Francis Bacon News

October 28, 1909, Dublin - April 28, 1992, Madrid

Pop Goes the Art Market

By KELLY CROW,  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 10, 2010

Never underestimate the power of suggestion: On Tuesday, Sotheby's hired waiters with silver trays to offer up tiny glass bottles of soda pop to collectors arriving for its major evening sale of contemporary art. Half an hour later, eight bidders fought over the sale's priciest offering - Andy Warhol's 1962 soda bottle, Coca-Cola [4] [Large Coca-Cola]. A telephone bidder won it for $35.3 million, over its $25 million high estimate.

But the sale relied heavily on faraway collectors to pick up its priciest pieces, including examples by boom-era favourites Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. An Asian telephone bidder paid $22.4 million for a lemony, untitled Rothko from 1955 that was being sold by architect Graham Gund. Sotheby's London-based expert Oliver Barker also fielded the $14 million winning telephone bid for Bacon's orange-and-blue Figure in Movement, which was priced to sell for up to $10 million with fees. (Sale prices include the auction house's commission, which estimate prices omit.)

Eager Collectors Snap Up Pop Art at Sotheby’s Auction

By CAROL VOGEL, The New York Times,  November 9, 2010

It was to have been Warhol’s night. Waiters in black served Coca-Cola in old-fashioned green-glass bottles to the throngs of collectors and dealers who packed Sotheby’s salesroom on Tuesday night, an homage to a 1962 Coke bottle painting by the artist that was on offer.

There has been far less work by Francis Bacon to come on the market this season than in years past, but Figure in Movement, a 1985 painting of one of the artist’s anguished figures, this one wearing knee pads and boxed in by sky-blue bars against a black background, was a present from Bacon to his doctor, Paul Brass, who had decided it was time to sell and was watching the sale from a skybox. Four people fought over the painting, which was estimated to bring $7 million to $10 million, and sold for $14 million.

ART UNCOVERED: THE PUBLIC'S ARTWORK DENIED AN AUDIENCE

IN THE current tough climate of arts cuts, Jane Clinton reports on the treasures that are costing taxpayers thousands of pounds to store but which remain hidden from view for much of the time.

By Jane Clinton, Sunday Express, Sunday November 7, 2010

THEY are the art treasures that are often away from view and include works by Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst.

News that the Arts Council England (ACE) has two thirds  of its 7,500-strong collection in storage has drawn criticism from some quarters but it has hit back insisting theirs is the hardest-working collection in the country. 

“We are like a gallery without walls,” says a spokeswoman. “We have a third of our collection on show whereas some museums have less than 10 per cent of theirs on display.”

Among those not on loan are Francis Bacon’s Head VI, 1949, Lucian Freud’s Girl In A Green Dress, 1954 and Damien Hirst’s He Tried To Internalise Everything, 1992-1994.

The Arts Council England is facing budget cuts of £100million and last week announced it will have to cut funding for more than 100 organisations by 2015.

It has also launched a new process whereby organisations will have to reapply for their grants. Despite the cuts, however, it insists the loans collection will not be sold off and is not under threat. “Selling off the collection would mean these world-class works would be lost to the British people for ever,” says Arts Council England chief executive Alan Davey.

“I’ve not heard anyone suggesting that we should sell off any of our other great national collections to pay off the national debt.

“A modest amount is invested on behalf of the public, supporting artists at the very beginning of their careers, many of whom have gone on to become key figures in the history of art. Francis Bacon’s Head VI was bought for £60 in 1952 and is now worth an estimated £12million. This means that these important works, a world-class collection of post-war British art, belong to, and can be seen by, the British people for ever.”

There are, however, plans to review the amount spent on new acquisitions. The Arts Council England collection is funded through its development fund, the budget of which has been cut by 64 per cent. “We are now evaluating priority projects which are supported from our development fund and hope to be in a position to confirm some funding soon,” adds a spokeswoman.

However, leading art critic Brian Sewell believes the Arts Council should sell off the collection to free up funds and save on the expense of storage and conservation. “I see no purpose in the collection at all,” he says. “The Arts Council is in many ways just duplicating what is done by the Tate and other collectors and collecting bodies. There is a great mass of material being accumulated by the museums and galleries that no one ever sees and the Arts Council simply joined in. 

It has very little out on loan. The collection should be spread into galleries. The Tate Gallery, as the heritage body in contemporary art, should be encouraged to go through the collection and select what it doesn’t have. Then that should automatically pass to the Tate. “The rest of it could easily be sold and even if it doesn’t make a substantial amount of money you will immediately save the costs of storage, conservation, maintenance security and curatorial staff. It would be a neat solution to the budget cuts.”

·

Kundera, unmoved, turns the canon on itself

MILAN Kundera is a great essayist, and yet his best essays are reserved for his fiction.

Encounter: Essays By Milan Kundera Faber & Faber, 178pp, $24.95

Geordie Williamson, The Australian, October 30, 2010

It is in the novel, that zone of total imaginative freedom, where the Czech author's genius for melding pure idea to character and narrative is most apparent.

Taking in the four volumes of essays made available in English since The Art of the Novel in 1986, we might say Kundera's nonfiction operates as a series of retrospective explanations and genealogical justifications for the louche, playful and incorrigibly metaphysical content of his imaginative work.

Nonetheless, there is much that is fresh here, not least because the writer's attention is thrown outward, towards other creative figures (hence the title). The collection opens, for example, with an essay on Francis Bacon that aims straight at the heart of that magnificent and brutal artist's program:

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? . . . Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

What impresses Kundera about Bacon is not only his quest for an originality that does not sever modernism from earlier painterly traditions, but also his willingness to search, "in a time when the 'self' has everywhere begun to take cover", for (in Bacon's words) "that treasure, that gold nugget, that hidden diamond" that is "the face of the self".

And so Bacon serves as a template for what the creative figure should possess: "a clear-sighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze trying to penetrate to the essential". writing unique: "

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.

An encounter on familiar turf

Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera revisits favourite themes in collection of unrelated essays

By Jose Teodoro, Edmonton Journal, October 24, 2010

In The Painter's Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon, the piece that opens Encounter, Milan Kundera evokes that singular horror that characterizes Bacon's painting by aligning its effect on him to a personal experience.

He recalls meeting with a woman in a Prague suburb in 1972. The woman had been mercilessly interrogated by police about Kundera only days before, and remained so traumatized by the incident that she had yet to recover control of her bowels and had to repeatedly adjourn to the toilet. Like "a great knife," Kundera writes, "fear had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook."

Kundera was suddenly seized by the desire to rape her, a desire "uncalled for and unconscionable" - and, I hasten to note, not acted upon - yet nonetheless real. This desire is summoned back into memory when Kundera surveys Bacon's triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes, in which "the painter's gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence."

By confessing to such unsavoury urges, Kundera illuminates Bacon's portraits as "an interrogation of the limits of the self."

Jose Teodoro is a former Edmonton playwright now based in Toronto.

Encounter Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher, HarperCollins 178 pp, $26.99

Sotheby’s

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING SALE

Session 1: Tue, 9 Nov 10, 7:00 PM

Figure in Movement 1985 Francis Bacon

LOT SOLD Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium:  14,082,500 USD

LOT NO. 31

FRANCIS BACON

FIGURE IN MOVEMENT

ESTIMATE

7,000,00 - 10,000,000

PROVENANCE

A gift from the artist to the present owner in 1985

EXHIBITED

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon: Paintings, May - July 1985, cat. no. 17, p. 39, illustrated in colour

Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, Current Affairs: British Painting and Sculpture in the 1980s, March 1987, cat. no. 2, illustrated in colour

Moscow, Maison Centrale Des Artistes, Nouvelle Galerie Tretyakov, Francis Bacon, September - November 1988, cat. no. 17, p. 61, illustrated in colour (organized by the British Council)

Glasgow, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow's Great British Art Exhibition, March - May 1990, p. 37, illustrated in colour

Paris, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, June - October 1996, cat. no. 81, p. 217, illustrated in colour

London, Hayward Gallery, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, February - April 1998, cat. no. 22, n.p., illustrated in colour

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Francis Bacon, January - May 2001, p. 111, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Britain; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Bacon, September 2008 - August 2009, p. 243, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Gallery, 2000 - 2010 (extended loan)

LITERATURE

Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Modern Masters: Francis Bacon, New York, London and Paris, 1986, no. 102, p. 107, illustrated and illustrated in colour on the back cover

Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris, 1987, no. 149, n.p., illustrated in colour

CATALOGUE NOTE

In the catalogue to the spectacular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the museum's renowned director Alan Bowness described the art of Francis Bacon thus: "His own work sets the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling....for Bacon, the virtues of truth and honesty transcend the tasteful. They give to his paintings a terrible beauty that has placed them among the most memorable images in the entire history of art" (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 7). Executed in this very year, Figure in Movement represents physical testament to this acclamation. Exhibiting the most striking composition, a magnificent array of brushwork and a supremely arresting palette, this is a formidable portrayal of the human animal that epitomises the full gamut of Bacon's artistic genius. Indeed, the inimitable traits of his method, specifically the intense combination of brilliant cadmium orange with depthless black, directly compare with the masterpieces Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Britain, London) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Gifted by the artist to his physician Dr. Paul Brass, who followed his father Dr. Stanley Brass as Bacon's personal doctor and with whom Bacon maintained a close bond until his death in 1992, Figure in Movement possesses an exceptional provenance. The terms of its ownership vividly reflect its importance to Bacon: not only was Dr. Brass a most trusted friend, but when he was first offered a choice of painting and initially suggested another work, the artist instead recommended Figure in Movement, assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. Eminently regarded through its distinguished exhibition history in major shows in Moscow, Paris, London and The Hague, as well as its long-term loan to the Tate; this marks the historic occasion of its first appearance to market.

Foremost among Bacon's innermost clique in 1985 was John Edwards, a handsome East-Ender and the artist's closest companion at this time. Edwards wrote, "it was a perfect relationship. I was never Francis' lover, but I loved him as the best friend a man could have. He was fond of me like a son" (Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1998, p. 7) and Dr. Brass has also stated: "I never heard Francis say a bad word about John. He said to me...'I think of John like a son. He's a son to me really'" (interviewed for Bacon's Arena, directed by Adam Low, produced by Anthony Wall, BBC Arena and The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2005). The parity between Edwards and the present physiognomy is clear: the long jaw-line, the geometries of the eye, nose and mouth and the jet-black hairline. However, Bacon never painted his friend from life and the naked torso of this body is adapted from photos of other models, notably the infamous shots of George Dyer in his underwear taken 20 years earlier. Thus, Figure in Movement conflates two of the most important figures in the artist's life. Significantly, Bacon inserts this being, an amalgamation of that which he held most dear, onto an exposed dais that is a crucible of existential isolation: the natural environment of his extraordinary artistic and philosophical innovation.

While the figure twists and writhes as if to struggle free of the canvas, it is contained within indications of rigid cricket pads. The sport was a subject of fascination for the artist's later career. A photograph of source material littering his studio floor reveals the intriguing arrangement of a copy of Physique Pictorial lying on top of England cricketer David Gower's book With Time to Spare, so that the legs of a brooding male bodybuilder join up with the cricket pads of a batsman underneath. This fusion of diametrically opposed images is archetypal of Bacon's ability to meld starkly eclectic themes to portray the chaos of human existence, and provides apt parallel with Figure in Movement. Bacon draws on his knowledge of art historical precedent, such as the incomparable figural studies of Michelangelo. He accelerates the effects of light and shadow, plunging form in and out of darkness so that several passages of light flow in simultaneous chorus. Chiaroscuro rhythms of anatomic gesture negotiate between material and void, while the figure's left leg dissolves in the black ether of the platform.

More than any other artist of the 20th Century, Bacon held a mirror to the nature of the Human Condition, and Figure in Movement provides the perfect reflection of what he saw. He was fascinated by the postwar works of the French existentialists Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and their themes of alienation, imprisonment and the absurd. The most important actors of Bacon's canon, typified by this figure, crystallise this entire philosophical enquiry, as they let go of the sureties of the past and stand on the threshold of an unknowable future.

An interview between Sotheby's Michael Macaulay and Martin Harrison, editor of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné in preparation for publication.

MM: Could you share your opinion of Bacon's late work of the 1980s and explain how Figure in Movement from 1985 fits into this important period?

MH: Bacon's project in the 1980s can be summed up as refining to their essence the themes that preoccupied him most of his career – the human body, gesture and movement. In eliminating superfluous detail, he could be described as a figurative minimalist. Figure in Movement is a quintessential exemplar of this process. It is a compelling variation of a concept he had first essayed in 1982, in which a naked form wearing cricket pads was raised on a dais. In the 1982 paintings, the 'figure' is an abstracted semi-torso, as in the panel Study from the Human Body, 1982–84, from the diptych in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C. and in Study of the Human Body, 1982 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Evidently, in Figure in Movement, 1985, Bacon set himself the challenge of representing a more complete human body.

MM: How does Bacon's symbolic content, in this case the gladiatorial inference of the inclusion of the cricket pads, relate to the isolation of his figures?

MH: The reference to cricket is deliberately ambiguous: the figure, isolated in an artificial arena, is simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive. Bacon's figures are radically decontextualised into a  kind of existential vacuum: cricket is an outdoor sport, but Bacon's visual field is neither exterior nor interior. Figure in Movement is one of a select group of works made in the last decade of his life that feature a dominant, bright cadmium orange ground, Bacon's favourite colour. In its positive and vibrant aspects it intensifies the confinement of the abject yet heroic figures.     

MM: The cricket pads invoke Bacon's appropriation of found imagery as cues for composition. How had the artist's treatment of found imagery altered by this stage in his career?

MH: Bacon collected images of cricketers in the 1980s, and four books on cricket that remained in his Reece Mews studio at the time of his death are now in the collection of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane: Patrick Eagar and John Arlott, An Eye for Cricket, (1979); David Gower and Alan Lee, With Time to Spare (1980); Mike Brearley, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Story of the England – Australia Series 1981, (1982); Patrick Eagar and Graeme Wright, Test Decade 1972–1982 (1982).  He was familiar with cricket through his relationship with Eric Hall from the 1930s to the 1950s; Hall was an aficionado of the sport and on intimate terms with many of the leading players. Bacon greatly admired David Gower, one of England's leading batsmen renowned for his good looks, and David Sylvester identified Gower as a specific spur for the paintings. [Interviews, p. 180] However, even in the last painting to reference cricket, the central panel of Triptych 1987, the head is unequivocally that of John Edwards whose representations were based on photographs: therefore, Bacon's modus operandi in terms of appropriated imagery remained the same as it had since the 1940s, when he first adapted reproductions of Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion.

MM: This work was executed seven years before Bacon's death. Do you perceive a growing sense of his own mortality, and what does Figure in Movement say about the artist's self-perception in this final period?

MH: Crucial to Bacon's anti-narrative strategy, he located the elements of Figure in Movement in a zone of ambiguity. The protagonist is non-specific, adopting neither an offensive or defensive attitude. The figure also defies spatial logic, occupying an abstract field both behind and in front of the pale blue and black backdrop. The padded left leg dissolves into a smoky shadow on the floor of the elevated dais, the dissociated 'field of play' that acts as a cipher for the confrontation between batsman and bowler on the cricket field. It is too facile to relate the dissolving of forms to his consciousness of mortality, although the black backdrops – opaque voids that resemble tombstones – tend to support such an interpretation, as would the collapsing of the head into the negative space.

This intense and deceptively simple painting transforms the role of the viewer from a passive to an active state: Bacon's fragmented forms and anatomical diversions – the tilt of the body and the violent diagonal sweep of the sketchy arms and hand – insist on a creative interaction. Our gaze is drawn through the converging perspective of the wicket/pedestal and we become both observer and participant.

£94 million of art sold at Frieze auctions

Last week’s auctions fetched more than double the amount achieved last year.

By Colin Gleadell, The Daily Telegraph, 18 Oct 2010

Study for a Dog  Francis Bacon

No one, it seems, was bold enough to bid at Christie’s fund-raiser for the Royal College of Art for the chance to have their portrait painted by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Nor was anyone prepared to bid on a scrappy painting of a dog by Francis Bacon that the artist chucked in a skip. The painting was rescued by an electrician, Mac Robertson, who sold it at an auction in Surrey three years ago, when it fetched £30,000 from a New York gallery against a £1,000 estimate. Last week it was presented by Christie’s with a £120,000 estimate, but with no mention of its history in the catalogue.

Howzat? Francis Bacon’s cricketing portrait to fetch £6m

A Francis Bacon portrait which the artist gave as a gift to his doctor is expected to fetch over £6 million at auction.

By Anita Singh, Arts Correspondent

The Daily Telegraph, 12 October 2010

Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement is estimated to fetch over £6 million at auction.

The 1985 painting, Figure In Movement, is being sold by Dr Paul Brass, the artist's friend and personal physician. It depicts a figure wearing cricketer's kneepads - Bacon had a lifelong passion for the sport.

Bacon, who died in 1992, was the perfect patient, Dr Brass said. "He was always 15 minutes early for every appointment." The portrait has been on loan to Tate Britain for the past decade and will be sold at Sotheby's in New York on November 9.

Francis Bacon painting of cricketer to be auctioned in New York

Figure in Movement, a gift to the artist's friend and GP, expected to fetch at least £4m in Sotheby's sale

Mark Brown, arts correspondent

The Guardian, Monday 11 October 2010

  Francis Bacon’s Figure In Movement

A Francis Bacon painting of a tortured cricketer twisting and writhing is to be sold at auction after hanging in Tate Britain for much of the last decade, Sotheby's announced today.

The painting is being sold by Bacon's friend and personal doctor, Paul Brass, who was given the portrait in 1985, the year it was completed.

After loaning it to the Tate, Brass has decided to sell and an estimate of $7m-$10m (£4.4m-£6.3m) has been placed on it ahead of the auction in New York on 9 November.

Figure in Movement, featuring a typically agonised figure, common in Bacon's work, this time in cricket pads and against a black and bright orange background with blue cage-like struts, also featured in the major 2008 Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, which toured New York and Madrid.

Brass took over the role of being Bacon's personal physician from his father, Dr Stanley Brass, and was offered a choice between two paintings – the cricketer and one of a jet of water.

In an interview with the New York Times, Brass said: "I was tempted to opt for the jet of water, but when I told that to Francis, he said no, that painting happened by mistake when he spilled white paint on the canvas. He told me, 'If I were you, I would choose the cricketer'."

Bacon died in 1992 and his works attract some of the biggest prices for any 20th century artist although no one expects the painting to get anywhere near the record, set in 2008 when Bacon's Triptych 1976 was bought by Roman Abramovich for $86m, reportedly to hang on the walls of his London home.

There have been disagreements about what is going on in Figure In Movement and who it is based on. The figure seems to resemble John Edwards, the man Bacon found solace in after the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971, but there have also been suggestions Bacon based it on David Gower, captain of the England cricket team in the mid-1980s.

A Bacon Cricketer With a Back Story

By CAROL VOGEL

The New York Times, October 8, 2010

The Francis Bacon that Dr. Paul Brass knew was altogether different from the raucous, hard-drinking artist whose canvases depict distorted figures screaming to be freed from their frames.

Dr. Brass, an internist, knew Bacon as a friend and as a patient of his father’s. “The first time I met him I must have been 16,” Dr. Brass recalled, sipping tea in a conference room at Sotheby’s in London recently. He added later, “I would occasionally treat him when my father was on holiday.”

When the senior Dr. Brass retired, his son took over the practice. “I never liked to send fees” — that is, bills — “to friends and family,” he said. “And one day I received a letter from Francis saying that if I didn’t send him a bill for the last two years he would have to find another doctor.”

Not only did Bacon, who died in 1992, pay by “return post,” as Dr. Brass put it, but he also “was always 15 minutes early for every appointment.”

Over the years, as their friendship grew, Dr. Brass would make a point of going to Bacon’s exhibitions. At a show at the Marlborough Gallery in London, Valerie Beston, a director of the gallery at the time, told Dr. Brass that Bacon wanted to give him a painting and that he was to choose from two in the show: one of a jet of water, the other a figure of a cricketer.

“I was tempted to opt for the jet of water, but when I told that to Francis, he said no, that painting happened by mistake when he spilled white paint on the canvas,” Dr. Brass said. “He told me, ‘If I were you, I would choose the cricketer.’ ”

So he did. But Dr. Brass has decided to sell this 1985 painting, Figure in Movement, which features one of Bacon’s anguished figures, this one wearing knee pads and boxed against a black background within a sky-blue frame that is much like a cage. It will go on the block on Nov. 9 at Sotheby’s in New York, where it is expected to bring $7 million to $10 million.

For the past decade the painting has been on loan to Tate Britain. It has also been included in many major Bacon exhibitions, most recently a retrospective at the Tate that travelled to the Prado in Madrid and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.

Cricket fascinated Bacon, and beginning in the 1950s he would attend matches. Over the years the subject crept into several of his paintings. In Figure in Movement, however, the man’s jaw line, eyes, nose, mouth and hair are unmistakably those of John Edwards, Bacon’s closest companion from the mid-1970s until his death.

But the body was adapted from 20-year-old photographs of George Dyer in his underwear. Mr. Dyer was Bacon’s companion until Mr. Dyer committed suicide in 1971. “Dyer and Edwards were both patients,” Dr. Brass noted.

Il compito dell'artista? Svelare qualcosa di me

La mostra milanese di Maurizio Cattelan fa riaccendere il dibattito sul ruolo dell'arte: ha una missione sociale o la sua responsabilità è di altro tipo? Per capirlo, proviamo a fare i conti con «due giganti del Novecento»

di Giuseppe Frangi, Tracce, Italy, 28/09/10

           Francis Bacon Autoritratto.

Complice (anche) la mostra milanese di Maurizio Cattelan, sui giornali è riaffiorata una domanda che tendiamo a dare un po’ per scontata, quando si parla di artisti contemporanei. Esiste una responsabilità sociale dell’arte? Insomma, l’artista ha dei doveri, un compito, in qualche modo “una missione da assolvere” nei confronti della società a cui si rivolge? Rispondo provocatoriamente dicendo di no. L’arte ha un’altra responsabilità: quella di “rispondere” alle domande che riguardano la radice dell’essere. 

Faccio un esempio, per rendere più chiara l’idea. I due artisti che più passa il tempo e più si affermano come i due giganti del secondo Novecento, Francis Bacon e Alberto Giacometti, non si sono mai fatti nessun problema sulla ricaduta sociale delle loro opere. Semplicemente sono stati fedeli a loro stessi e al bisogno vertiginoso di cogliere il mistero dell’essere dentro una società che chiudeva tutti gli spazi al Mistero. Bacon e Giacometti però, così facendo, sono stati artisti di enorme rilevanza sociale, perché per primi e senza timori hanno colto il dramma di quella «Chernobyl antropologica» che avrebbe investito l’uomo di fine millennio. Le immagini che hanno prodotto hanno portato allo scoperto una condizione (Bacon) e un’attesa (Giacometti). Hanno svelato il meccanismo che aveva investito e svuotato l’uomo. Come dice don Giussani: «L’organismo strutturalmente è come prima, ma dinamicamente non è più lo stesso. Vi è come un plagio fisiologico operato dalla cultura dominante». 

Bacon e Giacometti sono stati due grandi solitari, scontrosi e spesso asociali nei loro atteggiamenti. Non hanno risposto a nessuna delle chiamate civili o culturali che la società lanciava. Eppure, andando al fondo alla verità di se stessi, alla fine hanno restituito un messaggio di vera rilevanza sociale. Hanno messo l’uomo davanti alla sua condizione. Hanno rilanciato in modo drammatico e tranchant la domanda che sta poi alla base di ogni possibile consesso sociale: quella sul destino. Il loro modo di essere “sociali” è quello di essere stati testimoni fedeli della propria inquietudine e della propria ansia di verità.

Oggi, con il nuovo Millennio, l’arte tende a scansare questa grande sfida lanciata da Bacon e Giacometti. Magari siamo davanti ad un’arte “socialmente corretta”, ma è un’arte svuotata dalla sua capacità di rischiare, di esporsi per comunicare all’uomo la tensione di una condizione o di un’attesa. 

Se poi si vuole parlare nello specifico di Cattelan, dirò - consapevole di trovare poco consenso - che questo artista, in fondo, è molto più serio di quanto la vulgata mediatica non voglia fare apparire. La sua rappresentazione del Papa colpito dal meteorite, solo, nell’immenso spazio delle Cariatidi, abbarbicato al pastorale con la Croce, è un’immagine dirompente del dramma della Chiesa in rapporto al mondo aggredito dalla Chernobyl antropologica. Come sempre il suggerimento è di non fermarsi agli stereotipi, ma giudicare dopo aver visto e toccato con mano..

Francis Bacon Painting Shown Alongside Artist's Favourite Work

         Art Daily, Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Untitled (Crouching Figures), c.1952 Francis Bacon

The Estate of Francis Bacon has generously placed an important painting by the artist on loan to The Courtauld Gallery. Untitled (Crouching Figures), c.1952, went on display from yesterday and will initially be presented alongside Honoré Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c.1870, in recognition of Bacon’s admiration for Daumier’s masterpiece.

When James Thrall Soby, curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, was researching his book on Francis Bacon he contacted Harry Fischer, director of Marlborough Fine Art, the artist’s dealer. Fischer was able to give him some fresh insight into Bacon’s artistic taste and favourite works, noting: “He considers Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and El Greco’s View of Toledo to be amongst the greatest paintings in the world...”. Bacon knew Daumier’s masterpiece from his visits to The Courtauld Gallery, where it forms part of the Gallery’s celebrated collection of 19th century French paintings.

Untitled (Crouching Figures) is one of Bacon’s most important works from the early 1950s, a period when he was emerging as the leading British painter of his generation. It is one of a group of works in which nude figures are paired in sexually charged homoerotic compositions. In the post-war world of the 1950s, Bacon’s revelation through his paintings of the potentially destructive potential of human desire resonated particularly strongly.

Miguel de Cervantes’s great 17th century novel tells the story of the farcical Don Quixote who sets out on a series of illusory chivalrous quests, mounted on his emaciated horse Rocinante and accompanied by the witness squire Sancho Panza. Bacon scholar Martin Harrison, who first recognised the importance of Fischer’s correspondence with Soby, has written of Daumier’s Don Quixote: “To gaze at this great painting is comparable to experiencing a slightly scaled-down Bacon of the 1950s”, pointing out how the subdued palette and loose brushwork of Daumier’s painting is echoed in Bacon’s work. Bacon may have also have felt an affinity for Daumier’s bleak representation of the tragicomic figures from Cervantes’s novel.

  Bacon forever

      Le Figaro 14/09/2010

       Black and white photograph of Francis Bacon, 1967. John Deakin

L'endroit est incroyable. Au cœur de la même Galerie municipale d'art moderne, l'atelier du peintre irlandais Francis Bacon apparaît dans une salle tel qu'il fut au 7, Reece Mews (South Kensington) à Londres. Il aura fallu le travail de 40 archéologues durant un an pour démonter et remonter à l'identique ce fabuleux trésor. Tout est en place : murs, fenêtres, sol jonché de papier journal et bouteilles de champagne vides. Des photographies du peintre, de ses proches et de son repaire londonien encerclent l'atelier, ainsi que quelques toiles. Devant le refus de La Tate Modern de recevoir cet espace, John Edwards, légataire universel de Bacon, s'était tourné vers Dublin, où naquit le peintre en 1909. Une initiative successful.

The Hugh Lane, Parnel Square. Jusqu'au 31 oct. 2010.

Brian Clarke: rock star of stained glass

Paul McCartney and David Bailey are fans and friends; Francis Bacon chose him to look after his estate; and later this month the Pope will bless his work. Meet Brian Clarke, the world's grooviest stained-glass artist.

By David Jenkins, The Daily Telegraph, 08 September 2010

Pyramid of Peace, Kazakhstan Photo: Brian Clarke

There’s a stained-glass window in one corner of the former ballroom that occupies the first floor of Brian Clarke’s west London house, and it’s a marvel of smoky blues, glowing reds and trenchant whites.

It’s by Clarke and, as the 57 year-old talks about it, his rich Lancashire accent throbbing with enthusiasm, he sings a hymn to the glory of light and of stained glass as a medium: how the blue becomes transparent, the red goes on fire and the white becomes incandescent at 6pm each day, just 30 summer days a year. It’s how ‘stained glass is always kinetic’ that he adores, the ‘liquid element’ of glass that he loves, the ‘transillumination’ he reveres.

Beneath the glass is an ice-blue, geometric, double-sided sofa designed for him by his old friend Zaha Hadid to complement the window, a window she calls ‘fluid and stunning’; on the other walls are a huge lead on sheet lead representation of his even older friend Paul McCartney’s hands – ‘I was drawing his face for a record cover or something and he started playing air guitar, and I drew that, so it’s a sort of portrait of Paul’; a Warhol of Jackie Kennedy – ‘you felt, when you were with Andy, that you were with an artist. He was Narcissus looking into the pool and telling us our reflection was all right’; and a Francis Bacon – ‘I said to Francis once: “You know Francis, some of the things you’re doing could translate into stained glass in a tremendously interesting way, and you’d have the benefit of transmitted colour rather than reflected colour. Have you ever thought of doing any stained glass?” And Francis said [Clarke adopts a camp and bitchy voice]: “No, dear – and I’ve not done any macramé either.”’

Clarke honks with laughter, his broad, large-eared face creased with amusement and shakes his head. ‘He was such a b-----d.’ (Clarke is chairman of the Bacon Estate; so, he says, ‘a lot of people in the art world are, you know, very, very keen to be my friend’).

For all his famous friends and success as a painter, it’s for his stained glass that Clarke is best known. He has, he says, done ‘more stained glass than anyone, probably ever’, and it’s found in settings as diverse as the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan, the Pfizer building in New York, the Holocaust memorial in Darmstadt and the lobby of the Apax Group in Jermyn Street – the last a shimmering mix of deep blues, greens and carnation reds that is, Hadid says, like a ‘window to the outside world, very controlled, very strong’.

Right now, though, Clarke is having an ecclesiastical moment, having fled the overpowering shadow of church architecture 25 years ago: last weekend, in Linköping Cathedral, Sweden, three of his windows are being unveiled in a medieval church that has never before had stained glass in it (‘They went on a tour of Europe, the bishop and his mates and advisers from Swedish Heritage, to look at contemporary stained glass. And they saw a Cistercian Convent I’d done in Switzerland and commissioned me’). And in 12 days’ time the Pope will be blessing a stained-glass window, suffused in ultramarines and ruby reds, which Clarke has done for the Papal Nunciature in Wimbledon.

‘I’d said it wasn’t really my bag: I’m definitely not holy. But the Papal Nuncio is a genuinely cool guy, he really is; he’s everything you want in an archbishop. It’s a small work, but I’m very, very pleased with it – it’s a winner.’

As he tells me this we’re sitting in the kitchen of his house, eating chicken wrapped in bacon, couscous and salad. He’s wearing a pink shirt, khaki-coloured jeans and no shoes; glinting in his right earlobe is a gold cross. The house has been home to many artists from the late Victorian era onward, though Clarke bought it from the singer Leo Sayer (‘we found one of his clown outfits in the attic’) after his then dealer – the ultra-hip and very dangerous Robert Fraser – found it and told him: ‘If you don’t buy it, I’ll regard it as a personal insult.’

Ever ready with an anecdote and dauntingly erudite, Clarke is very affable company. ‘He’s good fun,’ cackles David Bailey, another good friend, ‘though not as funny as me – he hasn’t got my vicious cockney tongue.’ And it’s true: there’s a Lancastrian warmth to Clarke that helps explain why he’s so liked by so many.

The son of working-class parents, Clarke was born in the cotton-spinning town of Oldham. At ‘11 or 12’, a school trip to York Minster was a ‘very powerful juvenile experience. It’s a very warm stone, and I remember the light coming through the stained glass and the choir was practising. In my head, I say I could smell incense, but I suspect… But that was a definite moment, and in a way I’m always trying to recapture it.’

At 12, he won a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts and moved on, via Burnley School of Art and North Devon College of Art and Design, to be awarded a Churchill Memorial Travelling Scholarship. He was already working with stained glass, as well as painting. Teachers thought him: ‘Nuts. Most people were just worried I wouldn’t earn a living.’ Still, by 23, he was already the subject of a BBC arts documentary and living in an old vicarage in Derbyshire with his then wife, Liz.

It was, he says, an idyllic existence, but the capital beckoned and in 1978 he moved to London. ‘There was no possibility of me realising the grandiose ambitions I had for stained glass if I’d stayed.’ And there was his frisky character to take into account.

Clarke was, John McEwen wrote in the Spectator, ‘the most Sixties character to have emerged in the London art scene since the Sixties’, and, Clarke says, his Finsbury Square studio became ‘a hub of activity and of what today, I suppose, is called glamour’. Bailey became a friend (‘I learnt a lot about light from Bailey’), and Bacon’s lover, John Edwards, and then the McCartneys.

An electrifying period, then? ‘Oh yeah. I was the kid, I was the young one. And if I’d thought about it long enough, I couldn’t possibly have dealt with Francis, for example, because I would have been in awe. But I wasn’t, because I thought I was as good as he was: I was full of the arrogance of inexperience. And I wasn’t impressed, you know – by then I’d become friends with Paul [McCartney], close friends with Paul and Linda, and after Paul and Linda it’s difficult to be impressed, really.

‘They took it all so easily, so matter-of-factly – they were so unimpressed themselves. They were very supportive: they bought paintings from me, commissioned me to do stained glass projects for their home, stage sets. Paul really gets art: he gets it very quick, very sharp. And I was working ferociously.’

As McEwen put it when a show of Clarke’s paintings reopened Fraser’s gallery in 1983: ‘A year for Clarke is an age for most of us. His energy is both undeniable and commendably against the English grain.’

But there’s something very English in the singer and actor Richard Strange’s memory of that opening: Clarke’s mother was the guest of honour at an event littered with stars. And, Strange says, Mrs Clarke saw a familiar face across the room and said: ‘“Ooh Brian, you’ve got to introduce me.” So Brian took her across the room, saying: “Excuse me, Andy, excuse me, Mick, I’ve got to introduce my mum to someone.” And they come up to Paul McCartney and Brian says: “Now, mum, I’d like to introduce you to…’ and she interrupts him and says, “Oh Brian, Derek Nimmo needs no introduction.’”

Another important friend made at this time was Norman Foster, with whom Clarke later worked extensively. ‘We shared enthusiasms,’ Clarke says. ‘One of them is light. And the early period of our friendship – by which I mean the first 15 years or so – was just ricocheting from one thrilling moment to another. We’d see each other three or four times a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner, with telephone calls in between. It was all about discovery, new things; we developed new technologies.’

Clarke developed techniques that involve the bonding of glazed colours to architectural ‘float’ glass, often doing this in multiple layers that create an oscillating visual effect; a method that allows colour to be applied to large areas of glass without the familiar dividing lead strap work. Colour, in Clarke’s case, that’s radiantly life affirming.

Many of Clarke’s best friends are architects – Hadid, Foster, Peter Cook, the late Jan Kaplicky – and it is, Hadid says, ‘very rare to have someone who’s an artist who knows about architecture’.

Still, Clarke says: ‘I’ve done things I consider among my best work and they’re in buildings I think should be pulled down, quite frankly. But I can’t do that any more, because it’s lipstick on a gorilla. I can only really do my best when it’s in harmonious tandem.’

That harmony is what he enjoys about working with architects. ‘Artists work on the principle that they have a direct line to God. Well, very often that direct line has bad reception. And what was so thrilling about Norman, and architectural culture, was the inclusiveness of it, the collaboration,’ Clarke says. The downside being, of course, that people introduce him as ‘some kind of architect, or designer. And I’m not. I’m an artist – I’m a poet, not an organiser of imagery.’

It was that savage poet of violence, Francis Bacon who threw a spanner in Clarke’s works. ‘Francis quite liked talking about dying and how he was leaving everything to John – he kind of boasted about it. And John would say: “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Francis; I don’t know how I’ll manage all this.” And Francis would say: “Oh, Brian’ll help you.”

‘It was like that. And then it became that; I’d made a solemn promise I would. And John was as close a friend as I’ve ever had – he had great intuition; he could spot a phoney across a crowded pub. And Francis had been dead about three years and John came for help; he said to me: “I don’t understand these papers.”’

Clarke was, he says, in the middle of ‘an incredibly productive and exciting period of my life’. Still, at Edwards’s request, the High Court made Clarke sole executor of the Bacon Estate and he took up legal cudgels against Bacon’s old gallery, the Marlborough.

He assumed the matter would be over in months; six years later, litigation was still going on – at one stage, Clarke had 20 lawyers working for him. ‘It was horrible. It nearly killed me. If I could rewind the clock, that would be something I would definitely not want to be involved with.’

While the case was going on, ‘we moved Francis’s studio [from Reece Mews, Kensington] to Dublin and that helped me, because it showed some good could come out of this s---, as well as angst and anger and money – the money got bigger and bigger’. No surprise, really: as Clarke notes: ‘Francis used to say: “What people like about my paintings are the noughts.”’

Edwards died before the case was over, leaving Clarke his sole executor. He is chairman of the Bacon Trust, but he’s keen to resign. Meanwhile, a catalogue raisonné is in preparation, works are loaned and gifted, grants given. And ‘there’s one big pay off: I’ve been so close to Francis’s work now, at such an intimate level, with access to great masterpieces on a daily basis’.

Bacon’s studio was famously squalid and chaotic. Clarke’s – on an industrial estate in north-west London – is more ordered, despite the presence of his son’s drum kit. Classical music plays; there’s a view of the ‘lumpen’ Wembley arch; seven people work there.

Over here are the stairs down which Dennis Hopper fell on a visit to the studio; over there an oil on canvas study for a portrait of Andy Warhol. Here are drawings Clarke is making of paint tubes and of chocolate caramel sweet wrappers – ‘I’ve eaten thousands of them.’ Here’s the Fleur de Lys glass he did for Linda McCartney. Here’s multiple evidence of the ‘great hand’ and ‘fine line’ both Hadid and Doris Saatchi Lockhart praise. Here are the skulls that preoccupy him.

And here’s a large-scale proposal he’s preparing for a stained-glass installation at Stratford International, ‘where you get off the train from Paris and Brussels and for the Olympics’. It’s to be 300ft long and 20ft high, his first big work in London, green and yellow and flickering, punctuated with bands of swirling blue. ‘It’s such a quintessentially English thing,’ he says, ‘light coming through oak leaves.’

He pauses. ‘Stained glass – I’m more excited about it than I’ve ever been. It can transform the way you feel when you enter a building in the way nothing else can.’

Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera's exhumed essays cast a spell with their insights into creativity, writes Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer, The Observer, Sunday 2 August 2010

Milan Kundera, Czech born writer who has lived in exile in France since 1975. Portrait taken in Paris in 1981

It is a tribute to Kundera's ability to weave his essayistic spell that my interest was undiminished by the fact that I am either wholly ignorant of many of the composers and writers discussed (Iannis Xenakis, Marek Bienczyk, Gudbergur Bergsson) correct or am familiar with them only through Kundera's earlier books. In any case, Kundera's subjects are mirrors, offering variously distorted reflections on his own work and situation. As he says with reference to a remark by Francis Bacon about Beckett: "When one artist is talking about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what's valuable in his judgment."

The book kicks off with a particularly outrageous example as he reflects on and reprints a piece from the 1970s. In 1972, in an apartment in Prague, he met a demure young woman he knew well who had been interrogated for several days by the authorities. The trauma had upset her bowels so badly that every few minutes she had to rush off to the lavatory. "The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up and I suddenly had the urge to rape her."

"Unconscionable" though this desire was, Kundera cannot disavow it; it forms the basis of his understanding of "the brutal gesture" – the "hand movement that roughs up another person's face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there" – of Francis Bacon's art. This may not be art history as understood by Kenneth Clark but it shoves us into a horrible confrontation with Bacon's art. The standard art-critical habit is to comment on the horror without conveying it so that we look and listen quite comfortably.

Milan Kundera's Encounter is an excellent essay collection

Book review: In Encounter (Faber, £12.99) Milan Kundera reflects on the artists and aesthetic tenets he holds dear.

Metro (UK), Alan Chadwick - 17th August, 2010

Memory and forgetting, exile, identity and the power of art as a safeguard against the erosion of history and our own humanity: these are the themes that dominate this excellent collection of essays in which Milan Kundera reflects on the artists and aesthetic tenets he holds dear.

Writing about the art of Francis Bacon, Kundera praises Bacon’s ‘clearsighted, sorrowful gaze trying to penetrate to the essential’.

Yet that description could just as easily apply to Kundera’s own writing here, whether he is celebrating the music of Janácek or delighting in the comic marker laid down by Rabelais.

At one point, Kundera bemoans the demands of contemporary fashion (cultural ‘blacklists’) in a world where the importance of art is becoming diminished.

Book review: ‘Encounter’ by Milan Kundera

Compelling essays by someone who writes of authors, composers and artists from whom he continues to learn.

Encounter Essays Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher Harper: 192 pp., $23.99

By Michael S. Roth, Special to the Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2010

"Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself?"

Milan Kundera asks this question in writing about the painter Francis Bacon, one of many cultural figures he addresses in his commanding, compelling new collection of essays, "Encounter." It's a question that resonates throughout the book. To what degree can we be distorted by violence and fear — in short, by history — and still be ourselves? Kundera sees this distortion everywhere, a distortion that art engages. As the author looks at contemporary culture, his skepticism curdles into pessimism. In a world increasingly disinterested in art, when do we cross the border and forget what art has taught us about being human? Would we even realize that we crossed that border?

      “Bacons Finsternis”: Immer dem Maler nach

           von Florian Asamer, Die Presse, 31.07.2010

Im Kunstgeschichte-Krimi "Bacons Finsternis" sucht und findet ein verlassener Ehemann Trost und jede Menge Abenteuer in den Bildern des Leinwandapokalyptikers Francis Bacon.

Auch dieser Griechenland-Urlaub endet, wie Griechenland-Urlaube eben enden: bei Meerblick und Wein in der Taverne. Zum Nachtisch erfährt Arthur Valentin von seiner geliebten Frau Isabel allerdings, dass mit dem Urlaub auch ihre Ehe vorbei sein wird.

Zurück in Wien stürzt Arthur, der ein Antiquariat betreibt, nach dem Auszug von Isabel ins Bodenlose. Er verlässt die ehemals gemeinsame Wohnung kaum mehr, überlässt die Arbeit im Antiquariat zur Gänze seiner Partnerin Maia und hängt rosaroten Erinnerungen an seine Ehejahre nach.

Nach Monaten der Verzweiflung führt ihn eine Laune ins Kunsthistorische Museum. Dort in eine Ausstellung von Francis Bacon. Die Bilder rütteln Arthur auf, sie spiegeln seine verborgensten Ängste wider und geben ihm gleichzeitig neue Lebensenergie. Wie in Trance besucht Arthur immer wieder die Ausstellung und beschließt schließlich, den Bildern des irischen Malers quer durch Europa nachzureisen. In der Schweiz begegnet er dann erstmals auf einer Leinwand Bacons Muse Isabel Rawsthorne. Und zieht prompt Parallelen zu seiner Isabel.

Fesselnde Bacon-Interpretationen. Inzwischen ist Arthur eine Art Bacon-Spezialist geworden. Er liest sich quer durch die Arbeiten zu dem Jahrhundertmaler und versinkt in vielen biografischen Details und Zitaten des homosexuellen Künstlers (der ideale Liebhaber?, „der Nietzsche des Football-Teams“). So bringt Wilfried Steiner dem Leser auch die Geschichte der Beziehung zu George Dyer, die Rolle der Isabel Rawsthorne und vor allem Bacons Freundschaft zu Malerkollegen Lucian Freud, dem Enkel von Sigmund Freud, näher.

Dabei glänzt das Buch mit detaillierten Schilderungen – nein, fesselnden Interpretationen vieler Bacon-Gemälde, die dazu einladen, sie gleich noch einmal zu lesen, diesmal mit einem Bacon-Katalog in der Hand. Vor allem mit der seitenlangen Beschreibung des Triptychons „Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion“ gelingt es Steiner, den Leser in tiefe Beunruhigung zu versetzen.

In der Tate Modern in London bekommt die Handlung eine völlig neue Wendung. Während Arthur wieder einmal einen Tag im Museum verbringt, bemerkt er „seine“ Isabel, die mit einem älteren Mann Bilder betrachtet. Er belauscht die beiden unbemerkt, schnappt Gesprächsfetzen auf, die darauf hindeuten, dass eine Exfrau mit ihrem Begleiter einen Kunstraub planen könnte. Als er seiner Geschäftspartnerin Maia von dieser Entdeckung erzählt, und Maia den Mann als einen ihrer an Kunstkatalogen interessierten Kunden wiedererkennt, der auch bei Scotland Yard kein unbeschriebenes Blatt ist, scheint die Sache klar. Arthur und Maia versuchen, den vermeintlichen Kunstdieben in Hamburg auf die Schliche zu kommen.

Wilfried Steiner, der als künstlerischer Leiter am Linzer Posthof arbeitet, verbindet in seinem Roman drei Stränge: eine anschauliche kunstgeschichtliche Reise durch das Leben von Francis Bacon, die tragisch-ironische Schilderungen eines gebrochenen Verlassenen, der über die Trennung von seiner großen Liebe nicht hinwegkommen will, und schließlich einen Kunstdiebstahl in Rififi-Manier. „Bacons Finsternis“ verdankt seinen unbestreitbaren Reiz wohl gerade dem Kontrast zwischen der in jeder Hinsicht schweren Bacon-Kost und einer etwas leicht geratenen Krimihandlung.

Wilfried Steiner, Bacons Finsternis, Deuticke Verlag, 286 Seiten, 20,50 Euro.

Bacons Finsternis

Wilfried Steiners zweiter Roman

Ruth Halle, ORF, o6/08/2010

Ist es ein Krimi, eine intelligente Kunstgeschichte rund um den Maler Francis Bacon oder ein Liebesroman? Wilfried Steiners soeben erschienenes Buch "Bacons Finsternis" ist von allem etwas und lässt sich dennoch nur schwer kategorisieren.

Der Linzer Schriftsteller stellt in seinem bei Deuticke publizierten Buch die faszinierende Figur des radikalen Francis Bacon in den Mittelpunkt und umkreist den irischen Maler mit einer sehr komplexen und auch humorvollen fiktiven Handlung.

Trost von Francis Bacon

Ein Ehepaar verbringt einen harmonischen Urlaub auf Kreta und genießt den letzten Abend auf der griechischen Insel in einer Taverne. Für Steiners Protagonisten Arthur Valentin nimmt der Abend allerdings eine völlig unerwartete Wendung. Beinahe nebenbei erfährt Arthur Valentin nach 15-jähriger Beziehung von seiner Ehefrau, dass dies der letzte gemeinsame Urlaub gewesen sein soll.

Selbtmitleidig vergräbt sich Arthur in seinen Schmerz und überlässt seiner Geschäftspartnerin die Führung seines Antiquariats. Es sollte ausgerechnet der irische Maler Farncis Bacon werden, der Arthur Trost spenden wird. Der 1992 verstorbene Maler warf gleichsam Kreaturen ohne Sinn und Aussicht auf Erlösung auf die Leinwand.

Steiners linkischer Protagonist, den er überzeugend zeichnet und mit erquickender Selbstironie ausstattet, besucht eine Bacon-Ausstellung und ist von der Kraft und Energie Bacons begeistert - eine Begeisterung die Romanfigur und Autor teilen.

Temporeich erzählt

Doch die Faszination für Francis Bacon erweist sich in Steiners Roman keineswegs als probate Beziehungstherapie: Während Arthur der Beschaulichkeit und Innigkeit seiner Ehe nachtrauert, setzen sich die Ereignisse temporeich und von Steiner stakkato-artig erzählt in Gang.

Arthur reist den Bildern Bacons quer durch Europa nach, und vermeint aus den Gesprächsfetzen zwischen seiner Exfrau und einem Kunden die Ankündigung eines Kunstraubs herauszuhören.

Grenzen ausloten

"Bacons Finsternis", den zweiten Roman des Linzer Autors Wilfried Steiner, einordnen zu wollen, erscheint schwierig: Er ist sowohl eine teils humoristisch erzählte Liebesgeschichte, ein rasant und klug erzählter Krimi, als auch eine aufschlussreiche, gut recherchierte Abhandlung über das Leben und Werk Bacons. 

Der 50-jährige Linzer Autor Wilfrid Steiner hat mit "Bacons Finsternis" sein siebentes Buch und zugleich seinen zweiten Roman vorgelegt. Sieben Jahre hat der künstlerische Leiter des Linzer Posthofs an diesem Buch geschrieben.

Wie auch schon in seinem ersten Roman "Der Weg nach Xanadu", in dessen Mittelpunkt der englische Romantiker Samuel Taylor Coleridge stand, fasziniert ihn auch hier wieder das Ausloten der vorstellbaren Grenzen, die Faszination des Denkbaren. 

Textfassung: Ruth Halle

Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy

The Arts and Human Suffering
by Stephen K. Levine
Jessica Kingsley, 2009

Review by Marko Zlomislic, Ph.D.
Metapsycholog, Volume 14, Issue 32, Aug 10th 2010

Levine would have us "embrace our own chaos". However, what does this exactly mean? He writes, "Since we are chaotic, we can face the chaos of trauma without feeling that we must expel it from our being". Is it not the other way around? Since we are not chaotic, we have such difficulty with trauma. If chaos were the essence of our Heideggerian ground, then there would be no problem in dealing with trauma. Trauma would be just another form of chaos that we already are. The experience of trauma says otherwise.

Levine asks, "What kind of art is adequate to the experience of trauma? To me, the answer is the art of the terrible, the grotesque, and the ugly". Here Levine cites the paintings of Francis Bacon. Bacon's work had a huge impact on me. I thought, yes, this is it. I must take his work further into ugliness and darkness. Therefore, I painted a la Bacon and then I had an epiphany. 

What I was painting was only giving strength to death, darkness and chaos. I then began to paint landscapes and I think this is when I began to heal. Ten years after my traumatic event, I realize that art cannot save us from anything. Art is not salvific. It is not a salve or ointment. Returning to life is the grace that saves.

Master thatcher advises fire crews

Wokingham Times - 3 Aug 2010

Thatching work on a cottage once occupied by painter Francis Bacon led to a lesson in fighting thatch fires.

Wokingham fire crews passing Long Cottage in Davis Street, Hurst, took the opportunity to quiz master thatcher James McCormack on how thatch roofs are constructed so they would have a better idea of how to fight a future thatch blaze.

Mr McCormack, of Country Thatching based in Wokingham, told firefighters about the types of reed and straw used in thatching and explained how twisted hazel spares are used to fix bundles of wheat reed to the original thatch.

The impromptu lesson proved so popular a further five teams from fire stations around Wokingham went along to quiz Mr McCormack, who has been a thatcher for 21 years.

He is currently working on Long Cottage which is believed to date back to 1629 and has featured in a BBC film about 20th century painter Mr Bacon.

The owners of the cottage would like to hear from anyone with details about the history of the cottage.

Crossing the Channel

Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Alberto Giacometti

Friendships and Connections in Paris and London 1946-1965

Gagosian gallery,

17-19 Davies Street
London W1K 3DE

June 2 - July 31, 2010

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Crossing the Channel: Friendships and Connections in London and Paris 1946-1965, which examines the vibrant exchange of ideas and influences between Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacometti in Paris and London during the postwar years.

This exhibition spans the period from 1946-the year that the international borders reopened--to 1965, when the Tate Gallery presented Giacometti's retrospective. During this time, the web of friendships and alliances between artists, patrons and collectors from London and Paris proved to be enormously influential. It was Peter Watson - the important British collector and patron of the arts as well as a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London - who connected Bacon, Freud and Giacometti as well as collecting their works, providing stipends and organising exhibitions, including retrospectives for Giacometti and Bacon with the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1955. In Portrait of Peter Watson (1954), Giacometti paid homage to this dynamic and instrumental patron.

The eldest of the three artists, Giacometti was, to some extent, the trio's imaginative lynchpin. With Watson's assistance, Freud travelled to Paris in the mid-forties, where he met Giacometti and sat for two portraits. Giacometti first visited London in 1955, where he witnessed the still-devastating effects of the War. Although he did not meet Bacon until the early sixties, his influence on the younger artist is evident in works such as Miss Muriel Belcher (1959), whose sculpted facial features and dark, abstracted background recall devices that Giacometti used in paintings and sculptures of Annette and Diego.

Bacon and Freud became close friends around 1943. Each chose to paint only their most intimate friends, although Bacon worked exclusively from photographs while Freud painted from live models. Freud's portrait of his future wife Lady Caroline Blackwood, Girl in Bed (1952) was one of the many paintings that travelled with him between Paris and London. In John Deakin (1963-64), Freud portrayed the renowned photographer whose images of Muriel Belcher, Isabel Rawsthorne, George Dyer and others became the basis for many of Bacon's paintings. Bacon also painted a series of portraits of Freud from Deakin's photographs as counterparts to Freud's portraits of Bacon.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Pilar Ordovás.

Master Painters Side by Side for the First Time in the Frans Hals Museum

Art Daily, Saturday, July 10, 2010

HAARLEM.- The Frans Hals Museum is presenting a work by the British artist Francis Bacon flanked by two monumental paintings by Cornelis van Haarlem. What links these artists is their admiration for Michelangelo. This Italian painter, sculptor, architect and poet was a great source of inspiration for them both. The exhibition Conversation Piece II is on view from 3 July to 10 October 2010.

With the series ‘Conversation Piece’, the Frans Hals Museum wants to encourage visitors to take a fresh look at the 16th and 17th-century collection of paintings. By juxtaposing these works with modern and contemporary art, surprising links are laid between highly varied styles and periods in the history of art. The museum demonstrates that even though certain perceptions and opinions have a long history they are nevertheless still valid today and continue to be revisited and explored.

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) was extremely indebted to tradition; as he formulated it himself: ‘in the long run art cannot cut loose from its tradition, but only renew it in a way which will be compelling to a contemporary sensibility.’ In this connection, he also repeatedly acknowledged having a strong affinity with Michelangelo. Bacon particularly admired the Italian master’s nudes: ‘the fleshy figure, coiled around his own axis as if he were about to hurl a discus.’ This description could equally apply to the two works by Cornelis van Haarlem.

Tension and drama

In the painting From Muybridge The Human Figure in Motion: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water / Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (1965; on loan from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) the contorted, misshapen figures infuse the composition with enormous tension and drama. The way in which the paint twists and turns gives the painting a sense of plasticity and movement. The human body has a fleshy fullness and assumes an expressive pose that lend it a distinct sculptural quality. This is also seen in the work of Cornelis van Haarlem.

Voluptuous flesh

The influence of Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) is also evident in the paintings The Massacre of the Innocents (1591) and The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis (1592/1593) by Cornelis van Haarlem (1562 – 1638). His nudes exhibit a comparable interest in exaggerated poses and a voluptuous rendering of ‘flesh’. They are bravura pieces, action-packed and dynamic with an unprecedented drama and vivacity, and with extreme foreshortening and torsion. The poses are immensely complex and the bodies are recreated in innumerable contorted attitudes. The paintings demonstrate Van Haarlem’s artistic virtuosity, and testify to his thorough command of the human figure.

‘Conversation Piece I’ took place in the Frans Hals Museum in 2008 and juxtaposed the German artist Thomas Eggerer (born 1963) to the 17th-century painters Pieter Saenredam (1597 – 1665) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628 – 1682). The common thread then was the clear organisation and definition of space in combination with a precise positioning of the figures. Composition, colour and the effects of light are finely attuned to one another and crafted into a harmonious entity in the work of these three artists.

Bacon en Buenos Aires

Los polémicos dibujos de Francis Bacon llegan a Buenos Aires.

Joan Faus/EFE Buenos Aires, Argentina 08/07/2010

A lo largo de toda su carrera el pintor irlandés Francis Bacon negó haber realizado estos dibujos, unas polémicas obras de arte que no vieron la luz hasta la muerte del artista en 1992 y que ahora se exhiben en Buenos Aires. Una selección de 40 dibujos en papel, realizados por Bacon (1909-1992) durante los viajes que efectuó a Italia durante sus últimos años, componen la exposición La Punta del Iceberg.

Los dibujos de Bacon fueron durante años motivo de una larga controversia sobre su verdadera autoría, que concluyó en 2004 cuando un tribunal italiano verificó definitivamente su autenticidad, explicó a Efe el comisario de la muestra, Massimo Scaringella. Pese al fallo judicial, los miles de dibujos que trazó Bacon aún siguen envueltos en una polémica "que parece trascender la vida del artista", añadió Scaringella.

Para el comisario de la muestra, los dibujos del pintor irlandés reflejan sus "principales temáticas artísticas", como sus emblemáticas escenas de Papas -inspiradas en su "admirado" retrato de Inocencio X del español Diego Velázquez (1599-1660)- y de la Crucifixión, así como retratos y autorretratos.

"Se trata de dibujos que no fueron elaborados para ser exhibidos durante su vida, por lo que ofrecen una reflexión sobre las obras que realizó Bacon al principio de su carrera", agregó el especialista. La muestra acoge una selección de los denominados "dibujos italianos" de Bacon que esbozó en sus viajes al norte de Italia entre comienzos de los años ochenta hasta su muerte en 1992.

El pintor irlandés dibujaba sin ninguna finalidad comercial y fue regalando sus obras a sus amigos, que mantuvieron en secreto su faceta de dibujante, explicó el crítico de arte británico Edward Lucie-Smith, que fue amigo de Bacon. El periodista italiano Cristiano Ravarino fue quien recibió el mayor número de ilustraciones, del mismo modo, apuntó Lucie-Smith, que el italiano Miguel Ángel (1475-1564) dibujaba para complacer al joven Tommaso Cavalieri.

Las obras que se exponen en Buenos Aires son obras realizadas a lápiz sobre papel, en los que Bacon retrata escenas individuales mediante composiciones de líneas sencillas. La mayoría de los dibujos muestra a personas sentadas o de medio cuerpo con figuras deformadas que parecen fundirse con el espacio.

Bacon utilizaba trazos rectos y definidos para perfilar contornos de fondos, como puertas o ventanas, "que contrastan con las líneas desordenadas que insinuan los cuerpos humanos, cuyos rostros aparecen deformados bajo una profunda capa oscura", apuntó Scaringella. A juicio del comisario de la muestra, Bacon oscurecía los rostros de sus modelos porque quería "negarles la cara y entrar en la intimidad de la persona que evocaba". "La negación de la imagen parte de su idea de negar la intimidad del hombre. Quiere comunicar el concepto de que él se sitúa en el interior de la persona", añadió.

La muestra de Bacon, que se podrá visitar hasta el 19 de agosto en el Centro Cultural Borges, es una selección de los bocetos exhibidos en la Bienal de Venecia en 2009.

Francis Bacon’s ‘The Tip of the Iceberg’ Drawings Displayed in Buenos Aires

Art Knowledge News, 6 July 2010

BUENOS AIRES.- The exhibition was organized on occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale but it is a unique event with an extraordinary character; Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires, hosts an exhibition of drawings by Francis Bacon titled The Tip of the Iceberg. Drawings by Francis Bacon. The exhibition – curated by the famous English art critic Edward Lucie-Smith and by Alberto Agazzani - shows a ‘corpus’ of about 20 drawings on paper of various sizes, authentically signed by Francis Bacon which portray a gallery of monstrous human characters, typical iconography of the famous Irish painter who died in 1992.

The 40 black and white drawings attributed to Francis Bacon, which have already been exhibited in the context of the Venice Biennale 2009 and recently in Milan's Durini Foundation. The exhibition runs 30 June to 19 August 2010.

Few years ago (2003-2004) these drawings - and many others - were the subject of a trial to definitively determine their nature - true or fake? Until then, it was universally believed that Bacon did not use to draw, and if he did, it was believed that he immediately destroyed his drawings. Such statement was not entirely true and these drawings seemed to be only a part of the artistic world of Francis Bacon, ‘the tip of an iceberg’, as it was defined by David Sylvester, a Baconian art critic.

Many witnesses and experts were involved in the trial – both against or in favour of the authenticity of the drawings; in 2004 the court closed the investigation and cleared the owner of all charges, Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino - Francis Bacon’s close friend - from whom he claimed to have received the huge package of drawings. The court asserted that part of the drawings are really signed by Francis Bacon and, therefore, can not be regarded as fake.

Those authentic drawings are exhibited in Buenos Aires, but this time they will be subject to a different type of judgment: they will be judged by passionate and curious public and by those who have studied the painter and his work, by critics, art historians and collectors who have made Bacon the object of their passion.

“The strength of an image can be measured by its capacity to penetrate the eye and thereby insinuate itself into the soul of the person viewing it. - commented Alberto Agazzani, curator of the exhibition - It is like a virus that attacks a human being through his sight, softening his soul, causing an unrest for which there exists no cure. Bacon has been a major ruthless spreader of the Twentieth Century, giving visible form to monsters, to the anxieties, the monstrousness and disturbances not only of an entire era, but also of all humanity and amplifying the power to defile the mind, the infectivity through painting.”

It is very likely that the doubts on the authenticity or not of the drawings from the Lovatelli Ravarino collection will not be soothed with this exhibition, indeed. Quite the contrary, this is supposed to be an open, free and straightforward confrontation.

“While it may not lead to a certain, ironclad answer - says Professor Agazzani - it will enrich an enthralling mystery with a Venetian episode that is expected to be dense with suspense.”

Los polémicos dibujos de Francis Bacon llegan a Buenos Aires

EFE, July 3, 2010

Buenos Aires, 3 jul (EFE).- A lo largo de toda su carrera el pintor irlandés Francis Bacon negó haber realizado dibujos, unas polémicas obras de arte que no vieron la luz hasta la muerte del artista en 1992 y que ahora se exhiben en Buenos Aires.

Una selección de 40 dibujos en papel, realizados por Bacon (1909-1992) durante los viajes que efectuó a Italia durante sus últimos años, componen la exposición La Punta del Iceberg.

Los dibujos de Bacon fueron durante años motivo de una larga controversia sobre su verdadera autoría, que concluyó en 2004 cuando un tribunal italiano verificó definitivamente su autenticidad, explicó hoy a Efe el comisario de la muestra, Massimo Scaringella.

Pese al fallo judicial, los miles de dibujos que trazó Bacon aún siguen envueltos en una polémica "que parece trascender la vida del artista", añadió Scaringella.

Para el comisario de la muestra, los dibujos del pintor irlandés reflejan sus "principales temáticas artísticas", como sus emblemáticas escenas de Papas -inspiradas en su "admirado" retrato de Inocencio X del español Diego Velázquez (1599-1660)- y de la Crucifixión, así como retratos y autorretratos.

"Se trata de dibujos que no fueron elaborados para ser exhibidos durante su vida, por lo que ofrecen una reflexión sobre las obras que realizó Bacon al principio de su carrera", agregó el especialista.

La muestra acoge una selección de los denominados "dibujos italianos" de Bacon que esbozó en sus viajes al norte de Italia entre comienzos de los años ochenta hasta su muerte en 1992.

El pintor irlandés dibujaba sin ninguna finalidad comercial y fue regalando sus obras a sus amigos, que mantuvieron en secreto su faceta de dibujante, explicó el crítico de arte británico Edward Lucie-Smith, que fue amigo de Bacon.

El periodista italiano Cristiano Ravarino fue quien recibió el mayor número de ilustraciones, del mismo modo, apuntó Lucie-Smith, que el italiano Miguel Ángel (1475-1564) dibujaba para complacer al joven Tommaso Cavalieri.

Las obras que se exponen en Buenos Aires son obras realizadas a lápiz sobre papel, en los que Bacon retrata escenas individuales mediante composiciones de líneas sencillas.

La mayoría de los dibujos muestra a personas sentadas o de medio cuerpo con figuras deformadas que parecen fundirse con el espacio.

Bacon utilizaba trazos rectos y definidos para perfilar contornos de fondos, como puertas o ventanas, "que contrastan con las líneas desordenadas que insinuan los cuerpos humanos, cuyos rostros aparecen deformados bajo una profunda capa oscura", apuntó Scaringella.

A juicio del comisario de la muestra, Bacon oscurecía los rostros de sus modelos porque quería "negarles la cara y entrar en la intimidad de la persona que evocaba".

"La negación de la imagen parte de su idea de negar la intimidad del hombre. Quiere comunicar el concepto de que él se sitúa en el interior de la persona", añadió.

La muestra de Bacon, que se podrá visitar hasta el 19 de agosto en el Centro Cultural Borges, es una selección de los bocetos exhibidos en la Bienal de Venecia en 2009.

Francis Bacon fue uno de los artistas figuristas más relevantes del siglo XX y en calidad de autodidacta no asistió nunca a ninguna escuela de arte.

Sus inicios en la pintura están marcados por el surrealismo, pero progresivamente derivó al expresionismo, dentro del cual es considerado como máximo exponente de la escuela inglesa.

El artista plasmó en su obra el dolor, la angustia, la muerte y el sexo, ya que, como expresara en cierta ocasión: "Cuando se es fiel a la vida, se es inevitablemente macabro porque finalmente se nace para morir".

Su carácter le llevó a destruir, a los 35 años y cuando todavía no había logrado el reconocimiento de su obra, la mayoría de sus cuadros, y fue en 1944, al acabar "Tres estudios de figuras junto a una crucifixión", cuando le llegó la aceptación de la crítica.

DIBUJOS ITALIANOS DE FRANCIS BACON, PRIMERA VEZ EN MUESTRA

Ansa Latina 01/07/2010

Por Gisela Antonuccio BUENOS AIRES, 1 (ANSA) - Los "dibujos italianos" de Francis Bacon, uno de los artistas contemporáneos más cotizados, son expuestos en Buenos Aires por primera vez fuera de Italia, como testimonio del "método de trabajo" del pintor irlandés, que refuta además la aseveración de que "nunca dibujaba".

    Se trata de los dibujos que Bacon (1909-1992) realizó en Italia durante sus reiteradas visitas, que integran la muestra La punta del iceberg, que se exhibe en el Centro Cultural Borges, en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, hasta el 15 de septiembre.

    A raíz de una huelga del organismo de sanidad Senasa que controla los arribos en la Aduana, la inauguración, el miércoles por la noche, tuvo algo del destino accidentado que envolvió a las piezas en la última década: el público llegó a la sala antes que las obras, que terminaron de montarse a última hora.

    Es que los dibujos son los mismos que fueron objeto de una controversia judicial en Italia durante casi una década, que terminó en 2004, cuando un tribunal "no pudo determinar que no se trataban de Bacon", precisó a ANSA uno de los curadores de la muestra, Massimo Scaringella.

    Algunos fueron sólo exhibidos en la Bienal de Venecia de 2009. Otros, recientemente en la Fundación Durini de Milán.

    Los que integran la exhibición son una serie de 40 dibujos -sobre un total de 300- que Bacon obsequió a su amigo Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino a lo largo de sus frecuentes visitas entre 1980 y 1992, año de la muerte del pintor expresionista.

    Otra serie será exhibida a partir de julio en Lisboa. "Aunque es impropio decirles dibujos. Son más bien una obra completa, piezas acabadas en sí mismas. Más aun porque algunos son de un metro por dos de dimensión", opinó Scarigella.

    El curador italiano precisó que "la comparación de la firma de Bacon llevó a determinar su autenticidad, así como la veracidad de su vínculo con Ravarino".

    Para Edward Lucie-Smith, el otro curador de la muestra, se puede observar en ellos "el método de trabajo de Bacon", pues en ellos se capta "la habilidad para llegar al esqueleto de la imagen" que tenía el artista.

    Ello, a pesar de que Bacon insistía en que nunca dibujaba. Pero la razón de esa afirmación, dijo Lucie-Smith, se relaciona con el método de trabajo que empleaba, que muchas veces se servía de instrumentos o plantillas geométricas, del que surgía una forma predeterminada, y de ahí pasaba a la elaboración.

    Las piezas pertenecientes a la colección privada de Ravarino son los que confirman por primera vez con una exhibición que en cambio Bacon era prolífico también en el dibujo. Con Ravarino se ponía en contacto cada vez que viajaba en Calderino, cerca de Bologna, en Venecia o en Cortina d'Ampezzo. Tras la muerte del pintor irlandés -también de ciudadanía inglesa-, Ravarino vendió algunos de ellos. Pero enseguida fue demandado por sus compradores, descreídos de la autenticidad de la firma.

    El proceso para establecer la autenticidad de los dibujos llevó casi una década, y es narrado en el libro "La punta del témpano" (Maretti Editore), de Umberto Guerini, el abogado que defendió a Ravarino, tras reunir documentos originales y testimonios de allegados a Bacon, para respaldar su defensa.

    "Bacon dibujaba y pintaba abiertamente en Italia", cuenta Guerini. "Regalaba despreocupadamente sus dibujos", en especial a Ravarino, afirmó su abogado, aún cuando era y es uno de los artistas más costosos.

ACZ

DIBUJOS ITALIANOS DE FRANCIS BACON, PRIMERA VEZ EN MUESTRA

Están pendientes de recibir los trámites administrativos de control virológico

El Mundo, Efe | Buenos Aires || 01/07/2010

Los 40 dibujos del pintor irlandés Francis Bacon, que debían exponerse a partir de este miercoles en Buenos Aires, están retenidos desde el pasado viernes en la aduana del aeropuerto internacional de la capital argentina, según informó un portavoz de la organización de la muestra.

La retención se debe a que las cajas de madera en las que se almacenaron los dibujos están pendientes de recibir los trámites administrativos de control virológico, añadió el portavoz de la muestra, cuya inauguración estaba prevista para el 30 de junio en el Centro Cultural Borges de Buenos Aires.

Los responsables del centro se muestran confiados en que el bloqueo de los dibujos, que procedían de Italia, se resuelva de forma inminente para poder inaugurar la exposición lo antes posible. Los controles virológicos de productos en las aduanas argentinas suelen efectuarse en un plazo de entre uno y dos días, señaló el portavoz.

Una huelga de dos días por parte de algunos empleados del Servicio Nacional de Sanidad y Calidad Agroalimentaria podría ser la causa de la retención de los dibujos, apuntaron portavoces del organismo estatal.

Un total de 40 dibujos del reconocido pintor Francis Bacon (1909-1992) componen la muestra La Punta del Iceberg que expondrá las obras hasta el próximo 19 de agosto.

En el Centro Borges / Primera exhibición del pintor en América latina

Dibujos con historia en una muestra de Bacon

Se exhiben 40 obras que fueron parte de un largo litigio judicial

Laura Casanovas, |LA NACION | Viernes 02.07.2010

El pintor irlandés Francis Bacon decía que no dibujaba y así lo sostenía el mundo del arte. Hasta que empezaron a salir a la luz sus dibujos e, incluso, el dueño de 300 de ellos ganó hace algunos años un juicio en Italia que confirmó que esas obras eran del artista.

Es una historia atrapante a la que el público argentino tendrá el privilegio de acercarse desde mañana con la muestra de 40 de los dibujos que formaron parte del juicio en el Centro Cultural Borges (Viamonte y San Martín) y que, en su mayoría, se exhibieron en la Bienal de Venecia de 2009. La inauguración de la muestra estaba prevista para hoy, pero un paro en el Senasa retuvo las obras más de lo previsto. La intención de los organizadores es acelerar el montaje para cumplir con los tiempos para la apertura, hoy, a las 19, y prometen que sí estará abierta al público mañana.

Será la primera vez que llegue a América latina una muestra de Bacon, que falleció en 1992. Uno de los curadores es el renombrado crítico e historiador Edward Lucie-Smith, experto en los dibujos de Bacon. El otro es Massimo Scaringella.

En los tribunales

"Durante mucho tiempo se sostuvo que Bacon no dibujaba. Pero hizo muchos dibujos, y distintos. Hay varios grupos, entre ellos el de la Tate Gallery, los que se encontraron en el estudio de Bacon luego de su muerte, y los de Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino", contó Lucie-Smith a LA NACION ayer, en un diálogo en el que analizó los dibujos, los comparó, y explayó todo su conocimiento y pasión por su tarea artística.

Ravarino y Bacon tuvieron una larga y estrecha amistad y Bacon le dejó los dibujos. Sin embargo, alguien le inició un juicio penal a Ravarino al alegar que eran falsos.

Es entonces cuando llega a esta historia el abogado italiano penalista Umberto Guerin, que también está en Buenos Aires acompañando la muestra. Ravarino era periodista y algunas veces había contactado a Guerin para tener información de algún caso. Pero esta vez le pidió que lo defendiera en el juicio para probar la autenticidad de los dibujos.

La querella tuvo lugar entre 1996 y 2004. "Se probó que Cristiano y Bacon se conocían. Luego se probó que los dibujos eran parte de la relación entre ambos. Y los peritajes también examinaron la firma del artista en los dibujos, el papel y el diseño, comparándolos sobre todo con sus pinturas", contó a LA NACION Guerin, quien escribió un libro, La punta del iceberg , que da cuenta de todo el proceso judicial. Y comentó que estos dibujos cuestan hoy entre 100.000 y 500.000 euros cada uno.

Para Lucie-Smith, los dibujos de este grupo son "los más interesantes y los más ambiciosos" de la producción de Bacon porque, por ejemplo, no son bocetos, sino dibujos finales. El conjunto que se verá en nuestro país incluye dibujos de 70 x 100 cm, están hechos con lápiz entre los años 80 y su muerte, y presentan figuras humanas con esa línea deformada y esa expresividad entre grotesca y de inquietud que caracterizan su figuración. La muestra, titulada La punta del iceberg, se podrá ver hasta el 19 de agosto.

Abre una muestra con las obras “malditas” del gran Francis Bacon

Son dibujos que le regaló a un amante y cuya autenticidad fue muy cuestionada.

Por Mercedes Pérez Bergliaffa - ESPECIAL PARA CLARIN

Sociedad, Cultura, Clarin, 30/06/10

Amo la palabra “caos”. Mi vida es una serie de riesgos”, decía el genial Francis Bacon 30 años atrás. Su comentario viene como anillo al dedo para explicar sus obras y la historia casi maldita que arrastran.

La punta del iceberg se titula la muestra en la que 40 dibujos de Bacon estarán expuestos en Argentina desde hoy, si todo sale como estaba previsto.
Es la primera vez que se exhibe un conjunto de obras de Bacon, uno de los pintores más grandes del Siglo XX, en nuestro país.

Las obras que se verán aquí tienen una historia extraña: pertenecen a la colección de quien era uno de los amantes ilegales de Bacon: su amante italiano Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. Bacon le regaló los dibujos que hacía durante sus estadías en Italia, adonde viajaba escapando de la “corte de mediocres aduladores” de Londres, como el pintor llamaba a sus seguidores.

Cuenta Ravarino que Bacon dibujaba todo el tiempo y regalaba estos dibujos a gente que no tenía nada que ver con el arte: vecinos que ni sabían quien era el pintor, ladrones, borrachos, malvivientes, gangsters.

También le dio a Ravarino algunos centenares de dibujos. Aquí comienza el nudo de la historia, la punta del iceberg que da título a la muestra: cuando su amante anunció que tenía más de 300 dibujos, la galería con la que Bacon tenía contrato exclusivo (una de las más importantes del mundo, la Marlborough, de Nueva York) dijo que eso no era posible, que Bacon no dibujaba. Que esos dibujos eran falsos. Comenzaron entonces 20 años de juicios, análisis de historiadores del arte y críticos y rejunte de testimonios.

Debido a que la mayoría de los dibujos tiene la firma del artista, los jueces sentenciaron en 2004 que las obras son verdaderas. Y la galería tuvo que aceptarlo. Muestras como esta buscan que todo el mundo sepa que son legítimos.

Pero no dejemos que esta historia nos impida contemplar las obras: lo que se expondrá en el Borges son dibujos de Bacon, no pinturas. Esto significa que, si bien son fuertes, oscuros, dramáticos, no tienen el impacto ni la intensidad extrema que producen sus grandes pinturas. Pero sí tienen rasgos formales distintivos del artista, y mantienen su oscuridad.

Como explicó en exclusiva a Clarín el historiador inglés Edward Lucie-Smith, especialista en la obra de Bacon que viajó a Argentina como co-curador de la muestra: “Hay que fijarse en la torsión que existe en estos trabajos, en las señas que Bacon repite aquí y en sus pinturas, en cómo estos cuerpos y rostros se retuercen.”

Señas de una crueldad sórdida que Bacon hizo presente en su pintura y en su vida, esta exposición es un iceberg que tiene dos puntas: el valor estético de las obras, y también su valor económico. No en vano el abogado que llevó adelante toda la batalla, Umberto Guerini (dueño de algunos dibujos) también viajó a Buenos Aires para la inauguración.

Viaggio con Francis Bacon

«La prima volta che vidi un quadro di Bacon dal vivo fu a Palazzo Reale, in una grande mostra sul ritratto curata da Flavio Caroli. Stavo nella sala guardando un bellissimo ritratto di Alberto Donghi, un pittore che trovo affascinante e soprattutto inquietante per induzione, come sono affascinanti in tale modo certe belle donne che però non vogliono particolarmente colpirti col loro charme.

«Conoscono il valore della loro bellezza, e perciò, saggiamente, non ne abusano.»

Nel 2008, quando era scoccato il sedicesimo anniversario della scomparsa dell’artista americano, Luigi Ficacci pubblica uno splendido lavoro dal titolo “Francis Bacon e l’ossessione di Michelangelo” per i tipi di Mondadori Electa. Un’attenta indagine su un aspetto della poetica di questo grande protagonista della storia dell’arte internazionale: il profondo rapporto con Michelangelo che lega i due grandi maestri circa la percezione del flusso della profondità umana nello Spirito del Mondo.  Ed ora a distanza di due anni, esclusa qualche altra brillante monografia sull’argomento, per i tipi di Zona editrice, esce un lavoro eccellente dal titolo  “Un viaggio con Francis Bacon” di Franz Krauspenhaar.

L’autore rivela da subito in un gioco polisemico di rimandi e riferimenti, quanto Bacon possa diventare un’ossessione per uno scrittore: una patologia dovuto al suo essere oscillante tra un’incredibile potenza carismatica, una sensualità oscura, schiacciata da un terribile senso di tragedia irreversibile, il suo percepire la grevezza del meccanismo del peccato e della condanna, il suo rendere esteticamente la vulnerabilità dell’uomo, che può comunque con un estremo atto di forza e violenza elevarsi oltre i limiti. Per Krauspenhaar, Bacon è un mattatore della Fine, come categoria ultima prima del riscatto dell’uomo, che vive tra miasmi di putrefazione e morte. La Fine come incitamento alla Cattiveria, perché non si venga definitivamente eliminati dall’implacabilità di altri soggetti più “evoluti” e veloci magari programmati geneticamente meglio alla sopravvivenza. Non so bene definire questo prodotto editoriale, perché l’autore sembra provarci gusto nel non dare esplicite coordinate ermeneutiche sul suo lavoro dal momento che meticcia narrazioni, stili e grammatiche. Possiamo solo dire che la sua scrittura acidula e tagliente ci porta lungo un viaggio pop, pure troppo, su una delle figure più emblematiche della storia dell’arte.

Cinema, Arte, Letteratura in un mix che h come protagonista il sublime e morboso Francis Bacon I fan della Deriva nella Storia dell’Arte contemporanea non rimarranno delusi da un autore come Franz Krauspenhaar in grado come sempre di stupire!

«L’altro ieri scopro un quadro attribuito a Bacon dopo la morte. È il retro di un paesaggio non particolarmente brutto, di un certo Denis Wirth-Miller, artista semisconosciuto, dipinto nel ‘58; raffigura un campo di pannocchie, un cielo blu piatto, in lontananza una campagna inglese che avrebbe potuto pennellare Ennio Morlotti in vacanza dalla Brianza gaddiana del Maradagal dei suoi informali viaggi pittorici nella macchia lombarda. E dietro, di Bacon, c’è un cane; simile ad altri cani, piccoli, tozzi e presumibilmente famelici e cattivi, dipinti dal pittore inglese negli anni cinquanta».

Franz Krauspenhaar ha scritto Avanzi di balera (Addictions), Le cose come stanno e Cattivo sangue (Baldini Castoldi Dalai), Era mio padre (Fazi), Franzwolf. Un’autobiografia in versi (Manifattura Torino Poesia) e L’inquieto vivere segreto (Transeuropa). È stato redattore di «Nazione indiana». È uno dei principali animatori dei dibattiti culturali in Rete.

Michael Wojas: Proprietor, barman, counsellor...

The man who ran the notorious Colony Room Club has died, aged 53. Jerome Taylor looks back at the Soho establishment that for decades attracted London's literary and artistic elite

The Independent, Wednesday, 9 June 2010

Michael Wojas was characteristically sanguine when he was asked five years ago to describe what it had been like running one of London's most notorious private clubs. "I'm the proprietor, the bar manager, lavatory attendant, psychiatric counsellor, odd-job man and accountant," he beamed in a self-penned article for The Independent. "There certainly isn't anything I haven't done."

Wojas, who died on Sunday from cancer at the age of 53, was musing over the 21 years he had spent as a barman, and later proprietor, of the Colony Room Club, a debauched drinking establishment frequented by artists, dandies, thinkers, wits, pimps and whores which came to symbolise both the heart – and the eventual demise – of London's Soho.

Until its closure in 2008, when Wojas suddenly announced to the surprise of his patrons that he had sold the club's lease, the one-room members only bar had served some of the capital's thirstiest, rowdiest and most outspoken wits.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it became Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud's favourite drinking hole, a place where the two artistic titans could row, lunge, battle and then embrace in the comfort of an establishment that adored eccentricity and eschewed the mundane.

A literate fly on the club's nicotine-stained walls could have published the sort of no-holds-barred memoir of London's literary elite that would have had scandal-lovers and publishers alike foaming at the mouth in anticipation.

One only had to glance upon those frighteningly green walls to get an understanding of the type of clientele that came to call 41 Dean Street their home. Behind the bar stood an enormous mural painted by Michael Andrews depicting a typical night in the rooms. At the centre was the bar's founder Muriel Belcher, surrounded by scions of Soho such as great wit Jeffrey Bernard, Henrietta Moraes – a Bacon muse – and flamboyant aristocrat Lady Rose McClaren.

A Birmingham-born Jew and proud lesbian, Belcher discovered that the best way to keep her clientele interesting was to hire Bacon, through the medium of a healthy tab, to invite his friends. He acted as a sort of Pied Piper of unusual drinking companions attracting, as Wojas later remarked, "a mixture of people from Lord and Lady Muck to the barrow boys from the market where Muriel bought her vegetables".

Belcher opened her club in 1948 and was rarely seen without a cigarette and glass in hand. She was famed for referring to all her clients in the female form. At a time when pubs were forced to close in the afternoon, the Colony Room offered its parched guests a place to drink until the sun went down, and then some more.

Journalist and writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft spent many afternoons at the club in the Seventies. "Its heyday was probably just before I arrived but even in the 1970s it was an extraordinary place," he said. On one particularly debauched evening Bacon ripped his shirt open. "That wasn't anger or lust," he recalled. "Simply ... he couldn't quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall."

At first glance, Polish-born Wojas might have seemed an unlikely character to take over such a gregarious venue. Quiet, slim and almost luminescently pale, he studied chemistry at Nottingham University arriving in London two years after Belcher's death in 1979. Ownership of the club had passed to Ian Board, an even louder – and brasher – version of Belcher who was renowned for getting drunk, hiding the night's takings and then forgetting where he had put them the following day. Wojas would spend the first few hours of the morning looking for buried treasure. "I thought I'd work for a couple of months before I figured out exactly what I want to do – that was 24 years ago," he once recalled in 2005. "I didn't realise at first that I'd found my home."

The club nearly disappeared into the annals of Soho history during the 1980s, as yuppie culture stamped its mark on the capital. But the following decade a new breed of artistic clientele – forever dubbed the Young British Artists – led the Colony Rooms through a prolonged and heady renaissance.

"It was a mad and eccentric place," recalled Tracey Emin, who spent much of the 1990s quaffing the club's notoriously poor wine alongside fellow Young British Artists Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. "There were so many extraordinary funny occasions and nights there, but they all blend into one big night at the Colony Room."

Sebastian Horsley, one of London's most delightfully dysfunctional and outspoken wits, was known to spend weeks at a time propping up the bar at the Colony Room. "I first visited it when I was 20 because I'd read that that was where Francis Bacon used to hang out," he said. "I ran up the narrow stairs and was promptly told to 'fuck off' by Ian Board. I knew all about rudeness masquerading as honesty." A decade later he returned and was allowed in by Wojas. "The Club reminded me of an alcoholic tardis," he recalled. "It was minute on the outside but huge on the inside and you went there for love, which they served by the glassful."

But love was in short supply during the gruesome decline of the Colony Room, which, in many ways, came to symbolise the purification of Soho, once London's seedy, beating heart. By the mid-2000s the club and Wojas were in deep financial trouble.

Artists of all different hues pitched in to save their favourite drinking den by donating their work. But the mood soon turned sour with accusations that the club's proprietor had begun treating the paintings as gifts, sold off for his own personal gain, rather than for the greater good of the favourite venue.

Wojas sold the lease for the Colony back to the building's landlord and took a backstage role in the Soho scene. The camaraderie that once bound the club together was shattered as Wojas's detractors and defenders went to war, even in the courts. Horsley, who was initially a firm friend of Wojas but later fell out publicly with him over a campaign to save the club, said the Colony's closure represented the wider demise of Soho tradition.

"Soho has gone down hill immeasurably," he said. "Ten years ago, on a good night here, you could get your throat cut. The air used to be clean and the sex used to be dirty. Now it is the other way round. Now it's full of boutiques, 'weave-your-own-yoghurt' establishments, wall-to-wall coffee shops and gay hairdressers. There is even a health club. A health club in Soho, for Satan's sake! Can you imagine? That's like having a brothel in a church."

But others say Wojas did the best he could to sail against prevailing winds and remember the club before rancour took over. "He was a very special man who, following the death of Ian Board, turned the club on its head and revolutionised a little piece of Soho as we knew it then," recalls singer Lisa Stansfield, who knew Wojas for more than 20 years. "When no one else would listen, he embraced the young British and brought live music to the Club."

Above all, Stansfield remembers the way the Colony's last owner would call out last orders at the end of the night with the words "rush-up, dash-up, spend-up and fuck off."

"He was a punk at heart," she said. "He will probably be appalled if he finds that heaven actually exists."

Obituary: Michael Wojas

Michael Wojas, who has died aged 53, was the third and last proprietor of the Colony Room Club in Soho, the drinking club known for its bohemian ways and members such as Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard.

The Daily Telegraph, 07 June 2010

Michael Wojas, Tom Baker, Francis Bacon, Ian Board, John Edwards

The Colony, fundamentally an afternoon drinking club, in the days of restricted pub hours, formed, from 1948, a notable part of the real-life, comic-tragic soap opera of Soho. Wojas, an English Pole with a nasal London accent and a long chiv-mark down one pale cheek, arrived as a barman in 1981 and took over on the death of Ian Board in 1994.

Board, who called himself Ida after his supposititious initials, was a monster: hoarse-voiced, swollen-nosed and foul-mouthed, he fell into uncontrollable rages. He was also very funny. While the club's founder, Muriel Belcher, had taken to using as an affectionate diminutive a four-letter word with the letter -y tacked on, Board's speciality was a torrent of obscenities artfully studded with demoralising terms such as "dreary".

For 13 years under Board, Wojas served quietly behind the bar in the upstairs room with its dark-green walls covered with photographs and its carpet like asphalt. He dried up glasses, all the while clocking the peculiarities of the customers: Bacon, alternately hilarious and stiletto-tongued; Daniel Farson, who would suddenly turn from affability into strangulated tirades of abuse; Graham Mason, a former television journalist known for his stupendous intake of alcohol, once going for nine days without eating. Wojas knew too the habits of the solicitor who often fell backwards off his barstool, or of the old woman known as Mumsy whose son had died. At his best, Wojas was a therapist.

In his first two years at the club, each day would begin with a hunt to find the previous day's takings, which a suspicious Ian Board had hidden behind a mirror or inside the piano before passing out and forgetting the spot.

Some members grew tired of being insulted, and Wojas attempted after Board's death to prevent the club from turning into a museum by encouraging its use by a generation of young British artists such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin.

Wojas would sit on the high stool at the end of the bar near the door, taking note of who should be repelled. He also decided who could become a member. On top of the fridge by the window a bust of Ian Board, in which his ashes had been inserted, sullenly eyed proceedings. Opposite, a smoke-darkened mural by Michael Andrews covered the wall behind the piano that was seldom played.

But Wojas initiated music nights in the one small room, attracting names such as The Magic Numbers, Alabama 3, Billy Bragg and Paul Weller. Suggs, from Madness, whose mother had long visited the club, presented a music series for ITV from there.

Wojas also came up with the wheeze of holding a series of art exhibitions by members. Behind the bar, above a caption "Not worth a fucking penny", hung a spot-painting by Damien Hirst, who bucked the general trend by giving up drink and moving to the country.

Like most stories associated with the Colony, Wojas's ended in tragedy, with the closure of the club at the end of 2008, and a tangled series of lawsuits over his right to artworks he had offered for sale.

Michael Wojas was born in London on August 9 1956. After Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, he studied Chemistry at Nottingham University. The rest of his life he gave to Soho.

Habitués of the Colony were used to the florid symptoms of decay of fellow-drinkers; observing them was said to be Ian Board's pastime. In the last decade of his life Wojas, who died of cancer, could sleep only by leaving on the radio and rocking backwards and forwards. The rocking and shaking increasingly invaded his daytime life.

He did not marry, but had a succession of more or less long-term girlfriends.

Obituary: Michael Wojas

Final proprietor of the bohemian Soho drinking club where generations of London’s artistic set met to drink and exchange scandal

The Times, 8 June, 2010

If the walls of the Colony Room Club in Soho could speak, polite society would blush. It had been the archetypal louche drinking den for artistic bohemians for the past 60 years or so, with only three proprietors, the last of whom was Michael Wojas.

He did not cut a prepossessing figure. Pale, diminutive and hunched, he tended to slink through the streets of Soho in dark glasses, hugging the walls, as if trying to look inconspicuous. He had a serious vodka habit and the characteristic etiolated look of one for whom daylight was anathema. One acquaintance described him as looking like a blade of grass growing under a bucket. In his latter years he said little but would sit on a chair quietly rocking. He never seemed to eat. Or, at least, that’s what some saw. To others, he was quite the opposite: talkative, amusing, sensitive and with a great capacity to listen and dispense sympathetic advice — “our twisted shepherd”, as one friend described him. He was also an enthusiastic cook.

Some 18 months ago he incurred the wrath of some of the club’s stalwarts by giving up the unequal struggle to make ends meet and handing the premises back to the landlord, thus bringing down the shutters not only on their favourite watering hole and meeting place but also on a little piece of Soho history.

Over the years the tiny first-floor club in Dean Street, with its bilious green walls and battered carpet with countless cigarette burns, had beceome celebrated for its unbridled conversation and excess. It had gained notoriety in the 1950s as the place where the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud let rip in heroic drinking bouts under the baleful eye of its then chatelaine Muriel Belcher, a Portuguese-Jewish lesbian with an acid tongue who referred to everyone as “she”. Bacon mixed generosity with tartness. “Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,” he would say.

The Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg (later Lord Bradwell) was a regular, sometimes with a young man on his arm. The jazz singer George Melly was a habitue; the artists Patrick Caulfield and Frank Auerbach were members, as was Colin MacInnes whose novel about London life in the 1950s, Absolute Beginners, has more than a whiff of the Colony Room Club about it.

Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, E. M. Forster, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, even, it was said, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon — all had made the pilgrimage to the bohemian shrine and crossed the tattered threshold to savour its disreputable atmosphere. In recent yearsy, the club had been colonised by the Britart pack of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas.

Michael Wojas was born in Edgware, North London, in 1956 and was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then Nottingham University where he read chemistry. On graduating he came to London where he got a job as a barman at the Colony Room in 1981. His girlfriend’s mother was a friend of Muriel Belcher who had set up the club in 1948. Belcher had died a year before he arrived and her place had been taken by the even more foul-mouthed Ian Board.

“I thought I would work there for a couple of months before I figured out exactly what I wanted to do,” Wojas said. “I didn’t realise at first that I had found my home. I spend more time here than I do in my flat.

“I had led quite a sheltered upbringing, coming from a scientific background,” Wojas said, “and I was fascinated by the range of crazy extroverts here; Ian perhaps being the maddest. The first couple of years Ian would hide the takings from the till every night, when he was drunk. The next day we would spend an hour trying to find them. He thought I was going to nick the money. It took him two years before he realised I was going to stay, and he started to trust me. He drove a lot of people away.”

Board died in 1995 and left the business to Wojas. “I’m the proprietor, the bar manager, lavatory attendant, psychiatric counsellor, odd job man and accountant. There certainly isn’t anything I haven’t done,” he said.

Latterly, Wojas had suffered from depression and the vodka had taken its toll on his liver. He is survived by his long-term partner, the actress Amanda Harris.

Michael Wojas, proprietor of the Colony Room Club, was born on August 9, 1956. He died of cancer on June 6, 2010, aged 53

Bacon on the menu at Gorbachev gala

By Arifa Akbar, The Independent, Friday, 4 June 2010

An original, signed Francis Bacon triptych is one of the remarkable items up for auction at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation Annual Gala, which raises money for cancer care in Russia and Marie Curie in Britain. The work was kept by the late artist in his private collection at his 7 Reece Mews studio in London and, after his death, treasured by his lover, John Edwards, who died in 2003.

The foundation's patron, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose late wife it is named after, and chair, Evgeny Lebedev, who is also chairman of Independent Print Ltd, publishers of The Independent, are hoping money raised in the fifth annual gala will exceed the £1.1m generated last year at a star-studded event in the grounds of Stud House in Hampton Court Park. Other lots under the hammer include a pair of tickets to the 2011 FA Cup final at Wembley, lunch with the actor Kevin Spacey, and a dinner cooked by the model-turned-chef Sophie Dahl, with musical accompaniment by Jamie Cullum. Those of a frothier disposition can bid for a jelly wrestle with Lara Stone, refereed by David Walliams.

Confissões e disputas motivam bate-papos

Conversas entre escritores fogem do trivial e buscam aprofundar questões

Estadão, Brasil, 01 de junho de 2010

Ateliê. Francis Bacon, diante de seu estúdio em Londres: pintor fala sobre infância, álcool e influências como Picasso

Luis Fernando Verissimo comenta a morte do pai, Erico; o pintor Francis Bacon relembra as crises de asma que sofria na infância; já o escritor americano Paul Auster jura policiar a emoção de seus textos a fim de a linguagem chegar mais limpa ao leitor ? confissões, ainda que inocentes, surgem apenas quando o clima é favorável, o interlocutor porta-se como cúmplice, o respeito impera. É justamente esse momento especial que marca uma série de livros que chegam agora ao mercado, todos com uma característica comum: a de eternizar conversas previamente preparadas e nas quais assuntos são aprofundados.

É o caso, por exemplo, de Conversa sobre o Tempo (Agir), fruto do encontro entre Luis Fernando Verissimo e Zuenir Ventura durante cinco dias, no ano passado. Com a mediação do jornalista Arthur Dapieve, a dupla se isolou em um sítio no interior do Rio de Janeiro no ano passado para falar sobre amizade, morte, política, descobertas da adolescência e choque de gerações. "Tanto Verissimo quanto Zuenir logo perceberam que, pelos temas propostos, as sessões constituiriam uma variante literária da psicanálise que nenhum dos dois nunca fez", observa Dapieve, no prefácio.

De fato, apesar das brincadeiras (Verissimo diz que tem, há anos, só 16 fios de cabelo), temas delicados não são evitados. Como a morte de entes queridos. Zuenir diz que, mesmo preparado por conta da idade do pai (97 anos), ficou chocado quando foi informado de seu falecimento. E Verissimo ainda guarda com dor e nitidez os momentos finais de Erico Verissimo. O autor de O Tempo e o Vento acabara de telefonar para o amigo Jorge Amado quando sentiu uma tontura. "Aí ele se sentou em uma cadeira e eu vi os olhos dele ficarem vazios. O olhar dele ficou vazio. Ele tinha morrido."

As relações familiares, no entanto, nem sempre são amistosas. O pintor Francis Bacon (1909-1992), cujas telas são um retrato do pesadelo, não esconde um desprezo que beira o ódio pelos pais. A história é contada no pequeno mas maravilhoso Conversas com Francis Bacon (Zahar Editores), uma série de conversas comandadas pelo jornalista e crítico de arte Franck Maubert que, depois de conquistar a confiança de Bacon, conseguiu arrancar declarações reveladoras em seu estúdio.

"A fotografia me dá uma ajuda, me serve de apoio, me suscita e provoca imagens", conta o pintor, em meio ao lixo espalhado em seu local de trabalho. "A fotografia me permite arrancar, depois eu risco, subtraio, apago. No fim, não resta mais muita coisa da fotografia original." Em seguida, ele revela a chave sobre uma obra que expõe como nenhuma outra a miséria e o desespero do homem moderno: "A fotografia me liberta da necessidade de exatidão."

Inconsciente. A atividade profissional, aliás, é constantemente tratada pelos artistas. Em Conversas Sobre Escritores (Arte & Letra), reunião de 21 bate-papos entre autores, é justamente a troca de informações sobre o fazer literário que mais parece interessá-los. Paul Auster, por exemplo, confessa a tendência de se imaginar como um escritor altamente emocional. "Tudo vem dos sentimentos mais profundos, dos sonhos, do inconsciente", diz ele para Jonathan Lethem. "Apesar disso, nas minhas narrativas, estou sempre me empenhando em ser claro. Para que, de forma ideal, a escrita se torne tão transparente que o leitor esqueça que o meio de comunicação é a linguagem."

Felizmente, a divergência também alimenta os encontros. O Cristianismo É Bom Para o Mundo? (Garimpo Editorial) reúne o apologista cristão Douglas Wilson e o "neoateísta" Christopher Hitchens em um estimulante debate ? o livro, aliás, é dividido em rounds, como em uma luta de boxe, e não em capítulos.

Em meio a brilhantes tiradas (Hitchens afirma que a vigilância sem fim de Deus impõe um Big Brother celestial insuportável para os homens), o livro é um embate semelhante às mesas-redondas de futebol: todos têm razão e nada é conclusivo.

Evgeny Lebedev: a very Russian revolution

Evgeny Lebedev is determined not just to be a collector of modern art, discovers Colin Gleadell.

By Colin Gleadell, The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2010

Evgeny Lebedev

If you think all rich Russian art collectors are in it just for the money and the status, think again. Thirty-year-old Evgeny Lebedev is the chairman of Independent Print Ltd, which owns the London Evening Standard and the Independent newspapers, bought since the beginning of last year by his billionaire father, Alexander Lebedev. As one of the most eligible bachelors in the UK, he has been dating the actress Joely Richardson, though film and theatre come second to paintings and sculpture, which are his real passion.

But he’s not happy with the status quo. He thinks the contemporary art market is overburdened with brand products, that Damien Hirst is a better businessman than an artist, and that it is time for a more individual and spiritual art to emerge.

Lebedev, who was brought up looking at art and studied art history on a Christie’s Education course, is particularly excited by a lithograph of a triptych by Francis Bacon that was in his studio until he died. Bacon is great artist, he says, because “he had a take on the events of his time, anticipating the horrific effects of war”.

He doesn’t own a Bacon painting, but you sense he would like to. His fledgling collection includes works by the fantastical Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, the former musician and transvestite DJ Paul Fryer, the American master of staged photography Gregory Crewdson, and Damien Hirst. He was disappointed in Hirst’s recent paintings, though, feeling they borrowed too heavily from Bacon.

All The Rage

The Image staff muses on the culture of keeping up appearances

Q&A: Geren Lockhart dishes on her Francis Bacon-inspired fall collection

The Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2010

Geren Lockhart, designer for L.A. contemporary brand Geren Ford, always turns out chic, body-friendly looks. But for her fall 2010 collection, she also amped up the sex appeal — creating va-va-voom pieces such as metallic leather minis, body-clinging maxi skirts and silk cropped pants in rich jewel tones that slouch in all the right places. The overall effect: retro slink.

We caught up with the downtown-based designer to chat about how the streamlined collection came to be:

What was your key inspiration for fall?

Francis Bacon's Met exhibit last year, and the research I ended up doing on his life after seeing it. I walked into the exhibit the day before leaving to head back to L.A., which was also the last day of the exhibit. A friend was set to meet me there and ended up getting stuck on a conference call. So like the nerd that I can be, I got the audio guide, and while I've always been a fan of Mr. Bacon, I had never heard the story behind the work. I was mesmerized by his restraint and the delicate way that he delivers gore and violence. It's poetic.

At the end of the exhibit I practically dove into the bookstore and purchased every book I could on his life rather than his work. His studio 7 Reece Mews provided the inspiration for the prints in the collection; one modeled after the pock marks on an amazing antique mirror in his space, another by the shapes that his brushes made when he tested his paints on the walls and doors of one room rather than using a pallet. Another is inspired by the shaded and somewhat subtle idea of fingers pulling paint down a canvas, as in his Pope series. Mr. Bacon also informed the colour pallet — colour-blocked but not intense.

How did the design process start for you?

When I design it's a cumulative process of a constant “eyes open” state of mind — for what I like or have a reaction to, from colour to texture to vintage. At the same time, we work on a schedule so there is always a time frame that's slated for the process being put to paper. I was already into this process when I attended the Francis Bacon exhibit, and it all just came together as I was walking around and then digesting the books about his life and work.

You worked with so many different materials on this collection — what were your favorite to work with?

Metallic lamb, a floaty, soft stretch charmeuse  and a crafted open-weave silk linen blend. And, as always, zippers, rivets — our own signature [zippers] modeled after man-hole covers — and grosgrain ribbon.

What type of woman do you see loving these pieces?

Four words need to describe every garment we make: chic, effortless, sophisticated and sexy. That said, the same can be said of our core customer base. They're amazing adventurers — whether that be an around-the-world adventure or a local one.

- Emili Vesilind

A very unlikely encounter with Profumo girl Keeler

Over 60 years, historian and writer Paul Johnson came to know everyone who mattered.

In this second extract from his brilliantly indiscreet memoirs, he recounts encounters with autocrats, scoundrels, lechers and boozers...

Paul Johnson, The Daily Mail, 24th May 2010

      Scandalous: Christine Keeler discredited a government and locked Francis Bacon out of the bathroom

In the London of the Fifties, one of the places I liked to drink in the afternoon was the Colony Room in Soho.

Muriel Belcher, its owner-manager, would sit for hours on a stool, just inside the door, and when it opened would stretch out a claw-like arm, draw in the person entering, inspect him and decide whether he could stay.

She was fat and horrible to look at, but not disagreeable if you were in her good books. Muriel would allow the artist Francis Bacon unlimited credit, and at one time his champagne bill stood at more than £2,000, an immense sum in those days.

The Colony Room was unique in that ravenous queers, ferocious lesbians and perfectly normal sex maniacs mixed in friendly promiscuity.

She had a talent for creating an atmosphere in which gifted and famous, but lonely, people could be happy.

The place had only one loo, used by both men and women, and I remember around the time of the Profumo scandal finding it locked when I tried the door. A female voice within said prissily: 'It's occupied.' So I waited.

Francis Bacon, drunk and bursting, arrived. I said: 'There's a woman inside.' And he shouted: 'Come out of there, you bitch!' Then he began to kick the door. Eventually, the door opened and a beautiful woman emerged, nose in the air.

It was the ravishingly beautiful Christine Keeler, the call girl responsible for Profumo's downfall.

She did not look at us, but strode back to the bar. All she said was: 'Men!' A lifetime of experience went with that one contemptuous word. 

An abridged extract from Brief Lives: An Intimate And Very Personal Portrait Of The 20th Century, by Paul Johnson, to be published by Hutchinson on June 3 at £20, @ 2010, Paul Johnson.

To order a copy for £15.99 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.

Francis Bacon's bits in Camera

By Brian Sewell, London Evening Standard, 13.05.10

Francis Bacon, the greatest and most ambitious figurative painter of the later 20th century, was born in Ireland in 1909. The centenary of that event was most thoroughly celebrated in Dublin — Ireland thus laying claim to him as heroic successor to Brian Boru, Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement — and only a pedant might grumble that as in 1909 what is now Eire was then as much part of the United Kingdom as Ulster is still, Francis was as British as anyone born within the sound of Bow Bells. For those who knew him during the long years of his life in London before and after the Second World War, there was indeed nothing about him to suggest an Irish origin — Guinness played no part in his heavy drinking habits, the once ubiquitous record of Count John McCormack singing Ave Maria was never heard in his cottage in Reece Mews, and though Brompton Oratory was within very easy walking distance, he never set foot within its Catholic walls.

I must argue further that Francis did not even spring from the centuries-old Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry that made Dublin something of a European capital of culture in the 18th century, and that being the son of an ex-Army officer born in Australia and an heiress mother born in Northumberland gave him neither jottle nor tit of Celtic-Hibernian ancestry. That he was a direct descendant of that other Francis Bacon, the philosopher-statesman and political Iago who encouraged the suppression of Hugh Tyrone’s Irish rebellion in 1596, does much to prove his Englishness.

Francis died in 1992. His affairs were not quite in the simple order that he thought and when the time eventually came to decide on what should be done with the contents of his studio, we English (that is, Tate Britain, which might have been expected to become the enthusiastic owners of the studio) had exhausted our emotional involvement and moved on to other things.

Besides, health and safety regulations meant that the cottage could never be made into a museum; thus we let what was left in it pass to the Dublin City Gallery, and there the studio has been reconstructed in the perfect image of the room in which he had worked since the autumn of 1961.

This was no ordinary task. Francis discarded a great deal in his lifetime, but then accumulated more — more tubes and tins of paint that lost their labels, more brushes, more books and illustrations torn from books, more photographs and tearings from newspapers and magazines, all piled high, leaving no space on the floor on which to plant his easel or his feet (for these he had to kick clear a square foot or two if and when he wished to paint).

Rough stuff: a portrait of Bacon’s lover, John Edwards, in 1988, probably inspired by a photograph folded to reduce the height of the torso and the back of the chair

As for paintings, these stood face-in propped against a wall at angles increasingly perilous. I have seen photographs of Francis posed painting at an easel in this clutter, but never, over 30 years or so, did I see the man himself at work, nor did I ever see a space in which the vast triptychs of his later years could have been assembled. In a studio measuring only four by eight metres it would not have been easy, even in the neatest circumstances, for Francis to have viewed comfortably three related canvases with an overall measurement of two by five metres; knee-deep, thigh-deep even, in squalor and detritus, it must have been impossible. In addition to unfinished canvases to which he might return, a hundred more had been savagely slashed as a preliminary to their total destruction. And I must remind all concerned for Bacon’s reputation that over the past decade or so, many more slashed canvases with large areas lost beyond recovery or reinvention have come onto the peripheral art market, consigned by butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers with improbable explanations of their ownership.

It could be argued that reconstructing Bacon’s studio is itself a work of art, an installation in the manner of Edward Kienholz, with the same obsessive attention to detail. Dublin’s argument is that it is an act of archaeological deconstruction-reconstruction essential for the preservation of what must be the most significant archive of Bacon’s work and life, and that in this act of piety an irreplaceably rich hoard of source material survives to be examined and re-examined by art historians who, sooner or later and from time to time, will identify an odd scrap of paper with a scribbled or disrupted image as the springboard for a well-known painting. Alas, there are too few paintings for there ever to be a match with the thousands of photographs and pieces of printed paper that were removed to Dublin (there were some 7,500 objects altogether).

To Francis all this would have seemed madness. He was always dismissive of any attempt by critics to uncover the why and how of what he did. I believe that he had a pretty clear idea in his mind’s eye before he began a painting and that this came about from several concurrent sources or stimuli, often unrelated and very different and primarily from printed images and photographs. These suffered in his hands. For the photograph as a work of art he had not the slightest respect — it was merely paper that he could maul, crush, crumple, fold and tear until the image was as fractured as a reflection in a shattered mirror, frayed, abraded, scoured, torn in pieces and reconstructed to make hideous what had formerly been ordinary. This he was even capable of doing to reproductions or his own paintings.

Nifty knifework: study for a portrait, 1986, the most important section removed by Bacon himself with a Stanley knife

I have wondered if he knew André Breton’s philosophical treatise, Crise de l’Objet of 1936, in which the notion of the tortured object is discussed — he was certainly capable of reading it. One tortured image informed another and the first clarification of their union was a bold brush drawing on the canvas perhaps supported by the presence of a model. From then on, the development was an impulsive conversation with the canvas. Francis painted, paused, stepped back and considered what he had done; what he saw on the canvas then told him whether it was right or wrong, and he responded by surrendering to another impulse. We now know that we can rely on hardly a word or statement attributed to him by his famous but inventive interviewers, but the paintings — finished, unfinished and partly destroyed — speak for themselves and they support the notion of impulse superimposed on impulse, with the occasional acceptable accident thrown in. No wonder that the pigment occasionally clogged.

All this is made clear by Francis Bacon: In Camera, an exhibition at Compton Verney, six miles short of Stratford-upon-Avon. It is, however, a thoroughly worthy and didactic examination of his working processes, and the pity is that it is not in London where far the largest audience for such instruction is. What a pity, too, that no one thought of combining it with a season of Titus Andronicus at Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A handful of earlier paintings, remarkable for the passionate intensity of which he was capable in his forties, establish the marvellous and mystifying Bacon before so much of him evaporated in expanded triptychs and tedious self-reference. A handful of later paintings in various states of unfinish reveal all the processes from vigorous initial drawing to the overworked and clogged pigment that clouded his imagined images and balked their further development. Slashed canvases demonstrate how determined Francis was that unsatisfactory paintings should not survive. And a mass of material from the studio floor offers incontrovertible evidence of his dependence on the photographic and found image.

Before the end: study for a portrait of John Edwards, begun in 1989 and left unfinished at Bacon’s death three years later

Two important issues are raised by the preservation of Bacon’s studio and the survival of paintings that he clearly wished to be utterly destroyed. There is now a widespread assumption that the artist’s studio embodies something of his aesthetic and imaginative potency and in doing so offers us insight and understanding.

This may well be so in some degree — the contrasting studios of Anna and Michael Ancher in Skagen, Jutland, make the point most strongly, but what we may reasonably preserve in a holiday destination on the northern tip of Denmark is an unreasonable demand in a great and growing city like London. There is no sane argument for preserving the rooms in which every briefly celebrated artist worked (and if artists, why not poets, playwrights and philosophers, composers and choreographers too?), and we should not, in perpetuity, remove from the currency of studio accommodation every space once used to create their work by Hirst, Emin, Gormley, Kapoor, Hockney, Freud, Gilbert and George, the Chapman Brothers, Doig, Ofili and the thousand others who revel in the support of the Arts Council, the various Tates and the Royal Academy. To do so is to go too far with veneration and to venture into the realms of superstition, fetish and belief in relics. That a paint brush once held in Bacon’s thaumaturgical fingers should be, in Dublin’s reconstruction of his studio, within fractions of a millimetre in the same relationship with this jam jar and that pot of paint as it was in Reece Mews is to accord these trifles the same reverent awe as the medieval peasant rendered to fragments of the True Cross and the thousand teeth of John the Baptist.

As for the slashed canvases, enough bad Bacons to do serious mischief to his reputation were “abducted” from his studio for sale by his dealers, without the absurdity of keeping in the public eye those whose destruction he had begun with a Stanley knife. It is unfair to Francis to interrupt that process and we should respect this evidence of his profound self-criticism. The survival of a hundred of these wrecks should appal all who care for his renown.

I am one of those who see Francis as the perfect mirror of his age, the utterly selfish painter self-concerned, not an astute commentator employing metaphor in place of observation. In the wilderness of later 20th-century painting he was a towering giant, but he was not a Titian, not a Michelangelo, not a Velázquez, not a Picasso capable of Guernica, and we should not make more of him than he was. The cottage industry of the multitude of critics and curators whose raw material he has become risks doing him a grave disservice.

Francis Bacon: In Camera is at Compton Verney Warwickshire, (comptonverney.org.uk) until June 20. Open 11am-5pm, Tuesday-Sunday; admission £8 (concessions available).

Bacon e la terza via Calarsi all'infimo a vedere il sublime

ARTE. La rilettura critica di Deleuze sul Caravaggio del nostro tempo
Oltre l'astrattismo di pura evasione e la pittura senza figure. Il grande irlandese trovò la sua ardua strada tormentando l'immagine umana

Gian Luigi Verzellesi, La Arena.it, 07/05/2010

Il pittore irlandese Francis Bacon

L'ombra cupa, che s'allunga dietro la figura di Francis Bacon (1909-1992), ricompare sulla scena dell'arte contemporanea come un'intermittente apparizione che inquieta.

Nel 2008, a un secolo dalla nascita del pittore, si aprì a Londra una grande mostra antologica (di 60 opere), trasferita poi a Madrid e quindi in America. Nel 2009, la romana Galleria Borghese ha organizzato una rassegna mozzafiato, in cui erano a confronto — certamente provocatorio — 13 opere di Caravaggio con 17 di Bacon. E ieri, la vicenda tormentata del pittore di Dublino è stata rievocata da Barbara Briganti: con precisi riferimenti ai provini fotografici di cui Bacon si valeva come figurazioni stimolanti fatte di immagini di lottatori infuriati, che preannunciano i conturbanti sviluppi pittorici eseguiti dal pittore travolto dalla foga espressionistica: «Quasi in trance, anzi molto spesso in trance etilica» (Briganti).

Il suo intento primario era rivolto a tormentare la figura umana fino a farle conseguire un'imprevedibile presenza orrenda: talmente deformata da colpire l'osservatore con il complesso delle sue irregolarità squadernate e fermentanti.

Per intendere questo processo di desublimazione, coltivato come un'esigenza irrecusabile, giova rammentare che Bacon «percepiva la vita come una corsa inarrestabile verso il baratro» (Diez). Una lunga avventura malata di inguaribile estetismo, sempre e unicamente impegnato nel compito di scovare e dare evidenza visiva alla condizione umana stravolta e derelitta: così come ha fatto — secondo il gusto dei tempi — la pittura prenovecentesca delle varie tradizioni, studiata e ristudiata da Bacon con quel suo terribile occhio indagatore. Simile a una lama di luce gelida, che spregia ogni specie d'astrazione, rifugge da artisti come Matisse e si crogiola in Van Gogh, in Picasso e in quelle zone d'ombra tragica che, sia negli antichi che nei moderni, s'addensa come una caligine spesso inavvertita da osservatori poco attenti.

PROTAGONISTA I pareri, le predilizioni e i rifiuti netti di Bacon risultano raccolti nel libro che Gilles Deleuze ha dedicato alla Logica della sensazione (Quodlibet edizioni): un testo critico rigoroso che consente al lettore intelligente di mettere a fuoco non solo la figura di Bacon protagonista, ricercatore instancabile di fermenti pittorici carichi d'angoscia, ma anche quella delle varie tendenze artistiche novecentesche, sottoposte da Bacon a una lucida revisione correttiva.

Secondo Deleuze, l'espressionismo astratto, come arte informale, al contrario dell'astrattismo evasivo, «cerca l'abisso e il caos». Con Pollock, non si compie «una trasformazione della forma, ma una scomposizione della materia». Per l'autore del saggio, a Bacon spetta il merito di aver proceduto lungo la terza via: aldilà dell'ottica d'evasione della pittura astratta, e dell'appiattimento manuale, senza figure, tipico della Pittura azione.

Di fronte a non pochi suoi dipinti aggressivi, si potrà arretrare perplessi, quasi fustigati dalla feroce carica espressionistica che emanano. ma non si può negare che in essi la ricerca pittorica, così tormentata e complessa, risulta sorretta da un'energia che le consente di uscire dalla catastrofe invece di lasciarsene travolgere morendo nell'indeterminatezza soltanto suggestiva.

In parole povere, la figurazione non si estingue: mantiene tratti del motivo figurale prescelto, che cresce aldilà della rappresentazione solo imitativa. E «rappresenta ancora qualcuno, un uomo che grida»; un viluppo di corpi animalesco, talora ridotto a «carne macellata che urla e racconta ancora qualcosa» (Deleuze), con quella sua speciale presenza condensata, simile a una reliquia di sofferenze irriducibili. Guardate il Ritratto di Isabel Rawsthorne, del 1966: quasi un ritratto di Courbet, incapsulato in una sequenza di curvature provenienti dal Boccioni più spavaldo.

Gian Luigi Verzellesi

Great works: Sand dune (1983), Francis Bacon

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel

By Tom Lubbock, The Independent, Friday, 30 April 2010

Sand Dune 1983  Francis Bacon 

W H Auden's lines make a clear announcement. "To me Art's subject is the human clay/ And landscape but a background to a torso". It's a manifesto. Humanity, he wants to say, is the primary thing in Art. Everything else takes second place. Or so it seems.

But the words he chooses are not so sure. The human clay? They could let our imaginations run, taking us into stranger regions of flesh and matter and flux. Auden envisages a little moulding, a little baking, producing a safe and separate figure, and that's all.

Clay, though, is a very malleable and transformative medium. It is wet. It squashes. It has no limits. It comes from the earth and can be pressed back into the earth. And so the distinction that Auden strictly draws between a torso and a landscape is only relative. Body and ground can easily merge.

Look at paintings. Landscapes and nudes often lie down together. The rolling hills and the curving limbs can join in harmony, or fuse into something even closer. There is view of a coast by Degas, for example, where the shapes of the grassy terrain are also clearly the emerging forms of a naked woman on her back. And this Degas is probably an inspiration to a painting made almost a century later. Here the medium is a different stuff: human sand.

Francis Bacon's Sand Dune isn't exactly landscape. It is a heap and a slide of sand, an extract of the outside, perhaps from the seaside, perhaps from a builder's site, but now it's been taken inside, and put on stage. The scene has various stagey devices often used by the artist: a glass chamber, a hanging light bulb, a pointing arrow, a disc of blue spotlight on the floor, a dark suggestion of a shadow or a leak.

On this stage, the volume of sand has a weird physical presence. It is partly contained within the tank, and partly spilling out and through the sides of the tank, and most of it seems to be viewed as if in a 3D magnifying case, so when it appears outside (at the right) it visually shrinks. The bright blue screen at the back is sky, another extract of outdoors, or a screen projection.

But the sand dune itself is obviously the protagonist. You could call it a thing. You could call it stuff. It's certainly the subject. And unlike many of Bacon's subjects, bodies or heads, this one retains its integrity. Its form is not radically distorted or disrupted or dematerialised. This dune is a solid, continuous mass.

It is sand; but of course not only sand. It is also flesh, a pure flesh. This flesh has no rigidity, no internal structure, no tension, no action. It is simply a contour of skin, containing soft blob. It lies, lolls in itself, it has sinkings and swellings, it rolls in indolence, melding into a single flow. It might be the fattest person in the world, who has lost all parts.

Or rather, not quite. It is like pure flesh but it also has hints of a creature within it too. An anatomy exists, just about. There are buttocks rising, a bending left knee sticks out at the front, a right thigh is stretched out, even a shoulder and an elbow become visible. As you look more closely, this figure appears, face down, stirring like mounds from the sand, like somebody covered in sand, or made loosely from sand.

Ambiguities arise. This mass is uncertain between anatomy and sheer flesh, uncertain between flesh and various other substances, which could be powder or liquid or pulp. Sand itself is well-chosen and imagined. It's an intermediate stuff that can be dry and pulverised, or a running, pourable fluid, or a quite compacted, malleable paste, like clay.

Sand Dune is in metamorphosis, in a calm hysteria. It's an entity that can come half alive, and enjoy feelings. It can be picked up by the shovelful. It can be stroked and smoothed. It can cascade. It can be dispersed and lose all sense of limits. At different points around the dune, these different sensations come to the fore. There are even moments when it seems like dust in air.

And then at the crest of the dune there is something like a tuft of rough grass, or a crop of hair. It comes to the vestigial beginning of a head – a final intimation of the human about to break the surface.

About the artist

Francis Bacon (1909-92) used to be a nightmare visionary. His Screaming Popes and Crucifixions were horror shows. But this Soho bohemian was also a performer. His colours are gorgeous. His paintings look less blood-curdling – and more sumptuous, energetic, graceful, playful, even jolly.

Francis Bacon painting returned to heirs

A museum in southern France must return a Francis Bacon painting to his heirs, a court has ordered.

BBC News, Friday, 23 April 2010

The museum has continued to display the painting throughout proceedings

It was loaned to the museum of the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles a year before Bacon's death in 1992. In an earlier court case, it was ruled that his Homage To Van Gogh piece could stay with the museum, which said it was a permanent gift from Bacon. The appeals court ruled the work must be given back to the heirs of Bacon's friend John Edwards, who died in 2003.

Mr Edwards, a long-time companion of the painter, was Bacon's main heir. "The painting was not given as a gift, nor was there any promise of a gift," the court in Aix-en-Provence, north of Marseilles, said in its ruling. "The association must therefore give back the painting without delay."

Artist's record

The Van Gogh Foundation, which had said it had evidence proving that Bacon had gifted the painting, said it was "in shock" at the ruling, but that it would now "bury the hatchet" with the heirs. Lawyer Bernard Jouanneau said the foundation may appeal but that it would give the painting back in the meantime.

  The work was Bacon's homage to Van Gogh's The Painter On The Road To Tarascon, a self-portrait painted near Arles in 1888. Irish-born Bacon was one of the 20th Century's most successful artists, earning about £14m before his death, aged 82. In May 2008, a Bacon masterpiece broke the artist's record at auction after selling for $86.3m (£56.1m) in New York.

£13 million Francis Bacon painting to be returned to heirs 

A £13 million painting by Francis Bacon is to be returned to the late Irish painter's heirs after a French court quashed claims that he wanted it to stay in France.

By Henry Samuel in Paris, The Daily Telegraph, 22nd April, 2010

Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, 1985

The court in Aix-en-Provence ruled that Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, which Bacon painted in 1985, should be handed over to the Estate of Francis Bacon as it had only ever been on loan.

The disputed work, based on Van Gogh's 1888 self-portrait, The Painter On The Road To Tarascon, has been hanging in Arles, southwestern France, since 1991. Bacon had painted it at the behest of Yolande Clergue, a curator who wanted to create a foundation to exhibit works inspired by Van Gogh for the 100th anniversary of his two-year stay in Arles

She had claimed he had expressed his desire to leave it to her Van Gogh foundation in letters and in person.

The foundation first borrowed it for an exhibition from July 1988 to May 1989, when Bacon asked for it back. It borrowed it a second time in May 1991, and a contract showed it was due to be returned in July 1996.

The Arles foundation had kept it from then on, but the appeals court ruled that "Francis Bacon never implied that he was giving this painting away." "There is neither donation of the painting nor any promise of donating this painting" and no proof he intended it to stay in Arles indefinitely, it ruled.

Besides, under French law, it went on, "there is no such thing as a permanent loan which the lender can never put an end to".

Bacon died in 1992 and his partner John Edwards inherited his estate. When Mr Edwards died in 2003, it was handed over to a four-person trust based on the Channel island of Jersey.

This trust had been demanding the return of the painting since 2006.

Currently on display, it must be taken down in the next ten days, and the foundation faces a fine of 1,000 euros (£866) for each day its return is delayed.

Court orders French museum to return Francis Bacon painting

RFI, Thursday 22nd March 2010

A court has ordered a French museum to return a Francis Bacon painting to the painter’s heirs. On Thursday an appeals court in Aix-en-Provence ordered the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles to return Homage to Van Gogh to the heirs of John Edwards, Bacon’s friend and main heir who died in 2003.

The Irish-born painter’s picture was a tribute to an earlier self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh and had been loaned to the museum in southern France in 1991, just before Bacon’s death.

However it was never returned and this latest ruling overturns an earlier decision which stated that the painting could stay with the museum, which claimed Bacon meant to give it as a work to keep.

“The painting was not given as a gift, nor was there any promise of a gift,” the court said in its ruling.

“We will now bury the hatched,” said the foundation’s director Mary Gruber. She said she was in a state of “shock”, and while the foundation’s lawyer said a further appeal was possible, it would, for the moment, give the painting back.

Bacon, who died in 1992, cited Vincent Van Gogh as one of his great influences, and a “Homage to Van Gogh” was a version of the Expressionist’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon which was originally painted near Arles in 1888.

  The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Arles 1888 van Gogh

Van Gogh tribute must be returned to Bacon’s estate

Terry Kirby, London Evening Standard, 22.04,10

1      0

  Legal battle: Homage to Van Gogh

A £13 million Francis Bacon painting of his idol Vincent Van Gogh, which has been at the centre of a bitter ownership dispute, must be handed back to the London artist's estate, a court in the south of France ruled today.

The judgment in Aix-en-Provence, means that the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, a body dedicated to the memory of the Dutch master, must return the painting to the Bacon trustees within the next 10 days. Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, was painted by Bacon in 1985 as a tribute to the artist whom he constantly cited as his inspiration.

It was painted at the request of a curator, Yolande Clergue, who wanted to create a collection inspired by the Dutch's artist's two-year stay in Arles a century earlier. It has been held by the foundation since then and has been on public display. The dispute centred on whether the painting was merely on loan to the foundation or supposed to stay in Arles long-term.

Michel Pitron, the lawyer for the Bacon estate, said: “I am very pleased with the judgment, which recognises that a loan is simply that and it is at the discretion of the owners.”

Van Gogh's 'heirs' battle against attempt to bring home the Bacon

By Henry Samuel in Paris, The Daily Telegraph, 22nd April, 2010  

     Bacon's homage to Van Gogh, now the subject of a court dispute. It is said to be worth £13 million.

IN LIFE, Francis Bacon regarded Van Gogh as a kindred spirit and would constantly pay tribute to the genius of the Dutch master.  

He quoted his letters as inspiration saying it was the artist's job to create "lies that are truer than the literal truth".

But the late Irish painter's eagerness to do all he could to celebrate his hero has left behind a bitter dispute between the estates of the two men.

The heirs of Francis Bacon and The Vincent Van Gogh Foundation are embroiled in a legal battle for a £13 million Bacon painting that both claim is theirs.

A court will rule today on whether Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, painted in 1985, should be handed back to the Bacon estate or remain in Arles, in southwestern France, where the Dutch master spent two years.

The row centres on a claim that Bacon promised the work to the foundation a few years before his death in 1992.

He painted the disputed work at the behest of Yolande Clergue, a curator who wanted to create a foundation to exhibit works inspired by Van Gogh for the 100th anniversary of his stay in Arles.  

   Bacon's 1960 homage to Van Gogh and the Dutch master's self-portrait

The tableau was based on Van Gogh's 1888 self-portrait, The Painter On The Road To Tarascon, showing the artist in straw hat, carrying his easel and paints, and casting an ominous shadow.

Bacon never saw Van Gogh's original – destroyed when Dresden was firebombed in 1945 – and had to make do with photographs of the "haunting' work, from which he produced as series of paintings. His 1985 work shows the painter from waist down, blending into his shadow.

Bacon's estate was left to his partner John Edwards when he died in 2003, it was handed over to a four-person trust based on the Channel island of Jersey.

Bacon's paintings fetch astronomical sums, with his nightmarish Triptych, 1976, sold to Roman Abramovich in 2008 for £56 million – a record for an auctioned work of contemporary art at the time.

His "heirs" are now demanding the Van Gogh Foundation hand over the painting, which they argue has merely been on a long-term loan.

The foundation has refused, arguing that Bacon had implied in letters that he wanted the painting to stay in Arles. A photographer friend, Pierre Richard, also swore that he was present at a meeting in London in May 1985 between Mrs Clergue and Bacon in which he said his "dearest wish" was for the work to stay in Arles.

Bernard Jouanno, the Van Gogh foundation's lawyer, said the painting itself – the circular sandy form referring to Arles bullfighting ring and the red the torreador's cape – was enough evidence it was destined to stay in the town, he said.

The "sudden" interest by John Edward's "friends" for the work may have had something to do with its "sudden rise in market value – between 12 and 18 million euros," he added.

"These so-called heirs are nothing of the sort. A trust in Jersey is an Anglo-Saxon institution not recognised by French law," he added.

However, Michel Pitron, the lawyer for the Estate of Francis Bacon, dismissed the claims.

"Our argument is simple: there was a loan contract, which came to an end; I am asking for the painting back, full stop!" he said. "There is no such thing as an indefinite loan in French law."

Both parties can take today's appeal ruling at a court in Aix-en-Provence to the supreme court.

Too poor to buy paint: how Francis Bacon starved for his art

Lost letters reveal millionaire artist's early struggle

Dalya Alberge, The Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010

Francis Bacon at the Tate, 1985. Photograph: Ray Roberts

He is one of the 20th century's greatest artists, whose paintings change hands for more than £40m, but Francis Bacon’s early struggle to sell his paintings became so desperate that he threatened to become a cook or a valet, according to unpublished letters that have just come to light.

Bacon, a self-taught artist, was 40 before he gained proper recognition. The letters, dating from the 1940s, reveal that he was frequently reduced to begging for handouts from his dealer, his debts no doubt aggravated by his addiction to gambling.

"Is it possible to make me a small advance?" he implores in one. "I am quite broke, and canvas and paints are terribly expensive."

In another he laments: "If I can't sell anything or haven't anything to sell, I will get a job as a valet or cook."

The correspondence, contained in the archives of the Lefevre Gallery in London, is between Bacon and Duncan Macdonald, then its director. It is certain to deepen future biographers' understanding of the artist's struggle to launch his career. Barry Joule, the artist's friend who is now writing a Bacon memoir, said: "I haven't seen these letters before. They're a revelation. I've read everything on him inside out. The struggle is not covered in the biographies and is perhaps overlooked because of the prices paid for his paintings later in his life."

In one letter, Bacon reveals his battle to afford basic art tools: "If you know of anyone who will take the risk and supply me with paints, canvas, and the minimum of vittles, think of me. I might make them money."

Bacon, who died in 1992, believed his pictures deserved either the National Gallery or the dustbin, and he often dumped or slashed his own works.

Study for Man with Microphones in 1946 was among paintings that no one wanted to buy. Bacon painted over it. The letters also list numerous other works which no longer exist.

Many of the letters convey his desperation to exhibit his work. In one passage the artist wrote: "I shall have a group of 3 large paintings… Is there any chance of your having an exhibition in the autumn…? They want to be hung together in a series as they are a sort of Crucifixion… I think they are the most formal things I have done and the colour is a sort of intense blue violet. I think they are better than what I have done up to now…

"If you think there is a chance of your being able to show them, as I really need the money desperately … I want £750 for the set. It is not a quarter of what is has cost me with gambling etc; if you think you can get more, it would be tremendously welcome."

The paintings are thought not to have survived.

Richard Shone, editor of The Burlington Magazine, which will publish the letters in May, said: "One day a really comprehensive biography of Bacon will be written and these letters will be indispensable."

Maggie O'Farrell interview

Maggie O’Farrell tells Alastair Sooke about the photographs that inspired her latest novel, The Hand that First Held Mine

By Alastair Sooke, The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2010

Francis Bacon on the Orient Express, 1965   John Deakin

‘He could be vicious,” says Maggie O’Farrell, her eyes glinting with anarchic glee. “I would love to have witnessed it.”

The bestselling British novelist is sitting in a corner of the French House in Soho. She is talking about one of the bar’s most infamous regulars during the Fifties and Sixties: the witty photographer John Deakin, once described by the jazz singer George Melly as “a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom”.

In the early Sixties, Francis Bacon commissioned Deakin to take photographs of his friends and lovers, which the artist then used as aides-mémoires for his paintings. Deakin’s close-cropped mug shot of Bacon, taken in August 1952, has become the quintessential portrait of the artist, who died in 1992. A talented but devious and unreliable photographer, who loved gossip and pink gin and was twice fired from Vogue magazine, Deakin documented many of his acquaintances among post-war Soho’s barflies and bohemians.

His pictures from this period, many of which were haphazardly stored in cardboard boxes under his bed and only discovered after his death in 1972, have inspired O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, which will be published later this month.

“The starting point was an exhibition of Deakin’s photographs that I saw in Edinburgh,” O’Farrell tells me, while turning the pages of the catalogue that accompanied the show, which opened at the Dean Gallery in 2002. “I didn’t know much about the art scene in Soho in the Fifties, but I was really struck by it, and the atmosphere of the novel fell into place.”

Decorating the bar behind her are scores of black-and-white photographs depicting some of the frequently inebriated figures who knew Deakin, including Bacon who wears a belted black leather jacket.

What did she like about Deakin’s photographs? “Portraiture today can be so constructed,” she says. “Think of [the American portrait photographer] Annie Leibovitz, whose work is imaginative and exciting, but so theatrical, with the clothes, the make-up, the airbrushing. Deakin was the opposite. There’s nothing constructed about his photographs. They look like he couldn’t be bothered to think them through. That’s mesmerising.”

The characters whom Deakin captured with his camera fascinated O’Farrell, who returned several times to the exhibition and bought lots of postcards, which she put up around her study. Slowly the structure of her novel crystallised: The Hand That First Held Mine weaves together two stories, one set in the present day, the other in post-war London.

The heroine of the latter strand is a headstrong young woman called Alexandra, who is desperate for her life “to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious Technicolor”. One summer in the mid-Fifties, after meeting a hedonistic art critic with whom she later falls in love, Alexandra runs away from her childhood home in Devon and heads to London, where she calls herself “Lexie” and works for a magazine in Soho.

She spends her evenings in the French House, then a dissolute pub called the York Minster, as well as Bacon’s favourite haunt, the Colony Room, a riotously uninhibited drinking club run by a dragonish landlady called Muriel Belcher. “I started reading about this bohemian scene in Soho and imagining what it would have been like to arrive there and meet these interesting people who defied convention,” O’Farrell says. “An artistic world burned very brightly in this grid of streets for a decade or so. But now it has vanished. The Colony Room has gone. The only place that’s really left is the French House.”

Even this, though, has changed. As we talk, the “hordes of whores and sailors” who throng its “fetid interior” in O’Farrell’s novel are nowhere to be seen. “I still hope the sailors might come around the corner,” O’Farrell says, with a laugh. “I suppose I’m drawn to the romance of things that have vanished. That’s what fascinates me about living in cities. Everywhere you go, you’re constantly bumping into the past.”

While O’Farrell was inspired by post-war London, she wanted to avoid writing about the past in a nostalgic manner. “I don’t think that everything in the past was great and that modern life is awful – not at all,” she says. “In the Fifties, children were dying of diphtheria and polio. Yes, there was less traffic on the streets, but it was quite normal to beat your child with a leather belt. There are laws against that now. Life moves on, doesn’t it?”

But what about Deakin? Now the book is finished, will O’Farrell move on from her obsession with his work? She shakes her head. “I’m not going to take down my Deakin pictures – not yet, anyway.”

To pay tribute to him, O’Farrell gave Deakin a walk-on part in her new novel. At one point the photographer appears in the Colony Room, where an acquaintance asks if he might spare “a bob or two” to buy her a drink. Deakin turns and curls his lip:

“‘Fuck off,’ he drawled. ‘Buy your own.’”

“One of my editors was worried that this insulted Deakin’s memory,” O’Farrell says. “But I honestly think that’s what he would have said.”

Alastair Sooke is a commissioning editor on the Telegraph Arts pages

The Hand That First Held Mine is published by Headline Review on April 29 (£16.99)

Francis Bacon: New Studies

Centenary Essay Edited by Martin Harrison. 

Text by Darren Ambrose, Rebecca Daniels, Hugh M. Davies, Marcel Finke, Martin Harrison, Andrew R. Lee, Brenda Marshall, David Alan Mellor, Joanna Russell, Brian Singer.

Published by Steidl Photography International

The paintings of Francis Bacon are so confrontationally wordless in their articulations of the human plight that they seem—almost as a result—to attract continual commentary and meditation (not least from Bacon himself). Since Bacon's studio and its contents were moved to Dublin, and those contents at last documented and examined, a wealth of information has come to light about the artist's processes, his working habits, his readings and his source material. Benefiting from these new resources for Bacon studies, and marking the centenary of the artist's birth, this collection of nine essays from leading scholars worldwide is edited by the leading Bacon scholar Michael Harrison, and is full of fascinating new takes on the work. Contributors to these new perspectives on Bacon are Darren Ambrose, Rebecca Daniels, Hugh M. Davies, Marcel Finke, Martin Harrison, Andrew R. Lee, Brenda Marshall, David Alan Mellor, Joanna Russell and Brian Singer.

272 pages, 260 colour plates  ISBN: 978-3-86521-946-6 Price UK £35.00 US $58.00 EC €39.00

Francis Bacon: In Camera, Compton Verney, Warwickshire

A show that promises discovery of the private artist finds a man simply in thrall to the photograph

Reviewed by Ossian Ward , The Independent on Sunday, 4 April 2010

Thankfully, this country-house exhibition is not Francis Bacon on Camera – yet another show of black-and-white headshots of the troubled painter – although there are a handful of him on holiday in Athens, in front of a photographer's shop in Soho, or posing in his leather jacket, as was his wont.

No, this is Francis Bacon: In Camera, which translates from the Latin as "in chamber" or "in private". Of course, we already know much of what the notoriously boozy bohemian did behind closed doors, precisely because there was invariably a camera lens pointing at him, recording his every mood and love.

Over and above his friends, models and relationships, photography was Bacon's primary painterly muse. Indeed, so many newspaper scraps, crumpled photos and magazine cuttings have been excavated from the mounds of detritus left on the floor of his old Kensington studio, that scholars have been piecing together, almost frame by frame, the specific photographic references for each painting.

In many ways, the studio was his "camera" – a private chamber of experimentation – where he allowed no one to observe or document him while painting (not even his sitters were allowed to watch after the 1963 triple portrait of Henrietta Moraes, included in this display). Yet Bacon's famously cluttered workspace in Reece Mews is now also his most public bequest, left to us not only in imagery – more of those posed portraits by Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others – but in the physical remnants of the studio, now installed permanently at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, from where much of this show's fascinatingly decrepit stuff has come.

What, then, is this exhibition about? Francis Bacon and his Chamber of Secrets, or Bacon the Photo-copier? In Dublin, this show was titled A Terrible Beauty, which gets us no nearer the truth. It's hard to be clear-eyed about an artist who was so full of his own myth. Better to dive headlong into the material and see which Bacon emerges.

Among the 1,500 photos found in the hoard of paint pots, slashed canvases, postcards and records, a key source was always going to be the early motion-capture stills of Eadweard Muybridge, whom Bacon rated on a par with Michelangelo for his treatment of the human body.

It's never a bad time to look at Muybridge (he'll be getting the full museum treatment later this year at Tate Britain) and the pages ripped from his book, The Human Figure in Motion, were pored over obsessively by Bacon, who spattered them with paint as he placed these wrestling, shadowboxing or exercising nudes centre-stage in his paintings. The sweeping leg in one unfinished work, (Figure with Raised Arm, 1949) suggests that Bacon might have been searching for something in-between Muybridge's sequential snaps that not even the Victorian's rapid shutter could catch: an image, not of motion, but in perpetual motion.

Previously I'd assumed that Bacon's smeared, mangled faces, with their sliding jaws and torqued cheeks, were his approximations of a photographic blur – reproducing the moment when a head swivels or waggles too vigorously to be stilled. Yet these disfigurements (seen in portraits of Moraes, as well as Bacon's lovers John Edwards and Peter Lacy) seem to follow almost precisely the creases, crops, folds and crumples that Bacon, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, inflicted on his photos, often underfoot on the studio floor.

There's still more of the man and his myth to contend with in the scores of macho bullfighting, footballing and wildlife shots that made their way into other paintings. But even if no fresh view of Bacon surfaces from this soup of influence, then at least he is gradually being seen in a less dazzling, more illuminating light than before. His skewed vision had to come from somewhere – it wasn't an accident of his subconscious as he often claimed. In fact, Bacon eventually began to cannibalise his own images, deconstructing his face from photos, and repainting versions of previous works once they'd been photographed. He, like the child or tribesman who first sees the fixative settle their image for ever, was simply in thrall to the photograph. That was his dirty little secret.

Compton Verney, Warwickshire, to 20 June (01926 645500)

Francis Bacon’s photographic sources

By Robin Blake, The Financial Times, April 3 2010 

"I believe in a deeply ordered chaos,” Francis Bacon once said in a television interview, making an apparently mischievous remark about his own studio, in which he was standing. Visitors to the reconstructed studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, with the encroaching heaps of detritus that accumulated over half the artist’s lifetime, will readily appreciate Bacon’s affinity for deep chaos. But what, if anything, might “ordered chaos” mean as a description of his work? Francis Bacon: In Camera, an exhibition that has transferred from the Hugh Lane to Compton Verney, Warwickshire’s beautiful country house art gallery, throws a few shafts of light on the question.

The exhibition curated by Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison reveals Bacon’s creative starting-points by showing a selection from the vast number of photographs that he collected. Many were taken by photographer friends – notably John Deakin, his fellow denizen of Soho’s Colony Club, and the wildlife photographer Peter Beard – but he also culled a huge number from published sources.

These relics have been sifted from the confused mess of papers, rags, painting detritus, books, newspapers and magazines found in the studio, and carefully themed, mounted and framed in serried collections. Such careful, even artful presentation is as different as can be from the conditions under which Bacon himself kept the items. Their creased, yellowed, fragmentary and paint-stained state makes them look more like archeological finds. The Hugh Lane Gallery’s archive is really not Bacon’s, but a posthumous invention.

Yet it is a useful one because the “ordered chaos” of Bacon’s actual painting demands more serious attention, and a study of his photographic sources is a part of that effort. Bacon used them directly – often cut, torn through, folded or amalgamated – as models. He rarely made preparatory studies, and he neither drew nor painted from life. If he wanted to make a self-portrait, or a portrait of his boyfriend George Dyer or friend Isabel Rawsthorne, he would start from a photograph Deakin had taken, often at Bacon’s request.

At other times he used news photographs, advertisements, film stills and fine art reproductions. None of his many versions of the portrait of Pope Innocent X were from studies he made from Velázquez’s painting; all were sourced from photographs in books. Of the nine volumes on Velázquez found at the studio after Bacon’s death in 1992, illustrations of the seated pope had been ripped from eight of them. Some are on display here, as is the source of the papal mouth in mid-scream, a close-up that Bacon found in a book of stills from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.

There are no “screaming pope” paintings in this exhibition, but it does give a few opportunities to look from a source to a particular canvas. One room exemplifies Bacon’s reliance on reproductions of Michelangelo’s drawings, and on the sequential photographs made by the Victorian Edweard Muybridge to illustrate human and animal movement. A large canvas, untitled and unfinished, is shown of a nude male in a throwing attitude. The adjoining walls are hung with figure drawings by Michelangelo, torn by Bacon from fine art books, and with scores of Muybridge sequences of nude men and women walking, running, turning, reaching, bending. Eventually, we locate the particular one of these that is related to the painting, from a sequence entitled Man Heaving a 75lb Rock. But we can also easily see the other element, the similarity of the half-finished form to isolated Michelangelesque sketches of limbs and torsos.

The critic Norbert Lynton once floated the idea that Bacon might be seen as a modernist Vermeer depicting ordinary human activity behind the closed doors of the home. If this is true of some of his work, it is a simple step to see how it relates to the history of photography in Bacon’s lifetime. The box camera turned photography into the most accessible form of image-making. Photographs were a news medium but they were even more an art of the familiar and the mundane, and a handy means of ordering memory. Deakin was a Vogue photographer but his style was a refinement of the domestic snapper – which is why he was of such use to Bacon. It may be surprising to discover how domestic photography could inspire an artist celebrated for his distortion of figures and forms, but not when you look more deeply.

The deformity of his figures are of a kind that, in nature, might result from random mutations in the genetic pattern. Bacon was not interested in representing people with actual deformities, like Velázquez’s dwarves or the freaks photographed by Diane Arbus. His business, I think, was to visualise the mutations in all of us, the ways in which the randomness of experience tugs and rubs and twists our perfection out of shape. Bacon seeks to convey, too, the uncontrollable manipulations of the unconscious mind and the existential disruption that results from irrational choices – all of which are brought about by the distorting action of chaos on ordered patterns. And meanwhile, around these displays of distorted Baconian imagery are the most carefully ordered compositions. Order and chaos always either contend or blend in Bacon: his remark in that television interview was less flippant than it seemed.

Francis Bacon: In Camera, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until June 20. www.comptonverney.org.uk

   Bacon double exposure

A new exhibition shows just how crucial photographs were to the artist, says Richard Dormant

Exhibition Francis Bacon in Camera 

By Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2010

               John Deakin's photograph of Francis Bacon

Though he was primarily a painter of the human figure, Francis Bacon never drew from the nude, rarely worked from life, and painted directly onto the canvas without first making preliminary studies or using preparatory drawings. But however strange the ectoplsamic and ambiguously gendered creatures in his paintings appear to be, they don’t look wholly imaginary — at least not in the way that those in Symbolist and Surrealist paintings often do. This is because Bacon’s starting point for any new canvas was usually a photograph or a detail of a photograph he’d found in a book or magazine.

Once he selected an image, he’d refer back to the photo as he worked, using it as a spur to his imagination - or perhaps more accurately, as a means to access his unconscious. Francis Bacon: In Camera shows photos, film stills, magazines, and books found in Bacon’s studio after his death side by side with Bacon’s paintings to demonstrate the fundamental role photography played in his working method. The show, at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, isn’t large, but what it has to say poses a new set of questions about how Bacon worked and how that affect’s the viewer’s response to his pictures.

From 1949, the year of his first London exhibition, Bacon was using Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of human and animal figures in motion as a primary visual source for his paintings. In this he was hardly original, since the influence of the stop-action photos Muybridge took in the 1870s and '80s is detectable in the work of Degas, Picasso and Duchamp. But Bacon’s engagement with the Muybridge photos was visceral in a way that is true of no other artist. Since he had not studied anatomy and had never drawn from the live model, he pored over them, scrutinising them intently and isolating certain details by