|
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.
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
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.
||
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.
"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 'framing’ or circling them with crayon.
This
is immediately apparent in the appalling condition of the ones we see in this
show, where virtually every photo is mutilated, torn, folded, and spattered
with paint.
Bacon’s
unfinished Figure with Raised Arm (1949) is based on Muybridge’s photo
of a nude athlete seen in profile. Sketchily painted in grisaille over raw
canvas, the figure raises one arm as he strides across an empty stage against
a drawn curtain. We might be looking at a Greek Kouras figure, except that
the transparent right leg and the dragged striations of paint are used to
create a blurred effect not unlike a doubly-exposed photograph.
Figure with Raised Arm 1949
What
Bacon adds to the original pose (and the classical sculpture it reminded him
of) is a splatter of paint that gushes from the head like the spume of blood
or spittle after a blow to the head. Here is an early example of how in
Bacon’s work a single passage of smeared paint indicating extreme physical
violence becomes the entire source of a picture’s visual power.
Then,
too, the photos of young men wrestling certainly had a voyeuristic charge for
Bacon. In those picture in which he shows two figures it is hard to make out
what is happening because the implicit violence of the wrestling hold is
elided with a sexual act. An example in this show is an untitled canvas of
1989 in which two indistinct figures inspired by Muybridge’s photo are so
entwined that they appear to be copulating.
A
triptych with three heads of Isabel Rawsthorne was painted not from life but
from John Deakin’s photos of the sitter that have been torn, creased, folded
and crumpled. Seeing the photos and the pictures side by side we realise that
no matter how he distorts a face, Bacon was able to capture remarkable
likenesses of his subjects. Usually critics attribute the otherwise
inexplicable folds, cuts and mutilations in these faces to Bacon’s study of
photos soldiers hideously mutilated during the First World War.
But
the portraits in this show make us realise that such distortions may also
reflect the physical state of the photos on which they are based.
And
sometimes the level of violence to which a photo has been subjected can only
be described as pathological. One, which shows the head of Bacon’s lover
George Dyer, has been ripped to shreds, crumpled and crushed by hand, then
repaired with adhesive tape, and attached to a large brown envelope with a
safety pin through Dyer’s cheek so that end result looks like a cubist
collage. It isn’t Dyer in the flesh Bacon was painting, but his mutilated
photo. By constant reference back to it Bacon was able to maintain some
crucial connection to the anger and violence that (I can only conjecture)
fuelled his creative process.
Bacon’s
sadism took many forms. He based several of his best known pictures on a
photograph of Dyer wearing only his underpants, seated on a chair with one
leg crossed over the other. After Dyer’s suicide Bacon continued to use the
pose, simply substituting the face of his new lover John Edward for Dyer’s —
as though the two men were interchangeable. The effect is like looking at a
double exposure in which one figure is superimposed over another without
entirely obliterating the first.
Having
made his point about photography’s importance for Bacon, the curator Martin
Harrison doesn’t belabour it. The second half of the show is filled with
works by Bacon including some particularly good early pictures like the
wonderful Half Length Figure in Sea of 1957. But by the time we come
to these paintings, we’ve learned too much about Bacon’s working methods to
see them as mere imaginings. Even when we don’t know the visual source for
the image, we can be sure that it can be found is a photo, and that Bacon had
engaged with at such a profound emotional level it had become part of his
consciousness, a piece of who he was.
Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty
Foreword by Barbara Dawson.
Published by Steidl
No artist's studio rivals Francis Bacon's in terms of sheer iconic pungency.
The artist's furious hurricanes of creativity were writ large upon its walls,
scattered across its floors in a sea of paint pots, brushes, discarded
canvases and much-abused source and reference materials, all of which seemed
to bespeak Bacon's chaotically rigorous processes: bodybuilding snaps,
reproductions of Muybridge time-lapse sequences, photo-booth self-portraits,
magazine cuttings, tattered monographs, medical textbooks with images of
unusual and often horrific wounds and diseases, and countless photos of
friends such as Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher
and George Dyer, from which the artist built his portraits of them. Bacon's
exceptional eloquence on the subject of his painting process, taken in
combination with the iconicity and visual impact of his studio (now preserved
at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery at the Dublin City Gallery), enables his
admirers to envisage something of how his paintings were made. In celebration
of the centenary of Bacon's birth, and chiming with an exhibition at the
Dublin City Gallery, A Terrible Beauty excavates Bacon's studio to
reveal the methods, materials and processes through which Bacon arrived at his
paintings. Drawing on the Hugh Lane's vast archive of materials, it gathers
new scholarship and insights from Rebecca Daniels, Barbara Dawson, Marcel
Fincke, Martin Harrison, Jessica O'Donnell, Joanna Shepard and Logan Sisley,
and is a major publication for Bacon fans and scholars alike.
Irish-born
English painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) created work that remains unmatched
in raw force and vitality, and he is widely considered one of the greatest
artists of the twentieth century. Critic Ronald Jones has described his
themes as the howling subjects with which Bacon struggled - Existentialism,
Abstract Expressionism and the primal drama of a world newly acquainted with
the Bomb. Bacon was preoccupied with probing the isolation and terror of the
human condition, which he chiefly conveyed through a laboured distortion of
the human body. As Sam Hunter - who penned one of the first major essays on
Bacon in 1950 - writes in his introductory essay to this volume, what has
become increasingly clear with the test of time...is the clarity, durability
and powerful authority of his visual discourse. This concise monograph
presents an in-depth survey of Bacon's entire oeuvre.
British
artist Francis Bacon is one of the greatest painters of the twentieth
century. His canvases of the 1940s bore witness to the traumatized psychology
of the time and bestowed upon him a prominence that did not diminish in the
course of his 50-year career. Recent auction sales have confirmed his works
as some of the most sought-after of the Modern era.
ISBN: 9783869300276 Pages: 208 Publisher:
Steidl Publishing
Beneath the layers of Bacon
A new exhibition seeks to shed new
light on Francis Bacon's working practises and expose the fallacy of the
artist's own myth. Matilda Battersby reports.
The Independent,
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
John Deakin, Photograph of George
Dyer, Collection: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.
“I can dream all day long and ideas
for paintings just fall into my mind like slides,” Francis Bacon once said.
The self-promulgated idea that the Irish-born figurative artist’s wonderfully
twisted and subversive imagery appeared fully formed in his mind, not
demanding high levels of planning, drawing and experimentation, provides an
interesting mythical basis for Bacon’s genius.
But a new exhibition of torn papers
and photographs, manipulated film and other archival material harvested from
Bacon’s studio, seeks to some way dispel this myth, by revealing the
practise-runs, thought processes and scrawlings behind some of Bacon’s best
work.
Co-curators Martin Harrison and
Antonia Harrison have placed the scavenged studio artefacts alongside well
known Bacon oil paintings, including five works never shown before in the UK,
to demonstrate the root of some of his ideas, exhibited at the Compton Verney
gallery in Warwickshire from this Saturday.
“No one ever saw Bacon work. But
our research reveals a very different man from the public persona, which
demands we unlearn what we think we know about him,” Martin Harrison said.
The notion that Bacon was only a
spontaneous creative whose work emerged effortlessly and straight into paint,
is rendered “unsafe” by the exhibition, the researchers claim. Bacon’s
“collusion” in such ideas has been well documented, as is his devotion to
other artists who often bypassed the drawing process, such as Picasso and
Chaim Soutine.
Bacon said of himself that he
“never knew what to paint,” yet pages of lists from a notebook taken from his
studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington stand testament to his careful
planning. As do the influences of other artists, particularly Velazquez, and
even filmmakers like Buñuel and Resnais, according to the Harrisons.
“There’s a real risk that the myth
of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded- is all we will hand on to
future generations. Yet the paintings are still by far the most important
thing – it is only by reaching into those that we will ask the right
questions and do justice to Bacon’s real genius,” Martin Harrison said.
Francis Bacon: In Camera is at
Compton Verney gallery from 27 March until 20 June 2010. Admission is £8
Adults, £6 Concessions, £2 Children, £18 Family.
Francis Bacon: In Cinema.
Mary Miers, Country Life, Tuesday, 23 March
2010
Francis
Bacon: In Cinema. This exhibition will focus on Bacon's source material and
working methods, and will examine Bacon's work in relation to film and
photography. It includes oil paintings, film footage, stills and archival
material from Bacon's studio. From 27th March - 20th June. At Compton Verney,
Warwickshire CV35 9HZ. 01926 645 500
Head in Grey 1955 Francis Bacon
Exhibition
Francis Bacon: In Cinema
Compton Verney 27 March - 20 June 2010
The Blue
Lagoon 1952 Francis
Bacon
“I can dream all day long and ideas for
paintings just fall into my mind like slides" Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon is acknowledged as
one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. Visceral and
compellingly raw, his paintings generate powerful emotional responses which
continue to fascinate and demand our attention.
This exhibition will for the
first time focus on Bacon's source material and working methods. Besides
significant oil paintings from 1944 to 1989, it will include archival
material from Bacon's studio, now in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and
film footage and stills which shed new light on the visual references to film
and photography in his work and his transformation of these images in fluid
oil paint. Photographs by Muybridge and John Deakin will be displayed
alongside the paintings they informed - in particular, his reconfigurations
of the human body.
The South Bank Show:
final cut
For decades Melvyn Bragg has persuaded key artistic figures of the age to
talk with extraordinary candour: Here he considers the influence of The South
Bank Show, and relives his encounters with Paul McCartney, Alan Bennett,
Martin Amis, Tracey Emin and Eric Clapton
By Melvyn Bragg, The
Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2010
The first programme was in
January 1978. I led with Paul McCartney because I wanted to show that I was
serious. My aim on The South Bank Show was to include the “popular”
arts and make them an accepted part of the arts world. There were critics who
thought that by doing this we had fatally undermined any claim to be an arts
programme – even though in that first season I also included Harold Pinter,
Ingmar Bergman, the RSC, David Hockney, the ballet Mayerling.
The show brought together two
aspects of my own life. The working-class background, which at that time had
little access to ballet, opera, great galleries and classical concerts; and
the traditional arts, to which I had access later at Oxford University. The
arts establishment in 1978 had little truck with popular culture and even
less inclination to treasure it. That’s changed substantially over the past
30 years and The South Bank Show has been part of that changing.
The process of selection was
often little more than a stab in the dark. There are insights into the
instincts, thoughts and craft of artists of immense and perhaps enduring
talent – even, in a few cases, touching genius. These are spots in a time of
their lives, like painted portraits — a few sittings. The honesty and the
seriousness with which they talk about their work is, I think, impressive,
often exhilarating.
Though far from all the South Bank shows were
interview-based, many were. I think that a good way to discover what artists
are up to is to ask them. A “talking head” can be the best of television. If
there’s trust and if the preparation and research have been good, the results
can reveal truths. What matters is not the personality of the interviewer nor
the questions, much, but the quality of the reply. There are many ways to
interview people, but for the sort of programmes our team set out to do,
collaboration was the key. Now and then they were nervous. The objective was
to help make the meeting a place where they felt they could talk to the best
of themselves.
I began in television as a
researcher, then a director, and thought then and now that in any portrait of
an artist the interviewer’s job is to help gather material. I did not want to
be a critic. There are plenty of those in print. Our job was to put together
a portrait. I would be part of it but, as far as possible, outside it.
My conviction was and is that the
viewers can make up their own minds about the subject. Our job is to provide
the fullest evidence we can for them to come to their decision.
Francis Bacon
When Francis Bacon and I appeared
on The South Bank Show and for a few minutes we were caught in a state
of naked inebriation it provided, I think, a true insight into Francis as a
man and as a painter.
We were at Mario’s in Kensington
after a long lunch, alone except for a film crew which dissolved before our
blurry eyes as bottle succeeded bottle. Michelangelo, Francis proclaimed, had
made the greatest drawings of nude flesh that existed. "Michelangelo
gave the greatest male voluptuousness to the body." The way he expressed
the word ‘voluptuous’ warmed by much strong red Italian wine was vintage.
"It’s a great word," I
said, through the haze, "voluptuousness – we ought to live in a state of
voluptuousness."
"Yes," said Francis,
and repeated the word once more and then I suggested he was not interested in
fantasy.
"Fantasy? No, I’m not
interested. I’m interested in reality." He glared at me, his face afire.
"There you are," he said, "Melvyn Bragg. Real. How do you
render that in another art?"
"Why do you want to?"
Off-camera, my voice seemed to call up from an open tomb."
"I want to be able" –
each word perfectly clear despite the alcoholic breath on it – "to make
in another medium the reality of an image that excites me."
Once more from afar, my voice.
"But why do you want to, Francis, why do you want to?’
At which he got to his feet, a
redoubtable effort, picked up the bottle and steadily filled my glass once
again. "Because I want to. 'Cos I happen to be a painter. That’s
all." The wine almost reached the brim. "Cheerio,’ he said and did
not waste a drop.
Francis was born in Dublin of
English parents in 1909. His father was a breeder and trainer of horses.
Tales from the stables of violent equine beasts and randy stable boys have
been called up as the making of the man. In 1914 his father moved to London
to work in the War Office and early life was split between the two cities.
Francis was asthmatic and had no regular schooling. He went on to become a
designer and his work first hit print in the early thirties. He painted and
in 1933 his first Crucifixion was included in Herbert Read’s Art
Now. His first exhibition failed and he took to gambling, which became a
lifelong habit, at times an addiction. In the early forties he destroyed most
of his paintings and there was no reason for anyone to think this young
decorator would ever make his mark.
But in 1944 he produced his Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The snarling, distorted
bodies of almost mythical beasts struck a post-war nerve and both reflected
and helped to form the zeitgeist. In one bound he was launched and although
it took time to build his great reputation, there seemed to be an
inevitability. When we did this film in 1985 he could be called ‘the greatest
living painter in the world’.
We filmed in a vast empty
storeroom of the Tate in which we had set up a screen, brought in a projector
and invited Francis to comment on his own and others’ work.
We showed him one of his
paintings of a distorted female body splayed on a bed and nailed to the
ground with a syringe. "You've said that you de-form and re-form reality
in your paintings," I said.
"I would say there was some
de-formation there, wouldn’t you?" he laid on, a touch heavily. "I
don’t think you’ve seen a human body quite like that. They said, 'Why a
hypodermic syringe? Is she supposed to be a drug addict?' I just wanted to
impale her on the bed. I couldn’t use a nail."
At times Francis talked as if he
were nervous, almost hesitant, but always, when he wanted to say what
mattered emotionally to him, he would pause, physically steady himself, look
directly at me and be emphatically clear. "I try to make concentrations
of images."
Van Gogh’s The Night Café. I read
from van Gogh’s notes: "The café is a place where one can ruin oneself,
go mad or commit a crime." He wrote: "There’s a bar, a billiard
table, lights, chairs, one or two figures, violent colours. It’s one of the
ugliest paintings I've done."
"I love it," said
Francis. "One of the inventions is the way he’s done the lights."
Around each bare light bulb are concentric circles of yellow. "He’s made
the light turn around the bulb. Without that the painting wouldn’t have that
extreme intensity."
"He called the painting
ugly. Some people have called your paintings ugly."
"I’m genuinely pleased those
sort of people don’t like them. If they really hate them it means there might
be something there."
A couple of days earlier, we had
filmed in the mews flat in which Francis lived. We stood. There were no
chairs.
"When you come to a blank
canvas, do you have any idea in your head of what you want to do before you
start?"
Often, when talking, Francis
fidgeted with things, or looked away – slyly? Nervously? Seeking a way to pull
together his concentration. But then he would plant his feet, stare and
carefully deliver.
"I have an overall idea.
It’s in the working that it develops. It’s a very difficult problem. I’m a
figurative painter. You can’t any longer make illustrations better than a
camera.’ He begins to stumble in his sentences. ‘I thought you might ask me
that. I thought about it very clearly this morning and wrote it down. Now I
can’t remember. Can I use it?"
Blushing a little, he unzips a
pocket and takes out a scrap of paper and reads. "Not illustration of
reality but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a
shorthand for sensation." He smiles. He tucks the note away.
"Any drawings
beforehand?"
"No. If I drew it I’d just
be making an illustration of the drawing."
"You like to let your
unconscious take over?"
"I like to think so. There’s
this deep sea of unconsciousness and I do think I can draw from it."
"At the same time you like
to see things deeply ordered?"
"Yes. I believe in a deeply
ordered chaos in my work. I work very quickly."
"How do you do it?"
"Until the images come
through you’re not in control. When they come up you have to control
them."
"So you come up with an
overall image which you don’t want to define except by working towards
it?"
"Yes . . . no . . . yes,
that’s exactly how it is."
And then we went for lunch around
the corner, to Mario’s. A corner table by the window.
"Some people say your
paintings are too full of horror."
"What horror could I make
that would compete with what goes on every single day? If you read the
newspapers or look at the television, what could I do to compete with that
except that I’ve tried to re-create it?"
"So you paint the real
world?"
"Yes! Between birth and
death has always been the violence of life. I paint images of sensation. What
is life but sensation?"
"Do you think anything
exists outside 'the moment'?"
"No. I believe in nothing.
We are born and we die and there’s nothing else."
And after that, in that late
afternoon, we heaved over to the Colony Room Club (Members Only) in Soho.
There were occasional overheard sentences. "They’ve been giving him a
really bad time. He likes being given a really bad time. There’s a lot of men
like that."
His £50 notes crossed the bar and
bottles of champagne were shuttled back.
"People come in here and
lose their inhibitions," he said, a little superfluously as a
crimson-faced old friend yelled out, "Can I have a £50 note or two,
Francis? No? Oh. I thought you and I were doing a bit of whooooring
together."
Somehow he found the space to
stand in front of a mirror and comb his hair. Then I heard him, loudly,
"I never use make-up! Keep your make-up for yourself, you old cow!"
He came across. "I am not one of those made-up poofs. It’s very
old-fashioned, you know."
The roar of the Colony was
growing in my ears like a mighty tide, rising and crashing with a powerful
but queasy rhythm.
"Are you surprised at your
success?"
"Yes. I never thought I’d
sell at all. I always thought I’d have to take some other job. That’s
luck."
Yet again he raised his glass.
Yet again I did likewise. But whereas he would go on to Charlie Chester’s
Casino, with John, to play roulette – "they say it’s the silliest
game," he said, "but when you win . . ." – I managed, who
knows how, to navigate a passage back to north London, contentedly, and
slept.
- The South Bank Show: Final Cut
is published next month by Hodder at £20.
- T
£18 (plus £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Telegraph Books
The South Bank Show Revisited,
a season of classic interviews, starts next Sunday March 28 on ITV1
Les lutteurs qui ont
inspiré Francis Bacon en vedettes de la section photographie
Le Monde | 15.03.10
La Tefaf
(The European Fine Art Fair), comme se nomme la foire de Maastricht, est
passée de 239 exposants, en 2009, à 263 cette année. Cette augmentation du
nombre de participants s'explique par la création d'une nouvelle section,
Tefaf on Paper, tout spécialement dédiée aux dessins, aux estampes, aux
livres et manuscrits anciens, aux aquarelles et aux photographies.
Parmi les
dix-neuf marchands de cette nouvelle section, installée à l'étage, un peu à
l'écart de la foire, le Londonien Michael Hoppen. Ce spécialiste de la
photographie présente sous le titre Men Wrestling, New York un
ensemble curieux, à la fois familier et déroutant. Ce sont de grandes
planches-contacts. L'auteur en est inconnu, et elles valent essentiellement
par leur commanditaire, le peintre anglais Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Elles
ont été achetées par Michael Hoppen, non pas à un marchand, mais à un
électricien ! Un nommé Robertson qui travaillait parfois pour Bacon, et
auquel l'artiste, dont la générosité était proverbiale, a offert de nombreux
objets.
A la
demande de Bacon, le photographe anonyme a multiplié les clichés de deux
hommes en maillot luttant, "probablement dans un gymnase new-yorkais,
vers 1975. Des grands costauds, comme des chauffeurs routiers, et je suis
persuadé que Bacon les a choisis pour cela, coiffés avec des bonnets de
bain", commente M. Hoppen. "Bacon a utilisé ces clichés
comme base de certaines de ses peintures", ajoute-t-il en comparant
certains d'entre eux avec des reproductions d'oeuvres du peintre et en
montrant les traces de stylo-feutre signalant les choix de l'artiste.
Les
moeurs du peintre
Les
choix, et le début d'un processus créatif, puisque Bacon a visiblement
commencé à esquisser ses compositions directement sur les photos. "Ces
hommes ne jouent pas, ils se battent vraiment. Je suis fasciné par ce
qu'elles révèlent de l'esprit de Bacon, la violence, l'amour, la passion, le
talent, la torture dans laquelle il vivait. Il faut se souvenir que dans les
années 1960, en Angleterre, l'homosexualité était un crime. Les moeurs de
Bacon pouvaient le conduire en prison. Ce que disent ses peintures, et aussi
ces photos, c'est la passion qu'il portait au côté viscéral de la vie."
Par leur
succession sur la planche, dans l'ordre exact où ils ont été pris, les
clichés rappellent un peu les Chronophotographies,
de Muybridge, dont Bacon s'est aussi inspiré. "Le photographe n'était
qu'un outil pour Francis. Je n'y vois rien d'artistique, c'est simplement
l'enregistrement d'un événement. Ce qui m'intéresse, c'est que c'est Bacon
qui le dirige."
Michael
Hoppen, qui rafla lors de la vente André Breton en 2003 tous les portraits
des surréalistes (Dali, Buñuel, Ernst, Tanguy) réalisés dans un Photomaton,
se dit fasciné par cet anonymat, ces clichés en rafale, comme réalisés par
une machine. "Je les ai achetés pour la même raison que ces photos de
Bacon. C'est narratif, c'est réel, et l'identité du photographe n'a pas
d'importance. C'est une question qui me passionne. Comme en musique : qui est
l'artiste ? L'interprète qui joue le morceau, ou l'auteur qui l'a composé
?"
Mais,
Maastricht oblige, l'anonymat n'est pas toujours de règle, y compris chez
Michael Hoppen, qui présente aussi d'autres photographies en relation avec
Bacon, comme ce portrait du peintre pris en 1984 par Bruce Bernard, qui
travaillait pour le Sunday Times, ou John Deakin, qui fut un des
grands photographes de Vogue.
Harry Bellet
Michelangelo and the mastery of drawing
Michelangelo's astonishing 'presentation drawings', lessons in art
technique for a young aristocrat he adored, tell pagan stories about men and
love. The exhibition at the Courtauld is the most important ever devoted to
them, writes James Hall
James Hall, The Guardian, Saturday 6 March 2010
One of the most common complaints made about today's
artists is their apparent inability to draw. In matters of art, no question
is more decisive, more majestically final, than: "But can he/she
draw?" In a melodramatic hatchet job on Francis Bacon, Picasso
biographer John Richardson recently claimed that Bacon's "graphic
ineptitude" was his Achilles heel: "Tragically, he failed to teach
himself to draw."
Yet Michelangelo's attack on Venetian painting points
to a serious flaw in the argument. One can compile an extremely impressive
list of great (and mostly unliterary) artists who got by nicely without
bothering unduly with drawing. They displayed not so much graphic ineptitude
as indifference. Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio, Hals, Velázquez and Vermeer
seem to have painted directly on to the canvas, just incising or brushing in
a few outlines. Indeed, drawing as a major artform has been in spasmodic but
continuous decline since the 17th century: most drawings by great artists
after about 1850, including Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, are barely
worth exhibiting and are of interest only to specialist scholars. Bacon
represents the rule rather than the exception.
Michelangelo's
Dream is at the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2
(020 7848 2526) until 16 May.
Gallery: Two slices of
Bacon in Kirklees
by Sarah Bull, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, February 26, 2010
THERE are now two
places in which to view one of the most prized images in the Kirklees
Permanent Collection.
Figure Study II, by Francis Bacon, the most
valuable painting in the collection, was originally a gift to the old Batley
Town Council from the Contemporary Art Society back in 1952.
Lately, there has been
a minor campaign from Batley to have the painting shown there, with those
involved including Mike Wood, MP, Allan Thompson and Clr Mary Harkin.
But Robert Hall, senior
curator for visual arts in Kirklees, had to explain that the security and
environmental conditions needed for the painting meant it could not be seen
there.
So, a photographic
replica – just over half-size – has been made and this is now displayed in
Batley Library (not in the art gallery there, which has changing
exhibitions).
Mr Hall said the
original painting, currently on show at Huddersfield, was a strong image and
much in demand.
Last year was Bacon’s
centenary and the painting was shown at the Tate, Milan, Madrid and New York.
Figure Study II, painted during the 1940s, is a colourful, dramatic,
but strange painting.
Daniel Farson, in his
book Gallery, calling it the most spectacular painting in
Huddersfield, says: “The flatness of the title conceals an act of mysterious
violence.
“An apparently naked
figure, loosely-draped by a herringbone overcoat, mounted by an umbrella,
leans over a palm, his mouth wide-open with a scream. The background is the
colour of blood. What has happened? There is no telling.”
Though spectacular and
acclaimed by critics, the gift of the painting, was not appreciated by all
the people in Batley.
To quote Daniel Farson
again “Apparently, the painting was so disliked locally (so the artist
himself has told me) that motions were put forward to the council to sell it.
“These were defeated at
the time by the Director of Batley Art Gallery, Ronald Gelsthorpe, who
believed in the painting’s importance, and thanks to his perseverance, it now
hangs to greater advantage in Huddersfield.”
So what will the
present population of Batley think of the photographic replica they have got
now?
Time will tell, of
course, but bearing in mind its history, there’s a touch of irony about.
Ref:
Daniel Farson - Gallery: A Personal Guide to British Galleries and Their
Unexpected Treasure, Bloomsbury, 1990.
1,6 millones
para el Bacon más caro de Arco
El
Economista, Eco Diario, L. R. G. | 19/02/2010
Un visitante de ARCO, observando el
autorretrato de Francis Bacon en un 'stand' de la Feria.
Hay tendencias de todo tipo, desde las vanguardias más
representativas del siglo XX hasta las obras más rupturistas distribuidas a
lo largo de las 218 galerías que exponen desde el pasado miércoles las obras
de alrededor de 3.000 artistas en los stands de Arco 2010, la feria de arte
contemporáneo que acoge Ifema (Madrid). Se trata de una variedad que cubrirá
las expectativas de pequeños y grandes inversores y, especialmente, de las
instituciones, fondos de inversión y corporaciones.
Contemporáneo y de vanguardia
El programa general
de galerías es el lugar perfecto para encontrar obras maestras del arte
contemporáneo y de vanguardia. Pero, por encima de todas las obras expuestas
hay tres que destacan especialmente, en lo que al capítulo de cotizaciones se
refiere. La que cuelga la etiqueta
con el precio más alto es un
autorretrato de Francis Bacon que el pintor irlandés realizó en 1987.
Está a la venta por 1,6millones de euros, lo que la convierte en la obra más
cara de cuantas se pueden contemplar en la feria.
Problematisk
hyllning av Bacon
SVD, Svenska Dagbladet, 19 februari
2010
Förra året skulle Francis Bacon ha fyllt hundra år och Dublin hyllar fram till
den 7 mars sin son med en utställning där inget dammkorn lämnats åt slumpen.
I motsats till sin förebild Picasso var Bacon inte beroende av levande
modeller. Mellan honom och världen låg i stället ett filter av fotografier, filmer
och reproduktioner av målningar ur konsthistorieböcker: Poussin, Velázquez
och Goya.
Bilden av Bacon som oberoende av flyktiga intryck från
massmedier och populärkultur avlivades redan 1952 av Sam Hunter i en essä om
Francis Bacon och skräckens anatomi, men få var beredda att lyssna. Action
painting och abstrakt expressionism dominerade scenen och publiken ville ha
en konstnär som öste ur sitt inre. Bacon bidrog knappast själv till att kasta
ljus över sitt arbete. Brutal utlevelse var ledstjärnan och vaksamt lade han
ut dimridåer för att dölja att han likt vilken dödlig konstnär som helst
fuskade genom att använda teckningar som förlagor.
I Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty på Dublin City
Gallery The Hugh Lane presenteras ett rikt arbetsmaterial och ett antal
sällan visade men inte särskilt märkvärdiga målningar. Men någonstans på
vägen tappar galleriet fokus i sin redovisningsiver och vilja att kartlägga
Bacons oeuvre. Riktigt problematiskt blir det i en sal där sönderskurna
målningar presenteras – dukar som Bacon själv mönstrat ut, men som här inger
känslan av en medveten konstnärlig handling.
Det är ett tveksamt förhållningssätt att lyfta upp kasserade
målningar och ofärdiga alster till verkshöjd. Inte minst mot bakgrund av att
Bacon var mycket självkritisk och knappt släppte någon över tröskeln till
ateljén. Det tycks som om de förstörda dukarna är tänkta att kompensera
bristen på riktigt bra verk i utställningen.
Som ett besynnerligt akvarium framstår rekonstruktionen av den
legendariska Londonateljén på 7 Reece Mews. Genom tjockt skyddsglas möter jag
en tät djungel av intorkade penslar, tidskrifter, mattor, böcker och
målartrasor.
Efter Bacons död hoppades många att Tate Britains egensinnige chef Nicholas
Serota skulle inse värdet av att bevara ateljén i sin ursprungliga miljö.
Officiellt heter det att museet aldrig fick någon förfrågan. Troligare är att
Serota vid denna tid var fullt upptagen med sitt imperiebygge. Avknoppningen
av Tate pågick som bäst och Tate Modern med inriktning på samtidskonst invigdes
1998, samma år som Bacons ateljé med 7500 skrubbade och katalogiserade
föremål flyttade till Irland.
Även om Bacon föddes i Dublin så var det i London han hörde
hemma och utvecklades som konstnär. Flytten av ateljén är säregen, men ändå
blir jag alltmer övertygad om att det var ett korrekt beslut. Mytbildningen
var nära att överskugga Bacons verk redan under hans livstid. När ateljén så
rycktes loss ur sin ursprungliga omgivning kapades de sentimentala banden.
Ateljén i Dublin blir aldrig en kultplats.
Francis Bacon reproduction painting beats security fears to go
on show in Huddersfield
Huddersfield Daily Examiner,
February 16, 2010
Figure Study II 1945 - 1946 Francis Bacon
A PAINTING by Francis
Bacon has been copied – so it can go on show in Kirklees. The original of Figure
Study II is considered too valuable to be put on public show.
It remains locked in
secure storage by Kirklees Council’s cultural staff who will not say how much
it is worth. But now a reproduction of the work has been commissioned and it
will go on show later this week.
The painting, Figure
Study II by Bacon, one of the 20th century's most influential artists,
was presented to Batley Art Gallery by the Contemporary Art Society in 1952.
Over the years the issue of displaying the important work in Batley has
surfaced from time to time.
The reasons the
painting has not been able to be displayed are numerous but primarily related
to security and the impact on insurance, due to the painting’s value. There
are also fears about possible damage when it is being moved and transported.
Whenever Kirklees Galleries
lend the work, and it is often in demand, they need to be sure that the
borrowers can meet certain security, insurance, transport and environmental
conditions.
Now the work has been
copied and the resulting reproduction will be formally unveiled at Batley Art
Gallery on Friday at 10.30 am in front of Spen Valley MP Mike Wood and local
dignitaries.
Art experts claim the
work is an important early painting by Bacon, as he destroyed much of his
work from the period of 1935 to 1944.
It shows a coat motif,
from which a deformed, screaming figure – perhaps lurking under the coat –
emerges.
Grappling with Francis Bacon
Previously unseen images of
wrestlers made in Bacon's studio demonstrate the artist's love of the
visceral, writes Peter Conrad
The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010
"Who were the flabby butchers in
the stained, straining pants?"
The wrestling session commissioned by
Francis Bacon. Michael Hoppen Gallery
Two bodies in a bare, drab room, experimentally trying all the
things they can do to each other, from grappling, groping sex to choke holds
and karate chops: here is a privileged, confidential glimpse of Francis
secret theatre, never seen before. It comes from a pile of contact sheets
given by Bacon to an electrician who worked in his south Kensington studio;
the collection was acquired by the dealer Michael Hoppen, who will be showing
it at the art fair in Maastricht next month.
Nothing is known about this long session of polymorphous play.
Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants, obliged to wear
swimming caps that make them look like medical orderlies kitted out for
surgery? Where was the room, which might be called clinical if only the sheet
on the floor were cleaner and smoother? And who gave the orders, sitting
behind the anonymous photographer and directing the two men as they showed
off wrestling holds? That presumably was Bacon: he commissioned the
photographs, and used a felt pen to mark the images he fancied, sketching a
red cage around the hired thugs.
Bacon admired photographer Eadweard Muybridge's studies of
bodies in motion, which treat the physique as an apparatus with elegantly
calibrated, agile parts. But his own version of those athletic displays is
perverse, an exercise in abstracting the body by force. Picasso would have
appreciated the frames in which the two men, wrestling or perhaps sexually
coupling, merge into a monstrous quadruped with a pair of arses, one trailing
dislocated arm, and no head.
They have come together to cause each other pain: a wrestling
bout is the spectacle of physical agony, accompanied by grunts, groans, cries
of excruciation. Unlike boxing, wrestling has no neatly aimed knock-out
blows, no strict sporting etiquette. Here the coup de grâce is
delivered with an elbow or the back of a hand, after which one man shoulders
the other and carts him off like dead meat. Bacon was a connoisseur of
abattoirs, and all that's missing in these photographs is blood, although the
scrap of tape on the corner looks like the trace of some intimate, dried-up
fluid. Or does this stand for the imprint of Bacon's thumb, gripping the page
and depositing an equivalent to the smudges left on the floorcloth by the
soles of the wrestlers' dirty feet?
Like Greek tragedy, it is all a performance, as the men
demonstrate when they forget their feud and start to jump and skip or dive
into a non-existent pool. Opposed moods chase each other across the page like
black and white, the two extremes of the photographic spectrum. Brutality at
the top left changes to friskiness at the bottom right. But the change
happens imperceptibly: sex often looks, and almost always sounds, like
murder.
The detail that intrigues me most is the light socket halfway
up the wall. It seems quaintly foreign, which suggests that the photographs
may have been taken in Paris or New York, where Bacon spent time in the
1970s. Apart from any clue it might give about time and place, it functions,
like every object in a Bacon painting, as a memento mori. In this impromptu
gymnasium, energetic life goes through its paces, and soon enough confronts
death; the light that floods the scene is raw and harsh, but the current can
be turned off in an instant. Then perhaps an image will materialise in that
dark, empty square at the centre. Some photographs – the nastiest, the most
cruelly truthful – have to be looked at with your eyes closed.
The contact
sheets will be shown for the first time at the European Fine Art Fair,
Maastricht, Friday 12 March to Sunday 21 March
Billionaire Whistle
Blower Loses $730 Million Alleging Fraud
By Vernon Silver
and Anabela Reis, Bloomberg, February
04, 2010
Francis Bacon’s 1983 Oedipus and the Sphinx, after Ingres
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) - On a December
afternoon in 2007, billionaire Jose Berardo walked into the attorney
general’s 18th-century headquarters in Lisbon to rat out executives at the
Portuguese bank on which he had staked his fortune.
Sylvester Stallone
In a sun-filled gallery, Berardo
examines the 1808 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx by French master
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that’s on loan from the Louvre in Paris. The
painting is being installed next to the work that it inspired, Francis
Bacon’s 1983 Oedipus and the Sphinx, after Ingres. Berardo owns the
Bacon painting.
“You know who used to own this one?
Stallone!” Berardo shouts, referring to actor Sylvester Stallone. Berardo
recounts how he ran into Stallone and told him, “I’ve got your Bacon!”
The museum is located in a
state-owned cultural complex - the result of a deal Berardo cut with the
Ministry of Culture in 2006. The government agreed to house part of his
collection and took a 10-year option to buy 862 paintings and sculptures for
316 million euros, based on a Christie’s valuation in 2006.
A show
to Bragg about: The South Bank Show frontman Melvyn recalls his most
memorable moments
After 32 years and 800
episodes, Melvyn Bragg's The South Bank Show has come to an end. Here he
talks about the good, the bad and the not-always-sober moments behind the
scenes.
By John Mcentee, Daily Mail, 29th January 2010
Making a programme with the artist Francis Bacon involved
another day's drinking. 'I'd known Francis for more than 20 years. In 1985, I
spent a day with him for a programme and it turned into a pub crawl.
'This was an alcoholic waterfall. Francis and I pretended to
have lunch and did the interview. We ate nothing, but we drank on.
'We got very drunk. It showed. We
slurred. Once or twice we all but stopped. We went in to a gambling club next
to some blurred drinking hellhole.
At some time I found my way home, my liver leaping up to my
ribs like a salmon swimming against the stream.'
At this week's final South Bank Show award lunch, Melvyn was
touched by a filmed tribute from the Prince of Wales in which he described
the 'more or less' sober questioning of a drunken Francis Bacon while the
production team guffawed.
Bragg may yet take his show to a different channel if another
broadcaster can afford to bankroll it.
'I'm proud of the show because it changed the nation's view of
what constitutes art. Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music and
everything else deemed highbrow.
'It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be
treated equally.
'There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor
classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
'But it is all art and we are all in this together, and
through The South Bank Show people have come to realise this.'
• The South Bank Show Awards
is on ITV1 on Sunday at 10.15pm.
Francis
Bacon; valid retrospective or academic voyeurism?
The most recent
exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work features his rejected pieces, and is
presented as much as an insight to the man as an artistic endeavour.
Trinity News, 27
January 2010
The hundredth anniversary of Francis Bacon’s birth was
celebrated last year. By all accounts he displays the virtues recommended to
tortured artists. His highly prized angst is considered a prerequisite for
depicting the so-called ‘modern condition’. Whatever the catalyst was for his
art, the results are clear. Bacon was one of the highest selling painters of
his time. Born in Dublin at 63 Lower Baggot Street, his life was all cliché.
His father, a military man, disapproved of his son’s foray into art, leading
to a predictably strained relationship. Such friction lead Bacon to Europe
where he could ply his intended trade free from the untoward influences of
convention. Or so say the critics. There are two schools of art criticism,
one is interesting while the other is not. The first method attempts to find
value in the art work while assessing the technical merits (if any) of the
piece. The second method aims at an unnecessary archaeology of the artist’s
life and thought. The artists are usually dead, before these critics feel
free to extrapolate wildly and attribute significance as they please.
A Terrible beauty is the title of the Francis Bacon exhibit
currently in the Hugh Lane gallery. The exhibit is an exercise in
exploitation. Everything ranging from rejected works to refuse is on display
if Bacon so much as touched it. His library, paints and studio are displayed
so that each voyeur may garner a sufficient degree of empathy for the man,
and his interests. The Egyptians buried their dead with much fanfare, but no
one could say that they profited for it. Civilisation has marched on somewhat
since then, we still have fanfare, but now we’re also willing to profit from
our famous dead. Walking through the Hugh Lane you gain a considerable
education, but it’s an odd process somewhat like tearing through your
sister’s diary. What you find is of no particular use. Bacon was well known
for masochistic tendencies, with highly destructive and violent relationships
with his partners and muses for his disturbing works.
His revulsion at his own homosexuality, something he was open about all his
life is equally well known. One of his defining relationships was with a
George Dyer, thirty years his junior, who he claimed to have met when he had
burgled his apartment, Dyer, a colourful personality himself, committed
suicide just before Bacon’s biggest retrospective in Paris, just one instance
of tragedy in his life.
Bacon’s exhibition is the visual narration of a plausible life story. Scrap
books, photos and random notes are interspersed between a collection of
sketches, paintings and slashed paintings. The main themes to note are
progression and influence. Seeds of the final results can be seen in earlier
endeavours. The ‘slashed paintings’ are failures by another name. They
usually evince the same sparse background of the complete works with a hole
where the central image was supposed to reside. The desecration of all the
paintings displays a violent and brutal editorial hand. So the decision to
display them seems counter-intuitive. This posthumous abuse is no better than
the gratuitous airing of dirty laundry. But for all the flaws to be found in
the exhibit there are some positive points - namely, the paintings.
Bacon paints his scenes in a strangely figurative style on un-primed canvas.
This method enforces a difficult constraint upon the painter, by which
mistakes become difficult to alter, and so must be incorporated in the image.
This engenders some strange effects. There is an obvious disconnect between
his images and reality but at the same time, he paints hugely evocative
expressions of the human form. Contorted at bizarre angles or at rest, there
is always a degree of isolation to the figures depicted. As a result, one
cannot look on with indifference, and what strikes one as figurative
nonetheless communicates a literal truth.
It is by this principle of empathy that Bacon’s paintings communicate the
sense of the situation depicted. The miserable and wretched examples of
humanity in Bacon’s painting serve a cathartic effect. The appreciation of
such paintings follows primarily from the knowledge that such is not my lot.
The miserable nudity of the human body seems so defenceless and brittle under
Bacon’s brush that the survival of our species strikes one anew as an amazing
miracle. The recognition of the suffering or loneliness seems to be
instinctive, such that I do not feel able to dismiss such scenes of misery as
melodramatic extensions of the existentialist ‘epiphany’.
The clear emotive success achieved by Bacon’s stark depictions makes the trip
to the Hugh Lane worth it, but bear in mind that while it may give a degree
of insight into what was, as with many a creative mind, a troubled existence,
however, as with much of todays art criticism, it should be taken with a
pinch (or four) of salt.
La Fábrica
publica por primera vez el conjunto de recortes que inundaba el estudio del
artista
Reúne libro el archivo disperso que
inspiraba a Francis Bacon
Archivos
privados contiene 160 fotografías, armazón sobre el que construyó su
vocabulario pictórico
Tras su muerte,
el experto Brian Clarke tuvo acceso al material y logró recopilarlo
Armando G. Tejeda, Corresponsal, Periódico La Jornada, México, Domingo 24 de enero de 2010
Madrid, 23 de enero. Francis Bacon, el pintor irlandés de autocrítica severa y
desesperanzada, el artista que reflexionó sobre su tiempo con varias y
profundas heridas a cuestas, tenía en su estudio miles, quizá decenas de
miles de hojas, restos de hojas o material orgánico que formaban, en su
conjunto, su principal fuente de inspiración.
Quienes conocieron el estudio de Bacon en Londres –muy pocas
personas– confirmaron lo que se sabía en los mentideros artísticos de la
época sobre la ingente cantidad de recortes y más recortes que inundaban su
sala. Esas imágenes las fue recolectando a lo largo de su vida y se
convirtieron en sus compañeras, en sus fuentes de inspiración, en objetos
tocados por su mano singular e inspirada que, fruto de la alquimia de los
artistas, se convertían en otra cosa. En imágenes con vida propia.
A la muerte de Bacon, en Madrid en 1992, su heredero y
compañero sentimental John Edwards abrió el archivo personal a un experto en
la obra del artista, Brian Clarke, quien descubrió un universo de imágenes
que explicaban a su vez no sólo la evolución estética del propio Bacon, sino
también el origen de muchos de sus cuadros más célebres y de su empeño
infranqueable ante el último día de su vida de crear el cuadro perfecto.
Ese material se publica por primera vez en el libro Francis
Bacon: archivos privados, de la editorial La Fábrica, y que supone el
primer trabajo de recopilación exhaustiva con los documentos, papeles,
imágenes y recortes que formaron parte de ese archivo disperso en su estudio.
De ese caos, que al visitante neófito posiblemente le hacía pensar que Bacon,
además de genio y de ser una de las personalidades más atormentadas de su
época, sufría el síndrome de Diógenes.
El libro contiene 160 fotografías en los que se hace un repaso
de los temas centrales de su pintura; el cuerpo humano; los trabajos con
animales; los paisajes; los cuadros de artistas que marcaron su estética,
como Diego de Velázquez, y su postura al límite de lo caricaturesco. Es, en
definitiva, el armazón sobre el que trabajaba este artista para confeccionar
su propio método y vocabulario pictórico.
Para el visitante neófito posiblemente el caos del
estudio de Bacon le hace pensar en que, además de ser un genio, sufría el
síndrome de Diógenes. En la imagen, el artista en su estudio en 1984. Foto Bruce Bernard
Las intervenciones de Bacon convertían un vulgar o anodino
anuncio publicitario en pieza satírica o doliente sobre sus obsesiones, como
la muerte, el paso del tiempo, siempre implacable y severo, los rostros
deformados por el trasluz de su verdadera naturaleza, el misterio del proceso
creativo y su desgaste hasta el límite de la resistencia en algunos artistas,
como él mismo.
“Imperio del collage”
El propio Bacon reflexionaba así sobre los collages
o la manipulación de las imágenes: “El Imperio del collage se extiende
mucho más allá de las artes plásticas. Es aquí donde empieza el verdadero
efecto del collage: su misterio, su poder… su dimensión en el campo
conceptual”. Acercarse, en definitiva, al lado sensorial de los objetos. Pero
también del movimiento de los animales y de los hombres, que fueron fuente de
inspiración y de afirmación. En este sentido, Bacon ahondó en el carácter
primitivo de las cosas y de los animales, a la manera de una de sus máximas
de cabecera, en este caso de Bataille: “Si… esa matemática verdad militar se
contrasta con el orificio excremental del simio… el universo que parecía
amenazado por el esplendor humano en forma lamentablemente imperativa no
recibe otra respuesta que la descarga ininteligible de una carcajada”.
Bárbara Dawson, directora de la galería municipal de Dublín
The Hugh Lane, donde se resguarda el archivo personal de Bacon, señaló sobre
el carácter de algunos materiales. Su transformación en un ser frágil y
anciano, y su camino hacia la decrepitud trajo otros significados. Este
proceso de mutación fue importante para Bacon. Lo |
