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The
Real Francis Bacon
Brutal,
brilliant and passionate,
Peter
Conrad on the life of an
iconic artist
Cover
Story The Observer Review
The
power and the passion
Francis
Bacon, one of our greatest modern artists, was a man of bewildering
contradictions - he made high art but embraced lowlife; he could be disarmingly
kind but utterly cruel; he had loving affairs but craved casual, anonymous sex.
On the eve of a major exhibition, Peter Conrad talks to Bacon's friends to find
out what he was really like and how his fascinating life fuelled his brutal,
transcendant art
Peter
Conrad, The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008

Francis Bacon by John Minihan Paris 1977
I
saw Francis Bacon once in passing 30 years ago, on the gilt and velvet staircase
at the Royal Opera House. Even if I hadn't known who he was - the most
celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of
sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his
voluptuous taste for pain - I would have found him unforgettable.
His
face was a painting. Boot polish had been applied to his teased hair, with a
quizzical wisp of a fringe fixed over his forehead; a thick application of
make-up gave his cheeks a feverish heat. His eyes kept watch from inside
asymmetrical craters, mementoes of drunken tumbles or of beatings administered
by the East End bruisers with whom he consorted. His smile showed off teeth
scoured with Vim, and inside his oddly circular mouth his tongue darted as if it
were a lizard jabbing at its prey. He looked eruptive, like the popes who scream
on their thrones in his early paintings.
As
the novelist Paul Bowles wrote, Bacon's head always seemed liable 'to burst from
internal pressures'. Or perhaps that head was likely to liquefy, melted like wax
by some combustible fantasy within. I could imagine a puddle of boot polish,
mascara, rouge and granulated ammonia on the plush Covent Garden carpet.
After
a few more years of furious creativity by day and self-destructive indulgence by
night, Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 in Madrid. As his centenary
approaches, oligarchs and arms dealers compete for possession of paintings in
which feral, rutting men and mutant women reel through life in a mood of what
Bacon thought of as tragic gaiety, exhilarated by their lack of hope: last May,
Roman Abramovich broke the record for contemporary art auctions by spending $86
million on Triptych, 1976.
A
few surviving acolytes and cronies - veterans of stupefied afternoons in Soho
clubs, resilient victims of Bacon's vitriolic temper - cling to their memories
of revelling with him, though as time goes on it becomes harder to separate the
man from the mythic figure he has become. The French critic Michel Leiris
likened Bacon to a pantheon of legendary heroes: Orestes guiltily pursued by the
furies, Hamlet grappling with a censorious ghost, Don Juan driven by sexual
demons.
Hoping
to demythologise him, I talked to two fellow artists he encouraged, Peter Beard
and Michael Clark; to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, who was a 19-year-old
student when they first met in 1963; and to the Irish photographer John Minihan,
who, after snapping Bacon in 1971 outside a magistrate's court where he was
facing a trumped-up drugs charge, became obsessed with documenting his irregular
existence. What I found was that even those who knew Bacon well were unsure who
or what he was: a human being or a self-fashioned artefact? A bilious ogre or a
suffering god?
As
Peppiatt recalled: 'Francis used to say, "I'm the most artificial person
you'll ever meet." He followed the example of an old whore in Paris, who
said to him, "Je me fais jeune" - I make myself young.' 'He did a lot
of work on himself,' Clark agreed, hinting that Bacon's jowls had been tidied
away by cosmetic surgery. Peppiatt likened him to a devil, an irresistible
tempter, and Clark described him as a phantom, a noctambulant wanderer
noiselessly circulating on crêpe-soled shoes. 'I'd say he was a sacred
monster,' smiled Minihan. 'He was Prometheus,' said Beard, 'with the eagle
picking at his liver every day. He had a mantra that he got from Nietzsche. He
was always repeating it: "Since everything's so meaningless, we might as
well be extraordinary."'
One
thing they don't deny is Bacon's centrality to their lives. 'I had my best times
with Fran,' Beard told me. 'The drunker he got, the more sense he made.' 'That
was a life-determining encounter for me,' said Peppiatt about buttonholing Bacon
in a Soho pub to interview him for a Cambridge student journal. 'Francis
immediately became essential to you, like an addiction. It was so exciting, so
exalted to be with him.'

WITH MINIHAN
'I
love talking about him,' Minihan burbled, before leading me off on a nostalgic
tour of Bacon's South Kensington haunts - the mews studio where he painted in a
swamp of composted squalor, the cornershop where he bought his smoked salmon,
the automated booth in the tube station where he took the grimacing photographs
he used for his self-portraits, the bus stop where he was patiently standing
when Minihan saw him for the last time.
In
all these relationships, adoration was mixed with anxiety, even dread. Valerie
Beston, the Marlborough Gallery employee who looked after Bacon's chaotic
business affairs, once said to Peppiatt, 'I can't think of a worse fate than
being loved by Francis.' An early partner, Peter Lacy, fantasised about keeping
Bacon chained to the wall and buggering him with a gang of accomplices; when
they split up, Lacy sullenly drank himself to death in Tangier.
Bacon's
East End boyfriend George Dyer, a petty crook whose intimates included the Kray
twins, died in 1971 of an overdose of sleeping pills in a Paris hotel two days
before the opening of Bacon's retrospective show at the Grand Palais: the doomed
relationship is the subject of John Maybury's 1998 film Love is the Devil,
with Daniel Craig as the befuddled Dyer and Derek Jacobi as an evilly epicene
Bacon. Clearly, Bacon was dangerous to know.
For
both Peppiatt and Clark, to enter the dives he frequented was like descending
into an underworld, a realm of arduous tests and trials where young lads were
despoiled of their innocence. Or perhaps it was a dizzier, more vertical rite,
climbing into a rarified atmosphere of bohemian decadence.
Clark
remembered the staircase that led up to the studio in Reece Mews, with a rope to
clutch instead of a banister. 'It was as steep as a ladder, and so narrow that
his paintings had to be squeezed out with not an inch to spare, so the edges
always got scuffed. He'd leave the downstairs door open for me. I'd haul myself
up with one hand on the rope, preparing for some great experience when I got to
the top.'
The
initiation could be hazardous. Peppiatt was at first rebuffed by Bacon's pet
photographer John Deakin, who flapped his wrist and - using the feminine
pronouns that were obligatory for Bacon's camp courtiers - said 'Oh no dear,
she's become so famous she wouldn't deign to meet a student!' In 1977 Muriel
Belcher, the dragon-like proprietor of the Colony Room in Soho, told Clark he
was a 'cheeky cunt' when he gatecrashed her drinking club; another of Bacon's
witchy guardians said, 'You're too young and pretty, you'll need to get your
face bashed in a bit before my daughter takes an interest in you'.
'I
was a bit naïve,' Clark primly added. 'Valerie arranged for me to make a
portrait of Francis, but I wasn't a lackey - maybe that's why he trusted me.'
'Yes,
I was playing with fire,' Peppiatt admitted. 'There was always some foreboding
when I went to meet him, I knew I'd be X-rayed down to the bone. You remember in
that South Bank Show when he keeps on pouring out red wine and says to Melvyn
Bragg "Are you real?". You can feel Bragg flinching off-camera.
Francis probed you like that, but it was more fun than studying for my Cambridge
exams. I suppose he was attracted to me: he liked the challenge of a strapping
young heterosexual. But I felt protected by him, never exploited. With George
Dyer, it was trickier. He enjoyed the idea of luring me out of my respectable
background into something criminal.'
Peppiatt
brilliantly mimicked Dyer's adenoidal, glottal-stopped cockney grunt: '"Fuckin'
college boys, ain't got the guts for a proper job." He dared me to turn up
at some midnight rendezvous to rob a house or something. I was there on the dot,
it was George who didn't keep the date! Francis had a subtler way of corrupting
people. He loved to be ripped off, he'd leave bundles of money lying round to
see if the rough trade he picked up took the bait - and they always did. He
wanted to prove people to be rotten, himself included. "Rotten to the
core," he'd say about himself, and he said it with pleasure and a kind of
pride.'
Knowing
Bacon enabled Peppiatt to walk on the wild side, trifling with illegality; for
Clark - a fey, slightly haunted character, who told me in a paranoid whisper
that he was 'breaking silence for the first time after 30 years' by discussing
Bacon - the experience was an induction into mysteries that resembled the arcane
ceremonies of a religious cult. 'He gave me access to everywhere in the studio.
There'd be underwear strung up to dry in the bathroom, and frying pans full of
pigment in the kitchen. For me, it was like those labs where the alchemists
conducted their experiments - a cabbalistic place. There was a charm on the
door, a secret symbol to warn that you were entering somewhere hallowed. He had
a mirror that was smashed when someone threw an ashtray at it; it was pitted all
over, and the silver backing had corroded. It was a black mirror, like seers
use. It didn't reflect reality, it showed you visions. You can say it's all
hocus-pocus, but what Francis did was esoteric: he was playing with very
powerful, violent forces when he made those images.'
Peppiatt
too acknowledges that he was 'spellbound' during his time with Bacon.
Hero-worship usually compensates for some psychological need in the eager
worshipper, and in Peppiatt's case, as he said, 'Francis was a
father-substitute. I didn't get on well with my actual father, and here was this
charming, devious replacement. In return he told me about his problems with his
own father. He hated him, yet felt sexually attracted to him. And Eddie Bacon so
despised this effeminate son that he got the stablehands on their horse-breeding
farm in Ireland to flog Francis to toughen him up! Trust Francis to combine
pleasure with pain by having affairs with the grooms who were told to whip him.'
The
lurid Oedipal scenario may explain one of Beard's reminiscences. 'Fran loved his
Shakespeare, and he was always reciting that song from The Tempest, "Full
fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made".' It sounds
like a joyfully lyrical revenge, on behalf of wishfully patricidal boys. Yet
when Peppiatt's father died, Bacon was tenderly solicitous. 'He took me out to
dinner to console me, and we ended up at Annabel's having a second supper at one
in the morning. "Why don't you dance?" he said, but I told him I
didn't feel like it. So he went over and told a girl I'd had an eye on that I
was too shy to ask her to dance. He pimped for me! When we got on to the dance
floor, I looked around and he'd gone - he'd left me to enjoy myself. That was so
healing: it reintroduced me to the fun of life.'
While
Bacon supplied Peppiatt with an alternative father, to the homesick Minihan he
represented a lost fatherland. 'I was born in Dublin, like Francis, though his
family was grand and mine didn't have a pot to piss in. My mother went off to
England and gave me to her sister to be reared. Francis was sent away by his
father when he was 16; a friend of the family took him to Berlin, so he
completed his education in the gay bars and cabarets that Auden and Isherwood
went to. I was even younger when I escaped. I left school at 11, came to London
and got a job as an office boy in Fleet Street. You could say I finished school
at El Vino!
'It
wasn't fashionable to be Irish in London in the 1970s, as the IRA were blowing
the place up, but I always wanted to photograph my own people; I was working for
the Evening Standard in the Seventies and I volunteered to go to the
magistrate's court because they told me some Irish painter was up on a cannabis
charge. That's all I knew about him. He let me take his photograph, and after
they acquitted him - it was Dyer who planted the drugs and tipped off the police
after some tiff they'd had - we walked off to Soho together. He was very
gracious and kind, that was one of his Irish qualities.'
Bacon's
grace and hospitable generosity are evident in Minihan's photographs of him
squiring William S Burroughs around town: upstaged for once in his life, he
fusses over his frail, bewildered companion. Minihan's photographs also capture
a sociable exhibitionism that counteracts tales about Bacon's maniacal rages and
his morbid gloom.
Michael
Clark's portraits of Bacon emphasise the sad preoccupation of his sagging face,
with eyes deep in concussed hollows grimly contemplating mortality; Minihan's
Bacon, by contrast, looks quite different: dapper, dandified, irrepressibly
larky. In one photograph, he preens in a PVC mac, no doubt relishing the snug
feel of the female panties and fishnet stockings that he customarily wore as
undergarments. 'Ah yes,' said Minihan, 'that's Francis throwing me some shapes,
as we say in Ireland. He loved clothes, and so did I. He liked to pose and
swagger when he had something fancy to show off, just like Oscar Wilde with his
green carnation.'
Perhaps
there was more to this fashionable flaunting than Minihan suspected. 'His
clothes were always so tight,' Peppiatt remembered. 'Pegged trousers, leather
jackets with epaulettes, those belted macs - he liked the sense of constriction,
as if he was in bondage. And he wore a necklace that was so tight it often
seemed to be choking him.'
Clark
also recalled the choker, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the
self-asphyxiating games of those who seek the perfect orgasm. In Bacon's
paintings, a live, captive being often writhes in a steel cage; he created the
same agonised entrapment for himself when he got dressed. The fetishistic gear
also disciplined him. His afternoons and nights may have been devoted to the
sloppy satisfaction of desire, but his mornings in the studio were a triumph of
the strict, self-punishing will. Peter Beard noticed Bacon's weakness for
uniforms made from animal skins and polished to a high shine, and drew the
obvious conclusion: 'Fran sure as hell loved the Third Reich!' Bacon once gave a
figure he painted a swastika armband; he disingenuously claimed that he liked
the crooked shape and had no interest in what it signified.
Minihan,
chatting to Bacon about home, enrolled him in his own nostalgic psychodrama. 'My
great ambition was to introduce Francis to Samuel Beckett, so I could photograph
the meeting of two great Irish exiles. But Beckett was a recluse, and eluded me
for years. And Francis wasn't keen, he said he couldn't see what the two of them
had in common: he was nervous of meeting someone whose view of things was even
bleaker than his own. I suppose it's true that he'd listen to me rattle on about
Ireland, without contributing much himself. Most of what he said about it was
dismissive. In 1977 I showed him some photographs of a wake that lasted two days
and three nights in a village in the west of Ireland. I was so proud of this
work: it was a family of Beckett characters, and the whole thing demonstrated,
like Bacon's paintings, that death is the only reality. But Francis screeched
"Aaargh!" and looked away. He didn't like the photographs, but
wouldn't give a reason. He was consumed by himself, in his own world.'
Like
all who knew Bacon, Minihan had come up against a barrier, concealed by his
boozy conviviality. Peppiatt's biography is subtitled Anatomy of an Enigma. When
I asked Peppiatt what the enigma was, he immediately replied, 'His
secretiveness. He had an almost magical gift for slipping away, for suddenly
becoming someone else. And if you got too close, he warned you off by turning
nasty.'
The
pub crawls, the sessions in casinos, even the bouts of sadomasochistic sex were
all a diversion and an evasion. Bacon was only himself when he was alone in his
studio, accompanied by the private incubi he painted. Even if he was painting a
friend or a lover, he worked from photographs and debarred the living model: his
solitude could not be shared, and the secrets of the image-making that contorted
and even crucified reality were never imparted.
'No
one was allowed to see him at work,' Peter Beard remembered. 'The process had to
remain out of sight. Once when he was drunk he spilled a bit too much. He said
he added texture by sweeping up the mess on the studio floor and blowing it on
to the wet painting: it was a kind of blow job! Then he got annoyed with me,
because he regretted telling me.'
Michael
Clark saw the shutters drop when, invited to look at a new painting, he noticed
a patch of pastel and asked Bacon how he had fixed it. 'There was a pause, then
he said "By the usual method". He wasn't about to give away a
technical tip; I realised I'd gone too far.'
Confronted
by this disappearing act, Bacon's friends were free to see him as whoever they
wanted him to be, or as an ideal projection of themselves. This, I found, had
happened to Bacon in the befogged memory of Peter Beard. 'My mind is fucked,'
bawled Beard when I arrived to talk to him in Cassis, the resort near Marseille
where he lives in a seaside villa. 'It's my attention deficit disorder - and the
drink! Hey, that reminds me, can I get a kir? Then I can claim I was drunk
during the interview. You gotta try one too, it's the local specialty.'
While
waiting for his solicitous young wife to bring the sweet blackcurrant cocktail,
he ripped open a can of beer, chomped on a steak sandwich known as an Al Capone,
and treated me to a hallucinatory anecdote about leafing through a book of Bacon
reproductions while on an LSD trip in New York during the 1960s.
'I'd
recommend it,' he said. 'When you're full of the magic mushroom, you can see all
those clouds of gaseous, tumultuous air that Fran painted.' Had I come to the
south of France, I wondered, to talk about Bacon, or to meet Bacon's staggering
reincarnation?
Beard,
now 70, inherited a fortune from a clan of American railway entrepreneurs; he
spent his youth cavorting with supermodels and rock bands, and possesses the
eroded remains of a handsome profile that Bacon often painted. When not lolling
beside the Mediterranean, he lives on a property in East Africa, fondly named
Hog Ranch. His Kenyan connections make him a Hemingwayesque character,
boisterously virile - although, unlike Hemingway stalking big game, his
obsession is protecting imperilled species rather than gunning them down.
As
a photographer, Beard has documented the slaughter of elephants and rhinos,
which he sees as rehearsals for our human fate. 'Yeah, mankind is doomed,'
growled Beard. 'I often talked to Fran about population dynamics, about how we
were going the way of the elephants.' I wasn't sure about that meeting of minds:
Bacon certainly thought that men were beasts, but he hardly shared Beard's
ecological conscience.
Nevertheless,
Beard considers Bacon - whose mother and sisters moved to South Africa and
Rhodesia after his father's death, and who went on a photographic safari to
Kruger Park in the early 1950s - to be an honorary African. 'He was always
planning to come stay on the ranch in Nairobi. He never made it, but the
realities in his paintings are primitive, primordial, so to me they evoke
Africa. All that bleeding meat, and the dry grass: he's the greatest painter of
grass, and it's African grass, not a wet English lawn.
'He
was really into my dead elephants, and we had plans to collaborate on some
sculptures. He was gonna mould the corpses and twist them over these immaculate
chrome rails - he liked chrome because it reminded him of the car JFK was riding
in when he was shot in Dallas - but there was a problem with the gallery in New
York, some crap about keeping Brits out, and the dealer cancelled the show.'
Beard's
own work pays homage to Bacon's carnivorous art. On the roof of his
Mediterranean villa samples of elephant blood coagulated in the sun, waiting to
be smeared on photographic collages that include snapshots of Bacon,
transcriptions of his talk, and excerpts from Beard's African diaries, speckled
by vulture shit. Images, as in Bacon's paintings, emerge from an abattoir, and
paint - which Bacon once likened to the slimy track of a snail - is one of the
fluids that spurt from a live, dying body. According to Beard, a thug Bacon once
picked up in Monte Carlo stumbled into an unfinished painting in the middle of
the night on the way to the bathroom. 'He decided he wanted to add something to
it, so he whipped out his prick and jerked off on the canvas. You can still see
the jism dripping down it. Fran didn't mind sharing the credit!'
A
tough guy himself, Beard attributes the same machismo to Bacon. 'I hate the way
Derek Jacobi minces about in that movie. I never saw one homosexual bone in
Fran's body!' (At the very least, this counts as an original view.)
'He
was strength on strength,' bellowed Beard. 'He was the Rock of Gibraltar, the
best of British. Hell, he wasn't camp, the guy used to take a leak in the sink!
One time when we were walking through Paris, a car ran over his foot. The driver
jumped out to help, but Fran just shrugged like the stoic he was. Next day his
foot was so swollen he could hardly walk: that's what Hemingway called grace
under pressure. It's like Andy Warhol when he was shot in the guts by that nutty
feminist [Valerie Solanas]. When they carried him out on the stretcher, all he
said was "Now don't make me laugh!" Of course they were different
guys. Andy was an idiot savant, but Fran was a fucking genius.'
The
genius was a generator, transmitting an electrical charge to those around him.
'Francis used to say that 99 per cent of people weren't activated,' Michael
Clark recalled. 'He switched you on.'
Near
the end of our long lunch at Green's, a fish restaurant in St James's that Bacon
often patronised, Peppiatt gave me an example of how this vitalising influence
worked. A morose waiter brought us our coffee, then wearily retreated. 'You see
what an automaton he is?' asked Peppiatt. 'Francis would have twinkled at him,
flirted with him, made him a player. I remember once in Paris he ordered, as
usual, a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. The waiter poured it out with
tremendous care, and Francis offered him a glass. "Oh no, monsieur,"
he said, looking over his shoulder, "la direction!" But Francis
wouldn't allow the management the right of veto. He gave the waiter a glass and
told him to sneak into the kitchen with it and drink it later. After a while,
the door from the kitchen opened, the waiter peeped out, raised the glass and
toasted us. That was Francis: he created excitement, mostly by transgressing the
rules. That's what's missing from Love is the Devil. Jacobi doesn't convey
Francis's geniality, his love of fun.' Our waiter eventually returned with the
bill, hoping to speed our departure; I decided to leave him unactivated.
Bacon
could deactivate people just as abruptly. 'He thought that friendship gave
people the right to lacerate each other,' said Peppiatt. 'He did that to me
once. He spent an entire night doing down Hockney, going on and on. "Leave
it alone," I said. "Well of course," he shrieked back, "you
with your pathetic taste would think Hockney was worth something." I told
him off for it when he sobered up the next day.'
Beard
witnessed another gratuitous outburst, directed at Jerry Hall during a party in
a gay disco in Paris. 'I'd introduced Fran to Mick [Jagger] and that was fine,
but when Jerry turned up he aimed this thunderball at her. "You fucking old
cow," he said, "you grotesque cunt, you hideous bloody witch." He
just wouldn't stop; it was this wave of bad vibes. The rest of us went down into
some dark pit behind the dancefloor and hid. You can imagine what was going on
there, but it was better than being within range of Fran.'
When
Bacon died, the critic David Sylvester paid him a provocative tribute. Quite
apart from Bacon's achievements as an artist, Sylvester described him as 'the
greatest man I've known, and the grandest', and listed his staunch moral
virtues: honesty, generosity, courage.
'I
think that's a bit solemn,' said Peppiatt. 'He was mostly wonderful, but his
shenanigans could be a pain in the arse. Yet he played up superbly, and he could
be very suave when he took the piss. His rudeness was a by-product of his
searing determination to tell the truth. He was a great possessor of people, and
some of them were swallowed whole.'
Or
else they swallowed Bacon whole and can still disgorge him on demand, which
happened when Michael Clark staged a creepily vivid simulation of his antics in
my London sitting room. Clark, channelling Bacon, primped his forelock with a
non-existent comb, and freshened his makeup with sideways glances at an
imaginary pocket mirror. Having titivated himself, he then nimbly removed an
unseen £50 note from his pocket to press it into an open, needy hand that
supposedly belonged to Jeffrey Bernard. Groping towards a bar that wasn't there,
he wheeled across the floor in a re-enactment of Bacon's swooping gait, which
made him look like a dipsomaniac question mark. Clark, in common with Beard,
thinks of Bacon as a shaman who painted in a state of trance; during this
impersonation, Clark was the shaman who conjured Bacon up before me. The
spectacle was ghoulish but somehow touching: by such performances, Bacon's
loyalists keep him alive.
Even
in Bacon's absence, his images retain their terrifying power, a vampirish
capacity to imbibe life from those who look at them. For a while, Peppiatt had a
portrait that Bacon gave him hanging above his desk. 'It stared at me, and I
could never face it down. Nothing in the head had settled, there was unfinished
business going on inside the frame. It was so incredibly alive, and it made me
feel - how can I say this? - so static. It seemed to be asking me if I was real,
and I never knew what to answer.'
Peppiatt
eventually sold the painting, and ever since has felt an aching regret, combined
with relief at having escaped its mute interrogation. The story sums up the
impact of Bacon's personality and his art. To know him was to be enraptured, to
lose contact with the safe, stable norm; it made the rest of your existence,
when you had to return to it, a mournful anticlimax.
Biography:
From furniture to fine art
Early
life
Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents. Caught wearing his mother's clothes,
he is banished from home aged 16. Settles in London in 1929. Chronic asthma
causes him to evade enlistment for the Second World War.
Career
1929 Works briefly as an interior designer. A first exhibition
of his work features mainly furniture but includes one painting, Watercolour.
Meets Eric Hall, who becomes his patron and lover.
1934 Holds his first solo show. Disappointed by the reviews, he
destroys most of the work.
1945 Shows Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, now considered his masterpiece, in a group show in London.
Later donated to the Tate by Eric Hall.
1948 Erica Brausen represents Bacon. She sells Painting
(1946) to MOMA, New York, for £280.
1949 One-person exhibition at the Hanover Gallery is a
commercial success. Robert Melville writes an influential article about Bacon in
Horizon
1952 Lucian Freud paints portrait of Bacon.
1953 First solo exhibition in the United States features eight Studies
for Portrait after Velazquez's Innocent X. Bacon represents Britain at the
Venice Biennale, alongside Freud and Ben Nicholson.
1962 Bacon paints Three Studies for a Crucifixion for
his first retrospective at the Tate Gallery, a career-defining show.
1971 Lover George Dyer dies. Bacon begins the first of his
'memorial' triptychs.
1985 Major survey at the Tate.
1992 Dies of a heart attack, aged 82, while holidaying in
Spain. Leaves entire £11 million estate to his friend Jonathan Edwards who in
turn, donates Bacon's studio contents to Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery.
2007 Bacon's old studio junk, salvaged decades earlier by a
contractor, fetches almost £1m at auction. The paintings, diaries and photos
had been destined for the skip until electrician Mac Robertson persuaded Bacon
to give them to him.
Imogen Carter
Winning
streak: The rising price of Bacon
£200,
1946
The dealer Erica Brausen, introduced to Bacon by artist Graham Sutherland, buys
Painting, 1946 for £200 and shows it at the Redfern Gallery.
£280, 1948
Brausen sells on Painting, 1946 to MOMA, New York, where it remains
today.
£10,558, 1967
Sotheby's London sells Seated Figure.
£67,067, 1975
Sotheby's London auctions Study for a Pope.
£33,979 (US $66,371), 1984
It is alleged that Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that represented Bacon,
pays him $66,371 for Statue and Figures in the Street; it had valued it
earlier at
$250,000.
£3.53mn (US $6.3m), 1989
Bacon becomes the world's most expensive living artist when his Triptych,
May–June, 1973 sells at Sotheby's in New York.
£26.6m (US $52.7m), 2007
Study From Innocent X, 1962 breaks Bacon's record at auction in New York.
£44m (US $86.28m), 2008
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich buys Triptych, 1976 making it the
world's most expensive work of contemporary art. Art market monitoring agency
Artprice declares Bacon to be the top-selling painter on the planet.
·
The
Francis Bacon exhibition is at Tate Britain from 11 September to 4 January,
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The
Fan: Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
'He's
one of the greatest painters of all time'
Interview
by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008
I
think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time. He's up there with Goya,
Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. He's
complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity.
It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt
your way though it by sheer will. That's what's inspiring to me, alongside the
sheer bravery of confronting the dark side, the shadows, the full force of the
human psyche.
If
you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more
technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon
couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody
awful. He can't do boots. [Laughs] But it's so bloody powerful. His work always
veers into the imagination. There's always this raw, dark power, this visceral
energy that is compelling. The paint is alive.
Great
art comes from nowhere. In a way, I think Bacon said 'fuck off' to what went
before. He didn't go the traditional route that the great painters went. He
didn't have the patience to be like Velasquez or Ingres or whoever. He used to
look to these guys, but he just didn't have the patience to be like them and do
what they did. He painted from photographs, he stuck bits of corduroy in there,
bits of glass, whatever it took to get there.
He
talked about the brutality of fact. It's incredibly brave to take that on, to
face up to the horror and stare it down. Over and over. I mean, I've made maybe
four good pieces and the rest are, you know, sort of happy. He wasn't like that.
He was his own worst and best critic. He pushed himself to the edge every time.
They give you the shivers, his best paintings. He looks into the room that no
one wants to look in. He looks in the mirror and he sees meat. He shuns
tenderness. He wants to sleep on a hard bed. I think he saw the brutality early
on and he decided to take it on.
I
saw him a few times in the Colony but I avoided him, because he was my hero. And
I saw him be cruel and abusive to people around him. He was a bad drunk. He was
wrestling with the darkness all the time. The idea of putting yourself into your
art is a weird one. It makes for a hard life. The fears, the dread, the hopes
even; you have to stand naked. I once made this work called Standing Alone on
the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror. It's
from a book I read. I actually think Bacon lived like that. There's a nasty,
angsty, brutish edge to his work that is somehow about the nasty comedown side
of things, the horrific hangover, the psychic fallout of the heavy drinking, the
shadowy things you glimpse at the edge of your vision, the existential terror.
It's like you can surround yourself with things that give you comfort or you can
live an animalistic life. He chose the latter, leaving his animal tracks in the
snow.
I
went around to his studio one night when I was on the charlie [cocaine]. John
Edwards took me around. John was really upset about his death and we were all
off our heads, but you could feel this huge presence. And this huge absence. It
was palpable.
I
was obsessed with him as a young painter. I was into punk and I was into Bacon.
He was out there on his own. You had the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the
Pointillists and all the other ists, and you had Bacon. I gave up painting at 15
because of him. I was just doing bad Bacons. I saw his work and I stopped
wanting to be a painter. I stepped aside into sculpture. I've gone back lately,
though. For the last two years I've been in the shed slapping paint on canvas.
Big and small paintings. Skulls, crows, tryptichs. Dark blue. Baconesque. He's a
supreme colourist. Beautiful colours. He seduces you with colour.
I
have five Bacons now. They'll end up in the Manor [Hirst's country estate in
Toddington]. I have one on the wall by the TV. I watch it more than I watch the
TV. You can't not look at it. It demands your attention, pulls you in. It's just
unbelievable to me that I own them.
He
popped into the Saatchi once to look at my work. They called me and said,
'Bacon's been in, he was here for about an hour.' I didn't really believe them
but then here's this letter he wrote to Louis Le Brocquy, the Irish painter,
where he says, 'I saw this Hirst fly piece and it really worked.' I still can't
quite believe it.
Usual Boys and Girls
Sell High at Sotheby’s
By Judd Tully, ARTINFO July 2, 2008

Bacon’s Figure Turning; the bidding flopped at £7.75 million.
LONDON—The
contemporary art market boomed at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening in a marathon
two-and-half hour sale, achieving a total of £94,701,550 ($188,853,831), just
shy of its £96.6 million pre-sale high estimate.
Only four of the 75 lots offered failed to sell, translating to rates of 5
percent unsold by lot and 10.5 percent unsold by value.
Three works sold for over £5 million pounds, 27 for over £1 million, and 48
for over $1 million. The average lot price was £1.33 million, the firm’s
highest ever in Europe in the category. In terms of the global breakdown of
buyers, 49 percent were European, 39 percent were American, 3 percent were
Asian, and 8 percent were other.
“I think the market is continuing its onward march, blissfully ignorant of all
the turmoil in the financial markets,” said New York private dealer
Christopher Eykyn. “It certainly hasn’t been a bad investment so far.”
Not surprisingly, the evening’s top lot was Francis Bacon’s small-scaled but
potent Study for Head of George Dyer from 1967, which sold to a telephone
bidder for £13,761,250 pounds ($27,442,685). The pre-sale estimate was in
excess of £8 million, and the work was guaranteed. The seller acquired the work
from Marlborough Gallery in London in March 1967 for £2,000, according to
Gilbert Lloyd, head of Marlborough in London.
One of the evening’s few casualties was Bacon’s underwhelming Figure
Turning from 1962 (est. £10–15 million), which was not guaranteed; the
bidding flopped at £7.75 million.
Bacon Portrait Fetches 13.76 Million
Pounds at Sotheby's London
By
Scott Reyburn Bloomberg
July 02, 2008

Study for Head of George Dyer 1967 Francis Bacon
July 1 (Bloomberg) – A
Francis Bacon painting of his lover sold tonight for 13.76 million pounds ($27.4
million) with fees at a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art in London.
The 14-inch-high oil work, Study
for Head of George Dyer, dated from 1967 and had been expected to fetch at
least 8 million pounds, said Sotheby's. The picture was bought by Cheyenne
Westphal, Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art, taking telephoned
instructions from a client, against four other bidders.
Last night at Christie’s
international contemporary-art auction in London, a 1975 triptych of
self-portraits by Bacon fetched a top price of 17.3 million pounds with fees.
Bacon and the East London
petty criminal Dyer became lovers in the autumn of 1963. The tempestuous
relationship ended on Oct. 24, 1971, when Dyer committed suicide in a Paris
hotel suite 36 hours before the opening of a retrospective exhibition devoted to
Bacon's work at the Grand Palais.
Bacon Is Again a Top Draw at Auction
By
CAROL VOGEL
The
New York Times July
2, 2008

Study for Head of George Dyer 1967 Francis Bacon
LONDON
— A 1967 portrait by Francis Bacon fetched $27.4 million at Sotheby's here on
Tuesday night, becoming the 10th work by this artist to bring more than $25
auction in the last year and a half.
After a standing-room-only sale
of contemporary art that lasted unusually long, two and a half hours, the
auction house reported a total of $188.8 million, just shy of the high estimate
of $192.2 million. Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art for
Sotheby's who was the evening's auctioneer, said he could see bidders checking
currency conversion charts, indicating buyers from around the world.
Top
honours belonged to the Bacon. Five would-be buyers vied for the work, Study
for Head of George Dyer, a portrait of Bacon's companion, who committed
suicide in 1971. Cheyenne Westphal, the chairwoman of Sotheby's contemporary-art
department in Europe, representing a client on the phone, made the winning bid,
which was well above the auction house's $15.5 million prediction before the
sale.
Although
129 photographs of Dyer were discovered in Bacon's studio after the artist's
death in 1992, this portrait was one of only two Dyer images he painted in a
14-by-12-inch format. The inspiration was a photograph taken by John Deakin.
While Sotheby's wouldn't say who the sellers were, experts said the work had
belonged to Ian and Mercedes Stoutzker, London philanthropists who bought it
from the Marlborough Gallery two months after it was painted.
The
recent auctions of Bacon works have included a record-setter, the sale in May of
a 1976 triptych at Sotheby's for $86.3 million. At Christie's on Monday night
here, his Three Studies for Self-Portrait from 1975 was the top seller,
at $34.4 million.
(Final
prices include the commission paid to Sotheby's: 25 percent of the first
$50,000, 20 percent of the next $50,001 to $1 million, and 12 percent of the
rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)
But
not every Bacon draws a stellar price; the market is still selective. One of the
evening's biggest casualties was Figure Turning. That 1962 oil on canvas,
depicting a twisted naked man clutching an empty glass, his reflection visible
in the red foreground, did not sell. Though Sotheby's predicted that it would
bring $19.8 million to $29.7 million, bidding stopped well short, at $15.4
million.
Prices
continue to soar as a Bacon earns £17.28 million at Christie's sale
By Souren
Melikian
International
Herald Tribune 1
July, 2008

A panel from Francis Bacon's triptych Three Studies for
Self-Portrait, which set the tone at a Christie's sale on Monday
that totaled £86.24 million.
London:
The art market rolls on in a seemingly endless boom regardless of
subject, period or medium. On Monday night Christie's sold 48 works of
contemporary art for £86.24 million, or $171.87 million.
The
three big winners of the evening shared no other characteristic than
the degree of attention that the artists had aroused in the news
media. The highest price went to Francis Bacon's Three Studies for
Self Portrait, painted in 1975 while the British artist stayed in
Paris. The three views of the painter's face are handled in his
typical manner influenced by early 20th-century Expressionism, with
violent distortions suggestive of drug-induced hallucinations. The
presale estimate was "in excess of £10 million." Instead,
the triptych rose to £17.28 million, a gigantic price for three
panels each measuring 35.5 centimeters by 30.5 centimeters, or 14
inches by 12 inches.
Bacon Self-Portraits Fetch $34.5 Million at London Art Auction
By
Scott Reyburn Bloomberg
July 1st, 2008

A Christie's employee cleans the glass covering Francis Bacon's Three
Studies for a Self Portrait, from 1975.
July 1 (Bloomberg)
- A 1975 set of three self-portraits by Francis Bacon fetched 17.3
million pounds ($34.5 million) in London, the most expensive lot at
Christie’s International sale of contemporary art.
At least four
bidders competed for the 14-inch-high, gray-hued oil canvases Three
Studies for Self-Portrait, featuring faces that are twisted, sliced
and gorged. The lot, with a presale estimate of more than 10 million
pounds and seen in public for the first time, went to an anonymous
phone bidder. The record for Bacon was set in May when Triptych,
1976, depicting a headless corpse eaten by vultures sold for $86
million.
Christie's 58-lot
auction last night netted 86.2 million pounds, against the company's
own low estimate of 80 million pounds. Eighty-three percent of the
lots were sold. Bacon's piece was one of four trophy works - the other
three are by Lucian Freud, Jeff Koons and Lucio Fontana - whose
combined estimates represented half the auction's value. The Bacon was
the only one that sold for much more than its top estimate.
Guaranteed Minimum
The Bacon and the
Koons were among 14 lots whose sellers received guaranteed minimum
prices, according to Christie's catalog. When auction houses guarantee
items, they usually share a percentage of the amount above an agreed
price; If the lot doesn't sell, the auction house - or a third-party
guarantor - pays for the work and owns it.
"When
estimates are high, people won't bid,'' New York dealer Jose Mugrabi
said in an interview. Mugrabi said the market was otherwise "better
than ever.''
"Christie's
estimate was very aggressive,'' said Heinrich zu Hohenlohe, director
of the dealers Dickinson, Berlin, in an interview. "Even in the
current market there is a limit.''
According to
Christie's, 42 percent of purchases came from the U.K. and Europe, 48
percent from the Americas, 8 percent from Asia, and 2 percent from
other regions.
Prices include a
buyer's commission of 25 percent of the hammer price up to $50,000, 20
percent of the price from $50,000 to $1 million, and 12 percent above
$1 million.
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