallery, which had represented Bacon, was settled.

One report has suggested that Mordue had been selling Bacon's paintings - presumably with his lover Edwards's knowledge - to invest in Pattaya bars and clubs.

In an interview with the New York Times before his died, Bacon spoke of death and the afterlife. He said: "We live, we die and that's it, don't you think?" If only it were so simple.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

·         Contemporary market

The Daily Telegraph  17/06/2002

 

The world's top modern and contemporary art collectors travelled to Switzerland last week for Art Basel. For Gilbert Lloyd, director of Marlborough Fine Art, "Art Basel is the most important art fair worldwide. It is the place to make a statement." And he certainly had a statement to make.

Two years ago, the gallery was accused by Francis Bacon's estate of "exploiting" the artist, whom it represented for 34 years. At the time, Marlborough was advised by lawyers to withdraw from the market any paintings by Bacon that it held in stock. But last February the estate withdrew its claims and Marlborough was free to sell Bacon's work once more.

However, rather than make an exhibition in its gallery, Marlborough waited for Art Basel to create maximum impact. On display and priced between $750,000 and $10 million were eight canvases, including a 1957 Study for Portrait from Bacon's "screaming pope" series.

How did they compare, we were asked, with some of the paintings owned by the estate that have been exhibited for sale over the past two years and which many believe Bacon left unfinished, never intending them to be shown? This was more than a celebration. It was retaliation.

 

 

 

BACON SLASHER

 by JOHN KELLY

Sunday Mirror, Oct 6, 2002

Sunday Mirror

 

HUNDREDS of previously unknown preliminary sketches and slashed works by Ireland's most famous post-war artist, Francis Bacon, have been discovered by art scholars.

The finds, made at Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, have been described as "a spectacular insight into Bacon's mind" by the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson.

The discoveries came as the artist's chaotic Kensington bed-sit studio was dismantled and transported from London to Dublin after being gifted to the gallery by the artist's heir, John Edwards.

The move, which cost EUR2.6 million, began in secret more than two years ago in case the British government tried to block it.

The studio at Reece Mews had been virtually untouched since the artist died of a heart attack in Spain in 1992.

It has since been painstakingly recreated, item for item, at the gallery where it is now a major attraction.

The new finds were made by staff sifting through the clutter.

The preliminary drawings contradict Bacon's assertion that he did no preparatory work for his later paintings.

Ms Dawson said: "It's a very major find and important because for the first time we know how Francis Bacon approached his work.

"The material that we have discovered was inspirational for his extraordinary images, some of which are considered some of the finest paintings of the 20th century."

About 200 preliminary sketches have been found, 1,500 photographs and 100 slashed paintings.

"He may not have done conventional preliminary work but he certainly did a lot of painstaking research, realising the concept he had in his head before he went on to do the actual painting.

"He did a lot of preparatory work."

One of the slashed paintings dates back to 1946, though Bacon didn't move to the Mews until 1961.

"It is quite amazing to think that he kept it with him all his life. We found the two pieces that were actually slashed from the canvas.

"It was actually slashed many years after it was painted."

Ms Dawson said she doubted they would attempt to restore the slashed paintings: "I think that might go against the artist's wishes. He had particular reasons for slashing the canvas. Some are quite violently slashed and some just have the faces cut out."

Bacon was born in Baggot Street in October 1909 after his father moved to Ireland to train horses.

The studio, where he created many of his most famous works, had been offered to London's Tate Gallery. It failed to respond, but galleries in the US and Japan were said to be interested.

Then, when Hugh Lane was approached it gathered a specialist team to move the studio lock, stock and barrell.

First into the bed-sit was a surveyor, then archaeologists, archivists, conservators and cataloguers. In the chaos, every single item was numbered and tagged and its location marked with precision in relation to everything else. Its angle in the room, its orientation and exact position was logged.

Specialists who normally dealt with Renaissance and frescoed walls removed the dry-lined walls of the bed-sit. They were extensively daubed with paint as Bacon mixed his colours on them as he worked. Everything was moved, walls, floor and ceiling.

The studio was also re-created in virtual reality on a computer.

There were more than 7,500 items in the clutter including photographs of surgery, dead people and animals, piles of books several feet high, clothes, newspaper clippings, letters, notebooks and a broken mirror.

The new finds will go on display for the first time at a symposium on the artist's work to be held on November 8 and 9.

 

 

 

 

   Gallery reveals Bacon findings

     BBC News  Monday 23rd September 2002

 

     

           Bacon's studio has been recreated at the Dublin Gallery

 

Scholars have unearthed hundreds of sketches by artist Francis Bacon that have been hidden away in his former studio for decades.

The discovery of the drawings, and some of Bacon's paintings that were thought to have been destroyed, has given art experts new insights into the way the artist worked.

Over 70 drawings which were found offer evidence that Bacon did make preliminary sketches of some of his best known works, something he said he stopped doing after 1962.

Fragments of one of the paintings he destroyed - 1946's Study For Man With Microphones - were also discovered.

The painting vanished in 1948 and has always been thought of as a lost artwork.

Other items thought to have given Bacon inspiration, including magazine articles and a book from 1920 featuring photos of paranormal activity, were also uncovered.

The material was found by scholars who have been re-creating his famously chaotic Kensington Studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

The Gallery has been working on the project for two years and plans to present its new findings on Bacon at a symposium to be held in November.

""We spent two years going through every single item," Margarita Cappock, curator of the Francis Bacon Studio and Archive at the Hugh Lane Gallery told BBC News Online.

"Our findings show that Bacon was a lot more deliberate in his work than he pretended to be."

 

         

              Painting on canvas (figure study, advanced stages, destroyed), 1950s

 

Bacon was born in Ireland to English parents but he left Ireland when he was a teenager. He died in Spain in 1992.

For 30 years, he worked in a studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington.

His studio was known for being chaotic and messy, with every inch of floor space covered by newspapers, tins of paint and photos.

Bacon himself once wrote that his studio was the only place he could work because he was incapable of working in places that were too tidy.

 

 

 

 

 Bacon Estate and Dealer Settle A Two-Year Suit Over Pricing

 

 

 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



Three angst-filled paintings by Francis Bacon including an ominous portrait of his lover, representing a traumatic period in the artist's life, come up for auction in London next month.

Each is estimated by Christie's at under £1m, but could well soar far past that: the world record for a Bacon is over £6m, paid at a Sotheby's auction in New York last year, and a series of three portraits of his last companion, John Edwards, sold for just over £3m at Christie's in London.

One of the paintings, Head, the contorted image of a surgeon with a lamp on his forehead, was given as a present to his friend, the writer Daniel Farson. Four years later, in 1966, Farson sold it - in his own words to his "lasting shame and regret" - for £2,400: it is now estimated at up to £500,000.

Bacon's relationship in the 1950s with a former fighter pilot, Peter Lacy, was marked by fights which frequently became violent, and sometimes led to Lacy physically attacking Bacon's canvases. Head was painted in 1962, the year of Lacy's death.

A second small canvas was painted the following year, Portrait of Man with Glasses IV, and shows a face so distorted and apparently blood-spattered that it appears to have been beaten to a pulp: it is estimated at up to £400,000.

The painting expected to attract most interest is a portrait of Lacy himself, Man in Blue VII, estimated at up to £700,000. It was the culmination of a series painted in 1954 when Bacon was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, to be near Lacy's house.

Christie's specialist Fernando Mignoni said yesterday: "It is only fitting that a painting that show's traces of the features of Lacy, with whom Bacon had a turbulent relationship, should show his customary ambiguity. This is Bacon at his most existential."

Bacon's reputation has continued to soar since he died in 1992 of a heart attack, leaving his entire fortune, then estimated at £11m, to John Edwards, a former East End barman.

His chaotic studio, often knee-deep in litter, has been treated as a shrine, and recreated in his native - but hastily abandoned - Dublin.

 

 

 


Tony Shafrazi Gallery
119 Wooster Street
SoHo
Through Jan. 26

Francis Bacon had the studio from hell: famously small, never cleaned and unrepentantly messy. After his death in 1992, it was donated to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, which transported it scrap by scrap, smear by smear, and brush by filthy brush from London to the artist's country of birth.

The disassembling and reassembling of this setting, including walls and especially the ankle-deep debris of printed matter, photographs and art materials on the floor, was something of an archaeological tour de force. For better for worse, it set a new standard for the preservation of artists' studios.

The project began with Perry Ogden's meticulous colour photographs of the site. Already published in a book and in a Hugh Lane catalogue, they are now being presented as art, part of the growing photographic subgenre straddling art and documentary. The images first strike the eye as generic and familiar, a kind of lazy-man's collage. But soon the forests of dirty brushes, the walls abloom with colour tests, the paint-encrusted easel and most of all the detritus underfoot specify the context to an utterly engrossing degree.

There are snapshots of Bacon and reproductions of his art and the art of others. There are all manner of photographs, including reproductions of Eadweard Muybridge's Human Locomotion series; books on bullfighting and sports; strong-man magazines; a biography of Karl Marx. The importance of both photography and personal relationships to Bacon's art is reflected in an image centered on a creased, torn photograph of Bacon's lover, George Dyer, standing in his underwear in Bacon's studio - next to a wall pinned with photographs.

Like its preservation, these photographs could be said to fetishize the artist's studio. But they also provide an unusually tangible tour of Bacon's brain. In the process they reveal art-making as a process of tremendous, hard-won distillation, fed by incalculable amounts and many different kinds of knowledge, work and looking.

All of this was in pursuit of paintings that Bacon intended people to see. That his studio's chaos was intrinsic to the artist's process and possessed an order of its own is suggested by Mr. Odgen's photographs of Bacon's modest, neat-as-a-pin living quarters, just outside the studio door.


 

 

ART IN REVIEW; Francis Bacon

 

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