The New York Times October 26, 1989
Francis Bacon Archive

FRANCIS BACON FOUNDATION OF THE DRAWINGS
DONATED TO CRISTIANO LOVATELLI RAVARINO

The Francis Bacon Italian Drawings
This association exists to collect and catalogue the Italian drawings of Francis Bacon.
The collection consists of a large number of drawings, created between 1970 and 1990.
The drawings were a gift from Bacon to his Italian friend Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino.
The story of these drawings can be read in Umberto Guerini’s book “The Tip of an Iceberg”.
© 2013 Francis Bacon Italian Drawings
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DRAWINGS GIVEN BY FRANCIS BACON
TO CRISTIANO LOVATELLI RAVARINO BETWEEN 1977 AND 1992,
AND THE EVIDENCE THAT PROVES THEIR AUTHENTICITY.
By Umberto Guerini
Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino is the owner of finished, large-scale artworks, drawings, pastels and collages that were given to him as gifts between 1977 and 1992 by Francis Bacon, as is proven by a deed of gift, dated and signed personally by the Irish painter.
The deed of gift reads as follows: “02/04/1988. I left all my drawings to
Cristian Ravarino. I am indebted to him and Italian renaissance culture. I also
have the suspicion that in all those years Marlborough Gallery cheated and
robbed me thanks to awkward situations created by the gallery itself. With love,
Francis Bacon.”
In addition to the aforementioned deed of gift, the authenticity of these drawings is further demonstrated by the following proofs:
a) The sentence handed down by the Bologna Tribunal on July 8, 2004 that clears Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino of charges that he forged the drawings in his possession, and established the following circumstances as fact: Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino and Francis Bacon met one another and spent time together in Bologna, Venice and Cortina d'Ampezzo; the drawings are a part of their relationship and a part of them is signed by Francis Bacon, even if, probably, when he was drunk, as assessed Dr. Ambra Draghetti, prosecutor's expert during the trial in the Bologna Tribunal; Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino supplied Francis Bacon with some of the paper on which the drawings were executed, and in particular the paper obtained from the Fabriano company, as is demonstrated by the embossed stamps on the sheets of paper which, in the beginning, Bacon cut off thinking that they were advertisements.
b) Testimony from Cristina Pezzoli, known as “Bebella”, who declared that she was given a drawing as a gift directly by Francis Bacon in 1982/83, while the two were at the Osteria dei Poeti, a restaurant in Via dei Poeti, Bologna, one evening.
c) New expert analysis of the signature and graphological signs conducted by Dr. Ambra Draghetti. Starting with analyses she conducted as expert testimony for the prosecution beginning in 1999, Dr. Draghetti reexamined all the drawings in Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino’s collection (the first time she was not able to conduct such a direct comparison). Utilizing avant-garde technologies to analyze the signatures, graphic signs and the paper upon which they were executed through in-depth scientific analyses, she conducted direct comparisons between these signatures and graphic signs and the numerous and significant graphic signs that are already recognized as Francis Bacon’s. The results of her investigation were presented for the first time at a convention held in London on February 08, 2012, as part of the art exhibition “Signum Baconiensia, 8th -18th February 2012: A collection of drawings donated by Francis Bacon to Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino.” The convention was held in the Gallery in Cork Street, London. Dr. Draghetti reached the following conclusion: there can be no doubt that every single drawing in Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino’s collection was executed by Francis Bacon, as well as the signatures found on the drawings.
d) Testimony from the Marquise Horacio de Sosa Cordero, who was such a close friend of Francis Bacon’s that he was asked by John Edwards to go to Madrid in April 1992 in order to identify the artist’s body. During a press conference held in Buenos Aires on October 22, 2010, the Marquise de Sosa Cordero confirmed that the drawings exhibited and the signatures found on the drawings are both Francis Bacon’s. He also recognized and identified many of the people portrayed in the drawings.
In an essay written for a convention that focused on Francis Bacon’s drawings, held on June 26, 2012 at the Gate Gallery in Prague as part of the exhibition “Francis Bacon – Bhoumil Harabal,” Horacio de Sosa Cordero declared as follows: “Very few people frequented his studio in London on a daily basis: Peter Beard, whenever he came back from one of his photographic safaris in Africa; David Sylvester; Lucian Freud; George Dyer; and I; years later John Edwards, who sometimes arrived from Italy accompanied by a young, very friendly Bologna journalist named Ravarino. Francis Bacon toured Italy together with Ravarino, visiting Rome, Sicily, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Bologna, Tuscany and other Italian cities… The truth is that Francis Bacon began to make periodic trips to Italy, where things were quiet and he was away from the watchful eyes of Gilbert Lloyd, or his sister Angela or Pierre Levin, his right-hand man in NYC, today director of the gallery.
h) In September 2011, in Monte Carlo, several drawings from Cristiano Lovatelli
Ravarino’s collection were closely examined by David Nahmad, recognized as one
of the world’s foremost art merchants and collectors, who identified them as
authentic Francis Bacon artworks.
l) The drawings in the collection have been placed on display in
exhibitions held in museums and art galleries in the following cities:
Venice (2009-2011); Zurich (2009); Milan (2010); Cento-Ferrara, Italy
(2010); Évora-Lisbon, Portugal (2010); Buenos Aires: Borges Museum,
Espacio de arte SIGEN (2010); Berlin (2010); Paris (2011); Santiago,
Chile (2011); London (2011); Kaohsiung-Taiwan (2012); Prague (2012); and
Aguascalientes, Mexico (2012-2013). The exhibition held in Cento-Ferrara
was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and
Activities. The exhibition held at SIGEN in Buenos Aires was sponsored
by the Argentine Ministry of Culture and the Argentine National Bank.

Study for a Screaming Pope Francis Bacon

Study for a Pope Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon's 'repentances'
The complicated story of the artist's so-called Italian drawings
By Mimi Fronczak Rogers, The Prague Post, July 11, 2012
The selection of three dozen large-format drawings at the Gate Gallery was brought to Prague by a curatorial team composed of Serena Baccaglini, the renowned English art historian Edward Lucie-Smith and Monika Burian Jourdan, the director of Prague's Vernon Gallery.
The show presents two dozen pencil drawings and a dozen vividly coloured mixed-media works. All are from the private collection of Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino from Bologna, Italy. All are prominently signed and have been dated between 1980 and 1992 by the curators.
They undeniably relate to themes that obsessed Bacon throughout his career - portraits, popes (based on paintings by Diego Velázquez) and crucifixions - and clearly possess the defining feature of his work: a radical deformation of the figure to convey underlying emotion.
By Martin Hammer 11 May 2011 Tate Papers Issue 17
There is nothing like a pair of matching sofas for sparking off a conversation. In the case of this first juxtaposition, both are blue, with rounded backs, set against off-white walls and plain light brown floors (figs.1–2). Both are accompanied by middle-aged males in postures suggesting private contemplation, who have set aside their cigarette or pipe, as well as their well-thumbed papers, and who either sit or put their feet up on rather more flimsy items of wooden furniture. Each picture subverts the social transaction traditionally inherent in portraiture, evoking instead states of inwardness and the casual clothing and sparse environment of the modern bohemian. It was observing such affinities between Edgar Degas’s portrait of his critic friend Diego Martelli 1879 (National Galleries of Scotland), and Francis Bacon’s Self-portrait 1963 (National Museum of Wales), that triggered the exploration that follows.1 The two pictures are very different in ways that are typical of their makers: Degas’s dispassionate observation and daringly asymmetrical composition and high viewpoint, as opposed to Bacon’s symmetry, simplification and abstraction from appearances. Nevertheless, the parallels seem striking enough to go beyond coincidence and to provoke speculation about what Degas meant to an artist born seventy-five years later, who worked long after the demise of naturalism and, indeed, in the aftermath of cubism, abstraction and surrealism. The question, then, is what might have motivated Bacon to look all the way back to Degas?
Bacon once observed that ‘to create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another’.2 The mainstream texts on his work tend to emphasise the places Bacon encountered, the people he knew, and the terrible times he lived through, as though his work adds up to a kind of psychological autobiography. This is overstated and simplistic, even if Bacon in other moods encouraged such readings. Art does come out of life, but in an indirect and more complicated fashion than this type of commentary implies. What is more demonstrable is that major artists engage with past and present art as a resource in itself, in developing the aesthetic means to embody whatever content they have in mind. This was certainly true of Bacon, who insisted that he looked at everything. Quite a lot is now known about his visual and imaginative reactions to photographs, which he worked from more consistently than almost any other modern painter. But we are at a rudimentary stage in grasping how Bacon responded to the work of other artists. The theme encompasses his quotations from Old Masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Grünewald and Ingres; and his appropriations from such immediate predecessors as Picasso, Sickert and Soutine; as well as his interchange with contemporaries such as Sutherland and Giacometti.3 Bacon also declared great admiration for several late nineteenth-century artists such as Monet, Gauguin, Rodin, Seurat and, above all, van Gogh. But this essay focuses on Degas, and can only hint that Bacon’s interest in the work of these artists is much more jumbled up than a crude listing makes out.4
Artists scrutinise other artists in distinctive and idiosyncratic ways, through the filter of their own preoccupations.5 But Bacon’s take on Degas was also shaped by the works he happened to confront, and whose availability reflected decisions made by other people about acquiring works for museums, selling them in galleries, and displaying them in exhibitions. In that sense, Bacon’s artistic assimilation is one component within the larger story of the British response to Degas, which began as early as the 1870s, and is of course still alive and well.6 In between, we might note the commercial Degas show at Agnew’s, London, in 1936, the year before a group show in the same gallery in which Bacon participated; and further exhibitions in 1950 and 1958 at the Lefevre Gallery, which had also staged Bacon’s emergence in another series of group displays in 1945 and 1946.7 Many of the best works by Degas in British public and private collections were brought together in a major exhibition in Edinburgh and then at the Tate Gallery in 1952. Then there were the works and exhibitions Bacon could have seen on trips to Paris, which may well have been more frequent than is currently known. At any rate, Bacon had ample opportunity to engage with Degas in the original – over and above the increasingly vivid reproductions that were becoming available – and this essay will try to pin down what he gleaned from such specific encounters.
In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 (Tate N06171), the work in which Bacon came to believe he had discovered his artistic identity, the disquieting hybrid creatures pay homage to the grotesque anatomical distortions and sculptural presence of a particular phase in Picasso’s art around 1930, focused upon bather imagery.8 Bacon’s three images almost certainly started life as separate pictures, and the decision to bind them together visually into a triptych was realised in part by superimposing around the figures’ contours a consistent backdrop of unmodulated orange, with minimal perspective indications. One critic has drawn a visual parallel with Degas’s Combing the Hair c.1896 (National Gallery, London), which had been acquired for the national collection in 1937.9 In the wake of Degas’s death in 1917 and the sales of his studio contents, the interwar years were a key moment for the acquisition of works by British institutions, works that tended to be shown initially at the Tate Gallery and were only later sent to their present home in Trafalgar Square. Another work already in public hands, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando 1879 (National Gallery, London), was an even more telling model to Bacon for the floating three-dimensional form set against a backdrop of strong, flat orange, which Degas also superimposed late on, to offset the figure and perspective construction (fig.3).10

The triptych also indicates Bacon’s interest in a third Degas that had entered the national collection as early as 1926, namely the late Ballet Dancers c.1890–1900 (National Gallery, London; fig.4). Discussing the left-hand picture of the triptych (fig.5), Martin Harrison has noted that Bacon appropriated the head in profile from one of the photographs in an old book he owned about ectoplasms and mediums.11 But it is almost as though Bacon homed in on the particular illustration that reminded him of the treatment of the head in the nearmost dancer in the Degas. That figure certainly seems to be the springboard for the configuration of the upper body, where Bacon exaggerates the indentation between the two rounded shoulder blades, and the extension of the spine into the neck, which in his hands becomes elongated and downwards inclined. The slender white straps and emphatically curved forms seem to secure the connection with Ballet Dancers, as do the placement of his creature’s knee and the angle of the stool on which it rests. In sum, the Bacon figure starts to look like an unlikely composite of the photograph, the Degas, and Picasso bather imagery. Such things appear ‘mixed up’ in his mind in much the same way that Michelangelo and Eadweard Muybridge converged, Bacon famously remarked, in his imaginative projections of the male body.12 Moreover, it is likely that Bacon was excited by the painterly freedom of Ballet Dancers, the bold and diverse marks, made with the artist’s fingers perhaps in places, applied onto coarse unprimed canvas which is left substantially exposed, especially to the right of the picture.13 Bacon, too, often left canvas bare, as in the central panel of the 1944 triptych. He subsequently took to painting on the rear, rougher side of his supports, to heighten the contrast between the visual textures of granular canvas and smeared, scumbled paint marks. It is even possible to speculate that Degas’s necessary recourse to glazing large pastels might have reinforced Bacon’s impulse to use glass in framing his paintings, for practical reasons initially, perhaps, but thereafter on aesthetic grounds. At any rate, Ballet Dancers suggests that late Degas was a key point of departure for the sense of layering and variable degrees of sharpness and blur, the sense of an image suspended in the course of its improvisation into being, that remained fundamental to Bacon’s art.
At the same time, Degas demonstrated to Bacon how emphatically pictorial statements could emerge out of a process of appropriating photographic imagery. Degas’s overt exploitation of photography was announced in another London picture, the early Princess Pauline de Metternich c.1865 (National Gallery, London), famously based on a carte de visite. Given Bacon’s immersion in Muybridge, he may well have sensed the strong link between the late nineteenth-century photographer and the contemporary work of Degas.14 Bacon’s friend and interlocutor David Sylvester made the connection as early as 1954, noting Bacon’s exploitation of Muybridge’s ‘great photographic compendium – which served Degas in a quite different fashion – of human and animal locomotion’.15

A process of compacting visual sources may be evident again in Study from the Human Body 1949 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), which was executed shortly before being included in Bacon’s one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in late 1949. A fascination with the image of the human back is one of the more obvious common denominators between Bacon and Degas. After Bacon’s death, Sylvester remarked of Study from the Human Body: ‘The figure is the first of many which show an undying love for the Degas pastel in the National Gallery, London, of a woman drying herself.’16 For Bacon, After the Bath, Woman Drying Herselfc.1890–5 (National Gallery, London) was indeed something of a talisman (fig.6). It epitomised Degas’s approach to a larger obsession the two artists shared with the plasticity of the body, its potential for the most varied forms of articulation, in movement and repose. But when did Bacon encounter After the Bath? Sylvester’s authoritative tone suggests that he was remembering its discovery around the time that he and the artist first got to know one another. This particular Degas was not in fact acquired by the National Gallery until 1959. However, it was shown in the Lefevre Gallery’s Degas show in 1950, and there is no record of a previous public showing.17 After the Bath was then purchased by the collector Harry Walston from the exhibition (though it was twice lent to the Tate Gallery for a few months before finally being acquired for the nation).18 It is possible that Sylvester was conflating the work with the equally remarkable Degas bather pastel in the Courtauld collection, shown in a memorial display at the Tate Gallery in summer 1948; equally, before its exhibition, Bacon may have encountered After the Bath informally at the Lefevre Gallery, where he had exhibited and was well known.19 At any rate, such quintessential Degas imagery seems to have fed into Bacon’s first variant on the toilette theme, the Painting 1950 (Leeds Art Gallery), fusing with impressions derived from a Sickert drawing identified by the art historian Rebecca Daniels.20

From a different perspective, Degas’s After the Bath was again in Sylvester’s thoughts when discussing the remarkable Study after Velázquez 1950 (private collection), one of Bacon’s very first pope pictures. The critic evoked Bacon’s reinvention of the curtain motif here in less literal terms:
The short folds in the purple cape and the long folds in the grey background curtain together create a wonderful counterpoint … He had observed in certain late Degas pastels the use of sets of close parallel lines that seemed to be passing through a semi-transparent body. Bacon’s development of this usage, which he called ‘shuttering’, was to formalize the folds in background curtains into stripes that passed very emphatically through a figure. I asked him once if he could explain why Degas’s shuttering could be so poignant. ‘Well, it means that the sensation doesn’t come straight out at you but slides slowly and gently through the gaps.’21
Degas himself would not perhaps have put it like that. Rather, the remark captures Bacon’s own, highly metaphorical sense of pictorial devices. In a later interview, the artist remarked of Degas’s pastels: ‘he shuttered the body, in a way, shuttered the image and then he put an enormous amount of colour through these lines.’ For Bacon, this device ‘created intensity’.22 In Study after Velázquez, any such impressions from Degas fuse with more direct derivations from black and white photography. Bacon would, for example, have known Erich Salomon’s photograph, reproduced in Picture Post magazine in 1947, where the great and the good are captured, unaware and unposed, through a diaphanous curtain.23 Another possible model is pre-war Nazi propaganda imagery, specifically the spectacle of the ‘cathedral of light’ that Albert Speer devised for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and the culminating ceremony at the Nuremberg rallies, in which parallel beams of light directed into the night sky register as densely packed stripes of light and dark.24 Bacon was fascinated by the gulf between the Nazi propagandist façade and the ruthless will to power that it veiled. A terminology akin to shuttering came to mind when he talked, in a somewhat Nietzschean vein, about his aims: ‘We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.’25 Bacon surely saw Degas, Nietzsche’s near contemporary after all, as the exemplary artist who cut through to raw human realities.
The light and dark striations generally recede into the background in Bacon’s work from the first half of the 1950s. In the foreground, the Degas-like motif of the naked figure viewed from the back is restated in a sequence of pictures from 1952, including Untitled (Crouching Figures) (Estate of Francis Bacon) and, above all, Study for Crouching Nude (Detroit Institute of Arts) that was one of Bacon’s favourite works.26 The theme allowed him to channel visual suggestions from such varied sources as Muybridge’s photography, Michelangelo drawings, Rodin sculptures and from classical antiquity, which have all been seen as catalysts.27 Or Degas may again be cited, such as the nude drying herself, unusually oriented to the right, which had been shown at the Lefevre Gallery show two years earlier.28 But such points of reference interacted with an even more direct springboard in photojournalism for Bacon’s conception of the figure. For Bacon, the image of the back edited out the individuality implicit in facial features and so projected an animalistic sense of humanity. The association is reinforced here by the squatting or crouching posture that recalls the body language of apes, complementing the cage-like setting. For his part, Degas famously remarked that women at their toilette were like cats washing themselves, and the application to his work of the term ‘human animal’ goes all the way back to the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.29 In 1952 Bacon was actually working from an illustrated feature article that had appeared in the same 1947 issue of Picture Post magazine about a lioness attacking a photographer in the wild.30 Bacon was clearly mesmerised by the largest image, in which the seated lioness seems to take on an incongruously gentle and protective attitude towards the recumbent figure, and to take on a decidedly anthropomorphic appearance. In Study for Crouching Nude the image of an animal with human attributes is metamorphosed by Bacon into a figure with animal undertones. Aside from the articulation of the body, the relationship with the photograph is implicit in the pool of shadow to the right of the figure, and in Untitled (Crouching Figures) and several related pictures by the inclusion of elements of the lying figure with bent legs. Here the imagery takes on unmistakable homoerotic overtones, almost as if the instinctive violence of the kill is converted in Bacon’s imagination into some sadomasochistic fantasy. The photograph was Bacon’s immediate source, but Degas remains in play if we concur with the art historian John Rothenstein’s description in 1964 of a typical mechanism in Bacon’s creativity: ‘his images often derive from a variety of photographs of different subjects and these may be fixed or coloured by his memory of still some other thing seen or remembered.’31 This remark captures a very visual process of transformation and synthesis that is bound to be travestied in any verbal description.
Several new departures are evident in Bacon’s art of the late 1950s and into the 1960s, in the aftermath of the variations on a van Gogh self-portrait that Bacon hurriedly executed in 1957. These developments include, first, a proliferation of naked figures, and in particular of female bodies, hitherto a rarity in Bacon’s work; secondly, an emphasis on the overall articulation of the body, which is sometimes more dynamically charged, but in general becomes more sculpturally defined, against simpler and increasingly colourful backdrops; thirdly, a move away from the photographic effects of grisaille, blur and inconsistent focus that had been dominant a few years earlier; and, fourthly, an espousal of working on paper.32 Although Bacon always denied that he drew, a significant cluster of cursory sketches have since come to light, with provenances among Bacon’s circle, but without any signatures or dates. The bulk were acquired by Tate and exhibited in 2003. Curator Matthew Gale convincingly ascribed the bulk of the drawings to around 1957 to 1961, on the basis of documentary evidence as well as visual correspondences with paintings dated from 1959 to the early 1960s.33 It is the hypothesis of this essay that these various new directions register in part Bacon’s assimilation of a fresh aspect of Degas.
Bacon is very likely to have seen the Lefevre Gallery exhibition Degas. Monotypes, Drawings, Pastels, Bronzes, staged between April and May 1958. It was accompanied by a bigger catalogue than usual, with all works illustrated and with an essay by Bacon’s long-time acquaintance Douglas Cooper, setting Degas within the wider history of the monotype (fig.7).34 Indeed, although there was a handful of works in the other media, the undoubted revelation of the show was the thirty-six monotypes, one-off images pulled from a sheet of metal on which the artist had improvised the image in printers’ ink, with radical freedom of touch and economy of means (at times working with his fingers and with rags). This was a strand in Degas’s work that had hitherto been relatively unknown in Britain compared with the paintings, pastels and sculpture. No monotypes, for instance, had been shown at the Tate Gallery six years earlier. Their impact would only have been enhanced for Bacon by the well-founded rumours that Picasso was keen to purchase several brothel monotypes from the London exhibition.35 The works on show in 1958 are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Degas’s elegant ballet and race track pictures. Their earthy sensuality and bleak atmosphere were evoked at the time in the pages of the Burlington Magazine:
nothing can mitigate the wretchedness of their [the prostitutes’] existence. Degas is prepared with Goya-like mercilessness to drain away all vestige of lying glamour in order to distil this disagreeable truth. The women are hideous, fat, no longer young; their clients shifty, and horribly respectable with their umbrellas and bowler hats … his attitude towards all such sad exploits of human beings was never compassionate. Rather he was deeply concerned with truth for its own sake, in probing life beneath the crust of good manners … He knew just how thin this crust was, and took a defiant delight in exposing the squalor that lay below it. We who still like for the sake of a little piece of mind to pretend that the crust still holds, are put in our place by the spectacle of all grace, all varnish, being ripped away with so much genius to reveal the raw facts.36
While the words of this review may echo any number of contemporary reactions to Bacon’s paintings, what is the visual evidence that these works by Degas struck a chord with Bacon? The abject, contorted naked women, in minimal interiors, who feature in Bacon’s art over the next two or three years suggest a general continuity with the Degas monotypes. More specific affinities exist between the drawn Figure in a Corner and one such Degas: in both, the figures’ arms are stretched out, and one leg is extended and the other bent, with the genitals prominently displayed, while the bed or sofa on which they disport themselves recedes diagonally into a shallow space.37 In several of the monotypes Degas’s women recline and doze, perhaps in a state of post-coital stupor (fig.8). Likewise recumbent figures abound in Bacon drawings, as in Figure Lying No.2 (Tate T07375), and related paintings such as Sleeping Figure 1959, a tender depiction of his lover Peter Lacy.38 In its unselfconscious body language, remote from the posing of the traditional nude, the latter may incorporate Bacon’s recent memories of the girl conceived by Degas forRest c.1879 (Musée Picasso, Paris), one of Picasso’s acquisitions. The same monotype includes a fragmentary glimpse of a male customer entering the space which may have been a point of reference at some level for Bacon’s enigmatic Walking Figure 1960 (Dallas Museum of Art). Bacon’s nudes lying upside down on sofas, in works on paper (such as Reclining Figure No.1 and Reclining Figure No.2; Tate T07353–4) and on canvas – as in Reclining Woman 1961 (Tate T00453; fig.9) – recall the postures in several monotypes, which show prostitutes relaxing on upholstered couches (fig.8).39 Figures viewed from the back occur in several of Degas’s prints and drawings in the Lefevre Gallery exhibition, as they do in Bacon sketches like Standing Figure (Tate T07367), an especially economical image that possibly incorporates a recollection of one of Degas’s naked girls.40 Finally, Figure Bending Forwards (Tate T07358) and Bending Figure No.2 by Bacon (Tate T07379; fig.10) bring to mind the more contorted bodies in Degas’s imagery of girls at theirtoilette (fig.11), although Muybridge’s photographs are also relevant here.41Generally, Degas and Muybridge seem to have coalesced for Bacon within this body of work.42 It is not possible to say for sure that Bacon saw these works by Degas. But the cursory discussion above indicates that there are sufficient visual and thematic parallels, across a fair proportion of Bacon’s work known or thought to date from the subsequent period, to support the proposition that the Lefevre Degas show in spring 1958 was a significant catalyst.
Its fascination for Bacon may have gone beyond iconography. The exhibition might also have prompted him to explore the possibilities of drawing. The current view is that Bacon turned to working on paper in the late 1950s as something of a temporary expedient, in order to help him resolve his current pictorial problems.43 If that is correct, which is impossible to prove since earlier and later graphic production could be lost, then Bacon might well have derived sustenance from Degas’s monotypes. Their extraordinary daring and lack of inhibition, in relation to both imagery and technique, would surely have resonated with Bacon. At the same time, they demonstrated how an artist might choose working on paper, on an intimate scale, as a vehicle for private studio experimentation and perhaps for erotic reverie, producing images that only became public after the artist’s death. In other words, they showed how drawing could be something other than a practical instrument for developing ideas for paintings, which was anathema to Bacon given his commitment to improvisation on the canvas.
The argument about the Degas monotypes makes sense in relation to Bacon’s wider evolution. The period around 1960 tends to be rather glossed over, even by the Tate’s 2008 retrospective, reflecting its problematic aesthetic status. The one point that is regularly made is that Bacon’s simpler, colourful backdrops reflect his new awareness of American abstract expressionism and its St Ives equivalent in current British art, reinforced by his three-month stay in Cornwall in 1959.44 Yet, paradoxically, Bacon’s move towards a more animated treatment of the human body may in part have represented a reaction against abstraction, a type of art which lacked meaningful content in Bacon’s view. He may have been appropriating abstract devices for his backdrops in a spirit more of parody than emulation. An intensified interest in Degas, on the other hand, would be entirely compatible with the broader engagement with late nineteenth-century French art that informed Bacon’s art at this point. This extended notably to Rodin’s sculpture, analogous of course to Degas in its brutal realism and bodily contortions. Rodin was mentioned admiringly by Bacon in his lists of possible new pictures, and was proposed by Matthew Gale as a springboard for Bacon’s ‘distortion and idiosyncratic articulation of the human figure’ at this juncture.45
By general consent, Bacon hit his artistic stride again in the early 1960s, a moment which roughly correlates, coincidentally or otherwise, with the new contentment in his personal life associated with meeting George Dyer. The period from then until the mid-1970s was one of the undoubted peaks in Bacon’s art. His sense of himself as a latter-day realist comes through strongly in the concurrent interviews with David Sylvester. Correspondingly, Bacon’s engagement with Degas becomes more overt, one element in a Francophilia that was apparent in the satisfaction he derived from being invited to stage a big retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971, in his acquisition of a flat in Paris, and in his several friendships at this time with French artists and writers, notably Michel Leiris. It is plausible that Bacon identified with Degas as a fellow spirit, a model for his own devotion to ‘the human clay’, in W.H. Auden’s resonant phrase, and thus as the antidote to a contemporary scene dominated by abstraction and pop art, from which Bacon felt increasingly isolated.
His new immersion in portraiture, for instance, was bound up with his admiration for Degas, as has already been indicated. Bacon no doubt perceived that, in works like Diego Martelli, shown in London in 1952, Degas had taken portraiture off its pedestal in much the same way that the women at their toilette pictures brought the image of the nude down to earth, locating it within contemporary everyday experience and the private sphere. In the Martelli portrait, the pose served to convey the singular physical and psychological presence of Degas’s sitter, and to evoke a fictive obliviousness to the observing artist, rather than the social front that is normally encountered in portraits. Its enduring impact is evident in the more exaggerated body language of Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud 1969 (private collection), ‘awkward in his squirming pose’ in Chris Stephens’s words, as well in certain late self-portraits such as Self-Portrait with a Watch 1973 (private collection).46 Bacon’s immediate points of reference were often photographs by John Deakin, but in directing the conception and making of these, Bacon may well have had Degas at the back of his mind. The George Dyer images from the 1960s, such as Study of George Dyer in a Mirror 1968 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), raise the further point that including paintings within paintings is an interesting sub-theme in both artists’ approaches to portraiture.47 At the other end of the scale spectrum, the robust physicality and rich tonality of Degas’s Head of a Woman c.1874 (Tate N03390; fig.12), another early acquisition for the national collection, may have been an example for Bacon’s head and shoulder portraits form the early 1960s onwards, especially in the many, robustly sensual depictions of the artist and model Isabel Rawsthorne.
Dyer inspired other works that went beyond straightforward portraiture. In the 1964 triptych Three Figures in a Room 1964 (Centre Pompidou, Paris), a playful and erotically charged love letter, Bacon’s apparent feminisation of the naked figure is accentuated by his allusions to Degas. The centrepiece of Dyer in repose on a couch recalls Degas’s imagery of the boudoir interior as a place of serenity and bodily pleasure while the right-hand depiction of his lover swivelling on a barstool evokes the ungainly poise of Degas’s sculpted ballet dancers, exemplified by the two bronzes acquired by Tate in 1949 and 1951.48At the same time, the dance studio interiors could have encouraged Bacon to distil the luminous, simplified spaces that offset his increasingly plastic figures. Most obviously, Degas’s imagery of women at their toilette is transposed in the left-hand panel of the triptych into Bacon’s depiction of a man literally sat on the toilet, which it is hard not to see as light-hearted, even an in-joke, if Bacon is permitted to depart from tragic mode. The visceral physicality that he saw in Degas turns into a projection of Bacon’s own muscular ideal. Here, and above all in the depictions of the male toilette in Three Studies of the Male Back 1970, Bacon paid his most explicit homages to Degas’s After the Bath, by then on permanent display in the National Gallery. In between making the two triptychs, Bacon explained to Sylvester in their 1966 conversation what it was that he found so riveting about that particular Degas: ‘You will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether. And this gives it such a grip and a twist that you’re more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine naturally up to the neck. He breaks it so that this thing seems to protrude from the flesh.’49 The most literal elaboration of this idea in his own work occurs in Three Figures and Portrait 1975 (Tate T02112), though here virtuosity comes perhaps at the expense of vulnerability.
The first half of the 1970s may well have been the period in which Degas meant most to Bacon. Sylvester shrewdly noted thatTriptych 1974–7 (private collection) ‘surely contains Bacon’s most complex homage to Degas’:
The two male backs are among the many in his work which are indebted to the Degas pastel in the National Gallery of a woman sponging her back; the horses with rider also recall Degas; and the whole atmosphere must be indebted … to a further Degas in the National Gallery, the Beach Scene: the panorama of sands and sea and sky, the contrast between figures near and far, the umbrellas, the way that shadows and pieces of fabric are silhouetted against the sky.50
Bacon proceeded to include After the Bath in his The Artist’s Choice exhibition, staged in 1985 at the National Gallery, London, with the Degas on the cover of the accompanying pamphlet. The actual picture was hung in the middle of three nudes occupying what Sylvester recalled as ‘the best wall’, flanked by Velzáquez’s Rokeby Venus 1647–51 and Michelangelo’sEntombment c.1500: ‘Degas was seen as the progeny of the masters on either side, and thus as Bacon’s key painter.’51
Others who knew Bacon well picked up on this reverence for Degas. In the first, but still the most suggestive monograph, the art critic John Russell lingered over the importance of After the Bath but observed too: ‘since Degas was a great student of people in rooms, it is natural that Bacon should often have studied the paintings in which Degas brought off just that element of psychological ambiguity which Bacon himself often strives for’ – a point Russell illustrated with Degas’s early Interiorc.1868–9 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a picture which does indeed presage the air of indeterminate menace in, for instance, the central panel of Bacon’s Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer 1971 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel).52 Subsequently, the biographer Michael Peppiatt quoted Bacon thus: ‘I love Degas. I think his pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they’re far greater than his paintings.’53 And from Peppiatt himself: ‘Bacon had obtained a copy of the rare Lemoisne catalogue raisonné of Degas’s work and he kept it in the studio during this period, frequently leafing through the hundreds of images that Degas, whom he admired more than any other nineteenth-century artist save van Gogh, had created.’54
Visual parallels with Degas occasionally make themselves felt in Bacon’s work from his final decade or so. It is interesting to note that both of these committed recorders of the human form were unusually drawn in their later careers to imagery of landscape, although the knobbly, rounded forms that both of them explored in the natural world were redolent of bodily associations. Compare, for instance, Bacon’s Sand Dune 1983 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel; fig.13) with Degas’s late coastal scenes, for example Le Cap Hornu near St Valery-sur-Somme c.1890–3 (British Museum; fig.14). One of Bacon’s very last pictures, Study for the Human Body 1991, presents striking parallels of scale, imagery and palette to Degas’s Dancers at the Bar c.1900 (Philips Collection, Washington), notwithstanding the gulf between Degas’s slender, immaterial females and Bacon’s body-building beefcake.55
A feature of Degas’s later art that Bacon is likely to have found exciting was its combination of taut, analytical drawing of the structure of the body, in defined spatial settings, with sparse expanses of painterly texture and increasingly arbitrary flat colour, including the bright oranges to which Bacon was especially devoted. Equally, the acidic greens encountered in late Degas, such as A Group of Dancers c.1890 (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), are the most striking precedent for Bacon’s audacious viridians, epitomised by Crouching Nude 1961.56
In general, what Bacon admired in Degas was the sensation of visceral reality, created not merely through description but also by the knowing manipulation of paint marks on a flat surface, beneath the effect of spontaneity that both cultivated. An underlying affinity of attitude is evident by juxtaposing a typical comment made late in life by Bacon – ‘The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you’ve got of its looking real’57 – with remarks attributed to Degas such as: ‘One gives the idea of truth by means of the false’ and ‘”Art” is the same word as “artifice”, that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means’.58 Moreover both artists were neurotic perfectionists, prone to asking if they could take back for revision works they had completed and even sold. Each went so far on occasion as to destroy the work in question, and unsurprisingly both had such requests turned down by wary owners, by the Tate in fact in Bacon’s case, when in 1966 he asked to add a green carpet to Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963 (TateT00604), acquired three years earlier;59 and by the owner and friend of the artist Henri Rouart, when Degas asked if he could modify Dancers Practicing at the Barre1877 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), having come to regret the visual analogy between the watering can, commonly used to sprinkle the floor to suppress dust, and the pose of the rightmost dancer.60
It is tempting as well to see Bacon’s attitude to artistic media as reflecting his awareness of Degas. His mixing of pastel and paint, especially in the 1940s, may reflect a fascination with the French artist’s technical experimentalism. Bacon, too, felt the lure of working in three dimensions, judging from the Sylvester interviews, though unlike Degas he remained a sculptor manqué.61 Even taking into account the posthumously revealed sketches discussed earlier, Bacon barely drew and, according to Sylvester, was ‘forever asserting that he couldn’t draw’, but, interestingly, he was drawn to several artists renowned for their virtuoso draughtsmanship, Degas and Michelangelo as well as Giacometti and Seurat.62 Discernable here is an element of compensation or wish fulfilment in an artist who had never learnt to draw in the traditional sense, and who relied on inventive manipulations of paint to evoke the presence of forms in space. In other words, within the identification, there was also an attraction of opposites in Bacon’s response to Degas.
This essay assembles some evidence – and quite a lot of speculation – regarding what Bacon might have derived, throughout his career, from looking hard at works by Degas. Some of its juxtapositions of particular works may seem more persuasive than others, but it is hoped that the overall argument has demonstrated that there is a real continuity of sensibility between the two artists, and that Bacon’s documented admiration for Degas had profound, wide-ranging consequences for his art – on a par with his immersion in Picasso or Soutine. There is doubtless much more to be said about what he saw and valued in Degas, such as sexual connotations, or a darker side of the French artist implicit, too, in John Berger’s comments about his fascination with ‘the human capacity for martyrdom … The human quality Degas most admired was endurance’.63On a broader front, finally, this essay has sought to indicate the benefits of treating Bacon as a singular but also regular artist, rather than as a kind of shaman or a charismatic bohemian who happened to paint. Regular artists, especially those of the highest distinction, find compelling provocation in other works of art, and Bacon was no exception: ‘to create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another’. He may have been personally committed to alcohol, gambling and picking up teddy boys, but bouncing off great artists like Degas was ultimately far more significant for Bacon’s painting.
1.See Martin Hammer, ‘Clearing away the Screens’, in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2005, pp.21 and 27 note 17. Perhaps Bacon’s interest in Degas revived at this point as a result of encountering Jean Sutherland Bogg’s pioneering and monumental study Portraits by Degas, Berkeley 1962.
PETER FIFIELD
Gaping Mouths and Bulging Bodies: Beckett and Francis Bacon
Journal of Beckett Studies, Volume 18 (1-2): 72., Edinburgh University Press, September 1st, 2009.

Embodiment and abstraction are a potentially problematic mix. Beckett’s
statement that ‘Perhaps like the composer Schoenberg or the painter Kandinsky, I
have developed an abstract language’ (Gruen, 210), sits uncomfortably with, say,
the important contrast
Rather than consulting Kandinsky, however, we would do much better to examine the resolutely fleshly example of Francis Bacon, the proximity of whose papal images after Velāzquez’s Pope Innocent X to Beckett’s Hamm are briefly noted in the Faber/Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Ackerley and Gontarski, 36). When asked if he ever considered painting abstract pictures, Bacon admitted only of an interest in those Picassos, which, he says, use an ‘organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’ (Sylvester, 8).
On the more conventional model of abstraction, when asked his opinion of the Rothko paintings in the Tate, he said, ‘I think they’re the dullest paintings in the world’ and complained that the American had not used brighter colours (South Bank Show, 1985). As such, it is in the OED’s sense of abstraction as ‘drawn, derived, extracted,’ or ‘distilled to its essence’ that we might call Bacon an abstract painter. He confirms this when he tells Melvyn Bragg that he seeks to make ‘not [an] illustration of reality but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation’ (South Bank Show, 1985).
The methods of that concentration, which include contortion, mutilation and containment, bring the corporeality of Bacon’s distorted bodies to the forefront of his paintings. On show, then, is an abstraction based not on an abandonment of the subject but on an adherence to a central property of its being – that of its embodiment. If we are to take seriously Beckett’s claims for the abstract we must also give account of his irrepressible attachment to the human form. The space occupied by Bacon’s work stands to bequeath to us not an archaeology of imagery, but a painterly model that speaks eloquently to Beckett’s sarcoid figures.
It is a notably organic plasticity that fleshes out the figures of Beckett’s writing and Bacon’s painting. Rather than use the sort of geometric fragmentation of analytical cubism, which can only depict the sinuous curve of, say, a violin’s sound-hole by not dissecting it – by forsaking its very method – in Bacon and Beckett the human form is given through emphasis and exaggeration of the curved, the swollen and the bulbous. It is this attention to the arc that gives to the subject its fleshy roundedness; related to the masculine voluptuousness that Bacon so admired in Michelangelo’s drawings (Peppiatt, 225). We might recall the narrator of The Unnamable who, despite being unsure of the precise nature of his embodiment, stresses its tendency towards a featureless sphere. At one point he proclaims of his head, ‘no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain’ (Beckett, 1994, 307).
Later, in a sort of attendance register of physiological truancy the narrator says, ‘I don’t feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don’t, so much the worse, I don’t feel an ear either, this is awful’ (Beckett, 1994, 386). Removing all that seems excessive or merely incidental in physicality, it is the spherical form that cannot be discarded. So, while embodiment is compulsively placed in doubt, if it does prove to be the case, its apparent form will be curved. Clearly, it is not the case that all the subjects painted or written by Bacon and Beckett are on the tubby side, or indeed are large cranial spheres; rather there is something about embodiment–any embodiment–that seems to elicit from both artist and author an account of voluminous roundedness, rather than flat, if precise, line. This is surely related to the fact that embodiment is what makes three-dimensionality into an experiential condition, that brings sense and sensation to the idea of spatiality. It is our bulging into 3-D–even of the slimmest figures – that is evoked with Bacon’s scoops and smears of paint and the unnamable’s gravitation towards roundness.
Moreover, the most basic form of the head and its necessary curvature, are repeated for the rest the body. Beckett writes, ‘For of the great traveller I had been, on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk remains (in sorry trim), surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar’ (Beckett, 1994, 329). Removing limbs with abandon, the condition of becoming a mere torso is specifically referred to as the trunk, evocative of a tree as well as a body. Consequently, it is given the characteristic motion of roundedness: it rolls. Whilst all of these profess a lack, there is, precisely because of this distorting focus, a gross emphasis on the fact of three-dimensional embodiment, like the bulbous view through a fish-eye lens. Indeed, it is the loss of limbs that uncovers and foregrounds the natural curvature of the body’s trunk. Like many of Bacon’s distortions of the human form, drawn from vivid photographs of invalids or bent and pinned photographs, the embodied form in Beckett’s work is thus pushed to the extremities of the humanoid. When we look at the Eumenides of Bacon’s 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, we see a grossly distorted human embodiment, rounded and limbless but not dissimilar to The Unnamable’s humanoid monster. In both, then, there is an emphasis not on the fixed form of the whole as constituted by its individual parts–limbs, hands, feet and so on–but on its underlying fleshliness; the essential meat of the matter.
Bacon draws particular attention to the practice of embodying a figure by distorting–by breaking–its body. He said to an interviewer, ‘You must know the beautiful Degas pastel in the National Gallery of a woman sponging her back. And you will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether [...] He breaks it so that this thing seems to protrude from the flesh. Now, whether Degas did this purposely or not, it makes it a much greater picture, because you’re suddenly conscious of the spine as well as the flesh, which he usually just painted covering the bones’ (Sylvester, 46–47). For Bacon the broken body is a striking, multi-textured body, the artist stating, ‘I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance’ (Sylvester, 146). The shiver one has at the sight of a vivid mutilation is surely an extension of that ‘shorthand of sensation’ sought by Bacon in his paintings. Without the blood and gore so characteristic of the artworks, Beckett’s figures are, of course, notably distorted by injury and bodily malfunction as well as the sort of strange embodiment seen in The Unnamable.
In Beckett et le psychanalyste– which the artist himself read on the comparison (Archimbaud, 119)–Didier Anzieu aligns Beckett’s broken bodies with those of Bacon: ‘Bacon peint des portraits oų les yeux, l’ouïe, la bouche, le nez, la marche, la peau, la posture sont dévastés’ (Anzieu, 151). Several characters, such as Watt and Clov, have the stiff-legged gait of an ataxic, as if malady had lent them their very substance. Molloy finds himself crawling through the woods, Hamm cannot stand, Nagg and Nell are again trunks, in cylindrical containers. The posture of May in Footfalls, over which Beckett laboured for so long with Whitelaw (Haynes, 43), is as contorted as many of Bacon’s figures. This brief list of pathological specimens recalls us to what James Knowlson calls Beckett’s ‘long-standing curiosity about medical matters [. . . whereby] Anything abnormal or macabre fascinated him’ (Knowlson, 668). This preoccupation with oddity is shared by Bacon, who also repeatedly turned to the clinically strange to establish the common, and so ‘at one time haunted medical bookshops in search of an ever greater precision in the portrayal of extreme states’ (Russell, 56). Michael Peppiatt confirms that the artist ‘loved to talk to scientists and doctors [...and] at one point he was a regular reader of The Lancet’ (Peppiatt, 221), whilst Russell records Bacon’s possession of the unpromising-sounding sourcebook Positioning in Radiography, which illustrated the advised poses for successful medical x-rays (Russell, 113). For both Beckett and Bacon the medical exception often provides the physiological exemplar; the distortion stresses the everyday condition of being clothed in tissue.
In conversation with Michel Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992, Bacon responds at length to a comparison between his own works and those of Beckett. Betraying an extensive knowledge of Beckett’s work, he nevertheless denies any affinity, claiming, ‘I’ve always been amazed at this comparison between Beckett and myself’ (Archimbaud, 116). He admits to having ‘seen Waiting for Godot which I didn’t by the way find interesting, and some of his shorter plays which were, in my opinion, much better’ (Archimbaud, 117). Unable–or unwilling–to recognise the common attachment to renditions of embodiment and affect, he speculates of Beckett: ‘the idea may have been a good one but I wonder if, in his case, the cerebral didn’t take too much precedence over the rest [. . . ] there’s something too systematic and too intelligent about him, which is perhaps what’s always made me uncomfortable’ (Archimbaud, 118). He goes on to recall that, There was a very good actress here in London who performed in them. Beckett often used to write for her. Unfortunately, I no longer remember her name. They were very short pieces, not more than half an hour long, barely twenty minutes, and they weren’t bad at all. (Archimbaud, 117).
While
the name eludes the ailing Bacon,
whose death was to cut short this series of conversations, he is clearly
referring to Billie Whitelaw. The short works that
Bacon may have seen in London thus include Play, Footfalls,
Analysis of Beckett’s awareness of Bacon is altogether more speculative. Indeed, I can establish by inference only one occasion that Beckett would have seen a painting by Bacon. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was among the earliest purchasers of Bacon’s work, buying the striking Painting 1946 two years after its composition (Peppiatt, 118). Beckett visited the museum with Sidney Meyers, the editor of Film, in 1964 (Knowlson, 525) where he would have seen in Bacon’s painting what resembles a sinister re-imagining of Winnie from Happy Days, here turned into the upper body of an umbrella-shaded dictator. Submerged in shadow rather than sand, the figure has an altogether more explicit relationship to death, surrounded not by domestic flotsam but by the fragments of one or many carcasses. Apart from this likely encounter we are restricted to the examination of Bacon’s Parisian profile and the run of exhibitions that Beckett may have attended.
To be sure, though, neither of these are inconsequential. In a poll conducted by the Parisian magazine Connaissance des Arts in the late 1960s, with Beckett also nearing the peak of his renown, Bacon was voted the most important living artist in the world (Peppiatt, 233). This trend in public opinion was confirmed by Bacon’s full retrospective at Paris’s prestigious Grand Palais in 1971, only the second living artist, after Picasso, to be accorded such an honour (Peppiatt, 232). Furthermore, this was only the most prominent of numerous acclaimed Paris exhibitions held during Beckett’s lifetime. These include shows at Galerie Rive Droite (1957), Galerie Maeght (1966–67) – which owned a significant number of Bram van Veldes (Knowlson, 452)–Galerie Claude Bernard (1977), Galerie Maeght Lelong (1984) and Galerie Lelong (1987). One might also consider the possibility that Beckett encountered Bacon’s paintings in London or in any of many German exhibitions. Although we have no record of Beckett’s attendance at any or all of these exhibitions, the extensive profile of Bacon in Paris could not have escaped Beckett’s notice. Nevertheless, the image, if not the fact, of influence is present in the many shrieking mouths and contorted bodies shown to such widespread acclaim in Paris only the year before Not I was begun.
The mouth is undoubtedly the most prominent fixation shared by both artists, whether it is the jabbering panic of Not I or the screaming gape of Bacon’s numerous popes. The television adaptation of Beckett’s play, starring Billie Whitelaw, was produced by Tristram Powell in February 1975 for the BBC (Knowlson, 1996, 620), who screened it as the third part of Shades – alongside Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds. . . – on BBC 2 on 17 April 1977. It has a particularly obsessive focus, the omission of the shrugging figure of the auditor leaving only the mouth, whose slick sogginess, lubricating its own mechanism as it runs, is relished by the camera. The effect was so significant, Whitelaw recalls, that it elicited Beckett’s only comment on her work in her entire career. After watching the film, ‘out of the darkness, came one word, spoken with an Irish accent a whisper that just managed to float across to me: “Miraculous”‘ (Whitelaw, 132). Enlarged to fill the screen, the mesmerising motion of the lips as they manage the words, draws the eyes with the suggestive swell of an obscenity. Indeed, the transition to television quite literally bloats the mouth to new proportions, creating a spectacle of magnification that cuts against the manifest smallness of the isolated, spot-lit mouth on stage. Combined with this enlargement, the rhythmic thrusting and opening captures well what Bacon described in portraiture as ‘All the pulsations of a person’ (Peppiatt, 208).
Indeed, that combination of pushing itself out towards its observers, and drawing inwards with that dark central cave is, as Billie Whitelaw notes, ‘strangely sexual and glutinous, slimy and weird, like a crazed, over-sexed- jellyfish’ (Whitelaw, 132). That mixture of protuberance and pull is reinforced by the adaptation for television, which has a valuable serendipity to its manufacture of the mouth’s volume. Although we are likely to forget it in an era of oversized, flattened plasma sets, the play was filmed for a screen that would not only be much smaller than is now normal–albeit larger than life–but curved.
Maintaining that tendency towards the bulge found in both of the corpora, the very medium thus thrusts the image into one’s living room, holding the gaze with its own ocular curve. Indeed, the play’s titular pun thus gains an additional twist in its second format, for now the play makes the television’s dilated image return our stare: our gaze is held by that mesmeric tube whose detractors have bestowed the nickname the ‘devil’s eye’. The sexual overtones of the orifice in Not I are also very much present in Bacon’s many mouths. Many of the rounded mouths in particular, whilst recognisably screaming, are sexually inflected ambiguous holes, both inviting and forbidding penetration. As Michael Peppiatt writes, ‘There can be little doubt that Bacon’s interest in the open mouth was due in large part to its sexual suggestiveness’ (Peppiatt, 142). Quite apart from the multiple functions of any bodily orifice, both Beckett and Bacon were influenced by the same psychologically and physiologically- ambiguous oddity. Amidst his readings in psychology in 1935 (Knowlson, 178) Beckett encountered the folklore notion of the vagina dentata. Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth mentions the figure of the toothed vagina in reference to the neurotic male’s fear of intercourse (Rank, 49), a notion that Beckett added to his psychology notes (Beckett, 1930s). Embodying the dread of castration during–indeed by–the very act of coitus, it is the ambiguous orifice par excellence, at once mouth and genitals, site of pleasure and pain, desire and fear. This fundamentally enigmatic figure is also one of Bacon’s key sources. Rather than a psychoanalytic origin, however, Bacon’s source was already transmuted into painting. The vagina dentata emerges time and again in Picasso’s biomorphic paintings, where the head of the victim/subject is morphed into a ferocious, consuming sex.
The Blessed Virgin Mary in Picasso’s 1930 Crucifixion (Richardson, 399) is an early and spectacular example of these cross-bred body parts, which the artist associated with his lover Olga as their relationship soured. They were painted in the middle of that period of Picasso’s work most favoured by Bacon (Archimbaud, 34–35). Whilst this oddity is undoubtedly one root in the genesis of Beckett and Bacon’s mouths, one must also recognise the specifically oral fixation shown by both. Certainly, Not I makes clear the relish for the peculiarly wide-ranging types of corporeality of this particular orifice, with its combination of wet saliva, hard teeth, fleshy and flexible lips, muscular tongue and non-present hole. This is to say, there is a care not only for ambiguity and curiosity but for specificity and normality; a real captivation with what constitutes the mouth in particular. The fascination with this unique combination of forms–living and not-living, there and not–is also found in Bacon, as if it signifies a property of embodiment that no other feature can. Prominent among Bacon’s sources are photographs featuring, amongst others, the particularly active maw of Joseph Goebbels in full rabid rant; the various shapes, shifts and substances on show as if the extremity and diversity shown cut to the core of the mouth’s essential nature. As in Beckett , the contrast between the part of the mouth is significant, particularly between the flesh and what John Russell refers to in Bacon as ‘the magnificence and purity of the teeth’ (Russell, 56). And, although painting cannot reproduce that significant motion of Beckett’s Not I, it does seek to capture something of the quintessential mobility of the mouth, following Bacon’s statement that ‘I’ve always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the teeth’ (Sylvester, 1987, 50). Most significant are a couple of distinctly oral mouths captured in artworks seen by both Beckett and Bacon.
The first is Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents, held in the Château de Chantilly, which Bacon thought no less than ‘the best human cry in painting’ (Sylvester, 34). He saw it in 1927 when living near to the gallery with a family whose matriarch had first been fascinated by the flamboyant seventeen-year-old Bacon when in Paris, and who had then proceeded to befriend, house, and instruct him in French (Peppiatt, 32). Beckett also admired Poussin immensely, and spent a good deal of time looking at The Entombment in Dublin’s National Gallery (Knowlson, 58). On the 17 June 1934 he visited the Louvre with his brother to look at the extensive collection of Poussins and various Dutch works, and the following day had an outing to Chantilly, where he would have seen The Massacre of the Innocents (Knowlson, 195). The second prominent source for Bacon was the screaming nurse shot on the steps of Odessa harbour in the 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, which he saw first either in Berlin in 1926 or the following year in Paris (Peppiatt, 30). A decade later the film’s groundbreaking director Sergei Eisenstein would have received an application from a rather optimistic Beckett asking to become his assistant (Knowlson, 226), an eagerness that indicates a similar enthusiasm. The esteem in which Beckett held both Poussin and Potemkin places some particularly striking mouths in the author’s extensive mental repository of images, either or both of which may have fed into the central image of Not I alongside the acknowledged Caravaggio canvas, The Decollation of St John the Baptist, which Beckett saw in the cathedral at Valetta whilst holidaying in Malta in 1971 (Haynes, 55; Knowlson, 588).
Indeed, Beckett’s note to James Knowlson in 1973 perhaps implies sources other than Caravaggio: ‘Image of Not I in part suggested by Caravaggio’s Decollation of St John the Baptist’ (Knowlson, 588). Moving on from questions of influence and origin, the better part of comparison lies in a notable agreement in method. In both oeuvres a curved emptiness, undoubtedly related to the cavernous mouth’s curious combination of fleshliness and non-embodiment, becomes a strange sort of non-present prosthetic, stressing the three-dimensionality of the bodies not by extending them, but by containing, restraining and framing them in space. In his book on Bacon, Gilles Deleuze draws attention to the similar settings used by both artists. He writes, ‘Beckett’s Characters and Bacon’s Figures share a common setting, the same Ireland: the round area, the isolator, le dépeupleur’ (Deleuze, 35–6). Evoking both the ‘flattened cylinder’ of The Lost Ones and the notion of a space that strips its occupants of company, the description also points to the curved walls of many of Bacon’s painted rooms, to which one might add the round bed that features so often in the canvases. Indeed, this figure of curved isolation is rarely repeated to better effect than in MoMA’s Painting 1946, which, as Beckett would have seen, contains – and thus gives volume to – its central figure by the use of multiple curved forms. The head is partially obscured by an open umbrella, the foreground is occupied by what look like circular rails, while the figure’s upper body is almost fitted entirely within the cavern of a butchered carcass, opened into a kind of cruciform backdrop. The repetition of such containing forms might even demonstrate a spatial sense to Beckett’s desire to ‘find a form to accommodate the mess’ (Graver and Federman, 219), just as for Bacon, the containers on the canvas contribute to the ‘very, very ordered chaos’ (Kaleidoscope, 1991) he preferred.
Deleuze’s reference, made in 1981, to a specifically Irish space appears to anticipate a comment made by Bacon to David Sylvester in 1986–and again to Michel Archimbaud in 1992 (Archimbaud, 154)–recalling a particularly handsome house his father had bought from his grandmother. Bacon recalls that ‘Farmleigh was a beautiful house where the rooms at the back were all curved: I suppose one never knows about those things, but perhaps this may be one of the reasons why I have often used curved backgrounds in triptychs’ (Sylvester, 184). We might also note that the large Irish house of Beckett’s youth, Cooldrinagh, had curved windows both upstairs and down. One of these upstairs bays may have provided the infant Beckett’s very first light: emerging from his own fleshly confinement into a room illuminated by the arc of an oriel window. To suggest that these glazed curvatures influenced Beckett’s own curved spaces is perhaps to go too far–although of course not as far back as the author’s memories were said to stretch – but his predilection for containing figures in such bowed spaces is repeatedly put to work to figure and figure out his fictional bodies. Nagg and Nell in Endgame are contained in those ‘ghastly’ cylindrical bins, Winnie in Happy Days is trapped in a cone-like mound, Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape is shown in an illuminated circle given by the overhead light, the three figures in Play are in shapely, almost human-esque urns, and The Unnamable’s narrator tries to pass off its embodiment for a while by maintaining that it is propped up in an urn outside a restaurant. To consider the medium of television in this way, the multi-dimensional curvature of the screen – a distinct protuberance with curved edges – might be said to hold and frame the curves of the mouth in Not I, giving an actual volume to the image of the mouth on screen. (The television screen is also, of course, yet another curved window that appears to illuminate the dark confines of its interior.) In a similar vein, the visual persecution of the title character of Eh Joe is as much a product of containment as enlargement, the organic shape of the screen giving substance to both the character and, importantly, the harassment itself. The stronger Joe’s persecution grows, the more uncomfortably he is squeezed into and confined within the television’s box, gaining an increasing fleshliness as his face comes to occupy ever more screen space. Although cubes are present in the corpus, as they are in Bacon’s, it is the organic and swollen arc to which both particularly gravitate. To take an example of where curve and line meet, we might consider how in Imagination Dead Imagine each body lies within its own warped semi-sphere; that is, in a semi-circle on the horizontal plane and a semi-ovoid on the vertical. The position of these pleated creatures is described in the form of vectors, given in relation to the geometry of the rotundas they are placed in. This arrangement suggests strongly that they are embodied by their containment. Thus, after the mapping of one folded frame in the space ACB we are told there is ‘the white body of a woman finally’ (Beckett, 1995, 184), that ‘finally’ suggesting that the efforts of narrating the coordinates within the dome conjures the inhabitant herself. Like cowering or imprisoned versions of Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, the characters are given substance by their location within the geometry of the circle, albeit by an arrangement consisting of straight lines. This is also an important alteration of the unnamable’s bulbous hypothetical embodiment, as the later human frames are given substance by their points of contact with the curved lines of their circular habitat.
So, while they become less curved themselves, turned into a series of vectors–head to arse, arse to feet–they are conjured, indeed fleshed out, by mapping this geometry within a curved space. As a model for abstraction this is almost certainly not what Beckett had in mind when he compared his work to that of Kandinsky. But there is, even in Bacon’s resistance to analysis, a curious compulsion to place his work alongside Beckett’s, as Jane Hale has argued (Hale, 96). Thus it is with a resistance to classification and explication that the painter’s biographer records an inadvertent Beckettian echo, ‘Bacon reiterated throughout his life that his painting “meant” nothing, “said” nothing, and that he himself had nothing to “say.” “I’m not an Expressionist, you see, as some people say,” he would insist, sometimes adding as a last flourish: “After all, I have nothing to express”‘ (Peppiatt, 98). But the preponderance of bodies within both oeuvres demands an account of what, with their curious shapes and settings, they are doing here, in a space that, both have argued, has abandoned the task of expression. Beckett and Bacon share a process of modelling the body that includes reference to a broken or distorted model, and a predilection for swooping shapes in both the figure itself and its quasi-prosthetic containment. The repetition of these mutual acts of mutilation and distortion stresses (and distresses) the physical at the expense of conventional bodies and settings, forging a meaty mimesis of the atypical subject. Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of the television Not I that the use of a medium that, unlike theatre, does not present embodiment itself creates such a striking rendition of substantial embodiment. The enlarged and isolated image displays the meat of corporeality down to the spit and dribble that theatrical scale would dissemble. The very insubstantiality of the medium – constituted of no more than dots of coloured light–becomes the means by which physicality is so strongly and viscerally created. There is, in Beckett’s increased use of television, surely a technological descendent of his call for visible artifice in Waiting for Godot, where acting ‘has got to be done artificially, balletically, Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality’ (Haynes, 108). In this taste too, his tactics are also common to Bacon, whose portrayal of the subject is rendered by the overt, artificial distortion of illustrative forms: ‘I would like to make my pictures more and more artificial [...] The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you’ve got of its looking real’ (Sylvester, 146 and 148). The achievement of an art that is effective not despite its artifice but because of it is the talent and taste of both figures.
If Beckett’s creatures can be thought of as abstract, then, it is certainly not in the sense of being opposed to the concrete. On the contrary, abstraction here seems to mean the condensation of physicality; the obsessive, distorting focus not only on appearance but on the sensations of being clothed in flesh, and of bulging into three dimensions. It is to the notion of sensation, then, that we must finally appeal in this juxtaposition. In a letter to Alan Schneider – and repeated elsewhere – Beckett wrote that Not I is ‘Addressed less to the understanding than to the nerves of the audience which should in a sense share her bewilderment’ (Harmon, 283). Likewise, Bacon repeatedly described his images of faces in neural terms, as ‘an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester, 12). As both artists make explicit, then, their depictions of bodies signify not through reference to a bloodless or theoretical notion of physicality but through the observer’s own physical participation. Their aesthetic bodies work not because they resemble a particular person or even present an actual body, but because they depict the condition of embodiment itself, and because they excite through the sparking of our own synapses.
WORKS CITED
Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski (eds) (2006), The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, London: Faber.
Anzieu, Didier (1992), Beckett et le psychanalyste, Paris: Archimbaud, Menthe.
Archimbaud, Michel (1993), Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, London: Phaidon Press.
Beckett, Samuel (1930s), ‘Psychology Notes’, Trinity College Dublin, TCD MS 10971/8.
Beckett, Samuel (1986), Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber.
Beckett, Samuel [1959] (1994), Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, London: Calder Publications.
Beckett, Samuel (1995), Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press.
Deleuze, Gilles [1981] (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London: Continuum.
Graver, Lawrence and Raymond Federman, eds. (1979), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Gruen, John (1969), ‘Samuel Beckett talks about Beckett’, Vogue, 154:10, pp. 210-11
Lynn
'A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials'
Bacon, Beckett and Spurious Freemasonry in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

Series: Reimagining Ireland - Volume 6
Publishers:
ISBN 978-3-03911-854-0 br
The
Author
Lynn Brunet is an Australian art historian whose research examines the coupling of trauma and ritual in modern and contemporary art and literature. She was a full-time lecturer in art history and theory from 1994 to 2006 and she is a practising artist. She lives and works in Melbourne.
Book synopsis
The artist Francis
Bacon (1909-1992) and the writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) both convey in their
work a sense of foreboding and confinement in bleak, ritualistic spaces. This
book identifies many similarities between the spaces and activities they evoke
and the initiatory practices of fraternal orders and secret societies that were
an integral part of the social landscape of the Ireland experienced by both men
during childhood.
Many of these Irish societies modelled their ritual structures and symbolism on
the Masonic Order. Freemasons use the term 'spurious Freemasonry' to designate
those rituals not sanctioned by the Grand Lodge. The Masonic author Albert
Mackey argues that the spurious forms were those derived from the various cult
practices of the classical world and describes these initiatory practices as 'a
course of severe and arduous trials'. This reading of Bacon's and Beckett's work
draws on theories of trauma to suggest that there may be a disturbing link
between Bacon's stark imagery, Beckett's obscure performances and the unofficial
use of Masonic rites.
Contents
Trauma, depression and confusion in the life and work of Bacon and Beckett - Irish initiatory traditions - Francis Bacon, Masonic Royal Arch rites and the Passing of the Veils - Francis Bacon, Men of No Popery and the Irish warrior tradition - Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: a parody of Royal Arch rites? - Samuel Beckett's plays: ritual movements, subjective states, torture and trauma - Druidic rites in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable - Bacon and Beckett compared in the light of Druidism and the Gnostic tradition.
Introduction
This study is the product of a developing body of research and a new theory within the creative arts that proposes that particular artists and writers, especially those who appear to express a deep and confusing sense of anxiety and despair, may be representing the traces of initiatory rites found in various fraternities, religious groups, secret societies and cults.
Often neither
artist nor their audience is fully aware of the implications of their work. Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett could each be described as driven by a powerful
creative force underpinned by a sense of disturbance that has not yet been fully
understood. Both have plumbed the darkest levels of their psyches and
transferred their responses onto the canvas, be it
This book asks whether the sense of disturbance created in their work could be associated with traumatic exposure to initiatory rites that were commonly practiced by many secret societies in early twentieth-century Ireland. As there is no evidence to suggest that either man ever joined any secret societies this study asks whether they could have been exposed to the rituals in some other context.
As anthropologists explain, the use of initiatory rites applied to children and accompanies by a series of frightening tricks, enacted as rites of passage into adulthood, is a common practice in many cultures. These rites can often be painful and terrifying affairs and are generally conducted by specially appointed ritual elders. Many societies frown on such practices, regarding them as a sign of a backward culture, one steeped in superstition and fear, and claim a more enlightened view where the child is spared such brutal horrors. But what if similar practices lie behind the work of Bacon and Beckett? The reading here suggests that there may be the traces in their work of a clandestine initiation process, one that draws on a combination of Masonic rites, Druidic lore, Irish mythology, and biblical and classical themes, blended together with a liberal dose of cruelty.
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Francis Bacon: Order, chance and the abject body |
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by Silverman, Jennifer M., M.A., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2010. Paperback: 92 pages Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (3 Sept 2010) ISBN-10: 3639287088 ISBN-13: 978-363928708 |
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The Accelerated Grimace
In time for the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain, Grey Gowrie publishes his introduction for the 1988 Moscow exhibition in English for the first time
by Grey Gowrie, The Alligator, 16th January 2009
In September 1988, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the British Council organised an exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon in Moscow. Bacon (1909-1992) planned to attend the opening but decided at the last minute not to. Grey Gowrie, a Minister for the Arts in Margaret Thatcher’s administration and by this time European chairman of Sotheby’s, was a friend of the painter and represented him. Lord Gowrie also provided the introductory essay to the catalogue of the exhibition which was translated into Russian. It is republished here in English for the first time to coincide with the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Famished for unofficial art, and no doubt bored by Soviet programming, more than 100 million people tuned into the Moscow exhibition on television.
The 20th century has been called the age of anxiety. Certainly it is an age of extremes. Life lived against the edge, the extremity of the human experience is, even vicariously, electric with nervous stress. Scientific progress is double-edged. In the industrialised world people live longer, are better nourished, entertain ideas, at least, of developing their creative potential. Through film and television and the pervasive influence of photography they are bombarded with images of what life can or should be. At the same time they are made aware that this civilisation of cars and central heating and pain killing drugs has entertained more horrors than any since the dark ages. Visual technology transmits the parts of the globe which have been left out of the development race or, worse still, allows people to view skyscrapers and bars and hospitals beside open-drained hovels only a few metres away. Throughout the advanced societies, the great central images which once governed people’s lives have cracked or broken down: the religious icons which reminded them, however briefly, of matters richer than their own concerns. We live in an age of political and scientific materialism which is nevertheless uncomfortably aware of the psychological limits of materialism. We are aware of the physical limits as well, of an earth threatened by tools of peace as well as weapons of war. No wonder that we are an anxious species, or that artists, who hold up mirrors to our condition, are nervous themselves of attempting those images of an idealised experience which art used to provide.
Since the death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has more than any other painter provided the age with an image, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, of its accelerated grimace. The key to his work is its ambition. He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events. At the same time he has turned his back on the abstract artist’s indulgence in decorative introspection: the painting whose principal subject is itself and the fact that someone painted it. Although his subject matter, the visual impulse which triggers his attempts to fashion an image on canvas, derives from his own sensibility and is to that extent egoistic, Bacon is the least narcissistic of artists. He uses some recollection or preoccupation which is at hand, so to speak, as a prompt for an act of painting. But it is the paint alone, and what happens as a result of its being pushed around on the canvas, which can provide an image of great externality and force, influencing the viewer with a life of its own and doing this independently of the artist. Bacon is in some respects closer to being a sculptor than a painter. The background to his paintings, which are applied at the end, act as a kind of plinth for the images poised upon them. It is sad that Bacon’s eminence occasions, as is often the case with major artists, so much photographic reproduction of his work. The physical grandeur, the sensual texture of his paint outweighs the often horrifying imagery it encapsulates. In reproduction it is the imagery that tells.
“He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events”
Bacon is descended from his great Elizabethan namesake, Shakespeare’s contemporary and an ancestor of the English scientific enlightenment. In his late 70’s now, though looking and talking like a man fifteen years younger, he lives alone in two rooms in central London. He works continually at present, sees a few close friends, eats and drinks very well, gambles with less Doskovieskian intensity than before. He is a man of great but narrow erudition, narrow because he is impatient of anything less than masterpieces and impatient also of masterpieces which he cannot harness to his own art. He is an asthmatic who dislikes the countryside: an urban, noctambular spirit. His bleak view of human life does not stop him enjoying it; indeed he has said in an interview that the aim of art – however violent or sad or grim - is to produce joy. He is good company and generous with money in the way of one who has had to hustle for a living in youth and now has more than he needs. Politically, he is an old-fashioned aristocratic liberal with a low threshold of boredom. He has said that in recent years he has supported the Conservatives, because they are marginally less interfering of individual liberty than political groups on the Left; he is savage about the way modern states interfere with citizens’ lives for their own good. He has refused to be honoured. The British admire his eminence but do not know quite what to make of him: an elegant, wealthy, rather conservative gentleman who paints such scary pictures.
“His bleak view of human life does not stop him enjoying it; indeed he has said in an interview that the aim of art is to produce joy”
Nevertheless he is the greatest living painter and the most important Britain has produced since Turner. This is a large claim but it is shared by a remarkable number of people round the world, many of them painters, rather few of them British. To us natives, it is still difficult to recognise how distinct Bacon and the sculptor Henry Moore have made us in the visual arts. Our cultural establishment is musical and literary in outlook; we take our theatrical tradition, and Shakespeare, for granted; since the Beatles we can command a world stage in popular music. Seeing and touching, by contrast, belong to the slightly seditious universe of pure sensation and both our puritan and idealistic strands of thought make us suspect appearances. Happily, these two great men have encouraged more than one generation of artists now to build on their achievements and make international names.
Of the two, Bacon is the more surprising. Henry Moore’s work is permeated with the English love of nature. He gives simple and powerful signals about the correspondence between landscapes and female figures. He reinforces life’s primal effects, as if the poet Wordsworth were working in stone. Francis Bacon is not a romantic artist in this way, although he shares the aristocratic intuitiveness of later romantics like Baudelaire. He has the nihilism and gaiety of certain 18th century minds. Nature, when it appears at all in his work, is both threatening and monotonous: purposeless matter unrelieved by the flicker of civilisation’s match. One of his greatest paintings, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is a picture of a tree. It demonstrates the way colour, not drawing, is movement in painting, and how a tree’s sinews suggest muscular movement. But try to people this landscape and you are in the world of Beckett’s Godot or King Lear. A more recent work, Sand Dune (1981), is a picture of sand encroaching a building by the sea. The sand is all movement, dynamic; the building is being eaten and that will be the end of it because nature is in the business of demolition. To fly in the face of nature you need luck and the peculiar courage to stare her down. To adapt a line of the poet Thom Gunn, a few friends and a few with historical names have had the courage. A number of artists – Cimabue, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso – have looked without blinking. Otherwise, existence is the same as nature: food, drink, territory, sex and status. Bacon is an artist of endgame. His work is a lifespan distant from Moore’s family groups or mothers-with-child.
Classical and romantic are hoary old terms but they provide us with a shorthand, yet to be superseded, for a profound and permanent divide, a creative conflict, within our sensibility. The classical approach represents tradition and training. Its focus is on the human clay and on proportions suitable for the configuration of the body. ‘The lengthened shadow of a man/Is history, said Emerson,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, the great classical poet of our century and one who has always haunted Bacon, in his poem Sweeney Erect. The fascination of the classical artist is the way he bends tradition and training to his own purpose, be that subjective and self-realising, or objective in the sense of realising or trying to imitate a world beyond the self. The permanent things in nature are birth, copulation and death; the ruins of time, man’s time, are what interest the classicist and provide him with his forms. The romantic says, with the 19th century poet Hopkins, that the sensibility soars above its terrestrial confines: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/, Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.’
“Nature is in the business of demolition. To fly in the face of nature you need luck and the peculiar courage to stare her down”
This being the case, the classical artist is preoccupied with realism. Bacon is passionate for realism, only he would argue that now photography has made reportage redundant you need realism of another kind: the ability to capture the emotional energy thrown off by any living presence. Added to this is the energy which works of art generate themselves. In a recent interview he said:
‘I have just finished three portraits of a friend and the problem, as usual, was how to make an image and keep the likeness. To combine the two is what creates tension and excitement.’
The Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1988) is as ‘like’ as a photograph but with so much density of form that it has an object-life of its own. Because of the force of his painting, some commentators have confused Bacon with the Expressionists. They attribute to him an unsettling, northern sensibility. Bacon insists this is wrong. He is adamant that he is not an expressionist, believing in truthfulness rather than effects. The disturbing quality of his work comes partly from what Michel Leiris, quoting Bacon himself, has called his ‘exhilarated despair…the painful yet lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity.’ It also comes, more prosaically, from what Bacon would see as his failure to win the fight between the raw material of oil paint and the mind’s eye. When Bacon does win, as in the Edwards portrait, his paintings are both awesome and tender, moving in the highest and most humane way. Yet even in the most violent pictures, the distortions of his figures are implicit in their own flesh. This is where he comes closest to Picasso.
To an existential artist like Bacon, chance is very important, both as a rubric for the universe (his hobby is roulette) and for what it brings about on the canvas. Lying Figure (1969) is one of a number of works painted in the 1960’s in which a naked, usually female figure lies on a bed, the head south to the viewer, limbs akimbo, bed and body seemingly about to slide down a great escarpment of carpet. Facial features are blurred as if they and the pigment from which they are formed had been pummelled into the final image. (This is often literally the case, since Bacon paints with rags and his hands as well as with brush). Stripped of their associations, not least the threat to civilised values and human dignity suggested by hypodermic digging into vein, these paintings have the vibrance – the beauty even – of colour which early in his career Bacon found in a medical textbook about diseases of the mouth. Bacon’s surgeon’s aesthetics and sang-froid take some getting used to. They are worth it because they are bound up with his special lucidity of purpose. Look how close oil paint comes to the stuff of life, he seems to say. You are used to this happening with clouds and hills in landscape painting. Why not discover it with the body as well? If the painter is lucky, impulses of memory and desire may allow him to manipulate the stuff so as to trap elusive and temporal personalities, and our feelings about them. Bacon does not paint from life. His subjects are a few friends and himself, painted over and over, in some cases after they have died, from snapshots and memory. Bacon himself looks very like a Francis Bacon. In this respect he is close to his admired contemporary, the painter and sculptor Giacometti. And as John Russell wrote in his book Francis Bacon (1971), ‘Bacon when he wishes is one of the great painters of human flesh and can give it a kind of creamy resonance, a fulfilled soft firmness, for which both Ingres and Courbet had also been searching.’
Ambition, in art, requires not only high seriousness but sufficient personal confidence and aplomb to take on the masters at their own game. Bacon’s belief in un-accommodated man, his identification during the two decades after the war with London’s low life, his gambling, his generosity with money and caustic wit, his frightening ability to drink a great deal and remain at the height of his powers, his age-cheating appearance – all play their part in his anti-heroic legend. By contrast, his career has been altogether steadfast and determined. He was a late starter. He was born and spent much of his childhood in Ireland, where his father trained racehorses. There is a lot of Ireland in Bacon but it is reasonable to think of Bacon as Irish only in the way of thinking of Camus as Algerian. He was educated haphazardly and travelled about Europe in the late 1920s. Berlin and Paris held his imagination and Paris remains the city which most admires his work.
He made his historical debut about 1930 as an interior decorator and furniture designer; he worked in what is today called the Art Deco style, a popularisation of cubism and geometric abstraction. He studied the art of Picasso, at that time involved in attenuated semi-geometrical figure paintings which were beginning to look haunted and surreal. Inspired, he taught himself to paint. His early work, nearly all of which he subsequently destroyed, gave abstracted hominoid shapes a similarly heightened air – sometimes by little references to the Western religious tradition. His work was not well received and he was turned down for the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. He himself dates his career from the 1944 triptych Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in the Tate Gallery.
“Bacon’s belief in un-accommodated man, his identification during the two decades after the war with London’s low life, his gambling, his generosity with money and caustic wit, his frightening ability to drink a great deal and remain at the height of his powers, his age-cheating appearance – all play their part in his anti-heroic legend”
At first glance, this work still owes much to Picasso. It is a study, like the paintings and sketches of the Guernica period, of how to assault the nervous system of an onlooker with formal equivalents for pain, mental stress, distortions not of art merely but of daily living and his own hold upon it. Closer acquaintance suggest that here is someone who has looked hard and imaginatively at the Baroque tradition of wrenching the figure until it is, literally, dragged towards that self-extension known as the sublime. Although the triptych is a very strong, even a terrifying picture, one is at least as much aware of the scepticism and control underlying the element of shock. It is as if the artist were playing ‘touch’ with theatrical excess and learning to paint on the dangerous Baroque margin between going very far and going too far.
Bacon then dropped the linear, attenuated style of the triptych in favour of something much more solid. He was discovering oil paint’s correspondence with the density of the observed world: the Bourbet road to nature. Key paintings were Figure Study I and Figure Study II (both 1945-6), the latter also known as the Magdalene. These paintings seem to have inaugurated the interest in clothes (no other 20th century painter has rendered them so attentively) which reflected Bacon’s preoccupation with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X and led to his own robed and enthroned popes, Head VI (1949) for example. A strong formal understanding of the kind of space clothes are designed to occupy draws shocking, and effective, attention to the absence of any owner – or the presence, in the case of Figure Study II, of the wrong owner. “´What modern man wants,`” Bacon has said, quoting Valéry, “´is the grin without the cat`: the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” Throughout his career, he has attempted to combine psychological immediacy – his chamber of horrors side – with whatever formal mechanics are most likely to allow the viewer to retain the pained image until it moves into memory and becomes a way of looking at the world. In the years following the war this search led Bacon to solidity at all cost. The Magdalene has the poise of a Giotto figure, so much presence that the umbrella half-concealing her becomes a convincing frame and not the gratuitous surreal emblem for which it is sometimes mistaken. Thirty years later we see it again, in the left panel of Triptych (1974-77): quarry for Bacon iconographers, along with light bulbs, blinds, plumbing, cricket pads and newspapers.
In the following decade, Bacon juxtaposed violent historical signs of our era with the gravities, hollow maybe, but socially and spiritually well anchored, of earlier epochs of painting. His habit of working from photographs and news clippings is everywhere apparent. Himmler and Goebbels, silent or in oratorical flood; Nadar’s captivating photograph of Baudelaire’s sidelong look; people rushing for shelter during street fighting in Petrograd in 1917; Marius Maxwell’s photographs of animals in equatorial Africa; the screaming nurse from Eisenstein’s film Potemkin; a postcard of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – all appear and reappear as if they were slabs from some lost fresco of devastating formality and scale. There is the same feeling of a civilisation undergoing nervous breakdown that we find in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin.’) although the prevailing mood is relish rather than disgust. Bacon would bring technical devices out into the open and reinstate them as images. The famous boxes which circumscribe his male nudes, popes, business executives and monkeys start life as methods of containing space and end it as prisons out of Kafka or, prophetically, scenes from the trial of Eichmann. His brush strokes become rapid at this time (he does no preliminary drawing) and blur into one another. So originates the suggestion of the flesh poised, like that of M. Valdemar in Poe’s horrifying tale, on the edge of putrefaction
“There is the same feeling of a civilisation undergoing nervous breakdown that we find in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land”
In recent years the work has in the main turned from public to private scenes, although the image of President Wilson in Triptych (1986-87) must be one of Bacon’s greatest paintings. Bacon’s originality is on as firm ground here, and slightly less susceptible to the aesthetics of shock. It can be said against him, however, that his paintings of men defecating or vomiting lack the grace which Degas found in women’s exercise of natural functions. They look as if their purpose were epater le bourgeois and they do. Memory traces of friends, nudes and the urban interiors which provide a natural setting for all but our least superficial human encounters are recreated, hit and miss, in the large body of work which made his international name. Bacon is unique in this century in his ability to render the indoor, overfed, alcohol-and-tobacco-lined flesh of the average urban male. His painting is how most of us look. Bacon paints beds, platforms, chairs and sofas with the attention Courbet gave to rocks. The effect is a suffocating enclosure: the landscape of hell done as hell’s hotel bedroom; the non-world of Sartre’s Huis Clos and Beckett’s Endgame. The implied theatricality seems to be deliberate. Compositional layout is very much like a stage set; at any moment another figure, bearing hypodermic or ashtray, may enter left or right. Sofas and tables have, like flesh, puffed out and turned flabby, their Art Deco youthfulness long gone. Not surprisingly, the great Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) discovers a theatricality appropriate to its purpose. The Oresteia plays are an abiding inspiration for Bacon, as they are the most powerful image in literature of mankind trapped by its history and its own sensibility. But in general all these interiors reveal a truism of art impossible to over-emphasize. The function of any artistic medium is to make the recipient work: to offer interchange, metamorphosis, the telescopic sliding-together of our perceptions until they are gathered back to their solitary neural source, there to be stored, reprocessed and used.
Like Eliot’s early poetry, Bacon’s paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in which we find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the attempt to endow our diminished psychological circumstances with painting which can achieve the formal grandeur and beauty of texture of the very greatest old masters. These characteristics remain, in his best paintings, long after the initial assault on the system has worn off. When things work, therefore, the quality achieved is joy, which is, as Bacon said it should be, the purpose of art.
The Francis Bacon exhibition is on until 4th January and the Alligator strongly recommends going to see it.
“This
painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest,
the most implacable, lyric artist in late twentieth-century England, perhaps in
all the world. …Bacon is Ruskin’s antitype: in his ferocious sexual
frankness, of course, but most of all in his denial that human life has any
‘higher purpose’, or that art and nature connect us in some way to God”
(Robert Hughes, 2008).
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective (66 paintings and 65
objects from his studio) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET)
seeks to reevaluate the artist’s work based on new interpretations and
archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992. The exhibition was
organized by Gary Tinterow of the MET (along with Chris Stephens and Matthew
Gale of the Tate Britain). The main point of the show is to demonstrate that
Bacon did not lose his force and vitality as a painter after the 1960’s (he
lived until 1992). The show, which succeeds in this goal, has already appeared
at the Tate Britain, London, and the Prado in Madrid.
A major Bacon
retrospective is an event and an important part of such an event includes the
critical reception of it. As such, I’ll not only discuss the show at the MET
(in Section III) but also its critical reception (Section II). Most of New
York’s leading art critics are so charged with predetermined vitriol for Bacon
the man, and for his art, that it seems they would have preferred the show never
took place. Bacon is a challenging artist and it appears that New York critics
were not prepared to meet the challenges laid down by the exhibition.
II. Critical Responses to Bacon’s Centenary Shows
a) New York
Taken as a whole, the
response of New York critics to the MET show is at best unfortunate, and at
worst, embarrassing. The most intelligent and sensitive of the New York
reviewers was Roberta Smith (2009). She explained Bacon’s significant
contributions to artistic representation, including his path-breaking images of
male-male sexuality, but could not stop herself from referring to the artist’s
best known works as barely paintings.
Howard Halle
unfavourably compares Bacon’s works to popular American horror films (Jason
and Freddy Krueger in particular). Halle finds Bacon’s work “hard to take
seriously” and most of his review does not. We learn more a bout Bacon’s
choice of lovers than his art in this review. Halle acknowledges that Bacon was
among the first to foreground photographs as subject matter for painting but
ultimately finds his canvases “a bit of a mess”. In the end Halle finds it
all “oppressive”.
Lance Esplund (2009)
calls the Bacon show “a histrionic horror show”. Like other critics it is
the surface tortures on the body in Bacon’s painting that Esplund finds most
objectionable. Bacon’s influence has been a bad one says Esplund as he has led
a generation “to take the path of least resistance”. Like many critics
labouring under the burden of American mythologies of abstraction from an
earlier generation of critics (Rosenberg and Greenberg in particular), Esplund
is bothered by Bacon’s “mannerism”. Why is it that calling an artist a
mannerist today in America is as damning as calling a politician a “liberal”
there? Is it such a terrible thing for an artist to find his or her idiom and to
elaborate upon it in ways that show us how the work was made? I think even
Barnett Newman would be amazed at his lingering influence on New York critics
today. Must all painting be flat, abstract, and look as though any one artist
could have produced all of the works in a room?
Jerry Saltz says that Bacon is more of a cartoonist than a great artist (Saltz, 2009). Bacon is “an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst”. What seems to touch a nerve with Saltz, who claims to have also seen the Bacon show at the Tate and the Prado (for someone who dislikes Bacon’s work he certainly goes out of his way to see it), is the tortured nature of Bacon’s figures at which viewers “gape in wonder”. Americans are perhaps more sensitive about images of tortured figures since photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse by American GIs, at Abu Ghraib prison, grabbed headlines in the world’s magazines and newspapers. Perhaps Americans have not yet come to terms with being torturers and would rather that such things happen quietly, elsewhere in the night. The future of the naïve posture of American exceptionalism may depend on it.
Saltz offers up perhaps
the most shallow critical comment of the year when he adds: “Bacon has no idea
what to do with the edges of his paintings”. If Bacon’s edges trouble Saltz
one can only wonder how he feels about all the edges of geometric abstraction.
Ironically, British critic Adrian Searle (2008) notes that the edges of
Bacon’s canvases are as controlled as those of Barnett Newman!
Saltz
says Bacon stagnated after the 1960’s – a ludicrous claim as I show in
Section III). Mark Rothko is invoked in whose shadow Bacon “seems mannered,
conservative, simplistic”. The presence of Rothko is interesting here in that
Saltz accuses Bacon of ceasing to innovate. That said Bacon’s Blood
on the Sidewalk and a late Rothko sit rather well beside one
another.
Jed Perl (2009) charges Bacon with “preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism”. Bacon produced, says Perl: “not paintings… [but] rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti: angst for dummies”. Perl, who has erected for himself a lofty reputation as one of America’s foremost priggs, doesn’t like the “fact” (which is never established), that Bacon, like Caravaggio “is admired not because he was a good painter but because he was a bad boy”. To me this is utter nonsense. Bacon’s social “respectability” seems to still be an issue in New York – it is interesting that Perl chose the gay Caravaggio as another overrated “bad boy”. Perhaps what troubles Perl, and the right wing magazine he writes for, is that he might have to sincerely engage with Bacon’s homosexuality to take his art seriously. Perl, like many of the other New York critics, won’t allow Bacon the status of a painter and here he puts him in very good company as he has denied the same rank to Gerhard Richter (Perl, 2002).
If Bacon is aggressive it is only in shoving our face into an uncertain rendering of what we are – in all of our unspectacular, unholy, ignoble bestiality. Bacon’s Crucifixion represents not only his positive encounter with Picasso’s work but, in displaying the dead Christian God as Soutine presented a carcass of beef (Jesus as meat), the artist stresses the lack of holiness, nobility, and hence increases the kind of uncertainty that those who ascribe divinity to Jesus Christ attempt to stave off. Perl wants no uncertainty, no irony, nor anything unsettled – while living in a country up to its neck is all of these things. But that is the point isn’t it? Many American critics find Bacon so hard to take today because he painted unsettling and uncertain images which are like portraits of not only his own life – but the living life of history today. Many Americans have had enough of that history – it ended, they hope, with the beginning of the new order on the morning of September 12, 2001. For Perl Bacon leads a revulsion against painting and refuses to probe the meaning of Bacon’s remark that (like someone who has just finished eating a steak) “we live off one another”.
What is striking about
most of the New York based reviews is that they do not often mention the
paintings (if so only one or two) and objects on view. It is as though most
critics attending the Bacon show at the MET had an axe to grind with Bacon and
their mind was made up before going to the museum. I wonder if it is really
Bacon the New York critics detest or is it the fact that he reminds us just how
intolerable life has become – even in the freest and bravest of all nations.
The isolated figures in “cages and boxes” make Perl, like so many other
critics, uncomfortable. “Shock tactics” Perl says. Maybe so, but with all
those gaping mouths on the gallery goer’s faces maybe what we have here is a
genuine case of “shock and awe”.
b) Critical responses to Bacon at the TATE Britain.
While London too experienced a horrific terror attack (7/7) the damage done to New York by the attacks of 9/11 may have done significant harm to the city’s aspirations to be a world cultural capital. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (New York’s famous 9/11 mayor) perhaps indicated best the damage done to New Yorker’s higher cultural aspirations when he called for censorship (a decency panel) in deciding what could hang on the walls on New York’s museums. Most of New York’s art critics would not openly support such a position of course but it is interesting that the response to the current Bacon show has come together as one loud and pathetic plea: “please… just make it go away!”
Unlike their American
counterparts, the British critics tended to focus more sincerely on the
paintings on display and to take seriously the new research on Bacon which the
MET show also stressed. Unlike most American reviewers, who often went out of
their way to deride Bacon the man and the painter, the British critics arrive at
his work with an acknowledgement that his art is simply an accepted aspect of
contemporary culture (as are the Rolling Stones, the Internet, Picassos, or
Americans. The British critics write with an élan and cosmopolitanism that we
once would have expected from now increasingly insular New York. To the Brits
the fact that many view humanity as just another animal in a universe without
God, subject to the same urges and violence (Bacon’s understanding), is an
accepted (if intolerable) aspect of existence. The British responses to the
Bacon show did not seek to protect the public from Bacon [the message of New
York critics is clearly “avoid this show”] but rather to see him in a new
light (the focus of the exhibition). It is not the case that the British critics
like Bacon because he is British and the American’s dislike him as a
foreigner. While a little of that may underwrite the position of the reviewers
what is fundamentally different about the British reviews is their willingness
to take Bacon seriously – something the American critics so refuse to do and
it prevents them from penetrating the surface of his canvases.
Among British critics
John McAuliffe (2008) is typical in his focus on the art on display rather than
feeling uncomfortable with Bacon’s “bad boy” reputation or his images.
McAuliffe demands a show that does more with the artist and his work –
especially his relation to abstract art which Bacon came very close to at times
despite the care he took to express distain for it. While the show does deal
with abstraction McAuliffe is right – much more could have been done with this
artist who straddled both figurative and abstract realms (but not necessarily
realism).
John Molyneux (2008), writing from a leftist perspective, encourages the Left not to reject Bacon’s work. Molyneux goes on to make an interesting, if unconvincing, argument that Bacon is staring down alienation as a man who takes on the horror of the world. In Bacon Molyneux finds hope for resistance. In Britain, apparently, even the socialists approve of Bacon’s art. One can only wonder: Do New York socialists, their newspapers having long ago been forcibly closed down during a succession of communist witch-hunts, like Bacon too?
Rachel Campbell-Johnson (2008) tellingly, in strong contrast to her American counterparts, penetrates the shocking and disturbing aspects of Bacon’s oeuvre and finds in it philosophical depth and sumptuousness. The straightforward correlations between art and life which so occupied American reviewers are found to be reductive by Campbell-Johnson. Indeed, a key point of the show is that Bacon’s work derived from images he encountered and kept in his studio as much as from his life. Unlike the New York critics, Campbell-Johnson analyzes and penetrates her own biases and fears to take seriously the fact that Bacon offered us a unique depiction of the meaninglessness of life in modern times. Typical only of the British critics she isn’t embarrassed when she admires Bacon and his work.
Tom Lubbock (2008) notes
(unable to anticipate what was to come out of New York in a few months), that
mature critics and gallery goers have experienced a great change of view toward
his art, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Lubbock says
that Bacon’s work, which “used to look like death” now “looks like life
in abundance”. Lubbock, like none of the New York critics, delves into
Bacon’s work to find not merely violence and things that disturb the faint of
heart, but also comedy, tenderness, and the artist’s generosity. Like most
London based critics Lubbock refuses to be distracted by the theatricality of
Bacon’s images as most New York critics were (by their own admission they went
looking for it). Lubbock though seems to anticipate precisely what may have been
the biggest problem the Americans would have with Bacon: “He doesn’t have
any puritan qualms about being gorgeous. He’s a vulgar entertainer”.
Charles Darwent (2008)
focused on Bacon’s painterliness (no tirades about mannerism here) and his
“liturgical” use of colour and its role in Bacon’s understanding of evil
as generic. The American critics do not speak of evil. As far as colour is
concerned Bacon came alive after the early 1960s – why don’t the New York
critics (who normally speak to colour with great expertise) recognize this?
Finally, Adrian Searle
(2008) weighs the reasons why we might admire Bacon’s work one moment, and
dismiss him the next. Searle captures very well the ambivalence Bacon’s work
arouses in some critics while not forsaking his job as a critic to assess the
work on display. Searle believes that Bacon’s best work was behind him by the
1960s but he is willing to assess the work, make his case for and against it,
and to present an understanding of its seductiveness, plausibility, and relation
it holds to the horrors of the twentieth century. Searle’s review, while
ultimately turning a thumb down to Bacon, does so in an analytical and sensitive
manner which was lacking in the New York critics. What Searle is aware of is
that one can be distracted by the artist’s life and hence he is very careful
not to let this get in the way of his criticism of the specific paintings.
Searle, unlike the New York critics, relishes the experience of being taken out
of his comfort zone and this allows him to criticize Bacon in a much more
convincing manner.
III. Bacon at the MET
For my part I
did not know that we required a Bacon retrospective in order to demonstrate
something which has long struck me as obvious – that Bacon does not lose force
as he ages. Indeed, I have thought of it the other way around – if anything,
his artistic powers strengthened and became slightly more polished with time.
Witness his last great Triptych of 1991 and his Portrait of John
Edwards, 1988 (both on display at the MET). There is a precision and an
economy of means in each which tells us that we are dealing with a more mature
version of the man who painted George Dyer in Three Figures in a Room
(1964) or any of the popes for which he is so well known. Bacon’s great care
over these late works is not surprising as they include the two men most
important to him at the end. In the 1991 Triptych Bacon’s Spanish Lover
[left panel] bears a remarkable resemblance to that of then Brazilian Formula-1
race car driver Ayrton Senna (whom Bacon painted from a magazine cover).
The 1991 Triptych
is refined and accomplished and to me it is the last of his masterpieces – one
that gathers up everything he ever knew about art and life and brings it to bear
in these images. Bacon shows himself in the frame on the right – his face
painted from a Polaroid of himself which he liked from the late 1960s.
Interestingly, Bacon who was 82 when he painted this work, represents himself
(and his significantly younger lover) as highly sexualized males. Two male
figures are shown coupling in the middle frame. So much of Bacon’s severe
philosophy (humanity is an accident – we live, we love, we die), is here in
this extraordinary image. The whole story goes untold however and the enigma
remains in all of Bacon’s triptych’s as Gilles Deleuze recognized three
decades ago. Deleuze also saw the triptych as a form which allowed Bacon to
engage in figurative painting without surrendering to conventional story-telling
(Deleuze, 1981; see also Nochlin, 2008). The 1991 Triptych shows that
Deleuze’s insight would remain relevant of Bacon’s painting to the end.
The Portrait
of John Edwards is a painting of the man in London whom Bacon was closest to
at the end – his illiterate heir and gentle companion. Edwards is an image of
temporality – especially the unfixed nature of identity – a subject on which
Bacon is the absolute master. The portrait of Edwards shows the man disappearing
before our eyes. His left foot, and even the chair upon which he sits, have
begun to dissolve into a puddle and his arms have evaporated. All that is solid
melts into air, including all of our friends and loves, right before our eyes.
Bacon understood that we capture, at best, only a fleeting glimpse of the real
which is hidden under appearances which we rarely penetrate and then never for
very long (see Coulter, 2007). Like so many of Bacon’s paintings the Portrait
of John Edwards is painted from a photograph – the artist shifting his
perspective to the left of an image which was originally taken straight on –
of his former lover George Dyer.
Among the
strengths of the MET show is the way in which it brings so much archival
material (found in Bacon’s studio at the time of his death), to bear on his
paintings. So many of these images have not simplified our understanding of
Bacon but added a delicious complexity. This is only appropriate as Bacon’s
paintings do not make our world more commonsensical, but rather, make it more
enigmatic (Ibid). The MET show gave us a more complex Francis Bacon.
If Bacon’s
work began to weaken in the late 1960’s (the dominant New York critical
position), then you cannot see evidence of it in Bacon’s paintings of his
friend and lover Isabel Rawthorne. His paintings of Rawthorne are not simply
great; they are among the most sensitive images of woman painted by a man in the
later half of the twentieth century. Rawthorne (who was also a model for
Giacometti) is shown in one of her then fashionable outfits as a woman about
town. She is shown looking cautiously (?) over her left shoulder at a bestial
figure moving behind her in the street. We are left uncertain as to how she
feels about this attention as that enigmatic swirl of paint representing
unknowability appears in the middle of her face and she is just about to step
out of the light into the darkness.
If, in a thousand years,
this portrait of Rawthorne is the last surviving work by Bacon then people in
the future will still know the artist. It will be possible for them to know what
it was like to be a figurative painter while acknowledging the impossibility of
realism. They will also know both the excitement and danger present for women in
the streets of the great cities of the end of the second millennium.
If Bacon is
exhausted by the 1960’s why then does his best portrait (of Michel Leiris) not
appear until 1976? This is another way of asking why is it that critics cannot
let go of the popes and heads of the 1940s and 1950s and realize that the
portraits replaced them as a more sensitive and subtle (yet still highly
evocative) form for Bacon? The portraits also signify that Bacon has moved on
past Matisse who was very influential on Bacon at the time of the Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) where Bacon shows
his élan with Matisse’s way of isolating figures on a monochrome background.
Leiris is a wonderful portrait which is a strong likeness. The rest, as in all
of Bacon’s portraits, remains behind the mask. There is a significant
epistemology of identity at work in this manner of representation for which
Bacon has not received sufficient credit (see Coulter, 2007). Leiris is also
indicative of Bacon’s deep admiration for Picasso. This portrait, an homage to
Picasso, is as close as Bacon ever came to cubism – it is also a great tribute
to Leiris (and old acquaintance of Picasso’s) whose wife was, for a time, the
great cubist’s dealer.
If Bacon is
“over” by the 1960s then why do we find so much innovation in his later
works? This includes a move into landscapes which are, according to an
insightful take by MET curator Gary Tinterow, Bacon’s way of engaging with
abstraction on his own terms (see Tinterow, 2009). Perhaps his Jet of Water
is the best of these works in the MET show.
Against the
narrativizations of abstraction Bacon uses abstract elements to reference the
unknowable and enigmatic. Bacon’s genius is for touching on temporality
without narration. He pushes the swirl of unknowability out into the face and in
Jet of Water across the surface of an everyday scene. That white splash
is a portrait of time itself, frozen, in the act of wasting each of us.
IV. Conclusion
Bacon’s work doesn’t
attempt to lift us up rather; it puts us in our place and forces us to look at
ourselves. It does so with sympathy and a generosity of spirit.
Why do Bacon’s popes
scream? Surely because, after World War II, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the
pope realizes that only a few believe in God. Historically, even popes who
believe in God are rare. Why do they wear purple and not red as in the Velasquez
pope which inspired them? This is because the pope realizes that his churches
are emptying out at one of the two most sacred times of the year for the
Catholic Church – Easter, the time when priesthood wears purple in deference
to the seriousness of the event of the crucifixion.
Bacon is not as violent as he is raw. I do not find him hysterical but he is very intense. When such a number of his works appear in one place the artist is humanized and it is a lack of recognition of this that makes so many of the words of the New York critics ring hollow. For them Bacon’s raw intensity cannot be just another view of us, he cannot be just like the rest of us – his vision cannot count as does “ours”. Besides, in New York these days, disliking Europeans is something of a popular if discomfiting sport.
The Metropolitan Museum
has been attempting (with some success) to better serve contemporary culture
over the past twenty years. The Bacon retrospective fits well into this
programme and behind the show there has been some excellent curating and sound
scholarship. I especially appreciate the way the MET show recreated previous
showings of Bacon’s work (which were overseen by the artist in smaller
galleries) specifically the artist’s popes (Durlacher Gallery, New York, 1953)
and the heads shown in London (Hanover Gallery, 1949).
Every nasty
thing the New York critics had to say about Bacon is true but only if you are
willing to protect yourself in a prejudiced insular shroud before viewing
Bacon’s work. Bacon does paint exaggerated figures, some of his work might be
hysterical, it may not be gruesome but that’s a fair word, and his palate
provokes the eye. Bacon is also not a better painter than Ingres, Velasquez, or
Picasso – but he never claimed to be. Bacon had no illusions about his talent
– far less than the New York critics managed to invent. When you are in the
presence of his work, without prejudice, without the enormous weight of American
modernism on your shoulders, you can simply relish the experience – the way
Bacon’s paintings attract and repel at the same time. The ugly is as
attractive as the beautiful – it is the lesson of fashion shows for the past
fifty years.
Most intelligent people
who find themselves with Bacon’s work, no matter how it may challenge them,
realize how fortunate they are to be in its presence. This is something the
British critics were very aware of unlike their American counterparts who fail,
spectacularly, to explain why Bacon’s work is so compelling. While the New
York critics attempted to convince everyone that Bacon’s work is a horror
show, it isn’t good, it isn’t even painting, let alone compelling art –
the people came in droves as to any major art event. In the rooms there were, as
at all Bacon shows, many open mouths – not only the ones in the paintings –
so many viewers transfixed and moving much more slowly than people tend to do in
museums. The only horror actually present in the event was the embarrassing
criticism. What irony that Bacon – the painter who understood and represented,
perhaps better than anyone else in his century, the anxieties which swirl around
seeing – is treated in this manner in the city Baudrillard described as “the
epicenter of the end of the world” (2002:14).
Bacon’s work may
suggest violence but no one is tormenting his characters more than they are
themselves within the confines of the social. The social is the greatest
terrorist the individual will ever face and Bacon, a gay man in London when gay
men were put in jail, understood that very well. In 2009 he still isn’t
acceptable among New York art critics. New York really is not the centre of the
art world anymore and its critics show it to be, in the case of Bacon, no longer
a cultural capital either. I think Francis Bacon would relish this kind of thing
and would have gladly sacrificed his 100th birthday to the cause.
References
Jean Baudrillard (1993).
The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso.
Jean Baudrillard and
Jean Nouvel (2002). The Singular Objects of Architecture. University of
Minnesota Press.
Gerry Coulter (2007)
“Overcoming the Epistemological Break: Francis Bacon and Jean Baudrillard and
the Intersections of Art and Theory” Euro Art Magazine, Number 5,
(Winter): http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=6&page=1&content=140
Rachel Campbell-Johnson
(2008). “Francis Bacon at Tate Britain”. The Times of London
(September 9): http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4706909.ece
Charles Darwent (2008).
“Francis Bacon, Tate Britain”. The Independent (September 14): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/francis-bacon-tate-britain-lndon-929562.html
Gilles Deleuze ([1981]
2003). The Logic of Sensation. University of Minnesota Press.
Lance Esplund (2009).
“A Histrionic Horror Show”. The Wall Street Journal (July 5): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124709424380814667.html
Howard Halle (2009).
“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective”. Time Out New York: http://www.newyork.timeout.com/articles/art/75060/francis-bacon-a-centenary-retrospective-at-themetropolitan-museum-of-art-review
Robert Hughes (2008).
“Horrible!” The Guardian (August 30): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/aug/30/bacon.art
Tom Lubbock (2008).
“All hail a vulgar entertainer: Francis Bacon retrospective”. The
Independent (September 10): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/all-hail-a-vulgar-entertainer-francis-bacon-retrospective-924347.html
John McAuliffe (2008).
“Francis Bacon – Tate Britain”, The Manchester Review (November
21): http://mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk/blog/?p=262
John Molyneux (2008).
“Francis Bacon at Tate Britain”. Socialist Review: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10573
Linda Nochlin et. al.,
(2008). “Francis Bacon”. Tate Etc. (Online) Issue 14: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/francisbacon.htm
Jed Perl (2009).
“Slaughterhouse – Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective”. The New
Republic. (June 17): http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=5c8a2dfd-3e0d-4f3f-82e2-4f2b10dad432
Jed Perl (2002) “St.
Gerhard of the Sorrows of Painting”. The New Republic (August) [no
longer available online].
Jerry Saltz (2009).
“Francis Bacon at the MET”. New York Magazine (April 25th): http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/francis-bacon5-27-09.asp
Roberta Smith (2008).
“If paintings had voices Francis Bacon’s would shriek: Francis Bacon,
A Centenary Retrospective”. New York Times (M Halle: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/art/75060/francis-bacon-a-centenary-retrospective-at-metropolitan-museum-of-art-art-review
Gary Tinterow (2009).
Interview with Charlie Rose (available at: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10461

I wonder, perhaps it was that BBC documentary concerning the life
and times of the famed Irish born artist Francis Bacon, in which he confided his
love for roulette and the unfortunate turn of events or nestling of the little
spherical white object, which had instituted his going into hock forty grand
with a London bookmaker, that had planted the seeds of temporary fiscal self
destruction firmly within my sub conscious. Another work day and night of
hierarchically driven drudgery and perhaps old fashioned industrial revolution
style exploitation as a junior litigator had by some stroke of good fortune
resulted in my adjournment to bed. Lying down, I had facilitated the placement
of my laptop on my chest, an hospitable yet awkward locale, given the human like
warmth of its energy efficient battery upon my pectoral muscles and upper
abdomen, contrasted with its necessitating that I dig my chin into the flesh
protecting my clavicle and wedge a pillow tightly against the back of my head,
thereby generating a vague tension in the upper reaches of my spinal chord, and
an occasional meandering into concerned thought regarding the potentiality that
the proximity of my head to the laptop's wireless receiver might perhaps
precipitate some kind of cancerous growth in my brain, which would then be
immediately followed by a feeble attempt on behalf of my long term memory to
reconstruct some sensationalist, yet quite possibly factual commercial
television network current affairs report relating to the health risks
associated with mobile phone usage and thereupon make some kind of brief cost
benefit analysis before invariably reaching a conclusion concomitant with my
state of physical and mental fatigue. There, in the primeval comfort of my
metaphorical cave, ostensibly free from subjugation to political necessities
conveniently or humanly veiled as commercial necessities, I journeyed into the
world of Francis Bacon, where it became obvious, in an experiential or
existential sense and even a metaphysical sense, that one could confront the
unintended vulgarities, indignities and sufferings of life with a kind of
tragically spirited intuitiveness.
Each day we take something of a gamble on what to wear. For some,
the stakes of this perceptual wager are infinitely greater than for others, take
for example, women subject to Taliban rule or famous people afraid of being
mobbed when they go to buy some milk. Bacon rendezvoused with the intrepid
reporter slash interviewer wearing a black leather jacket. For some inexplicable
reason, the Bermuda triangularity of which is similar in nature to certain
mysterious aspects of quantum physics studied by Stephen Hawking, if you put an
old man in a leather jacket, all of a sudden every single word and or painting
that he utters is little short of gospel. Try it some time, I urge you to go and
try talking to an old man while he's wearing a leather jacket, let's say at
least 60 years of age or over, and I guarantee that if you can speak to him
(without being biased of course, from having read this) you will be noticeably
more inclined to believe everything he says or does. As an old man Bacon wore a
leather jacket regularly. Good leather has been places, it has experience; it's
really no wonder that a lot of the faces in his paintings are what colloquially
might be described as old 'leather faces'. Not to mention that he hailed from a
family involved with the thoroughbred industry, an industry renowned for being
into leather whips, saddles, boots and the like.
There is a luxurious decadence in Bacons' pictures, which is
perhaps not as readily emulated in works tending more toward photographic
realism. Here, we get generous blankets of violet, scarlet, agent orange,
turquoise; colours which in more sober (Bacon liked a drink or three or four or
ten) works we are afforded but small morsels in careful moderation such as
flower beds, the linings of clouds, patterning on curtains, and clothing.
Connected with the above theme is the mythological or artificial aspect of the
paintings, this conscious veering away from labourious realism provides that
element of escapism, that sense of the higher consciousness of humanity imposing
its culture slash technology upon the random all conquering sublimation of
nature. I think Kant said something about this, and Rothko refers to this in his
somewhat challenging writings on art as the 'plastic' aspect of a picture. When
asked about his favourite art or what he considered the best art, Bacon answered
that he liked that which was most 'artificial' – then emphasizing that he
viewed this word as a compound comprising the words art and official. Myself
personally, I love official art, and I love fake art too, so this covers so
much, it includes everything all in one; limiting infinity is Godly wouldn't you
say? Additional indicia that Bacon's art was endowed with an officially fake
sensibility, might be deduced through reference to the fact that Bacon's
painting have long been pedaled by only the most wealthy dealers, coveted by the
most hyper real collectors, and carefully stored in only the most posh and
widely legitimated art museums.
As opposed to the picturesque expanses of impressionist works,
Bacon's spaces are intensely claustrophobic. His distressed subjects are
occasionally boxed within boxes within boxes, perched upon some precarious plank
like object as though perhaps starring in a new television genre, the sad-not
com (the sadomasochistic assault of disapproving subjects which is not
considered comedy), or apparently under observation by a mechanisms in league
with those Foucault seeks to disrobe in him famous work 'The Birth of the
Prison'. Location in Bacon's paintings is generally a matter of ambiguity too.
Figures often appear to be lost or at least unfamiliar with their surroundings,
their expressions apprehending that in this atypical environment, they will meet
their fate in whatever form it may manifest itself in. Bacon would have been
well equipped to convey this emotion, no doubt having experienced that heady
sensual delirium besetting one confronted with the colourful cornucopia of
artificial lighting, the maize of homogenously decorated interconnecting rooms,
and the constant schizophrenic audiovisual stimuli which accompanies a crowd of
strangers conducting all the fevered discussions, the comings, and the goings,
of multiple selves possessive of a simultaneous disparity yet retaining a
distinctive crystallography as charming as diamonds harbouring a sulphuric
element of pathological toxicity, when initially orientating one's self with a
well patronized casino.
Bacon's penchant for gambling is artfully recounted in Michael
Peppiat's work Francis Bacon in the 1950's, published by the Yale University
Press. According to Peppiat, Bacon's abiding passion was for gambling. Often, it
was only through the proceeds of his manic gambling episodes, that Bacon managed
to finance the continuance of his costly painterly pursuits, and circumvent the
creativity constraining forces which would inevitably accompany any prolonged
return to bourgeois routine occasioned by the necessity to work a regular job.
Thus, it is through this Peter Pan like rubric of post war casinos in Nice,
Cannes and Monte Carlo, that Peppiat conducts his skillful post mortem on the
creative energy ultimately brought to bare in such striking fashion in Bacon's
paintings. Amidst these aesthetic environments, capital and its assorted
sophisticates reigned, and as though it were some pre menstrual chemical
reactant, there exploded a most flagrant artificiality; that masquerading
'official' fakeness that Bacon had reasoned as being most densely constructed in
only the best art. For Bacon, the poetic genius evinced by the painter was
analogous to that expressed by the roulette tragic. All the romantic futility of
the 'art life', that inspired confrontation with tragedy which Vincent Van Gogh
had waxed so lyrically and so repetitively about to his brother Theo, was for
Bacon, there, residing in a microcosm in a Monte Carlo casino ingeniously
positioned so as to enable intrepid punters to bask in the sublimity of a
mountainous coastal sunset whilst being besieged by a whole raft of sensual
psychosomatic tensions as the wheels of fate spun with the fluidity of the
'Formula One' motor racing tires being massacred nearby. In a free sample of the
publication generously provided by Peppiat and or the Yale University Press to
Amazon dot com, Peppiat recalls conversing with Bacon on the subject of his
gambling habit. The passage, and verbal exchange with Bacon therein, elucidates
with remarkable clarity, the cohabitation of intuition, sensuality and
paradoxical gregariousness that reverberates from Bacon's work. He was excited
by the terrific highs and lows that gambling, like painting, procured.
“You can't understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless
you've been in that kind of position where you terribly need money and you
manage to get it by gambling”, he told me once, going on to give a most
memorable vignette of his experiences in Monte Carlo. I had a really marvelous
win at one point I was playing on three different tables and I kept thinking I
could hear the numbers called out before they came up – as if the croupiers
were actually calling them out, I had very little money and was playing for
small stakes. But by the time I'd finished I'd got sixteen hundred pounds, which
was a very great deal for me then. And I went out and took a villa and stocked
it with food and drink, and invited a lot of people to come and live there... I
adore the atmosphere of Monte Carlo. It a has a kind of grandeur, even if you
might call it a grandeur of futility. There's something so beautiful about the
view you get when you look out on to the bay and the curve of the hills behind.
I love that kind of landscape. That, and just desert, I love that feeling of all
that space, and nothing in it. It sounds ridiculous, liking a landscape from
behind a window, but I actually can't stand the countryside. After a day or two
I long for streets and people, and just to be able to walk and see them. Those
places like Monte Carlo fascinate me too because of all the odd people who seem
to be able to exist there and nowhere else. You know, the curious kinds of
doctors with their promises of rejuvenating you who at the same time could only
practice in those kinds of places, and all the incredible old women who queue up
in the morning for the casino to open.”
A curious and perhaps humourous aside to this passage is that
Andy Warhol's diaries, record how in the twilight of his life, Warhol would make
regular trips to 'rejuvenating crystal doctors' operating in and around
Manhattan. At this point I should flag a future elaboration concerning the
curious interrelationship comingling art and medical doctors and or witch
doctors.
In a 1984 interview between Sylvere Lotringer and Jean
Baudrillard published by Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents as a post face to Jean
Baudrillard's essay Forget Foucault, Baudrillard refers to gambling as an
'organized catastrophic apparitional form', as 'coming from elsewhere'. This
bares a certain connectivity with not only the appearance and interpretative
scope often applied to Bacon's pictures, though also to Bacon's vignette
recounting the peculiar abode of the gamblers. According to Baudrillard, 'the
secret of gambling is that money has no value'. Does art then harbour the same
confidence? Was the secret of Bacon's pictures to convey the secret of gambling?
Like a tortured subject in a Bacon painting, wouldn't you too be inclined to
scream (!!) on discovering that your life savings were really of no value and in
fact, artificial? Would such a sham leave you reeling? In 1995, conceptual art
duo, the 'K Foundation' travelled to the Scottish island of Jura and filmed
themselves incinerating a million pounds of their own money. The ashes of the
fifty pound notes comprising the million pounds were later used in the
manufacturing process of a single house brick. By way of contrast, in 58 BC,
Julius Caesar in his Commentarii De Bello Gallico, had recounted a very
different spectacle (though which also involved flames) occurring in the
Scottish highlands. According to Caesar, druids (Celtic pagan priests) would
construct large human effigies out of sticks (wicker men) into which a living
man would be placed and then publicly burnt alive in tribute to the Gods. On
conducting a comparative analysis of the work conducted by the K Foundation with
that of the Celtic priests, one might lament that by 1995, art had lost its
humanity and become all about money.
Francis
Bacon
Peter
Kinsley The Storyteller
"You'll
all be sorry when I'm found lying in a pool of blood!" was the call from
time to time by Francis Bacon in the afternoon drinking club The Kismet, known
also as The Iron Lung, or Hell's Waiting Room, on the edge of Soho. John Deakin,
photographer, turned to me at the bar and said: "She's off again!" It
was not a cry for help, but a cry for attention, for Francis did like adulation
and flattery about his paintings, and would say to anyone who dared to question
his position in the hierarchy of great painters of the 20th Century: "When
that old bitch Picasso dies, I'll be number one." John Deakin started to
talk about his early photographs in Soho. There was one of Iron Foot Jack, the
brace on his short leg, who started a restaurant with Derek Ingrey, an award
winning novelist, as his waiter, and a menu with "everything's off - but I
can recommend the fish" and send Ingrey running to the fish and chip shop
down the street for two cod and chips for some poor young couple who had thought
it was a real resto. Francis Bacon interrupted his flow of words: "What's
going on here, then?" and Deakin said: "Oh, shut up you old Queen.
You're all jelly-bags because I'm talking to youngies..." "Did John
Hurt leave?" he asked, ignoring Deakin. "Yes he's gone to do a
voice-over." "Actors, novelists, musicians, painters," Bacon
said, "Ninety eight percent of the people in this world stand around
waiting for the other two percent to entertain them." John Neville made an
appearance and we walked up to Gerry's bar in Shaftesbury Avenue, another
basement club for artists. At the foot of the stairs, John Hurt turned to Liz
Gill and said: "Francis Bacon, John Neville, Peter Kinsley." Then the
serious drinking started, Francis buying champagne with his usual shout, which
dated back to the 18th century: "Champagne for my real friends. Real pain
for my sham friends." He was annoyed, however, when the barman added
Guinness to my champagne to make a "Black Velvet", took the champagne
bottle and poured until the glass overflowed and soaked the carpet. Much later
we had a fierce argument about subjective and objective writing.
Quote
from Chapter 19, Bogged Down in County Lyric, Vol. III Memoirs: "(I)
said Joyce had knocked Shakespeare for not writing a subjective work. Bacon kept
burbling on about Racine, and saying Shakespeare had a greater understanding of
humanity than Joyce, and I quoted Thoreau, requiring all writers to give an
account of their own lives. I said parts of the subjective memoirs of Joyce were
filched directly from Melville; and so we rambled on, drunk, until I crashed out
and into a taxi for the Press Club, where I was refused a drink for not wearing
a tie, and later, much later, fell off a bus in Dalston Garage"
Another
Soho hang-out was Muriel Belcher's afternoon drinking club, The Colony Room,
where Francis had once touted for Muriel, ("Get your bean-bag out, Lottie,
and buy a drink") bringing in tourists and getting a percentage of the
amount they spent. Bacon worked under a single electric light bulb in his tip of
a studio and came into the West End to relax in the afternoons. He told me:
"I don't like drinking with people who work." He did not mean working
class people, for his friends were fellow painters, actors, writers and out of
work waiters and barmen. He meant people who took their job into the bar with
them, boasting of their brilliance in advertising and copywriting and journalism
and commercial photography. Bacon was fascinated by extremely ugly people; one
man with a twisted face, who was a bouncer and doorman at a Soho club, was
sometimes used as a model for the painter, who was also very kind to
down-and-outs. I met a woman in Ibiza who normally slept in the car park
opposite the French Pub in Soho. Her name was Edna, known as Dreadna. She told
me that her air fare and her holiday had been paid by Francis. He would invite
tramps off the ramp to dine at Wheeler's restaurant, much to the annoyance of
the snobs who ran it, but they liked him as a big spender. One night I was with
Patrick Skene Catling and Stephen Constant (real name Danev) the Russian
correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Bacon invited us to Wheeler's.
Quote
from Chapter 9, Bogged Down in County Lyric, Vol. III, Memoirs: "At
supper, where they ordered Dover sole with lobster sauce and Pouilly Fuisse,
Bacon was affable until I said the French claimed there was there was a pecking
order in the Arts: first of all came the great philosophers, then the great
composers, followed by the poets and great prose writers, followed by the
painters...
"I'm
not going to listen to this," said Bacon, standing up. He was clearly
annoyed at painters being placed so low on the list, and, after all, he was
paying for supper. Not exactly paying, for the manager had greeted him with:
'Mr. Bacon, you owe us £660. Can you settle it soon?' to which Bacon had
replied: 'Oh, do you want a cheque or a painting?"
'Oh,
a painting, of course, Mr. Bacon.'"
It
was too late to explain to Francis that he thought the French were classifying
pebbles on a beach, behaving like sociologists, and how could they dream of not
putting Rembrandt and Michaelangelo and Leonardo at the very top. But it was too
late, and Francis had stormed out. Two American businessmen at the next table
had heard every word.
There
followed a long argument, with the manager insisting that the bill was paid and
being told to put it on Bacon's account as we were his guests. The avaricious
little manager called the police. Two enormous Bobbies came and questioned them
and took names and addresses, saying, with a hard look in their mean little
eyes: "We know Mister Bacon on this manor, sir." They conferred with
the manager and left, and the two American businessmen asked where they could go
on for a drink.
At
The Stork, off Piccadilly. they insisted on paying for all the drinks. They had
clearly been impressed at seeing the famous Francis Bacon at close quarters.
Next
morning Patrick Catling, a regular customer at Wheelers for many years, rang the
manager to register a furious complaint, harangued him, then stopped and put the
phone down.
The closest friend Bacon had was Dan Farson, wayward son of Negley Farson, author and former newspaperman in Russia. Once, on a train he looked at the electric shavers the Russian officers were using and said he had had a similar one in America before the war. One of them said: "You couldn't have. We didn't invent them until after the war." Negley led a rather bizarre life in Devon where he slept in a bed with his wife and the au pair girl slept at their feet in a sleeping bag, and recorded it all in his autobiography. Dan Farson had the idea to purchase, with Bacon, a hearse, and together they drove around the London docks for what was known as Turts, or TRTs (Tattooed Rough Trade). It was when John Deakin died that Farson suggested to Bacon that they go to view the corpse in the mortuary, but when they got there, Farson backed out, leaving Bacon to view the body alone, and when he returned and Farson asked how he looked, Bacon said: "Well, there she was, dead, with her trap shut! For the first time in twenty five effing years her trap was shut!"
Another
of Bacon's drinking pals was Jeffrey Bernard who wrote the very funny "Low
Life" column in The Spectator magazine, He had once advertised that
he was about to start writing his memoirs and if any of his friends could tell
him what he had been doing all those years in Soho he would be glad to hear from
them.
Bacon
invited Bernard to The Ivy, a resto. frequented by the famous stars of stage and
screen.
During
supper they talked about sex, and Bernard asked Bacon who he fancied.
There
was one of those silences in the celebrity filled room, when clocks are at
twenty past or twenty to the hour, or an angel is passing overhead, and it was
cut by the piping voice of Bacon, who said: "Oh, I'd like to screw Colonel
Gaddafi", which drew every eye and brought on a sudden babble of
conversation to cover the customers' confusion.
"What
about you, Jeff? Who do you fancy?"
"I
fancy Cyd Charisse," Bernard said.
"Sid
Charisse? Who's he when he's at home? I've never heard of him..."
"No,
no, Francis, Cyd Charisse is a beautiful dancer in the films, she has gorgeous
long legs..."
Best of Bacon
Isabel Andrews, Apollo Magazine, Tuesday, 16th
September 2008
The press view at Tate Britain for its latest retrospective of Francis
Bacon (the first was in 1960, the second in 1985)
buzzed with a level of anticipation I’ve not often encountered. A self-taught
painter, Bacon mutilated most of the work he
produced between 1933-45 at the time, but once his work became known his
popularity was quickly established, lasting throughout his life, and is, it
seems, growing by the day.
Tate’s current retrospective is very much a ‘best of Bacon’,
taking a chronological approach through a selection of 71 works, broken only by
two thematic rooms that group his Crucifixion works (a theme the artist drew on
throughout his career) and selected archival material taken from Bacon’s
studio that, after his death, was painstakingly uplifted and moved in its
entirety to public display in his birthplace of Dublin.
I was more than slightly interested to see this show, principally
because I’ve never really been able to make up my mind about Francis
Bacon’s work. I first came across Bacon’s
name as a teenager under the spell of Lucian Freud’s drawings – in
particular Freud’s 1951 portrait of Bacon –
but never quite felt the impact that Bacon
intended in his works so that the ‘paint comes across directly onto the
nervous system’ – but I wanted to. Granted, the colour, scale (from the
1960s onwards Bacon rarely deviated from the
2-metre high by 1.5 metre wide format; three for the triptychs) and compositions
are both arresting and impressive. But the paintings’ essence of human
vulnerability, of man existing as just another animal or mound of flesh in a
godless void (Bacon in a butcher’s shop
apparently wondered why he himself wasn’t one of the carcasses), didn’t for
me deliver the haunting psychological darkness and brutal isolation evident in
the harrowed lines and down-turned eyes of some of Freud’s etched sitters. And
walking through the Tate galleries, it still doesn’t. Put simply, it’s a big
idea, boldly done, to the same effect each time. But it’s also an idea
that’s been given more depth of treatment elsewhere, for my money in words
more than paint. It’s not for nothing that Bacon
references the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Aeschylus in his paintings from 1967-84.
I wonder what he made of Beckett.
It may be that some of the impact of Bacon’s
paintings has diminished with familiarity and time. The same is not true of the
artist’s persona. Only recently did I discover Freud’s opinion that his
portrait of Bacon, stolen in 1988 while on show
at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, was probably lifted by a fan of Bacon
rather than one of his own. Bacon’s reputation
for mutilating paintings, frequenting Soho drinking dens, having intense and
abusive relationships in a time when homosexuality was illegal,
and as the figurehead of London bohemians in a period now revered for its
creativity, has secured his iconic status.
And the sort of material emerging from the detritus of his studio
will do nothing to harm this image. It includes photography by John Deakin of Bacon’s
close friends only (Isabel Rawsthorne, Freud, his lover George Dyer)
commissioned by the artist who then painted them in isolation, using the image
as reference. In addition, scraps of magazine and newspaper cuttings with
photography of sportsmen and wrestlers or drawings by Michelangelo have been
resurrected from the litter of Bacon’s studio
and smartly framed and hung on the wall. I can’t help feelings it’s slightly
voyeuristic to riffle so fastidiously through this material – particularly
when these sources were often and openly acknowledged by Bacon
during his lifetime. Tate curators have brought to our attention the lists of
potential subjects they have found in the studio – lists Bacon
denied making, instead asserting the spontaneity of his approach. There’s also
a wall of so-called drawings – another process that Bacon
denied – but these are simple outlines of position rather than the finished
drawings being produced by Bacon’s
contemporaries. No doubt interesting discoveries
will be made about Bacon’s process and
technique, but the real essence of Bacon is,
ultimately, in his scream alone.
FRANCIS BACON'S LIPS don't lie; they scream their truths with bared teeth. His
male bodies are hot, steaming chunks of meat that make Mickey Rourke's portrayal
in The Wrestler look like Adonis. These male bodies are on the meat rack
of life and express Bacon's take on the gay condition as taken directly from the
wretched depths of his personal experiences. That said, there is no social
sacred cow that Bacon is afraid to slaughter in his portrayals of the human
condition.
Bacon's long-awaited centenary retrospective
-
he was born in 1909 - arrived last May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York City, fresh from its triumph at London's
Tate Gallery. The exhibit inspired New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz
to ask (March 25, 2009): "Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of
the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?" Neither question really
does justice to the Irish-born English artist, who fits neither of these
descriptions.
Francis Bacon is an
artist who lived a ruinous life. Friends describe him as a "devil, whore,
alcoholic, sacred monster and a drunken, faded sodomite swaying
nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho" (New
York magazine, 3/25/09). The artist himself claimed he was "rotten to
the core." In the end, Bacon was an artist who could not escape his demons,
which lived inside of him and frequently rose to the surface. His art is the
stark manifestation of his nightmares. Influenced by a variety of 19th-century
and modern artists ranging from Daumier to Picasso, Bacon's bodies shriek their
agony and shout their pleasure.
A
product of postwar Europe, Bacon's early work portrays violently contorted,
sweaty, bloody bodies isolated in vast spaces. Bacon claimed he wanted to
address the viewer's "nervous system directly, to unlock the valves of
feeling," using distorted forms derived from chance and accident. His early
paintings
-
including Crucifixion (1933)
and especially Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych
painted by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The work is based on the
Eumenides, or Furies, of Aeschylus' The Oresteia
(1944), about which a
four-year-old viewer standing near me at the Met exclaimed, "Mommy, look at
the pee pees!"-
dissect male anatomy in a non-literal
but startlingly direct way. Not surprisingly,
American critics of this era tended to sideline Bacon's art because of his
apparent, however unstated, homosexuality. All this changed in the 1960's and
70's with the advent of feminism and postmodernism. Younger critics relished
writing about his bravura brushwork
impasto thickly applied
paint that projects from the picture surface. Such works as Childe Hassam's Allies
Day (1917; National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C. ,
and the thick, luscious applications of painterly paint and sexual content.
These hallmarks of his signature style abated somewhat only after he had settled
down with his last lover, John Edwards, in the 1980's.
As a child, Bacon's imaginative world was more Brothers Grimm than Hans
Christian Andersen. Growing up, he was given morphine for the asthma that
ultimately contributed to his death. In this world, homosexuality was a defect
and a "limp." When Bacon was sixteen, his father, a failed horse
trainer, caught the teenager wearing his mother's underwear and a pair of
fishnet stockings that became an essential part of his wardrobe for the rest of
his life. (I can only imagine what a Freudian analyst would make of this
fetish.) In an attempt to cure the boy, his father had him horsewhipped by the
grooms. Bacon later claimed that afterwards they would sodomize him.
When the whipping treatment failed to rid him of his perversion, the elder Bacon
asked a family friend to "straighten the boy out" by taking him to
Berlin. The friend then bedded the teen, subsequently abandoning him to his fate
in a city that was a buggerer's seventh heaven. Attracted to males, the boy
remained in Weimar Berlin, where he fully indulged his taste for rough trade.
When the artist died in 1992, hundreds of people both straight and gay came to
bid him a final farewell. Nevertheless, Bacon's personal mythology is
ineluctably tied to his gayness, which rendered him a marked man living on the
margins of society. For half a century Bacon envisioned in his work the
unimaginable passions and forbidden ecstasy of same-sex sadomasochism as
no other modern artist had ever done. His paintings of male nudes evoke stages
of incompletion, damage, and fragmentation as totalities in themselves. His
compressed, majestic, muscular naked figures hunch, crouch, and shiver in the
cold light of the artist's unforgiving gaze. His dreadful bodies raise questions
about the individual, but more importantly (and this is what gives them their
universality) of the individual in relation to the Other. His Two Figures (1953)
locked in a violent, erotic embrace embody a raging bull of tenderness that most
of his critics seem to have missed in their rush to notice the brutality of his
work. Yet the plastic voluptuousness of these two sexy, tough men bound together
in their drive for satisfaction shocks us and requires us to begin to reevaluate
Bacon's resistance to normative heterosexuality and
the courage this required. Whether we are seduced or repelled by what we see, we
are compelled to look and to take it seriously.

Two Figures (1953) Francis Bacon
The phantoms that haunted Bacon's oeuvre are noteworthy for their
autobiographical elements. In 1952, at the age of 43, he met former Royal Air
Force pilot Peter Lacy. "I'd never really fallen in love with anyone until
then," he later remarked. "Of course, it was the most total disaster
from the start." The two lovers pushed the limits of S&M to the
breaking point. Just before his May 1962 retrospective opened at the Tate in
London, Bacon learned that Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from alcohol
poisoning. Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer, a petty thief who
had broken into his studio to rob him. Their stormy relationship lasted seven
years. History repeated itself when on October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon's
retrospective opened at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer overdosed on drugs and
died in their hotel room. Bacon was 61 at this time. The artist painted a number
of black triptych memorials, including his powerful In Memory of George Dyer,
1971 and Triptych August 1972. The bleakest and perhaps the greatest of
these testaments is Triptych May-June 1973, a work of monumental and
grave simplicity in which the circumstances of Dyer's death are gravely
re-enacted. What is clear from this magnificent triptych is that Dyer remained
forever in Bacon's heart, inextricably Bacon's
models are caught in transitory positions not easily registered by the naked
eye. To achieve this effect, he used a camera for reference. The captivaing,
thing about these paintings and drawings, whether the subject is male or
female, is their complex content and painterly technique. An inmate of his own
concentration camp, slaughterhouse, closet, Bacon employed lyric passages of
paint to express his deepest emotions. He cuts, slashes, and literally butchers
his forms on the canvas to create viscerally unforgettable images. Despite
Bacon's constant need to hide his weaknesses, his feelings and materials fight
brutal battles that disclose everything. These pictures are raw and redolent
with the textures and smells of his life.
Bacon's artistic inspiration comes from a variety of sources, among them
Velazquez' Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), which resulted in Head VI,
1949, with its sensuous purple cape. It was Bacon's earliest variation on a
theme and my first encounter with his work. He mined this picture with obsessive
intensity throughout the following decade and intermittently into the 1960's and
70's. His experience of the Velazquez was entirely by way of reproductions, a
dependency that, far from limiting the artist, encouraged him to take
extravagant license. Add to this his use of the silent films of Soviet director
Sergei Eisenstein, notably Strike and Battleship Potemkin, both
from 1925, notably a scene from the latter in which a screaming nurse is shot
through the eye on the Odessa steps, as well as hundreds of images from
magazines and newspapers, and one sees unmistakably that Bacon drew material
from a wide variety of visual sources. Bacon revered Degas,
who held a discreet distance from his young ballerinas and bathers. He replaced
the dance studio with the locker room and brought his subjects much closer in.
For me, his male nudes are intensely powerful as they twist and turn in their
cramped spaces. I feel their vulnerability in the constriction of
their ligaments and in the tautness of the musculature as
their bodies press up against the limits of the fore-ground. This intimacy makes
us just a bit uncomfortable because it confronts us with our own passions, our
voyeuristic impulses.
Despite being in a stable relationship, Bacon had not given up on
extracurricular desire. In his last years and in declining health (a cancerous
kidney was removed in 1989), he enjoyed a passionate relationship with a
cultivated young Spaniard that he met some time in the mid-1980's. Against his
doctor's advice, Bacon made a trip to Madrid in April 1992. Within days of
arrival, he fell critically ill and was taken to a medical clinic. On April 28,
he suffered a heart attack and died in the presence of two nuns from the
Servants of Mary. Bacon's remains were cremated in Spain and, in accord with his
request, there were no services. His ashes were transported to England, where
they were scattered in a private ceremony. Bacon named his lover, John Edwards,
as the sole heir to his estate. At the time of his death, a single unfinished
portrait stood on the tall easel in his Reece Mews studio. It had been there
since the previous November. The identity of its subject, the assertive profile
caught halfway between a self-portrait and a portrait of George Dyer, has so far
defied interpretation.
The biggest disappointment of the Bacon Retrospective is the catalogue
that accompanies the exhibition. It delves into virtually every aspect of
Bacon's messy life in a way that completely empties it of the vital forces that
his paintings so brilliantly capture. In trying to create an intimate narrative
of his life before, during, and after his leap to fame, the writers manage only
to analyze the man and his work to death. He emerges from their handiwork as a
zombie from Night of the Living Dead, controlled by unseen forces rather
than driving his own artistic destiny.
Cassandra
Langer is a freelance writer and art critic based in New York.
Francis
Bacon
Tate Britain,
London.
11 September 2008–4 January 2009.
Museo Nacional del
Prado, Madrid
3 February–19 April 2009
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
18 May–16 August 2009
In interviews, Francis Bacon insisted that he never drew, and that his
compositions were intuitive. These claims were refuted by the posthumous
revelation of figure studies from the 1950s. Bacon usually commenced painting a
figure on to the blank canvas. In 1962 he claimed that the genesis of his
paintings came whilst daydreaming. In fact his methods were often more orthodox.
The works on paper and lists that came to light after his death indicate that he
collected a wide range of material to use as points of reference. The present
exhibition, which makes a powerful impact on the viewer, comprises 65 paintings
and 13 major triptychs. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date, which
examines the artist’s sources, processes and thoughts. It is accompanied by an
excellent, scholarly catalogue; edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens; with
essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and
Victoria Walsh.1
Widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth
century, Francis Bacon can also be seen as one of the most powerful and searing
commentators of the human condition in Britain since the Second World War,
expressing unflinching images of sexuality, violence and isolation. The
exhibition is profound, haunting and iconic. Bacon’s philosophy as an atheist
is explored: man in a godless world is presented as simply another animal,
subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear. In this Bacon
personified the age. The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s was such
that the human image in art became increasingly difficult to portray. The
existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea
(1938), found a visual counterpart in the images of despair and alienation of
Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions
of Arthur Boyd. For the most part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated
because, after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found
images of humanity impossible to create.
John Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently wrote:
“He repeatedly painted the human body, in discomfort or agony or want.
Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it
seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the
misfortune of being physical”.2 In spite of the hellish drama
expressed, Bacon’s work is inspiring in the very dedication to the craft of
painting, and the intellectual dialogue created. This is a profound exhibition,
at once challenging and awesome. In spite of the bewilderment that can so often
be experienced in confrontation with his painting, there is an unexpected
affirmation in the choice of formal language and the precision and care applied
to the act of painting: the placement of each head, each brush stroke, every
subtle hue, the manner in which the figure inhabits the space, the form within
the picture plane. A quiet authority is established by the artist amid the
shrieking pain, due in large part to the dialogue he has with art from the past.
Bacon’s sources have been divided by various commentators now,
to include ‘high art’ sources and ‘low art’ sources. Bacon chose only
the most remarkable artists to aspire to: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velasquez and
Picasso. He also chose inspiration from the modern world: men in suits, modern
furniture, dangling light bulbs, gay comic books. He depicted a low-life from
gangster boyfriends, heavy drinking and sexually dissipated Colony Room artists
and intellectuals, a collision of high and low culture, survival and
destruction. Chance played an important role in Bacon’s work –
spontaneity was of key importance in a Post-Surrealist context. Although he
retained the human figure in his work, he embraced the Abstract
Expressionists’ love of chance in art as in life. A primordial energy is
central to many works, the Bullfight paintings in 1969 being perfect examples of
how Bacon infused the image on canvas with a reckless, fatal movement.
Describing the collision of illustration of facts and an expression of the very
deepest feelings, Bacon noted: “one wants a thing to be as factual as possible
and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of
sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do.
Isn’t that what it’s all about?”3 Bacon had the highest
ambition from a young age, claiming that his work should either be in the
National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between. His ambition as a
painter was to define his existential, atheistic stance in a post-photography
world. Bacon was a habitual destroyer of paintings; in 1962 he remarked that
over-working was a form of destruction, of clogging. Spontaneity was a vital
quality, which Bacon sought to capture.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of his
life in London, working as a self-taught painter from the 1930s. The human
figure was central to his work throughout his long and productive career. He
died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Time has played an important part in the
appraisal of Bacon’s work; his unflinching approach to violence and the human
condition is more poignant than ever. In 1973 he attributed his preoccupation
with violence and war to the times in which he grew up, interwar Germany and the
rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland:
I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long time…And then I
was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole life had been lived
through a time of stress, and then World War Two, anyone who lived through the
European wars was affected by them, they affected one’s whole psyche to that
extent, to live continuously under an atmosphere of tension and threat.4
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which the most
scholarly essays, explore the lasting significance of his work for the present
day. Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the inescapable suffering of human
existence dominate the exhibition.
Francis
Bacon
at Tate Britain is broadly chronological. Room One, Animal,
examines Bacon’s early work from the 1940s where his attitude to humanity is
already evident. His bestial depiction of the human figure combined personal
feelings of anxiety with broader references to the Second World War. He used
reproductions from books, catalogues and magazines. The male figure is used
repeatedly in Bacon’s long career; he often includes a scream or shout to
reveal the internal repressed and violent anxieties. The open mouth represents
the tension that exists between the individual and the broader context of time
and place.
Room Two, Zone, examines Bacon’s work of the
1950s where he carried out complex experiments with pictorial space. He
described the processes, in 1952, as ‘an attempt to lift the image outside of
its natural environment’. This work established his easily recognisable images
with boxed figures in cage-like structures. Hexagonal ground planes establish
tense psychological zones; the use of shuttering, the vertical lines of paint
merge the foreground and background. This is the period in which Bacon came of
age as a painter. Yet his personal circumstances were extremely difficult:
homeless, in debt and in a tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy. During this
time he searched for and found appropriate subject -matter with which to express
his deepest anxiety. In the 1950s Bacon used the painting by Velazquez’s Portrait
of Pope Innocent X, (c.1650),
as his starting point to explore the insecurities of the powerful. For Bacon,
the choice of the portrait of a Pope had nothing to do with religion; as a
non-believer he was concerned with the way man behaves to each other. For Bacon
the portrait by Velazquez was one of the greatest portraits ever painted for it
opened up feelings and prompted the imagination, beyond any real individual or
other art work. The colour is magnificent, prompting Bacon to give his own
images a sense of tragic grandeur, a sense of authority in painterly terms. The
Pope as a unique figure in the world suited Bacon’s ambition to create a
powerful image in which power is stripped of its essence.
Room Three, Apprehension, explores the pervading anxiety
in all of Bacon’s work. The Cold War anxiety that limited movement and
personal freedom was combined in Bacon’s case with the illegality at the time
of homosexuality. His sometimes, violent relationship, with Peter Lacy, is
captured in the Man
in Blue series, which concentrates on a single anonymous figure in a
dark suit. Although inspired by the greatest artists from history, Bacon
powerful images are achieved by combining the authority of the history of art,
with contemporary life. The figure is portrayed in isolation, sitting at a table
or at a bar. Like many artists in the twentieth century, including the Italian
Futurists, who worked with the figure, Bacon drew from the photographic work of
Edweard Muybridge’s, The Human
Figure in Motion, (1887) sequential photographs of animals and
humans, which Bacon described as ‘a dictionary’ of the body in motion.
Room Four at Tate Britain is devoted to one of Bacon’s most
famous and iconic series, of the Crucifixion. He made works
throughout his career at pivotal moments. As an atheist Bacon saw the
Crucifixion as a particularly poignant act of man’s violence. Brutality and
fear are developed in a particularly cruel evocation of the famous religious
scene. The ritual of sacrifice is given a new dimension, the brutality
emphasised with extreme abandon. Meat carcasses are used by Bacon to diminish
the human notion of superiority in the wider scheme of life according to
Christianity. In an early interview Bacon describes how existing images breed
others. He chose the Crucifixion by Cimabue as a starting point, but readily
admits that without all the paintings that have been done on the subject, his
could not have produced his own. Often under the influence of alcohol, and prone
to drug abuse, and frequently suffering acute exhaustion, Bacon would create
Crucifixion images of profound despair. He also juxtaposes fragments of films,
such as those of Eisenstein, and isolated stills allowing accident to play a
major part in the creative process. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of
a Crucifixion, (c.1944) is a key work and one that paved the way for his use
of the triptych format, and numerous later themes and compositions. The bestial
depiction of the human figure was central to Bacon’s oeuvre.
Displacing the traditional saints in Crucifixion paintings, Bacon later referred
to them as Furies from Greek mythology. In interview with David Sylvester in
1966, he was asked about the use of meat carcasses in these and other works. He
stated, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses”.5
Being human in Bacon’s world was utterly debased. Bacon took works from the
history of art that were created within a spiritual context and slashed them to
bits. In this he felt completely justified, for the Vatican never openly
condemned Nazism. This was Bacon’s vendetta for the hypocrisy played out in
the name of God. Where artists such as Hieronymous Bosch created devastating
images of humanity in works such as his Judgement Day paintings, Bacon chose the
traditionally edifying form of portraiture, which entails a degree of trust
between painter and sitter, and destroyed it. His disturbing papal images are
like the burning of an effigy, leaving the viewer with a sense of physical
revulsion.
Room Five Crisis, focuses on the period 1956-1961. Bacon
travelled widely in Monaco, France and Africa, mostly with Peter Lacy. He used
new methods of painting, choosing thicker paint, strong colour, often violently
applied. Using a self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to
Tarascon (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, as his source and inspiration, Bacon
painted works that were criticised for their ‘reckless energy’. With
hindsight the energy and drama in these works was necessary in introducing
chance into the painting process itself.
Room Six is the Archive in the Tate’s exhibition, based
on the revelations made by scholars after Bacon’s death. The source material
found in Bacon’s studio revealed his reliance on photography and other sources
that had not been fully examined during Bacon’s lifetime. There were
photographs of athletes, film stills and reproductions of works of art. Further,
his practice of commissioning photographs of his friends by John Deakin was
fully realised, and formed an important component of the exhibition in
Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, (2005). Bacon also took
many photographs himself, preferring to draw from photographs, for they were
already two-dimensional images. In his studio there were also lists of potential
subjects and preparatory drawings, which Bacon had denied making, preferring to
emphasise the spontaneous nature of the act of painting directly onto canvas.
Room Seven Portrait, is important given the findings in
Bacon’s studio. In descriptions in interviews, most famously those with David
Sylvester, Bacon describes his intention to reinvent portraiture. He drew upon
the works he admired of Velazquez and Van Gogh. His abiding concern was how a
painter should create portraits in an age dominated by photography. He distorted
the sitter’s appearance in order to extract a greater, more complete likeness,
informed by internal issues of personality and mood. George Dyer his lover is
depicted with a mixture of affection and contempt. Three
Figures in Room, (1964) expresses a range of human characteristics
including absurdity, pathos, and isolation.
Room Eight Memorial, is dedicated to George Dyer,
Bacon’s closest companion and model from the autumn of 1963. Two days before
the opening of Bacon’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer
committed suicide. The void created by Dyer’s death, under such tragic
circumstances prompted Bacon to produce a number of works in his memory. The
large-scale triptych suited the grand nature of Bacon’s statements, enabling
him to isolate and juxtapose simultaneously. The energy in these works is
overwhelming. The depths of despair experienced in the loss of his lover, are
expressed with consummate skill and heartfelt anguish. Bacon told Sylvester
shortly after Dyer’s death: “You don’t stop thinking about them; time
doesn’t heal” He referred to his repeated depiction of homosexual copulation
as a form of exorcism. Although he regretted its ‘sensational nature’, he
was compelled to paint, Triptych, May-June, 1973, “to get it out of his
system”. As well as repeated posthumous images of Dyer, he also made numerous
self-portraits.6
Room Nine, Epic, examines the work Bacon produced in
response to poetry and literature, particularly the work of T.S Eliot. Bacon was
emphatic in wanting to make works that evoked the meaning and mood of the
written word. They were not illustrations.
For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the
cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me. As for my latest
triptych and a few other canvases painted after I read Aeschylus. I tried to
create images of the episodes created inside me. I could not paint Agamemnon.
Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of
historical painting when all is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an
image of the effect that was produced inside me. Perhaps realism is always
subjective when it is most profoundly expressed.7
Bacon felt a great affinity for poetry, perhaps more so than
contemporary art. He appreciated a wide range of poetry ranging from the work of
Aeschylus, W.B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and
especially T.S. Eliot. From Aeschylus’ Oresteia
Bacon found an evocative image: “the reek of human blood smiles out at me”.8
In turn Bacon admired T.S. Eliot’s recasting of Greek tragedy, seeing in it an
appropriate model for modern society. Bacon appreciated Eliot’s preoccupation
with, ‘mortality, the pathetic futility and solitude of life’, and the
manner in which he located ‘those existential conditions within a specific set
of modern circumstances’.9
Bacon’s description of the tightrope between abstraction and
figuration can also be used for poetry. “You have to abbreviate into
intensity”, he remarked, also an apt description for Eliot’s poetry. Bacon
chose painting to assuage the futility of life as he saw it. “I think that man
now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that
he has to play out the game within reason... You can be optimistic and totally
without hope”. Later, he said, “I think of life as meaningless; but we give
it meaning during our existence”.10 By contrast, Eliot had a
Christian faith and belief in an afterlife.
The use of triptych, Bacon insisted was its resistance to
narrative: “it breaks the series up and prevents it having a story, that’s
why the three panels are always framed separately”. Yet the sequence created
by three canvases side by side could equally create a story through the
interrelatedness of the three images and specific references within each.
Specific intended meaning is always speculative in Bacon’s work. The triptych
emphasises Bacon’s fascination with theatrical devices to observe the human
condition. Likewise Eliot’s Wasteland,
‘describes specific scenes and events but does not tie them to a single
story’.11
Room Ten Late, examines the last decade of
Bacon’s life. The confrontation with mortality was an abiding theme in his
work, having lost key figures in his life already. In 1993 he stated: “Life
and death go hand in hand …Death is like the shadow of life. When you’re
dead, you’re dead, but while you’re alive, the idea of death pursues you”.12
The very black paintings made in the 1970s which confronted the death of George
Dyer, gave way to more contemplative works, with a palpable restraint and
composure. In several paintings he draws on his admiration for the work of the
nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Numerous
reproductions of Ingres’ work were found in his studio, which he combined with
incongruous images from sporting figures. Bacon also employed a controlled
element of chance by throwing paint at the canvas. The aftermath of violence,
blood gushing from a victim onto the pavement, for example, Bacon found
exhilarating. Blood on Pavement,
(c1988) is presented with the artist’s extraordinary detachment. “Things are
not shocking if they haven’t been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it’s
just blood splattered against a wall.”13 The theme of detachment
from violence and suffering is achieved throughout Bacon’s oeuvre,
from an early Wound for a
Crucifixion (c.1934)
to the Bullfight works in the 1960s to Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, (1983). The last paintings are the
antithesis of Bacon’s early frenzied works, and have been criticised for being
formulaic and lacking in tension. They have a monumentality and order, yet
returning to the same themes that had occupied him for forty years. His last
triptych of 1991 returns to the issue of sexual struggle, which permeates much
of his life’s work. His most private feelings are laid bare, and to which he
referred in 1971/3, “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off
my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m
not trying to say anything”.14
Bacon
in close focus
Rebecca Daniels praises the curators' discriminating selection of
works in Tate's impressive Bacon exhibition.
Rebecca
Daniels, Apollo, 1st November, 2008
Despite
claims that the Tate's Francis Bacon exhibition is the biggest retrospective of
him ever staged, it is, in fact, substantially smaller than the gallery's 1985
show. However, the decision to be more selective has resulted in a very
high-quality exhibition. It is really a celebration of Bacon's larger paintings
and the few smaller works included, such as Study for Head of George Dyer
(1967; private collection), tend to be over-shadowed. The focus on large-scale
works is justified given the crowds likely to flock to this show and the
paintings have been generously spaced, maximising the chances for an unimpaired
view of them.
This is particularly apparent in the opening room, which is hung with only seven
works, introducing the paintings that Bacon completed after Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (around 1944; Tate). The absence of
that seminal work from Room 1 (it is included in a later room devoted to the
Crucifixion) prevents the viewer from appreciating it as Bacon subsequently
intended: he made clear that it was the painting that launched his career and
anything he completed prior to it should be destroyed. Also missing, undoubtedly
due to its fragile condition, is Painting 1946 (1946; Museum of Modern
Art, New York), a work that held a lifelong importance for Bacon. These
exclusions from Room I highlight the fact that this is the first exhibition held
here since Bacon died and, without the control he exercised over the previous
Tate show, the curators have had a new freedom in the presentation and
reassessment of his art.
There are two principal thematic detours from what is a loosely chronological
hang, and these provide the most dramatic and visually powerful displays in the
exhibition. The first features Bacon's recurring preoccupation with the theme of
the Crucifixion, the earliest version being the haunting Crucifixion
(1933, Murderme, London), which Herbert Read illustrated in Art Now (1933), when
Bacon was unknown. Bacon's art is often characterised as violent and brutal but,
with a few exceptions, this does not hold up under analysis. However, the
Crucifixion triptychs are indeed violent, as the exhibition's curator Chris
Stephens noted in a BBC interview, and the decision by him and his co-curator,
Matthew Gale, to hang Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Crucifixion (1965; Pinakothek der
Moderne, Munich; Fig. 2) facing each other, as if in gladiatorial combat, is
inspired.
A source for the mutilated bodies that appear in both the 1962 and the 1965
Crucifixion paintings is probably, as Martin Harrison has observed in the
catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, an illustration in a book Bacon
owned, The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (1957). The prominence
of carcasses in both triptychs was prompted by a feature on abattoirs in Paris
Match in November 1961 (which was found in Bacon's studio). Furthermore, the
controversial inclusion of a swastika in the 1965 Crucifixion was
influenced by photographs of Hitler and his entourage. Therefore, the
inspiration for the motifs in these important triptychs is drawn, as in so much
of Bacon's art, from magazines, newspapers and books. Yet, despite the
importance of this material, several reviewers have denounced the exhibitions
inclusion of a room devoted to archival material as a distraction from the
paintings. To me, the archive room enhances the experience of Bacon's work, as
it adds to an understanding of Bacon's preparatory methods in the same way that
Michelangelo's preliminary studies (incidentally a major source of inspiration
to Bacon) enhance an understanding of his finished frescoes.
The second thematic room, 'Memorial', is devoted to triptychs of George Dyer,
Bacon's lover and muse. The three large triptychs were all completed in the
years following Dyer's death in October 1971. The first, Triptych - In memory
of George Dyer (1971; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Fig. 1) is unusual in
Bacon's oeuvre as it appears to illustrate episodes in Dyer's life, while Triptych,
May-June 1973 (1973; private collection, Switzerland) recalls events of his
lonely suicide by graphically showing him vomiting in a sink in one panel and in
another slumped on a toilet (where he was found dead). Despite Bacon's dislike
of narrative interpretation, these triptychs seem to encourage a biographical
reading, an approach that the curators have invited by collecting these works
under the heading 'Memorial'.
While it is tempting to analyse these works solely as a sentimental and
nostalgic pining for lost love
- and there is undoubtedly an element
of that poignantly expressed in Bacon's diary on 24 October 1972 ('George died a
year today')
- it must also be remembered that
shortly before his death Dyer had planted drugs in Bacon's studio, leading to
Bacon's arrest and trial only four months before Dyer's suicide. It is perhaps
because such complex personal emotions underlie these works that Bacon,
unusually, has been unable to frustrate a narrative reading of his works.
Bacon's penchant for painting in themes is well represented and there is a good
selection of popes, businessmen, crouching figures and animal paintings. The
decision to hang the paintings at an extremely low level (often just above the
skirting boards) enables the viewer to examine the variations in Bacon's
application of paint. Nowhere is this more marked than in Head II (1949;
Ulster Museum, Belfast; Fig. 3), where the top half of the canvas has paint so
thick that it seems impenetrable (Bacon was trying to capture the effect of
rhinoceros skin) but the lower left is just raw canvas (revealing also that
Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas). Subtle nuances in technique
and colour can be appreciated with the low hang of the series works,
particularly of the Popes, where the marked differences in such compositional
elements as the 'space frames', curtains or 'shuttering' and the depiction of
the throne are worthy of close attention.
The one problematic aspect of the hang is the decision to break up the series
paintings, particularly the crouching figures, which are displayed over several
different rooms and therefore offer no chance to view them comparatively.
Nevertheless, in the case of the businessmen - which are all hung in one room -
interspersing them with animal paintings forces one to view them independently
of each other, and subtle differences appeared that I had not noticed before.
The exhibition also has a wonderful range of Bacon's important late works,
particularly a room filled predominantly with triptychs from the 1960s to 1980s,
including Triptych (1976; private collection), which was recently sold in
London for the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art.
The quality and range of the works on display provide an opportunity to show
Bacon at his best to a new generation too young to have seen the 1985 show. I
left the exhibition feeling, as one should, visually exhausted but exhilarated.
Rebecca Daniels is a researcher on Francis Bacon: The Catalogue Raisonne.
The Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain Auditorium, Wednesday 1 October 2008
I can’t remember now whether it was in the catalogue of the current exhibition of Bacon or whether on it was on one of those panels but at some point there was a quotation from Bacon saying “I suppose in the end we’re just meat” and I wanted to try and start off, as it were, some thoughts about both texture and also materiality by considering some of the problems, what we might call the aesthetic problems, of meat especially in that difficult area that we call ugliness or which other people call ugliness, I want to try and suggest this evening this is not how it’s normally portrayed and if properly handled is an extremely powerful and valuable artistic and architectural instrument.
Let me invite you first to engage in a thought experiment. You look at some ones face as we scan some ones face we look, as it were, for signs of expression, in some sense for the way in which the face is thought to be able to represent emotions or states of mind or whatever. As we do it invariably we have a fantasy that this expression does not simply belong to the surface but it has a depth and we frequently actually experience that as a depth but of course it has this peculiarity because the depth is not remotely localised.
If we say he looked sad we don’t say it looked about two centimetres deep in the sadness of it. Now nowhere I think is it more remarkable than if you add in to this picture of a face which you experience partly through the dimension of the depth of its expression then imagine suddenly in some process, the face suddenly manifests a wound and you suddenly see that underneath the infinitesimally thin layer of skin there’s blood and there’s flesh and there’s bone; normally people have a kind of visceral turning away from this experience. Now if you try to follow through this action of turning away, we might wonder: what is it that we’re turning away from?...
The appearance of the wound indicates suddenly the collapse – a collapse of what; I mean, I’m going to say representation but I don’t mean it in a representational way. It’s as if I can’t continue having a fantasy about the depth of your sadness or the extent of your pleasure; I can’t do it any longer because, as it were, it is disrupted by the appearance of a wound. Essentially unless your medically knowledgeable, what you’re seeing, and I think Bacon was correct to use it in a general sense, is what he calls meat. Let’s kind of make a formula in some sense as saying: what meat is at a kind of level of experience, is almost the collapse of representation or of signification…
This
collapse of representation is I think part of what we might call the experience
of ugliness, the turning away, at which point we might begin to hypothesise that
this is not what I think it is, it is what I think people experience it as; an
experience of the ugly in that sense is this: it is without signification it is
without being a part of the a space of representation, it is stuff, it is
meat… People’s
experience of the ugly - again I’m not saying that’s what it is - is a
defence against this moment - a moment which is too raw and is too, almost,
unnerving; we might say that the popular experience of the ugly is: it’s that
which is there but at the same time, is perceived as it shouldn’t be there -
or sometimes it’s the same but the other way round: it’s that which is not
there but should be.
In Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment when the scene shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he has seen the ghost in box five; he describes the ghost to the girls and he says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly we know exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose and that no nose is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that isn’t there but should be… I want to suggest that one dimension of the achievement of Bacon is in a sense to take this problem on board directly and, in a way that it is very difficult to describe in his achievement, but has the achievement of as it were, bringing back meat into our understanding, bringing back meat into a kind of poetics, that which is always, as it were, normally excluded; I was at the exhibition on Sunday and it’s not just a question obviously of meat, it is those strange puddles of existence which you see so clearly in the three triptychs in homage to George Dyer - it is, indeed, a sublime moment…
Now in a sense all I’ve said is an attempt to say that what people describe as being ugly we should consider it a defence and if you can undo this defence, if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst of meat and find it not only human but essentially human, then, as it were, you remove some of the defences which so often kind of disable, I don’t mind putting it bluntly, disable public taste. It is a struggle. Now if something like this is the case, that I’m more than aware that I haven’t said directly anything about architecture and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the issues this evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career what also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level of a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to say, to undermine the public defence against the ugly and actually to propel it towards something new and powerful and human not in a humanistic way but human almost in a somewhat unnerving way. Thank you very much.
Painting the Pope: an Analysis of Francis Bacon's Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X
Rina Arya, University of Chester
Literature and Theology, Oxford University Press, 10th September, 2008.
Abstract
In many discussions of his work Bacon is disparaging about, and more specifically, Christianity. And yet, in spite of his unequivocal stance, throughout his oeuvre he was relentlessly drawn towards the symbols of the Christian tradition, especially the motif of the Crucifixion and the Pope. In this article I want to compare Velázquez's painting of Pope Innocent X (1650) and Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X (1953) in order to assess the reasons that explain Bacon's obsession with the image of the Pope. His descriptor ‘study after’ in the title qualifies his aims which entailed deconstructing the Velázquez painting and reappropriating it for his own ends. I think it fitting to describe Bacon's version as being a mirror-image or photographic negative of Velázquez's. And although Bacon virulently critiques the institutions of the Church, he is dependent upon the wealth of theological sources for his imagery as well as the position of theism, which alone gives credence to his practice.
Examines
one of the 20th century's greatest painters
Dr Rina Arya, Speaker,
Duration: 1 hour, 14 October 2008 at 2:00 pm
Venue:
Grosvenor Museum
27 Grosvenor Street
Chester CH1 2DD
01244 402008
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the greatest painters of the 20th century & his
powerful images will be explored in this lecture by Dr Rina Arya. Senior
Lecturer in Critical & Contextual Studies at the University of Chester.
Although Bacon's central subject is the human figure he cannot comfortably be
described as a figurative painter in the conventional sense. He uses abstraction
& distortion to give us a sense of the body and the bodily which is far more
intimate than figuration on its own would allow.
I. Introduction
Here, however, lies the task
of philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even
if they are catastrophic. …Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the
poetic and enigmatic value of thinking. For, facing a world that is
unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even
more unintelligible, even more enigmatic (Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion:
83).
What I want to do is distort
the thing far beyond appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a
recording of the appearance.
…To me, the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made. I know it
can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed. But how can this thing be
made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the
making (Bacon in Sylvester, 1980:40, 105).
Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976)
You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision (Giacometti in Sylvester, 1994:234).
The painting of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is of importance to contemporary
thought because it shares with contemporary theory important insights concerning
the real. Bacon understood, as did thinkers like Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007),
that we never know the real, merely the appearances behind which it hides. Art,
for Bacon, was about feeling and sensing until an appearance could be rendered
which stands in for the real. According to this view, the simulation – the
painting – is understood as more real than what we see. It is these
characteristics of Bacon’s work that are most appealing to contemporary
theorists who, like Baudrillard, believe that theory is a challenge to the real.
For Bacon the artists “feelings” (and what he often referred to as
“sensations”) are very much what Baudrillard saw as vital to “the soul of
art”. By looking at the ways in which the thought of these two radically
independent thinkers dealt with the real we see how artists and theorists can
share important epistemological insights. In the case of Bacon and Baudrillard
it is an epistemology which values enigma, unintelligibility, and a resistance
to collective meanings or truth.
This paper examines the
painting and thought of Francis Bacon alongside of the thought of Jean
Baudrillard. In this I follow an important caution from Deleuze who said: “We
do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say” (Deleuze: 81).
Bacon’s interviews with Sylvester (1980) and Archimbaud (1993) provide a
cogent rendering of his philosophy of the real and appearances. Going beyond
Baudrillard’s eleven rather cryptic mentions of Bacon, I argue that looking
more closely at Bacon’s painting alongside of contemporary thought concerning
the real and meaning, adds an important dimension to the effort to mend the
epistemological break under which we labour. This is a break that relegates
anything not deemed “scientific” (such as art) to a realm of non-knowledge.
Looking at artists like Bacon and theorists like Baudrillard along side each
other provides a striking example of the way so called “social” thought and
art may continue to intersect as part of the struggle against the hegemony of a
banal, colourless and emotionless epistemological empiricism.
II. Baudrillard and Bacon
I would like my pictures to look as if a human being has passed between them,
like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past
events, as the snail leaves its slime (Bacon in Archimbaud, 1993:40).
For Baudrillard, “...the
soul of Art” was its “power of illusion” and “its capacity for negating
reality”. Baudrillard called this the “setting up an ‘other scene’”
– one opposed to reality and in which “things obey a higher set of rules”.
In art, “beings, like line and colour on canvas, are apt to lose their
meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d’etre”. For
Baudrillard, and Bacon’s portraits do this very well, the sitter for a
portrait in a painting (like his own ideas in his writing), is to be pushed to
their extreme limit and possible destruction. Baudrillard, bewildered by the
excess banality of the contemporary art which surrounded him, years prior to
registering his satisfaction with Bacon, had come to believe that, art “in
this sense… is gone” (The Transparency of Evil:14).
Baudrillard
said that he preferred Bacon’s “singularity” (Paroxysm: 104) and
Bacon’s ability to “go beyond the dimension of art, aesthetics and well
tempered culture” (Ibid.91). He was deeply impressed by the lack of
“play acting” and the “staging of the self” in Bacon’s interviews (Ibid.)
For Baudrillard, Bacon was a very “creative individual” who “no longer
regard’s himself as a representational being – but as an obsessive,
temperamental object” (Baudrillard Live, 1993: 149, 99).
Another very appealing aspect about Bacon was the painter’s lack of anxiety
regarding his own position in the history of art despite his concern for artists
that provoked a response from him (Velasquez, Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh and
Soutine to name a few). Echoing the claim: “I write for myself” (Baudrillard
Live: 182), Bacon said “I don’t paint for others, I paint for myself”
(in Archimbaud: 29). The fierce individualism of both Baudrillard and Bacon
makes their shared epistemological and art historical values all the more
striking. For Bacon: “All painting is accident” – a process in which
chance, the making of involuntary marks, and unconscious decisions play an
important role (in Sylvester, 1980: 50 ff.). “Half of my painting activity”
said Bacon, “is disrupting what I can do with ease” …“I can quite easily
sit down and make what is called a literal portrait of you. So what I’m
disrupting all the time is the literalness, because I find it uninteresting” (Ibid.:
121). This self description of Bacon’s painting also applies to
Baudrillard’s understanding of his own writing – a kind of “revolt against
the establishment” as Bacon described it to Archimbaud (1993:128).
Bacon’s
assessment of Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X is especially
important to his view of art and the epistemological insights he shared with
contemporary thought. Bacon said that Velasquez’s portrait helps us to
understand how the painter “walks along the edge of a precipice… so near to
what we call illustration and at the same time… unlock the greatest and
deepest things that man can feel” (Ibid.:28). Velasquez’s painting
is not merely a rendering of the pope’s likeness, but also a deep tension (in
the pope’s face) which Bacon said tells us a good deal about Velasquez’s
ambivalent feelings for this particular sitter. Velasquez is not rendering so
much aspects of the pope he is certain of, but rather, feelings and sensations
about unknowable and disturbing aspects of Innocent’s character. Here
Bacon’s ideas sit well alongside those of Baudrillard once again as for Bacon,
painting has little to do with the real but is more about the making of
appearances – getting at the more real than the real – where the real is
abolished and vanishes into simulation (Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange:
11). Velasquez’s Innocent X is more than merely a good likeness of an
important historical figure, but also a record of Velasquez’s sensations of
Innocent’s cruel and evil character. As Baudrillard has it: “With a few
exceptions like Bacon, art no longer confronts evil, only the transparency of
evil” (Conspiracy of Art: 77).
Even a
close friend like Isabel Rawthorne retains, for Bacon, certain mysterious and
unknowable aspects when she sits for a portrait and these are represented by
Bacon with abstract or fragmented brushstrokes. While the style is different,
Bacon like Velasquez presents his feelings for a sitter and these unknowable
aspects in the final work (a shared problem). For many artists in the 20th
century the ultimate unknowability of the real led to a freefall into total
abstraction. For Bacon abstraction is not up to the task of painting which is to
record feelings, and sensations – to master the game a painter has to occupy a
space in between illustration and abstraction. Perhaps Bacon’s efforts to
represent human angst and suffering capture this aspect of his work best as in
the early painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
For Bacon then: “Painting
has nothing to do with illustration, any more than for Baudrillard writing has
anything to do with straight forward universally understood meanings. Bacon’s
painting is the opposite of illustration “…it’s the result of a sort of
conflict between the material and the subject” (in Archimbaud: 104, 145) as
Baudrillard’s writing is the opposite of banality. This is what Bacon calls
the “tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and
abstraction” (in Sylvester, 1980:12). In Baudrillard’s terms it is taking a
world that is given to us as enigmatic and unintelligible and making it even
more so.
For Bacon the challenge of
the real faces every artist: “The problem is how you’re going to make the
figuration. How are you going to make this thing look real, how are you going to
make it real to the way you feel about the thing or real to the instinct” (Ibid.:
64). The abstract and/or fragmented aspects of Bacon’s paintings, especially
his portraits, are his way of acknowledging the mysteries and unknown aspects
– what others have called the “zone of shadows” and “terra incognita”
(see Proust, II:123) – of the sitter, including a self portrait. As Bacon
tells Sylvester: “…there is a kind of sensational image within the very, you
could say, structure of your being, which is not to do with a mental image –
when that image, through accident, begins to form” (Ibid.: 160). The
painting of other people, good artists, could also provoke sensations: “…to
be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply
unlocking areas of sensation – other than simple illustrations of the object
– isn’t that what all art is about” (Ibid.:57).
The link between Bacon and contemporary theory, which I have chosen to illustrate here by way of Baudrillard, is his effort to work away from meaning in the direction of the enigmatic and unintelligible. The real is always there; ever unknowable, hiding behind appearances and the sensations we have of these appearances. Both Bacon and Baudrillard employ the notion of a “trap” which is useful in understanding Bacon’s motives as a painter as similar to Baudrillard’s as a writer. For Baudrillard: “Theory can be no more than a trap set in the hope that reality will be naive enough to fall into it” (Transparency of Evil:110). For Bacon …the difference from direct recording is that as a painter one has to set a trap by which one hopes to trap the mysterious aspects of a sitter alive: “There are always emanations from people whoever they are, though some people are stronger than others … with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them” (in Sylvester, 1980:34). What Baudrillard says of thought, Bacon believes for painting – painting (like thought) is a challenge – a trap set for the real to tumble into (Paroxysm: 37).

Study for a Bullfight No.2 (1969)
In a world
which is given to us as enigmatic (the real hiding behind appearances), and
unintelligible (in terms of any hope of shared truth or meaning), Bacon’s
painting like the best of contemporary thought, provides a strong challenge.
Bacon is committed to truth only so far as it exists along local and restricted
horizons. Of far greater interest to him, as for Baudrillard, is the enigmatic
qualities and ultimate unknowability of the world and its occupants.
Painting like writing is a form of simulation in which reality is always
recreated according to the feelings and sensations of the artist or writer. As
Bacon said of Van Gogh: Van Gogh really did find a new way of depicting reality,
and that method wasn’t realist, but was much more powerful than simple
realism. It was really a work of recreating reality (Bacon in Archimbaud: 42).
III. A Return to Art: Contemporary Theory after Empiricism
...one never believes in
anything. ...Belief is an absurd concept… (Baudrillard, Seduction
1990:142).
Bacon’s oeuvre works
against firm meanings and in doing so contributes to the world’s
enigmaticalness and unintelligibility. His painting is an ally of
epistemological approaches in social theory that seek to work beyond simple
empiricism. For Bacon, our feelings and sensations are vital in facing illusion
which prioritizes the importance of looking: “The most important thing”
according to Bacon, is to “look at a painting… not in order to understand or
know it, but to feel something” (Ibid. 77). This view of painting
(which Bacon extends to poetry and music and “art” generally), sits very
well with Baudrillard’s thought concerning meaning:
…do we absolutely have to choose between meaning and non-meaning? … The
absence of meaning is no doubt intolerable, but it would be just as intolerable
to see the world assume a definitive meaning… (Impossible Exchange:
128).
For Baudrillard, meaning (like truth or the real) appear(s) only locally, as a partial object (Simulacra and Simulation: 108). If we go by Baudrillard’s exacting standard for art – the kind of art he felt “was gone” – then the work of Francis Bacon, when we pry into its epistemological underpinnings, may well be a reason to imagine that a return to art is possible. This points us toward tremendous implications not only for a kind of art we thought was gone, but also for theory as it continues to intersect ever more frequently with the trajectory of art.Study after Velázquez (1950)

Study after Velázquez (1950)
The
intersections between social theory and art which have become increasingly
evident in recent years have only been possible because certain variants of
contemporary theory have sought an escape velocity from the dead weight of
empiricism – precisely the kind of literal painting or practical writing that
would reduce Bacon and Baudrillard to banality. What Baudrillard achieves in
texts Bacon achieves in his paintings in a pre-verbal manner. I cannot say what
Bacon’s impact on the art world will continue to be but it seems likely that
his lasting impact will be on epistemology as much as art. Bacon here emerges as
a central player in the current meeting points of theory and art against the
hegemonic censorship of thought by empiricism. It is little wonder why
Baudrillard found such an artist of interest. Bacon’s concern for the real,
seen through a Baudrillardian lens, shows us the importance of art (including
music, poetry, and literature etc.,) to theory.
Francis Bacon’s painting
is not only a challenge to the real (as is Baudrillard’s thought) – it is
also a great challenge to an art world which has, by and large, forgotten what
painting is, and a good deal of what art is as well. Similarly, in the artifical
departmentalization of what the university has attempted to do to thought,
theory too lost its way and became the hand maid of empiricism. Bacon’s
painting and Baudrillard’s writing, taken together, point to a more promising
horizon for thought and for art. The contemporary university (itself too much
under the guidance of so called “social scientific” principles) stakes its
value on what is, in fact, a denial of the world’s enigmaticalness and
unintelligibility. For Bacon, like Baudrillard, “reality” is present in the
abstractness of appearances (in Sylvester, 1980: 40) and we see it only
“through veils and screens” (Ibid.: 82). Bacon like Baudrillard is
always attempting to lift these veils: “...we no longer believe the truth is
there when all its veils have been removed” (The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place: 77). A significant portion of the future of contemporary theory may
well rest outside of the university.
Today
theory and art still remain largely separate areas of endeavour as does the
analysis of each. This allows the merciless and monstrous slaves of empiricism
(such as contemporary “social ‘science’”), to enforce a powerful
censorship on much social thought. The greatest challenge we face today is the
effort to begin mending an appalling epistemological break which makes this
censorship (including the banishment of the arts from social thought) possible.
The break has usurped the name of science and it relegates all other forms of
thought to a “senseless prehistory” of what is considered “knowledge” (Mirror
of Production:113). It is four decades since Baudrillard first attacked
this break and in the interim the problem has only worsened despite the efforts
of many now committed to transdisciplinarity (which itself is showing signs of
congealing into a kind of academic INTERPOL).
Unlike the fundamentalists
of empiricism, Bacon (like Baudrillard), was a man without belief (Sylvester,
1980:23). Bacon and Baudrillard also shared a despairing optimism and it is one
well suited to seeing us through to more artful possibilities for epistemology.
Painting, of the kind theorized and accomplished by Francis Bacon, is vital to
our hope to mend our fractured epistemology as it quietly joins forces with
Baudrillard’s writing. Recently many of us have begun to imagine intersections
of theory and art which are devoted neither to truth nor to empiricist
principles. Against the hegemony of empiricism over social thought Bacon and
Baudrillard each point to the importance of things in which not to
believe. It is precisely their refusal to believe that allowed them paint and
write so artfully.
Empiricism
is to theory what literalness is to painting – a recipe not for challenge but
for banality. As for science – it isn’t really centred on empiricism as many
(especially in the social sciences) today may believe, but rather, about
uncertainty and things in which not to believe – mysteries – zones of
darkness – the grand terra incognita of thought that theory and art will
continue to explore together. Indeed, uncertainty (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle) is science’s gift to contemporary thought. Through a return to the
excluded – art – theory which has commitments other than empiricism will
continue to re-envision how we know. Rather than chase a real we can never know
we may, like Bacon the painter and Baudrillard the theorist, develop sensations
of what lay beyond appearances. Again the ghost of Barthes appears in
contemporary theory as knowledge is much more personal than we have cared to
admit in our previous quest for universal truth.
Art and theory can make powerful allies against our epistemological break. Bacon showed us that art is once again possible when looked upon as a challenge to the real. Baudrillard did likewise with theory claiming that “theory is simply a challenge to the real” (Forget Baudrillard: 124). The best of theory today is more closely aligned than ever before with all forms of art – painting, poetry, literature, etc. Not surprisingly, theory committed to mending the epistemological break under which we have long suffered, is a very artful endeavor. It is little wonder why Jean Baudrillard and others including myself find the painting and thought of Francis Bacon so attractive.

Bacon (mid 1960s)
References
Michel Archimbaud. Francis
Bacon in Conversation with Michel Archimbaud. London: Phaidon, 1993.
Jean Baudrillard (Mike Gane,
Editor). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London: SAGE, 1993.
Jean Baudrillard. Cool
Memories I. New York: Verso, 1990
Jean Baudrillard. “Forget
Baudrillard: An Interview with Sylvere Lotringer” in Forget Foucault/
Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
Jean Baudrillard. Impossible
Exchange. New York: Verso, 2001.
Jean Baudrillard. “The
Politics of Seduction: An Interview with Suzanne Moore and Stephen Johnstone. Marxism
Today. January, 1989.
Jean Baudrillard. Paroxysm:
Interviews with Philippe Petit. New York: Verso, 1997.
Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra
and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Conspiracy of Art. MIT/Semiotext(e), 2005.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington, University of Indiana Press,
1995.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Singular Objects of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Transparency of Evil. New York: Verso, 1993.
Jean Baudrillard. The
Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Gilles Deleuze. Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.
Marcel Proust. In Search
of Lost Time (Volume II): Within a Budding Grove. New York: Modern
Library, 2003.
David Sylvester: Interviews
With Francis Bacon (1962-1979). London: Thames
and Hudson, 1980.
David
Sylvester. Looking at Giacometti. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994
Dr. Gerry
Coulter gcoulter@ubishops.ca His essay
“Baudrillard, Holderlin and the Poetic Resolution of the World” will appear
in Nebula in February 2009. His essay “Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive
Ambivalence of Gaming” appeared in the SAGE journal Games and Culture (Volume
2, Number 4, December, 2007:358-365) – also available on-line at: http://www.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/358.
His recent Article: “A Place For The Non-Believer: Jean Baudrillard on the
West and the Arab and Islamic Worlds”, appears in Subaltern Studies: http://www.subalternstudies.com/?p=476;
An essay “A Way of Proceeding: Joseph Beuys, the Epistemological Break, and
Radical Thought Today” appears in Kritikos: A Journal of Postmodern Cultural
Sound, Text, and Image (May - June, 2008): http://intertheory.org/gcoulter.htm;
and his quarterly column for Euro Art (On-line) Magazine: “Kees van Dongen and
the Power of Seduction” (Spring 2008) is available at: http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=13=1&content=156.
An interview will appear in the philosophy journal Khora in early 2009. His
teaching has been recognized on numerous occasions most recently by Bishop’s
University’s highest award for teaching – the William and Nancy Turner
Prize.
Desmond Morris on Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944)
Tate Etc Issue 8 / Autumn 2006
The face of the figure is distorted into a scream of horrific intensity. He painted many screams in later works, but none can match the impact of this one. It is the scream of the torture victim at the very moment that the lash cuts the flesh. The victim, of course, is Bacon himself. He was heavily into bondage and masochistic ritual in his private life, and he relived his painful eroticism in many of his images of trussed up, agonised, distorted figures.
Francis was fascinated by extreme forms of facial expression, and the mouth stretched open to full gape was his favourite. One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile." The truth was that he could get no kicks from an image of a smiling face. It was not part of his complex sexual obsession.
Others may see in this screaming face a reflection of the agonies of war-torn Europe, a statement about the horrors of modern existence, or the entrapment and isolation of modern man in his urban cell. I see nothing of the sort. I see a devout masochist enjoying the thrill of encapsulating the secret joys of his most private moments. The great mystery about Bacon's work is why this lifelong fetishistic indulgence should have resulted in the creation of such truly great art. But then mystery is the very essence of art. As Picasso once said: "I don't understand it and if I did, I wouldn't tell you."
- Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was presented to Tate by Eric Hall in 1953.

Francis Bacon Detail of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion c.1944
Oil on board Each panel 94x73.7cm
© Tate
'Obsessed by Life'
The Expression of Horror
Luigi Ficacci
Francis Bacon, Taschen, 2003.
Francis Bacon fixed the starting point of his artistic career on Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, executed in 1944, although he had been painting for over a decade, had created a number of extremely interesting paintings, and had appeared in several exhibitions, sowing the first seeds of his future notoriety as an artist. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion manifests a terrible, expressive violence. It does not represent any violent act. But some undefined and inhuman violence that occurred in an unseen space and time beyond the limits of the painting has impressed its horror on the forms and the coloured area surrounding them.
The composition is separated into three distinct canvases that are coordinated so as to form a triptych. The arrangement is of such disturbing originality that Bacon afterwards used it on a frequent basis, whenever the pictorial motif seemed to require this type of treatment. The orange hue spread across the space of the three canvases so violently strikes the observer as to overwhelm all powers of perception and eliminate the possibility of reading the forms according to common conventions of rational logic. A single sentiment unifies the figures, each of which is isolated on its own canvas: it is a furious, suffering, and horrified expression, of victims and witnesses to something whose effect is an atrocious sense of tragedy.
The human and bestial elements composing the figures, all rendered ambiguous by their respective deformation, are so impenetrable and enigmatic as to thwart comprehension of any explicit meaning. Any attempt to deduce prior intention in the morphology of these bodies by means of logic will fail, collapsing in admission that this painting leads into an unknown area, at whose boundaries conventional logic must halt. In Bacon, painting is not a field for the imitation of apparent reality, but an independent and artificial act emerging from the innermost and most instinctive needs of the individual, dominated exclusively by the profound, wild force of expression.
What the contradictory composition and mingling of the bodies' grey magma with other colours transmits in Three Studies is the lacerating expression of a cry, regardless of its nature or its cause. It is a cry reduced to its wild force, beyond the normal human need to identify and resolve the cause of malaise. More animal than human, so excessive as to become unaware of its own expressive implications: it is no longer capable of communicating anything intelligible. The very obscurity of the origin of this sensation and the likely identity of the visible subject allows the image to avoid any particular illustrative signification and penetrate instead to the quicker and more intuitive level of the mind: where sensations act, such as the modes of awareness that precede logic and run deeper than it.
Bacon needs to renounce natural logic and upset it in the act of painting in order to reveal and transform into comprehensible terms something originating in the unconscious: the complex, multiple, and contradictory mass of emotions and the obsessive images that arouse it. This is its material, nothing other than the experience of human existence and the unconscious subtrate over which it passes. Through revelation of the unconscious in painting, the insignificant existence of the individual rises to the grandness of a mythical experience: to a condition that transforms an infinitude of empirical experiences into the tragic story of mankind.
The magnetic orange surface is blinding, to the point that space is perceived more at the psychic than logical level. The struggle of pictorial composition reveals the traces of lines, partial geometrical figures interrupted during the construction of space. They are residual fragments of what painting in the past had used to delineate an organic configuration of man's architectural or natural environment around the human figure, the setting in which he was the measure and central point of reference. This representation of space dominated by man could express much of the narrative and symbolic intelligibility of the image. Of this impossible perfection, which fell to pieces in the wreckage of modern civilization, nothing survives in the chromatic magma of Bacon's work other than fragments that are perceptible with the same immediacy, plunging into the depths of the unknown abyss of the mind and the other sensations that constitute the material of painting. They are the traces of a tragedy that is identified with the progress of history, in the innermost way, not in distinct episodes, but with the same rhythm: the terrifying and vital rhythm of the transformation of man and his culture.
Biomorphic typologies burst into this work from the history of human civilization, recalling certain figures of bathers by Picasso from the 1920s, at the limits of the comical and the grotesque. They are forms that emerge from artistic culture, but with the same forcefulness of a mental obsession. The resulting figure is a traumatic expression of the horror that originates in profound feelings, revealed by artistic memory and the history of painting, felt as if it were living matter. It is as if Bacon encountered Picasso's creatures along the course of his imagination, as if it were a beaten path. He himself would define his conception of his historical source in art as "a formal armor."
An infinity of clues in the painting, and an infinity of clues in the historical memory of the subject looking at the work show that the horror is provoked by the immanent drama of a catastrophe for which mankind is responsible. (This triptych dates from 1944, a time when the conscience of Europe was upset by the horror of war). But the true object is the expression of horror in itself, superior to any specific and transitory cause. A relative cause might allow it to be overcome. But horror, as an integral force of existence, beyond all the contingent evidence that experience might have known, permits neither distractions nor progress. What Bacon does is grasp the most universal expression of horror through the force of painting: by giving from to a wail. Because the figures do not illustrate any action, the key to understanding the nature of their presence is implicit in the expression, "Studies," that enigmatically appears in their title. This expression is foreign to the representation of reality, belonging instead to the most specifically academic tradition of artistic work. Indeed, the figures are in the preparatory state of suspension in which every artist of any epoch places his model when he starts to transform it into the image of his inner world.
If Bacon gives the work a title like "Studies," which refers to a neutral condition of artistic work, it is because this preparatory act of traditional painting practice becomes the very object of the image. And in imposing this limit, he manages to transform his own existential experience into sensation and to express it as a universal force. Indeed, this is one of the most radical ambitions in modern art, where the real subject of the work is art itself.
Second Version of Triptych 1944, (1988) Francis Bacon
Great Works
Three studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)
Francis Bacon Tate Gallery, London
Sue Hubbard, The Independent, August 31st, 2007
Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion were painted over the course of two weeks in 1944 in the ground floor flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which had once been the studio of the artist John Everett Millais. During the day the converted billiard room served as Bacon's studio, and at night as an illicit casino.
B recalled that at the time he was drinking heavily and that he painted the studies in an alcoholic haze. Later he was to admit that he hardly knew what he was doing, though he believed that alcohol had loosened his style. Yet, despite this unpromising genesis, the triptych of three writhing, anthropomorphic figures, with their featureless, scarcely human faces contorted into what might be either pain or exquisite ecstasy, set against a background of visceral oranges, reds and blacks, marks a watershed in British painting.
Bacon had been painting the Crucifixion since 1933, commissioned by his then patron, Eric Hall, but he considered the works unsuccessful and destroyed them, and, for a while, abandoned painting. When he did return to the subject of the Crucifixion 11 years later he was influenced by his reading of Aeschylus's savage drama The Oresteia (itself a trilogy) which tells the tale of the curse of the House of Atreus and the pursuit, by the avenging Furies (or Eumenides), of those responsible for murder. Generally considered to be his first masterwork, Bacon was at some pains to suppress the showing of any paintings that pre-dated the Three Studies.
Executed in oil and pastel and, for economy, on light Sundeala boards rather than canvas, Bacon's Eumenides are barely recognisable as human figures, for they have no eyes but only gaping, silently screaming mouths. The creature on the left, seated on a table of sorts, is the most recognisably human. Partially draped in a length of cloth, this bent form, with its hunched white shoulders, its stumpy, malformed arms and bowed head topped with a mop of dark hair, might be a mourner at some unnamed wake, while that in the central panel, with its grimacing mouth set directly into its elongated neck, is blindfolded by a white cloth - a motif taken, perhaps, from Matthias Grnewald's Mocking of Christ - and resembles some large, flightless bird. The figure on the right appears to have most of its upper face missing. Its head is thrown back, its mouth stretched open to reveal its teeth, as if in the grips of some bestial orgasmic spasm.
The heads of all three figures point downwards, following a series of converging lines that radiate out from the central plinth and imply a room or an enclosed space. The mood is one of bleak isolation and violent angst. This work is to painting what Sartre's Huis Clos is to literature; a paean to existential despair.
This is also a Crucifixion with a difference, for there is no evidence, not even a shadow, of the actual event. No trace of Christ or his cross, though Bacon did say in a letter in 1959 that Three Studies were, "intended to [be] use[d] at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may still do". Yet how genuine this remark was is hard to gauge from the bleakly nihilistic non-believer who once said, "I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence..." "we are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."
Distortion and fragmentation are the tools that Bacon used to explore these elemental states, for he was at enormous pains to eradicate what he saw as any figurative illustration. What he wanted to convey was something visceral, a presence beyond mere likeness; of beings controlled by chthonic urges and base instincts, the Dionysian Calibans of human existence rather than the Apollonian Ariel's; his territory was what Freud would have called the id.
The sense of futility that Bacon was trying to capture is not surprising, given that it was 1944, and that rumours of the Nazi death-camps had begun to leak out. Such nihilism is also present in much of the work of TS Eliot. Bacon had come to know Aeschylus through Eliot's 1939 play, The Family Reunion, in which the central character, Harry, is haunted by "the sleepless hunters/ that will not let me sleep." Here the Furies embody the guilt and remorse felt by Harry, who harbours a dark secret.
Like many other artists and writers of the early 20th century, Bacon had read Nietzsche, and shared something of his hypothesis of "a strong pessimism". He had been particularly attracted to The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche's passionate rejection of Christianity, and his passion for life resonated with Bacon, who said: "... 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."
The American critic, Donald Kuspit, thought Bacon's figures were "sick with death - not necessarily literal death but rather the feeling of being nothing." Their loneliness, he suggested, depicted a "general sense of oblivion."
Bacon had always been fascinated with images of the mouth, in particular diseased mouths, after he found a second-hand book in which these were illustrated in a series of coloured plates. He spoke of "the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth", and said that he "always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." He was also taken with a photograph by the Surrealist J-A Boiffard in the radical magazine, Documents, in which the editor, the French writer and philosopher of the abject, Georges Bataille, had written a short text on La Bouche. Bataille rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion.
For Bacon, as for Bataille, the open, gaping, screaming wound of the mouth expressed something of our most intense emotional experiences and brought us close to our bestial selves. The linking of the noble and the base, of man and beast so as to blur the distinction between them, was part of Bataille's attack on the "idealist deception" that man practices upon himself. The open mouth of Bacon's right-hand figure ends in a savage, snarling, snout of teeth. For the promiscuously gay and sadomasochistically inclined Bacon the mouth had obvious sexual connotations. He was also, almost certainly, thinking of the scene in Battleship Potemkin where the wounded nursemaid stands screaming on the Odessa steps; in addition to making a reference to the despairing mother in Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents.
First shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945, the triptych caused a sensation. The critic John Russell was shocked by "images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half- animal..." Yet by 1971 he was able to write, "there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one... can confuse the two." More than 60 years later it has still not lost any of its power.
The artist
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 of English parents, the second of five children. He was asthmatic and had no conventional schooling. In 1925 his father threw him out for wearing his mother's clothes. In London he worked as a decorator and began to paint. In 1936 he submitted work to the International Surrealist exhibition but was rejected as "not sufficiently surreal". Between 1941-4 he destroyed all his work, and was pronounced unfit for military service. In 1945 he resumed painting. In 1953 Three Studies was acquired by the Tate. In 1955 he had his first retrospective at the ICA. In 1960 he had his first exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. In the early 1960s he and George Dyer became lovers and he painted Three Figures in a Room.
Violent Emotions
A Close Look at Francis
Bacon's 1944 Triptych
By
Raluca Preotu Art
History News 26 March 2001
Francis Bacon was widely acclaimed as an Expressionist: violent emotions burst through his paintings, wrenching sharp, nervous responses from an audience fomenting the ideals (and illusions?) of peace and humanity. Bacon was not the first to do it - before him we had Edvard Munch (see The Scream), or Egon Schiele (see Seated Couple)... to illustrate only two Expressionist forerunners.
Why was (and is) Bacon so disturbing then? Why do his comments on the meaninglessness of this world continue to reach so deep into us? Well, for one thing, when he exhibited in 1945, his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in London, Europe had just been through a war. Not a time to "revel" in Bacon's humanoid Furies, which, half-human and half-animal (John Russell)1, with missing limbs and bandaged, could very well remind one of dismembered mutilated cadavers, if it were not for their movement and much alive mouth and ear.
To a shocked audience, Francis Bacon responded by saying that he was trying "to unlock the valves of feeling" and not trying to be "horrific". 2. Also, Bacon - a declared atheist - maintained that his figures were references to the Furies, those goddesses which lead Greek tragic heroes to destruction by reminding them of their sins - after the Second World War, portrayal of angry goddesses like these makes sense.
Not to say that this interpretation brought only ovations. Here's the voice of critic Raymond Mortimer, "I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [to me] symbols of outrage rather than works of art." 3
One should keep in mind however, that the Furies interpretation is not the only one possible. First of all, the title still points to a Christian subject, and that should be investigated. Even though Francis Bacon said the triptych does not necessarily refer to Christ's Crucifixion 4, just take a moment and look carefully at the three panels. If you still stare blindly at the bandage and at the contrast between the central figure and the wriggling two on the sides, have a look at a Crucifixion piece by Antonello da Messina.
You'll see that the figures "at the base of the Crucifixion" could very well be Christ and the two thieves. Don't expect Francis Bacon to give you too much of an interpretation though. After all, as with Picasso and Guernica, see and understand what you will: the painter has done his job already. Now the painting is yours to interpret, according to your personal propensity.
But,
in case you want a final word from Francis Bacon, David Sylvester is
bringing you one - so here's the late Francis Bacon, honest (supposedly -
he has been known to stray from the truth once or twice) but evasive:
"It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad
mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I
sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. It's one of the only pictures I've
been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a
bit freer." 5*
End Notes:
1. FrancisBacon.cx2. Tate Gallery3. FrancisBacon.cx
4.
Tate Gallery 5. Francis Bacon; Interviews with Francis Bacon, David
Sylvester* (NB: Bacon is talking about his 1962 Three Studies for a
Crucifixion here and not the 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion).
Writer's Bio:
"I have a BA from Hanover College, IN, where I majored in Spanish and
minored in Art. I work as a graphic designer, and paint when time allows. As for
art history, I'm a reader, traveler and museum visitor. I hope to be able to
share my love of art with other About.com members."
-Raluca Preotu
Text © Raluca Preotu
Bacon, Francis (1909 - 1992) by James Hyman
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Francis Bacon by John Hedgecoe
Bacon,
Francis (1909–1992),
painter, was born on 28 October 1909 at 63 Lower Baggot
Street, Dublin, the second of five children of English parents, Edward Anthony
Mortimer Bacon, army officer, and his wife, Christina Winifred Firth. Bacon's
father moved his family to Westbourne Terrace, London, during the First World
War, when he worked in the ministry of war. After the war the family moved
between England and Ireland and Bacon himself went to Dean Close School in
Cheltenham, where he boarded from 1924 to 1926, frequently running away, before
moving to London on an allowance provided by his mother.
In 1927
Bacon travelled to Berlin with a male friend of his father, who was entrusted
with educating the young man. There Bacon was plunged into the decadent
night-life of Weimar Germany, which after the puritanism of his Irish upbringing
had a permanent impact. No less important were the subsequent months Bacon spent
in Paris, where, in the summer of 1927, at the Galerie Pierre Rosenberg, he
discovered Picasso's recent drawings. Picasso's depictions of figures on the
beach at Dinard had a profound effect on Bacon.
In 1928 Bacon returned to London, where from 1929 to 1932 he lived in
Queensberry Mews in South Kensington. There he worked designing modernist rugs
and furniture, stylistically indebted to Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray. He
rapidly established a reputation as a designer, being featured in a double-page
spread in Studio in 1930 and receiving celebrated
commissions including furniture for the kitchen of the politician R. A. Butler
and a desk for the writer Patrick White. He also began to paint in oils for the
first time, producing works that owed much to surrealism and cubism. Influenced
by his friend and mentor, the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, in 1930 Bacon
held an exhibition of five paintings and four rugs at his studio. Thereafter he
turned increasingly to painting but it was another three years before his first
significant paintings were exhibited, in two group shows at the Mayor Gallery,
London, in 1933. One of these works, Crucifixion (1933;
priv. coll.), was prestigiously illustrated in Herbert Read's Art
Now (1933), opposite one of Picasso's paintings of a bather.
In February 1934 Bacon staged an unsuccessful exhibition of thirteen works in a
cellar in Curzon Street in Mayfair. Visiting Paris again in 1935, Bacon
purchased a book illustrated with colour plates entitled Diseases
of the Mouth and this, together with seeing for the first time Sergey
Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, had a
profound effect on him. Not only did he use stills from the film as source
material but it also encouraged a tougher figurative dimension. Bacon's path was
set and in the years that followed his painful vision of man and his predicament
became one of the most recognizable, if horrific, bodies of work of the second
half of the twentieth century.
Bacon's work was proposed for inclusion in the celebrated International
Surrealist Exhibition, of 1936, being organized for London by Roland Penrose,
Herbert Read, and André Breton, but he was famously judged by the Englishmen to
be insufficiently surrealist. It was, however, a fortuitous rejection since
subsequently it was Bacon's ‘realism’ that was at the centre of the claims
made for him.
In January 1937 Thomas Agnew & Sons staged an exhibition, ‘Young British
Painters’, which included a painting that Bacon had only just completed but
which he subsequently destroyed. Entitled Abstraction from
the Human Form, it depicted a semi-human figure and demonstrated that
even before the Second World War Bacon had not only formulated but also was
publicly exhibiting his tormented vision of the world. Already he was using
photographs of contemporary events; drawing attention to the mouth; and
presenting metonymic segments of the body, which is shown as bulbous and
swollen.
A chronic
asthmatic from childhood, Bacon was declared unfit for military service, and
spent the Second World War in London, where with the aid of his former nanny he
held gambling parties. By 1942 Bacon was living in Cromwell Place, South
Kensington, where he began to build on his pre-war imagery to produce his first
major paintings, including a work that did more than any other to establish his
reputation as one of the most powerful and horrifying painters of the twentieth
century: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (1944; Tate collection). Against a fiery orange
background three barely human figures provide a compendium of injuries: torsos
are swollen and deformed, ribs scarred and dirtied, heads wounded and bandaged,
and each mouth strains at the end of a taut spinal column. The exhibition of
this triptych at a group show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945 established Bacon's
post-war reputation. Subsequently Bacon claimed this as his first mature work,
even going so far as to destroy as much earlier work as he could. The result of
this was to identify Bacon's work with the Second World War and to provide it
with roots in the 1940s, not the 1930s. This had profound implications for
readings of the artist's work, not as late flowering surrealism but as
contemporary realism.
In November 1949 the Hanover Gallery, London, staged the first one-man
exhibition of Francis Bacon. One of the seminal events in post-war British
culture, this show was a revelation. The exhibition included full-length figures
as well as a series of tormented heads culminating in one of Bacon's most
confident early paintings, Head VI (1949;
Arts Council collection, Hayward Gallery, London). A half-length portrait, this
was the first painting in the most celebrated series that Bacon ever produced: a
series from 1949 showing a boxed, screaming pope which established Bacon's
international reputation. Bacon developed this theme during the early 1950s,
taking as a starting point Velázquez's Portrait of Pope
Innocent X (1650; Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome). Bacon's pope,
enthroned and enclosed by a box, drew attention to the discrepancy between the
belief systems present at the time of Velázquez and modern discrediting of
religious authority. Their contemporary resonance gained potency through the
publication of photographs showing the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals,
boxed behind glass for their own protection. Although the origins of Bacon's
vision lay with paintings of oppressors, including Nazi leaders, the subsequent
status of these paintings depended on reading the tormented individuals as
Everyman figures: a conflation of oppressor and victim.
The first
major essays on Francis Bacon established readings which remain largely in
place. The two most important were by Robert Melville in the British publication
Horizon in 1949 and Sam Hunter in the American Magazine
of Art in 1952. The former became the basis for subsequent European
responses to the artist, most pervasively that of David Sylvester, who became
one of the artist's greatest champions, while the latter criticism was almost
entirely neglected by all subsequent critics except Lawrence Alloway. Although
both pioneering essays derived from conversations with Bacon, their emphasis was
fundamentally different. Hunter provided an emphatically British context,
including references to Wyndham Lewis, William Blake, Gainsborough, Turner,
Sickert, and even Beardsley, and wrote of the importance of London to the
artist. Melville, in contrast, developed a European context for Bacon's
tormented vision through references to Dostoyevsky and Kafka, to Dalí and Buñuel's
film Un chien andalou, Picasso's ‘air of
extreme hazard’, and Eisenstein's film Battleship
Potemkin.
Both authors also emphasized the contemporary resonance of Bacon's work, a
feature that helped him assume pre-eminence in the London art scene of the
1950s. However, while Hunter's text and accompanying photograph of Bacon's
source material made a direct link between Bacon's paintings and his collecting
of photographs of major international events and political leaders, including
photographs of Goebbels and of Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution,
Melville instead gave a more elevated reading. This lacked such direct
references and instead argued that ‘Modern Painting has suddenly been
humanised’, proposing that ‘Un Chien Andalou has
greater visual force and lucidity than anything achieved in the art of painting
between the two wars … only the recent paintings of Francis Bacon have
discovered a comparable means of disclosing the human condition’ (Melville).
In keeping with his belief that the image should act as an assault on the
nervous system rather than a stimulus for the intellect, Bacon denied that he
made preparatory studies for his paintings, preferring to emphasize the
immediacy of chance to generate his images. This denial did much to discourage
writers from pinning specific sources to his imagery and instead to stress a
conflation of sources that extracts his work from being mere story-telling or
illustration: a painting may be a portrait of an individual, but rarely is he,
or occasionally she, identified. Only after his death were drawings by, and
attributed to, Bacon publicized, published, and exhibited. Generally scrappy and
weak, they were clearly personal notations that he did not consider worthy of
exhibition but which none the less provide a revealing insight into his studio
procedure and indicate a greater degree of planning than interviews with Bacon
had suggested.
Bacon's
international reputation grew dramatically. As early as 1948 the Museum of
Modern Art in New York bought his important early work Painting,
1946. Then in 1953 he had his first one-man show at Durlacher Bros. in
New York and in 1957 at the Galeries Rive Droite in Paris. In 1954 he also
received major official recognition, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale
together with Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson.
Such events provided an international context for Bacon and consolidated
existentialist readings of his work. Indeed, from as early as his first one-man
show in 1949, he was associated with existentialism, as in a review by Nevile
Wallis:
Bacon's
work is the most profoundly disquieting manifestation I have yet seen of that
malaise, which since the last war, has inspired the philosophy of Sartre [There
is] a literary parallel in Kafka's nightmares of frustration, which largely owed
their inspiration to Kierkegaard's philosophy of despair. (N. Wallis,
‘Nightmares’, The Observer, 26 Nov 1949)
Sylvester,
too, provided just such a context for Bacon. In 1952, in his first major essay
on the artist, an article for The Listener, he
referred to Bacon's enclosed spaces with direct reference to Sartre's Huis
clos, quoting Garcin's ‘Eh bien, continuons’ and asserting that
‘life is hell and we had better get used to the idea’ (D. Sylvester, ‘The
paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener,
47, 3 Jan 1952, 28–9).
In 1955 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held the first
retrospective exhibition of Bacon's work, presenting thirteen paintings. In that
same year an Arts Council retrospective of the work of Alberto Giacometti was
also held in London. These two retrospectives did much to stimulate figurative
art in Britain and to encourage supportive critics to discern an element of
torment within their presentation of the human condition. Certainly Bacon
paralleled Giacometti, in whose sculptures movement, whether potential or
actual, suggests vulnerability and fear. Bacon's decisive, transitional group of
paintings of a head that he began in 1948 has striking formal and conceptual
links with Giacometti's caged nose, The Nose
(Centre Pompidou, Paris) of the previous year. Both are concerned with movement:
Giacometti allows actual movement while Bacon suggests twisting. Both use boxing
to draw attention to the space in which the subject moves: Giacometti provides a
box and Bacon an armature. Both emphasize a single element of the face as a
metonym of the whole: Giacometti emphasizes the nose and mouth, Bacon simply the
gaping mouth. Both, too, concentrated on the single figure and sought to deny
narrative readings of their work.
Bacon
became notorious for his social life. An inveterate drinker and gambler, he
loved chance, risk, and danger in his life. A focus in London was the Colony
Room drinking club in Soho, which opened in 1949 and whose founder, Muriel
Belcher, later one of the artist's subjects, employed Bacon to bring in people.
Other regulars included a circle of Bacon's artist friends, among them the
figurative painters Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, and Frank Auerbach. Bacon's
day began early and despite the incorporation of chance effects in his painting
he followed a disciplined routine. Exhausting mornings of work in his small
studio gave way to the release of life as a drinker and gambler in Soho when he
mixed as freely with East End criminals as he did with the landed aristocracy.
His extraordinary appearance—with his moon face and leather jacket—and his
life of immense highs and lows contributed much to his status as the leading
British artist of the last half-century: an extremist in both art and life.
Bacon was celebrated for the emotional impact of his work and for his desire to
connect directly ‘with the nervous system’ rather than the intellect. He
wanted, he explained, to show the effect, but not its cause, for example
preferring to paint the anguished figures at the base of the crucifixion rather
than the crucifixion itself. This allusiveness was praised for facilitating the
metaphoric potential of his work as a revelation of the human condition,
although this indirectness may also have had a more personal resonance that was
fuelled by the artist's own anxiety. Indeed in one of Bacon's most powerful
early works there is an intimation of why the painter's anxiety might have been
so acute.
Two Figures (1953; priv. coll.) presents a
darkened room in which two men, himself and Peter Lacy, make love on a bed. The
vertical lines that run down the picture veil the figures and suggest a view
glimpsed through a curtain, thereby placing the viewer outside the room, as if
spying on the men. In this way the painting embodies the clandestine nature of
an action at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. In Two
Figures anxiety about the state monitoring and constraining the
individual was expressed at a time of acute insecurity for homosexuals. A
manifesto painting, Two Figures remained
unexhibited until the Tate Gallery's retrospective exhibition of Bacon's work in
1962.
Whereas in
Bacon's pre-war and wartime paintings the range of colours had been wide, and
paintings of the mid-1940s had used a strong, dominant orange, from the later
1940s until 1956–7 Bacon instead presented a dark realism of dust and shadows
in which man is alone in a void.
Colour returned to Bacon's work in the Hanover Gallery's dramatic exhibition in
1957 of his recent paintings. However, this was a show that suggested a crisis
of direction for the artist. While American abstract expressionism was resurgent
in Europe, Bacon presented some of the least convincing and most
uncharacteristic paintings of his career. The exhibition was dominated by a
series of paintings based on a photographic reproduction of Van Gogh's Painter
on the Road to Tarascon, which had been destroyed in the Second World
War. The dark and dusty paintings upon which Bacon's reputation rested were
replaced by heightened colour and the recent use of thin stained grounds and
dusty smearings gave way to thick, free, all-over painting. Despite their
suggested movement, Bacon's earlier paintings had coherence; these latest
pictures seemed uncomfortably hurried. The application of paint is slapdash
rather than exhilarating, and the picture surface a dead end, not a space to be
explored. Fortunately for his reputation, this moment was short-lived and Bacon
subsequently derided most of these paintings. However, the lessons he learned
about colour dramatically transformed his work through a series of paintings
heralded by Bacon's triptych Three Studies for a
Crucifixion (1962; Guggenheim Museum, New York), which formed the
climax of his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1962.
By the time of this exhibition Bacon had moved from the Hanover Gallery to the
Marlborough Gallery where he stayed from 1958 until his death. The devoted
support and understanding he received there, above all from Valerie Beston,
together with the Tate Gallery's retrospective, did much to consolidate Bacon's
reputation.
From the
early 1960s Bacon created some of his most ambitious multi-figure compositions
in which, for the first time, he placed at the centre of his efforts the
exploration of his themes through the use of a large-scale triptych format,
first used in 1944, to produce some of his most ambitious paintings. In 1961 he
found a new studio at Reece Mews where he remained until his death. Although he
had other studios, it was here that he did the majority of his paintings for the
next thirty years. During the 1960s his range of colours widened and Bacon
developed the interior settings that had previously been so stark, and
introduced an ambiguous psychological dimension to his work. The possibilities
of the triptych, using three canvases, each separately framed, allowed Bacon to
show his figures to be at the same time related and separated. Several of these
figures were based on Bacon's partner, George Dyer, with whom he became involved
in 1963. Controversially, in one of the most powerful of all these triptychs, Crucifixion
(1965; Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich) one of the onlookers wears an
armband bearing a swastika to suggest a more specific contemporary resonance
than Bacon usually allowed. During 1965–6 he gave increasing attention to
painting small triptychs of heads. He had painted the first of these, Three
Studies of the Human Head (priv. coll.), in 1953, but now followed
this early precedent in a memorable series of portraits of friends, including
Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher, and Lucian Freud. Reviewers likened this use
of three views of the same subject to police mugshots of full-face and profile.
This interpretation was encouraged by knowledge of Bacon's own use of public
photo machines to provide him with source material.
By the late 1960s the settings of Bacon's paintings had become more
sophisticated, with spatial distortion often turning rectangular boxes into
spheres to suggest subjects trapped in a paperweight. Mirrors also began to play
a central part in allowing Bacon to combine more than one view of the subject
and to chart different forms of fragmentation and dissolution. An immensely
cultured man, Bacon drew inspiration from multifarious sources, sometimes making
these explicit through his use of titles, as in Triptych
Inspired by T. S. Eliot's Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (1967;
Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) and Triptych
Inspired by the ‘Oresteia’ of Aeschylus (1981; priv. coll.).
In October
1971 the Grand Palais in Paris staged a major Francis Bacon retrospective that
was dominated by his triptychs. Sadly the event, which should have been one of
the triumphs of Bacon's life, was marred by tragedy: on the eve of the opening,
Bacon's partner, George Dyer, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room. Bacon
commemorated Dyer's death in ensuing paintings, including a triptych entitled Triptych
in Memory of George Dyer (November–December 1971; Foundation
Beyeler collection, Switzerland). From 1974 Bacon had an apartment in Paris,
such was his love for the city and its culture. He did little work there but
established deep friendships, and the leading French intellectual Michel Leiris
became one of his most articulate champions. In 1974 Bacon met John Edwards
(1950–2003), with whom he formed a close paternal relationship, and Edwards
was later named as his sole heir.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings,
1968–74, in 1975, was the first time that works by a contemporary British
artist had been shown by the museum. In the same year David Sylvester's
interviews with Francis Bacon were published. Immensely revealing, the
interviews provide insights not only into Bacon's art and times but also the art
of the past. By the 1980s Bacon received major accolades, exhibitions, and
tributes. In 1983 a first retrospective of Bacon's work was held in Japan,
travelling to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nagoya. Two years later the Tate Gallery held
its second Bacon retrospective, an exhibition that travelled to the
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 1988 even the
Soviet Union staged a Bacon retrospective, an almost unprecedented honour for a
Western artist that was balanced by transatlantic acclaim the following year,
when a major exhibition was held in America, travelling to the Hirshhorn Museum
in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in
New York.
By this
time one of the striking features of Bacon's œuvre had become the consistency
of his vision and the rigour with which he focused on his themes. He
occasionally also made surprising, powerful statements on subjects that were
otherwise peripheral to his concerns. In the 1950s Bacon had painted memorable
depictions of animals, most movingly in paintings of 1952 and 1953 of a prowling
dog, and in the early and mid-1950s of a caged chimpanzee. Although landscapes
are virtually absent from his œuvre, Bacon did produce a turbulently evocative
painting of dusty ground and windswept trees entitled Landscape
near Malabata, Tangier (1963; priv. coll.). Two extraordinary
paintings of the 1980s, both set in indeterminate indoor–outdoor spaces,
provide a remarkable climax to this little pursued theme: the smudgy Sand
Dune (1981; priv. coll.) and the ejaculatory Jet
of Water (1988; Marlborough International Fine Art, London). Together
these paintings not only demonstrated Bacon's brilliant handling of paint, but
also provided a riposte to a Romantic vision of nature. His increasing use of
the airbrush as a painting technique resulted in innovative textural effects.
There were spectacular successes during this decade, especially his portraits of
John Edwards of 1986–8, but there were also accusations that his work had
become formulaic, less engaged, and lacking in tension. Bacon decided to paint a
second, larger version of his seminal early painting Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. This new version, Second
Version of Triptych, 1944 (1988; Tate collection) replaced the
poignantly scruffy original with an altogether grander, more imperial version,
something Bacon had long wished to do. The result was not without critics: they
felt that the grander dimensions and slicker painting technique of this second
version resulted in pastiche, which robbed the original of much of its charge.
He nevertheless continued to provide new insights into existing themes through
increasingly spare paintings in which he pared down the settings and
concentrated on essential anatomical details. In Triptych,
1991 (priv. coll.), Bacon's last triptych and his final statement of
mortality, his general theme, there is a tremendous sense of desolation and
loneliness. Much of each canvas is left bare and a defining feature is the dark
square against which the figure is set: an engulfing void with intimations of
death. A few months later, on 28 April 1992, Bacon died in Madrid where he had
been visiting a friend. He was buried in Almudeña cemetery, Madrid. He was
internationally the most acclaimed British painter of the twentieth century.
James Hyman
M.
Leiris, Francis Bacon: full face and in profile (1983) · M. Leiris, Francis
Bacon (1988) · D. Sylvester, The brutality of fact: interviews with
Francis Bacon, 3rd edn (1987) · J. Russell, Francis Bacon, rev.
edn (1993) · Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Paris, 1996) ·
M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: anatomy of an enigma (1996) · J. Hyman, The
battle for realism (2001) · b. cert. · S. Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: the
anatomy of horror’, Magazine of Art, 45 (1952), 11–15 · R.
Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, 20/120–21 (Dec 1949–Jan
1950), 419–23
Tate
collection, drawings and notes concerning his paintings | NRA, priv.
coll., corresp. with Sir Robert Sainsbury and Lady Sainsbury, relating to
exhibitions of his work · Tate collection, corresp. and papers of Ronald
Alley
BFI
NFTVA, The works, BBC2, 7 May 1996 · BFI NFTVA, Post mortem,
Channel 4, 25 Oct 1997 · BFI NFTVA, Arthouse, Channel 4, 2 Aug 1998 ·
BFI NFTVA, documentary footage
photographs,
1960–85, Hult. Arch. · I. Penn, platinum palladium print, 1962, NPG · C.
Barker, gilt-bronze mask, 1969, NPG · J. Hedgecoe, platinum print, 1970, NPG
[see illus.] · A. Newman, bromide print, 1975, NPG · C. Shenstone, conté,
c.1982, NPG · R. Spear, oils, 1984, NPG · L. Freud, portrait, Tate
collection
£11,370,244: probate, 24 Nov 1992, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004 - 2008
The BBC Archive celebrates the life and work of Francis Bacon, one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. This collection is inspired by the retrospective of Bacon's work at Tate Britain.
These archive programmes and documents chart Francis Bacon's TV and radio appearances, from the early 1960s until shortly before his death in 1992. The artist discusses his influences, his best-known paintings and his opinions of other artists, while art experts and historians explain the background to his vision.
Review/Art; The Master of the Macabre, Francis Bacon
The New York Times October 26, 1989
Since he exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's nightmare was fundamentally his own.
Coming as it did at the end of World War II, in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation.
Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday. The show remains here through Jan. 7, after which it is to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 31 to Aug. 28). With nearly 60 works from public and private collections around the world, this is the first major overview of the painter's achievements held in the United States since 1963. The exhibition has been organized by James T. Demetrion, the Hirshhorn's director, who obtained many of Mr. Bacon's best-known paintings.
There is, for example, one of the startlingly coloured works the artist based on van Gogh's Painter on the Road to Tarascon. There are a handful of the Popes that the artist created by combining elements of Velazquez's portrait of Innocent X with the image of a screaming nurse from The Battleship Potemkin, the Sergei Eisenstein film. The artist's arresting Man With Dog of 1953 can be seen here, and so can at least one canvas, depicting a paralytic child walking on all fours, that Mr. Bacon derived from Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer whose studies of figures in motion have had a profound impact on the painter.
There are a dozen or so small and strangely beautiful portrait heads of friends and associates as well as a handful of large triptychs from the 1960's and 70's, including a work from May to June 1973 that is Mr. Bacon's wrenching meditation on the death of a friend, George Dyer.
There is not, unfortunately, the Three Studies of Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion from the 40's, which was deemed too fragile to travel from the Tate Gallery in London. But a second version of this work that Mr. Bacon completed last year is on view, and to see it is to realize both how much the artist has changed over the years and how much he has stayed the same.
Mr. Bacon has stayed the same in the sense that his subjects have not really varied, nor have the essential elements of his imagery. His focus remains on the human body. He continues to twist it, mangle its features, X-ray it and make it evaporate, transmogrify and bleed. His figures huddle and struggle in windowless rooms lighted only by a bare bulb that dangles from the ceiling. They vomit into a sink, find themselves pinned to the bed with a hypodermic needle or face to face with one of the ancient Greeks' Furies.
When two men are engaged in sex, as they sometimes are in his paintings, they seem to be wrestling each other to the death. When the artist paints himself in a state of repose, it appears as if he is recovering from a crippling hangover. Even when Mr. Bacon is creating imaginary creatures, as in the second version of Three Figures the references to sex and violence cannot be missed. Mr. Bacon's images are rarely subtle.
But over the years they have been more beautifully rendered. The encrusted paint and vibrating atmosphere of such early works as Head I of 1948 and Study for Portrait (Man in a Blue Box) from 1949 have given way to a more serene and fluent style. Mr. Bacon is one of the greatest painters of voluptuous flesh. Few artists can make the body seem so palpable or transform a man turning a bathroom faucet into a figure of Michelangelesque proportions.
The artist has always imagined himself as engaged in a dialogue with past masters, not only Michelangelo and Velazquez and van Gogh but also Manet and Picasso and Ingres. At the same time, his paintings make conspicuous references to the latest furniture and clothing designs and they borrow freely from photographs in newspapers and magazines. His figures even occasionally bring to mind Willem de Kooning's paintings of women. But Mr. Bacon says he admires almost nothing contemporary in art. Abstract painting is to him a version of wallpaper. He insists he is a realist, that he re-creates the violence of everyday life.
There are times, of course, when Mr. Bacon seems more like a Surrealist. And there are times, it must be said, when he seems to have fallen back on tricks and melodramatic gestures. The images of cricket pads, the arrows, the swinging light cords and the slabs of beef are shallow devices to which the artist succumbs. The fact is that Mr. Bacon is often most affecting when his work is least theatrical.
It is clear, for example, from paintings like Study of Figure in a Landscape that Mr. Bacon can depict the outdoors vividly on those rare occasions when he puts himself to the task. His portraits, which at first look merely contorted, capture perfectly a likeness. They can also be witty. Several of the self-portraits are among the more endearing paintings in the exhibition because Mr. Bacon presents himself as charmingly ill at ease.
There are also striking images -like the darkened figure entering an empty house from the triptych In Memory of George Dyer (1971) -that speak in an unusually hushed tone. And there are a few works that seem to be the beneficiaries of chance. Mr. Bacon is a believer in spontaneity, and several of his paintings have been given a jolt of energy by a sudden splash of paint or a slip of the brush.
One of the most memorable canvases in the exhibition is also one of the artist's most recent works, his Study for Portrait of John Edwards from 1988. Here Mr. Bacon somehow manages to create a figure that looks at once fleshy and spectral, ashen and roseate. There is, in some ways, more of Velazquez in this austere portrait than there is in the early Popes. The work is neither histrionic nor shocking. It is mysterious and introspective and it underscores that, at the age of 80, Mr. Bacon has not missed a step.
Hayward Gallery, London UK
frieze, Issue 40, May 1998
Bacon’s work doesn’t comply neatly with attempted divisions between portraiture and explorations of the body, and this exhibition, The Human Body, is to a degree an artificial contrivance, especially for an artist who in many ways considered the head as just another limb on a torso. The works are hung strangely close to the floor in the Hayward’s artificially lit lower galleries, against sad, grey walls and a threatening dark ceiling. Light levels are low because of the artist’s improvidence of technique and the consequent delicacy of the work: the raw canvas he left exposed is vulnerable to darkening and embrittlement. Overall, the repressive effect makes the works look gaily pretty and cheerful.
This is the first significant opportunity to consider Bacon’s work since Michael Peppiatt’s critical biography of 1996, and makes the artist’s rigid withholding of his co-operation from any biographer understandable. Peppiatt is not party to the strange collaboration between those that accord the artist a greater singularity than is the case, and he makes an evaluation of Bacon that is neither characterised by either adulatory homage (to a Soho Disneyland of romanticised Existentialism) nor by kneejerk disgust. His book is more fondly querying of Bacon’s art than his many (equally committed but perhaps more constrained, credulous, or misinformed) predecessors. David Sylvester, who curated this exhibition and wrote the catalogue essay, has begun - just - a well-earned relaxation from the artist’s royal grip.
Details of Bacon’s upbringing, sexuality and relationships have autobiographical correspondences in the paintings which make them (in what would be an absolute anathema to the artist) much more narrative than intended. Bacon’s deliberate insistence on a non-analytical and non-narrative reading of his work (and potent enigma resulting from this), is now less possible to sustain. For example, Untitled (1943 or 1944), a work never exhibited or published before, (a variant on one of the triptych panels for Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion, 1944) seems particularly hectoring. Elsewhere, Bacon’s narrative is by degrees inarticulate and confused, but certainly present. This is most clearly seen in Triptych May-June 1973 (1973). The painting depicts the undignified suicide of the artist’s lover in cartoon strip style. The spiritual details of Bacon’s story of abuse, repressions and counter-repressions may be seen, with increasing clarity, elsewhere in the show.
Bacon’s outlook of religiosity (both absolutist, irreducible intent and frequent religious subject matter), politics and sexuality (of pain) may now be considered without constraint. The various biographies, newly revealed work and the simple passage of time allows us to consider him in relation to various traditions other than just a Modernist one. These might include the art of the right wing, 19th century Christian art, as well as the history of artists concerned with sexualised control, such as Richard Lindner, or even Aubrey Beardsley. Bacon’s use of raw canvas left in reserve is like Beardsley’s use of white paper, seen in his illustrations of Edgar Allen Poe, for example. There may even be a case for consideration of Bacon in relation to the English nonsense tradition in literature.
Bacon’s often very beautiful, grandee swirlings and sexualised skidmarks of paint are depictive of certain principal categories of subject. These are either other right-wing libertines like himself, or suicides and alcoholics - alcoholics, of course, just being suicides in slow motion. The libertine theme, and its policy of non intervention toward the emotionally or spiritually disadvantaged, can be seen in the falling freemarket of souls on the canvases, and their hierarchy of vulnerabilities in relation to each other, reflected within the structural devices the artists used.
The good paintings in this show have a continuing magic power, effecting an almost involuntary response. As Bacon’s often strained theatrical intensity becomes more painfully obvious though, his successes may perhaps be due more to his fabulous colourist skills and consummate fluency with paint than his existential pronouncements. As the duration of induced sensation in the viewer becomes diminished, through habituation and an increased tolerance to his devices, either complacency or a discriminating embarrassment at the accrued defects in the paintings sets in.
The Human Body further qualifies the reasonable objections to be made against the grandeurs and pomp claimed for Bacon’s work, but it also confirms his merits. Importantly, it also provides an opportunity to reconsider Bacon’s considerable influence on much contemporary art practice, and therefore to consider aspects of contemporary art practice itself.
Bacon’s insistent references to Paul Valéry’s - ‘the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’ - is seen reflected in the repeated significance of ‘sensation’ in much contemporary art practice, and its analogues in advertising, recreational drug use and the entertainment media. Bacon’s outsider status, ruthless survival strategy and self mythologising, as well as his great talent, also have correspondences in younger artists’ makings and marketings of art, although many of these are now safely institutionalised themselves. The bonds between Bacon and many contemporary artists may expose those working in his wake to stresses and counterbalancings dependent on the rise or fall of his retrospective fortunes.
Neal
Brown
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA
frieze, Issue 46, May 1999
History
gives and it takes away. The number of verified Rembrandts has diminished
recently, while the importance of Francis Bacon has increased with the discovery
of several paintings. When history ‘gives’ in this way, it creates the same
sense of surprise as being given a second car. The inevitable historians are
trotted out, glowing like proud new mothers. For this exhibition, Sam Hunter,
David Sylvester and John Russell have written the exhibition catalogue.
Discrimination from a special jurisdiction is required: that old time religion,
connoisseurship, must be dusted off and put into service. Three questions are
asked in quick succession: A. Are the pictures genuine? (beyond a doubt); B.
What were the artist’s final intentions towards works of art that were not
acquired from him during his lifetime? (the key question); C. What do they add
to the oeuvre? (because they always add up to something).
The
most engaging paintings from this ‘new vein’ are from the 50s and early 60s,
a period when Bacon was known routinely to destroy canvases with which he
wasn’t satisfied. Amongst this group are four relative spellbinders: Study
for Nude Figures, Study after Velázquez, Study After Velázquez
II (all c.1950), and Pope and Chimpanzee (1962). All of these explore
the howling subjects with which Bacon struggled - Existentialism, Abstract
Expressionism and the primal drama of a world newly acquainted with the Bomb.
The Velázquez studies and the Pope/chimp canvas in particular elaborate on a
theme that especially preoccupied Bacon: the obliteration of faith by instinct.
The
painting of Innocent X’s screaming face, (Study After Velázquez II)
flickering between the grey ribbons cascading all around him (which better
recalls Titian’s Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto, 1561-62),
broadcasts unbridled terror. But whereas Velázquez so perfectly depicted
Innocent’s hands at ease on the arms of his magnificent throne, Bacon presents
them like the white-knuckled hands of the condemned prisoner in the electric
chair whose Christian serenity has seized up at the instant of the switch,
unsure of what is poised to take over. It’s an awful truth that faith is
always vulnerable. In Pope and Chimpanzee, feral instinct is hurled toward the
personification of Catholic faith. The clinging savage viciously grapples with
an inert papal body crowned by a holy, repulsive, mangled face: faith made mush.
These
pictures are undoubtedly part of Bacon’s oeuvre, but what part? Where will
they finally find their place in the language of Bacon? One of them, Study
after Velázquez II (1950) was assumed destroyed. And now, either through
oversight or Bacon’s revised artistic insight, it is here with us and he is
not. Is it useful and appropriate to ask if this discovery causes any revision
of our appreciation and understanding of Bacon. I think not; these paintings
don’t add up to enough to justify a revision - they’re not as substantial as
those that formed our judgements of Francis Bacon so many years ago. It is clear
that the new Study After Velázquez (1950) is not as realised or even rectified
as Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X made just three
years later, and that Figure in Frame (1950) adds little to our
understanding of Dog (1952). In the final analysis, if there are breaches
in the oeuvre, these pictures do nothing to illuminate them.
Ronald
Jones
Francis Bacon's Tangled Web
Vanity Fair August 2000
Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon, perhaps Europe's most acclaimed painter since turner, is at the center of a major scandal. John Edwards, a former pub manager who is the painter's heir, has sued Bacon's longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. Examining charges that the gallery cheated both the artist and Edwards, its chicanery shielded by a token Liechtenstein branch, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON finds that all the parties in this scandal may have hidden motives, including Bacon himself
Francis Bacon has come to stay in an old stone building in Dublin. The widely declared "greatest painter since Turner," once condemned by Margaret Thatcher as "that awful artist who paints those horrible pictures," died in April 1992. But his spirit is here, in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, to which his humble London studio has been brought, bit by carefully recoded bit. A team of eight archaeologists disassembled the site, noting the placement of every crumbled photograph and paint-smudged book in a three-dimensional grid. Now four curators are are logging each of the studio's roughly10,000 items into a computer database. This is a first: no artist's studio has ever been enshrined in quite this way before.
The visual links are fascinating, if inscrutable. A torn-out magazine photograph of monkeys with open mouths may have helped inspire Bacon's "screaming popes" series. An old radiography text has drawings encompassed by frames and set off with arrows - both signature icons of many Bacon paintings. A large cutout picture of the head of one of Bacon's lovers, George Dyer, appears to have served as a stencil for portraits of the 2rough trade" thug. In November, Bacon's studio will emerge from the boxes and folders, complete with walls and door, as a permanent installation, like one of those dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It will be re-created just he way it was: dirty and messy.
These, as it happens, are also apt words to describe the lawsuit filed by Bacon's estate against the artist's longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. The lawsuit's charges suggest the sort of art-world scandal not seen since... well, since the last time Marlborough was accused of such chicanery, by the estate of the painter Mark Rothko, in 1971. Indeed, the superficial similarities between the two cases, and the fact that Marlborough stands accused of cheating Bacon during the same period it grossly underpaid Rothko's estate and was fined by a New York Surrogate Court judge more than $9 million for doing so, suggest to many observers in the art world a likelihood of guilt on the gallery's part - though such guild would be no less shocking for that.
To some, the Bacon case seems, if anything, more egregious, because the painter appeared so trusting of the gallery during his more than three decades of representation by it, and because the younger male friend who inherited Bacon's estate - estimated to be worth between $50 and $100 million - is a shy, uneducated Cockney whose work experience, before meeting the painter, consisted of helping his older brothers run a string of pubs in London's East End. But the picture that has emerged in the press - of big bad Marlborough hornswoggling the hapless illiterate - may be almost as distorted as one of Bacon's portraits, given the gallery's own, surprisingly persuasive, version of events. Imagine, instead, a real-life version of the board game Clue, in which a crime may have been committed in the drawing room and every character in the house has a motive. Including the deceased.
From outside, 7 Reece Mews appears just as it did when Bacon worked there. It's hard to locate, which is one of its charms: you take a tiny street off London's Old Brompton Road, then look for the arrow that points to a cobblestoned court of brick-walled former stables. Though plain, the mews is a lovely sanctuary in South Kensington. Inside No. 7, obviously, nothing remains as it was. Now that the archaeological excavation is done, , a work crew is sheetrocking the walls, finishing the transformation of Bacon's studio into a sleek apartment where Bacon's heir, 50 year-old John Edwards, will stay when he comes to London from his large country farmhouse in Suffolk. or from his home in Thailand.
A self-portrait by Bacon, 1970.
By the time Bacon moved to his address in 1961, his critical reputation was established, though he remained at age 51, a painter of modest means. That was fine by him: all his life he had a disregard for money that verged, literally, on the criminal. As a young man he moved from one small apartment to another, often without paying the rent due. As his paintings started selling, he loved having a wad of bills in his pocket to blow on gambling in private dens, or champagne at the Colony Room, seedy Soho bar where he held court almost everyday (the gleefully profane manager there, Muriel Belcher, had been shred enough, when she first saw how charismatic he was, to pay him £10 a week just to show up), or oysters at Wheeler's fish restaurant, where he invariably picked up the check for a group that often included painters Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach. After he bid his artist friends good night, he liked to spend money on young men who indulged his desire to be beaten, whipped, and sodomized - a lifelong acting out, it was sometimes said, of the physical abuse he'd received his quick-tempered fool of a father, a military man who bred horses in Ireland.
Otherwise, Bacon spent little money on himself, and the studio reflected that. A steep wooden staircase with a rope banister led up to a bare kitchen and tiny bed-sitting room with lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The adjacent studio was as chaotic as the apartment was stark. Its door was a palette of paint smears - as close, Bacon liked to joke, as he ever got to abstract art. Within lay piles of what appeaered to be garbage: torn newspaper and magazine picture, creased photographs of the friends he liked to paint, and hundreds of unwashed, discarded paintbrushes in buttered-beans and orange-juice cans. On his easel would be the next of his startling yet strangely beautiful portraits, the features of his subject stretched to the grotesque and rendered by the streaks and gobs of excess paint that Bacon flung onto the canvas with inspired daring.
Three years before his move to Reece Mews, bacon had left his first dealer, a mannishly dressed lesbian named Erica Brausen, to sign with London's hottest gallery for contemporary artists, Marlborough Fine Art. It was a move made less to burnish his career than to settle a £5,000 gambling debt that Bacon felt Brausen would be unable to pay off for him. In return for his signing a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him money against current and future paintings, with the price of each to be determined by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165 ($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($1,176); these were two sizes that Bacon favoured. According to the contract, the painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of pictures each year, and would be represented exclusively by Marlborough, which would also handle all his finances - acting, in effect, as his manager.
Four decades later, Bacon's estate would start asking pointed questions about that arrangement. Why, its complaint asks, was an artist so cavalier about money allowed to sign a binding contract without independent legal representation? Why was the pay scale for an artist of Bacon's stature based on measurement, and why did it not include a provision for paying Bacon a higher percentage of the retail price of his paintings if their market value increased over that 10-year period? Why, though Marlborough was required by the agreement to give Bacon an accounting of the paintings sold, did it appear never to do so? And why, the estate began to wonder, were Bacon's paintings not sold in London, but through Marlborough's notorious Liechtenstein branch, Marlborough AG?
At the outset, Bacon had no cause to complain. New York dealer Richard Feigen had staged a show of Bacon paintings in Chicago: "I was getting $1,300 for the nost expensive paintings," Feigen recalls ruefully. "The others were priced between $900 and $1,200." No one was necessarily buying them. The Marlborough deal gave Bacon his market price for 8 or 10 paintings a year - guaranteed. It also put him in the hands of Frank Lloyd, the most brilliant English art marketer of the postwar period.
Lloyd, born Franz Kurt Levai near Vienna in 1911, had started Marlborough after the World War II with a fellow Austrian refugee, Harry Fischer, naming it for the Duke of Marlborough to lend it an air of grandeur. The "old uncles," as Bacon would come to call them, chose to deal in top-tier modern art, much of it acquired discreetly from highborn British families brought low by the war. For entrée, they relied on a junior partner, David Somerset, the future 11th Duke of Beaufort.
By the time he signed Bacon, Lloyd had fashioned Marlborough into a powerhouse that had virtually cornered the market on undervalued European painters of the early 20th century - such as Klimt and Schiele - while cosseting and promoting contemporary artists as no other gallery did. As efficient as an investment bank, Marlborough gave artists advance, staggered payments, and handled all their finances for them. Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoscka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, and Lucien Freud - all were excited and proud to be Marlborough artists. Many gave their art to the gallery on consignment, receiving nothing until a painting was sold. But Bacon wanted ready cash, so the gallery bought his paintings outright.
Lloyd's shrewdest stratagem was to establish the branch in Liechtenstein. It was little more than a mail drop, but Lloyd and Fischer bought and sold much of the art they handled through Marlborough AG; that way, both they and their clients could exploit loopholes in English tax laws. "The legal avoidance of taxes was an integral part of the growth of Marlborough," explains one longtime London dealer. "Lloyd's real purpose in opening the gallery," says another, "was to move currency around. It was much more efficient, he found, to move currency around by paintings than any other way - and they made money on the paintings, too!"
Why did other galleries not follow Marlborough's lead? The first dealer laughs. "Laziness... and social responsibility. I think one should pay taxes. " By the mid-1970s, Bacon's paintings were sold exclusively through through Marlborough AG.
The paintings would be picked up in groups very few months by a Marlborough factotum named Valeries Beston, who soon came to play as large a role in Bacon's life as he played in hers. Not only did "Miss B," as bacon fondly called her, log the new paintings into a record book and arrange for their sale by Marlborough AG, she also handled his mail, paid his bills, even dealt with his laundry. 2Valerie was very, very attracted to him - a kind of love," says Michael Peppiatt, whose 1996 biography of Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, is, to date, the definitive one. "It was a major thing in her life, it was her raison d'être. It was like a shrine to Bacon in her office - photos and mementos." For legal matters, Miss B steered Bacon to Marlborough's solicitors. According to the estate, the solicitors in turn, recommended the accountant Bacon used to prepare his tax returns.
At some point, Bacon established a Swiss bank account - almost certainly with the help of Marlborough AG, though how much remains unclear. Into this account the gallery began to make partial payments for paintings it bought from the artist. For the Liechtenstein branch, this was a legal maneuver. For Bacon, as an English resident, establishing the account broke no law, either. But failing to declare Marlborough's payments to the English Inland Revenue as taxable income did.
SELF-DEFACING
A 1962 Irving Penn photograph of Francis Bacon with a Rembrandt self-portrait.
Midway through his 10-year agreement, Bacon chose to exercise an escape clause. Yet he stayed on as a Marlborough artist without a contract for the rest of his life. To those who side with the gallery in the Bacon case, this is the point that undercuts the estate's legal action. Bacon, they argue, was pleased with how he was treated by Marlborough; if he hadn't been, he would have left. Anyway, they say, he should have been pleased. In addition to paying him up front for his work, Marlborough was organizing major shows for him and meting out paintings in a carefully controlled way at steadily rising prices to establish him as a major artist.
"He did mention to me," says one old friend, "when that contract was up, 'I just can't be bothered to go anywhere else. I can't be bothered. I'll stay with them.' "
"Francis once said to me, 'I'd rather be in the hands of a competent crook than in the hands of an incompetent honest man,' " recalls art critic Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard. "What he said, and this shows the shrewdness of Francis, is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half of half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were being constantly pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. And so however little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he'd have got if he went with anyone else."
"He implied they'd been so good for him and put him where he was that he was grateful for that, and didn't want to change," says art historian Sam Hunter, recalling a conversation with Bacon about Marlborough. "And he was very loyal by character."
There is, however, another interpretation for why Bacon never left Marlborough. Perhaps he feared that no other gallery would funnel money into a Swiss account as Marlborough did, enabling him to shelter a sizable chunk of his income from English taxes. Perhaps, too, the account put the painter in a vulnerable position. "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed," suggests one old friend of Bacon's who occupies a high enough position in the art world to be a sort of Deep Throat for the Bacon saga. Is that to say Bacon did feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it," says this source, 2but I can' say anymore."
Lending credence to this theory are mentions, in a 1978 book, The Legacy of Matk Rothko, by Lee Seldes, of Swiss accounts established by Marlborough for another of its artists at roughly the same time. Like Bacon, Rothko had a Swiss account for partial payments from the gallery, in his case to avoid U.S. taxes. Seldes suggests he may have been haunted by the gallery's knowledge of his illegal act. "Those who know about such things in the art world would say that Marlborough often offered collectors as well as artists kickbacks deposited in numbered Swiss bank accounts," Seldes writes. "If so, these arrangements might have made severing one's ties with Marlborough... quite difficult."
The Rothko case is mentioned only in passing in the Bacon complaint, but it hardly needs to be stressed, so striking are the parallels it depicts. To some in the art world, the only mystery is why Marlborough hasn't already settled out of court with the Bacon estate: perhaps, goes the reasoning, Frank Lloyd pulled the same tricks with Bacon that he did with Rothko's estate.
Those tricks, as prosecutors proved in 1975, included influencing the estate's executors with blatant perks, to nudge them into selling some 100 of Rothko's paintings to the gallery for a low lump sum of $1.8 million, then reselling them for windfall profits. When a U.S. judge called a halt to the sales, Marlborough ignored him, making numerous sales covertly. When the judge returned a $9.2 million penalty against it, the gallery tried to smuggle a trove of Rothko paintings out of U.S. jurisdiction, first shipping them from New York to a Canadian warehouse, then trying a dead-of-night maneuver to fly them to Liechtenstein. But prosecutors, alerted by an anonymous tip, foiled the plan.
Lloyd, charming and evasive throughout the Rothko trial, became a fugitive from U.S. justice. Humiliated into resigning his chairmanship in London, he lived his last years in the Bahamas with a new young wife and family, until his death in 1998 at the age of 86 Starting in 1983, day-to-day management of the gallery fell to the two children from his first marriage, Gilbert and Barabra, and a nephew, Pierre Levai. The Duke of Beaufort remained, apparently unruffled by Lloyd's various crimes. Most Marlborough artists, including Bacon, remained, too, and the gallery, scandalized but solvent, soldiered on.
Whatever his feelings about the Rothko trial, Bacon was almost certainly less interested in it at the time than he was in a handsome 23-year-old pub manager from the East End, who confronted him rather belligerently one day in 1974 in the Colony Room. More than once, the young man explained, his older brother, who managed a pub called the Swan, had been tipped off that Bacon was coming, and stocked champagne for the occasion. But Bacon hadn't showed, and now the brother was stuck with the stuff, because no one in the East End drank it. "I said to him, 'Why don't you turn up when you are supposed to turn up for this fucking champagne?' " John Edwards related later to a British journalist. "He found that very amusing, and he took a shine to me. He invited me to have lunch at Wheeler's, but it's a fish restaurant and I don't like fish, so he bought me some caviar."
Edwards became Bacon's closest pal, though apparently not a lover - rather, a surrogate son. Unlike George Dyer, the petty criminal who was with Bacon for eight years and committed suicide in 1971, and a previous lover of Bacon's named Peter Lacy, who played piano in bars, Edwards was neither self-destructive nor a drunk. He had shrewd judgement, which Bacon came to rely on, especially in weeding out some of the hangers-on in the painter's entourage. Bacon's friends had no choice but to accept Edwards, though some did so reluctantly. "He's a nice guy," says one close family friend of Bacon's. "Up to a point."
GOOD WILL HUNTING
Bacon with his heir, John Edwards, in the early 1970s. "He's a nice guy. Up to a point," says a Bacon-family friend about Edwards.
With Marlborough's guidance, Bacon became world-famous over the next decade, and, in 1989, the most expensive living artist when one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over $6 million. Yet he kept Reece Mews as his home and studio. People would see him at the South Kensington subway station - but only after 9:30 A.M., when Bacon could travel at the reduced senior-citizen rate. With friends, however, he was an easy touch, often pulling a mass of crumpled bills from his pocket and handing them over. Peppiatt recalls a late night when Bacon invited him to go gambling. "But I have no money," protested Peppiatt, who was a student at the time. Bacon pulled cash from various cans around the studio and spotted him £50. At a private gambling den, Bacon quickly lost his own stake, while Peppiatt, to his own astonishment, won. When bacon asked for a loan, Peppiatt, naturally, obliged. Bacon proceeded to lose that money, too. The next day, over lunch, Bacon insisted on repaying the money he'd "borrowed."
As he grew closer to Bacon, Edwards adopted a more extravagant lifestyle, installing himself with friends and family in a Suffolk cottage called the Croft, which Bacon owned. According to Andrew Sinclair, whose book Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times appeared in 1993, the Edwards clan then acquired a nearby Georgian mansion with converted stables, and Dale's Farm, a house with outbuildings. For transportation, they had a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, one with the license plate BOY 1.
"One banker, who went to dinner with the Edwards brothers, found himself seated with eight men and two women at the table," Sinclair reported in The Sunday Times soon after Bacon's death. "Four of the men boasted of their prison sentences for burglary and demanding money with menaces; but the food and wine were excellent. The rooms of the house were superbly decorated, but the banker was told that the old furniture and the pictures were changed every three months. The constant factor was the numerous paintings by Francis Bacon, which were even hung in the lavatories."
Bacon, who often mused on the finality of death and remained an atheist all his life, appeared calm, almost cheerful, as he asked the family doctor and longtime friend Paul Brass to be one of the three executors of his will. "Don't worry," Bacon told him. "It's such a simple will, it'll all be over in a few weeks. Everything will go to John."
Seemingly unconcerned about possible conflicts of interest, Bacon appointed as his other two executors Gilbert de Botton, a wealthy financier who had once been a director of the Marlborough gallery and who still served as Bacon's financial adviser, and his own adored Valerie Beston. Death came quickly, of a heart attack in April 1992 while he was on a trip to Madrid to try to rekindle a romance with a much younger lover. On his easel back in Reece Mews, Bacon left an unfinished self-portrait.
Though probate took some years to establish, Edwrads was given money by the executors, whenever he needed it, from his initial inheritance of cash, real estate, and a handful of paintings, valued in sum at $18 million. But the gallery held on to a dozen or so Bacon paintings - the bulk of the estate - taken by Valerie Beston from the painter's studio soon after his death. "They kept telling him the market was flat; it was a bad time to sell,2 says one source. And when Edwards asked Marlborough for a complete list of Bacon's paintings sold over the years, and for how much, he thought the gallery's answers seemed insufficient.
Unfortunately, the estate's executors could be of no help. Gilbert de Botton resigned upon Bacon's death, citing other obligations. Edwards believed that Valerie Beston could hardly be counted on for impartial counsel about Marlborough. And Dr. Paul Brass, though well-meaning, could get nothing more out of Marlborough than Edwards had: Beston told him that she was very busy, but was supplying Edwards with all the information he needed. Beston thought that everything was proceeding properly, and that her relations with Edwards were, as she reportedly put it, "very good". But Edwards's frustration was growing, especially since Marlborough, as a stipulation of Bacon's will, was empowered to handle the paintings owned by the estate. "John was overwhelmed by having to carry on the Francis Bacon mantle, and wasn't happy with how Marlborough was doing it, because they were running the show completely," a person close to the situation recalls. Early on, this person says, Edwards had been contacted by an artist friend named Brian Clark, volunteering to help with the estate. Now Edwards took up on the offer, giving him power of attorney and asking him to scout around. "That," says another close observer, 2is when the niggles began."
When Marlborough at last opened its warehouse, about a dozen full-size paintings, not all of them finished, lay within. Among them was a stunning crucifixion triptych done a year before Bacon died, in magenta and mauve. The Inland Revenue hired an expert from Christie's to reappraise the works, and after much back-and-forth a settlement was worked out: the government would take the triptych in lieu of transfer taxes for the whole estate. But Edwards, wary of the process and fond of the triptych, said no.
Not long after, at an old farmer's shop that Bacon had favoured years ago, about 20 rolled-up canvases were found. These were mostly finished paintings, including two "screaming popes" from Bacon's golden days in the 1950s, but some had been declared "abandoned" by the artist in his catalogue raisonné. Nevertheless, they were said to be signed on the front and back - an indication that Bacon approved of them at the time. Now the estate was worth considerably more, perhaps five times more. A new settlement was agreed upon by the inland Revenue and Bacon's executors, but again, Edwards refused to accept it.
Then, four years into the process of settling the estate, the bombshell was revealed that Bacon had had a Swiss account, containing millions of dollars. Moreover, Valerie Beston had been a co-signatory on it, but apparently had failed to mention it to Edwards or anyone else involved with the estate in all this time.
Why? One Bacon friend observes that Beston had started as a secretary, as well as a nanny for Frank Lloyd's children, and worked her way up to be a director of the gallery with an elegant home on Harley Street in London filled with art. Later, to the press, Brian Clarke exculpated Dr. Paul Brass from any wrong doing, but pointedly failed to mention Beston. Yet a close associate of Beston's recalls the day when Miss B showed her a check for £1,000 from Bacon, intended as a gift. Beston had never cashed it "I didn't want my relationship with Francis to be tainted by that," she told the associate.
"She wanted to protect Bacon," says another source close to the situation. "She lived to protect him." Also, says another source, "she was old, and ... definitely got confused." So conceivably Beston had somehow forgotten about the account. In any event, says the participant, "after the Swiss account turned up, Valerie Beston was exposed. So she had to leave."
The estate moved to have Beston removed as an executor, and in December 1998 an English judge compiled. Dr. Brass was also removed, much to his relief: the new money had meant new taxes to be paid to the Inland Revenue, but Edwards now a resident of Thailand, had been able to acquire the whole Swiss account without having to pay any English taxes on it; theoretically, Brass was warned, he, as an executor, might have been obliged to pay them. Beston moved to France to tend a dying sister. Soon after, her lawyers reported that she was no longer mentally competent to answer queries about the account or anything else. (She is, in fact, not named in the estate's complaint.) Since no executors remained, Edwards was allowed to name Brian Clarke to the post.
Also at the hearing, Marlborough was severed from the estate. As a result, Clarke and Edwards were able to choose new dealers to handle Bacon's paintings now owned by the estate: Gerard Faggionato in London and Tony Shafrazi in New York.
Those appointments sent red flags on both sides of the Atlantic. Faggionato was relatively unknown; Shafrazi was all too well known, as the dealer who made his name by spray-painting the words "Kill Lies All" on Picasso's Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and who later represented Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, among other hot 80s artists. Neither Faggionato nor Shafrazi was remotely in Marlborough's league, but both were old pals of Clarke and Edwards's.
Both, as it happens, have exhibited the stained-glass of Brian Clarke.
By now the estate had a high-powered art-world lawyer in John Eastman, 60, of New York. Eastman, who is the brother of Linda McCartney, had represented many artists - one of his largest clients is the estate of Willem de Kooning - and on at least one occasion he had gone up against Marlborough, successfully representing the estate of the sculptor Naum Gabo in the early 80s. when Clarke described how Bacon's paintings had been handled by Marlborough AG, Eastman perked up, remembering the role that the Liechtenstein branch had played in the Rothko case.
At Clarke's urging, Eastman undertook to determine if Marlborough was hiding anything from the estate, and if Bacon had been underpaid systematically over the years. But every time he requested information from Marlborough, he felt the gallery failed to make a full disclosure. By last spring he was fed up, one observer says, and so was the estate.
OLD MASTER
The Duke of Beaufort, who helped Marlborough's founders gain access to highborn families, is the London chairman.
The estate's complaint, lodged in England, seems to make an impressive case. Much of it portrays Bacon as naif about money, easily duped by the gallery. At the start, the suit alleges, Marlborough let him sign the 10-year contract without independent representation. It paid him a pittance on the measurement scale when he should have earned much more. By way of example, the estate lists more than 40 paintings and studies Bacon created in 1965 and 1966, for which he was paid a total of £41,678 ($116,698) when their "fair market value," based on sales at the time, was £101,226 ($283,432). Instead of granting Bacon full market value for his work, the complaint declares, the gallery paid him less than 50 percent of that, and appears never to have told Bacon what his paintings fetched when sold through Marlborough AG.
Moreover, says the estate, the gallery was acting not just as Bacon's dealer but as his manager. As such, it had a "punctilio of honour," as the legal phrase has it, to get Bacon the highest possible price of a painting. As one estate lawyer observes, the Rothko case established a definition of prima facie fraud on the gallery's part for paying an artist 25 percent of a painting's retail price.
The most shocking documents in the suit concern six paintings bought from Bacon by Marlborough AG in the last years of his life. Soon after Bacon's death, his accountant received a receipt from Valerie Beston showing that Marlborough had deposited £1.6 million ($2,832,000) for the paintings into Bacon's U.K. bank account in January 1992. But the complaint produced another document from Marlborough AG purporting to show that the Liechtenstein branch had paid Bacon £4.2 million ($7,434,000) for those same paintings. Worse yet, the estate claims, the £1.6 million was taken from Bacon's own Swiss account. Not only was Bacon cheated out of half of what he was owed, the complaint suggests, he was paid with his own money!
When Eastman examined the list of Bacon paintings sold over the years, eventually surrendered by the gallery, 27 known paintings failed to appear on it. Some of those are visible in photographs taken of Bacon in his studio, yet Marlborough had no record of them. In an average year, John Edwards recalled, Valerie Beston picked up between 10 and 25 paintings. Marlborough's list, however, showed only two or three paintings in some of those years. Was it possible that Bacon, lost in his creative world, had never been paid for those paintings at all?
Lawyers for the estate demanded the formal record book that Valerie Beston had kept of Bacon purchases, but Marlborough U.K. failed to produce it - then allegedly sent it out of jurisdiction to Marlborough AG. They asked for photographs, books, and documents removed from Bacon's studio immediately after his death, but were given nothing. Instead, they learned that seven boxes of documents pertaining to Bacon's estate had been spirited off to Marlborough AG. The attorneys went to the agency which had taken photographs of all of Bacon's paintings, and ordered a full set of copies, only to learn that the copies and negatives were, according to the lawsuit, "collected in person shortly thereafter by Gilbert Lloyd."
As the charges were filed, they were reported both in the London papers and on the front page of The New York Times, without any point-by-point response from Marlborough, whose English lawyers forbade Gilbert Lloyd or anyone else to make any comment other than that the charges would be "robustly" contested.
Since then, Marlborough's side of the story has come clearer, pieced together from a number of sources. It's surprisingly credible.
In the first place, says a Marlborough source, Bacon was represented by two different law firms at the time he signed his 10-year agreement with Marlborough. One was Marlborough's own solicitor, but the other was hired to help him thwart a possible lawsuit from the Hanover Gallery, which he'd left so abruptly. Marlborough became his dealer but not, says one close observer, his manager: "all Marlborough did was allow Valerie Beston to become Bacon's secretary because Bacon was so disorganized."
In any case, the amount paid per painting was fair based on the painter's market value at that time, say sources, as was the method of paying by measurement. (Picasso, observes one art critic, was paid by a comparable measurement scale by his Paris dealer for years.) When Bacon terminated his agreement with Marlborough after five years, he set his own escalating prices, understanding that the gallery would try to double them or better, to cover its overhead and earn a profit. By 1990, according to a Marlborough source, he was charging the gallery as much as $1.8 million per artwork.
If Marlborough had handled Bacon's work on a consignment basis, it would have sent him regular financial statements - and paid him a higher percentage when a painting was sold than it did by by buying his paintings outright. But Bacon, says someone close to the case, "knew very well what his paintings fetched on the open market." The estate's claim that Bacon received as little as 26 percent of his paintings' retail price is based, says a Marlborough source, on the sale of a 1983 painting entitled Statue & Figures in a Street. This was a deal, though, in which Bacon also received a painting in exchange, says a gallery insider. Usually, says the same source, he received much more - enough so that over time, says a close observer quoting Gilbert Lloyd, the gallery netted only about one-third of its sale prices for Bacon paintings after all its expenses fro promoting him.
At first, says the source, the sums paid to Bacon seemed paltry, because the estate knew only about Bacon's U.K. account. Then the estate learned that Bacon's work had been sold through Liechtenstein. Marlborough AG invited the estate's lawyers to come to inspect its books, but the lawyers cancelled two appointments to do so at the last minute. When a full accounting was subsequently sent to the estate's lawyers in New York, it was initially returned unopened - because the lawyers realized it would show payments made to Bacon's Swiss account, which would obligate them to notify the Inland Revenue. "The gallery actually said, 'You might not want this information,' " says one estate lawyer. Finally, they sent the accounting to the estate's English lawyers, who did open it - revealing the Swiss account.
In any event, say sources, Bacon was hardly naïve about what Marlborough was making from his artwork, or how his finances were being handled. "There are all kinds of public statements, whether in interviews in the press or television, where Bacon complained about his taxes and talked with with a great deal of sophistication," says one observer. "This guy was no bucolic bumpkin."
Art critic, Brian Sewell agrees. "Francis was no fool. And this idea that he was naïve and being taken for a ride is absolutely idiotic." adds another old friend of Bacon's, "You must never forget about Francis that he earned his money early on by being a croupier at illegal roulette parties. He was very good; and he had to be able to count."
The shocking charge about the invoice of 1992 becomes an embarrassment to the estate if the gallery's side of this particular story is true. "Bacon got himself a bit mixed up," one source says. "He had all of the money - the full £4.2 million - sent to his Swiss account. Then he realized he needed to show some income in the U.K. for those paintings. So he asked for a portion of it to be sent back." To do that without implicating himself, he had his Swiss banker send £1.6 million back to Marlborough, which then forwarded the £1.6 million to Bacon's U.K. account.
As for the missing paintings, says a Marlborough source, they have all been identified. In most cases, Bacon gave them away himself - or sold them, which he was allowed to do after his initial agreement was terminated. ("It's well known," says biographer Michael Peppiatt, "that Bacon gave paintings to various friends.") Marlborough, which thus had no record of them, and claims it had no obligation to bother about them, tracked them down anyway. A list provided to the estate - and to Vanity Fair - appears to show all those missing paintings, along with the full prices paid for them, detailing payments made both to Bacon's U.K. and Swiss accounts. (A lawyer for the estate pronounces the information "not satisfactory.")
The estate also believes that Marlborough paid Bacon little or nothing for some 3,700 lithographs made of his work over the years. Yet if a list shown to Vanity Fair is accurate, Bacon was indeed paid, on a consistent and proper basis, for the lithographs.
Intimations of a cover-up, on this or any other aspect of the gallery's dealings with Bacon, says a Marlborough source, are simply groundless. Any documents and photos Beston may have taken from the studio were in the boxes that a lawyer sent to Liechtenstein by mistake, this source explains. Half turned out to contain information pertaining to Bacon, and were handed over to the estate. As for the telltale record book, only a copy of it was sent to Liechtenstein, this source says,; the original resides in London. But a copy of it has been made available to the claimants. And Gilbert Lloyd's personal trip to snatch back photos of Bacon's paintings, says a source close to the gallery, never happened. (A spokesman for Marlborough confirms this.) Lloyd did have a lawyer advise the photographer who took the pictures that the pictures belonged to Marlborough, and warned him that he'd be dragged into a messy lawsuit if he cooperated with the estate.
Sources close to Marlborough acknowledge that the Rothko case hangs heavily over the Bacon lawsuit, even 25 years later, and puts the gallery on the defensive. But "the gallery has learned its lesson," one insider says, "I can tell you that." And so it may have, to judge by two of America's best-known artists. "I've been very happy with them," Red Grooms says of Marlborough, which he had the nerve to join in 1974, in the heat of the Rothko trial. "The accounting's very good, very straight, they're very good at collecting money - which isn't easy to do, actually - and I get paid. And that's been consistent." Larry Rivers, a Marlborough artist for 30 years, concurs: "They've always been honest with me," he says "Like any two people who stay together a long time we've had our disagreements, but it was never about anything where I felt I was being short-changed. They were always perfect with me."
All of which leads one to wonder: in a game where every character has his motives, what were Clarke's and Edwards's?
"They're a bunch of cowboys," says Brian Sewell. "The man who inherited the estate knows nothing about pictures, knows nothing about the market. The executor of the estate, Brian Clarke, is an absolutely lowly artist who has a private war with Marlborough because he thinks he's marvelous and Marlborough wouldn't take him on." Their motives, say two other close observers, are simple. "Money, money, money."
Clarke in particular does seem to draw his share of disparaging judgements. One prominent American dealer calls him a "ferret." "Had you ever heard of Brian Clarke or his art," says one dealer, "before he got the Bacon estate?"
One of Clarke's supporters, English art critic Edward Lucie Smith, suggests that at core Clarke, like Edwards, is driven class resentment. "Brian is a tough North Country boy," says Smith, "and he's not going to let the Duke [of Beaufort] off the hook."
Clarke is, in fact, the child of a miner and a cotton-mill worker. "My childhood memories," he told one British journalist, "are of deprivation, of hardship, damp, mice and cockroaches." But he scoffs at Smith's comment. "There's a certain ill grace in suggesting that a [properly structured] lawsuit is class-motivated," he says. "It's too silly for words."
In the mid-70s, Clarke dove into the London art scene through a chance meeting with Robert Fraser, the glamorous bad-boy dealer who stood at the center of it all. Fraser was famous by then as a handsome, Eton-educated founder of London's most exciting gallery, the Robert Fraser Gallery, though his fondness for drugs and his utter recklessness with money doomed the venture from the start. In Groovy Bob, a recently published oral biography of Fraser by Harriet Vyner, Clarke recalls favouring clergyman's clothing at the time. The day he met Fraser, he recalled, "I had on a clerical collar and a leather jacket and tight jeans, and Robert tried to pick me up in the toilets."
The two became close enough for observers to feel that Clarke was Fraser's boyfriend, but Clarke denies this. "I would be proud to say I was, but it wouldn't be true." In Groovy Bob, he says the relationship was more complex than that. "That night Robert and I left with two boys from the club," Clarke recounts about an evening at a sleazy Soho club called the Toucan, "and that established a pattern of behaviour that was to characterise a particular part of our friendship for the next decade."
Through Fraser, Clarke met all the characters in the Bacon-estate saga: Edwards, Shafrazi, and Faggionato. Also Paul McCartney, who hired Clarke to design the sets for 1993 "New World Tour," and Linda McCartney, who would introduce him to her brother, John Eastman.
In the process, Clarke became what he calls an "architectural" artist, working in stained glass, and began to win large commissions to design abstract creations for corporate clients which ranged from a country clud in Japan to an energy company in Kassel, Germany. Before long he became rather wealthy, living n a spacious private house in Kensington called Peel Cottage.
Clarke says he's taken on his executor duties without fee. "I don't need any help from the estate," he says, "and I don't particularly want it." But an executor is entitled to charge for expenses, and Clarke is said to travel frequently with Edwards, sparing no expense: for a gallery show of Bacon's work in Paris, according to a dealer, the two reportedly stayed at the Ritz, with Edwards in a particularly impressive suite. !I know a person who was in it who had never seen a suite this large at the Ritz," says one person in the Edwards-Clarke circle. "I do travel by first class," says Clarke. "I've done so since 1980. And yes, I've stayed in hotel suites for 20 years, too - and expect to continue to do so."
Nor is an executor forbidden by law to receive gifts - of art, say - for his good work. One visitor to Clarke's home observed a large Bacon painting on the wall. "That belongs to John [Edwards]," Clarke explained. Still, if Edwards sees fit - and perhaps if the legal action is successful - Clarke could be rewarded with art on which, by law, he would owe no taxes unless he sold it or died within seven years of receiving it. Meanwhile, as one close close observer notes, the owner of such a gift could borrow money against it.
Clarke waves off the very suggestion, and says that in fact the case has become a huge obstacle and headache. For starters, he says, "I have an over-20 year relationship with both Shafrazi and Faggionato. I've never found them to be anything other than impeccable. And because both were known to Edwards through Fraser, I suggested he speak to them."
This case, Clarke says emphatically, is not about money. "John Edwards is wealthy enough not to have to worry about financial matters for the rest of his life. So am I. This is about the truth. And it's about Francis Bacon's legacy."
So far, Clarke says, the gallery has "given accounts created retrospectively. They have not answered our questions, they've stonewalled us, they've moved documents out of the juridiction of English courts. We had to get the courts to order it back.
"When a will is discharged," Clarke adds, "there are always delays of one sort or another. But in a simple will, a delay of five years is not acceptable. Especially when after that five-year period there was not the slightest hint it would be resolved. We've worked very diligently to avoid bringing this case to court. All we wanted was for Marlborough to tell us the truth. If they want the truth as well, they have nothing to fear."
One wat to assess Clarke and Edwards is by how they've handled Bacon's art to date. Several shows of the estate's holdings - the paintings at Reece Mews when Bacon died - have been held in Paris, London, and New York. The consensus seems to be that many of the recent works are unfinished, and that most of the rest appear in an early catalogue raisonné as "abandoned" paintings - listed that way by Bacon so that if they surfaced they would not be sold or judged as part of his oeuvre. One London dealer recalls taking on several "abandoned" Bacons in the 1960s, and incurring the painter's wrath. "I was on the wrong foot with Bacon after that." An art-dealer source who attended a Shafrazi show found the paintings "pretty indifferent... I think Bacon had every idea that these paintings should be edited out."
To one rival dealer, the recent shows suggest an intriguing motive for the estate's insistence on acquiring a complete list from Marlborough of all of Bacon's paintings. Clarke has acknowledged wanting to create an updated catalogue raisonné. When that's done, the matter of which Bacon's paintings are or are not "abandoned" can be revisited. The legal, logical arbiter of that will be the estate. If "abandoned" paintings are redefined as part of Bacon's body of work, their value will rise. Clarke concedes that probably make them easier to sell, "but the intellectual value is so exciting that the last thing we want to do is part with any of these pictures."
Another realm of Bacon's work in which the estate has made decisions is that of the drawings - genuine or not - which have surfaced since his death, challenging the painter's oft-stated claim that he went straight to the canvas.
The first lot surfaced courtesy of a South Kensington neighbour of Bacon's named Barry Joule, who became a friend and helper to the painter after meeting him by chance in 1978. Often, Joule says, Bacon asked him to destroy portraits that failed to meet his standards; Joule would comply by cutting out the faces with a Stanley knife. It was Joule, too, who introduced Bacon to a young Spanish banker in 1988 who became the painter's last lover. When the banker broke up with Bacon in 1990, the painter was devastated, says Joule, and poured his sorrow into all his last paintings. The hope of reviving that romance was what propelled Bacon to take his ill-fated trip to Madrid in April 1992, even after a collapse and hospitalization, three months before, for a faulty heart valve.
Joule says that when he drove Bacon to the airport that last time, the painter asked him to deal with a cardboard box and a folder that together contained hundreds of drawings, as well as magazine and newspaper images drawn or painted over, and an early self-portrait on canvas. Joule claims his instruction was somewhat cryptic - "You know what to do with that" - but Joule interpreted it to mean he should safeguard the work.
In his art-filled London apartment, the 45-year-old self-described Canadian ex- hippie, is long blond hair cut Sir Galahad style, recalls the furor that greeted his unveiling of the drawings in 1996. "Here is a man who said all his life he never drew - and the people who'd written about him, and particularly [Bacon critic and interviewer] David Sylvester, had followed that line, hook, line, and sinker." They were embarrassed, Joule feels, because they hadn't pushed him hard enough in their questions about whether he drew.
The estate responded first with silence, then with layer's letters demanding the trove be returned. In a number of coffeeshop meetings, Joule managed tp persuade Clarke that he was, at least, a real friend of Bacon's. And his avowal that he would give nearly all the drawings to a museum helped to assuage Clarke's suspicions. But a meeting at the Tate Gallery to judge whether the drawings were real ended in keen frustration. Sylvester, who had declared in a lecture upon first hearing of the drawings that they were legitimate, now said that he could not "see Bacon's hand in them." Another critic theorized that while much of the material must have come from Bacon's studio, someone else might have "overpainted" the magazine pictures. Despite enthusiasm for them from more than one of his curators, Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, was persuaded to reject the collection.
Bacon's biographer Michael Peppiatt, who sat in on the meeting, agrees with Sylvester about the Joule drawings. "They didn't smell right," he says. "From everything I knew about Bacon over 30 years, he didn't need to practice like that, repetitively, before doing a picture. The whole point of the picture was that as far as possible it should be spontaneous. And the idea that he should have kept that huge amount of work, which he didn't want people to see, then preserved it and given it to Joule - it's unlikely."
Yet within months of that meeting, the Tate announced its acquisition of a collection of other Bacon drawings from two old friends of the painter, Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock. The collection is essentially a notebook containing 42 works on paper, yet the Tate bought it for £360,000 ($637,200). Ironically, the collection came through Marlborough, supported by Sylvester and, tacitly at least, by the estate, which appears to need Sylvester as much as he needs it.
More curious still is the estate's decision to give Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin. In September 1997, John Eastman asked Serota if he would be interested in acquiring the studio as a gift to the Tate if it could be reconstructed as a permanent installation. Serota expressed some interest, but warned that he couldn't predict how the Tate's trustees would feel about dedicating a permanent space to it; the museum was having trouble enough finding space for its Bacon paintings. Eastman suggested that Serota view the studio by getting keys from Valerie Beston. But when Serota called her, on more than one occasion, Beston said the keys were with Edwards; she chose not to mention that the estate had begun to disassociate itself from Marlborough, or that she and Edwards were no longer working together.
Rather than approach Serota another time, Clarke and Edwards gave the studio to the Hugh Lane, reasoning that Bacon had been born in Ireland and spent his early years there. To Serota, who heard of the gift only when a newspaper reporter called to ask for his reaction to it, the estate's behaviour was baffling and unfortunate. The Tate clearly lost out on a plum, but to many in the Bacon circle the estate lost, too, because the Tate would have seemed the right place for the studio of a painter who had done nearly all his best-known work in London.
Now that most of the items are logged in on the Hugh Lane gallery's computerized catalogue, a Bacon fan can amuse himself by tying in the names of Bacon cronies to see how many references to each appear in the studio's contents. Photographer Peter Beard, a close friend since the mid-1960s, has 254 references. (Bacon, says Michael Peppiatt, gave him a triptych of Beard, just one of the many examples of paintings given by the artist to friends and not sold through Marlborough.) John Edwards has 143, and Lucien Freud 94. But, for Brian Clarke, there are only four references. Along with photographs and papers, the collection includes 58 slashed canvases - each with a gaping hole where the face once was - and one unfinished self-portrait, the painting found on Bacon's easel after his death.
A short ride away in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which looks like a castle with elaborate formal gardens, where an outbuilding is currently given over to the Barry Joule collection, warily subtitled "Works on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon." Many of them are news photographs - boxers, Nazi, cricket players - painted over with hurried brushstrokes. But enough of them do jibe so closely with the studio drawings as tto seem of a piece with them. If the estate declares them so, the Tate will look foolish for buying its smaller collection of drawings instead of taking the Joule material for free; so will the panjandrums of the Bacon circle for judging them unpersuasive. But if it calls them fake, it needs some proof, and so far, it appears to have none.
Handling Bacon's estate is, as it turns out, fraught with tough decisions - none harder than whether or not to push ahead with the lawsuit against Marlborough. The gallery's strong response will surely give the estate's lawyers pause. So must a recent verdict in another case against the gallery, brought by the estate of German Dadist Kurt Schwitters, who died in 1948. In the Schwitters case, Marlborough Liechtenstein branch was accused of withholding information about its stewardship of roughly 700 works by Schwitters from the legal guardian for the painter's stroke-debilitated son. The son, like Rothko and Bacon, had a Swiss bank account. But when the guardian tried to access it, Marlborough moved it to Liechtenstein. The guardian, in turn, terminated Marlborough's contract with the estate and sued for return of the artworks. Eventually, Marlborough did surrender the art - but counter-sued for breach of contract. A lower court in Norway found in the estate's favour, declaring Marlborough's conduct "reprehensible." But a higher court reversed the ruling last march, chastising the gallery for not coughing up information earlier to the estate, but finding that the gallery's actions did not breach its contract, and awarding $1.2 million plus court costs.
So Marlborough is powerful, and in the Bacon case it may also be right. If it is, however, that hardly makes it a paragon of virtue. As in the Schwitters case, the gallery is accused of almost extraordinary hubris, failing to communicate with Bacon's rightful heir, much less giving him a full accounting in a timely fashion. If so, the gallery has brought the suit upon itself. (Marlborough's lawyers say that the gallery cooperated with the estate's executors from when the first requests for information were made in 1997, and that charges of hubris are completely unfounded.)
Then, too, even if Bacon was eagerly avoiding English taxes, Marlborough has played the tax game on a grand scale for far too long. "It's a much bigger question than the Bacon affair," says one longtime London dealer. "It's about people using foreign currency to buy art." And using the art, in turn, to launder their money. "If you take $10,000 into the U.S., you have to declare it," the dealer explains, "but if you consign a $2 million painting through Liechtenstein, you don't have to declare it." The gallery wins, not just by selling its paintings, but by moving art from country to country for tax advantages. "Looking at the annual gallery reports," the dealer says. "You will never see Marlborough appearing in the highest profit or turnover columns," despite the gallery's prominence in the London art world. "There's a pattern," says the dealer, 2of disguising information." ("Absolutely false," says one Marlborough lawyer "It's just that in London people don't want to pay the 17.5 percent [value added tax]. So anyone who wants to buy a Bacon will go find it in New York or Switzerland.")
Which side, in the case of The Estate of Francis Bacon v. Marlborough Fine Art, is more egregious? One titled English collector seems to sum up the growing consensus. "I don't think for a moment the Marlborough [directors] are saints - they're rough and tough - but there are are very few artists' families who don't feel put out," he snorts. And in this case, John Edwards has little reason to be. "He's a wanker," says the old lord. "He's bloody lucky to get what he got."
Copyright © Vanity Fair 2000
Henry Lydiate Artlaw 1999
Artquest, University of the Arts London, 65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA
A strange saga has begun to unfold in London, where the High Court recently removed two of the three executors of Francis Bacon's estate, leaving the artist Brian Clarke as sole executor with the onerous responsibility of ensuring that all of Bacon's assets go to his sole named beneficiary, John Edwards. The two former executors were Paul Brass, Bacon's doctor, and Valerie Boston, a director of Bacon's gallery. According to Clarke, the doctor had done his very best to fulfil his duties as executor, but was not sufficiently versed in the art world to be able to deal effectively with the complexities involved in such a vast and valuable estate. The Marlborough Galleiy director had been put in a compromising position as an executor, since there was a potential conflict of interest between Bacon's estate and his gallery. Clarke has placed the legal work with US lawyer John Eastman, father of his friend the late Linda McCartney, and the commercial side of the work with the Tony Shafrazi Galleiy, New York, which has handled Clarke's work for some years.
Although Bacon took the sensible precaution of making a will, it would have been beneficial if he had engaged in some serious estate planning, to deal with essential matters such as selection of appropriate executors; cataloguing all his works and papers; storing and insuring all his assets; appraisal and valuation, and inheritance taxes. (An excellent guide was published in the US last year: A visual artist's guide to estate planning, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Act Foundation and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 1998,0966518802.)
© Henry Lydiate 1999
By Martin Bailey, The Arts Newspaper, Tuesday, December 18, 2001
The Francis Bacon Estate’s legal claim against Marlborough Fine Art has taken
a new twist, with allegations of blackmail. Bacon is said to have decided to
leave Marlborough to move to the Pace gallery (now Pace Wildenstein), but
changed his mind after being warned that he might then have problems with the UK
tax authorities and in getting access to money paid through Liechtenstein into
his Swiss bank accounts.
On 20 November the High Court in London ruled that the blackmail claim could be
incorporated into the Estate’s case, which will come to trial in February. Mr
Justice Patten pointed out that his duty was to filter out “hopeless
claims”, but the new allegation “does not fall into that category.” The
judge stressed that this “does not mean that it will succeed or that I have
formed any view at all as to its truth."
Although the extent of the
Estate’s claim has not been calculated, it could well amount to more than £100
million. When Bacon died in 1992, he left his assets to John Edwards, a former
East London barman who now lives in Thailand. The sole executor is Professor
Brian Clarke, who believes that Bacon was not paid properly by his long-time
dealer for many of his pictures. Professor Clarke is therefore taking legal
action against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Liechtenstein-registered
Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment (see The Art Newspaper,
no. 115, June 2001, p. 6).
Dinner at Claridge’s
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times March 23, 1999
Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that handled the artistic management of the British painter Francis Bacon for virtually his entire career, has had all association with his estate ended by England's High Court.
In a decision that has gone unreported until now, Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled in late December that an executor of the multimillion-dollar estate who was a director of the gallery should be removed and replaced by a new independent representative.
The new trustee is Brian Clarke, 45, a well-known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards, 49, the painter's closest friend, to whom Bacon willed his entire estate. Bacon, widely accepted as the greatest British painter of his generation, died of a heart attack at the age of 82 in 1992.
Mr. Clarke had been responsible for shifting the representation of Bacon's works from Marlborough to Faggionato Fine Arts in London and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, an arrangement that drew sudden attention last October when the Shafrazi Gallery mounted a show of 17 previously unseen Bacon paintings and photographs of his famously cluttered London studio. Marlborough's loss of the prestigious Bacon account and the reasons behind it became a subject of curiosity and speculation among contemporary art experts in London and New York.
Mr. Clarke would say only that lawyers looking into the administration of the estate had found "certain anomalies" in actions by Marlborough that compelled them to take their court action.
They had become alert to possible problems when, on making their first inquiries to Marlborough London, Bacon's gallery since 1958, they were told that the Bacon paintings were being handled not in London but by Marlborough Liechtenstein.
The explanation set off alarms since the Liechtenstein office had been central to a scandal in New York in the 1970's over the estate of the American painter Mark Rothko that led to the ousting of executors; heavy fines against Marlborough; the conviction of its head, Frank Lloyd, for tampering with evidence and the end of its membership in the Art Dealers Association of America.
Liechtenstein is also known as a place that affords corporations high levels of secrecy and protection against demands for disclosure.
The Rothko case exposed sinister inner workings in the supposedly genteel art world and cost Marlborough its pre-eminence in contemporary art. Among other abuses, Marlborough was found to have sold paintings to favoured clients at less than market value and to have collected inflated commissions.
Lawyers for the Bacon estate are busy in four European countries and the United States tracking assets that the estate believes should go to Mr. Edwards. "They are currently putting together a case that may at some point in the near future come to court," Mr. Clarke said.
His whole purpose, Mr. Clarke said, was to "get John everything that Francis left him."
The principal lawyer for the estate, John L. Eastman of New York, said in a telephone interview from St. Barts that "the defining question for the estate is what is there beyond what we already have." The argument presented to Justice Neuberger for the removal of Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough London, was that entrusting fiduciary responsibility to an official associated with the gallery whose actions were being examined by the estate presented a conflict of interest.
Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Eastman would specify what activities of Ms. Beston's or the gallery's they had questioned.
Geoffrey Parton, a director of Marlborough London, said the gallery would not discuss any aspect of the Bacon estate. Mr. Parton said "no comment" six times during a brief telephone conversation on Monday, including to questions about whether Ms. Beston had been a Bacon trustee or was a director of the gallery. Court documents confirm that she was both.
There were originally two other trustees of the Bacon estate, Gilbert de Botton, a financier well known in art collecting circles who was a former director of Marlborough Zurich, and Dr. Paul Brass, Bacon's personal physician. Mr. de Botton never took up his commission, and Dr. Brass was replaced in the same Dec. 18 action that removed Ms. Beston. Dr. Brass, Mr. Clarke said, had acted "impeccably" but was simply overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the task.
Mr. Clarke and Mr. Eastman both resisted putting any value on the overall Bacon holdings. Individual paintings have fetched up to $6 million, prompting outsiders to estimate the worth of the whole estate at more than $100 million.
The estate has paid its taxes and does not need to raise any money with sales of major works. "We may sell a number of pictures as time goes on, but we have no plans for any kind of big sale," Mr. Clarke said. "Not even a small sale, for that matter," he added.
Bacon's friends have found that the painter was even more prolific than they had known.
"Even though everybody thought that they'd been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 50's," Mr. Clarke said. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred, a hundred and fifty times, and I had missed them. John Edwards had missed them."
The studio where Bacon worked for the last 30 years of his life was a giddy jumble of half-finished canvases, books, rags, drawings, notes, twisted paint tubes, encrusted brushes and broken furniture with bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling and smears of paint on the doors and walls. It occupied two rooms of a South Kensington mews house and is being disassembled, measured, catalogued and documented for reconstruction in Dublin, where Bacon was born and spent the first 16 years of his life.
It will be reassembled in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art for public show beginning in 2001. The dismantling has been done in archeological fashion, with highly detailed and enumerated placement charts so that the creative chaos that Bacon wrought in London can be precisely recreated in Dublin.
More Bacon works emerged when Barry Joule, 44, a Canadian writer who was one of the painter's neighbours, came forth with 500 oil sketches, drawings, and worked-on photographs from 1945 to 1965 that Mr. Bacon had given him.
There have been reports in the British press of disputes and threatened legal action between the estate and Mr. Joule, but Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Joule shared the estate's interest in abiding by the painter's wishes that Mr. Edwards receive everything.
He said that talks with him were "perfectly amicable." Mr. Joule agreed with that characterization, saying, "Things are being worked out in a friendly fashion."
Last year the Tate Gallery purchased 42 similar works on paper from the 1950's and 60's in gouache, oil paint, ink, ballpoint pen and pencil from Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock, friends of the artist, and the estate of Sir Stephen Spender. The works, compelling early visions of the twisted figures, blurred faces, screaming popes and butchered carcasses that were to become Bacon's signature repertory of postwar angst, are on display at the Tate until May 2.
Mr. Edwards, a reclusive and simple man currently living in Southeast Asia, was Bacon's closest friend for the last 16 years of his life. Born within the sounds of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in East London and therefore a genuine Cockney, Mr. Edwards never learned to read or write and maintained a relationship with Bacon that friends described as filial.
Mr. Clarke said he became involved four years ago when Mr. Edwards approached him perplexed about delays and problems in dealing with the estate. "He asked if I would help him to try to understand why the estate was not being wound up, and he asked me to become his power of attorney. I thought it would be a very short thing, but after a while I discovered that there were, let's say, certain anomalies, problems without the resolution of which the estate could not be wound up."
Mr. Clarke took on the assignment without the knowledge of the executors, and when he found the task more daunting than he had anticipated, he turned to Mr. Eastman, a lawyer with broad experience in the worlds of art and entertainment. Mr. Eastman's sister, Linda, the wife of Sir Paul McCartney, had been a friend and collaborator of Mr. Clarke's, and the photographs of Bacon's studio that were displayed in New York last fall were the last pictures she shot before her death last April.
While he declined to get into the details of his preoccupation over Marlborough's management of Bacon, Mr. Clarke explained why he thought the painter's estate required special attention.
"Francis Bacon was famously disinterested and uninterested in money," he said. "He lived the life of an essentially simple man in a tiny bed-sit that was heated when very cold by leaving the gas door open. He had a tiny kitchen that contained an open bath, and a room with a bed and a chest of drawers.
"He was the last great existentialist. If you are an art gallery representing such a man whose chief legatee can neither read nor write and hasn't even had his own lawyer until recent years, your fiduciary obligations are all the greater because such a man could be described as 'easy pickings.' "
By CAROL VOGEL
The New York Times March 22, 2000
The international art gallery that was at the center of one of the art world's most spectacular scandals - the plundering of the estate of Mark Rothko - was accused in court papers in London yesterday of cheating a second prominent artist, the British figurative painter Francis Bacon, and systematically defrauding him and his heir.
In papers submitted to the High Court, an English court that can be overturned by the Law Lords, lawyers for the estate of the artist who died in 1992 after a turbulent life, charged that the gallery, Marlborough International Fine Art, consistently undervalued many of Bacon's paintings, which it bought outright from him and quickly resold for substantially higher prices, and could not account for the whereabouts of many other paintings.
The lawyers estimated the losses at tens of millions of dollars but said a total could not be established because Marlborough quickly moved documents out of Britain and seized photographs of the disputed paintings when it became clear that a court case was at hand.
Georgianna Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Marlborough London gallery, said that Bacon's relationship with Marlborough was not a passive one and that the artist was aware of the gallery's activities and transactions on his behalf. She also said the gallery has provided access to all the records the estate's lawyers have asked for. ''But any other documentation relevant to the claim will be disclosed during the course of the court action,'' Ms. Gibbs said. She said the documents that were moved out of Britain were papers that were returned to the gallery's Liechtenstein branch. Robert Hunter, a lawyer for Marlborough International, said he could not comment directly on the allegations because of the litigation.
The papers paint a complex picture of how the suit alleges the gallery took control of the most minute aspects of Bacon's financial and personal life - to the point of paying his laundry bills and handing him spending money - and then used this grip to deprive him of the true value of his work. According to the lawsuit, the Marlborough connection continued after his death, when a director of Marlborough's London gallery was named an executor of his estate and ran it to the detriment of Bacon's sole heir, John Edwards, an illiterate and reclusive cockney who now lives in Thailand and with whom, friends say, he had a filial relationship.
Bacon's paintings of distorted, anguished figures fetched as much as $6 million at auction and made him one of Britain's most celebrated postwar artists. His own life was as openly tortured as his art. ''You can't be more horrific than life itself,'' the artist was fond of saying.
He cultivated a bad boy reputation, speaking freely about his abuse of alcohol, his homosexuality, his penchant for gambling and his kinship with gangsters. Born in Ireland, he lived most of his life in a rundown mews house in South Kensington, London, with bare light bulbs, a tub in the kitchen, and paintings and photographs strewn everywhere.
Unlike some artists who change galleries periodically throughout their careers, Bacon put all his faith in Marlborough, which represented him from 1958 until his death of a heart attack eight years ago at 82. For much of this time Marlborough reigned over the contemporary art scene as one of the leading international galleries with branches in New York, London, Geneva, Madrid and Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
But the Rothko scandal shook it from its pedestal. In 1983, Frank Lloyd, Marlborough's founder, was convicted of evidence tampering and sentenced to community service in connection with the 11-year case in which Marlborough and the executors of the Rothko estate were found to have engaged in a conflict of interest in selling and consigning Rothko's work. Mr. Lloyd, who died two years ago, the gallery and two executors were fined $9.2 million.
Many of the charges made by the lawyers for Bacon's estate involved activities that they said took place during the same time period as many of the Rothko transactions. Indeed, Mr. Lloyd, as well as his son Gilbert, a director of Marlborough, were named in the suit filed yesterday. Two other directors of Marlborough were also cited, the Duke of Beaufort and Gilbert de Botton.
Bacon's will, which he wrote a year before his death, was a three-page document drawn up by Theodore Goddard, a London law firm which represented Marlborough. In it he left his estate to Mr. Edwards. Bacon appointed three executors: Valerie F. Beston, a director of Marlborough Fine Art, London; Paul Brass, his doctor, and Mr. de Botton, chairman of Global Asset Management. Mr. de Botton declined to take up his role as an executor.
The papers contend that Marlborough bought paintings outright from Bacon for well below fair market value and sold them for several times as much within months. A 1958 agreement filed with the court shows that Marlborough estimated the value of Bacon's paintings based on size - $462 for a painting 24 by 20 inches and $1,176 for one 78 by 65 inches. John Eastman, the lawyer for the estate, said an artist of Bacon's stature would get far more: about 70 percent of the price the gallery anticipated getting from a buyer.
According to documents, the gallery valued one painting, ''Statue and Figures in the Street,'' from 1983, at $250,000 in January 1984. Four months later it paid Bacon $66,371, about 26 percent of that amount, the documents show.
In one case, the papers said, two sets of books were kept on the sale of six paintings at the time of the artist's death in 1992, for $2.5 million. One set kept in the gallery's Liechtenstein office indicated that the money Marlborough used to pay the estate for the paintings came from Bacon's own Swiss bank account.
Ms. Gibbs said she could not comment on any of the valuations and referred all such questions to Mr. Hunter.
In many other cases, Mr. Eastman said, the gallery has not provided records of its purchases.
Marlborough furnished Mr. Eastman with records covering some transactions over a 20-year period, but he said many of these were incomplete or lacked documentation.
Ms. Gibbs said that Mr. Eastman had been given access to all the records but that it is difficult to determine exactly what is in the estate. ''Marlborough has accounted for everything they were aware of,'' she said.
''Who knows if it's all been found and there won't be more,'' she said.
Underlying the charges is the close relationship between Bacon and Marlborough. Ms. Beston was his link to the gallery before becoming executor, which Mr. Edward's lawyers say was a conflict of interest. Ms. Beston, who stepped down as executor with Mr. Brass, was not sued. Attempts to reach Ms. Beston were unsuccessful.
Records show that Ms. Beston had the power to sign checks on Bacon's primary checking account and to give him money when he needed it. Brian Clarke, an artist who is now executor of the estate, said that it was Ms. Beston's job to keep Bacon away from distractions and that she kept a brown envelope in the gallery for spending money for him, which he would often use to gamble.
Ms. Gibbs said Ms. Beston's relationship with Bacon was a close one. ''It was Bacon who appointed Ms. Beston as one of his executors,'' she said.
In a statement submitted to the court, his accountant, Hugh Thornton Brown, said Bacon signed his tax returns before the figures had been filled in. Mr. Brown became Bacon's accountant at the suggestion of Theodore Goddard, which also represented Marlborough. He said Mr. Brown, who prepared Bacon's taxes for 19 years, never met the artist, relying on Ms. Beston's information.
By Hugh Davies
The Daily Telegraph 04/07/2000
FRANCIS BACON, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th century artist,
allegedly kept a Swiss bank account to shelter large chunks of his income from
tax.
The claim surfaced when details of payments made to Bacon by his gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, were sent to the English lawyers of his estate, according to an article to be published in the magazine Vanity Fair. The estate is in the throes of a legal battle with the gallery, claiming that it wrongfully exploited him over more than 30 years.
Bacon died in 1992, aged 82, leaving his £11 million estate to his closest friend, John Edwards, 50, an illiterate east Londoner and his constant companion for the last 18 years of his life. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of Britain's most prestigious galleries with its worldwide representative Marlborough International Fine Art based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed to have exercised "undue influence" over the artist, who died from a heart attack in Spain.
It identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, worth as much as £30 million, that allegedly do not feature in the gallery's accounts. Michael Shnayerson, the author, said that the gallery's "partial payments" to the Geneva bank were legal for its Liechtenstein branch. It was also above board for Bacon to establish the account. But failing to declare the payments to the Inland Revenue as taxable income broke the law.
The magazine suggests that a reason why Bacon never left Marlborough was that he feared no other gallery would agree to the arrangement. An old friend of the painter high in the art world is quoted as saying: "He was perhaps less happy than he seemed." Did he feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of it." The art critic Brian Sewell said that Bacon once told him that he would rather be in the hands of Marlborough than in those of "an incompetent honest man.
"What he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still more than he'd got if he went with anyone else." Mr Sewell dismissed the idea that Bacon was naive and being taken for a ride: "Francis was no fool."
The Vanity Fair article, to be published in Friday's edition, quoted sources which appear to be close to the gallery, as saying that Bacon was hardly naive about what Marlborough was making from his work, or how his finances were handled. According to the magazine, in 1992 Bacon "got himself mixed up" and had all of his money from paintings - "the full £4.2 million" - sent to Switzerland, then, realising he needed to show some income in the UK, he asked for a portion to be sent back.
He allegedly had his Swiss banker return £1.6 million to Marlborough. The sum was then forwarded to his British account. A Marlborough source claimed that as for the missing paintings, they had all been identified. In most cases Bacon gave them away or sold them himself. Liz Beatty, a representative of the estate, said last night that she would have no immediate comment on the claims.
by Cal McCrystal, The Independent, March 12, 2000
THE DEATH of Francis Bacon, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th-century artist, is proving as controversial as his life. As art experts struggle to sort out and catalogue the cluttered contents of his London studio, lawyers are investigating the whereabouts of Bacon paintings claimed by his estate and willed in their entirety to John Edwards, Bacon's loyal friend for the 16 years preceding the artist's death in 1992.
The first effort has involved a team of archaeologists and conservators painstakingly excavating the jumble of the small, spartan South Kensington flat where Bacon lived and worked. The contents, along with the paint-streaked internal walls, have been shipped off to the artist's native Dublin where they have been meticulously reassembled for exhibition in November at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - a donation from Mr Edwards. (Some of this material can be seen exclusively in our Culture section.)
But the legal spur to discovery is equally intriguing. It concerns the London gallery which had handled the artistic management of the painter for virtually his whole career - an association which the High Court terminated more than a year ago. Mr Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled that all the executors of Bacon's multi-million- pound estate should be removed and replaced by Brian Clarke, the well- known British architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards.
Since then the effort to ensure that Mr Edwards, now 50 and living in south-east Asia, receives his inheritance has become a legal wrangle of immeasurable proportions, involving the gallery which represented Bacon for most of his working life: Marlborough Fine Art in London, and a Marlborough company in Lichtenstein. Marlborough also has galleries in New York, Spain, Zurich and Tokyo. One of the deposed executors was Valerie Beston, also a director of MFA.
Just as the jumbled contents of Bacon's studio were colourfully spattered with daubs of paint, so the conflict and the background to it are liberally spangled with the names of celebrities, some of them deceased. Among them are Sir Paul McCartney, his late wife Linda and her brother, the New York arts lawyer John Eastman. (His clients have included Willem de Kooning, Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell.) Mr Clarke is a friend of Sir Paul's. Mr Eastman is Mr Clarke's American lawyer. Mr Clarke has asked Mr Eastman to take up the case.
Within the canvas, too, are the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko who died in puzzling circumstances almost exactly 30 years ago; the 11th Duke of Beaufort, currently chairman of Marlborough; and some of the biggest names in the international art scene, including the former Marlborough boss - an unsavoury Viennese dealer who changed his name from Franz Kurt Levai to Francis Kenneth Lloyd and who died in 1998 with his reputation in shreds. The Queen herself is not left out of what is a confused and disturbing, picture.
Even the prestigious The Art Newspaper has difficulty interpreting it. Brian Clarke told that journal: "I knew Francis since the late 1970s - we were friends - but my long-term and great friendship has been with John Edwards. At John's request I have been given his power of attorney for a considerable time and then I agreed to help out with the estate."
As the estate's personal representative, appointed by the High Court, Mr Clarke has the necessary authority to administer and tie up the estate, and see that Mr Edwards - a chronic dyslexic who lived with Bacon but was not his lover - gets what is due to him. "I was assuming that it was a simple matter of resolving a number of outstanding issues and then the estate would be wound up," said Mr Clarke, "but before very much time had passed it was clear that it was a much more complicated affair than I had first realised." He found that the estate "is more extensive in terms of its holdings of paintings than has generally been assumed.
"Even though everybody thought that they had been through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the 1950s," continued Mr Clarke. "Since Francis died, I had been in his studio probably a hundred times, but I missed them, and John Edwards missed them. It was such chaos in there and one was very frightened of moving too much for fear of disturbing things."
It was then that an approach was made to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin's Parnell Square. With Mr Clarke's approval, Mr Edwards donated the entire studio and contents to Bacon's native Dublin. "[The Hugh Lane gallery] came to disassemble it archaeologically," Mr Clarke said. "But when they dismantled this extraordinary thing, we found these paintings. It also turned out that there were one or two works in other places - paintings that the Marlborough Gallery never saw that came out of that studio that we didn't know existed; John Edwards didn't know they were there. It is undeniable that the body of work that is in the estate constitutes the greatest collection of Bacons in the world, and it contains some unequivocal masterpieces."
By the time the Dublin studio is open to the public in November, more may have surfaced from the second effort at finding the complete oeuvre. That investigation will almost certainly examine the role of Frank Lloyd who ran Marlborough Fine Art and its international network of galleries since the end of the Second World War. The son of Austrian antique dealers, he fled the Nazis and went to Paris, and thence to England where he and a fellow Austrian refugee opened the Marlborough Gallery in London. By 1950, Lloyd had gained (as he put it himself) "some class, some atmosphere" by appointing as a director David Somerset, later to become Duke of Beaufort.
Royalty and gossip columnists attended Lloyd by the score. The Queen came to one of his gallery benefit nights. Venture capital poured into Marlborough from rich jet-setters, among them Fiat's Gianni Agnelli, shipping magnates Ragnan Moltzau (Norway) and Onassis and Goulandris (Greece), the Brazilian publisher Assis Chateaubriand and the Rothschilds.
Lloyd told his salesmen: "If it sells, it's art." He later declared: "I collect money, not art." He offered artists advances, staggered payouts and shielded them from the tiresome facts of business. He signed up such giants as Mark Rothko, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and, of course, Francis Bacon.
The Rothko affair was to inflict enormous damage on Marlborough's reputation. A 1974 book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, about the American artist's suicide four years earlier and the epic legal battle over his effects describes what occurred. According to a New York court petition by a daughter, Kate Rothko, her father's executors gave Marlborough "virtually absolute control of the market" for Rothko's paintings and "drastically limited the supply of money available" to the estate, "prevented" Rothko's children, committed themselves to paying "unconscionably excessive" commissions, and "compounded the fraud" upon the estate. Further, the court petition said, the executors and Marlborough "wilfully and deliberately concealed from all other persons interested in the estate" the details of these agreements.
During the litigation, Rothko paintings were ferried out of the jurisdiction to Canada, despite a court injunction forbidding Marlborough from squirrelling them away. It took a private detective to track them down and force their return.
In 1975, with the Rothko case still unresolved, a Francis Bacon exhibit opened in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Lloyd and his wife were there to share Bacon's limelight and approbation. A few months later, the judge handed down a decision in favour of Kate Rothko. He removed the three executors and cancelled the estate's contracts with Marlborough, ordered the return of 658 unsold paintings and assessed damages and fines which included a $3.3m (pounds 2.1m) fine against Frank Lloyd and Marlborough for violating a court restraining order by shipping 57 paintings out of the country. This was later increased to $3.8m after a recount showed five more paintings had been in the illegal shipment.
The Rothko story, wrote its author Lee Seldes, was "one of legal legerdemain, camouflages and cover-ups, destruction of incriminating evidence ... the laundering of records, funds, and paintings. It ruined lives and reputations, wrecked long-term friendships."
The Bacon story remains - like his legacy - to be seen. According to John Eastman, the principal lawyer for the estate, "the defining question for the estate is: what is there beyond what we already have?"
Court hearing on claim that could run to £100m highlights artist's unique relationship with 'minder'
John Ezard
The Guardian, Thursday April 26, 2001
An art dealer acted as the painter Francis Bacon's "keeper or minder", removing his paintings to her gallery "as soon as the paint was dry", a high court judge was told yesterday.
This was said to be one of the principal roles of Valerie Beston, who organised the artist's life for more than 30 years.
The allegations were made by Geoffrey Vos QC, who called Bacon Britain's greatest 20th century artist. He was acting for Bacon's estate in a claim which could run as high as £100m. The estate is suing Marlborough Fine Art (London) and the Liechtenstein-based Marlborough International Fine Art Establishment for breach of duty and undue influence over Bacon.
Mr Vos was speaking at a preliminary procedural hearing of a complex case which is expected to bring the dead painter's often desperate life back into the limelight when it is fully argued in January.
Mr Vos told Mr Justice Patten: "The relationship which is at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th century artist and his dealer. This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run of the mill about it."
The Marlborough gallery exclusively represented Bacon from 1958 - shortly before he became celebrated and was sometimes getting only a few hundred pounds for a canvas - until he died in 1992 as the world's highest-priced living artist.
Marlborough are contesting the claims of the estate, of which Brian Clarke was appointed executor in 1998. It is urging the judge to strike out the case this week.
The estate accuses the gallery of retaining up to 70% of the sale value of Bacon's paintings. It says a fair share of the proceeds would have been about a third. It alleges Marlborough has not yet demonstrated that it has paid for all the paintings it received. The estate is demanding a full accounting of the gallery's role to show that a fair balance was struck between its interests and those of Bacon. It also alleges that Marlborough have failed to account for the proceeds of a sale of 47 series of Bacon lithographs.
Mr Vos told the court Ms Beston could be described "as the defendants would have it, as Bacon's assistant", or "as one might say, his keeper or minder".
"But what is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK at all times material to the case, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry".
Outside court, the estate said in a statement: "It is right that the truth about the UK's pre-eminent artist and the treatment of his work be established and not buried."
Bacon left his £10m fortune to his longstanding friend John Edwards, 51, an illiterate east Londoner who now lives in Thailand.
The case continues.
A £100m court battle over works by the painter Francis Bacon was launched yesterday in what seems likely to become one of the most bitter art wrangles in decades.
Trustees of Bacon's estate are suing his former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd, alleging it took too much commission from the artist, produced prints without paying him and has not accounted for up to 33 of his paintings.
The gallery, which denies the allegations, is seeking this week to have the estate's claims struck out at the High Court in London. If it fails, a full-blown and probably highly-scandalous trial will begin in earnest early next year.
Yesterday, Geoffrey Vos QC, counsel for the estate's executor Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of the artist, told Mr Justice Patten: "This is a unique case. There is nothing normal or run-of-the-mill about it. The relationship at the root of this litigation, which one suspects will never be found again, is a relationship between Britain's greatest 20th-century artist and his dealer."
Mr Vos said that from 1958 until his death at 82 from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery and its international arm, Marlborough International Fine Art (MIFA), which is based in Liechtenstein.
But the estate alleges that instead of taking a "fair" rate of commission of about 30 per, Marlborough took up to 70 per cent. Further, it claims that the London-based gallery issued between 150 and 180 offset lithographic prints of the artist's work, valued at £25m to £30m, in 48 series. Yet it alleges Bacon was paid for only one series a flat fee of $40,000.
The estate has questioned the role of one of Marlborough's directors, Valerie Beston, who was also Bacon's assistant and an executor of his estate, something the trustees argue was a conflict of interest. There is no suggestion that Ms Beston benefited improperly from the arrangement.
Mr Vos added: "What is beyond doubt is that Valerie Beston, a director of Marlborough UK, organised much if not all of Francis Bacon's professional and personal life.
"One of her principal roles on behalf of Marlborough UK was the removal of the paintings that he completed to its own gallery as soon as the paint was dry in Marlborough's own words 'in Bacon's best interests'."
The beneficiary of Bacon's estate is Londoner John Edwards, 51, a former pub landlord whom the artist befriended "like a son", according to one of his friends, during the last 18 years of his life.
The trustees complain they have been unable to examine lists of the artist's work or details of his correspondence or diaries, even though it is the duty of his estate's executor to do so. Bacon signed over "sole and exclusive" rights to his work to the gallery in 1958.
"The trustees have not been able to get a full account of Bacon's works from the gallery and don't have evidence that some of them were paid for," said a source close to the estate. "Marlborough has failed to supply them with an account for some of the paintings thought to have been painted by him.
"But what is also annoying is that we can't get access to the correspondence, diaries and so on, that Bacon produced because the gallery holds them. They have everything from fan mail to hate mail.
"If nothing else, we hope to have these released for public consumption so we are no longer in the ludicrous position of scholars not being able to study Britain's greatest 20th-century painter."
During the 1970s and 1980s Bacon, who was born in Dublin to English parents, was the world's most valuable living painter. In 1989, his triptych, May-June 1973, sold at Sotheby's in New York for £3.53m.
He is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest painters if not the pre-eminent British painter of the last century. Some experts put him in the same league as Picasso and Magritte.
His stark, often nightmarish use of body imagery won him a stream of admirers but also, as with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion in 1945, caused revulsion among others.
His work, dark and impenetrable, was nevertheless much sought after in his own lifetime, guaranteeing him high-profile exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Metropolitan in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, as well as shows in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.
A lover of wine and gambling, the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland were among his friends.
His stature, therefore, has made the alleged failure to account for some of his works harder to bear. The Bacon source said: "We believe we have identified 33 paintings by Bacon between 1972 and 1981 which do not feature in the Marlborough or MIFA accounts. You could be looking at £5m for each of them.
"The figure of £100m was raised during an interlocutory hearing in the case. In truth, until we know what's out there, we don't know how much could be at stake."
A spokeswoman for the gallery, owned by the Duke of Beaufort and the family of the late connoisseur Frank Lloyd, said: "We totally reject the allegations. Our relationship with Francis Bacon was completely proper and we will be vigorously contesting the claims."
It is understood the gallery will argue that Bacon negotiated the price of the paintings he sold to Marlborough before it sold them on. Insiders reject the suggestion that Bacon was naive when it came to money matters, but was simply not concerned about the balance of his bank account.
One of his friends said: "He needed money for fine wines and gambling and to exercise his generosity. Other than that, it meant nothing to him."
During the case, it will be pointed out that Bacon approached Marlborough, not the other way around, and that he stuck with the gallery despite approaches by others. His initial contract was for 10 years. He exercised an escape clause half way through but stayed with the gallery. Why would he do that if he was unhappy?
Part of the reason might have been because of Ms Beston herself. Depending on which side you believe, she was either a Marlborough employee who exercised too much control, or a devoted fan and friend who gave years of service helping Bacon with everything from his tax affairs to his laundry. It is understood she is now ill and unlikely to give evidence.
The gallery is expected to claim that Bacon knew they could double the price of his works but that he set the initial prices. By the time he died, he was understood to be charging more than £1m for some works.
The questions the court must answer are: Were those prices enough, and did Bacon care?
Years of legal argument over the tangled affairs of Francis Bacon lie ahead after a judge refused to block a legal action by the artist's estate against his former agents.
The life of the man acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, which was ended by a heart attack in 1992, was notoriously chaotic, and his afterlife is proving to be just as bumpy.
The stakes are enormous. The assets in dispute could be worth up to £100m. In his life time Bacon was one of a handful of British painters whose works broke the £1m price tag.
Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar. Last week in New York a world record was set at Sotheby's, where just under £6m was paid for a triptych.
His estate is suing the galleries that promoted his work for 34 years, Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art, which is based in Liechtenstein, alleging "undue influence" over the painter.
As a result of yesterday's judgment, after three weeks of legal argument by Marlborough trying to have the case thrown out, the main action will go ahead. It is expected to take months, and will probably not begin before January.
Marlborough said it would "vigorously" defend the case. It described its relations with Bacon as "frank, close and mutually beneficial".
The high court was told that a representative of Marlborough acted almost as a minder, removing paintings from Bacon's studio - which was sometimes knee deep in rubbish, newspaper articles, old photographs and scraps of magazines - "as soon as the paint was dry".
When he died at 82, he was worth an estimated £10m, and left his fortune to his much younger friend, John Edwards, a former east London barman who now lives in Thailand.
The main legal action was instigated by the estate's executor, Brian Clarke. It is demanding a full statement of the galleries' dealing with the artist, claiming that they retained up to 70% of the sale value of his paintings when a third would have been fair, and that Marlborough has not demonstrated that it paid for all the paintings received.
Marlborough strenuously denies the allegations. Yesterday Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied there was "at least an arguable case". The trial would have to examine in detail Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough. While one of the greatest 20th century artists "both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate".
A legal contest between the estate of Francis Bacon and his former gallery, involving up to £100m in claims, should go ahead, probably next year, a High Court judge ruled yesterday. Mr Justice Patten refused an application by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art to have the case, brought by Bacon's trustees, thrown out before a full hearing.
A legal contest between the estate of Francis Bacon and his former gallery, involving up to £100m in claims, should go ahead, probably next year, a High Court judge ruled yesterday. Mr Justice Patten refused an application by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art to have the case, brought by Bacon's trustees, thrown out before a full hearing.
Marlborough insists the estate's allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and "undue influence" are unfounded. But the estate, headed by the executor, Bacon's friend, Professor Brian Clarke, claims the painter was underpaid for works, some of which, it alleges, remain unaccounted for. From 1958 until his death from a heart attack in Spain in 1992, aged 82, Bacon was represented by the Marlborough gallery.
The estate says it is seeking "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon". In a statement, Marlborough has said it enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years after Bacon approached the gallery with the request to represent him.
The full trial is expected to last 12 weeks and may begin next January. Mr Justice Patten said he was satisfied on the material presented to him that "there is at least an arguable case" that a fiduciary relationship existed between Bacon and the gallery from 1964.
The question of whether such a relationship existed would depend on a detailed examination at trial of Bacon's relationship and dealings with Marlborough both before and after that date.
"It is, I think, beyond dispute that Bacon was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century but both he and his paintings were controversial in their time and public recognition of his worth was not immediate," the judge said.
PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN paintings by Francis Bacon may be among a photographic archive that a court has ordered his former gallery to reveal to his estate.
A discovery application from Professor Brian Clarke, Bacon's executor, has been granted by the High Court, a move he believes may provide evidence that the artist was habitually underpaid and that a substantial number of his paintings are unaccounted for.
Professor Clarke, a friend of Bacon's and a highly successful artist in his own right, is suing Marlborough Fine Art and an associated company in Liechtenstein, alleging they exercised "undue influence" over the painter. The estate claims Marlborough would take as much as 70 per cent of the value of the paintings it sold for Bacon instead of a "fairer" 30 per cent and that it failed to pay him for lithographs.
The gallery rejects the claims, which could total pounds 100m, arguing that Bacon was content with what it paid him and knew it would make a profit when it sold the paintings on, a sentiment underlined by the fact that he continued to deal through it for 34 years.
A spokeswoman for the gallery said it had nothing to hide and had always been prepared to disclose the archive; it was simply the manner of inspection that it wanted to establish before allowing access.
Nevertheless, lawyers for the estate complained that Marlborough had refused them access to full records of its dealings with the artist. The latest order in the High Court means the gallery must give them further details of its dealings with Bacon between 1958 and his death in 1992.
It must disclose every Bacon painting and lithograph that it or its directors currently own or control and must hand over Bacon's correspondence and an archive of documents kept by Valerie Beston, a former Marlborough director who took care of the artist's affairs.
But it is the archive of photographs by Prudence Cummings, a fine art photographer, and a record book of Bacon's works kept by Miss Beston that have excited most interest in Professor Clarke.
"From an art historical point of view, the prospects of seeing detailed records of Bacon's life and perhaps previously unseen paintings are tremendous," he said. There might be, he said, completely legitimate reasons why Marlborough had recorded paintings he, as executor, knew nothing about.
"There were times when we believe Bacon may have changed his mind about a work and destroyed it after it had been photographed. If that is the case, Marlborough could have the only record of an unknown painting by one of the 20th century's greatest artists. That would be of immeasurable value to scholars of his work."
Mr Clarke, visiting professor at the Bartlett Institute of Architecture, University College London, met Bacon at the Colony Rooms in Soho in 1974 through a friend, John Edwards. For the last 18 years of his life, Mr Edwards enjoyed a close filial relationship with Bacon and became the sole beneficiary of his estate.
But four years after Bacon died, Mr Edwards had still not been given details of his legacy, so Professor Clarke drafted in John Eastman, the lawyer of his friend Paul McCartney, and an accountant, Peter Hunt.
As a result of examining what records they could, Mr Edwards asked Professor Clarke to become executor and they launched a legal action in December 1998.
"This is not a role I sought or wished to be laid at my door," said Professor Clarke. "Circumstances brought it to me and I have a moral and legal obligation to John Edwards, as my friend, and Francis Bacon, as my late friend, to see it through."
Although he believes Bacon was unfairly treated, Professor Clarke said the prime motivation in bringing the action against Marlborough was not financial.
"Perhaps the most important aim of the estate is to ensure that the entire output of Francis Bacon is available for appreciation and study," he said. "I would like to see the production of a full catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon's work to be put in the public domain. I would be perfectly happy to work with the Marlborough gallery to produce a catalogue."
Professor Clarke is also anxious to point out that John Edwards shares these aims and is not involved in the litigation purely for monetary gain.
Any Bacon paintings recovered would be of enormous value; only two weeks ago, a tryptych fetched pounds 6m at auction.
The full High Court hearing has been set for mid-February next year.
To most hungry artists, the offer would have been too good to refuse. Even to a wealthy Francis Bacon, sipping champagne at Claridge's, it seems to have been the answer to his prayers: a minimum of £50,000 per painting and a move to the books of the New York gallery that handled Picasso.
The offer was made in March 1978 by Arnold Glimcher, the influential Pace Gallery owner, at a time when Bacon, arguably the greatest British-based painter of the last century, is thought to have wanted to break from Marlborough Fine Art in London, the gallery that had pushed his work for the previous 10 years.
But Bacon did not go. Instead, he stayed with Marlborough until his death in 1992, a decision that baffled those close to him. Why he did not leave has remained a mystery. However, according to dramatic claims in what could become the most sensational legal spat the British art world has seen, the reason was simple. He was a victim of blackmail.
That is the allegation to be made in a High Court battle in February which, if proved, could make Bacon's estate up to £100m richer. On one side is Professor Brian Clarke, a friend of Bacon and the executor of his will. The professor claims Marlborough's then director, Frank Lloyd, asserted undue influence over Bacon, cheating him of millions of pounds and failing to account for up to 33 of his paintings.
On the other is Marlborough, the distinguished art house that claims it made Bacon famous and wealthy and dealt with his every whim with scrupulous fairness. Neither side has given ground in preliminary hearings since Bacon's estate launched a civil action against the gallery last year. But what no one expected was that a row over money and paintings would turn up allegations of blackmail.
The Independent reported three weeks ago that threats against Bacon had been alleged, but the full details of the allegations have only become clear since the judge, Mr Justice Patten, ruled that a statement by Mr Glimcher could form part of Professor Clarke's argument.
In it, Mr Glimcher alleges that Bacon was blackmailed by Mr Lloyd into staying with gallery.
According to High Court documents, Mr Glimcher said he had two meetings with the artist in London. "Bacon and I seemed to have an immediate rapport," he said. "By the end of the second meeting [also at Claridge's], we had reached an agreement on which we shook hands."
Bacon, Mr Glimcher said, was delighted with his promise of £50,000 a painting. But, suddenly, the artist pulled out.
Later, Mr Glimcher claims he was told by Michael Peppiatt, the respected art historian and author of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, about the allegations of blackmail.
Mr Glimcher said: "When Francis Bacon informed Frank Lloyd he was leaving Marlborough for Pace, Frank Lloyd told Francis Bacon that if he left Marlborough, Bacon would have problems accessing funds that Marlborough [had] paid to Bacon in Switzerland. I recall something that Bacon's sister was in a sanatorium of some kind. I was also told that there were threats by Frank Lloyd of income tax exposure."
Bacon, who had bank accounts at Dreyfus Soehne and Rothschilds in Zurich, was deeply in debt to the Inland Revenue. According to Professor Clarke, exposure would have left Bacon financially unable to care for his sister, Ianthe Knott, who was suffering from a degenerative disease in Zimbabwe, so he decided to stay with Marlborough.
In his statement, Mr Glimcher, who has been advised by his lawyers not to comment on the case, says he believes it was Mr Peppiatt who told him about the blackmail threat. Lawyers for Marlborough do not want Mr Peppiatt questioned until the full hearing in February. In another statement, however, Professor Clarke says that during a meeting in 1999, Mr Peppiatt said to him: "I suppose you will be wanting to know about the famous 'blackmail' conversation with Glimcher."
Mr Peppiatt has also been advised not to comment. It is understood he has expressed a willingness to co-operate fully with the court, but lawyers for Marlborough are unhappy that Bacon's estate has asked him to help compile a prestigious catalogue of the artist's work.
Marlborough's legal team is also concerned about the independence of Mr Glimcher. During a preliminary hearing several weeks ago, Michael Lyndon-Stanford QC, for Marlborough, pointed out that Mr Glimcher was a competitor of the Marlborough in New York. And he asked Mr Justice Patten to bear in mind that Mr Glimcher had acted for the estate of Mark Rothko when that artist had had a similar dispute with Marlborough in the 1970s.
Marlborough rejects the allegations. It said: "It remains Marlborough UK's case that a provisional arrangement was made between the Pace Gallery and Bacon (as evidenced by [a] letter of 4 March 1978).
"Bacon responded to that letter on 8 March 1978 stating that he had not made up his mind about whether to move to Pace Gallery and wrote again on 17 March 1978 stating that for the present time he had decided not to change his gallery in New York. Marlborough UK does not know why Bacon changed his mind, but would invite the court to infer that Bacon decided that it was in his best interests to continue to work with Marlborough."
That is something Bacon's estate disputes. It claims that dozens of his paintings may be unaccounted for and that he was paid only $40,000 (£28,000) for one series of lithographs when, in fact, many more than that were produced.
If the court case is successful, the recipient of any award would by Bacon's sole beneficiary, John Edwards, with whom he developed a filial relationship after the pair met in London in 1974. Professor Clarke says the primary purpose of the litigation is not to enrich Mr Edwards, but to establish a record of Bacon's work and to provide funds for research.
The judge is keeping an open mind as to the veracity of the allegations. "The court is only concerned at this time to filter out hopeless claims ... the blackmail claim does not fall into that category," Mr Justice Patten said in his judgment. "But that does not mean that it will succeed or that I have formed any view at all as to its truth."
Mr Lloyd cannot defend himself against the allegations. He died in 1998.
A High Court action brought by the estate of the artist Francis Bacon against his former gallery has been settled, lawyers announced yesterday.
A High Court action brought by the estate of the artist Francis Bacon against his former gallery has been settled, lawyers announced yesterday.
The estate had sued Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Mifa), based in Liechtenstein, which had vigorously defended the action.
Bacon, one of Britain's greatest 20th-century artists, was represented by the international Marlborough gallery from 1958 until 1992 when he died in Spain from a heart attack, at the age of 82.
The estate took legal action, saying it was seeking a "proper accounting from Marlborough, so as to be able to establish that there was a fair balance struck between the interests of the gallery and Bacon".
Marlborough said it had enjoyed a "frank, close and mutually beneficial" relationship with the artist for 34 years.
A statement from the solicitors Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer yesterday said: "The trial need not now proceed. Marlborough will release to the estate all documents still in their possession that belong to Bacon or his estate. Each side will pay its own costs."
The statement continued: "Professor Brian Clarke, the executor, was under a duty to investigate the concerns as to the relationship between Bacon and Marlborough, which he has discharged.
"It is with sadness that the estate has to announce that the sole beneficiary of the estate, John Edwards, has very recently been diagnosed as suffering from a serious form of lung cancer. This settlement has been agreed by the estate, against this background and on the basis of Professor Clarke's assessment of the merits of the case in the light of documents and witness evidence released by Marlborough in the latter part of last year as part of the litigation process."
Professor Clarke said: "I am glad that the litigation has settled. We are now going forward with our long-planned establishment of the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, which will be for the furtherance of the study of Francis Bacon and his work."
Sources involved in the settlement said: "Because of the length of time involved since Bacon died and since the litigation was begun, both sides were finding it extremely difficult to find evidence to back up their side of the claim.
"Coupled with that, when the news came that John Edwards was seriously ill it was decided that talks would begin with a view to reaching an amicable settlement. Since Mr Edwards is the sole beneficiary there seemed little point in entering into potentially acrimonious litigation. Each side will pay its own costs and both parties will walk away."
It is understood from other sources that no money will change hands as part of the settlement. This will be seen as a vindication of the Marlborough's claim that it had treated Bacon fairly.
On the side of Professor Clarke, it is understood there is considerable satisfaction because during the legal process a number of paintings were recovered and vast quantities of correspondence and documents relating to the life of the artist were handed over by the gallery that will interest art historians for generations to come.
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
By Robert Hunter, FT.com site
The Financial Times, Jun 10, 2002
"You run very well," said General Douglas Haig, the notoriously inarticulate first world war general, when giving a speech at an army athletics day. "You run very well indeed" - and then, disastrously: "I hope you run as well in the face of the enemy!"
General Haig, of course, will not be the last to fall prey to the error of thinking once and speaking twice. Much the same pitfall awaits any litigant who has to deal with the press regarding his case.
The decision to talk to the press is an easy one. Many claimants hope that, irrespective of their claim's prospects of success, the adverse publicity will bring an otherwise recalcitrant defendant to his knees. Allegations made in the course of legal proceedings are covered by absolute legal privilege. It is impossible to bring an action for defamation in respect of them. What is more, without the need to call witness evidence, unless the case can be demonstrated as hopeless a claimant will be able to keep it alive until trial. Technical rights of action exist in relation to malicious prosecution of civil claims, but these arise in such limited circumstances that they are rarely pursued.
In spite of these advantages, many claimants who believe their claims will generate adverse publicity for the defendant are disappointed. In a world numbed by successive scandals, the press and public have seen and heard it all before.
Sometimes, however, the allegations are so spectacular that publicity is guaranteed for the lucky claimant. The recent litigation between the estate of Francis Bacon and Marlborough Fine Art is a case in point.
The case was begun in March 2000 by Brian Clarke, executor of the estate, against Marlborough. Press interest was high. Francis Bacon was one of the most famous painters of modern times and Marlborough is one of the best-known art dealers in the world. Marlborough, which had dealt with Bacon's works for some 34 years, was alleged to be liable to his estate for a sum reported to be between £30m and £100m. There was even the tantalising suggestion of a missing hoard of "unaccounted for" works of art.
More sensational still were the allegations that accompanied the claim: it was said the liability arose because Marlborough had "exploited" Bacon by abusing his trust and paying him too little for his paintings. Subsequently, in summer 2001, a further claim was developed: that, for 34 years, Marlborough had not bought any paintings from Bacon at all but had simply sold them on his behalf without ever formally agreeing its fee.
Then, in November 2001, a more sinister allegation was made. Previously it had been claimed that Bacon had trusted Marlborough and that it had taken advantage of his trust. Now it was said he had distrusted Marlborough, as the gallery had blackmailed Bacon to continue to trade with it. Either one or the other must be true, the estate claimed, even if it did not know which.
The likelihood was slight that Bacon - an intelligent and sophisticated man - could have forgotten to agree Marlborough's remuneration over 30 years or could have been exploited in this way. Similarly, the key witness to the allegation of blackmail did not support it. Nor did the action reveal the hoped-for treasure trove of unknown Bacons. However, allegations of this kind in any claim can sometimes carry a settlement value even if they are likely ultimately to fail. No bad press can ever be completely corrected. Public embarrassment often outweighs the benefits of vindication at trial. What is more, a three-month trial, even when victory is expected, involves an enormous waste of management time. It is also expensive: in the English legal system the loser pays most, but not all, of the victor's costs. In large-scale litigation of this kind, the irrecoverable portion is often considerable.
There was, in short, ample justification for a payment to the estate to get rid of the litigation. Why then did the estate have to drop the litigation in February, recovering nothing from Marlborough other than some correspondence (which was of no commercial value and which Marlborough had said would be given to the estate in September 2001)? The estate's legal bill must have been several million pounds.
Part of the problem may have lain in a common claimant's error: to over- estimate his opponent's vulnerability to publicity. Many institutions, particularly in the financial sector, are not as responsive to bad publicity as a claimant would wish. It is not that they are insensitive; it is simply that vulnerability is a luxury they can ill afford. To settle one claim to avoid bad publicity is to encourage others to be made. Conversely, to resist the claim sends a message to others to readjust their expectations of what publicity will achieve.
But this is likely to be only part of the answer. Another significant factor may lie in the handling of the press. A number of statements by Prof Clarke and his lawyers sharpened press interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the claimant's allegations, when it would have been possible to adopt a more equivocal and muted stance. But it is one thing to expect a settlement from a defendant on the basis of bad publicity that a case may generate in future; it is quite another to present the defendant with bad publicity that the case has already generated. A defendant who knows he can avoid bad publicity by paying money has something to buy in a settlement negotiation. On the other hand, a defendant who has already received bad press has nothing to gain; the claimant has made the error of shooting the hostage before demanding the ransom.
The difficulty in the Marlborough litigation was that the publicity generated by the claim ensured that no settlement could be made. Any payment might have been taken as acknowledgment that the highly publicised allegations were true, unless it was accompanied by a public retraction and apology that would have been deeply embarrassing for the estate to give. The result was what is likely to be seen as one of the art world's most famous litigation disasters, with the Bacon estate having had to consent to its claim being dismissed and pay its own costs, while receiving nothing worthwhile in return.
As with any misfortune, there is a lesson to be learnt. It is a common tactic for a claimant to hope that the threat of bad publicity will result in a settlement payment but real care must be taken before allowing that publicity to occur. It is true it will be unwelcome to the defendant - but it may also obstruct the claimant's own objectives. Indeed, as in the litigation started against Marlborough, it may ultimately thwart the claimant and deprive him of any benefit from the legal costs he has incurred. It is not for the subtlety and sophistication of his manoeuvres that General Haig, who masterminded the Flanders campaign in 1917, is remembered; it is for a bruising war of attrition and a result that was almost certainly not worth the cost of achieving it.
The writer is a partner at Allen & Overy, the law firm, and was part of the team that represented Marlborough Fine Art in the litigation to which this article refers
Bacon's Estate
Artlaw 2001
Artquest, University of the Arts London, 65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA
It was widely reported last month that the court action brought by the Francis
Bacon Estate against the Marlborough gallery will be listed for trial in the
UK's High Court at the beginning of 2002, and is likely to last several months.
Brian Clarke is the sole executor of the Estate and he launched proceedings against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein), seeking judgment that would clarify the nature of the contractual relationship between the artist and gallery over 40 years, and to decide how much money is owed to the Estate.
In the UK's High Court last May, Marlborough applied for Clarke's action to be struck out, on the grounds that the Estate's claim was spurious. The judge rejected the application and determined that there would be a trial. The heart of the matter appears to be the nature of Bacon's relationship with his gallery, which is not supported by any clear documentary evidence of a contract between them. As the judge in this preliminary action stated, 'the artist was a bohemian, lacking in business and financial experience and without the benefit of any independent advice'.
Bacon's 'arrangements' with Marlborough reflected the artist's insouciant nature over five decades; from around 1956, when the gallery paid him for paintings depending on their size, through an episode in the early 60s when he sought to move to a new gallery (but did not do so), to his death when Marlborough remained his only dealers, always taking works from his studio/apartment as soon as they were completed.
The Estate claims that Bacon was not dealt with properly, especially in terms of payment, and that the gallery owed the artist a high duty or care, attention and transparency in their commercial dealings with him and for him; for example, by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and re-selling it almost immediately for seven times as much, the gallery was not necessarily acting in the artist's best interests. Issues involved include whether works were 'bought-in' by the gallery, which were then re-sold for a profit they determined; or whether such works were sold by the gallery on behalf of the artist as his agent (in which case a percentage of the sale price should have been paid as a commission by the artist). There are other claims that many paintings do not appear in the accounts provided by the gallery, and that the income owed by the gallery to the artist/his Estate could amount to millions of pounds.
Marlborough is strenuously resisting the court action, and may be encouraged by its successful resistance of a legal action brought against them earlier this year by the Kurt Schwitters Estate. Norway's High Court finally determined the Estate's allegation that the gallery had bought works from the Estate below their true market value, had under-insured them and had failed to make proper payments. Judgment was given in favour of the gallery, which was awarded substantial damages and costs. In this case, once again, the heart of it was the nature of the relationship between the artist and gallery, and the lack of clear documentary evidence to clarify the matter.
In 1976 Marlborough (New York) lost a case, similar to the Schwitters case and possibly even closer to the issues in the Bacon case, when the Mark Rothko Estate was given substantial awards against the gallery for breach of trust and fiduciary duties. Again, the absence of clear documentation evidencing the nature of the commercial relationship and the gallery's obligations was a key issue. (In the next issue, legal wrangles surrounding Salvador Dali’s Estate will be explored.)
© Henry Lydiate 2001
Art after Death: The Bacon Estate
Artquest - The Art Law Archive 2000
Henry Lydiate, Art Lawyer
On
February 6, 2002, the High Court in London dismissed the claims brought by Brian
Clarke against the Marlborough Gallery, on behalf of the Estate of Francis
Bacon, who had decided not to pursue the matter. The Judge, Mr Justice Patten,
was told that the parties had managed to resolve their differences, and would
not require the court to conduct an estimated three month trial of the issues,
which had been set to start on February 18, 2002.
Bacon
died in 1992 and his will named Clarke as one of two executors of his Estate,
responsible for managing his affairs and ensuring that Bacon's friend John
Edwards received the artist's assets remaining; after all expenses and taxes had
been paid.
The
first legal issue arose when the High Court ordered the removal of Clarke's
co-executor, who was a Director of the Marlborough Gallery. There was an
apparent conflict of interest between the duty of the executors (to maximise the
value of Bacon's estate) on the one hand, and the duty of Marlborough's Director
(to act in the best interests of the Gallery), on the other hand. It would have
been unfair to both the Gallery and the Estate for the Director to continue to
act in both capacities. This decision left Clarke as sole executor, and he had
no such conflicting interests, being a friend of Bacon in his later years and
wishing merely to do his best for the Estate.
As
the nature and extent of Bacon's dealings with the Marlborough Gallery over five
decades (from around 1956) began to emerge, Clarke's concerns over the
artist/gallery relationship began to develop. Eventually, Clarke's concerns
drove him to launch proceedings against Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd and
Marlborough International Fine Art (Liechtenstein); he sought clarification of
the nature and extent of the contractual relationship between the artist and
gallery over 40 years. The Gallery resisted Clarke's claims that it had dealt
with Bacon inappropriately.
One
of the major issues in the case was whether or not Bacon was subjected to undue
influence by the Gallery, and this and other issues were complicated by the
paucity of clear documentary evidence of the terms of the contract between them.
The particulars of claim served by the Estate asserted that 'the artist was
bohemian lacking in business and financial experience without the benefit of any independent advice'; which claim the
Gallery disputed.
The
Estate also asserted that the Gallery owed the artist a high duty of care,
attention and transparency in its commercial dealings with him, and had failed
in these respects; for example; by paying Bacon £6,000 for a work and
re-selling it for seven times as much; the absence of clarity as to whether
works were 'bought in' by the Gallery and then re-sold for a profit it
determined, or were sold by the Gallery on behalf of the artist as his agent;
and that many paintings were unaccounted for. Marlborough strenuously resisted
all such claims, and contended amongst other things that Bacon's works were
purchased 'in arm's length' transactions.
Late
last year the case took a dramatic turn when the High Court allowed Clarke to
include in his claim a specific allegation: that, when Bacon was considering
changing his dealer (from Marlborough to the Pace Gallery, New York),
Marlborough unduly influenced the artist to continue with it by suggesting that
he might then experience difficulties both in accessing money in his Swiss bank
accounts and in his future dealings with the UK's Inland Revenue (see AM 253).
This
latest assertion appears to have flowed from a recent dialogue between Clarke
and the well-known art historian Michael Peppiatt (a friend of Bacon), in which
they had discussed Peppiatt's recollections of his liaising with Arnold Glimcher,
the Chairman of the Pace Gallery, New York around 1978. Peppiatt had evidently
acted as honest broker, relaying to Bacon that Glimcher was interested in
representing him and attending a meeting which was then arranged between the
artist and Glimcher at which sale prices and Bacon's shares thereof were
discussed. Nothing came of this exchange and Bacon remained with Marlborough.
Days
before what became the final High Court hearing on February 6, Peppiatt formally
clarified to Marlborough's solicitors that in his discussions with Clarke he had
not encouraged Clarke to believe that there was any substance in the suggestion
that Bacon had been blackmailed by Marlborough. And it was this event which
triggered the settlement of the dispute and the formal dismissal of the Estate's
claims; the terms of the settlement are not public knowledge.
At the heart of this sorry saga lies the absence of clear documentation recording the nature and extent of the respective contractual duties and obligations of artist and gallery. For the past 25 years or so (and throughout roughly half the length of Bacon's contractual relationship with Marlborough) this column and other informed commentators have increasingly and continually stressed the need for such clear documentation between artist and gallery; covering, amongst other things:
• parties' names and contact data
• dealer's engagement (exclusively or
otherwise) to promote and represent the artist by one or any combination of:
i) selling work
ii) arranging commissions
iii) arranging showings
iv) arranging lectures, talks and media appearances
v) publications
• which works are included: all; only
paintings; only works on paper; sculpture alone, and so on; existing and/or
future work
• copyright: who owns it, manages and
licenses reproductions and on what terms
• moral rights: who can allow works or
reproductions of them to be altered or amended in some way
• geography: the limit of the
dealership's territorial representation (worldwide; only EU; EU and North
America and so on)
• length of representation: whether for
a fixed term (normally no more than two years) or periodically renewable with
written notice on either side
• sales: pricing strategy: timing of
release into primary marketplace; gallery's commission; VA1 arrangements
• consigned works: details of finished
or future works to be deposited with (consigned to) the gallery for sale/not for
sale
• bought-in works: how many and which
ones will or may be bought in by the gallery; prices including discount to the
gallery.
Crucially,
such deals also need to clarify: when and how the artist will be paid, and for
statements of account to be given by the gallery; details of all transactions
including names of purchasers, prices, commission, and so on, and whether cash
advances or stipends are to be set off against future income: the artist's
rights to have access to the gallery's accounts and records, for the purpose of
independent auditing (if ever required by the artist).
Finally,
agreement as to what should happen to the works, benefits and obligations
covered by the deal in the event of the artist's death or the dealer's
bankruptcy or ceasing to trade. Sadly, the creation and regular updating of such
documentation or similar records continue to be avoided by many artists and
their dealers/galleries - often in the belief that they are unnecessarily
bureaucratic and time-consuming matters. In truth, they are necessary 'good
housekeeping' chores; every good home should have them.
©
Henry Lydiate 2002
Baker/Rowland Exhibition Galleries
Milwaukee Art Museum January 27 - April 15, 2007
Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s is the first exhibition to look in detail at this extraordinarily fertile decade in Bacon's life and affords the viewer unprecedented insight into the artist's imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques. Although the most fruitful years in Bacon's career, they were also the most tumultuous and tortured in the artist's unsettled existence; Bacon was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with bewildering frequency.
By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess to forcefully express his vision, but he was still not fully in command of his disturbing images, which appear to rise from a dark well of the unconscious. Yet the rawness and sense of urgency exhibited in these pictures transcend any pictorial problems that Bacon eventually did come to resolve with experience and technical ability.
From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later, Bacon created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during this time. Also making an appearance were dogs, owls, and elephants; sphinxes, children, and naked women; heads of William Blake, self-portraits, and portraits of friends. For this painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of a dark, claustrophobic interior, there were even glimpses of the African and French landscape.
Milwaukee, WI, October 2006— During the 1950s, painter Francis Bacon began to formulate the iconography of his dark and troubled world in paint. The exhibition, Francis Bacon in the 1950s , opening at the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007, features nearly fifty paintings from the period in which Bacon was at the height of his creative powers. In this intensely fertile time, many of Bacon’s themes-screaming popes, howling dogs, and haunting figures trapped in tortured isolation-began to materialize as the man himself was becoming one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon in the 1950s takes a profoundly personal look at this fascinating period in Bacon’s career and is the first exhibition to examine Bacon’s formative works.
Curated by Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon’s, the exhibition provides a first-person perspective on the artist’s emerging style in the first decades of his career through paintings, drawings, and a selection of archival materials that illustrate the artist’s life and work.
At the core of the exhibition are thirteen paintings collected by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury, who were among the artist’s earliest patrons and, eventually, close friends. The works include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public.
This unique opportunity to view exceptional works by Bacon is credited to a new partner of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the global financial services firm UBS.
“We are proud to partner with the Milwaukee Art Museum, to be the presenting sponsor of Francis Bacon in the 1950s “, said Kim Jenson, Regional Manager - Upper Midwest, UBS Financial Services Inc. “Our Firm has a long standing commitment to the arts and we are pleased to help bring this outstanding exhibition to our clients, employees and the broader community of Milwaukee and the surrounding areas.”
Throughout his life, Bacon controlled every aspect of his art, from the selection and presentation of his work to the interpretation. He commanded that all exhibitions of his art be classic retrospectives, focusing on his most recent works. As a result, his later work was more visible. In contrast, Francis Bacon in the 1950s brings together paintings from a single decade in that earlier, less visible period.
“The usual feeling you get in a Bacon show is of tortured, strangled human beings alone in a room,” explained Peppiatt. “These paintings have a much more narrative quality, a much more approachable Bacon, of sorts. Someone who hadn’t decided who he was going to be, someone still in search of himself.”
By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess as a painter and expressed his often dark vision with force, but he was not fully in command of his disturbing images. Eager to explore themes and take risks in his early career, Bacon created images that contain a rawness and sense of urgency that would be lost in his later works.
To guest curator Michael Peppiatt, the fifties seemed to hold a lot of the clues to who Bacon was: “That was when he located his biggest themes. He felt that he had to focus on the most important things of all to man…his existence. ”
Bacon is one of the most unique and powerful artistic visionaries of post-war European art. The 1950s were the most fruitful years in Bacon’s career, but they were also the most tumultuous and tortured of the artist’s existence. During this time, the artist was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with incredible frequency. The artist established a pattern of all-night revelry, culminating in a feverish fit of creativity-painting into the early morning hours. Much like Bacon’s approach to life, his approach to the canvas was radical, aggressive, and seething with raw human emotion.
The Artist
Bacon’s staunchly Catholic father banished him from their Irish home when he was sixteen after learning of his homosexual activities. Bacon departed for Berlin, where he participated in the bohemian nightlife. Leaving Berlin in 1927, Bacon traveled to Paris where he saw an exhibition of drawings by Picasso that inspired him to become an artist.
The Surrealism of Picasso was not the only influence on the artist; poetry and film had a significant role in forming Bacon’s artistic vision. Bacon described his process: “I am like a grinding machine, I look at everything, and everything goes in and gets ground up very fine.” For example, Sergei Eisentein’s famous film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), had a major impact on the artist. The blood-splattered face of the screaming nurse in this film was an enduring image for the artist, and one that featured in many of his paintings, most significantly, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952.
Although he never attended art school, Bacon began to draw and paint in watercolor upon his return to London in 1929. There he established himself as a furniture and interior designer. While Bacon did not seriously pursue painting, he did exhibit a few early paintings alongside his design work. It was not until the end of the war when he began to formulate his evocative style of misshapen figures that reflect his disturbed worldview.
The artist’s work was met with financial success during the 1950s, and the artist himself became an instant hit in art circles, showing work at major galleries and moving comfortably between his aristocratic patrons and the seedy side of society. Throughout this period, Bacon visited exotic places where he engaged in relationships that would shape his life and influence his work. Bacon’s relationships with his lovers were vibrant and interesting, like the artist himself; however, some had violent and tumultuous overtones. Bacon’s personal relationships often bled onto the canvas, and are evident in the violence, intimacy, and passion portrayed in his work. According to the artist: “My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life.”
In the early 1960s Bacon settled into a studio space in South Kensington, where he resided until his death in 1992. Bacon described the studio: “I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me.” Heaps of photos, bits of illustrations, books, catalogues, magazines, and newspapers provided nearly all of his visual sources. Bacon added: “Images also help me find and realize ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.”
The artist utilized the entire space: paint was mixed on the door, and scraps of clothing were used to apply paint. When the artist died, seventy works on paper were found along with one hundred slashed canvases.
Catalogue and Tour
A fully illustrated, 174-page catalogue is available.
The exhibition will be on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK, October-December 2006. From Norwich, the exhibition will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007; then on to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, May 5-July 30, 2007.
This exhibition was initiated by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, with funding from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Charitable Trust. It was curated by Michael Peppiatt, who is also the author of the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition has been made possible by UBS, the global financial services firm.
About the Sponsor
UBS
is one of the world’s leading financial firms, serving a discerning global
client base. As an organization, it combines financial strength with an
international culture that embraces change. As an integrated firm, UBS creates
added value for clients by drawing on the combined resources and expertise of
all its businesses. UBS is the world’s largest wealth manager, a top tier
investment banking and securities firm, and one of the largest global asset
managers. In Switzerland, UBS is the market leader in retail and commercial
banking. UBS is present in all major financial centers worldwide. It has offices
in 50 countries, with about 39% of its employees working in the Americas, 36% in
Switzerland, 16% in the rest of Europe and 9% in Asia Pacific. UBS’s financial
businesses employ around 75,000 people around the world. Its shares are listed
on the SWX Swiss Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the
Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE).
Throughout his career as an artist, Francis Bacon produced a body of work that has been described by some as unpardonable, grotesque and an outrage. On the contrary, it has also been said of the artist that, “Not since Oscar Wilde has London been graced with a pair of eyes and a tongue like Francis Bacon’s.” Such discrepancies in critical opinion are not uncommon in the realm of art history, as aesthetic themes – especially with respect to modern art – are at best varied and worst, paradoxical. The rift in critical stance is particularly interesting in the case of Bacon’s work as the viewer’s reactions to his paintings seem to be consistently decisive, whether they are of a positive or negative nature. Lukewarm sentiments and middle ground are rare entities where Bacon is concerned. Taking into account the bulk of his subject matter, this seems to be a fairly logical outcome. For the casual viewer, a Bacon portrait or triptych is likely to appear first and foremost as an incredible exhibition of violence, involving plural figures within the work or a singular figure and an invisible force, perhaps more disturbing because of its ambiguity.
That being said, the criticism in circulation is generally rather accessible. The majority of critics have chosen to focus primarily on formal elements; studies approaching the work from biographical or psycho-analytical angles appear to be less prevalent. When read in conjunction with Bacon’s own commentary on his work, these various critical methodologies can to some extent, shed light on several aspects that appear throughout Bacon’s work. In a paper titled, “Remaking Bacon,” Andrés Mario Zervigón illustrates a basic framework for the study of Bacon’s work. For the purpose of this paper, Zervigón presents three approaches to the subject. He outlines these schools of thought by highlighting three critical works, namely: Francis Bacon written by John Russell, exemplifying a concentration on formal analysis as a method for understanding the artist’s work; Francis Bacon: His Violent Life and Times by Andrew Sinclair, focusing on a biographical approach; and Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self written by Ernst van Alphen, considering the paintings primarily in respect to the reaction of the viewer, thereby concentrating on an interpretation rooted in psycho-analysis.
Using Zervigón’s research as an armature, as Bacon himself might have said, this study will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the artist’s work in the context of these three methodologies – formal analysis, biography and psycho-analysis – as well as the artist’s statements as quoted by David Sylvester and Michael Peppiatt during their many talks with him. The work of Francis Bacon presented critics and patrons alike with an enormous amount of challenging material. Much of this relates to how the artist conceptualized violence and truth in the artwork he produced. Concerning the study of his work, an understanding of how the artist configures his work can be considered a step towards the understanding of why he configures it at all.
Violence is one of the most fundamental and frequently misunderstood elements in Bacon’s painting. While the content may initially seem violent in the traditional sense, it actually operates on a much more complex level within the work. In Bacon’s own words, “The violence of painting has little to do with the violence of war, rather, it is an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.” French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, author of Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, is often cited as a source for the psycho-analysis of Bacon’s work. Deleuze’s study of Bacon can also be insightful in terms of a formal analysis. In a text contributed to Artforum International, he offers a clarification of Bacon’s statement, explaining that the violence present in the work is that of sensation and not of a representation.
Though Deleuze expresses Bacon’s concept in a simpler fashion, it nonetheless retains its problematic nature. Bacon’s vision extends to the actual conception of sensation within the paintings themselves. Bacon sternly rejected abstraction and therefore must have employed some degree of representation in order to give form to a particular sensation or feeling; however, the presence of human-like forms within the pieces strikes a sensitive nerve in the mind of the viewer, as the brain immediately makes a connection between the being of the figure and its own awareness of being. This effect is challenging, as to actually see the figures as Bacon did, the viewer must reject the tendency to know the painting’s violence exclusively through his or her own experiences. Once the viewer has rejected this tendency, a fresh approach to the work is plausible.
Formally, Deleuze suggests that Bacon’s painting was a continuation of what Van Gogh and Gauguin were working on during the Impressionist movement. He maintains that both artists worked to resolve “the problem of painting after Cézanne,” that being dealing with the background as the framework of a piece and also the evolution of the form. In his discussion of Bacon’s work, Deleuze makes the case that while most modern painters chose to focus exclusively on the first issue, resulting in what he calls, “those great, brilliant monochrome fields that take life not in variations of hue, but in very subtle shifts of intensity or saturation determined by zones of proximity,” Bacon resolved the problem of the color field as well as the coloration of flesh. Deleuze’s reasoning can be helpful in the viewer’s understanding of Bacon’s work as it puts forth a method of knowing the work through its formal elements.
Bacon painted Deleuze’s zones of proximity as large colour fields, at times broken up or defined by lines. These strokes have often been described by critics as serving to confine the figures within a reduced spatial environment and furthering the notion of isolation within the work. Bacon strove to create a background that would allow the figures or forms to speak for themselves. Commenting on his exercise to create forms that are simpler and at the same time more complex – perhaps by which he means rich in content – Bacon said, “And for this to work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that is probably why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself.” In an article titled, “Francis Bacon’s Modernism,” Andrew Brighton describes these resulting figures as, “isolated painterly incidents within flat planes.” In isolating his figures, Bacon enabled them to emerge as the primary focus of his work. They are chaotic in their isolation, as if confinement increases their electric charge, making them more energetic.
Journal of Asthma, Volume 33, Issue 5, September 1996, pages 349 - 350
Author: Richard Hornsey
Journal: Visual Culture in
Britain
ISSN: 1471-4787
Volume 8 Issue 2, Winter 2007, pp 83-103
Abstract:
In 1975, David Sylvester's book Interviews with Francis Bacon promised an unprecedented insight into the life and work of one of Britain's most significant painters and it went on to shape critical interpretations of his work in subsequent decades. Amongst the few visual representations of the artist, the book included a set of portraits of Bacon taken by himself in automatic booths.
This article is about those photobooth images and explores how, whilst reinforcing the interviews' tone of candid revelation, they provided a displaced articulation of the artist's homosexuality. It begins by considering the photobooth portrait as an ambiguous object caught between official apparatuses of public bureaucracy and private rituals of remembrance and intimacy. I argue that the photobooth image oscillates between two modes of self-representation: one that makes reference to the camera obscura and invests in older ontological ideas of unique individuality, and a more playful mode of inauthentic image-making, as embraced by post-war youth culture, which exploits the photobooth's dynamics of commodification and repetition.
The second half of the article considers this in relation to contemporary attempts to formulate a 'legitimate' notion of homosexual selfhood. Turning, in particular, to the trial and defence of Peter Wildeblood, I explore how new claims for homosexual citizenship required a complex renegotiation around the terms of queer visibility. Contrasting two contemporary portraits of Wildeblood reveals that the playful subversion of authentic sovereignty that the photobooth made available to urban youth was exactly that which frustrated attempts to envisage the face of the homosexual citizen. In summary, I argue, the presentation of Bacon's photobooth portraits exploited this structure. They intimate his queerness through his inability to meet the terms of the camera's eye, whilst also suggesting how similar displacements ran through early critical reactions to his work.
Keywords: David Sylvester, Francis Bacon, homosexuality, photobooth portrait, Peter Wildeblood
Published by: Manchester University Press
Copyright © 2007 Manchester University Press
The Cunning of Francis Bacon
By Julian Bell
The New York Review of Books Volume 54, Number, May 10, 2007
Some 40 percent of a plate has been ripped out of the Atlas-Manuel des maladies de la bouche, a French translation of an 1894 German medical textbook. The torn-away trapezoid shows "Fig. 1": a heavily retouched photo of lips prised apart by forceps to reveal gums disfigured by an abscess, chipped teeth, and froth about the tongue. The chromolithograph with its flesh reds stands as an oval vignette on the creamy fragment of coated paper. But then the scrap has been scuffed by brushes loaded with green and cerulean; there are fingerprints to the right in blue-black and mauve, little splats of yellow and scarlet. The paper's edges are frayed and nicked, it has a riverine crack where those clutching fingers have bent it: a vertical sever being a further result of decades of overhandling.
The item is among the several thousand catalogued in 1998 during the clearing of a smallish workroom in Reece Mews, Kensington, London SW7. This room was occupied by the artist Francis Bacon from 1961—when he turned fifty-two—till his death in 1992, thirty-one years later. For six years Bacon's studio lay in an undisturbed limbo, but in 1998 negotiations between the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, which houses one of Ireland's leading collections of modern and contemporary art, and Bacon's partner and heir John Edwards resulted in its entire contents (not only each scrap of paper, but even the paint-encrusted walls) being packaged and transported to the museum. There they were reassembled in a purpose-built display room, in exactly the disorder in which Bacon had left them in London. In this manner the painter (whose English father bred horses in Ireland) returned to the land of his childhood. The Hugh Lane's curator, Margarita Cappock, reviews and analyzes the attendant inventory in her copiously illustrated volume, Francis Bacon's Studio.
Mostly Cappock has papers to describe. Her team found printed pictures ripped not only from medical textbooks but from news magazines; trampled snapshots of Bacon's friends; quick sketches for compositions; crumpled, scribbled agendas for imagery ("flesh-coloured shadows, "bed of crime," "meat seen in a box"). There were weathered volumes of wildlife photography and art books reproducing Velázquez and Ingres. All these had been cast down among champagne cases, paint rollers, brushes, pots, and cans over the course of three decades, mounting up and moldering in ragged drifts around a walkway to the easel. On worktables, uncapped paint tubes had fused into mountainous conglomerates. By the walls and windows and also underfoot, a hundred slashed canvases lay strewn, with holes where faces once had been. Earlier photographic records indicate that a circular mirror with pocked silvering—a relic of the painter's prehistory, his attempts while young to work in interior design—was one of the few items that had always stood proud of this dismal, dusty morass.
There is something giddying about the systematic resurrection of such an environment in another city, three hundred miles away. When the would-be cultural guerrilla A.J. Weberman coined the term "garbology" in 1971, he was teasingly dignifying his habit of sneaking around celebrities' refuse in a quest for telltale signs of ideological duplicity. (Had Bob Dylan turned from political protest to heroin addiction? Had Muhammad Ali been snacking on pork? Surely, sooner or later, the used needle, the emptied meat can would turn up!) Garbology has since been taken into the fold of academic respectability by archaeologists who recognize in it a fast-track variant on their own science. Object-based information is the great desideratum, from their perspective: distaste and decorum only form the fuzziest of qualifying considerations.
Naturally, professional archaeologists were involved in bringing Reece Mews to Dublin—Cappock includes their draftsman's floor plans of the clutter in her documentation. And yet turning over remnants as soiled and sad as that scrap of paper with the abscessed mouth, one is brought back to the sense of trespass that Weberman was playing with in a less information-fixated age. Is it really our business to be snooping around here, in another man's trash? What crime do we suspect him of? This Dublin high-tech display complex with its meticulously simulated chaos, this book that so forensically analyzes its constituents: doesn't it all amount to a loss of human proportion?
Well, there is a crime of sorts to be accounted for. That medical textbook, picked up in Paris in 1927 when Bacon was a teenager on the run from his father, would eventually supply a cue for the triptych with which he made his mark on the London art scene in April 1945. In the central canvas of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the same gaping mouth has been grafted onto a head on a lithe snake neck, descending from the body of a plucked turkey, with a white bandage over its eyes: this mutant being perched on a pedestal inside an expanse of glaring orange (see illustration on page 6). No one encountering that blind, voracious phantasm—whether in a London gallery at the traumatic moment when the Holocaust's horrors were just becoming public knowledge, or even now, reproduced in any primer of modern art—has found it easy to forget. But Bacon was far from done with his oral prompt. Those forced-apart teeth helped to catalyze the series of "screaming popes" that cemented his reputation during the 1950s. Echoes of them repeatedly punctuated the rushing, slithering flesh-flurries he specialized in painting during the following decade, as he settled into Reece Mews and into a niche of international renown far beyond that of any British contemporary.
There was nothing particularly covert, however, about his use of the image. Bacon himself spoke about his passion for the Atlas-Manuel, with its "beautiful" pictures of diseased mouths, in the course of a 1966 interview. He was talking with David Sylvester, a formidable London art writer who became his chief critical advocate. The eloquence with which Bacon expanded on such singular reference points was one of the reasons Interviews with Francis Bacon, published in book form in 1975, became a major art text of its time. That volume offered its readers photos surveying the already legendary studio muddle. Cappock's book provides further shots taken across the decades, including a couple from 1974 which set against it an impeccably natty artist, all dressed up to hit the drinking clubs or gaming tables that habitually completed his daily round.
The more you get used to this milieu and the mentality behind it, the more you sense that the pomaded fifty-four-year-old in the Jermyn Street shirt would himself have been controlling the shutter by proxy. He would have been exactly aware of the image he was giving out: he is said to have rejoiced in this "compost" around him, from which his images had sprouted. Have you been snooping around some private citizen's refuse? No, you have been granted a glimpse inside a monarch's palace. Arguably, Reece Mews was not simply a style statement, but the artist's lone work of sculpture—Bacon's equivalent to Duchamp's Étants Données, the installation that was only made available to the world after the artist's death. And if he was the master operator throughout, obscurely willing the studio's relocation from beyond the grave, then what of that scrap you took for a clue: Was it merely a decoy, a plant? Is it your credulity that those paint-smeared fingers have been gripping?
These thoughts occur because Bacon's own accounts of himself, to a remarkable degree, continue to dominate the literature on him. Interest in Bacon shows no signs of abating. Among the various Bacon exhibitions of the last two years, Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real in Düsseldorf and Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, which originated in Norwich, England, and is now traveling the United States, have each generated substantial catalogues, the latter including a long essay by Bacon's biographer Michael Peppiatt. The curator of the Düsseldorf show, Armin Zweite, concludes his text with the remark that when it comes to Bacon's art, "continued efforts are called for to explain the process and the product," and this injunction is certainly being heeded.
Besides Cappock's account of the studio, there is Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict, a new general study by Wieland Schmied; and Martin Harrison's In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, an extensive examination of Bacon's use of source materials. All these publications have worthwhile aspects. (It should be mentioned that Cappock's book is elegantly drafted, commandingly knowledgeable, and offers many telling local insights.) It remains the case, however, that whichever you read, the lines that sing out and stay in the mind are Bacon's own. "To unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently," for example, and "realism has to be reinvented." The Düsseldorf Violence of the Real catalogue functions as an extended, highly learned gloss on those Bacon dicta, with Zweite trying to ground them in texts by Kant, T.W. Adorno, André Breton, and Gilles Deleuze. And yet after bearing with his studious philosophizing it is to their loose gestural pungency that you long to revert.
Bacon's continued hold on the meaning of his own art is quite distinctive. If you turn to his initial artistic inspiration, Picasso—or for that matter to that other great post-Picasso painter, Jackson Pollock—you meet artists who habitually, for most of their careers, refused to offer verbal sops to interpretation. Writers on Picasso and Pollock contradict one another vigorously and incessantly; when it comes to Bacon, the commentariat is docile and orthodox. What is it that engenders this pattern of viewer behaviour?
Let us imagine a first encounter with a Bacon from what most agree was the heyday of his art. You round a gallery partition and meet the Three Studies for a Crucifixion of 1962 (now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York), glaring six and a half feet tall in fields of orange and red (thus reiterating, more expansively and slickly, the layout of the near-homonymous Three Studies from seventeen years before). To the left, you register the blobby silhouettes, floating like bacilli in blood, of two walking males, with paired sides of a beef carcass transecting the foreground. At the center, a far fiercer image arrests you: a bed seen end-on, its striped mattress swelling and drooping, on which there lies a knot of whirling, skimming brushmarks, pinkish-yellow and black, splattered with blood red and ejaculatory trails of white. The knot's loops don't quite untie into distinct limbs, yet a set of parted teeth confer on it a face. Loudest of all is the creation to the right: a winding gloop of black and blubber-pink that slithers down a post to a puddle and a ring of bones at its base, with a ripped-open ribcage and below it a screaming, eyeless head—yet further parted teeth, the acutest detail of the whole convulsive ensemble being a single canine tooth isolated against the mouth's black hollow.
The fleshly brushloads rasping the canvas rasp at your tactile empathy. You're prompted to imaginatively inhabit these heaves of paint, investing them with your own sense of body; and yet how could you? That would mean casting off all your comportment, all your muscular control: you would be skinless, virtually shapeless. To approach these images judders the guts. If nonetheless you stay before them, that is because they are also mysterious. How do those mutated presences behind the reflective glass (a constant of Bacon's framing procedures) relate to one another? To what on earth else might they refer? Both your discomposure and your curiosity create a keen demand, therefore, for something to hold on to. Obligingly, the gallery label offers the word "crucifixion."
That helps: reach out for religion, tradition, old church art. So that blubber on the post is some latter-day "study for" Christ's agonies? Yes, but as you read on—as the channels of curating head you toward Bacon's pronouncements—you learn that as of the twentieth century, this transfixed body is decisively bereft of divinity; that there is now no redeeming meaning to what a body might undergo, whether in torment or in orgasm; or rather, that meaning now inheres in the act of painting itself, and in the relation it bears to the naked realities of existence, to "facts, or what used to be called truth," in Bacon's phrase. For his pictures bear on "the inanity of our situation in the world as ephemeral beings, more capable than other living creatures of brilliant and pointless ecstasies," as his friend the philosopher Michel Leiris expressed it[1] ; they address what his spokesmen generically term the human condition. An encompassing, empowering phrase: equipped with it, perhaps you can regain your equipoise, master whatever threatened it, give it a name. It may even help you to discover in these uncanny images what used to be called beauty.
Master of the initiatory ordeal, master of the revelatory dictum, the atheistic Bacon—club-cruiser, gambler, gourmet, and leather-clad submissive—did as much as any artist to restore the missing quotient of belief to twentieth-century painting. Wieland Schmied is a distinguished devotee. He opens his essays on Bacon's art with the customary pieties of such writing: humanity's "agonies on the killing-floor of life," "the existential anxiety of modern man," and "the horror and despair that lurk beneath the surface of things." He moves on to salute the Triptych May–June 1973, done after the death of a boyfriend of Bacon's, as "the most tortured and desolate rendering of the human condition in the entire history of art." Hyperbole? Well, I like the warmheartedness. Schmied is a senior twentieth- century-art expert, based in Munich, who became acquainted with Bacon toward the end of the artist's life. Like Zweite, he takes Kantian calipers to the art, tackling the compositions via remarks such as "the purpose of space is individuation"; but also he can fondly evoke "the youngest 80-year-old I have ever met," who "moved with a nimble grace, almost skipping as he walked."
The former rector of the Bavarian Academy brings an Adam-like innocence to his description of a component in a "screaming pope" canvas—"Its appearance suggests some kind of metal frame, but this is not in fact the case: it is quite simply a brushstroke...." (Beware, professor! The trick's widespread. It's known as painting. Italics, admittedly, added.) Only he, perhaps, would dare reprimand the artist for failing properly to confront the papal image he was defacing: "That Bacon never saw the original of the Velázquez portrait is regrettable for several reasons...." Yet Schmied is a telling phrase-turner himself:
Bacon's ideal would have been to paint like Velázquez, using the methods of Pollock.... [His] dream...was that one day he would be able simply to throw a handful of paint at the canvas and a fully formed portrait with a perfect likeness of the subject would emerge of its own accord before his eyes.
That gets close both to the physical grain of the paintwork and to the cultural and historical crisis that Bacon felt he was confronting—even though, as Schmied notes, he had no liking for his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. It comes in a chapter on "The Painting Process and Its Goal" which is in fact as alert and as precise an account of Bacon's picture-making as I have read. Adhering to Bacon's creed of existential crisis in no way prevents Schmied from offering an illuminating perspective on his tactics and purposes.
Adhering to Bacon's dicta can, however, lead to doctrinal somersaults. One of the commonplaces of all the texts under review is that this work is not "illustrational." The point stems from the artist's interviews with David Sylvester, in which he posits an ideal of painting that makes a radically direct impact on the viewer, bypassing all rationally organized procedures for recording appearance—"without the brain interfering with the inevitability of the image," as he expressed it. If instantaneity is of the essence, then structures of time will be blown away, as Schmied pithily asserts: "Bacon is not a story-teller, but a destroyer of stories." Yet then he goes on to read triptych after triptych as a "sequence of events," busily inferring internal relationships between their figures. Michael Peppiatt, as Bacon's biographer, not surprisingly does the same. He supplies a lowdown on that big 1962 triptych—I annotate:
Read very briefly from left to right, it appears to recount Bacon's expulsion from the family home by his father [for borrowing his mother's underwear: father and son being the male silhouettes] through a traumatic sexual encounter [the squirm on the mattress]...to an inverted Crucifixion (no doubt of Bacon himself) in the last panel....
This interpretation of "humiliating exile and suffering" is one the art historian Martin Harrison also accepts in his book In Camera: Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting. In fact narrative paraphrases abound wherever you look: the Violence of the Real catalogue captions are glutted with them.
Is this all a crass traducement of Bacon's art? I don't think so. The point is that his talk of transcendent immediacy was an aspiration, a handsome modernist reverie, at odds with equally strong countervailing instincts. His pictures can judder the stomach, yes, but they are also adept at mystifying; they tease the viewer's imagination as much as they assault it. The abrupt handiwork he uses to conjure up figures—an interplay of quick-snatched curls and streaks with down-driven, explosive splats—gets increasingly overlaid, in the course of his career, by finicky texturings with powder pigment and fine bridging lines; for the prevailing direction of his art is toward aesthetic suspense. Increasingly, he dangles those clotted bodies in clean-planed interiors that hark back to his early experience working as a modernist designer; and always he keeps them removed under glass.
Seen in the light of this aestheticism, Bacon's paintings become no less interesting, but they do become less icon-like. Is it really essential to assent to a certain crisis-tinged doctrine of the human condition in order to appreciate what this particular artist is offering? A touch of irreverence might give us more room to enjoy his fiendish ingenuity; moreover, to distinguish the indisputable inventions of genius that issued from Reece Mews from the numerous non-events—among the latter, the cover image of Schmied's book, a dry, affectless specimen of Bacon's old-age aerated manner. (Incidentally, the publishers have also shortchanged Schmied by printing his text in an insultingly small font.)
It is in this broadly revisionist, canon-shuffling spirit that Michael Peppiatt worked on the exhibition of 1950s paintings now touring the United States. The accompanying volume, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, forms a kind of postscript to Peppiatt's 1996 biography, reverting to the period just before his own acquaintance with the artist began. Yes, we know that Bacon was a great reiterator, with that one set of Crucifixion studies succeeding the other (and yet more in his later years); but, says Peppiatt, the long interval between the two reveals him also as a plural-minded, restless, and reckless experimentalist. And indeed, it proves fascinating to follow the master of mangled flesh as he tries his hand at portraying Lady Sainsbury directly from life (quite against his normal practice); at essaying vibrant expressionistic variations on a self-portrait of van Gogh walking in Provençal sunshine; or conjuring up vistas of an African elephant fording a river, or of the Great Sphinx. Some of these ventures are blurted and botched, others—such as some mid-1950s figure studies, immersed in deep blue—unexpectedly beautiful: the extraordinary originality of Bacon's obsessions shows through throughout.
The 1950s, writes Peppiatt, were a period of turmoil for Bacon. In 1951 the recently arrived celebrity of the London art scene loses his one surviving fixture from his Irish childhood, the light-fingered Jessie Lightfoot—a nanny-turned-retainer who had taken to shoplifting to provide for the bohemian ménage that her former charge kept up with his lover Eric Hall. Distraught, he abandons both this address and this partner and spends years flitting through the gay demimonde, from country cottages to bordellos in Tangier, with no fixed studio. He falls into a grim love affair with the owner of a collection of rhino whips, who wished to keep him "chained to the wall, living like an animal on a bed of straw."
This tale of life lived on the edge—with its interwoven strand of steely artistic determination, which eventually brings Bacon to the stability of Reece Mews—makes for flavorsome reading. Peppiatt portrays his old friend with easy authority, acting at once as an ad hoc psychologist (as in his reading of the Crucifixion triptych) and as an insouciant phrase-twirler—"a drunken, farded sodomite," he dubs him at one point, an "affable, elegant boulevardier" at another. In truth I think the exercise is slightly overextended, even if it brings a number of unfamiliar Baconological minutiae into the public domain. It was interesting, however, to read how Bacon used what Peppiatt calls his "magpie eye" when he descended in 1959 on St. Ives, the Cornish base of what was then Britain's leading school of abstractionists.
Bacon liked to dismiss abstraction as "watered-down" art, telling Sylvester that his taste for it was mere "fashion." But he himself was keenly alert to fashion, and in the late 1950s the wind of "colour field painting" was blowing in from New York: heavy-laden angst was becoming passé, making way for the broad uninflected surfaces of Barnett Newman and his like. Three months on Britain's western coast, far removed from his customary urban bolt-holes, saw Bacon filching a slick new flattened presentation from the colorists around him—such as Patrick Heron—whom he affected to disdain.
From this point onward his art took on an expansive, deadpan hauteur, as the former flailing, abrupt obsessive got subsumed within the persona of the prince-guru of Reece Mews. This is the self-restyling that Peppiatt's Bacon in the 1950s is attempting to pick away at; though in fact the transition is described with deeper art historical grounding in Martin Harrison's In Camera. It is Harrison who, thanks to a wonderfully well-informed, re-tentive eye, is able most effectively to locate Bacon's painting within the broader development of twentieth-century visual culture. Harrison's researches are closely tied to Cappock's sifting of the studio papers, while showing a shrewd mistrust of the clues that Bacon chose to present to his public. "The layers of obfuscation surrounding a great artist are only just beginning to be penetrated," Harrison writes. His inquiry takes him to some considerably obscure places in the backwaters of British painting, but it also clarifies how this artistic act, which has struck so many viewers as utterly sui generis ever since 1945, relates to more familiar reference points.
As I interpret Harrison, Bacon starts out in art under the shadow of Picasso, the great figure-obsessed breaker-up of figures. Also fixated on the human figure, he regards the prospect of further pictorial fragmentation—the path that leads to Pollock's abstraction—as a downward detour for art. Up on the heights stands Velázquez, the supreme interpreter of human appearance. But there's no straight path that heads that way. Because—and this is what Degas and still more his British disciple Walter Sickert teach Bacon—the recording of human appearance has now been taken out of human hands. Through and through our culture is pervaded by mechanized picturing; we can only insert our art within that process, like the Atlas-Manuel's draftsman inserting his retouchings between the photograph and the chromolithograph..[2]
That, rather than any facet of twentieth-century public history, is for Bacon the cultural crisis that matches the spiritual crisis occasioned by God's failure to continue existing. It's a crisis that calls for Picasso's aggressive, disfiguring tactics, redoubled in ferocity as he clenches and throttles the lineaments of the reproduced image he has picked up off the studio floor, as he spatters it with gouts of white and red. Only that way, heading down rather than up, via inverted crucifixions and hollowed-out popes, is there hope of touching on what Velázquez touched—which is "what used to be called truth"; which is synonymous with what Bacon still calls art.
That, very roughly, seems to be Bacon's minimal rationale. Harrison's examination of how Bacon developed, practiced, and then modulated it is far more richly informed and imaginative than this résumé can convey. It returns the reader to the sheer variety and inventive cunning of Bacon's paintings, which people will probably still be poring over long after his particular theory of the human condition in crisis has become a footnote in cultural history.
[1] Quoted in Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, p. 218, from Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full and in Profile, (Rizzoli, 1983), p. 45.
[2] Schmied tells a relevant story: "On one occasion Bacon had a picture brought back to the studio after seeing the transparency made by the gallery's photographer. There was a blue in the reproduction that he particularly liked, but it was lacking from the original and he wanted to add it in as an afterthought." See Schmied, Francis Bacon, p. 80.
Francis Bacon Detritus.
Ivory Press 2006. Director: Elena Ochoa Foster

Francis Bacon's Detritus 2006
Detritus contains the most important items that Francis Bacon left in his studio. They represent the instruments of his creation. Since 2001 we have been researching and selecting these items. Detritus was launched in Autumn 2006 at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 5, 40213, Dusseldorf Germany. Detritus is displayed with the exhibition Francis Bacon - the Violence of the Real from the 15th of September until the 7th of January 2007.
Francis Bacon Detritus 2006. In a Limited Edition of 25. Height 37 cms, Width 65 cms, Depth 11.5 cms.
Each edition contains seventy-six facsimile items originally found in the studio of Francis Bacon and now held in The Dublin City Art Gallery, The Hugh Lane, in Ireland. The material consists of photographs, pages from magazines, drawings, letters and notes by Francis Bacon. Each item has been individually produced by hand, using special techniques, creating in effect a 'new original'. The material is contained within a facsimile of an old leather suitcase from Bacon's studio, which was discovered in the stable in Reece Mews. Each edition has a signed Certificate of Authenticity from the Estate of Francis Bacon. Detritus is a production of Ivory Press in collaboration with The Estate of Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon -
The Violence of the Real
Triptych, 1970 oil
on canvas each 198,1 x 147,3 cm
National Gallery of Australia Canberra. Purchased 1973
The exhibition Francis Bacon - The Violence of the Real was nominated as Exhibition of the Year 2006 by the German section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
K20 Kunstsammlung Nordhrein Westfalen, Dusseldorf
Dramatic depictions of human forms – writhing painfully, dissolving, struggling with or engulfing one another – shape the motivic repertoire of Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), the most eminent 20th century British painter.
Everything anecdotal or narrative has been excluded in favor of a concentration on the physical presence of human flesh. Bacon scenarizes bodies which appear mutable, vulnerable, or decrepit, while simultaneously asserting themselves with an aggressive, even boastful vitality. In aesthetically heightened form (for Bacon‘s images are always suggestively beautiful), such contradictoriness is conveyed in the form of the disquieting experience of the grandeur and finitude of human existence. Bacon said: “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence ...” (Francis Bacon to Hugh Marlais Davies, 1973).
Bacon sought to rend the veil of false perceptions and ideas that continually superimposes itself on the factual. He shows us forms and human traits whose artistic appearance is as fascinating as their physical deformations are alarming. His beings – which occasionally regress to the zoomorphic level – remain for the most part isolated, moving tentatively on stage-like platforms, in empty, windowless rooms or in structures resembling cages. Bacon discovered stimuli for his agitated image world in the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Degas and van Gogh, although he was inspired by reproductions rather than by originals. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic sequences of human and animal locomotion, books containing medical illustrations, newspaper photographs showing current events: all provided him with impetus.
Like a
kind of “mill,” Bacon reworked this flood of reproduced visual material.
Only after being transformed and profoundly defamiliarized were individual
subjects incorporated into his paintings. Manifesting itself in Bacon’s œuvre
is an aesthetic image world that is inextricably entangled with the
existentially abysmal.
The 60 exhibited works – produced between 1945 and 1991, among them 10 triptychs, and photographic material from the artist‘s studio – provide insight into an unsettling yet captivating image world. Francis Bacon envisioned the human individual as a subject deprived of any stable (masculine) identity. Here we find a self that is exposed to “invisible forces,” one rendered incapable of locating itself securely in the world. To a large extent, this accounts for the continuing actuality of Bacon‘s creative achievement.
By David Galloway
The International Herald Tribune Monday October 9, 2006
DÜSSELDORF Under the motto The Year of Art, this Rhineland capital has launched a Quadriennale that more than lives up to its hype. A dozen major exhibitions in museums and other public spaces are complemented by more than 20 shows in leading private galleries and an uncountable number of fringe events. The consistently high quality of this fine arts smorgasbord establishes Düsseldorf as Germany's only serious cultural rival to Berlin.
For the Francis Bacon show, entitled The Violence of the Real, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has assembled 64 works dating from 1945, when Bacon exhibited the first of his celebrated triptychs, to 1991, the year before his death at 82. Among the exponents on view are 10 triptychs and numerous preliminary works, photographs and memorabilia. Bacon's writhing, tormented bodies suggest striking parallels, as well as contrasts, to the sensuous, earthy, well-fleshed figures that would created the 17th-century vogue of "Caravaggisimo."
Unlike Caravaggio, Bacon has been the subject of several important exhibitions in Germany, so that viewers can expect few surprises here. Yet there are revealing moments and sudden insights to be gained: from the icon-like, small-format heads that underscore the painter's fascination with classical painting or the Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979), on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum, revealing the bulging, asymmetrical head that Louise Bourgeois once described as resembling nothing so much as "an overripe melon someone has sat on." Yet this small but stunning triptych turns these very irregularities into a painterly tour de force of sweeping curves, chiaroscuro effects and remarkable plasticity. This portrait of the artist as a vulnerable, far-from-young man has the stuff of fairy tale: of the repellent frog metamorphosing, before our eyes, into a handsome prince.
The curators at K-20 have had to contend with equally difficult spaces for the Francis Bacon show, but have failed to provide their Irish guest with suitable accommodation. A recycled exhibition architecture, originally conceived for last year's Matisse show, consists of a labyrinth-like setting with "cut-outs" that offer glimpses of works to come. This was a splendid concept for the Matisse show, which emphasized the borderline between interior and exterior spaces. The scheme makes no sense with Bacon. There is much that seems simply quirky here, but from which budding curators might learn a lesson or two. For example, if the decision has been made to situate labels to the left of works, stick to that principle unless the architecture forces you to do otherwise. And give folks a place to sit down.
Francis Bacon embalmedRichard Calvocoressi
Margarita Cappock
Art &
Architecture TLS The Times Literary Supplement March
29, 2006
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Francis Bacon
Gay Art History
tribe October 28, 2006
In the early Spring of
1927 Bacon was taken by Harcourt-Smith to the opulent, decadent, "wide
open" Berlin of the Weimar Republic, staying together at the Hotel Adlon.
It is likely that Bacon saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis at this time.
Bacon spent two months in Berlin, though his uncle left after just one -
"He soon got tired of me, of course, and went off with a woman...I didn't
really know what to do, so I hung on for a while, and then, since I'd managed
to keep a bit of money, I decided to go to Paris."
Bacon then spent the next year and a half in Paris. He met Yvonne Bocquentin,
pianist and connoisseur, at the opening of an exhibition. Aware of his own
need to learn the French language, Bacon lived for three months with Madame
Bocquentin and her family at their house near Chantilly. At the Château de
Chantilly (Musée Condé) he saw Nicolas Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents,
a painting to which he was often to refer in his own later work.
From Chantilly Bacon went to an exhibition that was largely to inspire him to
take up painting, a 1927 exhibition of 106 drawings by Picasso at the Galerie
Paul Rosenberg, Paris. His interest aroused he often took the train into Paris
five or more times a week to see similar shows.
Bacon saw Abel Gance's epic silent film Napoléon at the Paris Opéra when it
premiered in April 1927. From the autumn of 1927, Bacon stayed at the Paris Hôtel
Delambre in Montparnasse.
1930s
Bacon returned to London in late 1928 or early 1929, and started work as an
interior designer. He took a studio in a converted garage, 17 Queensberry Mews
West, South Kensington, and shared the upper floor with Eric Alden (who was
later to become his first collector) and his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot.
In the first issue of Cahiers d'Art for 1929, Bacon saw Picasso's
painted biomorphic figures, reproduced in an article by editor Christian
Zervos: Picasso à Dinard, Été 1928. (Likely to have been bought
either from Zwemmers bookshop, on the Charing Cross Road, or in Paris.) The
1927 show at Rosenberg's in Paris had been of Neo-classical drawings, and it
was the 1928 Les Baigneuses and Le Baiser in Cahiers d'Art, that
gave Bacon his direction as a painter.
Bacon was befriended by Geoffrey Gilbey, then the racing correspondent for the
Daily Express, and for a time worked as his racing secretary. Gilbey
had a house in Ormonde Gate, Chelsea.
Bacon advertised himself as a "gentleman's companion" in The
Times, on the front page (then reserved for personal messages and
insertions).[4] Among the many answers carefully vetted by Nanny Lightfoot was
one from an elderly cousin of Douglas Cooper, at that time owner of one of the
finest collection of modern art in England. The gentleman, having paid Bacon
for his services, found him part-time work as a telephone operator in a London
club and further sought Cooper's help in promoting Bacon's developing skill as
a designer of furniture and interiors. Cooper also commissioned a desk from
Bacon in battleship grey around this time.
In 1929 he met Eric Hall at the Bath Club, Dover Street, London, where Bacon
was working at the telephone exchange. Hall (who was general manager of Peter
Jones) was to be both patron and lover to Bacon, in an often torturous
relationship.
'The 1930 Look in British Decoration'
The first show in the winter of 1929, at Queensberry Mews, was of Bacon's rugs
and furniture (a rug was purchased by Hall), but may have included Painted
screen (c.1929 - 1930) and Watercolour (1929), both bought by Eric
Alden. Watercolour (1929) his earliest surviving painting, seems to
have evolved from his rug designs, in turn influenced by the paintings and
tapestries of Jean Lurçat.
Sydney Butler (daughter of Samuel Courtauld and wife of Rab Butler)
commissioned a glass and steel table and a set of stools for the dining room
of her Smith Square house.
Bacon's Queensberry Mews studio was featured in the August 1930 issue of The
Studio magazine, in a double page article entitled The 1930 Look in
British Decoration. The piece showed work including a large round mirror,
some rugs and tubular steel and glass furniture largely influenced by the
International Style, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier / Charlotte Perriand and
Eileen Gray.
Bacon returned to Germany in 1930. A dramatic studio portrait taken of Bacon
by Helmar Lerski, a Swiss photographer and cinematographer, probably dates
from this visit. Bacon was later to tell Stephen Spender that he had been very
impressed by the work of a photographer who had produced striking effects
using mirrors and natural light filtered through screens, but that he could
not remember the artist's name.
Later that year Francis Bacon met Roy de Maistre, an Australian painter who
was to become a close friend and mentor. De Maistre's circle included Graham
Sutherland, Henry Moore and Douglas Cooper.
A second exhibit was held between November 4th & 22nd at 17 Queensberry
Mews West. Alongside de Maistre and Jean Sheppeard, Bacon showed four
paintings and one print. Gouache (1929) may be the piece titled as A
Brick Wall in the hand-list. Painting (1929 - 1930) (probably the
work listed as Tree by the Sea) is Bacon's earliest surviving oil
painting. Both were bought by Alden. The two other paintings (Self-portrait
and Two Brothers) and print (Dark Child in an edition of three) are now lost.
Bacon left the Queensberry Mews West studio in 1931, and was not to have a
settled space for some years. Bacon probably shared a studio with Roy de
Maistre, about 1931/1932, at Carlyle Studios, (just off the Kings Road), in
Chelsea.
Portrait (1932) and Portrait (c.1931 - 1932) (the latter bought
by Diana Watson) both show a round-faced youth with diseased skin (painted
after Bacon saw Ibsen's Ghosts), and date from a brief stay in a studio
on the Fulham Road.
In 1932, Bacon was commissioned by Gladys MacDermot, an Irish woman who had
lived in Australia, to redesign much of the decoration and furniture of her
flat at 98 Ridgmount Gardens in Bloomsbury. Bacon recalled that she was
'always filling me up with food'.
In April 1933, Bacon moved to 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea (just across
Pimlico Road from Ebury Street, where de Maistre had his temporary studio).
The studio there was in a converted garage (like the Queensberry Mews West
studio), a friend, the interior designer (and property developer) Arundell
Clarke, had had his showroom there before moving on to Mayfair.
Bacon, unfit for active
service, volunteered for Civil Defence and worked full-time in the ARP (Air
Raid Precautions) rescue service. But the fine dust of bombed London
worsened his asthma and he was discharged. So, at the height of The Blitz,
Eric Hall rented a cottage for Bacon and himself at Bedales Lodge, Steep,
near Petersfield, Hampshire.
Figure Getting Out of a Car (c. 1939 - 1940) was painted here but is
known only from an early 1946 photograph taken by Peter Rose Pulham (taken
shortly before it was painted over by Bacon and retitled Landscape with
Car). An ancestor to the biomorphic form of the central panel of Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the composition
was suggested by a photograph of Hitler getting out of a car at one of the
Nuremberg rallies, (Bacon claims to have "copied the car and not much
else.")
Man in a Cap, and Seated Man (recto) / Man Standing
(verso) (now separated), both on composition board and from about 1943, are
abandoned works. The composition of Man in a Cap derives from a
picture of Joseph Goebbels that appeared in Picture Post. A
photograph of Hitler from the same issue was the basis for Seated Man,
and the more roughly painted Man Standing.
The Millais House
studio, 7 Cromwell Place: 1943 – 1951
Returning from Hampshire at the latter part of 1943, Bacon and Hall took the
ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais'
old house and studio. High vaulted and north lit, it had had its roof
recently bombed - Bacon was able to adopt a large old billiard room at the
back of the house as his own studio. Nanny Lightfoot, lacking an alternative
location, slept on the kitchen table. Illicit roulette parties were held
there, organized by Bacon with assistance by Hall, to the financial benefit
of both.
Now home to the National Art Collections Fund, the Millais house is just a
short walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum, holder of a National
collection of paintings by John Constable, whose oil sketches were much
admired by Bacon. It was also at the V&A that Bacon would first discover
and study the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.
The April 1945 show Recent Paintings by Francis Bacon, Frances Hodgkins,
Matthew Smith, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland at the Lefevre gallery
(then on New Bond Street, London) had two paintings by Bacon - Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Figure in
a landscape (1945).
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is a key
precursor to Bacon's later themes: the triptych format, the placement behind
glass in heavily gilded frames, the open mouth, and the use of painterly
distortion; the Eumenides, or Furies, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the
theme of the Crucifixion (Figures at the Foot of the Cross was the
first attempt at the title).
Done in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board within the space of two
weeks, Bacon considered Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (1944) to be the true start to his oeuvre - his masterpiece
in the original sense.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was
presented to the Tate Gallery by Eric Hall in 1953.
Untitled (1944) a variant of the right-hand panel of Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) was shown at Francis
Bacon: The Human Body, curated by David Sylvester, at the Hayward
Gallery in 1998. A version of the left-hand panel: Study for a Figure (c.1944)
was among the abandoned pictures in the 1964 catalogue raisonné.
Figure in a landscape
(1945)
A photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park was the basis of the
other painting in the Lefevre show, Figure in a landscape (1945)
which was bought by Diana Watson and, in 1950, by the Tate Gallery (with the
support of Graham Sutherland, then a trustee (1948 – 1954)).
Figure Study (1945) was destroyed; Figure Study I and Figure
Study II are from 1945 or 1946.
Study for Man with Microphones (1946), was shown at the Lefevre
gallery, (British Painters Past and Present July - August 1946), and
at the Anglo-French Art Centre, (Seventh Exhibition November - December
1946). Bacon was clearly unhappy with this picture: it was listed as an
abandoned work in the 1964 catalogue raisonné, and was passed on to the
Estate in 1992 as a slashed canvas.
At some point in 1947 - 1948, Bacon returned to make a second version, Study
for Man with Microphones (1947-48) (shown February to March 1948, at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Contemporary Painters (last (monochrome)
plate in the catalogue by James Thrall Soby) as Study for Man with
Microphones (1946); and from October to November 1962 in Francis Bacon
at the Galleria d'Arte Galatea, Milan as Gorilla with Microphones
(1945-46)).
Crucifixion (1933) (oil on canvas) was shown at the Summer
Exhibition (July - September 1946) at the Redfern Gallery, 19/20 Cork
Street, London, and bought by Sir Colin Anderson.
Painting (1946)
If Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is
Bacon's masterpiece, then Painting (1946) has a good claim to be his
Magnum opus. Originally to be a painting of a chimpanzee in long grass
(parts of which may be still visible), he then attempted to portray a bird
of prey landing in a field. Bacon described it as his most unconscious[6]
work - the marks suddenly suggesting this image - at once magnificent and
appalling.
FB:"Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, which was the thing that's
in the Museum of Modern Art…"
DS:"The butcher-shop picture."
FB:"Yes. It came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird
alighting on a field. And it may have been bound up in some way with the
three forms that had gone before, but suddenly the line that I had drawn
suggested something totally different and out of this suggestion arose this
picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in
that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of
another."
- Excerpt from the October 1962 interview with David Sylvester for the BBC.
Graham Sutherland saw Painting (1946) in the Cromwell Place studio,
and urged his dealer, Erica Brausen, then of the Redfern Gallery, to go to
see the painting and to buy it. Brausen wrote to Bacon several times, and
visited his studio in early autumn 1946 and promptly bought the work for £200.
(Painting (1946) was shown in several group shows including in the
British section of Exposition internationale d'arte moderne (18 November -
28 December 1946) at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which Bacon
travelled to Paris.)
Within a fortnight of the sale of Painting (1946) to the Hanover
Gallery, with the proceeds, Bacon had decamped from London to Monte Carlo.
After staying at a succession of hotels and flats, including the Hôtel de Ré,
Bacon settled in a large villa, La Frontalière, in the hills above the
town. Eric Hall and Nanny Lightfoot would come to stay. Bacon spent much of
the next few years in Monte Carlo, short visits to London apart. From Monte
Carlo, Bacon wrote to Graham Sutherland and Erica Brausen. His letters to
Erica Brausen show that he did paint there, but no paintings are known to
survive.
In 1948, Painting (1946) finally sold to Alfred Barr for the Museum
of Modern Art in New York for £240. Bacon wrote to Sutherland asking that
he apply fixative to the patches of pastel on Painting (1946) before
it was shipped to New York. Painting (1946) is now too fragile to be
moved from MoMA for exhibition elsewhere.
Head I, Head II - Head
VI
Bacon returned to London and Cromwell Place to paint, late in 1948. Head I
was shown at the Summer Exhibition at the Redfern gallery from July to
September 1948.
By the end of 1948 Erica Brausen, who had advanced Bacon money for works,
left the Redfern Gallery. Brausen had found private capital to start her own
gallery in Mayfair. In the spring, a Bacon painting, presumably Head I, was
shown at Erica Brausen's new Hanover Gallery (and was noted by Wyndham Lewis
in an exhibition review of 12 May 1949).
Held between November 8th and December 10th 1949 at the Hanover Gallery,
Francis Bacon: Paintings; Robert Ironside: Coloured Drawings, was in effect,
his first professional one-man show (Robert Ironside's watercolours were on
an upper floor). A series of six paintings Head I to Head VI, with Study
from the Human Body (1949) and Study for Portrait (1949) formed
the core of the show with four other paintings by Bacon.
Bacon's paintings attracted the support of Wyndham Lewis writing in The
Spectator.
Head I differs from Head II - Head VI in one important
respect: while the first is painted on hardboard and dates from 1948 (or
1947-8), the rest of the series date from 1949 and are painted on the
reverse of a (commercially) primed canvas.
"well, I was living once down in Monte Carlo and I had lost all my
money, and, I had no canvases left and so, the few I had I just turned them,
and I found that the, that the, what is called the wrong side, the unprimed
side of the canvas worked for me very much better. So I've always used them.
So it was just by chance that I had no money to buy canvases with."
- Excerpt from an interview with Melvyn Bragg in Francis Bacon (1985),
for the South Bank Show for London Weekend Television.
Head II is, for Bacon, very thickly painted, this was one of very few
instances when he had been able to 'rescue' a painting after it had become
overworked and the weave of the canvas clogged[7] (as happened with two
abandoned works on canvas from the Head series, from 1949, also in the 1949
Hanover show). The arrow, or pointer, motif in Head II is taken from
the book Positioning in Radiography by Kathleen Clara Clark, 1939.
Head VI was Bacon's first surviving engagement with Velázquez's great Portrait
of Pope Innocent X (three 'popes' were painted in Monte Carlo in 1946
but were destroyed). The Cobalt Violet mozzetta, crimson in Velázquez's
painting, may reflect Bacon's use of printed reproductions of the painting.
Bacon later said that, although he admired "the magnificent
colour" of the Velázquez, Velázquez "wanted to make it as much
like a Titian as possible but, in a curious way he cooled Titian".
An article by Robert Melville titled Francis Bacon appeared in the December
1949 – January 1950 issue of Horizon magazine (edited by Cyril
Connolly). Melville placed Bacon in the context of European painting and
film, comparing and contrasting his work with that of Picasso, Duchamp,
Eisenstein and, in particular, Salvador Dalí and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou.
The piece, along with Reproductions of Paintings by Francis Bacon,
was printed between a short story by James Lord and an essay on the Marquis
de Sade by Maurice Blanchot).
The Colony Room
The Colony Room, a private drinking club, at 41 Dean Street, Soho, also
known as Muriel's after Muriel Belcher, the formidable proprietor. Belcher,
who had run a club called the Music-box in Leicester Square during the war,
had secured a 3pm - 11pm drinking licence for the Colony Room bar as a
private-members club (public houses had to close at 2:30pm). Bacon was a
founding member, walking in the day after the opening in 1948. He was
'adopted' by Belcher as a 'daughter' and was allowed free drinks and £10 a
week to bring in friends and rich patrons. It was here that Bacon became
friends with Lady Rose McLaren.
Bacon met the painter and illustrator John Minton in 1948. Minton was soon
to become a regular at 'Muriel's, as were the painters Lucian Freud, Frank
Auerbach, Timothy Behrens, Michael Andrews, the two Roberts, Colquhoun and
MacBride, and above all the sometime Vogue photographer, John Deakin.
In 1950 Bacon met the art critic David Sylvester, then known for his writing
on Henry Moore and praise for Alberto Giacometti's work. Sylvester had
admired and written about his work (first writing about Bacon for a French
periodical, L'Age nouveau, in 1948) but had erroneously perceived it
to be a form of Expressionism. Head I, in particular, at the 1949
Hanover Gallery show, was, for Sylvester, proof of Bacon's importance as a
painter.
In September 1950 John Minton left for the West Indies for a few months.
Aware that Bacon was in need of money, Minton asked him to take over his
post as a tutor at the school of painting at the Royal College of Art. On
condition that he did no formal teaching, Bacon agreed. So for three months,
he was on hand to talk to the students for two days a week.
Painting (1950) and Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) were
among the works shown at Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings; Hilly: Paintings,
at the Hanover gallery, 14 September - 21 October 1950. Also Study for
Figure (1950) (destroyed) and Man at a Curtain (1949) - an
abandoned work.
Study after Velázquez
This series of three paintings after Velázquez were painted for the
September 1950 Hanover gallery exhibition. The exhibition was advertised as Francis
Bacon: Three Studies from the Painting of Innocent X by Velázquez but
the series was withdrawn before the start of the show by Bacon.
In November 1950, after Bacon had gone off to South Africa, the Hanover
gallery offered on his behalf Study after Velázquez (1950) to the Arts
Council, for the Festival of Britain show Sixty Paintings for '51. On
his return in May, Bacon again withdrew the painting before it was shown,
although it is in the catalogue to the exhibition. Study after Velázquez
(1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were sent to his art
supplier for the frames and stretchers to be reused. Bacon apparently
believed them destroyed.
Study after Velázquez (1950) and Study after Velázquez II (1950) were
rediscovered carefully rolled-up at Bacon's art supplier in September 1998
(and shown at the Tony Shafrazi gallery). Study after Velázquez II (1950)
(also known as Untitled (Pope) (1950)) is an abandoned work. Study after
Velázquez III (1950) is destroyed (but was photographed).
January 1951 Bacon was featured in World Review in The Iconoclasm of Francis
Bacon by Robert Melville (describing Study after Velázquez (1950) seen at
the studio and on the destruction of the three paintings in the series of
studies after Velázquez; Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) and Man
at a Curtain (1949) are shown in monochrome).
Study for Nude Figures (1950) (also known as Untitled (Crouching
Figure) (1950)), and Figure in Frame (1950) (also known as
Untitled (figure) (1950-1)), were among the abandoned paintings found in
storage after the painter's death. Figure in Frame (1950), in
particular, is a compellingly beautiful wreck, with thin dry-brushed paint
on raw linen over a spectral smear and scrapes of oil paint.
By 1950 Bacon's affair with Eric Hall had come to an end - he no longer
appears on the electoral register with Bacon and Jessie Lightfoot at 7
Cromwell Place - but he was to remain a loyal patron, friend and supporter.
November 1950 Bacon visited his mother in South Africa. This suited his
asthma better than spending winter in London. Bacon was impressed by the
African landscapes and wildlife, and took photographs in Kruger National
Park. On his return journey he spent a few days in Cairo, and wrote to Erica
Brausen of his intent to visit Karnak and Luxor, and then go via Alexandria
to Marseilles. The visit confirmed his belief in the supremacy of Egyptian
art, embodied by the Sphinx. He returned in the Spring of 1951.
30 April 1951 Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon's old nurse died at Cromwell Place.
Bacon was gambling in Nice when he learnt of her death. Nanny Lightfoot,
'Nan', Bacon's closest companion, had joined him in London, on his return
from Paris and had lived with him and Eric Alden at Queensberry Mews West,
and with him and Eric Hall at the cottage near Petersfield, in Monte Carlo
and at Cromwell Place. Stricken Bacon sold the 7 Cromwell Place apartment.
After 7 Cromwell Place 1951 – 1953
Bacon took a place in Carlyle Studios Chelsea near the King's Road and, for
a time, Bacon worked at the Royal College of Art, in a studio lent by
Rodrigo Moynihan.
Head (1951), Figure with Monkey (1951), Study for Nude (1951),
Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951), and a series of three popes Pope
I (1951), Pope II (1951) and Pope III (1951) were shown at
Francis Bacon at the Hanover gallery December 1951 - February 1952.
Study for Nude (1951), which relates in form to Study for Nude
Figures (1950), is one of very few paintings by Bacon for which a sketch
for the composition survives (in Chinese ink over a photograph in a 1920s
Naturist book Man and Sunlight by Hans Surén).
Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951) is based on a photograph of Kafka
printed as the frontispiece to Max Brod's Franz Kafka: eine Biographie
Prague: 1937.
Pope II (1951) was actually painted first in the 1951 series of three popes
(P. II, P. I, P. III) based not so much on Velázquez's Portrait of Pope
Innocent X, but on a photograph of Pope Pius XII being carried on a
sedia gestatoria through a fan vaulted room in the Vatican. (The series was
hung as a triptych at the 1962 Tate retrospective.)
The January 1952 Magazine of Art article by Sam Hunter: Francis
Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror, places Bacon in a British context, of
Sutherland, Wyndham Lewis and Sickert (and even, in passing, Aubrey
Beardsley). The article also reproduced two photographs Hunter had taken, in
the Summer of 1950, of Bacon's photographic source material; Hunter had
found the tables of the 7 Cromwell Place studio littered with newspaper
clippings, magazine illustrations and reproductions torn from art books, he
had arranged them to put the most images in frame and photographed them in
situ.
Study for Crouching Nude
Painted in the Spring of 1952, Study for Crouching Nude, the perched
figure of which may derive in form from Muybridge (Man Performing a
Standing Jump), was first shown at Recent Trends in Realist Painting
(organized by Robert Melville and David Sylvester) at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London, from July to August 1952, in place of Study
for Portrait (1949).
By the Spring or Summer of 1952, Bacon had met Peter Lacy, a former RAF
fighter pilot, at the Colony Room in Soho. Bacon embarked on an affair with
Lacy, his first sustained relationship with a younger man. Peter Lacy, a man
with independent means, a slight stammer, a ready wit and a violent temper,
had no regard for Bacon's paintings. He was, however, a sexual sadist. On
being in love with Lacy, Bacon was to say: "Being in love in that
extreme way - being totally, physically obsessed by someone - is like having
some dreadful disease. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy."
Lacy rented a house called Long Cottage, in the village of Hurst, Berkshire
near Henley-on-Thames. Bacon was invited to come to stay.
House in Barbados (1952), painted at The Royal College of Art, was, on
Lacey's direction, closely copied from a photograph of a house he owned
there. This was an unusual commission for Bacon, and he asked his friend,
Denis Wirth-Miller, for help with it.
Dog (1952) (also known as Study of a Dog (1952)) (based on one
photograph in a series by Muybridge of a walking mastiff and postcards of
Monte Carlo) and Landscape (1952) (based on photographs of Kruger
National Park) were painted a few weeks before his second visit to South
Africa. Landscape (1952) (also known as Landscape after Van Gogh
(1952) also has 'a few brush-strokes' added by Denis Wirth-Miller.
Bacon spent some months of 1952 in South Africa visiting his mother, who had
remarried and settled there. Again owing a considerable sum to Erica Brausen
of the Hanover gallery, Bacon returned to London to paint.
Dog (1952)
Two further studies from the Muybridge photograph: Dog (1952)
(de-accessioned in 2003 from MoMA to Gerard Faggionato, presumably to help
fund the acquisition of Triptych (1991) from Tony Shafrazi in 2004)
and Dog (1952) (in a private collection) were painted shortly after
his return from South Africa.
Elephant Fording a River (1952), Rhinoceros (1952)
(destroyed?) and a series of crouching figures in long grass: Landscape
(1952), Study for Figure in a Landscape (1952), Man Kneeling in
Grass (1952) were also painted for the Hanover gallery show: Francis
Bacon December 1952 - January 1953.
Landscape, South of France (1952) (also known as Elephant in
Jungle Grass (1952) (a complete misnomer - there is no elephant, nor is
this an 'African' painting)) was also painted at this date.
Figure in a Landscape (c. 1952) - an oil sketch on paper in the Tate
collection (the earliest of four given to Stephen Spender in the early '60s)
- relates in form to Study for Figure in a Landscape (1952).
Crouching Nude on Rail (1952) (also known as Untitled (Crouching
Nude on Rail) (1952)), one of the overworked and clogged canvases
abandoned by Bacon and recovered by the Estate in 1998, the thickly painted
pale cerulean strokes provide an unusual sustained delicacy of hue.
At some latter part of 1952, Bacon moved to 6 Beaufort Gardens, in Chelsea. Study
for Head (1952) (also known as Study for Portrait (Man
Screaming) (1952)) and Man Eating a Leg of Chicken (1952), were
painted in the autumn of that year, shortly followed by Man in a Chair (1952).
All have been cut down from larger canvases and have an 'encrusted' texture
from Bacon's experiments with mixing sand with the paint.
These three were sold privately in December 1952 to Helen Lessore of the
Beaux-Arts gallery, London, for ready cash, with David Sylvester acting as
Bacon's agent (with a 20% commission). The Hanover's advances were too
modest for Bacon's needs, so these unofficial sales (negotiated by
Sylvester) to friends or to rival galleries such as the Mayor, Beaux-Arts or
the Redfern, were quite frequent between 1953 and 1955.
Eric Hall bought Dog (1952), (the first of the three) from the
Hanover on New Year's Eve 1952 with instructions for it to be delivered to
the Tate gallery. The second in the series was bought for MoMA in 1953.
Study of a Nude
(1952–1953)
Study for a Portrait (1952), was shown in January at the New Year
Exhibition 1953 at the Leicester galleries, London along with Study of a
Head (1952) (also known as Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope
(1952)), which was shown as Study for a Pope.
There were two other pictures in this series of (four) head and shoulder
studies: Study of a Head (1952), and Study for a Portrait
(1952) (also known as Study for a Portrait of a Man in Blue (1952)).
The first three of the series are 'Papal' portraits with zucchetto, open
mouth and pince-nez deriving from a film still of the nurse in the Odessa
Steps sequence of The Battleship Potemkin. The last may have been
painted prior to his second visit to Africa, and may be of Peter Lacey.
Study of a Nude (1952–1953) (also known as Study from the Human
Body) was started in December 1952 and completed in January 1953. The
figure derives from one of a Muybridge series of a man preparing for a
standing high jump. Uniquely among the paintings the figure is painted
one-eighth life-size, rather than the almost unvarying range of between
two-thirds and three-quarters.
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Completed, and delivered to the Beaux-Arts gallery in February 1953, of Study
after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Bacon said
"I wanted to paint a head as if folded in on itself, like the folds of
a curtain"[8]. The Titian Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto
(c.1551-1562) is often cited as an ancestor to this device.
Bacon was 'painting hard' in the Spring of 1953, according to David
Sylvester, but practically all work executed in this period was destroyed;
only Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and Study
for a Portrait (1953) survive.
Man with Dog (1953) was painted in June 1953 according to the Hanover
gallery records. The composition derives from the same Muybridge photograph
of a walking mastiff as the Dog (1952) series. The Futurist painter
Giacomo Balla's Leash in Motion (1912) (Dinamismo di un cane al
guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash)), which was shown at
the Tate gallery in the summer 1952, was also a source for the painting.
'Bacon - the elephant' is inscribed (possibly in another hand) on the
stretcher. It was reported in the 1964 catalogue raisonné, that Bacon had
confirmed that the picture has nothing to do with an elephant.
Study for Portrait I -
VIII (1953)
In 1953, Bacon moved from 6 Beaufort Gardens to 9 Apollo Place, also in
Chelsea. David Sylvester, living at the same address at the time, had four
sittings for a portrait that on the final sitting metamorphosed into a pope
- Study for Portrait I (1953). This was to be the first of a series
of eight (the longest of his career) papal portraits painted that summer,
with the remaining seven studies painted quickly within the space of two
weeks.
Later life
In 1964, Bacon began a relationship with 39-year-old Eastender George Dyer,
whom he met, he claimed, while the latter was burgling his apartment. A
petty criminal with a history of borstal and prison, Dyer was a somewhat
tortured individual, insecure, alcoholic, appearance obsessed and never
really fitting in within the bohemian set surrounding Francis. The
relationship was stormy and in 1971, on the eve of Bacon's major
retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide in the hotel
room they were sharing, overdosing on barbiturates. The event was recorded
in Bacon's 1973 masterpiece Triptych, May - June, 1973.
In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards, a young, handsome Eastender with whom he
formed one of his most enduring friendships, eventually bequeathing his £11m
fortune to Edwards after his death.
Bacon died April 28, 1992, in Madrid.
The Estate
Bacon bequeathed his entire estate (then valued at £11 million) to John
Edwards after his death. Edwards, in turn, donated the contents of Francis
Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, to the Hugh Lane
gallery in Dublin. Bacon's studio contents were moved and the studio
carefully reconstructed in the gallery. Additionally draft materials,
perhaps intended for destruction, were according to Canadian Barry Joule
bequeathed to Joule who later forwarded most of the materials to create the
Barry Joule Archive in Dublin with other parts of the collection given later
to the Tate museum.
Bacon was disdainful of his early works and destroyed the majority of it. He
also destroyed an unknown number of works throughout his lifetime, and
fragments of canvases were found in his studio after his death. About the
studio, Bacon remarked: "for me, chaos suggests images."
Bacon's legacy
The best-known pictures
of Bacon were taken by photographer John Minihan, who photographed him
between 1963 and 1991 and developed such a good relationship with the writer
that he became, in effect, his official photographer.
Motion picture
Bacon's Soho life was portrayed by John Maybury, with Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig as George Dyer (and with Tilda Swinton as Muriel Belcher), in the film Love is the Devil (1998), based on Daniel Farson's 1993 biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Bacon is also cited in interviews with contemporary British artist Damien Hirst as being one of the latter's principal influences.

Study of a Dog 1954 Francis Bacon
Study for Portrait X 1957 Francis Bacon
Portrait of a Man 1953 Francis Bacon
Figures in a Landscape 1956-1957 Francis Bacon
Walking Figure 1960 Francis Bacon
Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (From Muybridge) 1961 Francis Bacon
The Night of March 20th, 1957
David Allan Mellor
Study of a Drawing by Van Gogh 1959 Francis Bacon
Van Gogh by Bacon
Arles, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, 2002
For his contemporaries, in 1957, the very appearance of the Van Gogh paintings seemed to betoken crisis. This was partly on account of their being manufactured at very short notice as oil painting merchandise arriving wet and late for display at The Hanover Gallery for his one-man show. It was certainly the opinion of John Russell, when he came to narrate the Van Gogh series for his monograph on Bacon in 1971. In this he opened a paragraph preceding his treatment of the series with the words, “Bacon has a certain lifelong relish for catastrophe”. A token of this catastrophic contingency and its indexical communication can perhaps be discovered in the drastic corporeal (apocryphal) image of the still-wet paintings being smeared and transferred, as if by monotype, onto the clothes and bodies of spectators at the squashed private view of the exhibition, which was, according to Daniel Farson; “...so crowded with friends and hangers-on that numerous people might have emerged with Bacon’s on their backs …”
Study of Portrait of Van Gogh III 1957 Francis Bacon
This panic but comic communication of an extreme image is typical of accounts of the opening night of Francis Bacon’s exhibition of Studies for Portraits of Van Gogh, at The Hanover Gallery, in George St. London, on March 20th, 1957, as a kind of private view maudit. John Rothenstein, for instance, described the night as a vision of social and cultural mix and mayhem: “The small rooms were densely crowded with artists, collectors, students, and the teddy boys with exotic haircuts and leather jackets (many of them very drunk), who mysteriously arrive as a matter of course, and in considerable numbers, at any quasi-public function of which Francis is the occasion. Above the noise a cry of pain was suddenly though faintly to be heard. Before anybody else had even seen what caused it, Francis had appeared, instantly, from the far side of the turbulent room and was staunching a wound. Some object from the balcony had fallen on a man below and laid open his scalp… (in the) presence of numbers of drunk toughs”. Here is a narrative text itemising transgressive sub-cultures, violence and blood as a framework for the paintings. There were collisions: it was undoubtedly a fateful occasion. This was the moment of Pegeen Guggenheim’s meeting with the wunderkind English abstract painter, Ralph Rumney. Her mother, Peggy Guggenheim then purchased Bacon’s Chimpanzee, which was on display alongside the Van Gogh’s, on Rumney’s advice.
Study of a Portrait of Van Gogh II 1957 Francis Bacon
The Formal Traces of Van Gogh
Offset, allegedly smeared on the proper persons of his beholders, Van Gogh’s bodily presence seems elusive. This essay argues, among other things, that Bacon’s Van Gogh exists as a catastrophic trace: as a ghost and a media trace, so that the cinematic phantom of Vincente Minelli and the mannikin burned in the Gotterdamerung of Bacon’s prototype, the lost Van Gogh painting, destroyed in the last year of the Second World War, hardly appear, can hardly become fully manifest. The solid, but flat, trace of the phantasmal body in the Sainsbury version, is physically cut-out, collaged, part of a carved out relief space of an (historically resonant) ashy figure, left higher, like a human plateau, by Bacon. The formal aspects of the series - its spaces and the rendering of spaces - are neglected in accounts of Bacon’s Van Gogh. But for younger artists at the time, the ones, say, finishing their studies at the Royal College of Art in 1957, the ones engaged in opening up the wave of American and continental abstract painting, it was the formal aspects of Bacon’s paintings which counted. Dick Smith, who would graduate from the RCA that summer, recollected the Van Gogh series in the Hanover exhibition solely in formal terms - as a play of flat but also, paradoxically, volumetric space in the road. Considered in this light, the play of flat but illusionistic angled depth then looks forward to Smith’s own art, after 1960. Bacon’s variety of styles also lent the series a sense of breaking with notions of decorums of unified treatment and unified style. The thick impasto of Bacon’s variants IV and VI in the series, are wholly different to the smooth creamy surfaces of V, with its Diebenkorn-ian pastoral.
Homage to
the master
Tanya
Harrod
The
Spectator August
17, 2002
The Painter on the Road to Tarascon Vincent Van Gogh 1888
"Haunted figure on the road like a phantom of the road." Francis Bacon
In the early
part of 1957 Francis Bacon made eight paintings based on Van Gogh's
autobiographical self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
Bacon knew the picture only as a colour reproduction in a Phaidon book on the
artist. The original, painted in Arles in 1888, had been destroyed during the
second world war. Bacon preferred early Van Gogh but he had a special fondness
for the picture "the one that was burnt in Germany". In 1957 a solo
exhibition of Bacon's work at the Hanover Gallery was looming and "as
nothing else had gone right I thought I'd try to do something with it". The
Tarascon paintings arrived barely dry and the crush at the private view was so
great that Van Gogh was further translated, onto the clothes of an assorted
crowd of students, friends, dealers, Teddy Boys and hangers on. The show was not
well received and subsequently the critic John Russell, in the first full-length
study of Bacon's work, dismissed the Tarascon series as "perhaps the
weakest of his groups of paintings".
Van Gogh vu par
Bacon reunites seven of them at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh at Arles,
together with a couple of later Van Gogh-inspired paintings that have
considerably less bite. Both the 1960 variant on Van Gogh's Self Portrait
with a Pipe and Homage A Van Gogh of 1985 are recognisably by Bacon.
But the 1957 Tarascon pictures are startlingly different - both from the rest of
his oeuvre and from each other. Indeed, each can be read as a separate,
remarkable essay on the practice of painting.
Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV 1957 Francis Bacon
As Andrew Brighton has
pointed out in his recent monograph on Bacon, the scholarship surrounding this
late, great artist is still embryonic. No catalogue raisonne exists and the
authenticity of a whole body of work - the Barry Joule collection of drawings -
is uncertain. Meanwhile the existing literature seems stagily old fashioned - a
mixture of plushly written formal analysis and mythologising of the gilded
gutter variety. And Bacon poses problems for the younger art historian who will
be less easy with Bacon's reinstatement of the Grand Manner, with the idea of
Genius, high Bohemia and, even, with the last gasp of Expressionist painting.
This unease characterises
David Alan Mellor's valiant catalogue essay for Van Gogh vu par Bacon. Mellor's
special gift is for a kind of social history of art in which unexpected
connections are made and overlooked figures are reinstated. Mellor therefore
tries to normalise Bacon by, for instance, including him in a generalised flight
south to the Mediterranean by artists after the war. He discusses Vincent
Minelli's blockbuster film about Van Gogh, Lust for Life, which Bacon saw
in 1956, his possible reading of Georges Bataille's essay on Van Gogh as
Prometheus, the impact of Suez and of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and the
conceivable influence of the sculpture of Eduardo Paolozzi. None of this seems
entirely convincing, except perhaps the mix of high and low influences the
Minelli/Bataille nexus. For instance, Bacon may have been part of an exodus
south after the war, but he chose to live in Monte Carlo. One imagines him
firmly indoors amongst the velvet banquettes and chandeliers of the gaming
house. Certainly his mediterraneisme did not translate very obviously into art.
The utopia pastoral of the Midi went unrecorded.
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh I 1956 Francis Bacon
Bacon's Tarascon series
has little to do with Mellor's careful cultural mapping. We know, however, that
Bacon greatly admired Van Gogh's letters, reread them constantly and kept a copy
of them by his bed. It seems that in 1957 Bacon worked from two overt sources -
the reproduction of The Painter on the Road to Tarascon and the letters
Van Gogh was writing to his brother Theo from Aries, the letters of un suicide.
Bacon's description of the destroyed painting as depicting a "haunted
figure on the road like a phantom of the road" capture the cadence of Van
Gogh's own letters of 1888. But the letters also provide a more practical
programme - with descriptions of the summer heat in Provence creating
"orange shades like storm flashes, vivid as red-hot iron", with
ambitious dreams of night paintings in which he would express "the terrible
passion of humanity by means of red and green" and talk of using colour to
suggest the emotions of an ardent temperament.
Bacon's tributes to The
Painter on the Road to Tarascon are his only plein air paintings, except of
course they are not plein air at all, but dictated by a reproduction and some
letters. In the background was an all-encompassing knowledge of other painting,
aside from the obvious homage to Van Gogh. Mostly this erudition was something
that Bacon did not flaunt. Film, documentary photography and modern design are
more trackable sources for his art. But the high colour, thick impasto and
allusive experiments with mark-making are unique to this series and alone worth
the trip to Arles. Thus of the two versions from the Smithsonian, one quotes
Daumier and Barnett Newman and the other Asger Jorn. The variants from Siegen
and the Pompidou Centre take on Cezanne. The wonderful picture from the
Sainsbury Centre honours Van Gogh by tackling the problem of night painting.
Working from a copy of a
lost original sounds like a typically post-modern exercise in appropriation.
Certainly in his early work Bacon tackled the myth of originality head on by
reusing and reshaping a huge range of existing visual material. But he has ended
up seeming the quintessential Magus artist, the man John Russell described as
"one of the most memorable men ever to hold a brush".
This magnificent small show at Aries suggests new ways of looking at Bacon and should not be missed. For students of the mythology there is a large, glamorous accompanying exhibition of photographs of Bacon at every stage of his life.
Copyright Spectator Aug 17, 2002
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh V 1957
Varying the Self: Bacon's Versions of van Gogh
Brendan Prendeville
Oxford Art Journal Volume 27, Number 1, 2004 , pp. 23-42(20)
Abstract
In 1957, Francis Bacon rapidly painted a series of five numbered paintings after van Gogh's Self-Portrait on the Road to Tarason, to fill an exhibition. They are exceptional in his work, both as to subject and in the way they are painted. A painter who regularly took reproduced images as his sources, he chose in this unique case the self-portrait of another artist, and used – also uniquely – methods evidently akin to those of ‘action painting’ so selfhood and the practice of painting come into unusual conjunction in these works. Paul Ricoeur's attempt, in Oneself as Another, to overcome the perennial self-other opposition, and his account of a constitutionally unstable self, lacking a ‘core’, are suggestive for discussion of the relationship between viewer and painting, specifically with reference to portraiture.
He presents an alternative to the antinomial theories of the self which have long dominated criticism of visual art, theories according to which visual images mirror, and so crucially help to construct, an ego enclosed against the other; such a model is presumed in Ernst van Alphen's Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. Admittedly, this series of paintings is itself bound to invoke what Ricoeur terms ‘hyperbolic’ concepts of selfhood: van Gogh, through his biographers, became the type of artist-as-genius; Minelli's biopic Lust for Life, which Bacon probably saw, came out in 1956, and in the same year Jackson Pollock, prototypical ‘action painter’ died in a way that contributed to a comparable mythology. Against that, it is important to consider what Bacon does, and to notice the kinds of action, or interaction, tended to us as viewers. In context, the link with cinema assumes a different importance.
Also crucial is Bacon's process of variation. Unlike philosophy, as Ricoeur shows, art can engage in play, freely varying all terms without a view to conclusion – art experiments with the self. Bacon takes selfhood apart, recombines its elements; he separates action from appearance, makes shadows substantial; he evaluates the centre, yet gives it bodily presence. He experiments (as had Velázquez) with the crossing of perspectives, reiterating the sense of arrest-in-passing evident in the van Gogh, as the walking figure turns to look out. In their postural address to us, these (self-) portraits engage us in reinventing versions of a painterly, slippery selfhood, other to itself.
VAN GOGH VU PAR BACON |
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La Fondation Vincent Van Gogh de Arles présentera du 5 juillet au 6 octobre 2002 une exposition intitulée "Van Gogh vu par Bacon" qui réunira pour la première fois en France la série des portraits que Francis Bacon fit de Vincent Van Gogh en s'inspirant de l'autoportrait disparu du maître hollandais "Sur la route de Tarascon". Cette exposition est exceptionnelle, la sérié, réalisée de 1951 à 1956, n'ayant été réuni qu'une fois en 1957 à Londres. Exceptionnelle enfin du fait qu'elle a pour cadre le Palais Luppé, siège de la Fondation Vincent Van Gogh de Arles. Cette exposition est complétée par une exposition de portraits de Bacon par certains des plus grands photographes contemporains, tels Irving Penn, Cartier-Bresson... ainsi que des clichés de l'atelier de l'artiste à Londres pris par Peter Ogden avant que l'atelier ne soit démonté puis remonté à l'identique à Dublin. |
Photomontage by Peter Beard |
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Vincent Van Gogh Foundation
EXHIBITION FRANCIS BACON
12 paintings on the road to Tarascon
July 5 - October 6 2002
Under the patronage of Irish Embassy and the British Embassy in France. |
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For the first time in nearly 50 years, Francis Bacon paintings of van Gogh will be exhibited as a series, from July 5 to October 6 2002, in Arles, France. |
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Throughout his life, British artist Francis Bacon idolized Vincent van Gogh. Between 1951 and 1956, Bacon created a series of paintings in homage to Van Gogh, walking along the road to Tarascon, near Arles in the south of France. These eleven paintings were exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in London, and then dispersed to private collectors and to various major museums - the Hirshhorn in Washington DC, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Tate in London, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. Since 1957, these paintings have never been exhibited together as a series. |
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In 1985, Yolande Clergue, wife of the renowned photographer Lucien Clergue, asked Francis Bacon to do one more painting of Van Gogh in Arles to celebrate the opening of the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles in 1988, which Madame Clergue founded and directs. Francis Bacon agreed. |
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That 12th painting constitutes the end of the series, and will be exhibited together with the others for the first time since the original paintings were completed between 1951 and 1957. The exhibition called Francis Bacon in Arles, 1951-1985; The Van Gogh series by Francis Bacon will be held at the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles, southern France, from July 5 through October 6, 2002. The Hirshhorn has never lent before the Bacon / Van Gogh paintings it owns to any institution in France, and several of the private collectors only reluctantly agreed to lend their paintings for this occasion, so the exhibition ill indeed be a newsworthy event. |
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At the same time, there will be a second exhibition of 30 black and white and colour photographs of Francis Bacon on view at the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles, from July 7 through October 7, 2002. These photographs, taken by Peter Beard, Harry Benson, Don Mc Cullin, John Edwards, Hans Namuth, Perry Ogden, Cartier Bresson, Carlos Freire, André Morain, Michel Pergolani and Michel Soskine, among others, portray Francis Bacon alone, working in his studio, or with friends and associates. Also on view will be precious documents from the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin and from the Estate of Francis Bacon. |
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For further information, slides and transparencies of the Francis Bacon in Arles exhibition and visuals relating to the exhibition of photographs of Francis Bacon himself, please contact: |
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Sherrie Murphy Sherrie Murphy
Public Relations / 225 Central Park West/ New York, NY 10024
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