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 andtotally
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.
BLOODYSLICE 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?
Michael Glover
The
Times March 2, 2005
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
By Dalya Alberge,
Arts Correspondent
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
By CAROL VOGEL
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.
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).
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
By ALAN RIDING
By ALAN RIDING
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
By Robert Horn in Pattaya
TIME Monday, Mar.
17, 2003
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
By CAROL VOGEL
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.
ART IN REVIEW; Perry
Ogden - '7 Reece Mews, Francis Bacon's Studio'
By ROBERTA SMITH
The New York
Times January 11,
2002
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
By KEN JOHNSON
The New York
Times April 26, 2002
Tony Shafrazi
119 Wooster Street, SoHo
Through May 18
If you were depressed by
the joyless art of Gerhard Richter at the Museum of Modern Art, you might not
think a visit with Francis Bacon would be much help. Bacon is popularly
thought of as the pontiff of existential horror, his most famous image being
of a screaming Pope Innocent X based on a portrait by Velázquez. What Bacon
produced, however, was more a kind of black comedy; increasingly as time
passed he realized it in suavely designed, vibrantly hued, generously spacious
compositions.
Far from depressing, the
late paintings in this show combine the sensuous and the visionary to
exhilarating effect. All of the large canvases from the 1980's feature the
painter's familiar iconography of smeary lumps of humanity - or, in one case,
a dangling, plucked chicken - in empty rooms. They are like updates of
Christian altar paintings. The largest work, a triptych in which a vignetted
male pelvis has wounded areas circled or pointed to by a small graphic arrow,
refers unmistakably to the Passion, even as the third panel with the
silhouetted head of a bull adds pagan resonance.
In anyone else's hands
such imagery would be unbearably heavy. But Bacon managed his traumatic vision
with a light, almost Pop-style touch. He paints the space around his deftly
distorted figures with the hedonistic delight of a Colour Field painter. In
the triptych and two related paintings, broad fields of scrumptious Creamsicle-orange
are balanced by windows of sweet sky blue. The ultimate effect is of a zany
and voluptuous beauty. KEN
JOHNSON
Three Bacon paintings
to be sold for pounds 2m
Matthew Beard, The
Independent, January 10, 2002
THREE PAINTINGS by
Francis Bacon, including a portrait of a tortured- looking Peter Lacy, a
homosexual lover, are expected to fetch up to pounds 2m at auction in London
next month.
Nearly 10 years after
the death of Britain's finest post-war artist, competition is expected to be
intense for Man in Blue VII, part of a series Bacon painted in the
early Fifties with Lacy as a model.
The tension-filled
portrait shows the subject in a dark suit, standing as though in the dock of
a courtroom. Bacon emphasises his subject's vulnerability by ghostly
vertical stripes in the background, which resemble cell bars.
The 60in by 42in (150cm
by 105cm) oil on canvas is estimated to fetch about pounds 700, 000 at
Christie's on 6 February. A second, much smaller Bacon, a haunting and
disturbing painting called Head and given by the artist to his
friend, the writer Daniel Farson, in 1962, is estimated at up to pounds
500,000. Farson, to his "lasting shame and regret", sold the
painting in 1966 for pounds 2,400 when he found himself "in the
doldrums".
A third Bacon, Portrait
of a Man with Glasses IV, painted in 1963 and showing a distorted face
reminiscent of the nanny shot in the head in the Russian film classic Battleship
Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, should make up to pounds
400,000. It is being offered for sale by a private collector.
The Man in Blue portrait,
for which competition is expected to be fiercest, was painted in 1954 while
Bacon was staying in the Imperial Hotel, Henley- on-Thames, to be close to
Lacy, who had a house in the Oxfordshire town. Fernando Mignoni, a
Christie's specialist, said yesterday: "It is only fitting that a
painting showing traces of the features of Lacy, with whom Bacon had a
turbulent and at times violent relationship, should show his customary
ambiguity.
"This is Bacon at
his most existential, painting the whole angst and fragility of life."
Last year, three 1984
portraits by Bacon of another lover, John Edwards, fetched more than pounds
3m at Christie's in London. The world record for a Bacon is $6.6m (pounds
4.6m) for a 1966 portrait of a previous lover, George Dyer, who killed
himself in 1971. Edwards met Bacon in 1974 and stayed with him until the
artist's death. He was, like Dyer, an East End boy much younger than Bacon.
Next month, the High
Court in London will hear allegations that Bacon was blackmailed into
staying with the Marlborough Fine Art gallery in London. The Pace Gallery in
New York offered to pay Bacon pounds 50,000 a painting in 1978, but its
owner, Arnold Glimcher, claimed that Bacon stayed with Marlborough after it
allegedly threatened to stop his access to his Swiss bank account and expose
him to higher income tax.
The court ruling will
settle a pounds 100m battle waged by trustees of the Bacon estate to
establish exactly how much the artist was paid in his 34-year relationship
with Marlborough.
Christie's
Post-War Art
Sale 977 Tuesday, November 13, 2001 7 pm
Lot 51 : Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Standing Nude with Tassels 1961
Francis Bacon
The
78-by-56-inch oil on canvas has an
Estimate:
of $600,000 to $800,000
Sold:
for $1,106,000, $6,000
DESCRIPTION:
Nude oil on
canvas 78 x 56 inches (198 x 142 cm.) Painted in 1961
PROVENANCE:Marlborough Fine Art Ltd.,
London. Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 19 November 1981, lot 61. Galerie
Beyeler, Basel. S. Bitter-Larkin Gallery, New York.
LITERATURE:
The Sunday Times Colour Magazine, 14 July 1963, p. 16 (illustrated).
J. Rothstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London, 1964, p. 141, no. 196
(illustrated).
EXHIBITION:
Mannheim, Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, July-August 1962, no. 73. Turin,
Galeria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, September-October 1962, no. 79
(illustrated). Kunsthaus Zurich, Francis Bacon,
October-November 1962, no. 72. Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon,
January-February 1963, no. 67. London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Francis
Bacon, July-August 1963, no. 3 (illustrated). Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis
Bacon, June-October 1987, no. 13.
NOTES:
Painted in 1961, Nude is a striking and comparatively rare
full-length portrait of a naked woman standing alone and isolated in a
bizarre, empty and somewhat imperial-looking purple interior. The woman is
exposed in this large painting as a solitary voluptuous living entity of
soft flesh harshly illuminated from above as if suddenly caught in the
sterile unfeeling glare of an electric arc light. With its interior
reminiscent of the lonely purple enclosures into which, in the 1950s, Bacon
had enshrined his screaming Popes, Nude projects an image of raw and
fragile humanity. Bacon, who was more erotically predisposed to the male
form, seldom painted women and even more rarely, the naked female form.
Here, he depicts the female figure, not, as a sexual being, but as a purely
material presence encased in an alienating monochrome environment. The
woman's features and her buxom figure suggest that Bacon has used his friend
Henrietta Moraes as his source.
Moraes
was a professional artist's model who frequented the social circles of Soho,
and Bacon had recently commissioned John Deakin to produce a number of
photographs of her in the nude. In the chaos of Bacon's studio, photographs
would become scrunched and damaged. Such damage would encourage and often
stimulate the distortions that Bacon would bring to what he called the
"illustrative" content of the image. Here, in Nude Bacon
has created a swirling globular mass of flesh that eloquently conveys the
weighty physicality of Moraes' voluptuous body whilst also suggesting a
vital living presence.
To
the right of the figure hanging ominously above her head hang two tassels -
items of Bacon's iconography that had previously appeared only in his
terrifying existential portrait heads of men screaming in the early 1950s.
Seeming as if they control the on and off switches of an invisible light
bulb that, in this context, also seems to control life and death, the
tassles are a poignant reminder of the fleeting temporality of life.
Deliberately contrasted against the splendid physicality of this fertile
nude, they are a central element in Bacon's unique search to express the
bizarre facticity of human existence. Fig. 1 Henrietta Moraes, 1961,
photograph by John Deakin.
Francis Bacon, clean your room
viewed by Kenneth
Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
San
Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, October 28, 2001
7
Reece Mews Francis
Bacon's Studio
Foreword
by John Edwards;
photographs by Perry Ogden
THAMES
& HUDSON; 120 PAGES; $24.95
British painter
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) left behind a studio that ranks as a significant
artifact in its own right.
Readers who remember the tidy impression Bacon's work made in the
1999 retrospective at the Legion of Honour may be stunned to see his work
space documented in 7 Reece Mews.
So suggestive of Bacon's creative ferment was his legendary
studio in London's Kensington section that the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
in Dublin, Bacon's birthplace, purchased and transplanted it as a permanent
installation.
The dismantling, archiving and transplantation of the studio from
London to Dublin makes one of the great art conservation stories of modern
times. It is the only thing missing from 7 Reece Mews. The book's
text is a brief memoir by John Edwards, Bacon's sole heir and his companion
late in life.
Urban archaeologists were enlisted to map and catalogue every
scrap of paper, soiled rag, slashed canvas and pot of soaking brushes that
Bacon left behind, so the whole ensemble could be replicated exactly in
Dublin. Facsimiles were substituted only for articles threatened with ruin
by time and those deemed worthy of scholarly study.
Photographs of the Hugh Lane installation are indistinguishable
from those collected in 7 Reece Mews, expertly made by Perry Ogden.
The conservators found some 1,700 pages of illustrations torn from books, 70
drawings by Bacon, who claimed he never drew, and 100 perforated canvases.
Bacon called the studio walls, on which he wiped brushes and
tested colours, his only abstract paintings. Ogden recorded them and the
whole metier with the precision of a crime scene analyst.
The fascination of 7 Reece Mews is hard to convey. Ogden's
images accomplish what would seem impossible for photography: renewing
curiosity in viewers for whom Bacon's art lost much of its mystery and
surprise with his acceptance into the modern canon.
BOOK IN BRIEF
By ELISSA MEYERS
The New York
Times
September 16, 2001
The British painter
Francis Bacon (1909-92) is best known for expressionistic triptychs and
portraits of himself, screaming popes, absent friends and vanished lovers.
In 7 REECE MEWS: Francis Bacon's Studio (Thames and Hudson, $24.95),+a
series of photographs of the studio where Bacon lived and worked for the
last 30 years of his life, Perry Ogden has produced what feels like a
landscape of Bacon's interior - a catalogue of the modern artist's psyche.
Crumpled photographs and letters splashed in paint flood the room.
Frayed
boxes long since emptied of bottles of port and Champagne disgorge
newspapers and pages ripped from magazines onto the floor. Hundreds of
dirty paintbrushes, dried in their butter bean and orange juice cans,
perch next to books on Seurat and Velázquez.
The corduroy rags Bacon
sometimes used to paint textures drape on top of paint-encrusted trays.
Books on skin disorders and forensics sprawl across the floor. A bare bulb
hangs next to its nooselike toggle string, an image familiar from several
Bacon portraits. Canvases stacked in one corner reveal only their white or
splattered backs; several slashed canvases lie scattered with the other
detritus on the floor.
The slightly sinister aura seems appropriate, given
that Bacon's estate has been involved in lawsuits charging art world
skulduggery, and leads one to wonder if Bacon really did leave his studio
just like this. Is there any way to know? John Edwards, Bacon's sole heir,
says in the book's foreword that the studio was left untouched from
Bacon's death until 1998, when it was removed to Dublin, Bacon's
birthplace. Turn the page and any doubts evaporate: Bacon the artist
re-emerges in the light, color and composition of the unfinished work left
on the easel at his death. In Ogden's photos, one almost smells the
sulfuric remnants of Bacon's imagination.
Elissa Meyers
Fifty years of hurt
They called it the battle for realism, and it wasn't a pretty sight. James
Hyman follows British art's trail of violence from the tormented Bacon to
the butcher Hirst
The Guardian, Saturday September 22, 2001
Why is it that the
greatest art is also sometimes the most horrific? For every Vermeer
interior, serenely suspended in time, there are hundreds of bloody
crucifixions, violent rapes and terrible massacres. In Britain, horror was
at the heart of two of the most important exhibitions of the past
half-century. In 1949 the now defunct Hanover Gallery in London was filled
with painting after painting of unremitting pain, in an exhibition that
announced the arrival of Francis Bacon and heralded one of the most
extraordinary success stories in 20th-century art. Despite the revulsion,
Bacon would soon be feted as the most important British artist of the
postwar period, and go on to exhibit at the Venice biennale. Soon, too,
his paintings would be hung in elegant drawing rooms, and his personal
torment celebrated as an artistic revelation of the human condition.
It was to be 40 years before another exhibition, Modern Medicine, even
approached that visceral impact of Bacon's first one-man show. The venue
was Building One, a rundown Bermondsey warehouse reminiscent of the sets
for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. And the artist was Damien Hirst,
who showed a rotting cow's head infested with maggots and surrounded by
flies that were being zapped by an insect-o-cutor.
It is no coincidence
that two of the most important artists since the second world war should
both dramatise extremes of violence in an attempt to heighten our
awareness of our own mortality. In fact, you could argue that the most
important British art of the past 50 years has been preoccupied with the
subject. It all started after the second world war - with what, at the
time, was called the battle for realism. This all but forgotten struggle
was one of the key moments in the history of British art.
At first glance, the
situations then and now could hardly be more different. The inhumanity of
the war years had cast a dark shadow over our lives. The world was
polarised between Moscow and Washington, and Britain was struggling to
establish a role for itself in a new world order. Yet it was from such
infertile soil that the seeds grew for some of the seminal works and
international success that British art has since enjoyed. For this was the
moment, in the late 1940s, when a School of London was proposed for the
first time, a challenge to the predominance of the Ecole de Paris and the
New York School.
It was a challenge
that saw British art elevated to a new status through the reputations
gained by artists such as Bacon, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. Their work
was at the centre of a battle fought between two competing visions of
realism: social or socialist realism, and modernist realism. Leading the
two sides were two of the 20th century's greatest art critics: David
Sylvester, the insider par excellence, and John Berger, a combative
outsider.
Each critic had a
hero. For Sylvester it was Bacon, for Berger it was Italian Renato Guttuso.
Today, Berger's realism is almost invisible in our museums, but at the
time was at the very forefront of British art. His was a realism concerned
with finding, as Walter Sickert advocated, "poetry in the
everyday", and was filled with such everyday subjects as Lowry's
matchstick men and the domestic scenes of the kitchen-sink painters.
In contrast,
Sylvester's realism addressed the human condition. It was fuelled by
existentialism and inspired by Giacometti. The artist was a loner, a
solitary genius revealing important truths - and from this side of the
battle emerged the victors, from Bacon and Freud to Kossoff and Auerbach.
Half a century later
it is difficult to capture the heat of this battle, its importance as a
riposte to American abstract expressionism, and its role in
intellectualising postwar British culture. It is difficult, too, to grasp
the passionate conviction with which it was fought, a conviction fuelled
by the belief that art really mattered.
Today, when so much
art has become entertainment, serving a public hungry for sensation, and
when the notion of high culture is attacked so routinely, it may seem
misplaced to recall the high seriousness of that battle. Yet behind the
headline-grabbing of Tracey Emin, or any of a dozen other young British
artists, the indebtedness of today's leading artists to these postwar
pioneers seems clear.
Rachel Whiteread's
most powerful recent commission is her eerie Holocaust Memorial for the
Judenplatz in Vienna. The Chapman brothers' most profound tableau, Hell
(2000), also depicts the Holocaust. Anya Gallaccio's moving installation,
a floor of 10,000 dying roses entitled Red on Green (1992), poetically
traces death on a mass scale. For all the differences in medium, Hirst's
boxed and butchered animals are surely the descendants of Bacon's
paintings of man as meat, and Whiteread's impassive monuments the
equivalents of Giacometti's stoic figures.
As modern artists
continue to grapple with humanity's vulnerability in a violent world, they
are creating a new realism that places them as heirs to the legacy of this
earlier battle. Fifty years ago it was the chimneys of Auschwitz and the
atom bomb plume at Hiroshima that prescribed the artistic struggle. Now,
in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities in America, the battle for
realism has assumed a chilling new resonance.
• The Battle for
Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War (1945-60), by James
Hyman, is published by Yale University Press at £45. An exhibition to
coincide with its publication is at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London W1
(020-7495 8575), until October 2.
Obituary: Peter
Pollock
The
Independent September 12, 2o01
Francis Bacon and Peter Pollock in Tangier
PETER POLLOCK was a
friend and supporter of Francis Bacon who in his fifties moved to Morocco
and bought a restaurant, the Pergola, which became famed for serving the
finest plate of swordfish and chips on the North African coast. Thirty-five
of the art-works given him by Bacon formed, with four drawings given to Sir
Stephen Spender, the bulk of the Tate Gallery's exhibition Francis Bacon:
works on paper and paintings earlier this year.
Born in 1919, Pollock
was part-heir to the Accles & Pollock empire - a Midlands-based and
highly successful light engineering company co- founded in 1901 by his
grandfather Thomas Pollock. In the 1950s the names Accles & Pollock were
juxtaposed nationwide on massive hoardings, suggesting all manner of
interesting spoonerisms - an innovative form of advertising considered quite
racy in its day.
Spurning a possible
"reserved occupation" career in light engineering, the young Peter
Pollock was an eager volunteer for military service at the start of the
Second World War. He gained a commission in the Gordon Highlanders and
served, as a captain, both in North Africa and in Italy, where he was taken
prisoner.
After demob, and
despite his spending four humdrum years in a German POW camp, the idea of a
career in Midlands light engineering seemed no more exciting to Pollock than
it had done at the start of hostilities. Instead, he bought a farm in
Flaunden, Hertfordshire, and took up the life of a gentleman farmer,
combining a dairy herd with pig-farming, greyhound breeding and, in the lazy
summer afternoons, idling through the leafy Hertfordshire lanes in his
vintage Rolls.
Continually frustrated at what he considered to be his own lack of creative
achievement, Pollock had an unquenchable passion both for the arts and the
company of artists. Sundays provided open house at the Flaunden farm for
painters, writers, actors and actresses.
A constant visitor was
the then little-recognised painter Francis Bacon. Lacking a home of his own,
Bacon enjoyed a come-and-go-as-he-pleased existence, both at the Flaunden
farm and at a flat, overlooking Battersea Park in London, which Pollock also
owned. Pollock allowed the young Bacon a rent-free life over the years 1955-
61- a kindness which the painter acknowledged by leaving behind the
occasional picture in unspoken payment.
Another young man whom
Pollock took pity on and befriended - and who was destined to become his
lifetime companion - was Paul Danquah. Danquah's father, J.B. Danquah, had
been a minister in Kwame Nkrumah's government in Ghana, but a change in
regimes had resulted in his temporary imprisonment. Paul Danquah, at that
time studying for the Bar at the Inner Temple, was left unfunded. Pollock's
generosity enabled Danquah to complete and pass his Bar studies - but the
young Danquah, inspired perhaps by Pollock's artistic leanings, was
temporarily to abandon his legal career when he was cast opposite Rita
Tushingham in the Tony Richardson directed film of Shelagh Delaney's stage
success A Taste of Honey (1961). (He was also to have parts in the Morecambe
and Wise vehicle That Riviera Touch, 1966, and, as "2nd
Exquisite", in the satire Smashing Time, 1967, written by George
Melly.)
The fast life at
Flaunden, slow greyhounds and an over-generous nature finally resulted in
Pollock's selling up the farmstead and moving on. It was in the Colony Club
in Soho, presided over by the redoubtable Muriel Belcher, that, with his
artistic friends including Bacon and John Minton, Pollock had first heard
tales of the exciting and exotic life that beckoned in Morocco. Upping
sticks in the late 1970s, Pollock and Danquah set up home in Tangier, where
notoriety was fast making Morocco fashionable.
Pollock acquired the
Pergola, a bar and restaurant on the Tangier seafront, where word of the new
owner's culinary skills soon spread. The "Flaunden set" of friends
remained ever-faithful and followed Pollock and Danquah out to Tangier at
holiday-times. John Lahr's 1978 biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your
Ears, includes a photograph of the playwright with the Kenneths
Halliwell and Williams enjoying themselves at the Pergola. Pollock's
expertise in the kitchen was overshadowed only by his generosity of spirit.
"No, my dear, I absolutely insist - this one's on me" might
provide a fitting memorial.
Peter Pollock suffered
a severe stroke in 1999, which left him an invalid. A second stroke, in
July, ended his life.
The extent of Francis
Bacon's gratitude for his mentor's hospitality came to light only a couple
of years ago, when a suitcase, which had gathered dust for decades
underneath a bed in a spare room at the Pollock and Danquah home in Tangier,
was found to contain a hoard of the painter's early work. It was Peter
Pollock's innate patriotism which ensured that those paintings were acquired
by the Tate Gallery, rather than offered on the open market.
Willis Hall
Peter William Pollock,
restaurateur: born London 19 November 1919; died Tangier 28 July 2001.
ARTS ABROAD; A Dublin
Diorama Reveals A Very Untidy Francis Bacon
By BRIAN LAVERY
The New York
Times
August 16, 2001
There were a few excited
gasps when the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery here unveiled its most significant
and most hyped acquisition recently. But most just stared and said, ''What a
mess!''
Admittedly, it is a very
big, very impressive mess, and it was made by the artist Francis Bacon. That
didn't stop the typically irreverent Irish press from looking in on Bacon's
famous studio, which has been reconstructed at the Hugh Lane, and comparing it
to a sloppy teenager's bedroom, or what's left of an apartment after a
nightmare tenant moves out.
Bacon painted in the small
London studio, which measures about 345 square feet, from 1961 until his death
in 1992. It holds 7,500 carefully catalogued objects, including 100 slashed
canvases, some dating back to 1946, and more than 70 drawings that Bacon never
admitted making while he was alive. It's difficult to focus on those refined
items, though, because they are buried under crumpled scraps of newspaper and
empty Champagne packing boxes, cut-up corduroy pants and marked-up
photographs, dirty brushes and paint cans filled with water, all scattered in
random piles as if by a whirlwind.
Visitors to the exhibit
enter a small glass-enclosed area one at a time, as if Bacon let them step
over the threshold and no further. It feels like walking into a room
immediately after a madman on amphetamines has made a violent exit. Only a
plaster bust of William Blake and a large round mirror seem intentionally
placed. The floor is just barely visible in front of the easel, where Bacon
stood while he painted. Instead of palettes, Bacon used the walls and the
door; paint is smeared everywhere.
The studio opened its
brightly splattered door in May, after more than two years of painstaking and
costly archaeological work. John Edwards, Bacon's heir, donated it in its
entirety to the Hugh Lane Gallery, in the heart of Dublin, but the process of
removing the room - floor, walls, beams, trash and all - from its home in the
South Kensington section of London ran up a bill of about $2 million, and
involved a few tricky procedures.
Since the walls had been
plastered twice, first in 1850 and again in 1930, the move threatened to split
the two layers of plaster and ruin Bacon's impromptu colour palettes. So the
conservation team securely packed the walls from front and back and cut them
into chunks that were not unlike bricks of peat, said Barbara Dawson, director
of the Hugh Lane.
Even clumps of dust were
photographed, numbered and stored before being shipped across the Irish Sea
and replaced in identical positions.
As expected with a project
of its scope, the studio has earned high praise and has also raised skeptical
eyebrows. Many critics have asked whether having the studio justifies the
expense of moving it, when resources are already scarce. The Hugh Lane is a
municipal gallery, they say, that should support local artists instead of
blockbuster attractions. Up-and-coming Irish artists are typically forced to
exhibit their work in commercial galleries, or even in accommodating pubs,
because of the lack of public space.
Others take issue with the
studio's entrance fee of six Irish pounds (about $6.90), when almost all other
Dublin museums are free, including the Hugh Lane's permanent collection.
Ms. Dawson defended the
fee. ''We need to build up a financial resource for the gallery in order to
bring in the world-class exhibitions that Dublin people seem to enjoy,'' she
said. ''It's not the norm yet. But neither are world-class exhibitions the
norm.'' She pointed to the gallery's phenomenally successful exhibition of
Bacon's work last year, which drew unprecedented crowds to the gallery and
increased the public's awareness of Bacon before the studio was opened this
spring.
The more searching
question, however, is whether Francis Bacon belongs here at all. He was born
in Dublin in 1909, and grew up outside the city in rural County Kildare. But
when he was 16, Bacon fled Ireland, like so many of this country's artists and
writers. He has always been called a British artist. He did not come back to
Ireland when the Hugh Lane exhibited his work in 1965. And he predicted -
jokingly, but somewhat accurately - that he would return to Ireland only after
his death.
Is Bacon's reconstructed
studio, then, yet another instance of Ireland reclaiming one of the many sons
and daughters it sent into exile, a habit some call the height of hypocrisy?
Or is that exile, and Bacon's sense of being an outsider, exactly what makes
him Irish?
''One of the things I have
always thought about Bacon is that he is a literary artist,'' said Brian
Clarke, the executor of the Bacon estate. Bacon was an avid reader, and his
shelves were stocked with Eliot, Yeats, Shakespeare and Aeschylus, not to
mention textbooks on medicine and the supernatural. ''I think that his
formative years in Ireland nurtured his love of spoken English, and in that
sense, he is very much an Irish artist,'' Mr. Clarke said.
The years leading up to
1926, when Bacon moved to London, were a traumatic time to be in Ireland. A
rebellion against British rule in 1916 was brutally put down. The struggle for
Irish independence finally succeeded in 1921, but was followed by a civil war.
Bacon's childhood home once needed sandbagged defenses in case of attack, Ms.
Dawson said.
In addition to being part
of an Anglo-Irish ruling class whose power was crumbling, Bacon would have
felt alienated from Irish society by his homosexuality, which he realized as a
teenager. Noel Sheridan, director of the National College of Art and Design in
Dublin, pointed out that other outsiders - like Yeats, a Protestant, and
Joyce, another exile - became the voices for Irish culture of the time.
''Very often, it is within
your isolation that you get the deepest insight,'' Mr. Sheridan said.
Even its critics
acknowledge that bringing the studio to Dublin was a bold move, and it has
earned Ms. Dawson respect from all quarters. Mr. Edwards and Mr. Clarke talked
to the Tate Gallery in London about housing the studio, and offers came in
from museums in Paris, Berlin, Washington and Tokyo. But Ms. Dawson's
ambitious approach and direct promises about how the studio would be treated
won them over, Mr. Clarke said.
Now, Dublin's art
community is hopeful that other institutions will take similarly aggressive
and innovative decisions. ''I think Ireland, in all honesty, if you look back,
hasn't been a country that valued its artists,'' Mr. Sheridan said.
The Hugh Lane's treatment
of Bacon seems to overturn that trend. Besides the studio, the gallery owns
only one Bacon work, an unfinished self-portrait. But it has obtained 14 major
Bacon works on long-term loan and is currently exhibiting Perry Ogden's
large-scale photographs of Bacon's London studio and apartment at 7 Reece
Mews.
Mr. Ogden said that he
approached the task with ''a very forensic sensibility'' - and the immense
prints are nearly scientific in their precision. They do, however, offer a
warmth and intimacy that the glassed-in studio lacks. (An American-edition
book of the photographs will be published by Thames & Hudson this fall.)
The Irish viewers who
liken Bacon's studio to that teenager's bedroom might be doing him a favour,
by humanizing him.
''Bacon is seen globally
today as an old master, almost,'' Mr. Clarke said. ''The Irish don't turn him
into an icon. They just say, 'There's a very interesting bloke.' And that
gives him back some of his real power.''
Francis Bacon
Millennium
Galleries Sheffield
Rating: ****
Robert Clark
The Guardian, Monday July 23, 2001
Second
Version of Triptych 1944,
(1988)
Sheffield's new Millennium
Galleries do Francis Bacon proud. Here, just as the artist intended, his
cast of naked wrestlers, drunken contortionists and lop-headed harpies look
perfectly well-groomed and dandified in their miserable predicaments.
Despite the studied squalor of his studio, and the voyeuristic bent of
popular opinion to view the artist as a purely impulsive genius, Bacon's
existentialist angst was in fact tempered by the immaculate good taste of a
highly sophisticated aesthete.
This selection from the
artist's work looks its best set off against the gallery's polished marble
floors, elegant scalloped ceilings and subtle, blind-filtered daylight.
Bacon was such an
idiosyncratic painter that one can easily develop a tolerance to his initially
breathtaking images. Yet it is an undeniable fact that he created some of the
most memorable figurative pictures of the 20th century. And, in this setting,
the formal transgressions of his images are easily as evident as their
tendency towards expressionist sensationalism.
The flicks and slurs of
white pigment that obliquely distort his portraits might be based on cum-shot
porno stills, but they also serve to set off the delicate and vulnerable bloom
of the pinkness of his unfortunate subjects' all too bruisable flesh. His Study
of a Dog is a giant of entrapped wildness, spinning endlessly on its
roundabout pedestal as miniature cars flash by in the distant background. The
1944 Crucifixion triptych, together with the Second Version
remake of 1988, is perhaps the only really serious and convincing image on a
Christian theme created in any medium over the past 100 years.
It's true that Bacon might
not have finally achieved his ambition of equalling the transvestite grandeur
of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X. His rabid dog might not approach the poignant
quicksand of loneliness into which Goya's Black Period dog eternally sinks.
Yet give Bacon his due: what other painter of our times could we even begin to
compare to such epoch-defining names?
Until 23 September.
Details: 0114 278 2600.
Christie's
London
- 2001
Lot 13 : Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Three Studies for a
Portrait of John Edwards left panel: signed, titled, inscribed and
dated '3 Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 left
panel' (on the reverse) centre panel: signed, titled, inscribed and dated
'3 Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 centre panel'
(on the reverse) right panel: signed, titled, inscribed and dated '3
Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards Francis Bacon 1984 right panel'
(on the reverse) oil on canvas Each: 781/8 x 581/4in. (198.3 x 148cm.)
Painted in 1984
PROVENANCE Marlborough
Gallery, New York.
EXHIBITION
London, Tate Gallery Francis
Bacon, May 1985-March 1986, no. 125 (illustrated in colour). This
exhibition later travelled to Stuttgart, Staatsgallerie, and Berlin,
Nationalgalerie. New York, Marlborough Gallery, Masters of the 19th and
20th Centuries, November-December 1986, no. 2 (illustrated in colour).
New York, Marlborough Gallery, Francis Bacon, Paintings of the Eighties,
May-July 1987, pp. 26-27, no. 5 (illustrated in colour). Paris, Galerie
Lelong, Francis Bacon, Peintures Recentes, September-November
1987, no. 1 (illustrated in colour). Moscow, Central House of the
Union of Artists, Francis Bacon Paintings, September-November 1988,
no. 16 (illustrated in colour). Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis
Bacon, March-May 1993, no. 56 (illustrated, pp. 119 and 161,
illustrated in colour pp. 120-123). Zaragoza, Palacio de la Monja, Despu‚s
de Goya-Una Mirada Subjectiva, November 1996-January 1997, no. 167
(illustrated in colour, pp. 337 and 339-341). Sao Paulo, XXIV Bienal de
Sao Paolo, Nacleo Hist¢rico-Antropofagia de Canibalismos,
October-December 1998 (illustrated in colour, pp. 418-419). New Haven,
Yale Centre for British Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco,
California Palace of the Legion of Honor; and Modern Art Museum of Fort
Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, January-October, 1999, no.
XX (illustrated in colour).
NOTES
John Edwards first met
Francis Bacon in 1974 and became his companion until the artist's death in
1992. Edwards was, like Bacon's former lover, George Dyer, an East End boy
much younger than the artist, but from the outset his relationship with
Bacon differed fundamentally from that earlier traumatic romance, which
had ended tragically in 1971 with Dyer's suicide. Edwards, however, was
not destined to be swallowed and destroyed by the love of the great artist
in the way that both Dyer and Dyer's predecessor, Peter Lacy had been.
Indeed, Edwards is known to have stood up to Bacon and this forthright
quality along with his directness and honesty greatly endeared him to the
artist who reportedly grew to dote on the young man. According to longtime
friend Ian Board - the owner of the infamous Soho drinking club the Colony
Room - Bacon was "riddled with love" for Edwards and became
increasingly protective of him coming to regard him less as a lover and
more as an adoptive son.
Three Studies for a
Portrait of John Edwards is a rare and important triptych from the
1980s that in many ways reflects the different nature of Bacon's
relationship with Edwards. A major work that attempts to capture the
essence of the straightforward and forthright character of the artist's
young companion, this three-paneled portrait was chosen by Bacon to be the
final work of his second retrospective exhibition. Bacon's first
retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962 had begun with his first
triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of
1944 and ended with his great reworking of this painting, the 1962
Crucifixion triptych. The second Tate retrospective paid even more
attention to Bacon's great triptych paintings and beginning with the same
1944 painting, it culminated with the Three Studies for a Portrait of
John Edwards which had been painted one year earlier. As the emphasis
of the Tate retrospectives show, Bacon's triptychs are widely recognised
as being his finest works.
Yet, as Bacon himself
often observed, these paintings were in essence not triptychs in the
traditional sense of the word but, like a progression of film stills, a
sequence of paintings that aimed to capture the essence of its subject by
conveying a sense of having captured its animated motion and frozen it
into a cinematic sequece of static form. "In the series one picture
reflects on the other continuously," Bacon observed, "and
sometimes they're better in series than they are separately... one image
against the other seems to be able to say the thing more" (Quoted in
D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon,
London, 1990, p. 22).
Furthermore, the
artist once warned Michael Archibaud, "I don't know that I should
talk about a triptych in my case. Of course, there are three canvases, and
you can link that to a long-standing tradition. The primitives often used
the triptych format, but as far as my work is concerned, a triptych
corresponds more to the idea of a succession of images on film. There are
frequently three canvases, but there is no reason why I couldn't continue
and add more. Why shouldn't there be more than three? What I do know is
that I need these canvases to be separated from one another. That's why I
was so annoyed with the way the Guggenheim mounted the three panels of its
Crucifixion all in one frame. It was absurd. I wanted them to be separate,
and this is also the case for the canvases of the other triptychs... One
image, another, then another with the frame adding a certain rhythm to the
progression of images" (F. Bacon quoted in In Conversation with
Michel Archimbaud, London, 1993, p. 165). This separation was
essential for Bacon because he saw "every image all the time in a
shifting way and almost in shifting sequences" and through the
sequential portrait he was able to take "what is called ordinary
figuration to a very, very far point" ( Op. cit., Sylvester, p.
21).
In Three Studies
for a Portrait of John Edwards this shifting sequential viewpoint is
exemplified by the work consisting of three alternate and yet seemingly
simultaneous views of Edwards seated on a stool in an empty studio space.
The use of a calm grey-blue coloured background and the relative lack of
violent distortion in the features of the sitter clearly distinguishes
this portrait from those of the angst-ridden Peter Lacy or the sado-masochistic
George Dyer portraits. Although pulling no punches in the raw expression
of Edwards' pale Anglo-Saxon features and his muscular physicality, there
is a tenderness expressed in this work that captures a sense of Edwards'
innocence and simple honesty; features which some commentators on Bacon
have declared the artist was incapable of expressing.
The relative lack of
grotesque smears and distortion in the features of his sitters was a
noticeable trend in much of Bacon's work of the 1980s but this is
particularly evident in Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards
where Edwards' features have been sharply delineated and in two of the
panels are still clearly recognisable beneath the gestural smudges of
Bacon's paint. Framed in the left and right hand panels by a geometric
structure that lends a unity to the three paintings and seems through the
magic of perspective to have partially disappeared in the central panel,
Edwards is presented as if he were being observed through the two-way
mirror of a police viewing room.
Exposing his innate
humanity and charming ordinariness, the three panels, like a sequence of
slides present Edwards seated on a swivel stool as if he were an
interesting organism under the objective eye of the microscope. The victim
of the artist's harsh dispassionate gaze, Bacon has also surrounded
Edwards in the left and right hand panels by a circular chrome ring which
recalls some of his early furniture design. In doing this Bacon appears to
have wanted to enclose and fix permanently the shifting images of the
object of his affection by framing them with perspectival lines and the
enclosing metal armature and at the same time pinning Edwards' figure to
the floor with the thin one-legged stool. It appears in this work as if in
doing so, he hoped he could in someway contain and possess the image of
his companion, hold onto it and protect it as indeed he sought to do in
life.
Bacon triptych goes
for £3m at auction
By
Will Bennett, Art Sales Correspondent
The Daily Telegraph
19/06/2001
Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards
1984
A SERIES of three paintings
by Francis Bacon of his long-time companion John Edwards sold for more than £3
million at Christie's in London last night.
The triptych, Three
Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an anonymous collector
at a sale of post-war art. Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie's international director,
said: "It is a piece that Bacon himself identified as being of museum
quality."
Bacon
met Edwards, who was a barman, in 1974 and their relationship lasted until the
artist's death in 1992. The triptych shows Edwards seated on a stool in an empty
studio space.
Posters beg Berliners to bring back the Bacon
Maev
Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
The
Guardian, Friday June 22, 2001
Berlin will wake up this
morning to find the streets plastered with posters for a wanted man: a tiny
portrait of Francis Bacon, painted by Lucian Freud 50 years ago, which has
disappeared without trace since it was stolen from an exhibition in 1988.
The posters were designed
by Freud, who yesterday sent a personal message to the thief: "Would the
person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my
exhibition next June?"
There is a more tangible
prize than a cleared conscience: a reward of DM300,000 - almost £100,000 - is
also being offered, no questions asked, for the safe return of the picture.
The British Council, which
organised the touring exhibition from which the painting was stolen, yesterday
launched the campaign to persuade the thief to return it in time for a major
Freud retrospective next year at Tate Britain.
The little picture was
described yesterday by William Feaver, the art critic who is curating next
year's show, as "the greatest smallest portrait of the 20th
century".
Andrea Rose, director of
visual arts at the council, said it was unique, "one national icon
painted by another".
An anonymous donor - the
council was unable yesterday even to divulge his nationality - who is a
devotee of the work of both artists has put up the entire cost of the project,
including the reward money, the cost of printing 2,500 posters, and the poster
sites in Berlin.
Although the campaign is
only being mounted for one week in Berlin, the image of the wanted poster is
certain to go global. Since 1998 the reputation of both men has soared
internationally, making them among the most famous and admired artists in the
world. Both long since broke through the £1m price barrier breached by only a
handful of contemporary British artists.
Although the painting is
priceless, and irreplaceable since Bacon died in 1992, one expert guessed
yesterday that its value at auction is probably around £1.2m.
The theft was
excruciatingly embarrassing for the British Council, and for the Neue
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, from which it was stolen. Berlin was the last stop on
a tour which had already included Washington, London and Paris.
By chance a camera crew
was in the gallery on May 27 1988, and at 11am the portrait was still on the
wall.
By 3pm the gallery had
telephoned the council: the picture was gone. It had simply been unscrewed,
and, not much larger than a postcard, pocketed. The gallery had no alarms and
no security cameras, and has accepted full liability. Ms Rose, who was curator
of the exhibition, said: "It was, I think, the worst moment of my
professional career."
Most major art thefts are
now carried out for ransom, to the gallery or the insurers, or so the picture
can be used as collateral for loans, often for drug deals. In either case news
of the picture's fate tends to filter up from the criminal underworld. There
was a hoax ransom demand for the portrait within a few weeks, but nothing
since.
In 1951, when the picture
was made, Bacon and Freud, then aged 42 and 31 respectively, were close
friends, though the relationship later cooled sharply. Bacon made a portrait
of Freud, which was based on a photograph of Kafka, and turned out looking far
more like Kafka. "That quite often happened with Bacon," William
Feaver said.
But Freud worked on his
portrait for months, sitting knee-to-knee with Bacon, painting in oils with a
fine brush on a copper etching plate balanced on his knee.
Although Freud is best
known for his pitiless studies of nudes, the portrait is full of tenderness,
in contrast to the raddled figure Bacon became after a lifetime of alcohol and
excess. It was bought instantly from the studio by the Tate Gallery - for an
undisclosed sum, but believed to be less than £100 - to the chagrin of
Freud's dealer, who hoped to include it for sale in an exhibition a few months
later.
The 1988 exhibition was
crucially important for Freud: it was his first major overseas show, and
helped to transform him into an international star. He is so attached to the
painting that he refused to allow a colour image to be reproduced today,
because he believes the only transparency does not do it justice.
Freud, with memories of a
favourite book from his childhood, Emil and the Detectives, where a town is
covered with posters overnight, originally asked for the wanted posters to be
printed on the cheapest possible paper, and flyposted, like those in cowboy
movies.
Discretion has prevailed.
The British Council has rented legal sites, on buildings and on roadside
kiosks. The printers could not handle the cheap thin paper Freud wanted. In
the end they have been printed on heavy art paper, and with a limited edition
of just 2,500, are certain to become coveted collector's items themselves.
Bringing home the Bacon
It's not just a stolen portrait that Lucian Freud wants back, says Jonathan
Jones. It's his much-missed friend
The Guardian, Saturday
June 23, 2001
When a great artist does a
portrait of another, there is usually more at stake than meets the eye.
Friendship, rivalry, alliances of ideas and sympathies - down the centuries,
artists have expressed these things by exchanging portraits. So when Francis
Bacon, the supreme painter of scenes of modern horror, and Lucian Freud, the
heir to Courbet and Degas in his depiction of the human body, sealed their
friendship by painting each other's portraits at the beginning of the 1950s,
it was a significant moment.
When Bacon painted Freud in
1951 - his first identified portrait - and Freud returned the gift with a
portrait of Bacon in 1952, they were expressing a deep artistic bond as well
as friendship. And this is why Freud's attempt to retrieve his portrait of
Bacon, which was stolen in Berlin 13 years ago, in time for his
retrospective at Tate Britain next year, is such a revealing gesture by this
most private of men.
Freud and Bacon became
friends in the 1940s; the older man, Bacon, was born in Ireland in 1909, and
Freud, the grandson of Sigmund, was born in Berlin in 1922. Both made their
lives in London, and their visions of London - Bacon's depraved wasteland,
Freud's bedsit nightmare - are some of the most troubled images of the city,
comparable to those of Conrad, Eliot and Pinter. Their friendship appears to
have been at one remove from the flam boyant, drunken relationships Bacon
had with his hangers-on in Soho; it was something else, a matter of mutual
respect. In the recently published book of photographs of Bacon's studio by
Perry Ogden, photographs of Freud, torn at the edges but capturing him in
his handsome youth, can be seen among the objects Bacon always kept with
him.
The portrait of Bacon -
a tiny work in oil on copper about the size of a large postcard - is one of
Freud's earliest works to achieve the intimacy and emotional frankness of
his greatest portraits. It was bought by the Tate Gallery in 1952. In 1988
the painting went on loan to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin as part of a
retrospective of Freud's work. It never came back. No trace has ever been
found and no one knows what happened. It wouldn't have been difficult for a
thief to vanish into the Tiergarten with this tiny painting stashed in a
carrier bag or under a coat.
Now Freud has devised a
wanted poster calling for the return of this stolen painting of Bacon, to be
pasted up all over Berlin in a desperate attempt to bring back what was
lost. But the poster is more than a practical attempt to retrieve a
painting, although of course we must hope it succeeds. It is also an
artistic gesture. Freud, the greatest living figurative painter, has never
been known as a conceptual artist. Yet this wanted poster is conceptual art.
It recalls a famous work by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1923 put his own face on
a police wanted notice. Freud painting Bacon, we expect that; but the master
of the portrait quoting Duchamp? More is going on here than police work.
This poster is as much
an act of mourning as a public appeal. It is a lament for a painting, a man,
and a city. Wanted, reward 300,000 Deutschmarks (£100,000). What is wanted
here? Not only Bacon's lost portrait, but the man himself, Freud's friend,
his fellow artist, who died in 1992. Gone. There is no mistaking the longing
here. Indeed, seen in the black and white of the poster, the painting has a
startling likeness to an object Bacon kept close to him - a copy of the
death mask of William Blake. The cast of Blake's face has its lids lowered.
That downturned face, the artist who no longer looks, is echoed in Freud's
portrait of 1952. And on the poster of 2001 it becomes an allusion to
mortality, to the gaze that is no longer returned.
Freud's poster also
recalls, in addition to Duchamp, the series of paintings, Most Wanted Men,
created by Andy Warhol in 1963. Warhol took FBI photographs of wanted
bankrobbers and mafiosi and turned them into portraits, punning on the
meaning of the word "wanted". Andy Warhol himself wanted these
men, confessed in these paintings his own desire for them and admiration of
their criminality and outlaw status.
This poster deliberately
looks like an old-style crime notice. Imagining it pasted up in one of the
S-Bahn stations in the former East Berlin, I think of Fritz Lang's film M,
in which a child murderer is hounded through the streets of this city. Yet
the face in the picture is not that of the unknown criminal, but the most
celebrated British artist of the 20th century. It's a nice joke. Under the
big red letters that spell out wanted is the outlaw Francis Bacon, in a
black-and-white photograph of the lost painting.
The poster's design
invites you to apply 19th-century notions of the criminal face to this
painting, to read Bacon's face as that of a dangerous street character, a
man not to be trusted. But Bacon's still youthful face - he was in his early
40s when it was painted - seems vulnerably exposed. The monochrome image has
the cropped brutalism of a police mugshot. And yet this is a far more
introspective image than we normally get of Bacon the artist, who wore a
tough public mask. Looking at his pensive face, we sense a tenderness. His
wavy, unkempt hair and the uncontrolled, bursting structure of his face
pushing outwards towards the edges of the picture suggest a nature thrusting
beyond the conventional forms of life.
Yet the presentation of
Bacon as outlaw reframes this portrait, and perhaps makes it less reticent
than it was in 1952. We see how it shares the humour, love and clarity of
Freud's paintings of Leigh Bowery in the 1990s. Bacon, the Soho bohemian,
drinker and lover of petty criminals, is given, by this poster, the same
grand attention that Freud gave the outrageous Bowery. Here is Bacon the
monster, wanted in Berlin.
And this is where the
poster truly becomes a work of conceptual art. The meaning is not just in
the work itself but in the entire campaign. This is a poster campaign for a
lawless artist in the historically ripe streets of Berlin, where every
corner you turn reveals a bullet-scarred wall or the site of a political
obscenity. And the Jewish artist who made it was born in Berlin in 1922,
spent his early years in a flat near the city's central park, the Tiergarten
(close to where the Bacon portrait was stolen in 1988), and emigrated from
Germany with his parents in 1933. How can there not be a larger historical
resonance to Freud putting a wanted poster on display throughout the city he
and his family were forced to leave?
In Fritz Lang's M, the
outsider is hunted down. Freud's poster campaign inevitably evokes the past
of a city where human plurality was repudiated, where to be wanted by the
authorities was to be categorised as inhuman. And yet what his campaign is
about is restitution, a return.
Freud's mixing of grief
for Bacon with a plea for the return of his portrait is a confirmation of
what anyone who looks at his portraits must feel. Freud's portraiture is
consciously naive in its restatement of the portrait's oldest, most utopian
purpose: the preservation of the dead.
Freud's savage ecstasies
of green and orange flesh, with their unconcealed desire to put someone's
very being on canvas, are a struggle to hold back time, or at least keep a
souvenir of those time steals. Freud's most distressing portraits are those
of his mother getting older and older - and finally, shockingly, his drawing
of her dead. But all his paintings have a compulsion not just to capture
someone's appearance but their presence, to make something of them live
forever on canvas.
And in the ambiguity as
to whether this is an appeal for Bacon's portrait, or for the return of
Bacon himself - or, perhaps, for Freud's lost childhood and never-to-be
adulthood in Germany - Freud makes it plain how much he invests in painting.
If Bacon's portrait is restored, something of Bacon will be restored. For
Freud, a portrait is a living thing; the fact he will only allow his lost
work to be reproduced in black-and-white must be more than a technical
consideration. It suggests a mourning for the painting itself, and a
perception of the painting as dead, lost. A reproduction means nothing. It
is in the paint that life goes on.
For Freud, it's as if a
thief returning this painting would return a token of the dead, and its
resurfacing would be an image of a much larger redemption, a token of all
the missing people, the lost connections in a life.
Artist 'mourns'
missing work in photographs
The Daily Telegraph 25/06/2001
Portrait of Francis
Bacon Lucian
Freud 1951
UNTIL
now, Lucian Freud's only acknowledgement of the theft of his portrait of Francis
Bacon has been in the way he has allowed photographs of the work to be used.
"Partly
because there was no decent colour reproduction, partly as a kind of mourning,
I've only allowed it to be reproduced in monochrome," he told The Telegraph
yesterday, the first time he has spoken about the theft. "In fact the
painting is quite near monochrome - so it comes out quite well, and I thought it
was a rather jokey equivalent to a black arm band. You know - there it
isn't!"
The
theft was very unusual. Most art thefts are committed by criminal gangs who use
them as negotiable assets in underworld deals. Generally, sooner or later,
feelers are put out for a ransom deal. But in this case, the little picture has
disappeared into a void. Nothing, not a whisper, not a rumour, has been heard of
its whereabouts.
Freud
speculates that it might have been taken by a Francis Bacon fan, since Bacon is
highly regarded in Germany. "I wonder whether it was taken by a student
because it was stolen when the gallery was full of students. Also, for a student
to take a small picture is not that odd, is it?"
He
remembers painting the portrait, nearly half a century ago. "I saw a lot of
him at that time and we were very friendly, so it was natural for me to paint
him." Freud and Bacon are to be seen in close conversation, for example, in
Michael Andrews's group portrait at the famous Soho drinking club the Colony
Room, painted in 1962 (which will be included in the Michael Andrews exhibition
at the Tate, opening next month). "But of course," he adds, "I
was pleased that he agreed to sit."
Freud's working methods are
notoriously slow, often involving sittings for many months. At that time, he was
employing a painstaking, almost miniaturist technique. "In those days I
worked with the painting on my knees rather than standing at an easel, as I do
now. I always take a long time to paint a picture, but I don't remember the
Bacon portrait taking particularly long.
"Bacon complained a lot
about sitting - which he always did about everything - but not to me at all. I
heard about it, you know, from people in the pub. Really, he was very good about
it."
In any case, the result was
a remarkable study in suppressed tension. The art critic Robert Hughes has
compared Bacon's face to a grenade a fraction of a second before it explodes.
Freud, less extravagantly, notes that "I was pleased with it, and he seemed
to like it as well". Bacon also painted Freud, but his portraits, less
demandingly, were almost all done from photographs.
The idea for the poster
comes from Freud himself. "I did a rough sketch. The idea is to have a
monochrome reproduction of the painting, with the word 'Wanted' in red, and the
reward in red. Then simply the telephone number, to make it absolutely plain,
like those posters in Westerns which I've always liked very much."
By a minor historical irony,
Freud, a painter now so much associated with London, spent the first 10 years of
his life in Berlin. The Freud family (his father Ernst, an architect, was the
son of Sigmund) lived near the Tiergarten until they fled to England in 1933.
Many of his early memories concern the very area of Berlin from which his
picture later disappeared.
He recalls swapping
cigarette cards with dealers around the Potsdamer Platz - "certain cards
were rare, you could swap three Marlene Dietrichs for one Johnny Weissmuller,
that kind of thing" - and falling through the ice while skating in the
Tiergarten ("it was very exciting"). He also remembers how he loved
the pavement pillars on which advertisements were posted (100 large Wanted
posters will be placed on their modern-day equivalents).
So, all that remains to be
seen is whether the picture will turn up. Freud would very much like to see it
included in the big show at Tate Britain scheduled for his 80th birthday year
next year. Some auguries are good. Under German law, prosecutions can no longer
be brought after 12 years - so the thief has little to fear.
The reward is generous. And,
if all else fails, Freud suggests that a highly unusual proposal might be made
to the robber. Would, he wondered, the thief be prepared at least to lend the
picture to the Tate exhibition? In an art world that has seen practically
everything, that would almost certainly be a first.
Freud designs poster to
save his Bacon
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts
Correspondent
The Daily
Telegraph27 June 2001
IT is a happy marriage of
conceptual and figurative art. They would even have got the point in the Wild
West.
Lucian Freud, Britain's
Grand Old Man of figurative painting, has taken the unusual step of designing a
Wanted poster appealing for the return of one of his most famous pictures, a
rare portrait of his sometime friend, the artist Francis Bacon who died in 1992.
The tiny portrait was stolen
in Berlin 13 years ago. It was ripped off a gallery wall and has never been
heard of since. Measuring just seven inches by five, it was painted 50 years
ago, is worth well over £1 million and is of great historical significance.
Neither artist was well
known at the time but they went on to become the dominant figures of British
20th-century painting. Bacon has been called the greatest British artist since
Turner and the work of both men now sells for millions of pounds.
It was Freud's first
portrait of a known person and is also one of only two known portraits of Bacon
- the other is considered of little importance. Freud's was done as the two men
sat almost knee-to-knee at Freud's home in St John's Wood, north London, for
several sittings over three months in 1951 and 1952.
William Feaver, Freud's
biographer, yesterday called the painting "the greatest smallest portrait
of the 20th century" and an icon of the age. The critic Robert Hughes has
said of it: "Bacon's pear-shaped face has the silent intensity of a grenade
in the millisecond before it goes off."
In the hope that the thief
can be flushed out, 2,500 of Freud's posters will be plastered on hoardings and
kiosks in the German capital today, offering a bounty of almost £100,000 for
its return.
The poster is based on a
sketch sent by Freud, now 79, to the British Council. The portrait is owned by
the Tate Gallery in London - it paid just a few hundred pounds for it soon after
it was finished - but the council organised the exhibition of Freud's work at
the Neue Nationalsgalerie in Berlin from which the painting disappeared on May
27 1988.
The portrait, oil on copper,
is in colour but Freud has insisted that it appear in black and white on his
poster because it remains "a ghost" until it is found and because he
says he is in mourning for its loss. Though the theft was many years ago, there
are reasons for the timing of the appeal.
Next year, Tate Britain is
holding a huge retrospective for Freud - it will perhaps be the last in his
lifetime - with 140 of his paintings. His Francis Bacon is badly wanted. Also, a
statute of limitation in Germany means that when 12 years have passed after a
theft, the criminal cannot be charged. It is hoped that this will make the thief
feel more secure about returning the picture.
Andrea Rose, director of the
council's visual arts unit, said yesterday that the painting had vanished into
thin air: "Generally, after two or three years there is a ransom call or
some sightings somewhere but in this case there has been nothing. It is very
unusual. We have nothing to go on and we don't even know if it is in Berlin.
It's no bigger than a postcard and it seems it virtually disappeared in
someone's pocket."
The reward money has been
put up by a prominent British arts philanthropist who has asked to remain
anonymous. The rarity of a new work by Freud does raise one worry. The British
Council is concerned that the posters - in a strictly limited edition - may be
ripped down and taken home by Berlin's art lovers before they achieve their
goal.
David Sylvester, 76,
Art Critic Who Championed Modernism
By
JOHN RUSSELL
The
New York Times
June 20, 2001
David Sylvester, for
many years an influential critic, exhibition organizer and shaper of opinion
in the international modern-art field, died on Monday in London. He was 76
and lived in London.
The cause was colon
cancer, said a spokeswoman for the Tate Gallery.
Mr. Sylvester's career
was a lifelong romance with the idea of the modern in art, music, literature
and the movies. What he loved he shared unstintingly.
Anthony David Bernard
Sylvester was born in London on Sept. 21, 1924, and educated at the
University College School in central London. When still very young, he
endeared himself to many artists, among them Henry Moore and Francis Bacon,
by the authenticity and the drive of his commitment to their work.
By 1948 he was giving
broadcast talks for the BBC. In 1951 he curated exhibitions of sculpture by
Moore and drawings by Alberto Giacometti at the Tate Gallery. Afterward, the
long list of exhibitions he organized in London included the work of Stanley
Spencer (1954), René Magritte (1969), Robert Morris (1971), Henri Laurens
(1971), Joan Miró (bronzes, 1972), Willem de Kooning (1977), Dada and
Surrealism Reviewed (1977) and late Picasso (1988). In 1994-95 he was
co-curator of a large exhibition of de Kooning in London and in Washington.
In 1993 Mr. Sylvester
organized an exhibition of works by Bacon, his close friend, as Britain's
contribution to the Venice Biennale. For this he was awarded the Biennale's
Golden Lion Award, which had never before been given to a critic. Last year
he organized a major Bacon exhibition for Paris, Munich and Dublin.
A first visit to New
York in 1960 at the invitation of the State Department resulted in Mr.
Sylvester's lifelong commitments to several American artists. In particular,
Jasper Johns, de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko fired his
enthusiasm. On his return to London he supported the New York School in a
series of BBC radio programs that had a lasting impact.
In later years he was a
regular visitor to New York, where he was prized as a critic, a friend and a
memorable conversationalist. A master of the purposeful pause, during which
he sometimes seemed to have left the room, he was also able to proclaim his
opinions in a long series of perfectly formed sentences.
Much in demand as an
adviser, he was on the acquisitions committee of the Musée d'Art Moderne in
Paris from 1984 to 1996. In 1995 he was made a Commander in the Order of
Arts and Letters in France. He was also an Honorary Academician in the Royal
Academy in London.
Mr. Sylvester was a
trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1967 to 1969, and a trustee of the Henry
Moore Foundation from 1996 on. In 2000 he was awarded Britain's Hawthornden
Prize for art criticism.
His marriage to Pamela
Bidden ended in divorce. The couple had three daughters. He later had
another daughter, Cecily Brown, with the English novelist Shena Mackay.
Among his many
publications, the collected Interviews with Francis Bacon was revised
and enlarged more than once over the years. Last year he published Looking
Back on Francis Bacon. Another lifelong enthusiasm culminated in his Looking
at Giacometti in 1994.
About Modern Art (1996,
enlarged 1997) touched on many aspects of his trawl through the second half
of the last century. As was true of the Bacon and Giacometti works, About
Modern Art included elements of autobiography. They gave immediacy to a
form of critical writing that often shies away from it.
A monumental five-volume
catalogue raisonné of the work of Magritte (1992-97) was a collegial effort
by Mr. Sylvester and, among others, his friend Sarah Whitfield.
In his last months he
was at work on a book of interviews with American artists, including Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg, de Kooning and Richard Serra.
David
Sylvester
The Daily Telegraph 20the
June 2001
DAVID SYLVESTER,
who has died aged 76, was generally reckoned to be the greatest critic of modern
art writing in English.
A notable scholar
and organiser of exhibitions, Sylvester was also the author of the Magritte
catalogue raisonne, which was to occupy him for more than a quarter of a
century, and of the standard monograph on Giacometti. He was a leading authority
on Francis Bacon and on Henry Moore.
Sylvester's
extraordinarily smooth voice and polished literary style belied a waspish
temperament. He could be as devastatingly critical about people as he was shrewd
in his judgments on art. This led him into memorable confrontations, such as
when Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, spat at
him and then burst into tears following an altercation over the hanging of the
American Art in the 20th Century exhibition in 1993 - which Sylvester had
condemned as "scandalous".
A man who provoked
violent dislikes in some whom he crossed, Sylvester was also capable of
inspiring great loyalty in those who worked alongside him. They admired his
dedication and utter perfectionism and respected his formidable eye. A large
bearlike man with a great presence, he could be a charming and witty companion,
and, despite his rather prickly nature, an inspiring teacher at the Royal
College of Art from 1960-70, the Slade (where he was Visiting Lecturer from
1953-57), and Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania (1967-68).
A writer who could
turn his hand to film reviewing or sports commentary, Sylvester had the gift,
rare among art critics, of being able to explain the most difficult modern art
in the most down-to-earth, comprehensible language.
One article which
illustrated this vividly was Art of the Coke Culture which first appeared in
1963 in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine and was republished in his anthology of
collected essays, About Modern Art (1996). Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs, wine and
Coca-Cola, were brilliantly contrasted to highlight differences between
contemporary European and American art, between the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein
and what Sylvester called the "folk" art of Peter Blake.
Anthony David
Bernard Sylvester was born on September 21 1924 into a family of Russian-Jewish
silver dealers. He was educated at University College School, where a fellow
pupil was Alan Bowness, later Director of the Tate Gallery.
Sylvester's
interest in art was awakened at the age of 17, by the discovery of a black and
white illustration of Matisse's La Danse which gave him "an awareness of
the music of form" and showed him that art did not always have to tell a
story. Following this Damascene conversion, Sylvester tried his hand at
painting, but, discouraged by his efforts, turned instead to writing about it.
In a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph's Martin Gayford, Sylvester
claimed that the critical impulse had come even earlier. "I went to see a
football match when I was 10 or 11, Arsenal v West Bromwich Albion at Highbury,"
he recalled. "I came home and I wrote a report on it."
His first review
appeared in November 1942 in Tribune. For three years he enjoyed a charmed life
as a regular reviewer for the literary pages edited by John Atkins and, later,
George Orwell, but he was to fall foul of the editor, Aneurin Bevan. His
swan-song - ironically, in view of his later fame as an authority on the
sculptor - was a review of a picture book about Henry Moore which appeared in
1945.
When Sylvester
telephoned to complain that he had been paid so poorly for the article, he was
told, tartly, that how much he earned depended upon how good the article was.
However, Moore clearly liked the article even if the magazine's editor did not,
because Sylvester was invited to visit Moore's studio in Hertfordshire and later
spent a few months as Moore's part-time secretary.
The working
relationship was terminated, according to Sylvester, "because we spent too
much time arguing about art" and his secretarial input would seem to have
been minimal, given that there is no surviving written evidence of his tenure in
the otherwise very extensive Henry Moore archives.
Having turned down
a place at Cambridge to read Moral Sciences, Sylvester set out for Paris in
1947, supporting himself through reviews and translation work while frequenting
the studios of Brancusi, Leger and, above all, Giacometti, for whom he sat and
who came to represent to the young critic "the saintly knight without
armour who had come to redeem art from facility and commercialism."
Another beacon of
inspiration was the work of Paul Klee, whose major retrospective in Paris
Sylvester reviewed for Sartre's existentialist monthly, Les Temps Modernes. But,
despite his admiration for Klee, Sylvester at this period had little sympathy
for abstract art which he regarded as "incomplete art", or for the
work of the American Abstract Expressionists whom he was later to admire.
When he returned
to figurative painting, it was in particular to the work of Francis Bacon, with
whom he was to conduct a series of memorable television interviews culminating
in his book Interviews with Francis Bacon (1975). While embracing Bacon's brutal
realism, Sylvester was careful to dissociate himself from what he regarded as
the banality of artists such as John Bratby, memorably branded as "The
Kitchen Sink School", and from the ideas of the critic John Berger, who
championed their work but "was too much of a boy scout not to find Bacon a
monster of depravity".
In a lecture given
at the Royal College of Art in 1951, Sylvester called upon the students to
embrace a new, more subjective type of realism, reflecting the fact that
"modern man occurs in the consciousness of each individual". It was
his own ability to put these sensations so vividly into words which made him
such a sensitive critic of Bacon's work.
The return to
England had brought a revival of his interest in Henry Moore, culminating in the
first of a series of major exhibitions on the sculptor organised by Sylvester at
the Tate Gallery in 1951. Further exhibitions were to follow in 1968, also at
the Tate (with Joanna Drew), and in 1978 at the Serpentine Gallery, very shortly
before Moore's death. The Tate also played host to important shows which
Sylvester organised on Soutine (1963), Giacometti (1965) and Magritte (1969).
The Magritte
exhibition led to the most taxing undertaking of Sylvester's career when he was
invited to write the catalogue raisonne of the artist, which was published in
1992. It was a project which was to occupy him for a quarter of a century and
which he was later to regret, partly because it diverted him from other areas of
criticism, and partly because, despite his unrivalled knowledge of Magritte, he
was not wholeheartedly in sympathy with his subject.
"The fact
is," he later wrote, "that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on
someone who was not my type." Despite this, he wrote about Magritte with
great insight, concluding one memorable essay with an inveterate analysis of
art: "If one looks at anything with the intention of trying to discover
what it means, one ends up no longer looking at the thing itself."
His involvement
with Magritte made him also a natural choice to curate the 1978 Hayward Gallery
exhibition Dada and Surrealism, but, despite his interest in Magritte, he had
little respect for that other pillar of surrealism, Salvador Dali, comparing the
experience of looking at his work to attending a performance by Liberace -
"one of the unhappy few squirming in the midst of an audience revelling in
this oily message".
Despite his
lifelong admiration for Moore and Bacon, Sylvester was otherwise rather out of
sympathy with most 20th-century British art, which he saw as bedevilled by
vagueness and a tendency to compromise.
Sickert was one
artist who attracted Sylvester's most vitriolic criticisms, and he also wrote a
brilliantly acerbic essay on that genteel establishment painter Sir William
Coldstream, which contains passages reminiscent of Lytton Strachey. "A list
of the honorary positions he held reads like something out of Gilbert and
Sullivan," he wrote. "As some people are accident prone, so is he
prone to attract official handles." The article concludes: "Looking at
what was painted during the hours between committee meetings, one is at a loss
to know whether, had he painted more, the gain would be more than
quantitative." Surprisingly, Sylvester remained on good terms with the
painter.
Sylvester was also
an expert and avid collector of oriental art, particularly Islamic carpets. This
bore fruit in the exhibition The Eastern Carpet in the Western World at the
Hayward Gallery in 1983.
Other great
enthusiasms were music - particularly jazz - films and cricket. He captained a
team called The Eclectics and wrote cricketing articles for the Observer, where
fellow contributors were A J Ayer and John Sparrow. His film criticism, which he
started to write first for the magazine Encounter, was sufficiently
distinguished to earn him the Golden Lion of Venice award in 1993.
Among his many
official duties he was a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation and the Tate
Gallery, an adviser to the Arts Council and a member of the Commission
d'Acquisitions at the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Perhaps the remark
which best sums up his career was that which he himself made in a brilliantly
illuminating essay about Matisse, the painter who first kindled his interest in
modern painting. "He was a dandy amongst painters . . . one who took
infinite pains to get a casual look." Sylvester was also a dandy by this
definition, one who took infinite pains to get a casual look and his gift was to
make the most difficult art seem easy and accessible.
He was appointed
CBE in 1983. Sylvester married, in 1950, Pamela Briddon; they had three
daughters. The marriage was dissolved. He also had a daughter with the novelist
Shena Mackay.
Obituary: David
Sylvester
Liz
Jobey, The Guardian June 20, 2001
A brilliant art critic,
his work deepened our understanding of Matisse, Picasso, Magritte, Giacometti,
Henry Moore and Francis Bacon
David Sylvester, who has
died aged 76, was one of the finest writers on art in the second half of the
20th century. His clarity of expression and his adherence to the discipline of
looking, as a route to understanding the power of a work of art, set him in a
class apart. He wrote predominantly - whether in his journalism, in catalogue
essays or books - about modern art, from Cézanne
and Matisse up to mature artists of today. He was also a skilled maker of
exhibitions. He curated his first Henry Moore show in 1951, and contributed
many major shows to British and foreign museums and galleries.
His
exhibition schedule was particularly frantic during the 1990s, after he
finished the catalogue raisonné
of René
Magritte, which had taken, "with interruptions", 25 years. Though
his writing was marked by its simplicity of style (he cautioned editors that
he used shorter words than most critics, so if his pieces did not make the
required column length, that did not mean he had not supplied - or should not
be paid - the agreed amount), it never came easily or quickly. It was also
marked by his analogies - accurate, but unexpected - drawn as easily from sex
or football as from art history and psychology.
In the
1950s and 1960s, when he was at his most prolific as a journalist, Sylvester
also wrote about football and cricket for the Observer, ran a cricket team
called the Eclectics, and reviewed films wherever he could, introducing sci-fi
films and musicals to the readers of Encounter.
His
expertise in modern art was matched by a love of Islamic, Indian and Oriental
- as well as Egyptian and tribal - art, and he collected throughout his adult
life. He revolved this personal collection with obsessive frequency, and
unsuspecting visitors to his house might find themselves up a stepladder,
hanging on to a Picasso drawing or a 16th-century Chinese carpet, while he
fretfully solicited their views on this latest domestic rehang.
Sylvester had begun listening to jazz as a schoolboy in the 1930s, and still
had the buff's ability to identify time, place and line-up of a session on CD
without recourse to the sleeve notes. He also owned an enviable collection of
art-house videos, which he reordered with Desert Island avidity; David
Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film was his indispensable volume
of choice. He was an inveterate compiler of lists. Eliot was his favourite
poet; L'Age D'Or and Ai No Corrida vied for his favourite film;
Manchester United was his team; and Mike Brearley, one of his favourite
cricketers, was among his closest friends.
As for
his favourite painter, the artists he championed changed over the years.
"I started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948," he explains
in his book of essays, About Modern Art (1996). And not until 40 years
later did he feel nearer to "accepting [Picasso's] genius, rather than
resenting it". It was a tug of love that underpinned his development as a
critic, and only the thoroughness with which he tested his early champion,
Giacometti - in essays, collected in Looking At Giacometti (1994),
exhibitions (1951 and 1981), and on film (1967) - gives some measure of how
prolonged and painful such a shift could be.
The
question of Picasso dominated Sylvester's career as a writer. "It is not
even the question of Picasso versus Matisse," he wrote, "for even at
those times when Matisse seems the greater, Picasso himself is still the
question, probably because Matisse is a great artist in the same sort of way
as many great artists of the past, whereas Picasso is a kind of artist who
could not have existed before this century, since his art is a celebration of
this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the
practice of art.
"Picasso is the issue, Picasso is the one to beat, Picasso is the fastest
gun in the west, the one every budding gunfighter has to beat to the draw in
order to prove himself . . . The young critic cuts his teeth on Picasso. He
proves his manhood by putting down Picasso, which is quite easy, because he is
so flawed an artist, is such a colossal figure that he has several parts that
are clay, probably including his feet, but not his balls."
Sylvester was born in London, the son of a Russian-Jewish antiques dealer, and
went to University College School, which he left at the age of 16. He enjoyed
a brief career as a dealer himself before turning to painting at 17, inspired
by a black and white reproduction of Matisse's La Danse. Until then, he
said, he thought of art as "telling a story".
Matisse
changed all that. It was not its narrative qualities that enthralled him, but
its abstract ones; he understood the rhythms and tensions in its series of
curves. By his own account, Sylvester was not a good painter, and decided he
might be better at writing about it than making it.
While
still in his teens, he had an article about drawing accepted by Tribune. He
wrote another, after which the literary editor, George Orwell, gave him some
book reviews. There were few wartime art exhibitions to write about, but the
National gallery put on monthly shows, and some commercial galleries exhibited
British artists. In this way, Sylvester was introduced to the works of Henry
Moore, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Matthew Smith, while he met a
younger generation of London artists, including Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews,
Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.
His
stint with Tribune ended in 1945. As Sylvester remembered, its then
editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too "heavy with Latinisms".
In any case, he was soon redeployed: his last piece for the magazine, on Henry
Moore, elicited an invitation to the sculptor's studio, and a job as Moore's
part-time secretary. The chance to study an artist's work in depth led to
Sylvester's first exhibition installation, and, in 1968, his first book, on
Moore.
In 1947, he
turned down a place to read moral sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, and
went to Paris, finding work editing and translating. In 1948, after seeing the
work of Paul Klee, he wrote a piece about him for a New York magazine, Tiger's
Eye, which the critical review Les Temps Modernes then wanted to
publish in translation. Sylvester asked for time to rework it; it finally
appeared two years later.
The
time-lag testified to the kind of deliberations of which those who knew him
subsequently would find nothing surprising. In conversation, he was a master
of the grand pause, the prolonged silence broken by heavy breathing, then a
sudden intake of breath that heralded the dramatic response. Lord Snowdon
liked to tell the story of how, driving with Sylvester to Brighton, Snowdon
asked a question at Reigate, and saw the domes of the Brighton pavilion appear
before a voice from the back seat answered deeply, "Yes".
It was
through Picasso's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, that Sylvester, then 24,
met Giacometti. After that, he visited Giacometti's studio regularly, and
began to write about his work. In 1960, he sat for Giacometti, and the
resulting painting finally graced the cover of his collected pieces 35 years
later, to critical praise.
Sylvester's first glimpse of American abstract expressionism, in 1950, left
him unimpressed. He was, at this point, anti-American and pro-figurative, and
more interested in Bacon, whom he had identified as the most outstanding of
contemporary British artists. During the 1950s and 1960s, he became a personal
friend of Bacon's, and, in 1975, when their collected conversations on art
were published, the book was recognised as one of the great additions to the
study of late 20th-century art. It made Sylvester's reputation, and has been
revised, extended and republished in several editions.
Sylvester's support for figurative (though not necessarily realist) painting
embroiled him in an early battle with the critic John Berger, conducted in
essays and reviews, particularly on the pages of Encounter. A byproduct of
this was a piece that coined a new title for a group of British and French
contemporary realist painters - the kitchen-sink school. Taken up by the
media, and applied wholesale to literature, theatre and film, it added a new
genre to the decade.
In
1960, Sylvester took over from Berger at the New Statesman. Two years
later, he resigned, having discovered that the column was too short for his
good ideas, and came around too frequently to avoid his bad ones. His career
as a broadcaster, however, blossomed. He took up a visiting lectureship at the
Royal College of Art in 1960 (he had been a visiting lecturer at the Slade
from 1953-57), and, in the same year, the US state department invited him to
spend two months in America, during which he interviewed American artists for
BBC radio.
It took
Sylvester most of the decade to make up his mind about contemporary American
art. He was warming to Pollock by the mid-1950s, and, after a touring show at
the Tate - and the US trip - had given him a more detailed chance to see it at
first-hand, he was finally converted. Then came Pop. He introduced it, in a
1963 essay, Coke Culture, in the Sunday Times magazine, which he had joined as
an art writer and adviser.
In the
1960s, his career took off in several directions at once. He was making a
series of films, Ten Modern Artists, for the BBC, curating at least one
major show a year, writing two books - Henry Moore (1968) and Magritte
(1969) - and taking on an escalating number of public appointments. He liked
being asked to sit on committees and accept trusteeships - something he put
down to being an outsider and a Jew.
Having
accepted them, however, they did not always last. He resigned as a Tate
trustee after two years, and gave up the British Film Institute production
board after three. But he kept up his membership of the art panel of the Arts
Council for almost two decades, and, though not a very politicised bureaucrat,
he did bring about some fundamental changes. He got the rates for visiting
curators raised, and revised the way works were bought for the Arts Council
collection - to prevent people pushing their favourites through. Towards the
end of his life, he was a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation, on the board
of the Serpentine gallery and, in 1997, became a governor of the South Bank
Centre.
In 1950, Sylvester had
married a student teacher, Pamela Briddon, with whom he had three daughters,
Catherine, Naomi and Xanthe. He later had a fourth daughter, Cecily Brown,
with Shena Mackay; all four daughters survive him. When the marriage broke up,
he moved back to their old flat in Wimbledon, south London, and filled the two
large rooms with pieces of art. Most visitors complied with his rule that they
remove their shoes at the door, though the artist Joseph Beuys is supposed,
famously, to have refused, and been sent packing into the night. At the end of
the 1980s, Sylvester moved to a townhouse in Notting Hill, where, for more
than a decade, his then partner, the art critic and curator Sarah Whitfield,
lived next door. It was there that he finished editing his work on Magritte.
The
commission had been offered by the art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil in
1967, initially as a four-year contract. What was originally intended to be
one book finished up as a five-volume catalogue raisonné,
a critical biography and a touring exhibition. In retrospect, Sylvester
occasionally wondered if he had made the right decision; he was given to
periods of self-doubt, and regretted giving up the opportunity to develop more
films and interviews for television.
As it
was, Magritte took over his professional life. In 1982, he gave up what had
been his most prominent public position to date, his seat on the Arts Council,
and vowed to do nothing else until Magritte was finished. In 1983, he was
awarded a CBE for his public services to art.
In
fact, his period of abstinence did not last long. The following year, he
accepted a place on the acquisitions board of the Musée
Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, and, in 1988, heralded his return with a
show of Late Picasso at the Centre Pompidou. His catalogue essay was a tribute
from an old adversary who recognised, in the works of the ageing Picasso, the
loss not of artistic but of sexual potency.
The
culmination of the Magritte period came in 1992: the first volume of the
catalogue raisonné was published, and the exhibition opened at the Hayward
gallery, and travelled to New York, Houston and Chicago. After this, one
volume appeared every year until 1996. After 25 years with Magritte, Sylvester
felt it to have been too long: "I still love the work," he wrote,
"but the fact remains that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on
someone who was not my type."
When
the de Menils' support came to an end, Sylvester worried that, both
economically and professionally, he might not be able to hold his own. He had
always been anxious about money. In the 1950s, he had thought he might be able
to finance his life by gambling, as Bacon and Freud did, but he had none of
their success. Considering his reputation, some people regarded his fears as
false modesty, but he was not immune to depression and insecurity. There was a
side to his nature that needed praise, and he was genuinely pleased when he
received it. But by this time people expected him to be grand.
The
word "panjandrum" was often chosen to describe him, partly because
of his reputation, partly in reaction to his imposing physical presence.
Although he played on the grandeur when necessary, he could also undercut it.
His injection of a slangy word or phrase could refocus the reader's engagement
with a difficult piece; when lecturing he could inspire a kind of dinner-table
intimacy. And his intimacy, and stamina, on the telephone was legendary among
his friends: his late- night conversations took in everything from share
prices to the impossibility of resolving the demands of love and morality.
As for
returning to a freelance career, Sylvester was soon engulfed by commitments,
and, in the last five years of the century, travelled constantly, particularly
to the United States. He was writing prolifically - catalogue essays and
introductions, reviews, particularly for the London Review of Books, and
shorter pieces for the national press.
By now,
many of his old friends were in positions of power. Nicholas Serota, whom
Sylvester had known since he was a young director at the Whitechapel gallery,
was now director of the Tate. Lord Gowrie, who deemed Sylvester his "best
friend among the generation immediately preceding my own", was head of
the Arts Council. Sir Ian Bancroft and Joanna Drew, for whom he had curated
exhibitions at the Hayward, were among his many close friends.
He had
been a connoisseur of love affairs for most of his life, and he encountered
fem- ale friends with a gaze that could match his pauses of speech in length.
It was his very own mirada fuerta, the look Picasso used to seduce and shock.
In Sylvester's case, it was described, with fond exasperation, by a habitual
recipient as "one of those long, sideways, admir ing,
get-your-clothes-off kind of stares" that often heralded "a brief,
platonic love affair".
Of the
artists within his field of expertise, Bacon was the first, and the one he
will be remembered for as both champion and major critic. In 1993, a year
after Bacon's death, Sylvester curated a show of paintings at the Museo Correr,
for the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion, the first time it
had been given to a critic rather than an artist. Three years later, by which
time the French had made him an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, he
curated another Bacon show at the Pompidou, which he said looked even better.
And in the spring of 1998, he made a relatively small selection of Bacon
paintings, on the theme of the human body, for the Hayward gallery, which
showed how his familiarity with the work could produce a subtle show that
pleased critics and the public alike.
Last
year, he published his own study of Bacon, Looking Back At Francis Bacon,
and installed a show at the Hugh Lane municipal gallery, in Dublin, which
preceded the installation of the reconstructed interior of Bacon's studio
dismantled from Reece Mews, South Kensington.
At the
end of the 90s, Sylvester had become embroiled in the fuss over the discovery
of a clutch of badly executed oil sketches, allegedly disproving what Bacon
had told him - that he never did preliminary drawings. Though this provided
art historians with a new area of research, Sylvester made his own definitive
response last March, during a debate at the Barbican, when he reminded the
audience that, whether by Bacon or not, everybody accepted that the drawings
were bad, and therefore an intensive study of them was pointless; much better
to spend the time studying the paintings, which were, uncontroversially,
Bacon's masterpieces.
By this
time, Sylvester was ill. But though he complained about growing old, mentally
he never seemed it. His experience of life, combined with his intellect, made
him an unshockable, unjudgmental and, when the occasion demanded it, candid,
adviser and friend. He could be irritable and demanding. But he was delicate,
kind and never lost the appetites that made him appear more alive in his
senses than most people around him, and which made his writing about art as
visceral as it was analytic.
Sylvester will be remembered as one of the great 20th-century critics, on a
level with Michel Leiris, the one he probably admired most. During his
lifetime, the art world of 1950s Soho, of which he had been part, became
mythologised, almost an art-world soap opera. The art world itself became ever
more deeply involved with and dependent upon the media, in need of new
sensations to keep it in the public eye.
Sylvester was still a key personality in all this. He was consulted by Charles
Saatchi and Nick Serota; he was asked to write on contemporary work, as well
as his more characteristic areas of expertise. One of the things that most
excited him was the prospect of a long interview about film with the young
Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, which he realised shortly before his death.
He was
part of the contemporary art world, and yet he was also set apart from it. He
understood the game of art, and his writing deepened our understanding of it.
Anthony David Bernard
Sylvester, art critic and curator, born September 21 1924; died June 19 2001
Obituary:
David
Sylvester
Christopher Green, The Independent, 25 June,
2001
Anthony
David Bernard Sylvester, writer, art critic and exhibition curator: born
London 21 September 1924; Chairman, Art Panel, Arts Council of Great Britain
1980-82; CBE 1983; married 1950 Pamela Briddon (three daughters; marriage
dissolved), (one daughter by Shena Mackay); died London 19 June 2001.
"The dignity of an
old man's acceptance of approaching death is touched by absurdity in so far as
he is already dead as a man. For a woman, the horror of ageing resides in no
longer attracting; for a man, in no longer acting." This was how David
Sylvester began his essay for the Centre Pompidou's exhibition of the
"late Picasso" in 1988. In his words, the subject of "late
Picasso" was "loss of manhood, loss of face, loss of everything but
the ambivalent pleasures of voyeurism". Sylvester, a critic and curator
who made a real difference to the art of his time, died aged 76 last week.
Those
sentences on Picasso and old age say a lot about David Sylvester. They are all
pith; not a shred of waste has been allowed to remain. Clarity and cogency
were what he wanted and usually got from his writing.
When he
wrote on "late Picasso" he was in his mid-sixties and still
agonising over every word in every phrase, though his status as a writer on
art was already assured. On the threshold himself of old age, he writes about
his own fears as well as about Picasso. His engagement with art and artists
was personal in the fullest of senses; when he looked at art he wanted to find
out about himself as well as what he saw, and he could be devastatingly honest
about both.
Sylvester's cogency as a writer can be misleading, as can his status at the
end of his career. He was not as decisive as his usually unequivocal
judgements can make him seem Đ he was always willing to re-examine the
most firmly held opinions; and he never felt security even at the heart of the
cultural establishment. As a person, he communicated anxiety as much as force
Đ a great deal of both.
He
became, incontrovertibly, a sacred monster of the Establishment. At the turn
of the 1970s and 1980s, he was a member of the Arts Council. He was appointed
CBE in 1983 when he stepped down as Chairman of the Arts Panel, having been a
dominant presence on the panel for nearly 20 years. He had already served as a
trustee of the Tate, and later became a member of the purchasing committee of
the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris (one of
very few foreigners to be asked). In 1993, in Italy, he was the first art
critic to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale; in 1995, in
France, he became a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; in England
there was an honorary fellowship from the Royal Academy too.
He was
loaded with honours, and his advice was sought by the directors of museums of
modern art world-wide. Yet, the pleasure he undoubtedly took in his
establishment status went with dislike of everything repressive about
institutional authority, and a strong sense of himself as an outsider who
could never be sure of acceptance.
His
early life and career might have been designed to produce such contradictions.
His upbringing was solidly bourgeois, in a successful London Jewish trading
family. His father moved from fish to the family silver business in Chancery
Lane. His mother kept a kosher kitchen. He had security within the Jewish
community, but as a young child in his private school he was often the
outsider Jew, mocked for his tradesman father "in fish", and unable
to play games because of observance of the Sabbath.
He
escaped from all that: thrown out of the house for contemplating conversion to
Roman Catholicism in his teens, and expelled from University College School
for truancy. He never went back to orthodox religious belief of any kind or to
the education system (in 1947 he chose Paris rather than a place to read Moral
Sciences at Cambridge), but he never lost the taste and talent for trading his
family gave him.
His
beginnings as an art writer producing copy for George Orwell at Tribune between
1942 and 1945 were supported by dealing in silver. He started on a small
scale, but told the story that in the end his father actually paid him for his
client list. He also gambled, having been introduced to racing by a favourite
uncle; not so successfully. His independence was a feature of every aspect of
his life, material as well as intellectual. Later he became a collector rather
than a trader, but he never lost his respect for commerce, something which
aroused suspicion among the great and the good, even when the importance of
his contribution demanded recognition.
The foundations of David
Sylvester's convictions as a writer on art and a curator were laid in the
mid-to-late 1940s; at the heart of them was an uncompromising belief in
personal experience and independence of judgement. They were laid among
writers, thinkers and above all artists in London and Paris; he believed it
crucial to be responsive to artists as well as art. In London contact with
Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon was formative; in Paris so was contact with the
heroes of the pre-war vanguard, among them Léger, Masson, Brancusi and
Giacometti. Time with Giacometti especially mattered to him. He might have
decided not to read Moral Sciences at university, but he loved ideas, and in
Paris, in the milieux of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Michel Leiris, he
deepened his commitment to art as the way to intensified individual experience
and self-knowledge. For Sylvester, art and ideas were not optional extras; he
was an intellectual in the French sense of that word.
Yet, as
a critic Sylvester belongs in a distinctly English empirical lineage. Another
major influence on him was A.J. Ayer, and, though he was never a believer in
Clive Bell's "significant form", his insistence on the primacy of
direct encounters with works of art, and his willingness to treat each
encounter as a new experiment open to new conclusions, marks him out as the
most important English heir to Roger Fry in 20th-century art criticism.
Sylvester was plural in the passions he wrote about: football and cricket (for
The Observer in the 1950s and 1960s), film (for Encounter, The New
Statesman, etc) as well as art; but art remained at the centre for him, an
obsession as well as a passion.
His
profile as a public figure was probably at its highest in the 1960s, when he
became a ubiquitous presence in cultural broadcasting, and in the 1990s, when
the press gave him space for his views on Gilbert and George as well as
Picasso, and when he was one of the engines powering the international rise of
the modern and contemporary art exhibition. Yet, he should be remembered as
much perhaps for the dynamism and long-term impact of his contributions to the
cultural debates of the 1950s in England.
Sylvester always took abstract art seriously. He had positive things to say as
much about Barnett Newman as about Mondrian, and came to consider the
radically non-figurative sculptors Donald Judd and Richard Serra among the
most important artists of the 20th century. But from the late 1940s through
the 1950s he was most deeply committed to figurative art, and it was as the
champion of a figuration whose power came from the artist's personal
engagement with appearances that he took sides against John Berger's
championship of "Social Realism" in England: on the side of
Giacometti, Masson, and Picasso, along with Moore, Sutherland, Auerbach and,
especially, Francis Bacon.
He had
worked as Moore's private secretary between 1948 and 1951, and from 1949
developed a close relationship with Bacon. His coining of the catch-phrase
"kitchen-sink" in 1954 for the "realism" of such as Bratby,
Middleditch and Jack Smith was derogatory. He rejected utterly the idea that
art by merely representing things "as they are" could have value as
an instrument of social change. Of Bacon he wrote, also in 1954: he "has
mastered the essential problem of painting, of trapping a reality without
naming it".
Much
later, in 1975, he would publish his Interviews with Francis Bacon
(enlarged as Brutality of Fact: interviews with Francis Bacon, 1987),
one of the most far-reaching explorations of the creative process ever
achieved with the co-operation of a major artist. It will remain essential
reading for any one interested in the possible ways in which a painter can
relate to the visible world.
The
debate with John Berger was conducted most publicly in exhibitions
(Sylvester's curating began with Moore at the Tate in 1951) and journals
(Sylvester writing especially in Encounter, Berger in The New Statesman).
Neither Sylvester nor Berger won their duel in the 1950s Đ they were each
too strong as advocates to be "beaten" Đ but Sylvester's
pugnacious yet always nuanced defence of art as an arena for individual
experience prepared the way for American Abstract Expressionism in England.
The
Berger-Sylvester duel was a worthy successor to Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry's
earlier in the century (Berger, it is worth recalling, was an admirer of
Lewis). But, where Lewis marginalised himself and Fry closed the door against
the most vital continental developments of the 1920s, Sylvester remained at
the centre and opened things up. He had actually opposed Clement Greenberg's
promotion of Pollock on Greenberg's own turf in the New York periodical The
Nation in 1950, but when the Americans were shown in London in 1956 he was
convinced. Some of his most acute later writings are on the Abstract
Expressionists, and among his most prized possessions later were three
remarkable drawings by de Kooning. He was open to younger American artists
too, especially Jasper Johns.
The
phase in David Sylvester's career that tends most to be underplayed is the
Magritte phase. In 1969 he staged Magritte's work in a labyrinth of white
passages and compartments in the Tate Gallery. The impact on the Houston
collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil was such that they commissioned him to
write a catalogue raisonné
of Magritte. Never academically trained, Sylvester became a scholar.
His
approach was not merely to accumulate data, but to question the very form and
function of the oeuvre catalogue. Every aspect of the genre was debated at
seminar-like sessions in his Walpole Street office or in nearby Chelsea
restaurants (especially Chinese). It took him and a team which included
Elizabeth Cowling, Michael Raeburn and Sarah Whitfield until 1992 before the
first of the five volumes of René Magritte: catalogue raisonné appeared (he
continued throughout to publish elsewhere and to curate). He wrote a companion
critical study, Magritte: the silence of the world (1992), and was co-author
of three of the volumes (with Sarah Whitfield), but his template shaped them
all, and, characteristically, he worried about every word they contained.
Concluded in 1997, the catalogue is a major art-historical contribution. It
not only maps Magritte's work with immaculate precision, but also offers
original and highly effective solutions to problems which every scholar
confronted with the task of mapping an oeuvre has to overcome.
David
Sylvester was as much a self-made scholar as he was a self-made intellectual.
He was immensely proud of his great-aunt "Madame Fanny Waxman", a
star of the Yiddish theatre. He became a star too. The pleasure he took in
institutional recognition was a performer's pleasure in applause. In the end,
however, he needed institutions much less than they needed him.
VISUAL ART: Take a peep -
it's a voyeur's dream
Charles Darwent, The
Independent, May 27, 2001
To say that Francis Bacon is
missing from his newly-reconstructed studio in Dublin sounds dim, even by the
demanding standards of British journalism. The Master of the Screaming Pope died
in 1992, after all: his attendance at the studio's official opening last Tuesday
would have been taking the Baconian grand guignol thing a little far. Still, you
can't help feeling Bacon's sulphurous presence in the Hugh Lane Gallery's new
annexe, and wondering just where the old devil has hidden himself.
Which is a measure of the
project's triumph. When the idea of disassembling Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews
in South Kensington, shipping its 7,200 pieces of slashed canvas, torn paper and
truncated corduroy trouser-leg across to Dublin, and then re-assembling the lot
with archaeological accuracy, was first mooted in the late 1990s, reactions in
Britain ranged from mild annoyance to white fury. David Sylvester, Bacon's
ailing hagiographer and friend, pointed out that the artist had always hated
Ireland. (The son of a horsey ex-army officer, Bacon skipped to England at 17
having been caught being buggered by a groom, and never went back.) The Tate
Gallery - which, it is said, was offered the studio by Bacon's last boyfriend,
John Edwards, and lost it for being too blase - was predictably tight- lipped
about the project.
Of deeper worry, though, was
the sense that preserving Reece Mews as a shrineful of Bacon relics went against
the artist's habit of ruthless self-editing. Bacon proudly maintained that he
had destroyed his best pictures, evidence of which was provided by the dozens of
slashed and overpainted canvases found in his studio when he died. (A similar
shadow was cast by Barry Joule, the one-time handyman accused by devout
Baconians of removing incunabula from St Francis' studio against his wishes.)
Bacon's mystique rests in part on the belief that his genius sprang from his
brush fully-formed, without the need for bourgeois interventions like drawings.
Being able to see the hundreds of worked-over photographs and magazine pages
that had littered the floor of his Reece Mews studio might dim the public's awe.
Speaking as a member of that
public, it doesn't. Bacon's studio was more than a coincidental space in which
to paint. As Margarita Cappock, manager of the project, notes, pretty well the
only thing not unearthed at Reece Mews in the course of its removal was a
palette. Instead, Bacon used his studio's walls and doors to experiment with
texture and colour, mixing his paints on them and scuffing away at the results
with odd bits of paper and trouser-leg. (Remember those stripes in Untitled
(Crouching Nude on Rail)? Corduroy.) The studio - perhaps uniquely in art - was
also an artwork, giving it a value that Brancusi's sterile atelier, rebuilt at
the Pompidou Centre, does not have.
And 7 Reece Mews was more
than that, too. The project's architect, David Chipperfield, has included a
quotation from Bacon on the wall of the free- standing bunker in which he has
encased the artist's studio: "The mess around here [ie., at Reece Mews] is
rather like my mind: it may be a good image of what goes on inside me." Far
from denying the intrusion of ogling Bacon's sanctum, Chipperfield has made a
fetish of it, exploiting a quality in his design - voyeurism - which Bacon,
always open to such things, would doubtless have enjoyed.
Step into the glass box that
provides your first view of the studio, and you have the embarrassing sense of
being somewhere you shouldn't be. On the opposite wall, two steel tendrils
sprout like motifs from a Bacon anthro-machine. These hold lenses giving
specific views of painted wall and door, emphasising the studio-as-palette idea
but also stressing the illicitness of what you're doing: turning the
installation into a What the Painter Saw machine, visitors into voyeurs. (You
half-expect Bacon's bloodshot eye to peer dolefully back at you.) Chipperfield
plays his third variation on the voyeurism theme on the final wall, his spiral
walkway allowing you to look down through the studio windows like an
old-fashioned Peeping Tom.
Circulation is important
here. On the one hand, the fact that you approach the studio in one of two ways
- through a room hung with unfinished canvases from Reece Mews or via another of
finished Bacons - means that the new annexe integrates itself into the Hugh Lane
Gallery's William Chambers core. ("Bacon thought of his portraits as being
like Gainsborough's," notes the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson.
"It's not inapt.") At the same time, the bunkerish look of
Chipperfield's annexe tells you this is a place where you have, at best, a
dubious right to be. It's a dangerous feeling, and a useful one.
For the clever thing about
Chipperfield's design is that it celebrates criticisms of the project rather
than denying them. There's no questioning the extraordinariness of it all: the
team of archaeologists that plotted the position of every last ball of paper and
fluff on Bacon's floor; Cappock's computer database, which allows each of the
objects to be pulled up, interrogated and cross- referenced on screen; Perry
Ogden's photographic archive which, inexplicably, recorded slight changes in the
disposition of these objects when the archaeologists came to do their stuff.
("Very Francis," sighs Dawson.)
But the
question remains: would Francis have approved? "John [Edwards] says he
would have roared with laughter," says Barbara Dawson, "and he was
with Bacon for the last 16 years of his life." And when he'd finished
laughing, you feel that Bacon would have enjoyed the illicitness of it all, and
the spying.
Francis Bacon Studio: Hugh Lane
Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903); Perry Ogden's project photographs, to 28
October.
7 Reece Mews: Francis
Bacon's Studio is published by Thames & Hudson, pounds 14.95
Francis Bacon studio
recreated in Dublin
By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
The Daily Telegraph 05/06/2001
DUSTY
newspapers attest to the authenticity of the studio of the late Francis
Bacon, which was opened yesterday in Dublin after it was dismantled and
shipped from London.
The
artist was born in Dublin but did not regard himself as Irish. He spent
all of his most creative years at his studio in south Kensington. The
arrival of the entire contents of his studio, all painstakingly catalogued
before being moved, has created an air of bemusement in Dublin's artistic
community which has shown as much interest in Bacon as he did in Ireland.
An
art critic said: "If you went into an Irish bookshop and asked for
something on Bacon they would point you to the Elizabethan history
section." After Bacon's death the studio's contents were given by his
companion and sole heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in
Dublin's Parnell Square.
More
than 7,000 items, including books, floor and roof timbers, tubes of paint,
a dressing gown and discarded boxes of champagne, feature in the
recreation of the artist's habitat. Even the dust which had accumulated at
No 7 Reece Mews studio was swept up and scattered over the Dublin display.
Barbara
Dawson, the Hugh Lane Gallery director, said: "The acquisition of
Francis Bacon's studio was a great coup. The gallery's innovative approach
to retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a database of
information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Bacon's
work."
An
exhibition of unfinished paintings will accompany the studio. Mr Edwards
described the studio as a dump. When he tidied it up he found bundles of
banknotes that
had been hidden, some of which were so old they were out of date.
Bacon
discovery excites art world
The Daily
Telegraph
Sunday 7 January 2001
By Catherine Milner, Arts
Correspondent
THREE portraits by Francis Bacon of his homosexual lover have
surfaced on the London art market nearly nine years after the
artist's death.
The portraits, which are expected to
fetch a record price at Christie's auctioneers next month, are
of John Edwards, who was Bacon's companion for the last 18
years of his life. When Bacon died he left his £61 million
estate to Mr Edwards, a dyslexic recluse who now lives in Thailand. The portraits,
of the subject seated on a stool, are thought to be Bacon's
own favourites and once hung in his studio.
They were sold during his lifetime to
an "unnamed European collector" who is now selling
them for an estimated £4 million. Jussi Pylkkanen, head of
the 20th-century art department at Christie's, which is
selling the paintings on February 8, said: "They are
works that Bacon himself identified of being museum
quality."
Mr Pylkkanen said: "Rather than
creating a single portrait, he wanted to capture every single
element in terms of colour, form and texture. It is exciting
to see something of this importance on the market at a time
when Bacon's true worth is officially being recognised by
international collectors."
The grotesque smears and distortion
of the features that distinguished Bacon's work in the 1970s
appear to be less obvious in his portraits of John Edwards,
which were painted in 1984 and in which the features are
sharply delineated. In two of the panels the features are
clearly recognisable beneath the smudges of Bacon's paint.
Mr Pylkkanen said: "His later
paintings were not quite so enraged and butchered, but these
pictures may have been particularly harmonious because they
are of his lover." Mr Edwards met Bacon in 1974. Like
George Dyer, the artist's former lover, John Edwards was from
London's East End and was considerably younger than the
artist.
Bacon, who has been acclaimed as the
greatest British artist since Turner, was born in Dublin in
1909, went to London at the age of 16 and travelled shortly
afterwards to Berlin and Paris. Self-taught, he did not begin
to paint seriously until the 1930s. He lived in London during
the Blitz, when he undertook the first important painting of
his career, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, now in the Tate Modern gallery.
7 REECE MEWS: FRANCISBACON'S STUDIO
A precious collection of
debris
Perry
Ogden, Foreword by John Edwards
Thames & Hudson, 120pp, £14.95, ISBN 0500510342
Patrick
Skene Catling
The
Spectator, Saturday, 19th May 2001
John Edwards, FrancisBacon's heir, donated Bacon's
South Kensington studio, the whole room and all its contents, to the Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, his birthplace, thus submitting the
compost of the artist's memorabilia to archaeologists, curators, art critics,
psychoanalysts and, from 23 May, the public.
The
laborious 1998 dismantling, shipment and exact reassembly of the detritus of
30 years of what Bacon called his 'exhilarated
despair' will give his admirers and detractors clues to the creative processes
of a gambling, alcoholic, homosexual, atheistic genius. In the intimately
enlightened opinion of Edwards, companion to Bacon
for the last 20 of his 82 years, the act of transferring this complex of
chaotic artistic fecundity to Dublin, a wonderful coals-to-Newcastle
operation, 'would have made him roar with laughter, his own special laugh,
full of warmth and joy'.
Though Bacon would rarely
have been able - or have cared - to pass a breathalyser test, he was
passionately serious about working at his easel in the morning, no matter what
he had been doing until late the night before. He was a man of prodigious
stamina, recuperative power, prolificity, and eventual wealth. He told David
Sylvester, the foremost authority on Bacon, 'I really like highly disciplined
painting, although I don't use highly disciplined methods of constructing it.'
He depended on receiving images from his subconscious by fortuitous accidents.
His paintings sometimes evolved as he painted them, as if having lives of their
own.
He depicted people as meat,
flayed, twisted and corrupted, as though portraying mortality might exorcise his
fear of loss. He dreaded abandonment and impermanence: long relationships ended
in death. He was gregarious but valued contemplative solitude. He said he was an
optimist, but regularly exposed himself to the risks of roulette, rough trade
and drunken oblivion. In Tangiers, according to the late Daniel Farson, a
long-time, on-and-off friend of Bacon's, the British consul general impressed on
the local chief of police that
Francis was a very
distinguished painter and kept getting mugged. A few days later, the chief of
police returned, patently embarrassed: 'Pardon, mais le peintre adore Œa!'
Dreading the end of life,
Bacon seemed to be in a hurry to get it over, while at the same time relying on
attentive doctors to prolong it. He deplored the term gay; he said he was queer.
He enjoyed his circumstances of 'gilded squalor'.
I knew him only at times of
post-meridian frivolity in Soho, presiding with intellectual fervour and
flamboyant charm over long lunches and consequent sessions in the Colony Room
club, the beloved, bile-green vortex known as Muriel's. Muriel Belcher greatly
encouraged him. Those festivities were the early stages of his daily routine
transmogrification from Jekyll to Hyde. 'Champagne for our real friends!' was
his favourite toast, 'and real pain for our sham friends!' As he ordered bottle
after bottle, he was closely surrounded by friends of both kinds. He was an
insistent host, generous to a fault, usually tolerant of hangers-on, but
ruthlessly critical of other artists, especially abstractionists.
Before the studio was
transported to Dublin, Perry Ogden spent several days photographing every part
of 7 Reece Mews as it was when Bacon lived there - the orderly bedsitting room,
the kitchen/bathroom (he was a good cook and carefully ablutionary), and the
steep wooden stairs down to the studio, which looked as if his id had run amok
in it.
Bacon was an autodidact all
his life. Ogden's close-ups of bookshelves reveal the wide range of his reading,
such as biographies of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Freud, Ezra Pound, Rothschild and
Seurat and at least three of Velazquez. (He said he thought Velazquez's portrait
of Pope Innocent X was 'one of the greatest paintings in the world and I've had
a crush on it'.) Among the numerous other books were The Romantic Agony by
Mario Praz, Spender's Journals, Greek Made Easy, The Complete
Scarsdale Medical Diet - and Larousse Gastronomique. On a shelf near
his bed, there were snapshots of lovers and a plaster-cast mask of William
Blake.
At first glance, the studio
looks like the devastation caused by an explosion in a rubbish tip. However, the
gallery's team of archaeologists catalogued over 7,000 items, including 80
'works on paper', 1,500 photographs and many slashed canvases. According to
Barbara Dawson, the director of the gallery, there is now 'a definitive archive
É a database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis of
Francis Bacon's work'. A 'Micro Gallery' will give visitors access to
'highlights of this archive.'
In the meantime, Ogden's
elegant photographs provide an opportunity to scrutinise a lot of significant
Baconian debris - a page from Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion
(his nude male wrestlers became Bacon's amorous meat on an unmade bed), glimpses
of Michelangelo, Rodin and the late George Dyer in his underwear, and pages from
a book on forensic pathology, displaying skin diseases, hundreds of discarded
brushes and paint-pots, and empty cartons that once held bottles of Vat 69 and
vintage Krug.
Bacon found day-dreaming in
chaos richly productive. John Russell, in his excellent biography of Bacon,
considers Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of 'unconscious scanning' and Edward de
Bono's 'lateral thinking' as explications of Bacon's artistic creativity.
Russell later quotes Bacon on his mysterious procedure: 'I think of myself as a
kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed.'
Ogden's and Edwards' book is
a fascinating survey of the sorts of material that Bacon pulverised. The
fascination easily quells any reluctance to pry into a dead man's privacy. And,
after all, with his real friends Francis Bacon found everything in his tortured
existence absolutely hilarious.
Bacon estate action
against ex-agents goes on
By Maev KennedyThe
Guardian, Wednesday May 16, 2001
Years of legal argument
over the tangled affairs of Francis Bacon lie ahead after a judge refused
to block a legal action by the artist's estate against his former agents.
The life of the man
acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, which was
ended by a heart attack in 1992, was notoriously chaotic, and his
afterlife is proving to be just as bumpy.
The stakes are
enormous. The assets in dispute could be worth up to £100m. In his life
time Bacon was one of a handful of British painters whose works broke the
£1m price tag.
Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar. Last
week in New York a world record was set at Sotheby's, where just under £6m
was paid for a triptych.
His estate is suing
the galleries that promoted his work for 34 years, Marlborough Fine Art
(London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art, which is based in
Liechtenstein, alleging "undue influence" over the painter.
As a result of
yesterday's judgment, after three weeks of legal argument by Marlborough
trying to have the case thrown out, the main action will go ahead. It is
expected to take months, and will probably not begin before January.
Marlborough said it
would "vigorously" defend the case. It described its relations
with Bacon as "frank, close and mutually beneficial".
The high court was
told that a representative of Marlborough acted almost as a minder,
removing paintings from Bacon's studio - which was sometimes knee deep in
rubbish, newspaper articles, old photographs and scraps of magazines -
"as soon as the paint was dry".
When he died at 82, he
was worth an estimated £10m, and left his fortune to his much younger
friend, John Edwards, a former east London barman who now lives in
Thailand.
The main legal action
was instigated by the estate's executor, Brian Clarke. It is demanding a
full statement of the galleries' dealing with the artist, claiming that
they retained up to 70% of the sale value of his paintings when a third
would have been fair, and that Marlborough has not demonstrated that it
paid for all the paintings received.
Marlborough
strenuously denies the allegations. Yesterday Mr Justice Patten said he
was satisfied there was "at least an arguable case". The trial
would have to examine in detail Bacon's relationship and dealings with
Marlborough. While one of the greatest 20th century artists "both he
and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition
of his worth was not immediate".
Bacon triptych sets
sale record
Anonymous bidder pays
$8.6m in New York auction of works of modern artists
Maev Kennedy,
arts and heritage correspondent
The Guardian,
Thursday May 10, 2001
A record price for the
work of Francis Bacon has been set at a Sotheby's sale in New York, where
a vast 1979 triptych sold for $8.6m (£6m), way above the estimate.
Studies of the
Human Body (above), a typically grim Bacon view of life and love, was
the star of an extraordinary collection of contemporary art built up by
Stanley J Seeger, a millionaire American collector.
It had been estimated
at $4m-$6m but reached the $8.6m in a phone bid from an anonymous buyer.
The previous record for a Bacon was $6.6m, paid three years ago for
another triptych.
There was frantic
bidding at the sale on Tuesday night for another Bacon, the 1980 Study
for a Self-portrait, a painting on paper. It was finally sold for
$1.8m (£1.23m) - four times the estimate.
Several other record
prices were reached on the first night of the two day sale, including
those for works by Max Beckmann and Hans Hofmann, and for works on paper
by Beckmann and Joan Miro. The pictures already sold have realised $54m,
against an estimate for the entire sale of $39.9m.
The collection was
regarded as one of the most important still in private hands. Charles
Moffett, chairman of Sotheby's worldwide modern art department, said
Seeger had bought his art out of love, and the market had responded to the
quality and excitement of the works he had collected.
Some of the paintings,
including the Bacon triptych, had once hung at Sutton Place, a Tudor
mansion in Surrey which has been owned, but scarcely occupied, by a
procession of art loving American millionaires, including John Paul Getty.
The sale has been a
coup for Sotheby's in New York, after a bruising week that saw a US
government indictment against its owner and former chairman, Alfred
Taubman, and the former chairman of Christie's, Anthony Tennant, for
alleged colluding in price fixing.
Records are expected
to be broken again today, when an iconic 20th century painting by Beckmann,
Self-portrait with Horn - made in 1938 when the Jewish artist was on the
Nazis' banned list of "degenerate artists" - is on offer.
It is being sold by
the estate of his friend and patron, Stephan Lackner. Sotheby's has
described it as "certainly the most important German painting to come
up for auction in living memory", and it is estimated at up to £7m.
Bacon estate 'trying it on', court
is told
By Paul Peachey
The Independent
27 April 2001
A multimillion-pound legal
action brought by the estate of Francis Bacon against his former gallery was a
"try on" and "ill-founded", a High Court judge was told
yesterday.
The case brought by Bacon's
estate was described as "muddled and confusing" by counsel for the
gallery when it sought to have the claim, potentially £100m, thrown out.
Bacon, one of Britain's
greatest 20th-century artists, was represented by the international Marlborough
gallery from 1958 until his death in Spain in 1992, aged 82.
Professor Brian Clarke, the
executor of Bacon's estate, launched a unique claim against the gallery and
Marlborough International Fine Art (Mifa), based in Liechtenstein, alleging
breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence".
The estate says it wants
proper accounts to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the
interests of the gallery and Bacon.
In a statement, Marlborough
said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship
with the artist.
On the second day of
preliminary hearings in London, Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, for Mifa, said:
"We say this action is a try on. What the claimant wants to do is achieve a
living action and he doesn't care how he does it."
The estate claims that
instead of taking fair commission of one third, Marlborough kept up to 70 per
cent of the paintings' value and had not demonstrated it paid for all the Bacon
paintings it received.
BACON
ESTATE LAUNCHES £100M CIVIL SUIT AGAINST MARLBOROUGH
Antiques Trade Gazette 10 May 2001
UK: Preliminary proceedings have
begun at the High Court in a
£100m claim by the estate of Francis Bacon
against Marlborough Fine Art (London) and Lichtenstein-registered
Marlborough International Fine Art. The estate claims the galleries were in
breach of fiduciary duty and exerted “undue influence” in their dealings
with the artist.
The estate accuses Marlborough
Fine Art, who were Bacon’s dealers from 1958 until his death in 1992 aged
82, of taking an unfair commission rate of up to 70 per cent on the
artist’s paintings, of issuing 47 series of lithographic prints valued at
£25-30m, for which the artist received a flat fee of $40,000, and of not
satisfactorily demonstrating payment for up to 33 paintings by Bacon. The
estate questions the role of Valerie Beston, a Marlborough director who,
according to Geoffrey Vos QC, acting for the claimants, could be described
as Bacon’s “keeper or minder” and was responsible for “the removal
of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint
was dry”.
Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC,
representing Marlborough, who were seeking to have the case thrown out, told
Mr Justice Patten: “This action is a try-on. What the claimant wants to do
is achieve a living action and he doesn’t care how he does it.” In an
official statement, Marlborough Fine Art described their relationship with
Francis Bacon as “frank, close and mutually beneficial”.
If the judge allows the case to
proceed, it will provide a highly revealing insight into what Vos described
as the “relationship between Britain’s greatest 20th century artist and
his dealer”.
The claim, scheduled to be heard
in January, is estimated to run as high as £100m. The beneficiary of the
estate is John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom Bacon befriended
“like a son” during the last 18 years of his life and to whom he left £10m.
Mr Edwards now lives in Thailand.
Artist's
estate takes gallery to court
BBC
News Wednesday, 25 April, 2001
Bacon (left)
often used lover John Edwards in his work
A multi-million pound legal action
has been launched by the estate of artist Francis Bacon
against the gallery which represented him.
From 1958 to his death in 1992,
Bacon exclusively used Marlborough Fine Art to show his
work.But his estate is alleging
"undue influence" and breach of duty in a claim
which could be worth £100m.
The defendants, who's
headquarters are in Liechtenstein, are contesting the
allegations as "unfounded".
Bacon's work on lover
John Edwards were sold at auction
The value of Bacon's work can be
gauged by the sale of three paintings of his long-time partner
John Edwards which sold for £3m.
Geoffrey Vos QC, representing the
estate, told Mr Justice Patten that Marlborough UK director
Valerie Beston "organised much if not all of Francis
Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles
on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings
that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was
dry - in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best
interests'."
'Fair'
Bacon's estate is alleging that,
subject to a fair allowance for the work it did, Marlborough
should not have been keeping up to 70% of the value of Bacon's
paintings.
The estate believes a fair amount
would be a third of the total value.
It wants to see "proper
accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish
that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of
the gallery and Bacon."
Mr Justice Patten was listening to
the outline of the arguments to decide on a timetable for the
case which is scheduled for January 2002.
Bacon's
'Michelangelo' triptych fetches a record £6m
By Will Bennett in New York
The Daily
Telegraph
10/05/2001
ART belonging to a reclusive
multi-millionaire living in Londonhas been sold for more than £37 million in
New York with a triptych by the British artist Francis Bacon fetching a record
£6 million.
The
collection of 20th century art built up by Stanley
Seeger attracted vigorous, sometimes frantic, bidding
from dealers and collectors at Sotheby's on Tuesday
evening.
Mr
Seeger, who began collecting in the 1950s, is the
American-born heir to a family fortune made mostly from
petroleum and timber. He used to own Sutton Place, near
Guildford, Surrey, one of Britain's finest Tudor
mansions but now lives in the West End of London.
He
became even richer after Tuesday's auction in New York
at which 59 of the 63 lots sold, many for far more than
he paid for them. An anonymous telephone bidder paid £6
million for Bacon's Studies of the Human Body, a
three panel oil painting which the artist said had been
influenced by Michelangelo.
The
price for the painting, which Mr Seeger bought for an
undisclosed sum from a dealer more than 20 years ago,
far exceeded the previous record of £4.6 million for
one of Bacon's works set only last year.
Sotheby's
The
Eye of the Collector
Works from the
Collection of Stanley J. Seeger
New York
May
8, 2001 (Lots 1 - 62)
Studies of the Human Body 1979 Francis
Bacon
Lot 14: Studies of the Human Body, 1979,
Francis Bacon
Description:
Francis
Bacon 1909-1992 Studies of the Human Body
Signed, titled and dated 1979 on the reverse of each
panel
Oil on canvas
Triptych
each: 78 by 58 in. 198.1 by 147.3 cm.
Sold:
$8,585,750
Provenance:
Marlborough
Gallery Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on
October 1, 1980
Exhibited: New York, Marlborough Gallery Inc., Francis
Bacon, 1980; London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon,
1985, no. 107
Literature: Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face
and in Profile, New York, 1983, no. 123, illustrated;
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987,
no. 119, illustrated; Hugh Davies and Sally Yard,
Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 82, illustrated pp. 82-83;
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London,
1987, illustrated pp. 156-57 Francis Bacon, (exhibition catalogue), Musee
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1996-97, illustrated p.
47
"Actually Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up
in my mind together, and so I perhaps could learn
about positions from Muybridge and learn about the
ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo, and
it would be very difficult for me to disentangle the
influence of Muybridge and the influence of
Michelangelo... I am sure that I have been influenced
by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous
nudes in the plastic arts." (Quoted in David
Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with
Francis Bacon, London, 1988, p. 115).
Executed
in 1979, Triptych - Studies of the Human Body sees
the confluence of two of Bacon's greatest
inspirations, Eadweard Muybridge and Michelangelo in
one of his most beautiful and erotically charged
compositions. Through its slight ambiguity of content,
this work teems with sexual energy and tension, born
of Bacon's deep instinctual understanding of the
painterly language which he so uniquely manipulated.
Having spent most of the seventies gradually purifying
his images and narrowing his focus, this work is a
distinct development from works such as Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion,
1944 (Tate Gallery, London) and seems like the
affirmation of a refined and mature style, in which
vast blocks of joyous colour hold court to brief,
extraordinary bursts of painterly energy. In this
sense these three meditations on the male nude form
confront the viewer in a manner unique to the art of
Francis Bacon: unnerving the viewer, challenging his
or her sensibilities and perception, yet still
declaring a masterful poise and precision.
Seemingly inspired by Matisse's Atelier rouge of 1911
Bacon has cast his performers on a huge blocked orange
expanse, which fills all three panels, representing
both the walls and floor of separated blank interiors.
Against this calm and spare background, the players
fidget and buzz with energy.
The
familiar nudes in the central panel are derived from
Muybridge's sequential still depictions of naked
wrestlers in motion, grappling for the upper hand (see
fig. 2). Here, they have been transformed into two
lovers locked in the ecstasy of sexual congress and
virtually morphing into one as they violently battle
for each other's bodily affections. Backed onto a
yawning void of darkness, the howling grimace on the
face of one of the perpetrators bears witness to the
struggle, the fully exposed ape-like teeth and the
slash of blue next to the face are testament to his
agitated movement.
Michelangelo's
figures of Giorno (day) and Crepuscolo (Twilight)
that face each other on the tombs of Giuliano and
Lorenzo de' Medici in the Medici chapel, Florence, are
the direct inspiration for the two figures in the left
and right hand panels (see figs. 3 and 4). Here these
two toweringly masculine Guardians whose every muscle
and sinew has been meticulously and inflexibly cast in
stone, have been transferred from their imperious
plinths and set onto the hard straight lines of
makeshift surgical tables where they have been
re-moulded as bold yet vulnerable objects of study.
Bacon has referred to the 'voluptuousness' of
Michelangelo's figures and here he has lovingly
accentuated this feature, every rounded curve
heightened, every ridge emphasized with a dash of pure
Titanium white. Yet still these figures seem insecure
and restless, their clean white garments serving only
as if to underline the fact that they are samples for
the viewer's gaze.
Bacon frames his figures as if in a spectacle: we are
watching them and they seem to know it. They are
cognizant of our attention, the left-hand figure turns
away to bare the gash on his back whilst the
right-hand figure turns toward us to flex his biceps.
The triptych format seems to hint at a narrative
between the panels, but that narrative remains
ambiguous. The title is knowingly non-committal. Are
the figures in the left and right panels the same as
those in the central panel or are they merely
guardians, or even voyeurs? Is this a before and after
scenario, or a freeze frame? This is a classic device
which Bacon used to revel in, allowing his imagination
to run wild. In 1979, he stated "Triptychs are
the thing I like doing most and I think this may be
related to the thought I've sometimes had of making a
film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated
on three different canvases. So far as my work has any
quality, I often feel it is the triptychs that have
the best quality." (Quoted in David Sylvester, Looking
back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 232).
Triptych - Studies of the Human Body represents
a grand tour through the great traditions of Art
History, beginning with its most historic subject, the
Nude and moving through the sculpted forms of
Michelangelo, the obsessive recorded photography of
Muybridge, the renowned Cubist device of fragmented
perspective and the sublime stripes of Barnett Newman
to arrive at an entirely individual and unique
composition which questions the very nature of
appearance, artistic or otherwise. Here the nature of
the human form, which has been mediated through a
number of representative media is adapted through
Bacon's mind and hand to be at once amorphous, yet
totally real. Through moments of magic, Bacon
coagulates colour and form to achieve a heightened
sense of figurative reality, which leaves the viewer
thrilling to the sensations of his subjects. This is
nowhere more dramatic than in the present composition.
Sotheby's
New York
May
8, 2001 (Lots 1 - 62)
Study for Self Portrait 1980 Francis Bacon
Lot 9: Francis
Bacon Study
for Self Portrait
Estimate:
$350,000 to $450,000.
Sold:
$1,765,750.
Description:
Francis
Bacon 1909-1992
Study for Self-Portrait
Signed, titled and dated 1980 on the reverse
Oil on canvas
14 by 12 in. 35.6 by 30.5 cm.
Provenance:Marlborough
Gallery Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on
October 2, 1980.
Exhibited:
London, Marlborough Gallery Ltd.,
Francis Bacon, Small Portrait Studies, 1993, no. 28; Dusseldorf,
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ich ist etwas Anderes. Kunst am Ende des 20.
Jahrhunderts,
2000, no.6.
Litrature:
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and In Profile, New York, 1983,
no. 132, illustrated;
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 125, illustrated; Milan
Kundera and France Borel, Bacon, Portraits et Autoportraits, Paris, 1996,
illustrated p. 164.
"The
single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961
onwards, the scene of some of Bacon's most ferocious
investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an
after-echo or parallel report, so these small
concentrated heads carry their ghosts within
them." (John Russell, Francis Bacon,
London, 1993, p. 99).
As
part of the constant questioning of his ability to
transcend mere representation in his work, to record
the self beyond the expression, Bacon's small portrait
studies became the lifeblood of his oeuvre. In his
unbounded quest for the ultimate immediacy of
depiction, the intimate size and proportions of these
canvases allowed him to experiment endlessly with the
potency of his brilliant painterly gesture. Bacon
would paint, re-paint and discard these pieces until
he found the core of his subject's being. It is
therefore not surprising that relatively few of these
self-portrait studies survived. The ones that did,
however, such as the present work, provide some of the
most compelling images of his painterly genius.
For
a few chosen subjects, including himself, Bacon's
constant social and professional dedication to their
appearance, his repeated observation of their
mannerisms and movements provided the key to their
existence on his canvases. As he wined, dined and
conversed his life away, the one driving force behind
his art was the desire to understand the sensation of
existence. In the age of photography, Bacon felt that
traditional portraiture lacked depth and mere
appearance was not enough to capture the essence of
life. For him, the outcome of his art depended on a
direct opposition between a kind of visual
intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and
sensation. His portraits strove not to tell the story
of someone's life, but to clamp themselves to the
viewer's nervous system and offer as he put it
"the sensation without the boredom of its
conveyance." A history of observation could be
conveyed in the cast of a gesture and that was where
the painting stood or, as most of the time, fell.
Consequently,
Bacon's art depended on the complete immersion in his
subjects, a fact which was often left exposed to the
vagaries of life. His paintings clung to the fragile
social relationships he built, the regularity with
which he saw his friends and, as time went on, the
permanence of life itself.
For
Bacon the seventies were marked at each end by the
deaths of two of his closest friends. In 1971 George
Dyer, his greatest confidant and lover, committed
suicide in Paris and at the end of the decade Muriel
Belcher, the owner of his beloved Colony Room drinking
club in Soho, and one of his few female subjects,
died. Bacon was gradually becoming the one remaining
constant subject throughout his oeuvre. As such, the
few self-portraits that Bacon retained during his
working process show not only the evolution of his
exterior form, but also the development of his inner
painterly reaction to the extreme joys and tragedies
that life was throwing at him.
"I
loathe my own face but I go on painting it only
because I haven't got any other people to do. It's
true to say... One of the nicest things that Cocteau
said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at
work.' This is what one does oneself." (Quoted in
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London
1975, p. 133).
Study
for Self-Portrait shows Bacon emerging from the
shadowed depths of a limitless darkness at the
beginning of the 1980s. Dressed in a formal white
collar, the sheer jet black emptiness which surrounds
his features only serves to heighten the haunted,
blurred presence which emanates from the canvas. In
the present work the confident, bold swathes of color
and exaggerated form of Bacon's paintings during the
sixties and seventies have become knowingly clarified
and subtly calmed (see fig. 1). Yet within there is a
poignancy to the haze which enshrouds his face.
Over-brushed and scumbled, the ambiguity explored in
this work brings a heightened reality to the image, a
fact which is at once accentuated and governed by the
slippage of the form. His head smears softly sideways
into view, the exactness of the two faint white swirls
surrounding his face indicating a rotation, not
necessarily in the Cubist manner, but as though it has
endured some terminal rearrangement by a form of
painterly manipulation.
As
Bacon stares at his image reflected in the
paint-splattered mirror of his studio (see fig. 2),
the image he finds is fraught with contrasts; life
versus death, self versus other, psychology versus
physiognomy, together compounding to generate an image
of immense raw energy which unites an exterior
presence with an interiorized power. Outside, the
shape retains an obstinate and familiar integrity, the
precise result of a sudden movement. Within, the sheer
concentration on his face transfixes the viewer.
Behind the veil, the pensive sorrow in the piercing
concentration of the eyes conveys a hidden turmoil and
suffering which is at the heart of Bacon's genius.
Record £6m for
Bacon
From Susan Moore in New York
The Evening Standard
London 9 May 2001
FRANCIS BACON'S erotically charged and
tortured triptych, Studies of the Human Body, doubled expectations to
establish a new world auction record for the artist when it was sold for
almost £6 million at Sotheby's New York. It proved the star of the
auction house's highly successful offering of Part 1 of the Seeger
collection last night, a sale which realised 37 million - almost double
its enticingly conservative pre-sale estimate - and saw only three works
fail to find new owners. Until recently, the almost two-metre wide Bacon
lined the bedroom of London-based American collector Stanley J Seeger.
Before that it had graced the hall of Sutton Place, the Tudor House in
Surrey that Mr. Seeger acquired in 1980 from another art-loving American, J
Paul Getty.
The highly ambiguous work, painted in 1977 by Bacon, reveals
the artist's response to both Michelangelo, the creator of what he
described as "the most voluptuous nudes in the plastic arts" and
to the obsessive early photography of Edward Muybridge. He looked at
Muybridge's sequence of images of naked wrestlers grappling for the upper
hand and transformed them into two lovers locked in violent sexual
congress, the face of one reduced to a bestial, howling grimace. To
unnerve us still further, he sets all four figures against a flat block of
joyous orange. It is up to the viewer to consider what to make of that,
and of the relationship, if any, between the flanking youths on their
surgical slabs and the demonic lovers.
SHOULD IT STAY OR SHOULD IT GO.....
Art Review May
2001
The relocation of Francis Bacon’s studio from London to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin has divided the critics. Peter FitzGerald says that it is a valuable resource for Ireland, while William Feaver argues that the significance of Bacon’s studio died with the artist.
First, the more general question: why preserve the Francis Bacon studio at all? Some of the most important reasons are close to the best ones for not doing so. On the positive side, when we see the studio, we see at one remove the process of making works of art. It is a sort of externalization of inner conflicts all mixed up with the practicalities of testing out paint
colours, sorting through source material, slicing up failed canvases – standard studio stuff. It’s a demystification: the paintings become process and not just finished works. Problem is, it’s also a mythification and mystification: so much attention devoted to one person and you’re in genius territory, with all the concomitant notions of superhuman talent.
There’s probably no more harmful nor widespread belief about “great art” than that it is the product of genius. So a strong reason for preserving the studio proves a double-edged sword. There are many more pros and cons. Would Bacon have wanted it? Even if he were opposed, it might still have been worth doing. But it would be unwise to skim over the apparent appropriation of Bacon by the Irish, as in the oft-repeated headline “Bringing Home the Bacon”. Irish by birth, but scarcely by identification, Bacon would not seem very fertile ground for repossession, were it not for a conjunction of factors.
In Ireland at the moment there is a sense of the end of history: the Good Friday Agreement separated us from our partisan past at a time when many old certainties were collapsing. We find ourselves with unaccustomed wealth and a feeling the sun never sets on the Irish
diaspora, however tenuous the links. It’s become a time to bring things home, metaphorically and literally: mull them over, see if we can make head or tail of them.
Bacon’s studio is a prime example. Schadenfreude makes it sweeter for some – word has it that it was swiped from under the nose of the Tate. But the studio is also part of a remarkable upsurge in the visual arts in Ireland. Although funding is still tight, because of infrastructural changes the major institutions are much more assertive and competitive. If it’s there, they may grab it. That’s the wider context – what of the practical level? The studio has peepholes through the walls – tubes with wide-angle lenses at the end. It will be voyeuristic in the extreme, resonating in a disturbing fashion with the once-taboo nature of Bacon’s sexuality. Were he there in the studio, what would he be doing, with whom? And will it be like approaching a mausoleum, a sacred relic, or like approaching just another art installation, a work of art in itself?
So there are worries connected with the studio’s coming to Dublin, but also challenges. It’s an important experiment. It will be a new phenomenon, a new way of viewing art and artists in Ireland, but also an expression of the new ways in which we are coming to view ourselves and others. Bacon’s studio is coming to Dublin because of his fame. But the really interesting aspect, and the best reason for the move, is the way it will function within society and within the visual arts in Ireland at a crucial time. It will be high culture and Disney and hype and archaeological feat and sincere fascination. It promises to shift awareness about art, and our ways of dealing with art. It’s a leap in the dark, but it’s worth the risk
.
By Peter FitzGerald
Creatively spotlit, Van Gogh steps back from the easel: another masterpiece completed in record time. The dimple on the chin that Kirk Douglas brought to the role complements the dimples pitting the
center of each sunflower.
Thirty-five years on, in another studio, with a lower budget this time and slightly less sweaty with artistic urge, Francis Bacon ponders a moment, then advances on the easel and, using a dustbin lid as a template, inscribes a near-perfect circle. Another self-portrait has begun. Derek
Jacobi, immersed in the exercise of camping it up while sploshing it down in Love is the Devil, had art director Christina Moore and set-dresser Phillipa Hart to thank for furnishing him with so convincing a replica of 7 Reece Mews. It was all there: circular mirror, paint rags, bottles and brushes, wastepaper, books, the naked light bulb. In
Love is the Devil, as in Lust for Life, the studio set serves as a mindset. Here is the stuff that gets genius going; here, if you look carefully, you may spot the very things that made it into the paintings. Here, therefore, you may gain a unique insight into the workings of art.
Romanticism overlaid with sentimentality is indiscriminate, and superstition amplified by publicity machines is voracious. Forget the art, visit the location. I dare say those responsible for relocating the first floor of 7 Reece Mews, London SW7 to Parnell Square North, Dublin 1, where the Hugh Lane Gallery stands, have been at pains to get the chaos right. Walls have been dirtied, painterly dabs transferred, VAT69 cardboard box correctly placed between orange box and Chelsea boot on a heap of kitchen rolls and fetid documentation. The director of the Hugh Lane argues that the studio contents are an archive. She describes the gift as a “cornerstone of the Gallery’s collection” If so, it’s a structural liability. No accessible archive in the normal sense, all you can do is gawp at it, compare it to the photographs of the original state he left it in nearly nine years ago and wonder at the contrast between the mess he made and the conspicuously tidy shop window-style triptychs he produced there in his later years. You will note reproductions of triptychs stuck up for reference, books on boxing and
Velazquez, brushes stuffed in a Maxwell House jar and a Leach pottery mug: cultural references crowned by the paint squished like a flattened wreath around the circular mirror.
Picasso filled one house after another with stuff that he had made or simply not thrown away. When he died the executors and the taxmen went through it all, disentangling art from memorabilia from refuse. The Musée Picasso has no studio reconstruction. A chair caked in paint, yes, but this is presented as a sort of sculpture, a fetish almost. In Paris, several artists’ studios – among them Rodin’s and Gustave Moreau’s – have been preserved. But these, unlike 7 Reece Mews, were always intended as showrooms, as were those of Lord Leighton in London, and Duke
Fildos, and indeed every successful portrait painter.
When Giacometti died they stripped the plaster off the walls of his studio in the Rue Hippolyte-Maindron in order to preserve the sketches scratched on them. Yet Brassaï’s photographs of them in situ had more to them somehow. Equally Brancusi’s own photographs of his studio are more informative and atmospheric than the sanitized reconstruction stuck next door to the Centre Pompidou.
A studio in use is a den of practicalities. Most have comfy armchair, radio, postcards pinned up, stashes of failures or potential failures. The tubes and tubs of paint, bags of plaster, blowtorches, wipes and solvents are there for a purpose. Once that purpose has died away the materials are redundant. That leaves romanticism, spliced with voyeurism, as the motive for preserving the studio.
The export of his studio to Ireland, the country he loathed and left at 16, is an affront to Bacon’s memory. Particularly as he was a keen one for bonfires of anything that he feared might be classified as “archive”. Bacon knew, as every artist does, that only the work counts, so only the works themselves need remain
.
By William Feaver
Francis Bacon’s studio opens at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903) on 24 May.
7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio is published by Thames & Hudson on 23 May, priced £14.95. To order your copy for £12.95
(incl UK p&p), call Lisa Thompson on 020 7246 3370.
Bacon's cottage industry
by Brian
Sewell
The Evening Standard
16.02.01
The director of the Barbican Art Gallery has
been brave enough to step into a snake pit with his latest exhibition.
It is of pictures torn from newspapers and
magazines, collaged photographs and reproductions of old masters,
scratched, folded, stained and scribbled on with paint, selected from
almost a thousand of such fragments, together with pages from an album
of what, at first glance, could be taken as preliminary sketches, all of
which come from the studio of Francis Bacon.
There has been, and still is, some argument
as to what part these have played in Bacon's work and as to whether the
painted adjustments superimposed on them are by Bacon himself. When they
first appeared in 1996, four years after the painter's death, David
Sylvester, eminent art critic and Bacon's close friend - Boswell to his
Johnson, indeed - was inclined to accept the interventions and
disturbances as Bacon's and published a small number of them in public
lectures at the Tate Gallery, but seems since to have changed his mind.
I too, concurrently, published a few of them in ES Magazine (15 November
1996), and have not since changed my mind, but the album, which I had
not seen before, to which the Barbican exhibition gives such prominence,
causes me grave misgiving.
Bacon promoted several myths about himself
and his work, of which the most relevant in this context is that he did
not draw, had no facility for drawing, made no particular preparation
for any work and that his ideal method of painting a picture "would
really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas
and hope that the portrait was there" - it is interesting that he
said portrait rather than image or subject. The myth was
sustained without question until after his death, and then drawings
began to emerge. Angus Stewart was first into the field with a small
exhibition at Olympia in February 1996 and his revelations could not be
denied, for he had discussed drawing with Bacon himself (whose
definition of drawing was as narrow as Clinton's definition of sex) and,
knowing the painter's family well, had secured drawings of impeccable
provenance. It was this exhibition that drew from obscurity the
collection that is now at the Barbican, the property of Barry Joule,
Bacon's near neighbour in South Kensington and for many years his
cup-of-sugar and errand-running friend, given him by the old and ailing
artist a few days before his fatal heart attack.
Dealers in Bacon's pictures have been pretty
sniffy about what we must now call the Joule Archive and Bacon's
executors apparently think that it should be part of the artist's
estate; unpleasant rumours have been circulated from unknown sources,
among them that the archive is a hoax or fake, and that the whole of it
is by some feeble imitator working in Bacon's studio.
These are unacceptable hypotheses. To have
produced so much, another presence in the studio would have been noticed
by Bacon's courtiers and sycophants, and to have forged the archive
posthumously required access to English and French magazine and
newspaper material from the later 1940s into the early 1960s - virtually
impossible.
We have so fixed an idea of Bacon as an
immaculate painter whose canvases offer little evidence of revision and
much of the well-practised sweep, the brush loaded with just the right
quantity of paint of just the right consistency, that we have great
difficulty accommodating the idea of an early stage of fumbling
incompetence.
When the Tate bought 40 sketches from old
friends of Bacon and exhibited them in 1999, it was immediately evident
that, apart from two sheets that are revisions of printed illustrations,
these are infinitely more accomplished than any in the Joule Archive,
assured in line, deft in the application of oil paint, immediate in
execution, and so distilled in idea that they are evidently a long way
into the working process and have become presentation drawings rather
than preliminary sketches, small paintings on paper, finished as far as
they will go, and as habitual in touch and cypher as the cartoons of
Fougasse. The two exceptions, however, prove the point that the amended
scraps in the Joule Archive must be taken seriously as by Bacon.
There is further supporting evidence: an
American art historian, Sam Hunter (a serious and diligent sort of
bloke) saw, in 1950, a collection of material such as this in Bacon's
studio, then in Cromwell Place; and in 1998, Bacon's old and very
long-term friend, Denis Wirth-Miller, recalled that in Bacon's studio he
had seen suitcases packed with scraps and photographs that formed a core
archive of iconography - he must also have seen their contents.
At this point I must make it clear that the
Barbican curators' selection from the archive does as much to cast doubt
on Bacon's authorship as to reinforce it. Too much of the material is
too slight to be of relevance in any argument, the painted stains the
business of brush-cleaning and drying rather than of intelligent
revision, the choice dictated by the power of the printed image rather
than any perceptible purpose in Bacon's intervention, and thus
misleading; of this, the clear-est example is the face of the nurse from
Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, the slight touches of colour
irrelevant to form or structure or emotion, making no sense other than
as casual stains, though the section torn away below her nose has the
same deliberately damaging effect as the wanton splashes - sloshes,
indeed - of white paint with which the mature Bacon occasionally
disrupted, pointlessly, his formal, finished, images.
The half dozen of us who have leafed through
every single scrap must be influenced in our conclusion by the better
things that are not on view at the Barbican.
These represent the first glimmerings of ideas,
some of which were developed, more still-born, some perhaps standing in
their own right as the ephemera of Surrealism. In the best, the
underlying image is intelligently revised, by a variety of means, to
alter its literal meaning and lift it from the flatness of illustration
into the dimension of painting; in others, his intervention is no more
than the effect of creases on a filched image folded to fit into his
pocket - as with Joe Orton, no book was safe from him. The ineptitude of
so much of it, the inaccurate fury of the scratchings and the hesitant
uncertainty of the brush, make the Tate's sketches seem wonderfully
resolved, but we look in vain for something of their quality in the dis-bound
sheets from the album in the Joule Archive.
In the Barbican catalogue this album is
given (without certainty) a date in the early 1960s, and in the
exhibition it has undue prominence; it is largely the product of a
faltering hand entirely without skill and of a tentative mind's eye, the
level of accomplishment unconvinced and unconvincing, ugly in
incompetence, the predilection for the erect penis the tiresome nonsense
of the obsessed adolescent. The album's stiff cover I believe to have
been removed by Bacon (ripped off, more likely) and used for two heads
boldly sketched in oil. Of these, one is clearly connected with the
finished painting of 1955, Study for a Portrait II, based on the life
mask of William Blake, and with the kindred study of a mask pinned to
the wall of Bacon's studio, documented by a photo-graph taken by Douglas
Glass in
1957. The second head is an early stage in
the development of Bacon's interest in reaching an abstract image of
emotion by reinventing, through distortion, a given face without
entirely abandoning its recognisable features - something that he was
well able to do by 1959.
The pages of the album are a different
matter. The quality of the paper is poor and the edges brittle; many
corners had broken away before the pages were painted, other peripheral
losses have occurred since; no serious artist would have committed his
work to so fragile a support. Some of the images are so feebly conceived
and executed that, though they may have an iconographic link with
Bacon's work, they cannot be by him. The application of paint is in the
stiff short strokes of a rigid wrist and hand entirely without a
painter's flexibility, the brush far too dry for a painter with Bacon's
early relish for fat paint. Some pages, were they isolated from the
context of the album, could never have been attributed to Bacon; others,
very close indeed to Bacon's imagery, prove that these pages are not by
him. One is a feeble variant of the crouching figure with an umbrella
that we know as Figure Study II, another virtually a copy of Study for a
Portrait of Van Gogh II; the hints of drawing in both are identical, the
handling of paint in both identical, too, with even the palette shared -
though this is very different in the finished pictures, of which the
first was painted in 1945-6, the second in 1957. It is impossible that
preparatory sketches for pictures painted more than a decade apart, and
so dissimilar in every respect, should be so much the same; these
wretched drawings are copies by a worthless hand.
Was Bacon indulging some adolescent rent-boy
who, having performed his duty with whip and cigarette stubs, then
uttered such whimsy as: "I've always wanted to be an artist - can I
have a go?" Did Bacon toss him the wreckage of the album and a book
of reproductions of his own work and say: "Copy those." The
only thing to be said for these contemptible sheets is that, no matter
which of his mates and rent-boys did them, Bacon could not resist a
helpful intervention now and then and to the heads his touch of paint
occasionally gives a power and purpose wholly lacking in the figures.
Why did Bacon keep the Joule Archive,
carrying it from studio to studio for the decade between leaving
Cromwell Place in 1951 and settling in Reece Mews in 1961, where it must
have lain unused for 30 years, playing no part in his creative
processes, the suitcases a Pandora's Box ready to deny his myth of
immaculate conception, ready to reveal proof of trial and error and the
early roots of his imagination? Was it nostalgia? Was it the vice common
in old women of never throwing anything away? Or was it always his
intention to let the truth be known, but not yet, not yet, to make fools
of the fawning experts on whom his fame so much depended, for whom he
early became a cottage industry?
Barbican
Gallery until 16 April. Admission £5. Opening times Monday, Tuesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 10-6pm, Wednesday 10-8pm, Sunday/Bank Holidays
12-6pm.
The
Born again Dubliner
The artist Francis
Bacon was born in Dublin, but took good care not to return. He would
have found it a laugh, his old friends reckon, that his studio should be
lovingly moved, lock, stock and diabolical mess, to a gallery there.
By
Sally Vincent
The Guardian, Saturday
May 12, 2001
Chaos is where it all began; the natural order of things, neither good
nor bad, just immutable. Philosophers banged on about it before things
got written down, trying to get their heads round the enormity of the
great, primeval mess, determined not to come over all feeble and
judgmental, and so limit their chances of coming up with something
wonderful to say about life and associated matters. Order - the
convenience of orderliness is the imposition of squeamishness upon
reality, practised by the sort of control freaks whose imaginative
shortfall leads towards dreary stuff like certainty and guilt. You
haven't got to like chaos, was the idea, but you have to try to respect
it, give it its due.
I don't suppose Francis Bacon was especially
enamoured of chaos, he simply knew he had to have it in order to
function. It was, he used to say, what he tapped into for his imagery.
He wasn't squeamish and since it is acknowledged that he was the
greatest British painter of the 20th century, it follows that the
British are either not particularly squeamish when they look at what
Margaret Thatcher described as "those dreadful paintings", or
they recognise raw, violent, foolhardy nature when they see it and
choose to stand round applauding as though it might be the lightning
conductor that keeps them safe from God's chaotic wrath.
Anyone visiting the sky-lit studio at 7
Reece Mews, South Kensington, where Bacon worked for the last 30 years
of his life and from whence sprang all those crucified monsters and
screaming Popes, might be forgiven for wondering if the original Big
Bang hadn't happened right there behind the closed door.
It was, he'd say, a bit of a dump, but then
he was used to it. To anybody else, it was knee-high detritus caused by
a cosmic explosion, and presided over by a man who'd rather die than
relinquish a crumb of it.
In what has to be the most bizarre
enterprise in the history of art, this incredible pile of rubbish has
been solemnly transported across the Irish Sea and reassembled in
Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, where it will be entombed in glass like a
Bacon portrait and offered to the art-loving public as a kind of
peep-show. They've been at it for the past few years or so, a team of
respectable archaeologists and conservators, scrupulously annotating and
boxing up Bacon's working environment: old newspapers, dried-up pots of
paint, photographs, booze cartons, empty bottles of L'Oréal hair tint
(Naples black), pudding basins, broken spectacles, slashed canvases,
horse whips, old socks, the fly-blown mirror, a table with a drawer
containing a snap of Giacometti and a tablespoon, bits of corduroy
trouser, the plaster off the walls, the staircase, the old greasy rope
that served as its banister.
The last thing a nice lady called Mary did
at the London end was to sweep up the dust and mouse dirt from the floor
and place them reverently in a plastic bag with a Stick-It label on the
side, upon which she had written "Bacon dust". When the
transference is over and the Lord Mayor is on his way to the Grand
Opening, she plans to shake it out over the reconstruction in a final
flourish of authenticity, for the use of posterity. So far as the more
partisan members of the Republic are concerned, Mr Bacon will have come
home to roost. "It is," said someone in authority and a soft
Dublin accent, "a legendary space."
I don't know what Francis Bacon would have
made of all this. He was always rather reticent about the geography of
his birth. He'd say things were "a bit Irish" if they were
quaint or fanciful or up a gum tree of some kind. But he was certainly
born in a Dublin nursing home and lived with his family at 63 Lower
Baggot Street until he was 16 and his father caught him trying on his
mother's knickers and booted him out. So the story goes. And he almost
certainly never returned.
In fact, the very idea of visiting Ireland
exacerbated his asthma. He'd clutch his collar and make noises like
seagulls wheeling about in a snowstorm if anyone suggested it. But a
short pilgrimage in a taxi to number 63 seemed appropriate. What with
the traffic and the wind and bluster, we couldn't hang about, but it's a
large and elegant Georgian pile with a current market value, according
to the taxi driver, of well over two million. It also has a spanking new
blue plaque gracing its facade. The driver craned out of his window and
managed to read the name. Francis Bacon. "Who was that?" he
said. "What did she do?" Which would have amused Bacon no end,
for he and his friends found ceaseless amusement in the game of gender
transference.
Needless to say, this is where the dreadful
happened. You tend not to grow up to be a creative genius unless a)
you've been marked for life by something unspeakable befalling you
before the age of seven, and b) you not only speak about it but embrace
it as part of your make-up. It seems that when Mr and Mrs Bacon went out
for an evening, the young lady who baby-sat had her soldier boyfriend
over for rumpy-pumpy on the sofa. In order not to be interrupted by
obstreperous four-year-olds, she always took the precaution of locking
Francis up in the cupboard at the top of the stairs and leaving him to
scream his lungs out in the dark until her coitus was achieved.
The pragmatic way he told this
"anecdote" somehow implies that the whole thing was reasonable
to him in retrospect, if not some kind of privilege. He had been a
spectacularly demanding child, a bloody nuisance, in fact. Of course she
locked him up. Of course he screamed his head off. But the important
thing was that he had experienced the pit and that the depth of the
reality of the violence was something he treasured. Like someone who
turns round in the middle of his worst nightmare and discovers the
monster behind him is only his own shadow, he knew where fear really
comes from. Knowing this, the Irish Troubles seething through his
adolescence were mere banalities.
He was never, he used to say without
chagrin, close to either of his parents. Or, when feeling particularly
perky with a glass of Bollinger in his hand, he'd say that his father
was just a "silly old cunt". He couldn't cope with an effete,
asthmatic son who clearly had no intention of being furtive about his
homosexuality or his artistic proclivities. Of course the silly old cunt
tried to make a man of the wretched boy by laying about him with a
horsewhip, but the child was father to the man and he stepped up his
pain threshold with a true masochist's relish, rather than relinquish or
repress any part of his nature.
There are several versions of the Irish
exodus. One is that his father nominated a trusted friend to take
Francis to Europe and make a man of him there. The other is Bacon's own
account: he was sent away with a small income from his mother at the age
of 16, and taken to Berlin by a man who picked him up in a bar. It would
be more hilarious to think the paradise he found there was innocently
instigated by his homophobic father, but more likely that he fell into
five-star decadence and the whole Christopher Isherwood ambience of
prewar Berlin because his luck was in.
There, apart from learning the aesthetics of
gourmandising, which stayed with him forever, he spent a lot of time
designing Bauhaus-inspired furniture and rugs with geometric patterns on
them - and still more time thereafter re-collecting them and destroying
them. He wasn't yet ready to be defined by his work. He hardly ever was.
Francis Bacon spoke to me once. Come to
think of it, it was nearly as exciting as when Samuel Beckett smiled at
me in the bar next door to the Royal Court in Chelsea, but not as nice.
I was in the French House pub in Dean Street awaiting the arrival of
some Soho visionary - Jeffrey Bernard, most probably - just standing
there by myself, incandescent with youth, when I became aware that the
beady eyes of a small man in a leather bomber jacket were boring into
me. It gave me quite a frisson because I knew who he was and I was never
averse to the odd contact with the famous.
"I suppose," he said, "you
think you're very beautiful." The way he pronounced "you"
- yieeeew - the sour sneer of it, put me on the flinch and in the time
it took him to draw breath I knew he wasn't about to ask me to pose for
him. "Well," he said, "you're not." And slouched
off. Had I had the wit, I'd have called Jealous Sod after him.
"The young have a better time of
it," he used to say. "People are much nicer to you when you're
young." And famously he'd mix light and dark tan boot polish on the
back of his hand and scrub it through his greying hair with a shoe
brush. He wasn't averse to a bit of peach foundation, either, or a dab
of lippy, and there was never any secret about cleaning his teeth with
scouring powder. I remember the first time I saw him laugh across a
crowded Colony Room. His face transformed like Queen Victoria's when he
smiled, only his teeth were better than hers. His teeth were splendid.
It always amazed me, after that first mean
encounter, how relaxed and merry he seemed in the company of his friends
and how much affection flowed between them, for they were a surly bunch
left to their own devices. Daniel Farson, John Deakin, Muriel Belcher,
you wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift with any of them. Sometimes,
when the champagne (his treat, invariably) was flowing, you'd hear their
shrieks of merriment bouncing off the walls of Wheeler's and wonder what
you'd done to be excluded from their mutual festivity, and what the hell
it could be that was so funny. The only clue I ever eavesdropped was
seeing Francis Bacon pat his lips with a fine damask napkin and remark
that what he'd like now was a good tying up. It was years before I
realised what he was talking about. It's hard to fathom, even now, what
it must have been like to grow up homosexual when homosexual activity
was a criminal offence, but small wonder the homosexual brethren - or
sorority - of Soho exuded this bitter, outraged and outrageous
flamboyance.
It wasn't that they were proud of
themselves; I mean, I doubt any one of them longed to stick a feather up
his bum and go on a Gay Pride parade. They had nothing to be ashamed of
and, by the same token, nothing to be proud of, either. So far as
Francis Bacon was concerned, his homosexuality protected him from the
distractions, responsibilities and controlled domestic life of a
heterosexual man. It went with his chosen territory, like voting Tory
because he felt socialism was too idealistic to tangle with, too much a
drain on his thought processes. I once heard him greet Bobby Hunt, the
painter-turned-designer, in Old Compton Street. "Hallo," he
cried, stepping neatly through the traffic, "come and have lunch
with me. How are all those women and children of yours?" You could
hear it spelled out between the lines: Dear old Bobby, such early
promise, heterosexed into the commercial world. Heigh ho.
Much of the apocrypha that circles in
Bacon's name is centred on bog-standard heterosexual man's misconception
that he is somehow potential prey to the predatory queer. Kingsley Amis
used to tell a thumping good story about meeting Francis Bacon with
Daniel Farson in a restaurant in Cardiff, which culminated in poor young
Kingsley legging it desperately up a length of dried-out dockland to
escape the priapic attentions of Francis Bacon. He wrote about it in his
memoirs. How Farson had absented himself after an afternoon's lavish
lunching and Bacon had whipped out a set of porny pictures of young men
in states of undress doing rude things to each other. Farson, we are
meant to infer, was literally pimping for his friend. Tut, tut.
Yet with benefit of hindsight, there is
something absurdly mendacious about this story. Young married men were
simply not Bacon's type. Nor were middle-class, educated, literary,
clever men. All his life he practised a sort of serial monogamy with
what used to be called rough trade: young, swarthy, dangerous-looking
blokes who kept themselves fit and were uneducated, semi-literate and
queer as coots. Plus, if the "porn" he left behind is anything
to go by, Bacon liked those 50s magazines devoted to portraits of
body-builders and advertisements for exercise regimes guaranteed to turn
seven-stone weaklings into Tarzans so as to stop bullies kicking sand in
their faces.
In short, Bacon was too modest, too
self-mocking and too expert a gambler to chance his arm on such long
odds. As a young man teaching himself to paint through the simple
expedient of looking at paintings, he never believed that one day he
might be successful enough to give up the day job. It seemed perfectly
reasonable to him that he must find employment in order to buy time to
paint. To this effect, he worked for years as a gentleman's gentleman,
doing a little light valeting, running the odd bath and cooking dainty
dinners, at which he was famously adept. Thereafter he worked as a sort
of tout/master of ceremonies at Muriel Belcher's Colony Club, which
began its life as a hang-out for homosexuals seeking refuge from
entrapment officers in public lavatories. In this endeavour he was
assisted by his old nanny from Dublin days, the oldest hat-check girl in
the history of nightlife. For any further funding, he would trot along
to the Gargoyle club and the roulette tables. If he was ever short of
money, he must have kept it strictly to himself, because to this day
Soho habitués old enough to have been there marvel at the way
"Eggs" splashed it around.
When it became apparent that he no longer
needed a day job, he couldn't believe his luck. The late and deeply
lamented Bruce Bernard could occasionally be prevailed upon to describe
a moment from those heady days of Bacon's celebrity. They'd been gently
debauching themselves around Soho from bar to restaurant to club and
back again for what seemed like a week, having a splendid time,
culminating in Bacon tripping up on a kerb, falling in the gutter and
finding himself unequal to the task of getting up again. As he lay
there, a police constable approached and viewed the scene in a rather
censorious fashion; at which point Bacon announced: "I'm a very
Famous Pynter." Talking with old acquaintances in old stamping
grounds, I noticed how often they found difficulty in giving an account
of what Bacon was like for them; how self-deprecating, how ironic, how
camp he could be with the odd inflection or accent. His words didn't say
it. You had to have been there.
Bobby Hunt remembers the day he thought he
had solved the mystery of Bacon's style. Sitting on a tube train
watching his reflection in the window as the stations moved past. That
was it! The transience, the time lapse, the still yet moving image. He
took his discovery to Bacon, who smiled benignly and ordered a bottle of
champagne.
He was neither pleased nor irritated by
critical attention. When one well-meaning interpretative wizard wrote
that the violent and distressing images he had lately unleashed upon the
world were Bacon's "condemnation of man's inhumanity to man",
he replied tartly, "Well he would say that, wouldn't he?" And,
"Nothing was further from my mind." Later, following still
more unleashings of violence and distress, the Daily Telegraph's arbiter
of taste wrote that Bacon had now gone beyond the realms of despair and
entered the arena of all that is "vicious" and
"evil". Farson telephoned Bacon at home to give him the news,
taking care to accentuate the vicious and evil bits. Bacon listened
attentively, then said in his most offhand yet gracious way, "Oh
really? I thought they were rather nice."
Like a lot of serious painters, Bacon found
it tiresome to discuss his work, on the grounds that if he talked about
it he wouldn't have to fucking well paint it, would he? Yet he was
entirely candid about the obsessions and preoccupations that fuelled his
tireless attempts to come to terms with what he described as "the
vulnerability of the human form". From childhood he had been
fascinated by butcher's shops. The dead meat, the colour of blood. He
wanted to make a painting of flesh and blood as thrilling as a Monet
sunset. Mouths obsessed him.
And diseases of the mouth. And mutilated
corpses. And young men in underpants. In a series of conversations taped
by David Sylvester, a lifelong friend and the one art critic he had any
time for, Bacon confided some of his less arcane motivating forces.
Sylvester concedes that in transcription the tapes lack reality, miss
the expression behind the tone of voice. It would be too easy to read a
kind of atheistic nihilism into his sentiments, because he says the
universe is an accident and humanity is an accident and you can stuff
immortality. "We are meat," he says. When he dies you can put
him in a bin liner and chuck him on the cart. But you would miss the
yearning. Talking one day about Bacon's passion for roulette, Sylvester
asked him if he thought it was true that what inveterate gamblers like
himself truly wanted was to lose. Bacon replied that, no, he wanted to
win. Winning is the big buzz. It was the same, he said, as painting.
You're waiting for the right image. All his life he'd been trying to
"distort the human figure into reality".
That's what it's all about. Waiting for the
big win. There was one time, though, when Bacon was prepared to expose
himself verbally. He was to meet Giacometti, who, along with Velázquez,
Picasso, Monet and Degas, had the power to impress him. He looked
forward mightily to the encounter - a little too mightily in the event.
Having primed himself for the great moment with an excessive intake of
alcohol, he was frankly quite drunk when they sat down together.
Undeterred, he held forth wildly on his deeply held views of the
existential nature of the universe, making absolutely no sense
whatsoever. And all the while he was fiddling with the table-top,
lifting it inch by inch until the whole lot, plates, knives, forks,
glasses, food, bottles, napkins, went cascading to the floor. There was
an awful crash followed by a terrible silence. Then Giacometti burst
into laughter. The chaos was eloquence enough. Point made. Point taken.
Old colonials
Martin Gayford
The Independent,
July 22 2001
The time is probably
about four in the afternoon. This small room, sunk in subaqueous gloom, is
crowded with people. Most are holding drinks. Almost all seem to be talking
intently to one another. This is The Colony Room 1, a painting by Michael
Andrews, which is included in the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain.
It is at once a record of a celebrated Soho drinking club, a group portrait,
a memorial to an era, and a painting about a certain frame of mind.
If Soho is London's Left
Bank, the Colony Room at 41 Dean Street is the closest equivalent to those
Parisian cafes where painters met to drink and gossip. Michael Peppiatt,
Francis Bacon's biographer, described it as "a smallish dingy room
reached by an evil-smelling staircase flanked by dustbins". One's
overwhelming impression on entering is of seediness. Yet, in the 1950s and
1960s, this was headquarters to Francis Bacon and other notable London
artists, and in the 1990s it was a centre for a number of Young British
Artists, for whom Bacon was a cult figure.
The Colony Room was
dominated, indeed, created, by two personalities - Bacon's and that of its
owner and founder, Muriel Belcher (the place was also known as Muriel's).
Belcher, who died in 1979, came from a wealthy Jewish family - her parents
ran Birmingham's Alexandra Theatre. She opened the Colony Room in 1948 and
Bacon was one of her first customers.
By all accounts, she had
remarkable presence. Paul Potts, the malodorous and penurious Soho poet,
called her "a kind of non- ecclesiastical cardinal or a delinquent
saint". The writer Daniel Farson, another habitue, described her
favourite position, "poised like an imperious eagle on her stool by the
door, able to observe the antics of her members, quick to repel strangers
with an outraged squawk of 'Members only!' "
Belcher's conversation
was outrageous, witty and obscene. Men were invariably referred to as
"she", or as "Lottie" or "Clara". Bacon,
uniquely, was "daughter". The tight-fisted or boring were
banished, but she could take the lame ducks under a kindly wing. The Colony,
Potts said, was "the sort of place where you can't get much for 10 bob
but you can get an awful lot for nothing. Once you're in, you're in... But
if she does not like you, you've had it."
Belcher instantly took
to Bacon, and vice-versa. Spotting his potential as a social catalyst, she
offered him pounds 10 a week plus free drinks if he would bring in
customers. "She said, 'Bring in people you like,' " Bacon once
recalled. "I loved Muriel enormously, and for some reason we both got
on very well, and so I went in there a lot. I could drink in there for
nothing, which was marvellous of course."
So, with Bacon, came his
painter friends, who included Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and also Michael
Andrews. However, the Colony was not exclusively an artists' hangout. On the
contrary, according to Farson, "[Muriel's] special genius as a club
owner lay in creating her own territory so that the Colony was not typed
like the other afternoon clubs, which catered exclusively to queers,
gamblers, police or villains, or `resting' actors."
The Colony seemed, many
people noted, more like a party than a bar. (The painter John Minton,
another regular in the 1950s, found it even more intimate, "like being
in bed with drinks".) And Andrews's 1962 painting shows a party in full
swing.
Most people identify the
figure sitting at the bar on the right as Bacon (though Farson insisted that
it was himself, and Andrews, when questioned, was evasive). Next, at the
other end of the bar, comes Belcher, and to the left of her, Lucian Freud,
followed by the photographer and critic Bruce Bernard. Bernard noted that
Andrews had "at first shocked my humility by making me virtually the
central figure, then shocked my vanity by bringing in Henrietta Moraes [the
artist/ model, who posed for Bacon among others] to obstruct the view"
- although Farson thought the female figure to be another regular, Virginia
Law. She is talking to the photographer John Deakin.
Precise portraiture was
not Andrews's point, however. The Colony Room 1 was one of a number of works
he painted on the subject of parties - which, he observed, are times when
people "allow themselves to be and are judged. They perform. They
succeed or fail. They increase in stature or flop. They put themselves to
the test."
That was certainly the
case at the Colony, where the unsuccessful might be ejected ignominiously by
Muriel. This happened to the novelist John Braine, who, Farson related, was
dismissed with the words, "On your way, Lottie, or you'll get a
fourpenny one."
Andrews frequented the
Colony Room from 1954 onwards, drinking with his wife, June. Bernard
remembered him as being "socially quite manic, drinking and socialising
with an engaging and, of course, entirely sensitive recklessness".
Later, Andrews moved to the country and became quite reclusive where he died
in 1995. In a wonderful series of paintings, he took balloons floating over
landscape as a metaphor for the fragile envelope of the ego. But, in The
Colony Room 1, he painted egos engaged closer to the Earth, in the curtained
dark of a Soho afternoon.
'Michael Andrews' is at
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1, tel 020 7887 8000, until 7 October
360º of Francis
Bacon
RTE Interactive
Ireland 24 05 2001
Cristín Leach
There is something compellingly voyeuristic about standing in a glass case
smaller than a telephone box just one step inside the door of the studio in
which one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century worked. The fact that
you have queued for more than ten minutes to reach this unique vantage point
does not relieve the guilt of spending two minutes trying to absorb the chaos
before tearing yourself away – behind you the queue has grown so long that
people will now wait more than twenty minutes for a glimpse at the source of
genius.
The opening of Francis
Bacon's reconstructed London studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Wednesday 23 May
was an opening like no other. An estimated 1,300 people turned up, each
determined to actually see the studio, the work and the other items on display.
The excitement was palpable, with an almost religious feel to the queuing and
silent gazing at what already seems like a shrine.
Just outside the viewing
booth your feet hover over a glass panel in the floor. Down there, preserved
forever, are the steep, bare wooden stairs that led up to the studio. There's
the rope he used to pull himself up and the light switch marked by his dirty
fingerprints. You imagine descending to open the door at the bottom and finding
yourself in London outside the real 7 Reese Mews.
Much has been written about
the 1998 donation of the studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery by John Edwards,
Bacon's sole heir. More has been written about the mammoth operation of
transporting it, along with its contents, from London to Ireland. Even the dust
from the room was collected and re-scattered over the carefully replaced
objects. Standing in the glass viewing booth, you see crates and boxes from
bottles of alcohol, a dressing gown, photographs, scraps of paper, shopping
bags, books, catalogues, paintbrushes and most of all paint. These items fill
every corner of the 4x8 metre room. The paint is everywhere, in tins and tubes,
on small canvases and on the walls and door - no artist's pallet was found in
the studio. There is an illogical feeling that even the air, sealed behind the
glass, could be the very air he breathed - so complete is the illusion.
Walking around the outside
of the studio you come to two peep-holes with wide angle lenses that allow you
to focus on the paint blobs on the far wall and give a view of brushes in pots
on a table. Around another corner you stand looking through the windows of the
studio. From here the eye is led to the large, round mirror at the end of the
room, but not before you are distracted by old shoes, a soft guitar cover, a
'Bally' shoe bag and the cardboard box packaging from an electric food mixer –
Magimix 2000.
Francis Bacon once said,
"I cannot work in places that are too tidy." He compared this
incredibly cluttered room, where he worked from 1961 until his death in 1992, to
the inside of his mind. Those who like to examine abstract modern art and
proclaim, "my two-year-old could do that", may now change their tune
to boast about the artistic state of their teenagers' bedrooms - but it has to
be said, it would take some 14-year-old to make a mess like this.
The reconstructed studio
features the original door, walls, floors, ceiling and shelves. Every item found
in the gallery – there were more than 7,000 – has been catalogued on a
specially designed database before being replaced. It is this unique information
bank that will allow for further study of the artist and how he worked. The
accompanying Micro Gallery features touch-screen audiovisual displays with
highlights of the database as well as information on the artist, his life and
his work. After listening for a while, you feel compelled to return to the
studio to gaze again on the jumble, the paint, the books and the brushes. It's
uplifting and intriguing.
Beyond the studio and the
Micro Gallery, the Exhibition Gallery boasts a collection of unfinished
paintings on display to accompany the launch. The door at the end leads you back
around to the front of the Hugh Lane. As the queues continue to form, stretching
back almost to the thronged gallery's entrance, it is clear that this curiosity
will become our capital's cultural must-see, maybe even surpassing the Book of
Kells. Congratulations Hugh Lane Gallery - Ireland has got its own Mona Lisa.
The Hugh Lane Gallery is
open Tuesday - Thursday 9.30 - 6.00, Friday and Saturday 9.30 - 5.00, Sunday
11.00 - 5.00, closed Monday. Admission to the Francis Bacon Studio £6; £3
concession, £2 for 12-18 year olds and under 12s free. For further information
on Francis Bacon and the studio go to www.hughlane.ie
Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle
over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon
by Steve Boggan
The Independent
26 April 2001
A £100m court battle over works by the painter
Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of
the most bitter art wrangles in decades.
Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former
gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much
commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not
accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.
The gallery, which denies the allegations, is
seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court
in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial
will begin in earnest early next year.
Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the
estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr
Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or
run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation,
which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between
Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."
Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82
from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the
Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International
Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.
But the estate alleges that instead of taking a
"fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up
to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued
between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work,
valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for
only one series a flat fee of $40,000.
The estate has questioned the role of one of
Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant
and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict
of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly
from the arrangement.
Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that
Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of
Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles on behalf of
Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its
own gallery as soon as the paint was dry in Marlborough's own words 'in
Bacon's best interests'."
The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner
John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended
"like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last
18 years of his life.
The trustees complain they have been unable to
examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or
diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so.
Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the
gallery in 1958.
"The trustees have not been able to get a
full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence
that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate.
"Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of
the paintings thought to have been painted by him.
"But what is also annoying is that we can't
get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced
because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate
mail.
"If nothing else, we hope to have these
released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous
position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest
20th-century painter."
During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in
Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter.
In 1989, his Triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.
He is widely acknowledged as being one of the
greatest painters if not the pre-eminent British painter of the last
century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.
His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery
won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among
others.
His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless
much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile
exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the
Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.
A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors
Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were
among his friends.
His stature, therefore, has made the alleged
failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source
said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between
1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts.
You could be looking at £5m for each of them.
"The figure of £100m was raised during an
interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out
there, we don't know how much could be at stake."
A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke
of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said:
"We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis
Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the
claims."
It is understood the gallery will argue that
Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before
it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when
it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance
of his bank account.
One of his friends said: "He needed money
for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than
that, it meant nothing to him."
During the case, it will be pointed out that
Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck
with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was
for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed
with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?
Part of the reason might have been because of Ms
Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a
Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and
friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his
tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely
to give evidence.
The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew
they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial
prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m
for some works.
The questions the court must answer are: Were
those prices enough, and did Bacon care?
Bacon triptych goes for £3m at auction
The Daily
Telegraph
Friday 9 February 2001
By Will Bennett, Art Sales Correspondent
A SERIES of three paintings by Francis Bacon of his long-time companion John Edwards sold for more than £3 million at Christie's in London last night.
The triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an anonymous collector at a sale of post-war art. Jussi
Pylkkanen, Christie's international director, said: "It is a piece that Bacon himself identified as being of museum quality."
Bacon met Edwards, who was a barman, in 1974 and their relationship lasted until the artist's death in 1992. The triptych shows Edwards seated on a stool in an empty studio
space.
Dealer 'snatched Bacon paintings away'
John
Ezard
The Guardian,
Thursday April 26, 2001
An art dealer acted as the painter Francis Bacon's "keeper or
minder", removing his paintings to her gallery "as soon as the paint
was dry", a high court judge was told yesterday.
This was said to be one of the principal roles of
Valerie Beston, who organised the artist's life for more than 30 years.
The allegations were made by Geoffrey Vos QC, who
called Bacon Britain's greatest 20th century artist. He was acting for Bacon's
estate in a claim which could run as high as £100m. The estate is suing
Marlborough Fine Art (London) and the Liechtenstein-based Marlborough
International Fine Art Establishment for breach of duty and undue influence
over Bacon.
Mr Vos was speaking at a preliminary procedural
hearing of a complex case which is expected to bring the dead painter's often
desperate life back into the limelight when it is fully argued in January.
Mr Vos told Mr Justice Patten: "The
relationship which is at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will
never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th
century artist and his dealer. This is a unique case. There is nothing normal
or run of the mill about it."
The Marlborough gallery exclusively represented
Bacon from 1958 - shortly before he became celebrated and was sometimes
getting only a few hundred pounds for a canvas - until he died in 1992 as the
world's highest-priced living artist.
Marlborough are contesting the claims of the
estate, of which Brian Clarke was appointed executor in 1998. It is urging the
judge to strike out the case this week.
The estate accuses the gallery of retaining up to
70% of the sale value of Bacon's paintings. It says a fair share of the
proceeds would have been about a third. It alleges Marlborough has not yet
demonstrated that it has paid for all the paintings it received. The estate is
demanding a full accounting of the gallery's role to show that a fair balance
was struck between its interests and those of Bacon. It also alleges that
Marlborough have failed to account for the proceeds of a sale of 47 series of
Bacon lithographs.
Mr Vos told the court Ms Beston could be described
"as the defendants would have it, as Bacon's assistant", or "as
one might say, his keeper or minder".
"But what is beyond doubt is that Valerie
Beston, a director of Marlborough UK at all times material to the case,
organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles on behalf of
Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own
gallery as soon as the paint was dry".
Outside court, the estate said in a statement:
"It is right that the truth about the UK's pre-eminent artist and the
treatment of his work be established and not buried."
Bacon left his £10m fortune to his longstanding
friend John Edwards, 51, an illiterate east Londoner who now lives in
Thailand. The case continues.
All your own work, Bacon?
The Daily
Telegraph
22
February 2001
The pictures in a new exhibition come from the studio of
Francis Bacon. But, asks Richard Dorment, are they all by
him?
THE Barbican Gallery's exhibition of the Barry Joule
archive of works on paper attributed to Francis Bacon
consists of more than 900 items, including 68 original
works on paper and what the gallery calls "working
documents" - images from newspapers, books and
magazines that have been worked over in ink and crayon.
Leading
the field: one of many painted-over photographs
that are attributed to Bacon
Bacon claimed that he never made
preparatory studies for his paintings, but worked directly
on the canvas, relying on chance and visceral instinct to
arrive at those strange, compelling images of screaming
heads, disintegrating bodies and animalistic copulation.
We know, from a collection of sketches that came to light
after the artist's death, that this is not an entirely
accurate description of the way in which he worked.
Nevertheless, if authentic, the Joule cache both enhances
our knowledge of Bacon's sources of inspiration and
transforms our understanding of his creative process. But,
if a large number of the works are deemed to be doubtful,
then the uncritical exhibition of this material will muddy
our comprehension of Bacon's achievement. What is at stake
is Bacon's artistic identity. For, until you first
determine what is and what is not by an artist's own hand,
you cannot say anything else meaningful about him.
The provenance of this material
is not in question. No one doubts that everything on view
came from Bacon's studio, or that Bacon handed it over to
his friend, handyman and chauffeur Barry Joule just before
his death in April 1992. What is at issue is whether the
original drawings, and the graphic work on top of the
photographs and newsprint, are by Bacon himself.
Several respected figures in the
art world have accepted that everything on view is
authentic. The problem is that a number of equally
distinguished voices, including that of Bacon's friend and
interpreter David Sylvester, are unhappy with the
attribution of the archive to the artist.
It must be said at once that the
Barbican never quite claims that the works are
indisputably by Bacon. Virtually every work is labelled
"attributed to Francis Bacon", and a somewhat
muddled catalogue essay doesn't quite rule out the
involvement of other hands in the creation of the original
drawings. What is more, admitting that the collection
"has yet to be officially recognised as the work of
the artist", the Barbican has quite properly borrowed
from the Tate Gallery a selection of the working drawings
that surprised even experts on Bacon's work when they were
discovered and whose authenticity is not in doubt. This
enables us to study the verified material alongside the
controversial work in the Joule archive.
Most of the undisputed material
in the Tate consists of magazine and newspaper images over
which Bacon has drawn. In every one, we have the sense
that Bacon looked long and hard at each image, then
brought his own idiosyncratic visual intelligence to bear
on it. We become familiar not only with the calligraphy of
Bacon's draughtsmanship, but also begin to understand how
his mind worked, what interested him about each image, and
how he interacted with it.
In one newspaper photograph,
showing the boxer Jack Dempsey standing in the ring, for
example, Bacon draws a spindly, cartoon-like
"opponent" in black ink.
The dark knots of the drawn torso
against the boxer's white flesh animate an otherwise
static image. The way Bacon in his imagination
"enters" the photograph serves to illustrate the
powerful element of fantasy - and even eroticism - that he
brought to the act of looking. In another sheet, he draws
a "frame" around the image of a fallen boxer
with four swift lines, then adds a second, smaller frame
within the first to locate the figure in deep receding
space.
In undisputed works like these,
you sense that Bacon possessed tunnel vision: his eyes
zoomed in on the area of an image that intrigued him,
isolating it from everything around it. He uses his pen or
crayon unhesitatingly, as though thinking with them,
instinctively working out how a figure moves or stands in
the way it does, cropping it to see whether it would make
a picture in its own right. It's not so much the aesthetic
quality of the Tate material that is significant, but that
you feel Bacon's searching intelligence at work in every
line he draws.
Turning from the Tate's holdings
to the so-called X Album of drawings and collages - one
part of the Joule collection on show, which has been
unbound for display - the difference is startling. In
these drawings, the figures are without shape, direction
or volume, there is little sense of recessional depth, no
reason for many of the lines. What is more, the collages
and drawings feel precious, self consciously
"aesthetic".
These works are certainly not
preparatory studies. My impression is that they were
created by someone who already knew the famous painted
images, but who didn't understand the anatomical or
spatial complexities of the originals.
Try though I might to sense
Bacon's hand in a drawing of two nude figures lying
against a green field, or of a prelate in a transparent
box, or of a screaming pope, they feel flabby, flat, weak.
My strong instinct is that these works are not by Bacon.
Now turn to the hundreds of
photographs, magazine, and newspaper images also lent by
Joule for this show. Again, no one doubts that these items
were in Bacon's studio where they were probably stepped
upon, spattered with paint or used to test pigment and
wipe brushes: the question is, how much of the graphic
work on them is by Bacon himself? For me, the answer is
that, in a number of cases at least, Bacon did work over
these images.
A few examples will have to do.
Bacon doctors a black and white photograph of a corner of
Picasso's apartment in the rue des Grands Augustins in a
way that would have amused Picasso himself. In the photo,
there's a Picasso portrait hanging on a wall and a pair of
slippers on the floor. Outlining the rectangular portrait
in black ink, Bacon turns it into a "head"
connected by a wiry torso to the slippers, or
"feet" on the floor.
Compare the knotty line in this
torso to the figure in the Tate's re-worked photograph of
Jack Dempsey, and it is instantly clear that we are
dealing with the same hand. What's more, the element of
wit and invention suggests that this is the same mind as
well.
Sheet
from 'The X Album': assume nothing and decide the
authenticity of these works for yourself
Or, to take another example,
Bacon uses purple crayon to draw over a reproduction of a
Degas painting showing a nude sponging herself in the
bath. Bacon reinforces the long line of the subject's
back, as though trying to understand her anatomy, then
frames the figure, as though by isolating it he can see it
more clearly. The way the pressure on the crayon varies
from heavy to very light gives the line something of the
same kind of energy we see in the Tate's material. Often
in photos of athletes he does the same thing - separates
individual figures, emphasises the "line" in
their movements, reinforces the areas of their bodies that
interest him, whether it be a punching arm, an open mouth,
or a crotch.
In many cases, however, someone
has scribbled over the image or enhanced a photograph in a
way that feels purely cosmetic. I suppose these could be
by Bacon, but much more work needs to be done before we
can say this for sure. So there are two questions here.
The first is who is responsible for the X Album?
The short catalogue essay seems
to hint that it might have some connection with Bacon's
lover in the Fifties, Peter Lacy, and goodness knows that
Bacon moved in a world where any number of people might
have tried their hand at imitating his work.
The second question is whether
the Joule material other than the X Album is authentic.
Some of it certainly is, but doubts still linger over much
of it. A photo of Bacon and Joule exhibited in this show
which has been extensively worked over in ink by
photographer Peter Beard proves that those in Bacon's
circle did alter images in precisely the way they are
enhanced in the archive.
The only way to reach a
conclusion about all this is through old-fashioned
connoisseurship. Each image has to be looked at
individually by a panel of experts on Bacon's work, who
must compare it with undisputed drawings.
Bacon should be treated as though
he were a Michelangelo or Raphael. What worries me about
the way this material has been presented at the Barbican
is that doubts such as those I've just raised have been
minimised. Though briefly referred to in the catalogue and
wall labels, nowhere are we given a sustained argument
against the authenticity of this material.
This could have been stronger
exhibition had it been called "Francis Bacon, true or
false?" and used as a platform to air these issues
and perhaps make some progress in resolving them. As it
is, the exhibition is in its own way fascinating, but you
should go to it armed with the shield of scepticism. Look
at everything, assume nothing, decide for yourself.
'Bacon's Eye - Works on Paper
attributed to Francis Bacon from the Barry Joule Archive'
until April 16. Also at the Barbican is 'Robin and
Lucienne Day Pioneers of Contemporary Design' until April
15.
MESS IS MORE.
Art Forum May, 2001
RICHARD SHONE ON THE FRANCIS
BACON STUDIO
There are immaculate studios
and there are messy studios. There are private ones that are no-go areas for
housekeeper and dealer alike. And there are those that show signs not just of
working but of living--an easy chair, bookshelves, even a put-up bed. Francis
Bacon's last studio was notoriously messy and pretty private, entered only by
close friends and the occasional photographer. It was exclusively for work-a
small, skylit, fairly cheerless space within his almost pretentiously modest
flat up a steep flight of stairs in South Kensington. Its simplicity stood in
marked contrast to earlier studios.
In the 1930s, for example, when Bacon was
both painter and modernist interior designer, his workspace was all neo-Bauhaus,
fitted out with glass, steel, and abstract rugs. Later he lived and worked in
the palatial but bomb-damaged studio occupied in the nineteenth century by John
Everett Millais. It was in 1961 that Bacon took 7 Reece Mews--bed-sitting-room,
studio, and kitchen-cum-bathroom--remaining there until his death in 1992.
Although he could have afforded a substantial London property, that was not his
style; nor did he gather good or interesting furniture or works of art around
him.
People often commented, "Francis has no taste," and of course,
Walter Sickert was right when he said that "taste is the death of the
painter." But, as with so much else in his life, Bacon took tastelessness
to an extreme: Photographs of his bedroom record possessions of unadulterated
utility. Upon scrutiny, some details of this visual desert--certain clothes, a
Marlboro pack-suggest the presence of John Edwards, Bacon's friend and sole
beneficiary.
Inheriting the property,
Edwards was obviously in a tight spot. He wanted to use the flat without being
responsible for destroying the studio's unique look. After lengthy negotiations
and the removal of Bacon's estate from his longtime gallery, Marlborough Fine
Art, the studio--its walls, floor, and contents (over 7,000 items)--was given
over in whole to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, in Dublin, the
city of Bacon's birth.
Reconstructed there to scale, and with a flotilla of
attendant displays designed by architect David Chipperfield, the studio opens to
the public May 24. A lecture by David Sylvester and publication of the picture
book 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio (Thames & Hudson) will mark
the occasion. With its paint-smeared walls and piles of rubbish, its interesting
photos and books, and its slashed canvases, the studio will be a ghoulish
showpiece, but it remains to be seen whether the public availability of its
contents will be useful in authenticating the master's disputed pieces,
particularly a group of works on paper "attributed to Bacon," recently
on view in Dublin and London.
Richard Shone is associate
editor of the Burlington Magazine.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Artforum
International Magazine, Inc.
The
vulnerability of the human body
Gay News
February 27 2001
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), one of the giants of modern art, will be honoured in Holland for the first time with a retrospective. In the
Haags Gemeentemuseum in, you guessed right, The Hague, you can see all the
important works by the painter, whose main source of inspiration was the
vulnerability of the (human) body, especially since 1945 (how come, one
wonders!?). Up till then Bacon got little to no recognition - critics
unanimously wrote down his work, while Bacon himself did little to help matters
by destroying most of it. But in 1944 he caught some eyes with a triptych and
from then on his career spread giant wings. Bacon became one of the most
successful postwar artists.
Gay News is not the periodical to vex you with a long, art historically correct
analysis of his work and gladly leaves that dirty job to those who claim to know
all about that. We prefer to take a closer look at the man's homosexuality, his
preference for men, which influenced his work so dramatically.
Francis Bacon grows up near Dublin, where his father owns a racing stable. His
love-hate relationship with his father, a retired army officer, sets the tone
for his childhood. He feels sexually attracted to his father. As the weakest
child he doesn't get the love he yearns for, but, to toughen him up, the whip.
When at fifteen Francis begins striking up sexual affairs with the stable hands,
he and his bullying dad get into such a blazing row, that he decides to move to
London. In a last attempt to turn his son into a real man, his father sends him
off to Berlin under the supervision of a chaperone. And indeed Bacon learns a
lot in Berlin's decadent nightlife, though not exactly what his dad had in mind.
In 1929 Bacon meets the Maecenas Eric Hall, a married businessman with two kids,
who educates him culturally. For more than fifteen years they also keep up a
sexual relationship. Another homosexual friend helps him to further his artistic
career as well. And the Australian painter Roy de Maistre teaches him more about
painting, while also enlightening him on further tricks of the sexual trade.
Breakthrough
Upon his artistic breakthrough Bacon finds himself in a world of champagne, posh
limousines and big bucks. In 1952 he meets the retired air pilot, Peter Lacy,
who works in Tangier as a bar pianist to support himself and pay off his boozing
and gambling debts. Bacon rents an apartment in the city, in those days a
meeting place for many homosexual writers (Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams,
Christopher Isherwood and others stayed there for big parts of the year). Bacon
falls in love for the first time. Given his background it's not surprising he's
attracted to men who in the long run turn out to be neurotic and hysterical.
Like Lacy, a man who, next to his humour, in his fits of rage has a penchant for
getting violent.
In 1962 the boozing eventually catches up with Lacy and destroys him - just
before the opening of his retrospective in the London Tate Gallery, Bacon
receives word Lacy died.
In 1964 Bacon meets George Dyer, a rough-neck with a criminal record. Dyer
becomes Bacon's muse and models in the nude for several of his most beautiful
paintings. But he also takes refuge in booze and several suicide attempts.
Another love affair which nearly destroys Bacon's successful career. History has
a knack for repeating itself and two days prior to the opening of a big
exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer, having overdosed on pills and
alcohol, kicks the bucket. In memory of his lover Bacon creates his best work,
including three triptyches with an undisguished homosexual theme.
Working class boy
In the mid-Seventies a new lover walks into Bacon's life, John Edwards, a dark,
handsome and illiterate working-class boy, who, for the next sixteen years, has
a puer-senex love affair with Bacon. That we're speaking of true love here is
made clear by the fact that Bacon makes Edwards his heir of his entire capital,
assessed at 11 million pounds. When on April 28, 1992 in Madrid, Bacon, at 82,
dies of a heart attack in the home of his latest flame, a young, attractive and
educated Spaniard, Bacon's body is cremated and his ashes are scattered in
England.
Till recently Bacon's London studio was left untouched. His heirs offered the
complete atelier to the main London museums of modern art. But their
bureaucratic mills turn slowly, and eventually Bacon's heirs decided to
dismantle the entire studio in the dead of night and ship its contents to
Dublin. Everything was meticulously planned in advance, so the legendary studio
could be rebuild in detail in Ireland. The English art world just missed out!
Retrospective
The retrospective in the Haags Gemeentemuseum (41 Stadhouderslaan, Den Haag) is
from January 27 till May 13. With it comes a full-colour catalogue of 144 pages.
About the love affair of Bacon with Dyer a movie has come out, called Love is
the Devil, directed by John Maybury, with Derek Jacobi in the role of Bacon and
Daniel Craig playing Dyer. The movie gives a marvelous idea of Bacon's work,
without showing any of his works, since his heirs didn't grant permission.
Maybury nevertheless manages to portray Bacon in visually powerful images.
Disputed Bacon art works go on
display
Huge exhibition of previously unknown
paintings and photographs opens but doubt surrounds their authenticity
Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage
correspondent
The Guardian,
Thursday
February 8, 2001
A huge exhibition of works attributed to the late
Francis Bacon opens today at the Barbican Gallery in London despite fears of a
last minute injunction from the artist's estate.
Before yesterday's preview, representatives of the
estate, which jealously defends the copyright and reputation of the artist,
visited the exhibition of works whose ownership and authenticity have been
bitterly contested .
The estate's lawyers, Payne Hicks Beach, said last
night they had no comment to make.
The archive has been the subject of a simmering
row since Mr Bacon, regarded as one of the major painters of the 20th century,
died in 1992.
Both the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the
then Tate Gallery considered exhibiting the archive, but backed off in the
face of the unresolved dispute.
Although the Barbican exhibition is peppered with
the word "attributed", Tate Modern has given it some credibility by
lending Bacon sketches, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, which it bought two
years ago.
A spokeswoman for Tate Modern said: "We have
lent six works on paper, totally authentic and not in any way disputed, which
allow an interesting comparison to be made. Beyond that we cannot comment on
the exhibition."
John Hoole, director of the Barbican Gallery, said
he has "no doubt that the vast majority of the works must be by
Bacon".
When Mr Bacon died of a heart attack, aged 82, the
sole heir of his estimated £11m estate was John Edwards, an East End barman
who was his companion for many years. The inheritance included the contents of
his chaotic studio, which has now been reconstructed in a gallery in Dublin,
the artist's birthplace.
But boxes of papers were allegedly given, just
four days before his death, to Barry Joule, a Canadian who was his neighbour
in London and later a friend. Mr Joule said yesterday that when Mr Bacon gave
him the papers, he said: "You know what to do with it", and that
this was familiar code for a gift.
Part of the Bacon mythology is that his genius
poured straight on to the canvas, without any preparatory work.
The hundreds of sheets of paper in the archive
include hoarded photographs, clippings, pages torn from magazines and books,
the medical text book illustrations which fascinated him and scribbled
sketches.
The photographs include images which recur in his
finished work, including the screaming nurse from the Eisenstein film
Battleship Potemkin.
Album X is an old photograph album given him by
his nanny, from which the photos were torn and replaced with heavily worked
collages and overdrawn photographs.
The authenticity of the archive has been
questioned by David Sylvester, a leading expert on Bacon. He concedes that the
sheets of paper must have come from Bacon's studio, but doubts that the
overpainting and sketches are in the artist's hand.
Mr Joule has been accused by other sources of
betraying his friend's intentions. It has been suggested both that he tampered
with the papers and that if he was indeed given them by Bacon, the intention
was that they should be destroyed.
Mr Joule said that he has frequently felt crushed
by the bitterness of the row.
"I think that there's an element of jealousy.
I'm not an artist or a scholar - I'm a carpenter, so why the hell should I
have this stuff?" he said.
"Then there's the gay thing. They claim him
as their own and I happen to be a straight man.
"But there's no doubt in my mind, he gave
them to me to keep, and I kept them. If he'd come back and asked for them
back, I'd have given them back. But he didn't come back. He died and I had to
decide what to do with them."
He added: "I have highs and lows. Exhibitions
are a high, so this is a good day."
A
portrait of the artist as a man inspired by clutter
The
Irish Times, Wednesday, May 23rd 2001
Francis Bacon's reconstructed studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery could give more
than one teenager an idea or two about tidiness, writes Frank McNally.
The new
exhibition at Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery should carry a parental discretion
warning.
Younger children can probably view it safely enough. But impressionable
teenagers could be seriously damaged by the sight of Francis Bacon's
reconstructed London studio, and particularly its subliminal message that you do
not have to tidy your room to be a success.
The studio is a mess, to put it mildly. Its 4 x 8 metre space contains more
clutter than a crack team of first-year university students could ever dream of
creating. This ranges from some 2,000 samples of painting material; slashed
canvasses; old newspapers and articles of clothing to such artistic accessories
as a cardboard box, formerly the home of a crate of VAT 69 Scotch whisky.
One of the few artist's conveniences not found amid the chaos is a palette. But
then, Bacon didn't need one. When mixing paint, he preferred to use the walls,
both sides of the studio door, and anything else that was handy. It doesn't say
so in the gallery programme, but one has to presume he wasn't renting.
The exhibition opens to the public today, three years after the dramatic news
that the studio's contents had been donated to Dublin by the artist's partner
and heir, John Edwards.
The intervening period has seen the completion of an epic task, beginning with
the making of a 360-degree photographic record of the flat in Reece Mews,
London, and the cataloguing of its more than 7,000 items, and ending with the
meticulous recreation of the whole mess in a specially designed space in the
Parnell Square gallery.
Even the original dust was preserved, removed in bags and sprinkled back on the
exhibits before the room was resealed.
Gallery visitors can view the interior through the glassed-off door and two
windows. To complete the voyeur experience, the steep stairway to the
first-floor flat has also been recreated, sunk in the floor, under glass. The
project cost £1.5 million, a burden shared by Dublin Corporation, the
Department of the Arts, the Millennium Commission, and the Ireland Funds.
Mr Edwards joined Lord Mayor Maurice Ahern and others to admire the finished
work on Monday. But, notoriously shy, he confined himself to saying he thought
Bacon would have "enjoyed this". Born in Dublin in 1909, the painter
left Ireland in 1925 and never returned, later joking, with prescience, that he
could only go back after his death.
Nine years after the last-mentioned event, the artist's archive, complemented by
a collection of paintings on long-term loan, is considered the most important
addition to the Hugh Lane since its establishment in 1908. Admission to the
gallery is free, but there will be a charge for the exhibition: £6 for adults,
£3 concessions and under 12s free.
Last night, Mr Edwards was presented with a Lord Mayor's award in recognition of
his generosity to the city. On Saturday, RTÉ's Network 2 screens a documentary
on Bacon, which includes an account of the studio's relocation.
FRANCIS BACON STUDIO
AT THE HUGH LANE GALLERY, DUBLIN
Local Ireland
Opening
24 May 2001, until 28 October
"I feel at home here in
this chaos because chaos suggests images to me. And in any case I just love
living in chaos."
Francis Bacon on 7 Reece Mews
Francis Bacon's 7 Reece Mews
studio reconstructed at the Hugh Lane Gallery will be the definitive archive of
one of the finest figurative artists ever and one of the greatest European
painters of the twentieth century. The database of over 7000 items is the most
detailed and technically advanced archive of any artist's studio in the world.
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
was born in Dublin and is celebrated as one of the most important artists of the
20th century. 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London was the artist's home and
legendary working space for the last thirty years of his life and it was here
that Bacon produced some of his best work.
The Hugh Lane has now
reconstructed the studio in Dublin in new spaces designed by leading British
architect David Chipperfield. The studio is supported by an Audio Visual room,
an Exhibition Gallery and a Micro Gallery.
This exceptional and
undisputed archive of Francis Bacon comprises over 7000 items including 80 works
on paper, approximately 1,500 photographs by John Deakin, Peter Beard and Henri
Cartier-Bresson among others, books and slashed canvases.
This archival material has
been entered on a specially designed database. The Micro Gallery provides the
visitor unique access to highlights of this archive. In the Exhibition Gallery a
remarkable exhibition of unfinished paintings will accompany the launch of the
studio. Their unfinished state provides a singular insight into the artist's
process and technique.
The Hugh Lane Gallery
appointed a team of archaeologists and conservators to painstakingly catalogue
and remove the entire studio contents. The reconstructed studio features the
original walls, floor, ceiling and shelves as well as the famous wooden
staircase. "The acquisition of Francis Bacon's studio was a great coup and
its retrieval and documentation has confirmed our suspicions we have the
definitive archive on Francis Bacon. The Gallery's innovative approach to
retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a database of
information which will be crucial in critical analysis of Francis Bacon's
work", says Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery.
7 Reece Mews: Francis
Bacon's Studio with photographs by Perry Ogden and with foreword by John
Edwards, will also be launched by the Lord Mayor the same evening. Published by
Thames and Hudson the book features Perry Ogden's extraordinary photographs of
the studio and living space at 7 Reece Mews, taken before the studio was
dismantled by the Hugh Lane Gallery. These photographs will go on exhibition at
the Gallery on 24 May until 28 October 2001.
For further
information please contact:
Jessica O'Donnell or Ruth Dowling, Hugh Lane Gallery, tel. 00353 1 8741903
email jodonnell@hughlane.ie
Kate Burvill, Thames and Hudson, tel. 0044 207 8455019 email
k.burvill@thameshudson.co.uk
Published by: Local Ireland
Year written: 2001
Copyright owned by: Hugh Lane Gallery
More than 2,500 ''Wanted''
posters have been plastered on billboards and kiosks all over Berlin. But the
face is not that of a criminal. Rather, it is the image of the British artist
Francis Bacon as portrayed by another master British painter, Lucian Freud, in
1951, when he was 42 and Bacon was 31.
The tiny image, an oil on
copper only 5 by 7 inches and based on a photograph of Kafka, depicts Bacon with
brooding eyes and tousled hair. It was stolen from a traveling exhibition when
it was at the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin in 1988 and was never recovered.
Now, with a major retrospective of Mr. Freud's work opening at Tate Britain in
London next year to celebrate the artist's 90th birthday, Mr. Freud is desperate
to recover the stolen portrait - so desperate, in fact, that he designed the
poster himself.
In a written statement
released to the press last week, Mr. Freud sent the thief a message: ''Would the
person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my
exhibition next June?'' The British Council, which organized the exhibition from
which the painting was stolen, began the campaign to recover it. An anonymous
donor, believed to be Sir Jacob Rothschild, is offering a $140,000 reward for
its return.
When the painting was stolen
there were no security cameras in the National Gallery in Berlin. The portrait,
which had been screwed to the wall, was taken in the middle of the day. The
statute of limitations for theft in Germany is 12 years, which means that the
criminal could not be jailed if he came forward now. Andrea Rose, the British
Council's director of visual arts, said she hoped this would make the thief feel
more comfortable about confessing.
Bacon painted Mr. Freud
several times, but this is Mr. Freud's only known portrait of Bacon. It is
considered of great historical importance and thought to be irreplaceable, since
Bacon died in 1992. Art experts say it is worth well over $1.5 million. William
Feaver, Mr. Freud's biographer and the curator of the Tate show, called it ''the
most important small portrait of the 20th century'' and ''one of the three
crucial paintings of Freud's early career.'' The Tate bought it in 1952.
In Berlin ''there is
enormous interested both in Freud, who was born there and lived a stone's throw
from the museum, and in Bacon, who spent his formative years in Berlin,'' Ms.
Rose said. The poster has made such an impact, Ms. Rose added, that people have
been spotted trying to steal it. Since the posters were designed by Mr. Freud,
many of his greatest admirers consider them collector's items.
Francis Bacon studio recreated in
Dublin
By David
Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
The Daily
Telegraph
Wednesday 23 May 2001
DUSTY newspapers attest to the
authenticity of the studio of the late Francis Bacon, which was
opened yesterday in Dublin after it was dismantled and shipped
from London.
The artist was born in
Dublin but did not regard himself as Irish. He spent all of his
most creative years at his studio in south Kensington. The arrival
of the entire contents of his studio, all painstakingly catalogued
before being moved, has created an air of bemusement in Dublin's
artistic community which has shown as much interest in Bacon as he
did in Ireland.
An art critic said:
"If you went into an Irish bookshop and asked for something
on Bacon they would point you to the Elizabethan history
section." After Bacon's death the studio's contents were
given by his companion and sole heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh
Lane Gallery in Dublin's Parnell Square.
More than 7,000 items,
including books, floor and roof timbers, tubes of paint, a
dressing gown and discarded boxes of champagne, feature in the
recreation of the artist's habitat. Even the dust which had
accumulated at No 7 Reece Mews studio was swept up and scattered
over the Dublin display.
Barbara Dawson, the
Hugh Lane Gallery director, said: "The acquisition of Francis
Bacon's studio was a great coup. The gallery's innovative approach
to retrieving and documenting the contents has resulted in a
database of information which will be crucial in critical analysis
of Bacon's work."
An exhibition of
unfinished paintings will accompany the studio. Mr Edwards
described the studio as a dump. When he tidied it up he found
bundles of banknotes that had been hidden, some of which were so
old they were out of date.
16 September 2000
Not for
Sale
Comment
The
Daily Telegraph 04/02/2001
IN
his article on Francis Bacon, Andrew Graham-Dixon referred to a
"series of now classic interviews" with Bacon
"conducted by the critic and dealer David Sylvester"
(Magazine, January 28). I was appalled to see myself falsely
described as a dealer. Art dealing can be an honourable
profession; nevertheless, for obvious reasons, it is not easily
compatible with being an honourable critic.
Bacon art payments case can
go to trial, judge rules
By Steve BogganThe Independent, 16 May 2001
A legal contest between the
estate of Francis Bacon and his former gallery, involving up to £100m in
claims, should go ahead, probably next year, a High Court judge ruled yesterday.
Mr Justice Patten refused an application by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd
and Marlborough International Fine Art to have the case, brought by Bacon's
trustees, thrown out before a full hearing.
Marlborough insists the
estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence"
are unfounded. But the estate, headed by the executor, Bacon's friend, Professor
Brian Clarke, claims the painter was underpaid for works, some of which, it
alleges, remain unaccounted for. From 1958 until his death from a heart attack
in Spain in 1992, aged 82, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery.
The estate says it is
seeking "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish
that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and
Bacon". In a statement, Marlborough has said it enjoyed a "frank,
close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years
after Bacon approached the gallery with the request to represent him.
The full trial is expected
to last 12 weeks and may begin next January. Mr Justice Patten said he was
satisfied on the material presented to him that "there is at least an
arguable case" that a fiduciary relationship existed between Bacon and the
gallery from 1964.
The question of whether such
a relationship existed would depend on a detailed examination at trial of
Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough both before and after that
date.
"It is, I think,
beyond dispute that Bacon was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century
but both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public
recognition of his worth was not immediate," the judge said.
Bacon judge
gives trial go-ahead
BBC News,
Tuesday, 15 May, 2001
Francis Bacon photographed in 1970
A High Court judge
has refused to halt a legal action brought by the estate of Francis
Bacon against his former gallery today.
The estate is
bringing a suit against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and
Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), based in Liechtenstein.
The gallery
contested the action, urging Mr Justice Patten to halt the action -
which could be worth as much as £100m - before it reaches the courts,
probably in January 2002.
The defendants
claimed that the estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and
"undue influence" were unfounded, and urged Mr Justice
Patten to "strike out" the action before it got to court.
'Mutually
beneficial'
Marlborough has
said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial"
relationship with the artist for 34 years.
Bacon approached
the gallery with the request to represent him in 1958, and it
exhibited his work exclusively until his death from a heart attack in
Spain in 1992, aged 82.
The estate says it
is seeking a "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be
able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the
interests of the gallery and Bacon".
More specifically,
Bacon's estate believes Marlborough International is only entitled to
a third of the total value of Bacon's work.
It is currently
believed to own around 70%.
High value
Bacon's work is
highly valued. In February of this year, three paintings of his
partner John Edwards were sold for £3m.
On 9 May a new
record for his work was set when his 1977 triptych, Studies of the
Human Body, was sold at auction for £6m.
Marlborough had
paid Bacon £70,000 for the work in 1983.
The judge gave his
ruling after earlier preliminary proceedings to organise the timetable
of the case.
On Monday, further
court sessions will take place to determine the start of the trial
proper, the earliest expected date being January 2002.
Bacon sale hits world
record
BBC NewsWednesday,
9 May, 2001
Study of the Human Body Francis Bacon
An auction of the Francis
Bacon painting Studies of the Human Body has set a new world record price
for the artist of £6m in New York.
The sale price of the
triptych doubled expectations and proved the major draw at the auction of
the Stanley J Seeger collection at Sotheby's.
The 1977 work is seen as
his response to Michelangelo's nudes and the early photography of Eadweard
Muybridge.Until
recently the Bacon work was hung in the bedroom of the London-based American
collector.
It was bought by Mr
Seeger when he acquired Sutton Place, a Tudor house in Surrey, from J Paul
Getty.
Self portrait
Francis Bacon's Study
for a Self-Portrait from 1980 sold for $1.8m (£1.2m), four times higher
than the estimate.
Works from the Mr
Seeger's collection sold for a total $54m (£37m), surpassing a pre-sale
estimate of $39.9m (£28m).
Charles Moffett,
co-chairman of Sotheby's impressionist and modern art department worldwide,
said: "The marketplace responded to the quality and excitement of the
works in his collection.
"There was a
tremendous depth in the bidding we saw this evening across a range of
collectors and dealers, both European and American, and included a museum in
the competition."
Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle
over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon
By Steve Boggan The Independent26 April 2001
A £100m court battle over works by the painter
Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of
the most bitter art wrangles in decades.
Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former
gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much
commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not
accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.
The gallery, which denies the allegations, is
seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court
in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial
will begin in earnest early next year.
Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the
estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr
Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or
run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation,
which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between
Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."
Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82
from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the
Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International
Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.
But the estate alleges that instead of taking a
"fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up
to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued
between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work,
valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for
only one series a flat fee of $40,000.
The estate has questioned the role of one of
Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant
and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict
of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly
from the arrangement.
Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that
Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of
Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles on behalf of
Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its
own gallery as soon as the paint was dry in Marlborough's own words 'in
Bacon's best interests'."
The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner
John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended
"like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last
18 years of his life.
The trustees complain they have been unable to
examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or
diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so.
Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the
gallery in 1958.
"The trustees have not been able to get a
full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence
that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate.
"Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of
the paintings thought to have been painted by him.
"But what is also annoying is that we can't
get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced
because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate
mail.
"If nothing else, we hope to have these
released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous
position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest
20th-century painter."
During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in
Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter.
In 1989, his triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.
He is widely acknowledged as being one of the
greatest painters if not the pre-eminent British painter of the last
century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.
His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery
won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among
others.
His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless
much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile
exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the
Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.
A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors
Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were
among his friends.
His stature, therefore, has made the alleged
failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source
said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between
1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts.
You could be looking at £5m for each of them.
"The figure of £100m was raised during an
interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out
there, we don't know how much could be at stake."
A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke
of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said:
"We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis
Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the
claims."
It is understood the gallery will argue that
Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before
it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when
it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance
of his bank account.
One of his friends said: "He needed money
for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than
that, it meant nothing to him."
During the case, it will be pointed out that
Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck
with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was
for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed
with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?
Part of the reason might have been because of Ms
Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a
Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and
friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his
tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely
to give evidence.
The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew
they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial
prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m
for some works.
The questions the court must answer are: Were
those prices enough, and did Bacon care?
A side of Bacon
Athletes,
pop-stars, defaced dictators: the doctored photographs and febrile sketches
Francis Bacon gave his former driver reveal the sources of the artist's
inspiration.
Andrew
Graham-Dixon reports on a new exhibitionGraham-Dixon reports on a new exhibition
The
Daily TelegraphFebruary
2001
ON
the subject of sketches and other forms of preparatory work, Francis
Bacon was adamant. He had little talent and even less inclination for
drawing, he said. What happened on the canvas was the only thing that
mattered. He thought of painting as a rather mysterious process that was
liable to be ruined by too much premeditation. His most arresting
pictures, he believed, were those in which he had responded to
'accidental' marks in a work-in-progress and gone on to create something
unexpected.
The
most celebrated (and best remunerated) British painter of the 20th
century explained all this and more in a series of now classic
interviews conducted in the Sixties and Seventies with the critic and
dealer David Sylvester: 'The hopelessness in one's working will make one
take paint and just do almost anything to get out of the formula of
making a kind of illustrative image - I mean, I just wipe it all over
with a rag or use a brush or rub it with something or anything or throw
turpentine and paint and everything else on to the thing to try to break
the willed articulation of the image, so that the image will grow, as it
were, spontaneously and within its own structure, and not my structure.
Afterwards, your sense of what you want comes into play, so that you
begin to work on the hazard that has been left to you on the canvas. And
out of all that, possibly, a more organic image arises than if it was a
willed image.'
So
there it was: the painter of screaming popes, deformed children,
copulating men, prowling monkeys, people with faces like open wounds and
an inverted crucifixion designed to make Christ resemble 'a worm
crawling down the cross' did not draw or otherwise prepare himself
before springing into action in the studio. But after Bacon's death in
1992 it turned out that, in fact, he did. And the evidence was not only
there in his studio, but elsewhere.
The
art market being what it is, and the prices for Bacon's work being at
the level that they are, it did not take long for quantities of studies
and drawings by the painter to emerge from various attics and
safety-deposit boxes. In 1996 the Tate Gallery paid an undisclosed sum
for approximately 40 Bacon sketches which the artist had given at
different times to his friends Paul Danquah, Peter Pollock and the poet
Stephen Spender. David Sylvester, perhaps regretting his own failure to
have extracted anything in the same line from the artist, wrote a wry
article in which he described drawing as 'Bacon's secret vice' and
admitted that the painter had pulled the wool over his eyes in all those
interviews 30 years before. Meanwhile, expert opinion on the sketches
remains somewhat divided. Accusations of fakery have been made and
subsequently retracted; the current critical consensus is that almost
all of the works in question are indeed by Bacon and that, although they
are not necessarily masterpieces, they shed considerable light on the
sources of his inspiration and his creative processes.
Just
last year, yet more miscellaneous examples of Baconiana emerged from the
so-called 'Joule Archive'. Barry Joule was the artist's driver, handyman
and general factotum during his last years. Their relationship appears
to have been close but, like most of Bacon's relationships, somewhat
uneasy. One of Joule's many allotted tasks was to slash and burn works
deemed failures by the painter. On one occasion, following some
unreliably boozy instructions issued to him by Bacon in an all-night
drinking club, 'Trasher' Joule went off and Stanley-knifed the wrong
painting. The artist did not speak to him for several months but
eventually relented and rehired him. By Joule's own account, a few days
before Bacon died he entrusted his faithful retainer with a bundle of
papers comprising approximately 1,000 separate items, saying only, 'You
know what to do with this.' Joule claims that this enigmatic
pronouncement was Bacon's coded way of indicating a gift. Anyway,
perhaps recalling the incident of the wrong picture destroyed, he put
the bundle in a safe place.
Now,
this mass of more or less dodgy Bacons - having, so to speak, fallen off
the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine - has been edited down to form
the body of a striking and intriguing exhibition curated by Mark Sladen.
(Bacon's Eye may well turn out to be that rare event: an
exhibition at the Barbican Gallery actually worth visiting.)
The
Joule Archive material, all of which seems to date from around 1955 to
1963, can be divided into two types. First, there are works entirely by
Bacon's own hand, generally done in pencil or oil on paper. These
include a number of recognisable sketches for extant paintings,
including studies for a screaming pope picture, for a painting of a
monkey sitting in the crook of the branches of a tree, and for a
portrait of Van Gogh - an artist who meant much to Bacon - trudging down
a dusty road inthe
south of France. Aside from scotching the myth of Bacon's soi-disant
'spontaneity', such sketches are of little intrinsic merit.
The
second type of imagery in the Joule Archive takes the form of doctored
photographs, most of them apparently dating from the same period as the
sketches. Bacon collected pictures from newspapers and magazines, and
cut images from books and hoarded postcards. He also drew and scribbled
on them - often with palpable vehemence. When Richard Hamilton, the
founder and first describer of British Pop Art, saw these works, he
commented that they show how close Bacon was to other artists of the
time who came under the spell of mass media imagery - an interesting
connection, and one seldom made, Bacon generally being placed in Old
Masterly juxtaposition to the Pop Artists.
The
photographs form an index of Bacon's preoccupations and a kind of
encyclopaedia of the iconography of his paintings. Although they do not,
necessarily, explain his pictures, they do show the sort of thing he was
thinking about when he was painting them: handsome young men -
predictably enough - who might be members of the Kennedy clan, or boxers
in action, or Elvis Presley singing; monkeys; people suffering from
diseases of the skin or mouth; assassinations; Nazis and other
murderers; paintings from the past that Bacon found moving.
Often
Bacon's alterations to such pictures seem merely camp and mischievous -
he gives the Kennedys a botched make-up job, smearing paint on their
faces like poorly applied cosmetics, and he draws lines or arrows
pointing at the genitals of sportsmen - but in other cases they seem
more serious in character. A photograph of Velazquez's portrait of Pope
Innocent X has been almost obliterated by a grid or cage scratched into
it by the artist; a photograph of Hitler has been eloquently defaced,
slashed vertically on the axis of the Fuhrer's pencil moustache. It
would be tempting to read some revelation of meaning into these relics -
Bacon confessing his hatred of authority figures, revealing his
abhorrence of genocidal tyrants - but it would be as well to bear the
artist's own caution against literary or over-literal interpretation of
his work.
Bacon
lived through a bloody century, registering his deep-rooted sense of its
many atrocities in his art. But he also loved violence and depravity,
and revelled nihilistically in his own perceptions of a world where the
natural order of things seemed - in permanent spirit of carnival - to
have been turned on its head. He was repelled but also excited by the
sight of blood. He liked his boyfriends to tie him up and beat him. It
is not easy to sum up such a man, with any degree of accuracy, using the
familiar clichés of 20th-century art history - 'painter of existential
doubt', for instance - which is just as Bacon himself would have wanted
it.
Nothing,
in that sense, is changed by the discovery of new material from the
artist's studio floor. The meaning of his studies, sketches, doodles,
mementoes - quite what he would have called them is unknown - is just as
clouded as the meaning of the paintings that they helped him in various
ways to create. So Bacon need not have feared the effect that public
exhibition of his leavings might have on perceptions of his art.
Perhaps,
as Barry Joule maintains, Bacon would not in the end have particularly
objected to the preservation of these works. I suspect that the artist
gave them away not because he wanted them destroyed, but because
he
could no longer bear to look at them. Having subsided into the truly
execrable painter that he was in his later years, a purveyor of smooth
and fatuously anodyne compositions principally inspired by the work of
Knightsbridge's slickest window-dressers, the last thing that he wanted
to be reminded of was the vitality of his youth.
Bacon's
Eye is at the Barbican Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2
(020-7638 8891) from 8 February to 16 April
Slices of Bacon
sell for £3m
BBC
News Friday, 9 February, 2001
Francis Bacon
and his partner John Edwards
A series of three
paintings by the late Francis Bacon of his long-time partner John
Edwards have sold for £3m at an auction at Christie's in London.
The triptych,
Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards, was bought by an
anonymous collector of post-war art.
One of the
three parts of the triptych showing John Edwards
The works show Edwards,
who was a barman when he met Bacon in 1972, sitting on a stool in an
empty studio space from three different perspectives.
Jussi Pylkkanen,
Christie's international director, said: "It is a piece that Bacon
himself identified as being of museum quality."
Finest works
The paintings were
done in the 80s and Bacon's triptychs are widely recognised as being his
finest works.
Bacon was one of the
last century's most commercially successful artists, earning about £14m
from his paintings before his death.
He dealt with themes
of death and decay and his style has often been described as
existentialist.
The artist once
said: "I don't know that I should talk about a triptych in my case.
"Of course,
there are three canvases, and you can link that to a long-standing
tradition. The primitives often used the triptych format, but as far as
my work is concerned, a triptych corresponds more to the idea of a
succession of images on film."
My brushes with Bacon
Art critic David Sylvester was friends with Francis Bacon for 40 years.
During that time, he recorded many of their conversations. Here, he
introduces a selection of the artist's previously unpublished thoughts -
about sex, about God, and about cricket...
The Observer, Sunday May 21, 2000
I 'm not sure whether I was Francis Bacon's concierge or his butler, but
intrusive strangers certainly believed that I had the entrée to his domain. I
used to get calls from famous photographers saying that they were great fans of
my writing and could they take my picture. I knew what was coming if I didn't
speedily decline. 'Would it by any chance be possible to photograph you in
Francis Bacon's studio and then perhaps do the two of you together if he happens
to be there at the time?' The comedy of being importuned in this way was a nice
bonus for having done a book called Interviews with Francis Bacon, which had
been widely translated.
My relationship with Bacon began in 1942, when I was
17 and had just become interested in painting. One of the books I absorbed was
Herbert Read's Art Now, a veritable bible first published in 1933. It
reproduced a Crucifixion, painted that year by a young artist with the name of
the great Elizabethan writer, and this painting therefore stayed in my mind,
although the artist had disappeared from view. But at the end of the war, new
works by him started to appear in galleries. They were sensationally disturbing
and widely considered worthy of the Chamber of Horrors.
It was in 1949 that I realised he was not only an
arresting image-maker but very much a painter, and I started saying so in print.
I also met him by chance and was soon seeing a good deal of him. In 1951, I was
asked to give a talk about his art for the BBC's Third Programme , my first
substantial radio talk. I described him as the most important living painter, by
which I didn't mean he was the greatest, but the most relevant to the age. I was
told afterwards that Harman Grisewood, head of the Third Programme , swore that
it would be a long time before I did another talk for them.
Bacon and I became quite close friends. We drank and
dined together, went dog racing together and shared off-course bets on horses. I
also sat for him a few times, helped him to write a short piece in praise of an
older artist, Matthew Smith, and acted as his agent in selling works to dealers
behind his accredited dealer's back when he urgently needed cash. I idolised him
as a man - this never stopped - and until 1956, I loved his work unreservedly.
But I thought it then took a wrong turn and I became rather alienated from his
current production. I was also put off by the way he jeered at the work of
abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock: my own pantheon had plenty of room
for them both.
So between 1957 and 1962 I stopped writing about
him; nor did we see much of each other. In 1962 he had a retrospective at the
Tate, and as art critic of the New Statesman , I had to review it at length. I
wrote with admiration but reservations and dismissed the work of the past few
years, but concluded that he had returned to form in his latest piece, a big
Crucifixion triptych.
Shortly after, the BBC radio Talks producer, Leonie
Cohn, who had commissioned that 1951 talk and had lately got me to do interviews
with several American Abstract Expressionists and also with Stanley Kubrick,
asked me to interview Bacon. I said I wasn't sure whether Bacon would agree, as
he didn't readily give interviews and may not have liked my review of his show.
But he did agree, and the result was brilliant, producing passages endlessly
quoted since, such as: 'What is fascinating now is that it's going to be much
more difficult for the artist, because he must deepen the game to be any good at
all.'
Four years later I was asked by Michael Gill to
interview Bacon in a BBC TV film he was making. This time we were quite
aggressive at moments. I asked tougher questions than last time and he accused
me of liking abstract art because I was a slave to fashion. But we were now
seeing a lot of each other again and we were both saying that it would be
interesting to do more interviews, especially if we could talk as we did among
friends, without having to think of a lay audience. So we did some private
recordings at my flat and then we decided to publish a book of interviews. This
happened in 1975, and Graham Greene wrote that it was 'an exciting document
which can rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin'.
We went on recording interviews, some for ourselves,
some for TV, one for an audio company. We published an enlarged edition of the
book in 1980 and a further enlarged one in 1987. Meanwhile, they got translated
into about 10 languages; I don't know whether any of the translators managed to
create an equivalent for the amazing vividness and rhythmic power of Bacon's
talk. The reason we went on doing interviews for about 25 years was that Bacon
loved getting involved in theoretical talk about art. This is a rare thing in
English artists, who tend to poke fun at a custom so French. And it's a key
aspect of Bacon's personality which is not sufficiently emphasised in most
accounts of the man.
His love of talking about art made the recordings
easy. The hard part was the editing. Interviews with artists, even when they
have Bacon's turn of phrase, tend to sprawl and repeat themselves; I wanted the
printed version to be economical in exposition and coherent in structure. I
therefore did most of the editing in collaboration with Shena Mackay, whose work
as a fiction writer suggested that she was the ideal person to help to achieve
that.
Now, if one is aiming for structural coherence, a
lot of the best things said are not going to fit in anywhere; so they get left,
so to speak, on the cutting-room floor. I was always aware how much was being
lost in this way and had it in mind to return to the transcripts, retrieve some
of the best rejected bits and publish them torn from their context as fragments
of talk. The ones that follow are The Observer 's selection from my selection.
Bacon on Bacon
Francis Bacon I love
watching the idiocy of other people, and of myself. And they can watch my
idiocy. David Sylvester
People you know and people you don't know, passing people? FB
Yes. I love passing people. I love going to towns
and places where I know nobody at all but very quickly talk to them. It's so
easy to talk to them. DS You
can't really imagine living outside of town, can you?
FB I can't imagine lying on the seashore, for
instance, for hours, like people can do, with the dumb satisfaction that the sun
is shining on them. That I couldn't do at all. DS
And what about, say, moving to the country to work? FB
That would be impossible for me. DS
Why's that? FB Because
I like crowds. I mean, I'd rather be in a station than in the country. [1975]
DS Do you at all enjoy
the kind of star quality which you have always had when moving among people? FB
That's a thing that you are not conscious of
yourself at all. I have no idea of what impression I make on other people. DS
You have not been conscious that, when you come into a bar, you immediately
become the centre of attention? That is something I have seen happen ever since
I have known you, which means before you became famous as a painter, so it
wasn't influenced by that. FB
Perhaps I was drunk and garrulous, had a lot to say. I think it can only be for
that reason. I certainly am not conscious of those things. This is not false
modesty; I am just not conscious of it. [1984]
DS Did you go to the
theatre when you were younger? FB
I drifted from bar to bar. DS
And when did you start gambling seriously? FB
Well, I have always been brought up with it, because when we were very young, we
used to be sent to the local post office to put on bets. So, as I was brought up
in that sort of atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that that
influenced me. I don't know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case.
[1984]
DS It's often said
about you by hostile critics that your work reflects a feeling of disgust about
human beings and of self-disgust. FB Well,
I may have, I may very often be very discontented and loathe myself but I'm not
trying to bring that out. In any way whatsoever. Nor have I a disgust with life.
Life is all we have. I mean, here we are for a moment. [1984]
Bacon on religion
FB Of course one knows
how very potent some of the images of Christianity have been and how they must
have played very deeply on one's sensibility. And after all, one believes in the
ethics of Christianity, or a great number of them, without actually believing in
the practice of the Church. DS
You believe in the ethics of Christianity? FB
Well, I think that they are a carry-over of Greek ethics really, and I think
that so far a better code of ethics for the Western world hasn't yet been found,
though of course the religious side of it is something I can't accept. DS
But then at the heart of Christianity is the idea of salvation and of a life
after this life in which one gets punishment or reward for what one has done
here. FB I think you
can accept the ethics without believing that the good you do will be rewarded or
the evil you do will be punished. [1966]
Bacon on work
FB The only thing that
really keeps me going on is that I want to work - but work, I may say, for no
reason. I just work; it still excites me to work. You see, unless you have
religious feelings or something of that kind, how can you not think that life is
totally futile - and becomes more so with age, because it hasn't got the
pleasures of youth? Probably the only thing, although I know it has no meaning,
is that I like working. I like the possibilities of invention and the
possibilities of something happening. Not because I think they've got any value,
but because they excite me. [1979]
FB I know that teaching
is one of the methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a
period when there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your
own attitude. The only thing that I can understand for art schools would be for
them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are striving
to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems with... But many
people have to teach because they can't make the money out of their work. In my
own case, even when I could earn no money, I never taught. Except that once a
friend went to the West Indies and he asked me to take his job for three months
at the Royal College of Art, which I did. It's true to say that I did it very
badly. I didn't often go there; there was nothing I could teach them whatsoever.
DS And what effect did
that have upon your own work? Did you feel it was just using energy which you
needed for your own work, or...? FB Not
especially, because it was only for three months. Otherwise I would never have
done it. I'd rather go out and just do a job working. After all, I can cook, I
can clean floors, I can earn my money that way. It would use physical energy,
which would be so much more interesting than mental energy. Because I've got
plenty of mental energy, because I never stop thinking, myself. After all, I
think about painting. Not that I think thinking finally helps, and yet it does.
[1975]
Bacon on books
DS What are you mostly
reading nowadays? FB Well,
you know, I read generally the same thing over and over again. I very often read
translations of Aeschylus; I read Proust; I read anything that comes to my hand.
Or any rubbish as well. DS
What rubbish do you read? FB
Well, most things are rubbish. So I can't tell you exactly what rubbish. There
are piles of rubbish and very little stuff that is any good. DS
Do you read Shakespeare a lot? FB
I read a certain amount, yes. I'll tell you what I really read: things which
bring up images for me. And I find that this happens very much with the
translations of Aeschylus, and with Eliot. For some reason I read them, and when
I read them another time, a different image comes up. I mean, I don't say that
these images are really to do with the poems of Eliot or even with the plays of
Shakespeare, but they open up the valves of sensation for me and so images drop
in like that from reading those things. It could happen just as easily from
reading any of the trash. So it doesn't really make much difference. Except that
I'm less bored by those than I am by the trash. DS
In the same way that you can be influenced by a news photograph or you can be
influenced by Velazquez? FB
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [1984]
Bacon on Michelangelo
FB Do you think
Michelangelo was an erotic artist or not? DS
Very. But almost embarrassingly. I find the Slaves almost embarrassing in the
longing they conveyed for these boys. FB
He was, after the Greeks, the great male voluptuary, wasn't he? He made the male
body really voluptuous. DS
But with the Greeks, you feel that the artist has had these boys, and with
Michelangelo, that he'd just longed for them. And that's one reason why I find
there's a morbid quality in Michelangelo which doesn't stop him from being the
greatest artist of our civilisation. FB I
think that Michelangelo, from what one knows about all of his history, had a
deeply morbid side to him. But it's more voluptuous than the Greeks. Because I
think in those Slaves the longing is more poignant than anything you find in
Greek art. [1973]
Bacon on cricket
DS As to working from
documentary photographs, one interesting case of this was your recent use of a
photograph of David Gower batting: you translated the pads to the legs of a
headless male nude. FB
Well, I have often seen cricket, and cricket is such an important game in this
country, I am very conscious of it. When I did this image I suddenly said:
'Well, I don't know why, but I think that it's going to strengthen it very much
and make it look very much more real if it has cricket pads on it.' I can't tell
you why. DS The
painting is in Paris, and some French people I know, while very much admiring
it, have been extremely puzzled by what the figure had on its legs. Some of them
thought they might be bits of Etruscan armour. FB
Don't the French have games in which they use pads? They're deformed cricket
pads, in any case. DS
I take it that your attitude to bringing in the cricket pads was rather like the
attitude you took about 20 years ago when you brought that armband with a
swastika into a Crucifixion triptych. When I asked you whether the presence of
the swastika had a meaning for you and also whether you were concerned that
people might take it to have a meaning, you said the swastika was there simply
because the armband had been in the photograph you'd used and you'd put it in
without thinking about how it might be interpreted. Did you have the same
attitude to bringing in the cricket pads? FB
It wasn't quite the same. You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often
been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all these
people, and they all had armbands on with the swastikas on them, and I wanted
that in this image: it was stupid to put in the swastika, but there it is. I
didn't think about it, I didn't think that people would interpret it all the
different ways they have. But with the cricket pads, I didn't put them in
because I am particularly interested in cricket; I did so because it made the
image more real. [1982]
Take a peep - it's a
voyeur's dream
Charles Darwent, Culture;
The Independent on Sunday, May 27, 2001
To say that Francis Bacon is
missing from his newly-reconstructed studio in Dublin sounds dim, even by the
demanding standards of British journalism. The Master of the Screaming Pope
died in 1992, after all: his attendance at the studio's official opening last
Tuesday would have been taking the Baconian grand guignol thing a little far.
Still, you can't help feeling Bacon's sulphurous presence in the Hugh Lane
Gallery's new annexe, and wondering just where the old devil has hidden
himself.
Which is a measure of the
project's triumph. When the idea of disassembling Bacon's studio at 7 Reece
Mews in South Kensington, shipping its 7,200 pieces of slashed canvas, torn
paper and truncated corduroy trouser-leg across to Dublin, and then
re-assembling the lot with archaeological accuracy, was first mooted in the
late 1990s, reactions in Britain ranged from mild annoyance to white fury.
David Sylvester, Bacon's ailing hagiographer and friend, pointed out that the
artist had always hated Ireland. (The son of a horsey ex-army officer, Bacon
skipped to England at 17 having been caught being buggered by a groom, and
never went back.) The Tate Gallery - which, it is said, was offered the studio
by Bacon's last boyfriend, John Edwards, and lost it for being too blase - was
predictably tight- lipped about the project.
Of deeper worry, though,
was the sense that preserving Reece Mews as a shrineful of Bacon relics went
against the artist's habit of ruthless self-editing. Bacon proudly maintained
that he had destroyed his best pictures, evidence of which was provided by the
dozens of slashed and overpainted canvases found in his studio when he died.
(A similar shadow was cast by Barry Joule, the one-time handyman accused by
devout Baconians of removing incunabula from St Francis' studio against his
wishes.) Bacon's mystique rests in part on the belief that his genius sprang
from his brush fully-formed, without the need for bourgeois interventions like
drawings. Being able to see the hundreds of worked-over photographs and
magazine pages that had littered the floor of his Reece Mews studio might dim
the public's awe.
Speaking as a member of
that public, it doesn't. Bacon's studio was more than a coincidental space in
which to paint. As Margarita Cappock, manager of the project, notes, pretty
well the only thing not unearthed at Reece Mews in the course of its removal
was a palette. Instead, Bacon used his studio's walls and doors to experiment
with texture and colour, mixing his paints on them and scuffing away at the
results with odd bits of paper and trouser-leg. (Remember those stripes in
Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail)? Corduroy.) The studio - perhaps uniquely in
art - was also an artwork, giving it a value that Brancusi's sterile atelier,
rebuilt at the Pompidou Centre, does not have.
And 7 Reece Mews was more
than that, too. The project's architect, David Chipperfield, has included a
quotation from Bacon on the wall of the free- standing bunker in which he has
encased the artist's studio: "The mess around here [ie., at Reece Mews]
is rather like my mind: it may be a good image of what goes on inside
me." Far from denying the intrusion of ogling Bacon's sanctum,
Chipperfield has made a fetish of it, exploiting a quality in his design -
voyeurism - which Bacon, always open to such things, would doubtless have
enjoyed.
Step into the glass box
that provides your first view of the studio, and you have the embarrassing
sense of being somewhere you shouldn't be. On the opposite wall, two steel
tendrils sprout like motifs from a Bacon anthro-machine. These hold lenses
giving specific views of painted wall and door, emphasising the
studio-as-palette idea but also stressing the illicitness of what you're
doing: turning the installation into a What the Painter Saw machine, visitors
into voyeurs. (You half-expect Bacon's bloodshot eye to peer dolefully back at
you.) Chipperfield plays his third variation on the voyeurism theme on the
final wall, his spiral walkway allowing you to look down through the studio
windows like an old-fashioned Peeping Tom.
Circulation is important
here. On the one hand, the fact that you approach the studio in one of two
ways - through a room hung with unfinished canvases from Reece Mews or via
another of finished Bacons - means that the new annexe integrates itself into
the Hugh Lane Gallery's William Chambers core. ("Bacon thought of his
portraits as being like Gainsborough's," notes the gallery's director,
Barbara Dawson. "It's not inapt.") At the same time, the bunkerish
look of Chipperfield's annexe tells you this is a place where you have, at
best, a dubious right to be. It's a dangerous feeling, and a useful one.
For the clever thing about
Chipperfield's design is that it celebrates criticisms of the project rather
than denying them. There's no questioning the extraordinariness of it all: the
team of archaeologists that plotted the position of every last ball of paper
and fluff on Bacon's floor; Cappock's computer database, which allows each of
the objects to be pulled up, interrogated and cross- referenced on screen;
Perry Ogden's photographic archive which, inexplicably, recorded slight
changes in the disposition of these objects when the archaeologists came to do
their stuff. ("Very Francis," sighs Dawson.)
But the question remains:
would Francis have approved? "John [Edwards] says he would have roared
with laughter," says Barbara Dawson, "and he was with Bacon for the
last 16 years of his life." And when he'd finished laughing, you feel
that Bacon would have enjoyed the illicitness of it all, and the spying.
Francis Bacon Studio: Hugh
Lane Gallery, Dublin (00 353 1 874 1903); Perry Ogden's project photographs,
to 28 October.
7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's
Studio is published by Thames
& Hudson, pounds 14.95
A precious collection of
debris
Patrick Skene Catling,
The Spectator, May 27, 2001
7 REECE MEWS: FRANCIS
BACON'S STUDIO Photographs by Perry Ogden, Foreword by John Edwards Thames
& Hudson, L14.95, pp. 120, ISBN 0500510342
John Edwards, Francis
Bacon's heir, donated Bacon's South Kensington studio, the whole room and all
its contents, to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, his
birthplace, thus submitting the compost of the artist's memorabilia to
archaeologists, curators, art critics, psychoanalysts and, from 23 May, the
public.
The laborious 1998
dismantling, shipment and exact reassembly of the detritus of 30 years of what
Bacon called his 'exhilarated despair' will give his admirers and detractors
clues to the creative processes of a gambling, alcoholic, homosexual,
atheistic genius. In the intimately enlightened opinion of Edwards, companion
to Bacon for the last 20 of his 82 years, the act of transferring this complex
of chaotic artistic fecundity to Dublin, a wonderful coals-to- Newcastle
operation, 'would have made him roar with laughter, his own special laugh,
full of warmth and joy'.
Though Bacon would rarely
have been able - or have cared - to pass a breathalyser test, he was
passionately serious about working at his easel in the morning, no matter what
he had been doing until late the night before. He was a man of prodigious
stamina, recuperative power, prolificity, and eventual wealth. He told David
Sylvester, the foremost authority on Bacon, 'I really like highly disciplined
painting, although I don't use highly disciplined methods of constructing it.'
He depended on receiving images from his subconscious by fortuitous accidents.
His paintings sometimes evolved as he painted them, as if having lives of
their own.
He depicted people as
meat, flayed, twisted and corrupted, as though portraying mortality might
exorcise his fear of loss. He dreaded abandonment and impermanence: long
relationships ended in death. He was gregarious but valued contemplative
solitude. He said he was an optimist, but regularly exposed himself to the
risks of roulette, rough trade and drunken oblivion. In Tangiers, according to
the late Daniel Farson, a long-time, on-and-off friend of Bacon's, the British
consul general impressed on the local chief of police that
Francis was a very
distinguished painter and kept getting mugged. A few days later, the chief of
police returned, patently embarrassed: 'Pardon, mais le peintre adore ca!'
Dreading the end of life,
Bacon seemed to be in a hurry to get it over, while at the same time relying
on attentive doctors to prolong it. He deplored the term gay; he said he was
queer. He enjoyed his circumstances of 'gilded squalor'.
I knew him only at times
of post-meridian frivolity in Soho, presiding with intellectual fervour and
flamboyant charm over long lunches and consequent sessions in the Colony Room
club, the beloved, bilegreen vortex known as Muriel's. Muriel Belcher greatly
encouraged him. Those festivities were the early stages of his daily routine
transmogrification from Jekyll to Hyde. 'Champagne for our real friends!' was
his favourite toast, 'and real pain for our sham friends!' As he ordered
bottle after bottle, he was closely surrounded by friends of both kinds. He
was an insistent host, generous to a fault, usually tolerant of hangers-on,
but ruthlessly critical of other artists, especially abstractionists.
Before the studio was
transported to Dublin, Perry Ogden spent several days photographing every part
of 7 Reece Mews as it was when Bacon lived there - the orderly bedsitting
room, the kitchen/bathroom (he was a good cook and carefully ablutionary), and
the steep wooden stairs down to the studio, which looked as if his id had run
amok in it.
Bacon was an autodidact
all his life. Ogden's close-ups of bookshelves reveal the wide range of his
reading, such as biographies of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Freud, Ezra Pound,
Rothschild and Seurat and at least three of Velazquez. (He said he thought
Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X was `one of the greatest paintings in
the world and I've had a crush on it'.) Among the numerous other books were
The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, Spender's Journals, Greek Made Easy, The
Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet - and Larousse Gastronomique. On a shelf near
his bed, there were snapshots of lovers and a plaster-cast mask of William
Blake.
At first glance, the
studio looks like the devastation caused by an explosion in a rubbish tip.
However, the gallery's team of archaeologists catalogued over 7,000 items,
including 80 'works on paper', 1,500 photographs and many slashed canvases.
According to Barbara Dawson, the director of the gallery, there is now 'a
definitive archive ... a database of information which will be crucial in
critical analysis of Francis Bacon's work'. A 'Micro Gallery' will give
visitors access to 'highlights of this archive.'
In the meantime, Ogden's
elegant photographs provide an opportunity to scrutinise a lot of significant
Baconian debris a page from Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion
(his nude male wrestlers became Bacon's amorous meat on an unmade bed),
glimpses of Michelangelo, Rodin and the late George Dyer in his underwear, and
pages from a book on forensic pathology, displaying skin diseases, hundreds of
discarded brushes and paint - pots, and empty cartons that once held bottles
of Vat 69 and vintage Krug.
Bacon found day-dreaming
in chaos richly productive. John Russell, in his excellent biography of Bacon,
considers Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of 'unconscious scanning' and Edward de
Bono's 'lateral thinking' as explications of Bacon's artistic creativity.
Russell later quotes Bacon on his mysterious procedure: 'I think of myself as
a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is
fed.'
Ogden's and Edwards' book
is a fascinating survey of the sorts of material that Bacon pulverised. The
fascination easily quells any reluctance to pry into a dead man's privacy.
And, after all, with his real friends Francis Bacon found everything in his
tortured existence absolutely hilarious.
Bacon's beloved muddle
recreated
Louise Jury
The Independent, May 23rd,
2001
THE PAPERS, books,
photographs, brushes, paint and scrap material used by Francis Bacon go on
display today after being moved piece by piece to rebuild his London studio in
the artist's native Ireland.
The Hugh Lane Gallery in
Dublin has reconstructed the walls, floor and ceiling of Bacon's workspace and
added more than 7,000 items discovered there when he died in 1992.
Conservationists and
archaeologists photographed and logged every section of the studio at 7 Reece
Mews in South Kensington before it was moved. They found more than 7,000 items
including 80 works on paper and roughly 1,500 photographs, with some by Henri
Cartier- Bresson and John Deakin, as well as books and slashed canvases.
The studio was donated by
Bacon's long-term companion John Edwards and was moved with funding from
bodies including the Dublin Corporation and the Department of Arts in Ireland.
Mr Edwards said Bacon
"loved it in that little room", which was so messy that they would
discover wads of banknotes that Bacon had lost between the canvases. He added
that he believed Bacon would have roared with laughter that it was now all in
Dublin.
CHRISTIE’S
POST-WAR
NEW
YORK, ROCKEFELLER PLAZA | 15 NOVEMBER 2000
Francis Bacon
(1909-1992)
Portrait of
George Dyer Talking
Portrait of George Dyer
Talking 1966 Francis Bacon
Price
Realized
$6,606,000
Price
includes buyer's premium
Estimate
$3,500,000
- $4,500,000
Sale
Information
Lot
29 / Sale 9576
post-war
15 November 2000
New York, Rockefeller Plaza
Lot
Description
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Portrait of George Dyer Talking
titled and dated 'Portrait of George Dyer Talking 1966' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
78 x 58 in. (198.2 x 147.3 cm.)
Painted in 1966
Provenance
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd.,
London.
Galerie Maeght, Paris.
Dr. Israel J. Rosefsky, Binghampton, New York.
Dr. Israel J. Rosefsky, sale; Christie's, New York, 5 May 1987, lot 85. Acquired
at the above sale by the previous owner.
Literature
Maeght, A. ed., Derrière
Le Miroir: Francis Bacon, no. 162, Paris, November 1966 (illustrated in colour
on the cover and p. 19).
L. Trucchi, Francis Bacon, New York, 1975, no. 109 (illustrated).
M. Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and in Profile, New York, 1983, no.
44 (illustrated in colour).
J. M. Faerna, ed., Bacon, Barcelona, 1994, p. 19 (illustrated in colour).
C. Domino, Francis Bacon, Taking Reality by Surprise, London, 1997
(illustrated in colour, p. 98).
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Francis
Bacon, November 1966-January 1967.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon Recent Paintings,
March-April 1967, no. 8 (illustrated in colour).
Paris, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grand Palais and Düsseldorf, Städtische,
October 1971-May 1972, Francis Bacon, no. 65 (illustrated in colour, p.
77).
Caracas, Bogota, Montevideo, Buenois Aires, and Rio de Janeiro Four
Contemporary Masters: Bacon, Dubuffet, Giacometti, De Kooning, April-October
1973.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San
Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honour, and Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, January-October 1999
(illustrated in colour).
Lot Notes
In his early career, Bacon
executed paintings after well-known works of art, such as papal portraits by
Velazquez and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, but during the 1960s his paintings
often featured individuals to whom he had deep personal attachments. His
portraits of these years included those from his intimate circle, such as Lucian
Freud, John Edwards, and Isabel Rawsthorne, but George Dyer was the friend who
appeared most frequently in Bacon's paintings, as the subject of works in three
series between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s.
The artist met Dyer in the fall of 1963 while drinking in a public house in
London's Soho district. Dyer was an uneducated, petty thief who lived in the
East End and is often thought to have appealed to Bacon's darker side. The two
were intimate companions for the rest of the decade, and during this time, Dyer
was a fixture in Bacon's paintings. He died in 1971, committing suicide in a
Paris hotel on the occasion of Bacon's first major retrospective in France.
The present painting includes an early example of Bacon's use of the
full-length, turning figure in his paintings. While the present work clearly
positions its sitter at the center of a brightly-coloured and oddly-shaped room,
it also generates multiple ambiguities as the violent distortions and
displacements in the human figure are echoed in the symmetrical, though
seemingly precarious, curvatures of both floor and walls. Moreover, even the
primary articulation of the room is unclear: the aperture which frames Dyer's
head may be either a window or a door, or as suggested by a related painting of
the same year, Portrait of George Dyer Staring at a Blind Cord, a
photograph pinned against the back wall. The ominous lightbulb suspended above
Dyer's head heightens the pervasive feeling of instability in this interior.
Bacon always executed his
portraits from photographs or from memory, even when he had direct access to his
subjects. Bacon stated, "Even in the case of friends who will come and
pose, I've had photographs taken because I prefer working from them. It's true
to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't
know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to
work than actually having their presence in the room. . . . What I want to do is
to distort the thing beyond appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back
to a recording of the appearance" (Quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews
with Francis Bacon, London, 1980, pp. 38).
The present painting, in fact, twists tradition in multiple, provocative ways.
Bacon was influenced deeply by Edward Muybridge's famous studies of human
locomotion. In most images of Dyer, Bacon offers several views at once of this
figure, providing an additional suggestion of movement through multiplication,
either by literal doubling or mirror reflections. The present painting indicates
motion more conceptually and confines any activity to the figure's violated
anatomy; the only other movement rests in the pile of papers, scattered perhaps
by the revolution of Dyer's stool.
The colors in the present painting seem to reflect the bright colours of 1960s
fashion and interior design (Bacon's first choice of profession was interior and
furniture design), but the composition and central figure suggest a return to
art-historical sources, specifically works of the Italian Renaissance. There are
echoes of paintings such as Piero della Francesco's famous Madonna in the
Pinacoteca Brera in Milan in which an egg hangs from the cupola above the
virgin's head. However, even more forceful is Bacon's portrayal of Dyer's
twisted and contorted form: his pose, through its insistent torsion, recalls the
restrained torsion of Michelangelo's slaves. This visual connection relates to
John Russell's description of Dyer: "A compact and chunky force of nature,
with a vivid and highly unparsonical turn of phrase, he embodied pent-up energy.
As a spirit of mischief, touched at times by melancholia, he had been the
subject, and the inspiration of some of Bacon's greatest images" (J.
Russell, op. cit., p. 160).
(fig. 1) Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913.
(fig. 2) Dyer in Bacon's Studio. Photograph by John Deakin.
Christie's
Post War Sale
Sale 9576November 15, 2000
Art Auctions, The City
Review, November 2000
Portrait of George Dyer Talking1966 Francis Bacon
Lot 29, Portrait of
George Dyer Talking, a 78-by-58-inch oil on canvas by Francis Bacon
(1909-1992) is perhaps the auction's most painterly work.
Painted in 1966, it has an
estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000 and is a classic Bacon, eerie and
terrifying and fascinating. It sold for $6,606,000 breaking the artist's world
auction record of $6,270,000 that had been set May 2, 1989 at Sotheby's. Dyer,
according to the catalogue, met Bacon in a public house in the SoHo district of
London in 1963 and they became "intimate companions for the rest of the
decade…He died in 1971, committing suicide in a Paris Hotel on the occasion of
Bacon's first major retrospective in France."
"While the present work
clearly positions its sitter at the center of a brightly-colored and
oddly-shaped room, it also generates multiple ambiguities as the violent
distortions and displacements in the human figure are echoed in the symmetrical,
though seemingly precarious, curvatures of both floor and walls…The ominous
lightbulb suspended above Dyer's head heightens the pervasive feeling of
instability in this interior….The present painting indicates motion more
conceptually and confines any activity to the figure's violated anatomy; the
only other movement rests in the pile of papers, scattered perhaps by the
revolution of Dyer's stool," the catalogue continued, adding that Dwyer's
twisted form "recalls the restrained torsion of Michelangelo's
slaves."
This is a striking and
unusual composition and the relatively realistic treatment of everything but
Dyer's figure is brilliant and forces the viewer to concentrate on the figure,
which is painted in a way that emphasizes muscularity and motion. In forcing
concentration on the horrific figure, Bacon combines the centrifugal energy of
Munch with the devilishness of Bosch.
6 Records Set at Christie's
First Auction of Postwar Art
By Carol Vogel
The New
York Times
November 16, 2000
''The generation now buying
art is the generation that relates to postwar material,'' the Manhattan dealer
Abigail Asher said at Christie's last night. ''They're selective, but they'll
spend big, big money.''
And spend they did at the
company's sale of postwar art. Six records were broken for artists like Willem
de Kooning and Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Ellsworth Kelly.
Another surprise was the
huge price for an important work by Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer
Talking (1966). One of the artist's twisted images of a subject posed in
an empty room with just a naked light bulb overhead, it was expected to bring
$3.5 million to $4.5 million. Again the bidding got down to two telephones,
and the painting finally sold for $6.6 million, another record.
(Final prices include
Christie's commission, 17.5 percent of the first $80,000 plus 10 percent of
any amount above that. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)
Chaos transfer
Mick Brown on archaeology and the artist
The Sydney Morning Herald,
26/08/2000
Method in the madness ... Francis Bacon's work space and its contents, including
a Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait of the artist that was stuck to a wall, are
being painstakingly transplanted from his London studio to Dublin.
In April 1992, Francis Bacon, the greatest British
painter of the 20th century, walked out of his home and studio at 7 Reece Mews,
South Kensington, for the last time. Against the advice of his doctor, Bacon was
travelling to Spain, for an assignation with a lover. It was there, in Madrid,
that he was to die a few days later, at the age of 82, from a heart attack.
More than a studio, the small, cramped quarters at
Reece Mews had, for the previous 31 years, been the epicentre of Bacon's life.
He lived in almost monastic simplicity. His small sitting room on the first
floor, accessed by a narrow set of stairs with rope for a banister, contained
only a bed, a table and a battered sofa, and was lit by four bare light bulbs.
Its fastidious neatness was in stark contrast to the studio, in an adjacent
room.
There, Bacon had assembled around him the impedimenta
of his life and work, a detritus of papers, books, photographs, rags, paint
pots, scraps of material, some of it piled in boxes, most scattered haphazardly
about the room, a mind-boggling tide of clutter that covered every available
surface, spread ankle deep across the floor and lapped against the walls,
threatening at any moment, it seemed, to drown the artist himself.
For six years after Bacon's death, this extraordinary
spectacle remained undisturbed, save for a fine patina of dust gathering on its
surfaces. Then in 1998, a team of archaeologists and conservators moved in and
set to work. In a remarkable feat of conservation and reconstruction, the entire
studio and its contents have been removed and transported to Dublin, Bacon's
birthplace, where it is being reassembled as a permanent exhibit at the Hugh
Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and opens in November.
Walls, doors, light fittings, radiators, shelves,
cabinets, the mosquito netting that Bacon used as curtains and every one of the
12,000 items that littered the studio, down to the last scrap of tissue paper,
have been removed from Reece Mews, annotated, photographed and committed to a
comprehensive computer database. What was superficially a mess has turned out to
be a treasure trove, offering an unparalleled insight into the painter's life
and work.
Bacon became the world's most expensive living artist
in 1989 when his triptych May-June 1973 sold at Sotheby's New York for
POUNDSTE3.53 million. The son of a British Army major who had retired to train
horses and hunt, Bacon was born in Dublin and grew up in Co. Kildare. His poor
constitution and his unusual enthusiasms were the despair of his father. He was
eventually banished from the family home at the age of 16 after a string of
sexual liaisons with the stable boys and being discovered dressing in his
mother's underclothes.
Bacon came late to painting and had no formal training.
He spent his teenage years drifting around Europe. He worked as "a
gentleman's gentleman" and designed fashionable furniture and rugs before
being inspired to take up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso's work
in Paris. By the time he occupied the studio in Reece Mews in 1961, his stature
as a painter was already assured. He would later recall, "The moment I saw
this place, I knew I could work here."
Bacon relished the apparent chaos in which he worked:
indeed, he suggested that chaos was the only environment in which he could work.
"The mess here around us is rather like my mind," he told the visiting
French art critic Michel Archimbaud. "It may be a good image of what goes
on inside me; that's what it's like, my life is like that."
"I believe that 7 Reece Mews was in itself a
conscious work of art," says Brian Clarke, executor of Bacon's estate.
"Francis consciously and painstakingly left it as it was for all those
years; he added to the object, but very rarely took away from it. And he was
proud of it. He didn't want it disturbed; and he didn't want people in there
except on his terms." Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery,
says that walking into the studio for the first time in 1997, she was reminded
of "a latter-day Egyptian tomb. The environment was excellent. The studio
was above a garage so the air circulated. It wasn't damp or smelly. It was
completely undisturbed, as if it had been frozen in time."
Standing on the easel was the self-portrait that Bacon
had been working on the day he left the studio for the last time. A drawer, its
surface thick with congealed paint, was pulled open, as if the artist had been
rummaging in it only a moment earlier, perhaps studying the photographs of
Giacommetti and John Edwards which were visible inside.
A row of slashed canvases was racked against one wall,
awaiting removal. There were a dressing gown thrown on a wicker chair, a pair of
Chelsea boots, an old sock. Scattered among the detritus on the floor were books
on the painter Velazquez and on Scottish dance; a scrap of corduroy that
Bacon used to create texture on paint; Winsor & Newton and Dulux paint pots
cluttered the shelves, along with a bristling nest of dirty paintbrushes, stuck
in tin cans that once contained Libby's orange juice and Batchelors beans.
Yet what was immediately apparent, says Dawson, was
that there was a pattern in this chaos and that in their groupings and proximity
to each other the artifacts provided a unique series of "maps" of
Bacon's thinking and working processes. "My feeling was that the studio
should be approached as an archaeological dig. You couldn't just go in and take
out all the books, for example, and list them. It wasn't just the fact that the
books were there; it was how close they were to the canvas, what relation they
had to his work. He was working on a self-portrait at the time of his death
(which will be on display at the Hugh Lane) and there was a book on diseases of
the mouth, near the easel, and a magazine article about how George Michael would
only be photographed from the left side. You could see there was a kind of arc
which described his thought processes."
Working under the gallery's consultant conservator,
Mary McGrath, a team of 15 archaeologists and conservators from the Courtauld
Institute spent 10 days in the studio, methodically excavating, photographing
and recording its contents. Every item was numbered, with a record of its
precise location, its relation to other objects, its north-south orientation,
its height from the floor; so if F14 was the surface of a table, F14,1 was the
book on top on it; F14,2 a photograph directly beneath that, F14,3 a scrap of
paper with a lunch date, and so on.
Each item was carefully wrapped and boxed for removal.
Even the paint-smeared walls and doors, which Bacon used as a mixing palette,
have been removed. McGrath's final act as she left the empty studio was to sweep
up all the dust, which is in a bag labelled "Bacon dust". "I've
said that the last thing I'll do as I back out of the reconstruction is scatter
it all over everything. We don't want it too pristine."
Perhaps the most remarkable items are the photographs
and illustrations which Bacon used as his source material. Hostile to the idea
of painting from life, Bacon used photographs for reference and inspiration, a
template for gestures and expressions "triggers of ideas", as he put
it.
Among the hundreds of images found in the studio are
the photographs that he commissioned from John Deakin of his friends and
subjects Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne providing a vivid
evocation of the bohemian milieu in which Bacon moved. There are studies of
wrestlers, again commissioned by Bacon, in the style of the 19th-century
anatomical photographer Edward Muybridge; a trove of Muybridge's own
photographs, torn from books and scattered liberally around; images of Nazi
rallies and of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; film stills and pictures of
pop and movie stars such as Elvis Presley, Catherine Deneuve and Buster Keaton.
The contents are often macabre, disturbing: a book of
gruesome mortuary photographs shows victims of gunshot and knifing wounds; there
are books on forensic pathology, on diseases of the mouth. Defending the
unremittingly bleak vision of his paintings man as meat, devoid of spirit Bacon
described himself as "a realist". "You can't be more horrific
than life itself," he once remarked. "What horror could I make to
compete with the horror that is going on every single day?"
And yet, extraordinary as this exercise in archaeology
and archivism may be, it begs one question. Is it telling us more than we need
to know about Bacon's life and work? In explaining the processes behind his art
so thoroughly, are we not also demystifying it?
McGrath thinks not. "Francis Bacon was a very
clever man. And his art reflected only as much about himself as he wanted to
show. What's interesting to me is how his mind worked and how he assimilated all
that information, and created the art that he created; and I don't think that
mystery will ever be solved by anything we're doing. The nuts and bolts of
somebody's life is not the secret of their art. It doesn't explain their genius.
It never could."
Murky Bacon
Circa Issue
92, Summer 2000
Did Francis Bacon do
preparatory sketches or not? Do you care? Certainly the Irish Museum of Modern
Art, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, and the Bacon estate care a good deal. A
show of sketches on photographs, possibly by Bacon, opened to the public at IMMA
on March 30. According to a report in the Sunday Times, however, leading
Bacon expert David Sylvester has “described the drawings as ‘crummy’…and
said they were ‘almost certainly not Bacon.’” The sketches owner, Barry
Joule, “has promised to donate 90% of his entire collection to the [Hugh Lane]
gallery if the works are authenticated.”
There was much discussion on just this topic at the opening of IMMA’s new
galleries, in the former Deputy Master’s House. If the praise of the new
galleries, seting, and Jim Buckley’s complementing outdoor fibre-optic
artworks were universal, doubts about the authenticity of the Bacon works on
show was not uncommon. The pieces, painstakingly displayed, are painted-on,
scribbled-on, scrached-over, generally abused images from books and the popular
press. A few thoughts cast by viewers in their direction included: why did he
always seem to be using the same colour of paint on so many of the images?; why
no fingerprints?; why no sign of skill? Others, including some experts on Bacon,
and IMMA itself, seem a bit surer of their provenance. IMMA’s press release
says that “The use of news and sports images, as well as art images and the
annotation of books, demonstrates not only Bacon’s knowledge of art of the
period (late 1950s and early ‘60s) and of art history in general but also his
awareness of and involvement with popular culture and the mass media.” Not, of
course, if Bacon didn’t do them.
IMMA’s Director, Declan McGonagle, hedges somewhat, but he is quoted in the
presss release as saying that “Both exhibitions [there is also a Picasso
works-on-paper show] represent a transformation of the ordinary and commonplace
into the extraordinary, revealing something of each artist’s thinking and
decision-making process.” Again, not if Bacon didn’t do them.
Meanwhile, we have two important Bacon-related articles in this issue: Mary
McGrath describes the ‘archaeology’ of moving Bacon’s studio to Dublin,
and Mick Wilson comments on the logic of the exercise. See pages 20-26.
Leading artist 'was tax dodger'
Ronan McGreevy, The Evening Standard,
4 July 2000
Francis Bacon, one of the foremost British artists of the 20th century, was a tax dodger, it has been alleged.
Vanity Fair magazine is to publish details that Bacon, who died in 1992 aged 82, is alleged to have avoided paying tax in Britain by failing to declare payments made by his dealers Marlborough Fine Art to a Swiss bank account.
The payments, made through the gallery's worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art, based in Liechtenstein, were legal but Bacon's failure to inform the Inland Revenue was not, according to the article to be published in this month's edition of the US magazine.
Bacon's tax affairs have come to light because of a legal wrangle between his estate and the gallery. Bacon's estate is alleging that the gallery exercised "undue influence" over the artist in a 30-year association.
The estate identified 30 works of arts for which it claimed Bacon received no payment. The gallery claims that all the paintings have been accounted for because Bacon either sold them privately or gave them away.
Bacon left his entire £11 million to his companion John Edwards, an East End publican.
Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell says that Bacon's relationship with the Marlborough gallery was a constant compromise and that he preferred to be in their hands than those of an "incompetent honest man".
He added: "What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he got if he went with anyone else."
Vanity Fair alleges that just before his death, Bacon put £4.2million from the sale of his paintings into a Swiss bank account, but asked for £1.6million of it back when he realised he would have to pay tax on his
earnings.
Digging in the
dirt.
What lay behind the brutal visions of Francis Bacon?
Lynn Barber ventures into the twilight world of a father-fixated, homosexual
sado-masochist
Lynn Barber
New
Statesman Issue: June 12, 2000
LOOKING
BACK AT FRANCIS BACON David
Sylvester Thames & Hudson, 272pp, [pounds]29.95
Are we ready to look back at Francis Bacon? It is
only eight years since he died, and most of the posthumous attention has focused
on his Soho social life rather than his work. In any case, artists' reputations
after their deaths often seem to go through a curious period of suspension, like
those cartoon characters who go on running horizontally off the edge of a cliff
until eventually they plummet. British artists usually do plummet Henry Moore,
Barbara Hepworth and Graham Sutherland are currently out of sight beneath the
waves, although perhaps they will bob up again.
Francis Bacon is still pedalling in midair, not yet
assigned to oblivion or apotheosis. He is an awkward case, because his work is
easy to admire, but difficult to like. His power to shock has already lasted
much longer than that of the "Sensation" shockers - 30 years against
three -- but shock alone is never enough to ensure survival. And the question
remains: do his paintings really describe the human condition or merely the sado-masochistic
gay condition? There was a line from Aeschylus beloved - "The reek of human
blood smiles out at me". Perhaps these blokes on beds doing nasty things
are just blokes on beds getting their jollies; perhaps the screams are screams
of pleasure. It doesn't make him a less brilliant painter, but it makes him a
less universal one.
David Sylvester is well equipped to look back at
Francis Bacon because he and Bacon go back half a century. Sylvester first
noticed Bacon's name when, as a schoolboy, he saw his 1933 Crucifixion
reproduced in Herbert Read's Art Now. But Bacon then completely disappeared
until after the war, when he emerged with Three Studies for Figures at the Base
of a Crucifixion. Sylvester started writing about him in 1948, and got to know
him in 1950. There after they were friends, and Sylvester served variously as
Bacon's gatekeeper, critic, promoter, curator, illicit dealer and occasional
model (although Sylvester was upset to notice that, when he sat for Bacon in
1953, the, painter kept consulting a photograph of a rhinoceros - he said it
was helpful for depicting the texture of the skin).
But Sylvester's most valuable role was as Bacon's
Boswell. From 1962 to 1986, he recorded the great series of radio, television
and print interviews that, in their final book form (Interviews with Francis
Bacon, 1987), provide one of the richest, most fascinating insights into an
artist's mind ever published. The present book is, by comparison, mere jots and
titles, recycled catalogue notes and fragments of conversation that were omitted
from the published Interviews. A typical fragment goes as follows:
"FB: I was thinking about your bedroom -that
just to have Holland blinds would be better aesthetically, but that curtains
make sex more comforting.
DS: Well, I'm sure curtains go very well with sex
because they're there so often in pictures of sexual scenes. You yourself used
to have curtains in your earliest pictures of having sex, but now the
backgrounds are starker and the sex seems just as good.
FB: Yes, but in the more recent pictures it's pure
sex. You know, I don't really like the billing and cooing of sex; I just like
the sex itself. Do you think that's a homosexual thing?
DS: No. I think it can go right across the
board."
If you like this sort of thing, there is a lot of it
in Looking Back at Francis Bacon. It often strikes me that art books operate
with different rules to normal books. There is absolutely no guarantee that a
"new" art book contains any new text or even new thought; authors are
allowed to recycle and plagiarise themselves, provided they have a new
packaging. Looking Back is not as bad as some, but I would estimate that less
than a quarter of the text is new, and what is new is often nugatory, as above.
However, Sylvester's writing is always charming, even on its second or third
outing, and the cover price is justified by the excellent illustrations,
including 12 triptych fold-outs.
I was hoping, however, that this book would
elucidate the mystery of the unknown, uncatalogued Bacons that have emerged
since his death in 1992. It absolutely doesn't. Sylvester seems to accept them
as genuine and includes a few in the illustrations, but offers no opinion on
their quality and no explanation of their provenance. This is
naughty-particularly when one of them is captioned "David Sylvester
walking, c1954". Including the picture is tantamount to authenticating it,
but Sylvester's only comment is that he knew nothing about it until several
years after Bacon's death. Why not? In 1954, they were seeing each other
frequently - surely Bacon would have shown it to him, or at least mentioned it?
And Sylvester must have some opinion on whether the figure resembles him, or how
it could have been mislaid all these years. He hints ominously that "there
is reason to believe that a number of other unknown canvases are going to
emerge". What makes him believe this? We ought to know; he ought to tell
us.
Sylvester would be perfectly equipped to write the
definitive biography of Bacon, but unfortunately he shows no signs of doing so.
Nevertheless, the biographical note at the end of this book, with its very full
and chatty footnotes, provides some fascinating glimpses. Daniel Farson was good
on the gilded gutter life - the drinking, the gambling, the rent boys, the
whole Soho galere - but Sylvester knew Bacon better at home, and knew a
better man. He records Bacon's kindness to his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who
lived with him until her death in 1951, and to a friend of Nanny Lightfoot's
whom he continued to visit once a week until her death many years later. Bacon
remarked in 1987 that "I've only taken on morality because I've had the
money to do so", but Sylvester says firmly that "this was not
true". Sylvester is observant and astute about Bacon's psychology. He notes
that Bacon's lavish generosity was a "means of control", a way of
avoiding obligation and dominating any social transaction, but he also suggests
that it derived from a cynicism rooted in low self-esteem: "He believed he
had to buy his way through life... He could be quite confused if people were
utterly kind, asking for nothing in return. He expected them to behave badly and
was rather relieved, it often seemed, when they did."
Nor is
Sylvester afraid to risk Pseuds' Corner by delving into Freudian depths. He
suggests that Bacon's Popes - Il Papa - were inspired by his father, of whom he said
in the Interviews: "I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him
when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was
only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with,
that I realised that it was a sexual thing towards my father." He also
notes that two of the screaming faces that haunted Bacon - the nurse from The
Battleship Potemkin and the mother from Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the
Innocents - are "induced by the same situation: the threat of infanticide
by soldiery"; and he goes on to remind us that "Bacon was the son of
an army captain, who was himself the son of a captain and the grandson of a
general. He grew up in fear of his father, who despised him as a weakling. He
had a lifelong devotion to his nanny... [who] was around when he was painting
those cries." So this makes t he screaming Popes - what? A conflation of
his father attacking him as a child and his nanny defending him? It seems
farfetched. But then, can you think of a near-fetched explanation for screaming
Popes? I feel that Sylvester has earned the right to be trusted for his
intuition, even, or perhaps especially, when it seems completely off the wall.
But as for a final judgement... we are still waiting.
COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
Sotheby's
Self Portrait 1980 Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: Self-Portrait,
Lot 9. Estimate of $350,000 to $450,000. Sold for $1,765,750.
Provenance:
Marlborough Gallery Ltd., London;
Acquired from the above on October 2, 1980.
Exhibited:
London, Marlborough Gallery Ltd.,
Francis Bacon, Small Portrait Studies, 1993, no. 28; Dusseldorf,
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Ich ist etwas Anderes. Kunst am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts,
2000, no.6.
Litrature:
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and In Profile, New York, 1983,
no. 132, illustrated;
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, no. 125, illustrated; Milan
Kundera and France Borel, Bacon, Portraits et Autoportraits, Paris, 1996,
illustrated p. 164.
Francis Bacon
with Study for Self-Portrait 1980 Edward Quinn Archive
"The single head,
fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards, the scene of some of Bacon's
most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo
or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within
them." (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 99).
As part of the constant questioning of his ability to transcend mere
representation in his work, to record the self beyond the expression, Bacon's
small portrait studies became the lifeblood of his oeuvre. In his unbounded
quest for the ultimate immediacy of depiction, the intimate size and proportions
of these canvases allowed him to experiment endlessly with the potency of his
brilliant painterly gesture. Bacon would paint, re-paint and discard these
pieces until he found the core of his subject's being. It is therefore not
surprising that relatively few of these self-portrait studies survived. The ones
that did, however, such as the present work, provide some of the most compelling
images of his painterly genius.
For a few chosen subjects,
including himself, Bacon's constant social and professional dedication to their
appearance, his repeated observation of their mannerisms and movements provided
the key to their existence on his canvases. As he wined, dined and conversed his
life away, the one driving force behind his art was the desire to understand the
sensation of existence. In the age of photography, Bacon felt that traditional
portraiture lacked depth and mere appearance was not enough to capture the
essence of life. For him, the outcome of his art depended on a direct opposition
between a kind of visual intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and
sensation. His portraits strove not to tell the story of someone's life, but to
clamp themselves to the viewer's nervous system and offer as he put it "the
sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." A history of observation
could be conveyed in the cast of a gesture and that was where the painting stood
or, as most of the time, fell.
Consequently, Bacon's art
depended on the complete immersion in his subjects, a fact which was often left
exposed to the vagaries of life. His paintings clung to the fragile social
relationships he built, the regularity with which he saw his friends and, as
time went on, the permanence of life itself.
For Bacon the seventies were
marked at each end by the deaths of two of his closest friends. In 1971 George
Dyer, his greatest confidant and lover, committed suicide in Paris and at the
end of the decade Muriel Belcher, the owner of his beloved Colony Room drinking
club in Soho, and one of his few female subjects, died. Bacon was gradually
becoming the one remaining constant subject throughout his oeuvre. As such, the
few self-portraits that Bacon retained during his working process show not only
the evolution of his exterior form, but also the development of his inner
painterly reaction to the extreme joys and tragedies that life was throwing at
him.
"I loathe my own face
but I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It's
true to say ... One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the
mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." (Quoted in
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, London 1975, p. 133).
Study for Self-Portrait shows
Bacon emerging from the shadowed depths of a limitless darkness at the beginning
of the 1980s. Dressed in a formal white collar, the sheer jet black emptiness
which surrounds his features only serves to heighten the haunted, blurred
presence which emanates from the canvas. In the present work the confident, bold
swathes of color and exaggerated form of Bacon's paintings during the sixties
and seventies have become knowingly clarified and subtly calmed (see fig. 1).
Yet within there is a poignancy to the haze which enshrouds his face.
Over-brushed and scumbled, the ambiguity explored in this work brings a
heightened reality to the image, a fact which is at once accentuated and
governed by the slippage of the form. His head smears softly sideways into view,
the exactness of the two faint white swirls surrounding his face indicating a
rotation, not necessarily in the Cubist manner, but as though it has endured
some terminal rearrangement by a form of painterly manipulation.
As Bacon stares at his
image reflected in the paint-splattered mirror of his studio (see fig. 2), the
image he finds is fraught with contrasts; life versus death, self versus other,
psychology versus physiognomy, together compounding to generate an image of
immense raw energy which unites an exterior presence with an interiorized power.
Outside, the shape retains an obstinate and familiar integrity, the precise
result of a sudden movement. Within, the sheer concentration on his face
transfixes the viewer. Behind the veil, the pensive sorrow in the piercing
concentration of the eyes conveys a hidden turmoil and suffering which is at the
heart of Bacon's genius.
A furnace fuelled by drink and despair!
Nigel Richardson
The
Daily Telegraph 16 September 2000
Fifties Soho was a far
darker place than its popular image suggests, says Nigel Richardson
'IF I described a Soho type of
person, it would be someone who enjoyed drink and food and conversation and
laughter, who would never cash a cheque at a bank but always with a friend or
pub or shop, who'd probably cry quite a lot and enjoy it, and would miss the
train back home if a party was going on." So said the photojournalist and
Soho habitué Daniel Farson in a 1991 radio interview.
It makes Soho sound raffish and
enviably bohemian, and that is the picture of Soho that has persisted in the
public mind. But Farson's Identikit Soho person says more about his self-image
than it does about the real place. The true Soho was a darker, crueller place.
Thanks principally to Farson, its story has remained largely untold.
Farson appointed himself the
chronicler and mouthpiece of Soho in its pomp, the 1950s. It was in this decade
that the confluence of people and ideas in this square mile of central London
reached the ripeness of a golden age, producing such memorable figures as the
painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the columnist and professional drunk
Jeffrey Bernard and the artist's model and muse Henrietta Moraes.
Farson, who died in 1997,
appropriated such people and painted a relentlessly picaresque picture of their
lives, turning Soho into a lucrative cottage industry with a flood of books,
articles and interviews. But Farson told only part of the story. "He was
interested in success and publicity and so on," says Oliver Bernard, the
elder brother of Jeffrey. "He ignored most of the people that I cared for
in Soho, which did irritate me, really, considerably."
Farson played down the pain and
self-destructiveness that was all around. You could erect a memorial tablet in
the French Pub to the victims of Fifties Soho. Some of the names engraved there
you might recognise, such as the brilliant painter Johnny Minton, who committed
suicide in 1957, or the Edwardian beauty Nina Hamnett, a gifted artist who had
modelled for Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska and ended up an incontinent wreck on
a Soho barstool. Some, such as Josh Avery, the subject of my semi-fictionalised
book Dog Days in Soho, were sidekicks and hangers-on who fed the Soho furnace.
Norman Bowler, the actor who
starred in the Seventies television series Softly Softly, knew all about the
darker side - he had been a close friend of Minton and was briefly married to
Moraes. Farson's version of Soho left a good deal out, Norman said. "It was
a very painful place to be. You know, people weren't getting drunk and abusing
each other out of fun. It was pain."
Perhaps Farson played down the
dark side of Soho because he couldn't face his own pain. "Dan had a sort of
despair, I think," George Melly recalled. "It didn't kill him for a
long time, but the fact is that at a certain point in the evening he turned from
being the very charming man he was into a werewolf."
It's a metaphor for Soho itself.
Shade, as well as light, has been the essence of the place. For too long
Farson's determinedly bibulous, wink-wink version has held sway. It's time we
acknowledged the deeper recesses.
Sacred monster, national
treasure
The
Guardian Profile: David Sylvester
He is the most influential critic of the past 50 years and a champion of modern
art. But he hates his own writing, would rather set up exhibitions and wishes
the public would stay away from galleries. Nicholas Wroe on the iconoclast who
is an unashamed elitist
The Guardian, Saturday July 1, 2000
David Sylvester's
influence on the post-war British art world is unparalleled, as art critic,
installer and curator of exhibitions, and as an administrator. He wrote his
first article about drawing for Tribune in 1942 when he was only 18. Now aged
75 - think Orson Welles for both his profile and effortless projection of
rumbling gravitas - he has just published the definitive account of his friend
Francis Bacon's career and staged an exhibition of his work in Dublin.
n the intervening years his
role as confidant, adviser, interpreter and arbiter of taste has made
Sylvester's contribution to shaping the artistic landscape unique. Because of
his efforts the Tate has in its collection whole swathes of work that it could
not possibly afford to buy today. It was he who almost singlehandedly alerted a
hostile British artistic establishment to the importance of post-war American
artists. He has sat for Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon and worked for
Henry Moore. If anyone prepared the ground for the explosion of interest in
contemporary art over the last decade it was David Sylvester.
"David is the only
sacred monster that has ever existed in the English art world," says the
artist Howard Hodgkin. "He has that kind of grandeur." Tate director
Nicholas Serota first met him in the early 70s and says they have remained
close. "He was a powerful influence in making me think internationally and
has been enormously encouraging in terms of trying to acquire work for the
collection. He is an incredible treasure for Britain."
The usually tight-lipped
collector and gallery owner Charles Saatchi makes an exception for Sylvester and
throws the dictionary at him. "David Sylvester is charming, crotchety,
effusive, enigmatic, opinionated, receptive, vivacious, languid, sharp,
romantic, perceptive and cuddly. He is the finest installer of art exhibitions
in the land and his writing is so delicious he should be doing cook books."
With the recent opening of
Tate Modern - categorised as Britain at last making its peace with modern art -
this should be Sylvester's moment. For long periods his has been a lonely voice
speaking up for the merits of modern and contemporary art. Now is his
vindication. But far from celebrating the acceptance of contemporary art into
the mainstream of British cultural life, Sylvester finds himself made gloomy by
the prospect. "One really doesn't want to be in a gallery with more than a
few people. This is the great problem with art. A big audience is no good for
it."
His friends speak of an
Eeyore-like temperament, edging towards melancholy. Added to this, in recent
years his health has not been good. He had a heart attack in the early 90s and
was diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 1998, for which he has recently
undergone surgery. He also has diabetes.
But his glomy outlook and
objections to the ongoing art boom come from neither physical nor psychological
motivations. Sylvester's vision of what art is for, and its place in the
culture, simply has nothing to do with latterday notions of Cool Britannia,
people's art galleries or the veneration of "access". Last month he
launched a devastating attack on the recent thematic hanging of the collection
in Tate Britain - "like serving up a dish in which roast beef is side by
side with grilled sole" - and he is appalled at the thought of the
one-out-one-in admission system recently needed to regulate the massive crowds
at the 19,000-capacity Tate Modern on London's Bankside.
"At these huge
exhibitions, like the Monet in London, or the Vermeer in the Hague, they are so
packed there is no pleasure in going to them." But what about the benefits
of being exposed to great art? "The whole education argument is crap."
Encouraging a new generation of art lovers? "I hate museums cluttered up
with children. I was turned onto art by a simple black and white reproduction
and that was enough," he continues. "I am all in favour of taking
films and reproductions of art into schools and of decent television programmes.
But one doesn't necessarily have to sit in front of masterpieces."
Fellow art critic Richard
Dorment says this is typical of Sylvester. "David would have loved to
celebrate unambiguously the opening of the Tate but he says what he thinks needs
to be said. He is in nobody's pocket and the fact that he doesn't like the new
Tate gallery is an example because he deeply likes and admires its director
Nicholas Serota." Serota acknowledges that he doesn't pull his punches.
"But friends like that you always need. He is always refreshing to talk to.
He constantly questions what artists are doing and his own judgment."
Sylvester's stance is that
the most effective way for a society to consume its fine art is not through
better access to galleries but through diffusion via the applied arts. "I
don't think it matters a fuck whether people go and look at Mondrian or not,
because they live among furniture and wallpaper and cars and everything else
that has been influenced by an earlier moment in the fine arts. Even if fine art
has a tiny audience of rich people, ultimately it affects the whole of society,
and that is where it really validates itself socially." Television
commercials are a prime example. "They are unbelievably brilliant and
exciting and they come out of avant garde film making. You just do not need
millions of people going to museums. You already have many more millions living
in environments created by the followers of the artists in the museums. That is
the role of art in society."
Sylvester was born in 1924
in Hackney. His parents owned an antique shop in Chancery Lane and another shop
selling silver. He and his younger sister were mostly brought up by nannies,
although during the 1930s the family struggled financially and "the maid's
room suddenly became the lodger's". He recalls his father as a rather
conventional man, while his mother was a more hedonistic figure who went to the
ballet and the theatre and was a ballroom dancer of professional standard.
"She liked her fun and would go off to Paris for a few days whenever she
felt like it."
The family had originated in
Russia and Poland, and when David was a child "like many Jewish
families" in London they left the east end for north west London. His
father was a prominent Zionist - Sylvester himself now has an increasingly
rabbinical appearance and demeanour - although he preferred spending his time
with gentiles. Near the end of their lives Sylvester's mother said to him that
"your father's tragedy was that he was an anti-Semite".
The art dealer Leslie
Waddington compares Sylvester to Isaiah Berlin: "he has one of those
wonderful Jewish renaissance minds. It is a rarity in English life."
Sylvester says he was "dragged along " by his parents' Judaism but did
not engage with it. In his early 20s he was on the verge of converting to
Catholicism but pulled back at the last moment. "It still seems a very
civilised thing to be," he says. "I admit I have broken two or three
noses in my time but I don't really believe in revenge. The idea of turning the
other cheek as given in the Sermon on the Mount still seems a notion of
extraordinary beauty."
His first school was Vernon
House prep in Brondesbury, London. At 13 he went on to University College School
in Hampstead whose alumni include four-minute miler Roger Bannister, former Tate
director Alan Bowness, and Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail . "Vernon
House was where I received all my education," he says. "UCS was just
masturbation." At 15 he was asked to leave, before he had taken his school
certificate. He spent a year buying and selling gold and silver to jewellers.
"I made more money than I ever have since."
Coming from a family that
dictated if he wasn't top of the class it was a disgrace, he cultivated his
ambitions elsewhere. First he wanted to be a cricketer. When he realised he
wouldn't be good enough he turned to jazz. "I wanted to be a composer and
arranger. I listened to records in school, starting in 1934. I missed Duke
Ellington at the London Palladium but did see Coleman Hawkins at the Phoenix
Theatre." His introduction to art came at 17 when he saw a black and white
reproduction of Matisse's La Danse. Jazz was put to one side as he painted 10
hours a day for a year before he realised, "I was no good at it".
Then, at 18, he submitted on
spec an article on drawing to Tribune. It was published and soon after they
asked him to review a French painting on loan to the National Gallery. He began
to write regularly for the magazine under the mentorship of the literary editor
George Orwell, although the editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too
"heavy with Latinisms".
He had now embarked on a
writing career, but it was war-time and the services called. He failed a medical
for the army and became a teacher instead. "It was absolutely 'Decline and
Fall'. I didn't even have the school certificate but they were desperate for
masters. I loved teaching. I knew the mistakes made by people who taught me so I
tried to be more understanding."
He started writing a book
about the psychology of art and after the war nearly reactivated his academic
career when he won a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge to read moral
sciences - philosophy and psychology. He chose the college because Wittgenstein
was still teaching there, but before Sylvester even started he knew it was
another career that was beyond him, and he didn't take up his place. He did
think he could write about art, however. Over the next half century he produced
a stream of art journalism and broadcasting, wrote about sport and films, and
produced key books on Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, René Magritte and Giacometti.
He is the only non-artist to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale
but still admits to a lack of confidence about writing.
His friend Grey Gowrie, the
former arts minister, says he can spend hours on the phone agonising over a
single word or phrase. "If I didn't know better I would think I had a heavy
breather," says Gowrie. "There can be what seems like 20 minute
silence before he declares, 'it's David'. You assume he is going to announce
imminent bankruptcy or news of a death, but it's usually a prelude to a
fascinating discussion."
Sylvester has had two
abortive sessions of analysis and says he has "wept on the couch at things
that have been done to my writing by American editors. They have totally
destroyed the rhythm of the prose and changed the meaning." Precise meaning
is everything in a critical approach that is based on a scrupulous, obsessive
attention to the work at hand. The art historian Frances Spalding has noted his,
"dogged examination of his own sensations in front of art. Though he is
often acute on the relationship between a work and the period in which it was
made, he is less interested in history than physical presence; it is the impact
a painting or sculpture makes on us that he tries to catch - how it affects the
head, heart and guts."
Sylvester says his
"fate was sealed" after watching Arsenal versus West Bromwich Albion
in 1935. Arsenal won 4-1 and he went home and wrote a report on it. "That's
been my life; seeing aesthetic experiences, other people doing the work, and
then completing the experience by writing about it. The way I write is a bit
like St Teresa of Avila writing about being fucked by God. I do try to describe
the actual experience of looking at the work. "
A piece written about an
installation by the American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra at the Tate in
1992 typifies this approach. The work consisted of two large steel blocks and
Sylvester describes his experience as he approaches the work. He first thinks
that the blocks are the same height and then, as he gets closer, he realises
that this is an illusion. But how many other critics would then point out that
what he had described only applied to people between five foot six and six feet
tall? This is not mere pedantry but part of an intriguing observation about the
subjectivity of our response to art. Serra says Sylvester has the ability to ask
questions that other people don't.
Sylvester has maintained
close links with artists ever since he visited Paris in 1948, where he met
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's dealer. Kahnweiler secured him an
introduction to Giacometti whose work was then, "the one thing that seemed
to matter". Sylvester became close to Giacometti and started writing about
him. It is a sign of his assiduousness/prevarication that a book did not
actually appear until 1994.
He briefly toyed with the
idea of becoming a dealer himself because he so much admired Kahnweiler, but
abandoned it when he realised that when a dealer sells something to a customer
for a profit, "he genuinely feels he has done the customer a favour. I, on
the other hand, felt as if I was somehow taking advantage of the buyer. But I
suppose my primary emotion about every thing is guilt." He says he really
would have liked to work for a rich person with a small private museum where he
could do all the buying and installing. "I love using my eye to choose
things and to install things. And I think it would have been rather good for
anyone who asked me to do it as well."
In 1950 he met his
wife-to-be, Pamela Briddon, a schoolteacher who was then a student at London
University. They had three daughters, Catherine, who has two children and who
Sylvester describes as, "a very good potter"; Naomi, who works as a
publicist for a publisher; and Xanthe, who has one child and is a freelance
sub-editor who worked for many years for Time Out. Pamela enjoyed art but was
not as keen on contemporary work as her husband. They lived in a flat in Putney
where Sylvester was a keen gardener, cultivating roses particularly. The three
girls had to share a bedroom and Pamela, increasingly fed up with the lack of
space, would take the children off on month-long camping holidays to Spain. When
Sylvester bought a larger house in Wandsworth he kept the flat as his office.
The marriage gradually came to an end over a period of years, with minimal
trauma, say his children, as he spent more and more time at the flat and less in
the new house. They eventually divorced in the early 80s.
He also has a daughter from
a relationship with the novelist Shena Mackay, conducted while she was married
to someone else. Cecily Brown was born in 1969 and now lives in New York where
she is an acclaimed artist.
Sylvester says he is
"neurotically preoccupied" with his daughters and is proud that he has
good relationships with them. He had first met Mackay when she worked in his
parents' shop. Cecily didn't know he was her father until she was 22. She used
to see a lot of him but when they started going to art galleries together and
she called him her best friend he began to feel uncomfortable. "I went to
an analyst with Shena to discuss how to tell the family. We didn't want it to be
too much of a shock to her sisters or to my daughters. I do most things wrong in
my life but with regard to the timing of telling Cecily I think I did quite
well."
From the mid 80s until late
90s his partner was the art historian Sarah Whitfield. He is still close to
Whitfield and says he was virtually a step-father to her daughters Saskia and
Sophie. "But now I'm just a lonely old bachelor," he says. "Sarah
says it suits me."
His career as installer of
exhibitions came about because of his relationship with Henry Moore, about whom
he had written a couple of articles for the Burlington magazine. Moore asked to
meet him and Sylvester became his secretary, but says, "it didn't work too
well because while there was a pile of letters to be answered we would get
involved in some aesthetic discussion". In 1951 the Tate staged a Moore
exhibition which he was invited to curate. He had visited Wakefield with Moore,
who had shared some ideas as to how sculpture should be shown. "Choosing
and installing that exhibition excited me more than anything and it remains to
this day the thing I like doing best." Sylvester's reputation as an
installer extends beyond painting and sculpture. He has also been acclaimed for
exhibiting Islamic carpets. "I don't feel I have a talent for writing, but
when installing I feel at home in the way that someone who drives racing cars
feels at home behind the wheel."
His approach hasn't changed
much over 50 years. He likes to provide lots of space around works and
acknowledges a tendency towards symmetry. It was once pointed out to him that at
two separate sculpture shows he had, unconsciously, used exactly the same
configuration. "This was my natural rhythm. I don't like my prose style but
I do like my installations. If you're writing you see your own personality
crystallised on paper and it is a horrible sight. But with an installation there
is somebody else's great work and you don't look at the installation but at the
work itself. But that work is combined with your rhythms."
He made his name as a writer
in the 1950s and says one of his prime motivations was to counter the influence
of John Berger, who was then setting the art critical agenda in the New
Statesman.
"He was a brilliant
writer, a compelling personality and a great force. I always envied his writing
but I felt he was wrong," says Sylvester. Berger says now that they were
"very fierce opponents", but while Sylvester didn't have an artist's
eye, "he did have a collector's eye, and was one of the first people to
realise what was new about very many artists and to explain it".
Sylvester objected to what
he saw as Berger's promotion of a popular but "retrogressive" movement
by some painters and sculptors as "back to the figure". In a satirical
article Sylvester postulated a "Kitchen Sink School" of painters,
noting that "the graveyard of artistic reputations is littered with the
ruins of expressionistic painters whose youthful outpourings once took the world
by storm." The label was almost instantly co-opted to describe the
groundbreaking drama and fiction of the period.
Speaking up for modern art
then was hazardous. Sylvester faced editorial pressure but says what sustained
him was the force of his own physical experiences with art. "It was as if
people were attacking fucking but you knew you enjoyed fucking. It was as simple
as that. I got the most tremendous physical excitement from looking at modern
art."
His habitual self-criticism
and insistence on treating work on its merits as he sees it has meant he has
never become boxed into critical positions. It was only in the 1980s that he
changed his mind and decided that Picasso was a greater artist than Matisse.
Howard Hodgkin once recalls him writing about a sculptor in the early 60s.
"David said he was 'probably a very great artist'. A little while later he
wrote about his next exhibition saying 'I thought he was the greatest English
sculptor under 35 with red hair, but I was wrong'. The man's career never
recovered. It might be completely apocryphal but it's still true somehow."
Alongside Sylvester's
distaste for what he sees as recent populist developments in art he retains a
faith in strong centralised institutions. "The BBC was a very enlightened
patron of modern art. My talks with American artists in the 60s are invaluable
documents. The interviews with Francis Bacon came from the BBC. We even did an
interview with Giacometti in French. The treatment of art on television is now
at a much lower intellectual level than it was in the 1950s." He dismisses
anti-elitist arguments and complains that delegating power to the Arts Council
regions has weakened arts administration. "There is an elite. But it is not
rooted in class or wealth or privilege. At any one time there are only five or
six people who can really spend public money well, be they right, left or
centre."
Sylvester's politics were
formed in the aftermath of the second world war. "I was to the left of the
Labour Party but that changed after Czechoslovakia in 1948 [when the communists
took control]. I didn't even wait for Hungary in '56. I saw that you can't get
into bed with the communists without getting clap." He has since voted
Labour, Liberal and Conservative, and briefly even had high hopes for the SDP.
He says he is probably still a Gaitskellite because he maintains a belief in
nationalisation, but Grey Gowrie sees him as a singular sort of floating voter.
"At the last election
he said, 'I'm in an absolute rage. They've redrawn the boundaries and I don't
want to vote Tory but I suppose I'm going to have to vote for Al Clark.' I said
to him that it was a human right not to vote for Al Clark but David said, 'the
problem is he is such a fucking good writer.' He might not have done it in the
end but he did make me laugh."
Sylvester admits to voting
Conservative in the 60s, when he lived in Putney, just to stop a man who would
have been arts minister in a Labour government. But his politics and artistic
leanings had been exploited some years earlier when he had been invited on a
State Department-sponsored trip to America in 1960. In an odd sideshow to the
cold war the CIA was covertly sponsoring the cultural magazine Encounter and
promoting abstract expressionism as an example of western freedom. Sylvester is
untroubled that he might have been used. "Jolly good for them. But no-one
ever told me what to write or say."
His introduction to the
American art scene coincided with his arrival in Paris. After going to a jazz
club to see Charlie Mingus he was introduced to Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline
and Philip Guston. He later made contact with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns. He says that, broadly speaking, over the last 40 years his primary
interest has been contemporary American art.
He is currently editing his
interviews with artists over this period. He has at the same time managed to
produce, with Sarah Whitfield, the definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné of
Magritte, not an artist you would normally associate him with. It was a
monumental project and while he says he does love the work, "the fact
remains that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my
type".
Someone who very much was
his type was Francis Bacon. Sylvester first wrote about Bacon in the late 1940s
and they soon became friends. Sylvester was his self-appointed Boswell and
undertook a series of landmark interviews in the 50s and 60s. The show currently
on in Dublin is the fifth he has staged of Bacon's work. His new book about
Bacon is dedicated to the composer Harrison Birtwistle who says that Sylvester's
conversations with Bacon are among the most interesting things written on
creativity. Birtwistle has dedicated a piece of music to Sylvester and says he
is having a, "sort of intellectual love affair with David. Dedicating a
piece to him was a way of describing our friendship." Sylvester has asked
Birtwistle to read the cricket poem "At Lords" by Francis Thompson at
his funeral.
Although he never staged a
Bacon show during the artist's lifetime, every show since has taught Sylvester
something new about the artist. The biggest revelation has been in Dublin.
"I think the pictures look like 18th-century portraits in English country
houses. And that is very true to Bacon's background. He had a typical
upper-class background and grew up in Irish country houses. In Dublin, in these
neo-classical rooms, the pictures look wonderful, they look like their true
selves. Seeing them there it as if he has come home."
In his 1996 collection of
critical essays, About Modern Art, Sylvester regretted the exclusion of
artists born after 1945 on the same basis that he regrets, "becoming
useless at tennis". But this is no slight to the BritArt generation. He
says there are, "some seriously talented artists. I think Damien Hirst is
pretty hot. Rachel Whiteread is a very good artist. Jenny Saville [who is
painting him for the National Portrait Gallery] is very good, as is Douglas
Gordon."
But whatever their
strengths, Sylvester is adamant that encouraging queues of people to see their
work is not the way forward. "Of course it is nice to see artists making
some money," he explains. "So many of the artists from my generation
struggled. But I think there is a price to be paid for it. I'm a bit ashamed of
being the subject of a piece like this. It's a symptom of a bad state of
affairs. You are only coming to see me because art is so popular but I wish
there was less interest. Perhaps the answer is for art to become unfashionable
and un-loved again."
• Francis Bacon in Dublin
is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, until August 31
Looking Back At Francis Bacon is published by Thames & Hudson at £29.95
Artist Bacon 'had a Swiss account to dodge income tax'
Hugh Davies
The Daily
TelegraphTuesday
4th July 2000
FRANCIS BACON, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th century artist, allegedly kept a Swiss bank account to shelter large chunks of his income from tax.
The claim surfaced when details of payments made to Bacon by his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, were sent to the English lawyers of his estate, according to an article to be published in the magazine
Vanity Fair. The estate is in the throes of a legal battle with the gallery, claiming that it wrongfully exploited him over more than 30 years.
Bacon died in 1992, aged 82, leaving his £11 million estate to his closest friend, John Edwards, 50, an illiterate east Londoner and his constant companion for the last 18 years of his life. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of Britain's most prestigious galleries with its worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed to have exercised "undue influence" over the artist, who died from a heart attack in Spain.
It identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, worth as much as £30 million, that allegedly do not feature in the gallery's accounts. Michael
Shnayerson, the author, said that the gallery's "partial payments" to the Geneva bank were legal for its Liechtenstein branch. It was also above board for Bacon to establish the account. But failing to declare the payments to the Inland Revenue as taxable income broke the law.
The magazine suggests that a reason why Bacon never left Marlborough was that he feared no other gallery would agree to the arrangement. An old friend of the painter high in the art world is quoted as saying: "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed." Did he feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it." The art critic Brian Sewell said that Bacon once told him that he would rather be in the hands of Marlborough than in those of "an incompetent honest man.
"What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he'd got if he went with anyone else." Mr Sewell dismissed the idea that Bacon was naive and being taken for a ride: "Francis was no fool."
The Vanity Fair article, to be published in Friday's edition, quoted sources which appear to be close to the gallery, as saying that Bacon was hardly naive about what Marlborough was making from his work, or how his finances were handled. According to the magazine, in 1992 Bacon "got himself mixed up" and had all of his money from paintings - "the full £4.2 million" - sent to Switzerland, then, realising he needed to show some income in the UK, he asked for a portion to be sent back.
He allegedly had his Swiss banker return £1.6 million to Marlborough. The sum was then forwarded to his British account. A Marlborough source claimed that as for the missing paintings, they had all been identified. In most cases Bacon gave them away or sold them himself. Liz Beatty, a representative of the estate, said last night that she would have no immediate comment on the claims.