,                                     Francis Bacon News Archive 

 

                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                     Francis Bacon in London 1979 by Dmitri Kasterine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2005 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 BLOODY SLICE OF BACON

  Rachel Campbell Johnston gets a taste of raw artistry

  The Times, 19th March, 2005

 

   

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The magic of paint

Andrew O'Hagan 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: lost and found

 

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

 

Apollo Magazine March 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

The Art Newspaper  May, 2005

Richard Calvocoressi

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Calvocoressi
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World of Bacon

 By Graham Reid   

The Zealand Herald   24.02.05

 

      

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* When: Wednesday, March 2, 7.30pm

Thursday, March 3, 7.30pm

Friday, March 4, 6pm and 9pm

Saturday, March 5, 6pm and 9pm

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Face to face with Bacon

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

   

 

 

 Unshown Bacon portrait exported from Iran

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Alan Mellor: Image maker

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

The Guardian, Tuesday March 1, 2005

 

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

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

 

 

 

 

 New York Arts Magazine March 2004

 

Letter From Valencia: Francis Bacon

Ginger Danto

 

                                                                              

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

 

 

 

 

FALSE FRIEND

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Boyfriend of artist Bacon spent £10m in 10 years

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

  Sam Jones

  The Guardian, Tuesday August 31, 2004

 

  

                              Philip Mordue with Dave Courtney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

  Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian, June 18 2004

 

  

 

 

 

 

  £9.5m required to save the 'lost' Bacon

     By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

     The Times, May 28, 2004

 

      

            Study after Velasquez  1950  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Bringing home the Bacon

 

    By Luke Leitch, Evening Standard London 17.06.04

 

 

     

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

INSIDE ART  A Loan From Tehran

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Bacon triptych saved from ayatollahs

Lost masterpiece surfaces in Teheran vault, writes Nigel Reynolds

The Daily Telegraph 18/06/2004

 

Few modern paintings have a history quite like it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

Francis Giacobetti: Tell me about your childhood.

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

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

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

FG What role did photography play in your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FG  What do you believe in?

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

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

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

FG You hate conventions?

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

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

FG What is your vision of the world?

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

FG Is death an obsession?

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

FG How would you like to die?

FB Quickly. 

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

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

PANDORA

Even friends aren't safe from the Bacon slicer

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent  June 12th, 2003

 

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

 

 

 

The screen painters

The Daily Telegraph   22/05/2003

 

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

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

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

 

 

      

                Francis Bacon and William Burroughs in London in 1989   John Minihan

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and John Edwards

East End History.com  March 2003

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

John John Edwards, 53, Francis Bacon Confidant

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 An Artful Passing

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Bacon's extraordinary legacy

 

By Jonathan Cooper,  Evening Standard  London  07.03.03

 

  

  Francis Bacon: An irascible charmer

 

 

 

 

FOCUS: Bacon: a mystery in the East

 

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

The Independent on Sunday, 9th March, 2003. 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

 

 

 

 

    Bacon's legacy in doubt after heir dies

       Colin Blackstock   The Guardian  Thursday March 6, 2003

 

         

                           John Edwards

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

An insightful view into an artist’s world

Francis Bacon Studio at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

 

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

By Jackson Ellis
5 February 2003  

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

  Visual inspiration

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

     

 

      Bacon and Caro

            The Daily Telegraph  11/11/2002

 

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

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

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

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

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

 The New York Times  February 2, 2002

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Three Bacon paintings up for auction

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

 

 

 

The New York Times  April 26, 2002

Tony Shafrazi
119 Wooster Street, SoHo
Through May 18

 

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

Far from depressing, the late paintings in this show combine the sensuous and the visionary to exhilarating effect. All of the large canvases from the 1980's feature the painter's familiar iconography of smeary lumps of humanity - or, in one case, a dangling, plucked chicken - in