Rétrospective Francis Bacon au MET
- Le château de Barbe-Bleue
Paul Bennett, Le Devoir,
Montréal (Québec), Édition du le samedi 04 et le
dimanche 05 juillet 2009
Après Londres et Madrid, c'est au tour du Metropolitan Museum
of Art de New York d'accueillir, jusqu'au 16 août, la rétrospective
organisée à l'occasion du centième anniversaire de naissance
du peintre anglais Francis Bacon, une des figures majeures de
l'art contemporain. Regroupant 65 tableaux et autant de témoignages
documentaires, l'exposition est incontournable pour quiconque se
rend à New York cet été. Le Devoir en revient tout juste.
New York - La foule qui se presse dans les salles consacrées à
la grande rétrospective de Francis Bacon au Metropolitan Museum
of Art de New York (MET) suffirait à convaincre les sceptiques:
depuis le décès de l'artiste en 1992, l'oeuvre de Bacon n'a
cessé de gagner en popularité, de même qu'en succès
critique. Même ses détracteurs les plus acharnés, recrutés
le plus souvent chez les partisans de l'abstraction -- surtout
américains --, sont forcés de reconnaître son influence prépondérante
chez la jeune génération d'artistes figuratifs et la
fascination qu'exerce son oeuvre sur les amateurs d'art
contemporain. Et ce, en dépit de ses images souvent qualifiées
de «repoussantes» ou d'«abjectes».
Le MET n'a acquis son premier Bacon qu'en 1998 et ne possède
toujours pas de grand triptyque.
C'est dire la résistance passée de la critique et des
institutions américaines devant l'oeuvre de cet artiste à la
vie sulfureuse, jouisseur et joueur compulsif, qui peignait
comme il jouait à la roulette, en misant sur le hasard. À ce
petit jeu, Bacon, critique impitoyable de son oeuvre, perdait
plus souvent qu'à son tour, ce qui l'amena à détruire des
centaines de tableaux - il n'en subsiste qu'environ 600.
Un choc
Parcourir la grande rétrospective du MET, c'est encaisser tout
un choc, mais pas nécessairement celui auquel on s'attendait.
Car le visiteur n'est pas tant happé par un sentiment de
trouble ou de répulsion devant cette succession de créatures
monstrueuses et de corps déformés, disloqués, qu'ébranlé
par la grandeur austère et la théâtralité complexe - en écho
à un Becket ou à un Ionesco - des oeuvres. Il ne peut aussi
qu'être séduit par la sensualité presque voluptueuse de ces
couleurs chaudes et franches.
Dans les salles où sont regroupés la série des papes (d'après
Innocent X de Velasquez) ou encore les grands triptyques des années
1950 et 1960, on a l'impression de déambuler dans les galeries
de grands maîtres de la Renaissance. Comme si les imposants
cadres dorés qui servent d'écrin à chaque tableau et les
vitres qui les recouvrent - à la demande expresse de Bacon -
concouraient à la fois à protéger leur mystère et à leur
conférer une noblesse altière, à la limite parfois de la
grandiloquence. Sans jamais atténuer la crudité des scènes
violentes ou sordides projetées sur la toile, les procédés
utilisés par Bacon - comme ces rideaux qui font corps avec les
personnages, les cages qui les emprisonnent, ces rails qui les
hissent comme sur une tribune - contribuent eux aussi à
engendrer chez le visiteur une certaine distance avec le drame
qui se déploie sur la toile. Le sens énigmatique des oeuvres
est ainsi préservé.
Tableau après tableau, le visiteur a l'impression d'ouvrir une
après l'autre les portes d'un château de Barbe-Bleue, derrière
lesquelles viendrait de se dérouler ou s'apprêterait à éclater
un drame sanglant et tragique, comme dans les pièces d'Eschyle
- une inspiration pour Bacon - ou de Shakespeare. Les tableaux
et triptyques de Bacon ne racontent cependant pas d'histoire;
leur sens reste ainsi voilé d'ambiguïté, d'où leur énorme
pouvoir de suggestion.
Le
parcours
Le parcours de l'exposition est chronologique, depuis les premières
oeuvres à l'imagerie agressive qui ont propulsé dès 1945
Bacon à l'avant-scène de l'art contemporain jusqu'aux
autoportraits et aux grands triptyques des années 1980 et 1990,
dont le raffinement accru de la composition et les couleurs plus
subtiles ne réussissent pas à masquer une froideur presque
clinique.
Certains préféreront sans doute les premiers tableaux, plus
crus et moins encombrés par les procédés ultérieurs, telles
ces terrifiantes Têtes des années 1945-47 dans des tons de
gris, mi-humaines mi-animales, qui semblent tenter de s'arracher
à un cauchemar. La Tête I, avec ses crocs et sa gueule
convulsée, sans qu'on sache si elle hurle de peur ou si elle
s'apprête à mordre, clame la nature bestiale de l'homme, qui
faisait partie du credo de Bacon. Tout comme Jean Genêt à la même
époque, le peintre, d'un pessimisme irréductible, s'appliquait
à terrasser toute illusion réconfortante sur la nature humaine.
Les murs des premières salles de l'exposition sont
malheureusement encombrés, au risque de gêner le champ visuel
des visiteurs. Dans les salles suivantes, dont celles abritant
les grands triptyques, la présentation devient beaucoup plus
espacée, l'éclairage plus lumineux.
À mi-parcours, il vaut la peine de s'attarder dans la salle dédiée
aux documents d'archives retrouvés dans le dernier atelier de
Francis Bacon à Londres. Ces documents permettent de comprendre
de manière saisissante de quelle façon l'artiste travaillait,
à partir de photographies, de reproductions d'oeuvres d'art ou
de pages de revues délibérément pliées, froissées et découpées.
On sait à quel point la découverte de ces précieuses archives
après la mort de l'artiste a bouleversé la compréhension de
son oeuvre: Bacon assimilait un nombre incalculable d'influences
pour en faire chaque fois une seule image intense et déroutante,
dans un style personnel immédiatement reconnaissable.
Les panneaux explicatifs qui accompagnent les oeuvres sont
instructifs, mais se font discrets sur son homosexualité
pourtant manifeste dans certains tableaux (pudibonderie américaine?)
ou encore sur sa dette envers le surréalisme (Ernst, Michaux,
Dali).
Heureusement, le somptueux catalogue de l'exposition - en
anglais seulement - ne fait pas l'impasse sur ces questions et
comprend plusieurs études thématiques passionnantes, notamment
sur certains mythes à propos du travail de Bacon, par exemple
sa prétention à l'absolue «spontanéité» de son oeuvre,
souvent contredite par les reprises détectées dans plusieurs
tableaux.
Pour finir, une suggestion: ne manquez surtout pas la sculpture
fabuleuse de l'artiste américain Roxy Paine sur le toit du MET,
vous le regretteriez...
***
Essential NY: Francis Bacon at the Met
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
@ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 20-August 16, 2009
By By Andrea
Silenzi, WNYC | Wed, Jul 1, 2009

Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion,
1944 Francis Bacon
Up now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the show Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective. If you’re interested in
learning more about the show, there are two radio segment that
have recently aired on WNYC worth checking out.
First Studio 360, explores
how Bacon’s colourful, distorted, grotesque human figures have
influenced a younger painter, Jenny Saville. The piece, produced
by Studio 360’s Sarah Lilley, looks at the work
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,
ca. 1944 (pictured above), and asks what about the painting
makes it so compelling. The story draws comparisons to
Saville’s own unusual work and that memorable scene
from Alien.
Alien
1979
“The
basis of Bacon’s work for me is the idea that we’re animals,
propelled by instinct and yet given the gift of reason. …
That’s why I’ve painted animals so much myself, and try to
pull out the animal from within human, because it turns you back
on more violently to life itself.” - Jenny Saville
Also,
on The Leonard Lopate Show, guest Gary Tinterow, Engelhard
Chairman of the Metropolitan
Museum’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and
Contemporary Art, shares a bit more about Bacon’s formation as
one of the most important artists of the last
century, and his critical, polarizing reception in the art
world.
Market Motors Along at Christie’s Contemporary Sale
By Judd Tully, ARTINFO, June 30, 209
LONDON—Christie’s
finished out the London evening-auction season with a
reassuring sale of postwar and contemporary art that realized £19,063,350
($31,778,604). That compares to pre-sale expectations of £17.4–24
million for the 40 lots offered, of which all but five sold, for
an impressive sold rate of 88 percent by lot and 86 percent by
value. Of the successful lots, four hurdled the million-pound
mark and 11 made over a million dollars.
The
geographic breakdown of buyers was dominated by Europeans and
Brits, who made up 65 percent, while Americans trailed at 29
percent and Asia at 6 percent.
It was
slim pickings for other London School artists, though that did
help what was on offer. A decidedly mediocre and small-scaled
Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait (ca. 1986–88),
which bears a Bacon-estate provenance, sold to a bidder in the
room for £870,050 (est. £800,000–1.2 million).
It’s
safe to say that price fluctuations have probably found a
foundation to build on, and if sellers are willing to put
desirable property back on the market, more progress can be
made.
Artist Francis Bacon subject of one-man
show
EDP 24, Norfolk Eastern Daily Press,
29/06/2009

Pip Utton in The Life of Francis Bacon
The torrid
and extraordinary life of one of England's most brilliant
artists will be brought to life in Norwich.
Francis Bacon had a reputation for gambling, hard drinking and
destroying his own paintings, but now he is coming back to life
in a one-man dramatisation, thanks to an award-winning portrayal
by one of Britain's best fringe actors.
Pip Utton is at the leading edge of monodrama - a theatrical or
operatic piece played by a single actor or singer - and his
portrayals of Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Tony Hancock have won
acclaim as masterpieces.
Now he is bringing his talents to the Sainsbury Centre at the
UEA for a celebration of Bacon and his works as part of the
South Norfolk Festival of the Arts.
Michelle Monck, South Norfolk Council's cabinet member for
leisure, said: "It will be an eye-opener. Bacon took the
British and international art worlds by storm.
"Bacon's paintings still disturb and amaze, and what's
uncanny about Pip Utton's portrayal is how like the artist he
really is."
The performance is on Wednesday at 6.30pm, with guided tours of
Bacon's works at 5pm. The tour costs £1 and the performance
costs £8.50. Tickets are available by calling 01603 593199.
Late Wednesday: The Life of Francis Bacon
What’s On, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1st July, 2009
Enjoy an
exciting evening of live theatre in the stunning surroundings of
the Sainsbury Centre. Pip Utton’s portrayal of Francis Bacon
brings to life one of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th
century. This colourful one-man show reveals the life of an
artist famous for his gambling and drinking, and for destroying
his own paintings.
The
Sainsbury Centre has one of the best collections of early work
by Francis Bacon. Why not take time before the show to see the
works on display? Book for a friendly and informal short tour
with our guides, or explore with friends.
This year
is the centenary of the birth of Francis Bacon. Look out for
news of special celebrations at the Centre this autumn.
Please
note there is no interval during the event, but the Gallery Café
will be open beforehand.
This event
is part of South Norfolk Council’s Festival of the Arts, which
runs from May to September this year. Visit
www.south-norfolk.gov.uk/festival for more information.
5pm
– 5.30pm and 5.30pm – 6pm: tours with Sainsbury Centre
guides 6.30pm – 8pm: performance by Pip Utton Where: arrive at
Gallery Reception Price: tour plus performance £9.50,
concessions £8.00; performance only £8.50, concessions £7.50.
Concessions include South Norfolk Passport to Leisure holders.
Early-bird booking does not apply Booking: advised
Pip
Utton in The Life of Francis Bacon
Columna de opinión: El grito de Francis Bacon
Al igual como se asocia a Duchamp con un orinal y a Warhol con
una lata de sopa, Bacon será conocido como el pintor de los
papas aulladores.
Un exposición en el Metropolitan de Nueva York, repasa su obra.
Edmundo Paz Soldán, La Tercera,
Chile, 29/06/2009
Reinterpretación del retrato del papa Inocencio X de Velázquez
La semana
pasada, mientras veía la fastuosa retrospectiva de la obra de
Francis Bacon en el Metropolitan de Nueva York, concluí que, así
como asociamos a Duchamp con un orinal o a Warhol con una lata
de sopa Campbell, Bacon será conocido como el pintor de los
papas aulladores. Esa serie, pintada a fines de los años 40 y a
principios de los 50, está basada en un cuadro de Velázquez (Retrato
del papa Inocencio X, 1650), que Bacon admiraba por la perfección
de los detalles y la intensidad de los colores.
Pocos
casos como el de Bacon para mostrar cómo el gran arte no sólo
se inspira sino que saquea al gran arte. En los papas del pintor
irlandés está Velázquez, pero la majestuosa solemnidad del
pontífice en el cuadro del español se ha convertido en otra
cosa: el retrato de una humanidad doliente. Un hombre que
concentra el poder en su tiempo aparece frágil, vulnerable en
extremo.
Es curioso
que Bacon no se haya inspirado en Munch, cuyo El grito es una
obra clave en la expresión de la desesperanza de la condición
humana. Quizás a mediados del siglo XX el cuadro de Munch se
había vuelto demasiado obvio, un alarido para adornar las casas
de la clase media en la era de la reproducción tecnológica. O
quizás era que a Bacon le interesaban los detalles viscerales
de la boca abierta (los dientes, la lengua) que se convertían
en el centro de la composición, y eso no se encontraba en
Munch.
Bacon decía
que su grito no tenía un significado psicológico especial, que
sólo quería "lograr el mejor cuadro del grito humano".
Por supuesto, no tenemos que creerle. Para ello sólo hay que
pensar en los otros modelos que eligió en vez de Munch. En
primer lugar está Poussin, en cuya Masacre de los inocentes
(1628-29) Bacon descubrió la más brutal representación del
dolor humano: la madre que grita cuando su hijo está a punto de
ser asesinado. Segundo, Eisenstein, que mostró en El acorazado
Potemkin el impactante "aullido silencioso" de una
enfermera agonizante con los lentes rotos. Si comparamos los
fotogramas de El acorazado Potemkin con los cuadros de Bacon, la
conclusión es clara: el gesto desesperado de la enfermera es
muy similar al de los purpurados del irlandés.
Al
ver los cuadros de un pintor que hoy es considerado un clásico,
es difícil imaginar que hubo alguna vez resistencia a su obra. Al leer a contrapelo las críticas, sin embargo, se
descubren algunos secretos del porqué la obra se impuso.
En los años
30 y a principios de los 40, Bacon era una mala palabra en el
mundo del arte británico. En 1945, el prestigioso crítico John
Russell se refirió a un cuadro de Bacon como tan "irremediablemente
horrible… que la mente se cierra de golpe". Exacto.
Bacon creía
que la pintura de su tiempo se había convertido en un juego
para académicos, que incluso los espectadores más inteligentes
trataban de comprender un cuadro cuando lo que debían hacer en
realidad era sentirlo visceralmente. Había que pintar lo más
cerca posible del sistema nervioso. Había que cerrar la mente
de golpe.
La
retrospectiva del Metropolitan muestra que, así como Bacon
estaba influido por la pintura, el cine y la fotografía, también
lo estaba por la literatura.
No es poca cosa, para alguien que decía buscar lo que estaba más
allá de las palabras. El sentía que su equivalente literario
era T.S. Eliot, y que había conexiones temáticas entre su obra
y La tierra baldía.
Pero las
influencias no sólo provenían de la literatura moderna;
Esquilo era también clave, sobre todo por La Orestíada. A
Bacon le gustaba citar una frase de Esquilo: "El hedor de
la sangre humana provoca alegría en mi corazón". Pues sí:
ante tanta desesperanza, no quedan más que reacciones extremas.
El gozo, o el aullido de un papa impotente.
Edmundo Paz Soldán, escritor boliviano. Su última
novela es Los vivos y los muertos
“The best exhibition I have ever seen,
anywhere, in my life”
– Francis Bacon at the Met.
Robert
Ayers in New York
Robert
Ayers, A Sky filled with Shooting Stars, June 3, 2009
I
know it’s beyond a joke now, but having experienced Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Met yesterday I now
formally reinstate it as New York’s museum show of 2009. I
admit I was thrilled by the Guggenheim’s “The Third Mind”,
and because I enjoyed such a breadth of the work that it
included, I hailed it as Exhibition of the Year in one of my
first posts here on A Sky filled with Shooting Stars. But
the Bacon show really is something else altogether, and at least
partly because it’s not about breadth at all: everything here
is the product of one artistic personality.
So
I go back to what I originally wrote for ARTINFO back in
December:
“It’s
as simple as this: Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the
twentieth century’s most innovative, dramatic, and
controversial painters; his personal life was at least as
romantically chaotic as the best of his pictures; his work still
manages to split opinion right down the middle; his long shadow
still falls on much of contemporary art making; and this is a
huge, all-encompassing museum study of his career, boasting new
technical and interpretive insights. With more than 150 works in
total, and the organizing and intellectual weight of the Met,
the Tate, and the Prado behind it, this hundredth birthday
tribute is New York’s show of the year.”
In
fact now I’d say more than that, because despite that
near-eulogistic enthusiasm I now find myself reflecting that I
had actually always misunderstood and underestimated Francis
Bacon’s art.
Growing
up and getting most of my formal art education in England,
Bacon’s painting was always there in the background. In the
Tate (which was only one oh-so-familiar museum in those days)
and in every published or exhibited survey of British art, he
was always there. I am ashamed to admit that I got so that I
couldn’t even see him any more. I took his work for granted. I
certainly didn’t appreciate its intensity or comprehend its
difficult, tragic, and utterly human subject matter.

Francis Bacon, Painting
(1946)
Why
this realization is so beguiling is because it makes me register
how much of my misunderstanding of Bacon was symptomatic of
misunderstanding much of modern art in general. The first
picture of Bacon’s that you see full-frontal in the Met’s
show is Painting from 1946. It’s a terrifying image,
all hanging carcasses and screaming, but what struck me most
about it in the context of this show is the odd little enclosure
that appears here so early in Bacon’s work, and really stays
there in one way or another throughout his career. In this
picture it’s described by the circular rail in the lower
quarter of the picture – it reminds me of the dock in a
British court room or of a display in some fancy Fortnum &
Mason sort of emporium – and by the set of drawn roller blinds
at the top. In other paintings it’s delimited by the walls of
rooms, by geometrical forms sketched out in fine white lines, or
by yellow ochre suggestions of church furniture in the early
fifties portraits after the Velasquez Pope Innocent X. There’s
even a whole gallery at the Met that’s given the title
“Caged”. At least part of the claustrophobic power of
Francis Bacon’s art derives from this really rather simple
device of conjuring an enclosed space immediately behind or just
inside of the surface of his pictures. It’s like a chamber
prepared for a ritual, or a ring in which wrestling or bare
knuckle fighting might happen, or an arena.

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait I (1953)
That
word “arena” made me think of this statement of Harold
Rosenberg’s from The American Action Painters, which
is quite understandably one of the most celebrated passages in
the whole of modern art criticism, “At a certain moment the
canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as
an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to
reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual
or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but
an event.” Now anyone who knows me will be aware that the last
thing I’m going to indulge in here is some sort of jingoistic
tub-thumping for British art’s superiority over American –
it was my besottedness with American art that brought me to New
York City in the first place – but just think about this: in
Francis Bacon (to borrow Rosenberg’s language) we are
confronted with an artist for whom the canvas was an arena in
which to act, as well as a space in which to redesign,
analyze and ‘express’ objects – and more particularly
human beings – actual and imagined. What was to go on the
canvas was both a picture and an event.”
The
Three Studies for a Crucifixion of March 1962 is still,
even nearly half a century after it was painted, a ghastly,
genuinely upsetting piece, each panel recording some different
moment of horror, but what gripped me here (though not only
here) is the nature of transubstantiation in Bacon’s art. In
the right hand panel, he drags dry-ish white-ish paint over the
mud color of his bare canvas to evoke with the slightest of
means that horrible floating enclosure of stripped bones; in
what the Met’s label rather quaintly calls the “sordid
scene” of the center panel he squirts white paint directly
from the tube to suggest ejaculated semen. Alright, he makes
paint look like something else, that’s what painters have done
for centuries. But representation is only half of the story for
Francis Bacon. In the forms of the two unsettling characters in
the left hand panel – in what we might otherwise have to read
as one figure’s ballooning hunchback and the other’s
jellyfish arms and extravagantly brushed club foot – it as
though he is melting representation back into the fluid of paint
again. Something similar is happening in the “shadow” in the
foreground of the right hand panel. In fact, once you become
conscious of it, you find it happening everywhere, nowhere more
beguilingly or beautifully than in the right hand panel of Triptych
in Memory of George Dyer (1971) where the
squirted-paint-as-squirted-semen trick is extended lasciviously
by then being made to represent the slick highlight on Dyer’s
greasy cheekbone.
There’s
a grey dimly-lit room in the middle of this exhibition, which
would in truth have made a small but perfectly fascinating
exhibition in itself. It’s labelled an “Archival Gallery
Overview”, and one wall is filled with a more than life-sized
slice out of the famous photograph of Bacon’s studio at 7
Reece Mews.
In
a weird way that picture transforms the room into an echo of the
studio itself, and that is entirely appropriate, for it contains
Bacon’s source materials: pages torn from books and magazines,
photo booth pictures and specially commissioned photographs of
Bacon and his friends and his lovers, and most harrowingly,
pictures of George Dyer, the bruiser who was the love of
Bacon’s life, sitting in his baggy underpants in the very same
studio that the little gallery has become.
Everything
is torn, or crumpled, or glued back together, or smeared with
paint. The response of Met visitors to this whole
exhibition is fascinating. Tourists in their summer vacation
clothes who happily romp their way through pretty much the whole
of rest of the museum are stunned into abject silence by the
sheer overbearing power of Bacon’s art. (“Let’s get out of
here!” I heard one unsettled young woman whisper to her
boyfriend.) But in this room they become particularly hushed and
reverent, as though visiting a shrine. Look again at that studio
photograph, with its every surface strewn with paints, brushes,
books, and the very newspaper clippings and photographs that we
have here in front of us, and the walls peppered with little
gory circles and smears of paint. The place looks like the scene
of an explosion, or a crime, or a passion.
There
has in the past been a tendency to romanticize Francis Bacon’s
life and art. I’ve been guilty of it myself. But seeing this
show makes me realize that there is nothing romantic about him
or his work at all (and in passing makes also reassures me that
I was right about Love is the Devil – what an
utterly absurd movie that is.) Why Bacon’s tragedy is real
tragedy (or why that routinely devalued word is for once
appropriate) is because it has absolutely no romance to it, and
– other than the art that it spawned – not a single
elevating aspect.

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait (1973)
There’s
a painting here called Self Portrait (from 1973) that
I’d never really looked at before. In it Bacon leans on his
elbow on the corner of a bare sink. His legs are twisted around
one another in some paroxism of boredom, and he paws at his
forehead above a screwed up jowly face that is once again doing
that turning-back-into-paint thing. Bacon’s only companions
are that sink, his bentwood chair, his own reflection, and a
bare bulb that hangs above him. His watch reads 10 past 5. It is
a truly harrowing picture. There are no hanging carcasses, no
mysterious intruders, no fights or embraces, no bloodstains.
Just Bacon enduring his own company at the end of an English
afternoon, and finding it empty, boring, and loathsome. And in
those days even the pubs didn’t open until 5.30.

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979-80)
This
picture also tells us something about the peculiar role of
resemblance in Bacon’s art. He famously hated to paint his
subjects from life – he just couldn’t stand their proximity,
apparently – and thus resorted so often to photographs. It’s
interesting to ponder whether he hated other people’s
appearance as much as his Three Studies for a Self Portrait (1979-80)
– with its grotesque exaggerations of his nose and the bags
around his eyes – makes it obvious that he despised his own.
But what is undeniably the case is that the strange
transubstantiation that occurs in Bacon – from paint to
appearance and at least some of the way back again – is
fundamental to his ability to evoke human presence. Look at that
photograph of George Dyer again. Look at how like and unlike him
Bacon’s various portraits look, and you begin to see that
Bacon shows up portraiture that relies on resemblance as trite
and lightweight and distracting. And only a stab in the dark at
the sad mystery that is human existence.
Mystery
runs through Bacon’s art like its spirit, for as well as
portraits of real people that look little more like their
subjects than they look like elaborate smearing of paint, there
are all those portraits that look scarily like people they
cannot possibly represent. There’s a whole room full of these
so-called "Men in Blue” at the Met. Perhaps it tells us
more about some unresolved oedipal problem of mine that I find
these pictures of big framed middle aged men in business suits
so frightening, but I still want to know how – decades before
their emergence as adversaries on the world stage – Francis
Bacon could come up with such convincing representations of
(here) Ronald Reagan, and – in another painting with the same
title – of Leonid Brezhnev.

Francis Bacon,
Study for a Portrait
(1953)
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is not merely the real exhibition of the year, I
genuinely think it may be the best exhibition I have ever seen,
anywhere, in my life. “Best” in the sense that it has made
me totally reconsider not only the status of its subject, but
also my comprehension of his relation to his predecessors (the
late Picassos down at Gagosian suddenly look terribly
unsubstantial by comparison) and to his contemporaries
(rethinking Rosenberg’s The American Action Painters is
really going to force me to think again about de Kooning, and
particularly about Pollock). It’s also left me with all kinds
of problems around my understanding of words like “tragedy”,
“representation”, and “portraiture” and, though I
haven’t mentioned them here, like “existentialism” and
“beauty” as well. That such questions are wrapped up in a
show that utterly renews one’s faith in the power of art to
communicate something major about the human condition means that
whether or not this is the best exhibition that has ever been
seen in the city, it’s going to be a hell of a wait before
another one that’s as good comes along.
The power of the ugly and the brutal
ENTHUSIASMS & FOREBODINGS
By Rene Q. Bas, The Manila Times, Wednesday, June
24, 2009
My aim is to make you appreciate the art of Francis Bacon and of
the late National Artist Ang Kiukok, whose work has a spiritual
bond to Bacon’s.
The
paintings of Francis Bacon (b. October 28, 1909 in Dublin, d.
April 28, 1992 while vacationing in Spain) disgusts some and
edifies others. Dame Mar-garet Thatcher referred to him as
“that man who paints those dreadful pictures.”
He
was a great-great grandnephew of his namesake Lord Francis
Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher (Utopia) and
essayist. But he preferred to eschew talk of his blueblooded
forebears and instead thought of himself as a nonconformist who
boldly designed his own destiny.
New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has a centenary exhibition
of his work, which will go on until August 16.
The
current issue of First Things (“a journal of religion,
culture and public life” whose founding editor was the late
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, 1990–2009), has an article by its
features editor R. R. Reno. As usual with those found in First
Things, Reno’s article—an assessment of the MOMA exhibition
as well as the worth of Francis Bacon as an artist—is fair,
deep and guided by wisdom. It is titled A Master of Horror.
Reno
opens with Aristotle. “In his Poetics, Aristotle observed that
some works of art have a paradoxical effect. They represent
things that make us cringe and recoil: Orestes kills
Clytemnestra; Medea murders her children. Yet, even as we shrink
from the brutality and avert our eyes in horror, we are
nonetheless strangely attracted to and sometimes ravished by the
scenes. What is ugly and brutal can exercise an aesthetic power
as great as—perhaps even greater than—beauty itself.”
Reno
tells us the MOMA exhibition “offers an ideal occasion to
experience the strange aesthetic appeal of deformity, pain, and
the darkness of life. Bacon famously filled his studio with
images of disease from medical books and murder scenes from
tabloids. The paintings that resulted are not ugly. On the
contrary, many have alluring colour and form. But there can be
no doubt about Bacon’s genius. It was energized by the
grotesque.”
Reno
gives a glimpse of Bacon’s life and career. “By the late
1930s, Bacon had produced a small body of work. In the early
1940s, however, he repudiated his early efforts, and he
destroyed the canvases still in his possession.”
Reno
continues: “The centenary retrospective adheres to Bacon’s
stricture that his early work should be excluded from his canon.
The show begins with a triptych of agony filled paintings:
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
[1944], the uncharacteristically busy and overdone
‘Painting’ [1946], and a series of portrait studies
culminating in his famous evocation of the portrait of Pope
Innocent X by Velazquez [1949].”
“The
continuity between these early paintings and his later work
shows that Bacon was not an experimental artist who bounced form
theme to theme or style to style in order to keep up with the
latest movements. His paintings from the 1940s serve as an
effective overture to the exhibition as whole . . .”
Reno
teaches us, proves it by pointing out details, that Bacon’s
paintings were not as the respected critics Jed Perl and Robert
Hughes said they were.
Jed
Perl had written in the New Republic Slaughterhouse, his
review of the MOMA centenary exhibition. Reno says, “Jed Perl
reads Bacon’s paintings as tedious expressions of modern
artistic posturing. Instead of genuine art, Perl writes, Bacon
produced ‘noirist graffiti: angst for dummies.’ The images
amount to ‘modernist melodramas,’ ‘visual claptrap,’ and
‘bad dreams with fashionable upholstery.’ The Bacon
exhibition, he concludes, offers nothing but ‘a nihilistic
blood sport, the hideous spectacle of an artist in the process
of eviscerating the art of painting.’ ”
Reno
calls these “Strong words, but misguided.” He teaches us
what Jed Perl missed: That Bacon also tried to paint pictures of
“chimpanzees with open-mouthed expressions of primal
horror.” But “It’s not very interesting to imagine Edvard
Munch at the zoo. The same holds for other pictures without
human forms. Blood on Pavement [1988] and A Piece of
Wasteland [1982] have a tired, didactic feel—just the sort
of thing that fills Chelsea galleries these days.”
Then
Reno explains that “The relative failure of these paintings
indicates, I think, Bacon’s almost complete artistic
alienation from the natural world. The exhibition presents no
landscapes, no flowers in bloom, no apples lovingly arranged.
Bacon seems to have been entirely focused on the human
condition. Indeed, within the human condition his concerns were
narrower still: Crucifixion, yes, but no Madonna and Child, no
Annunciation, and certainly no Resurrection. Yet, in this domain
Bacon certainly succeeded in doing a great deal more than give
painterly form to the existentialist and nihilist clichés of
our age. His work suggests lived reality—pain, of course, but
also endurance.”
Critic
Robert Hughes, Reno writes, “cheerfully describes Bacon as
‘the complete atheist, anti-metaphysical, anti-transcendent.
Birth, copulation, death, end of story.’ Hughes knew Bacon,
and perhaps his description is accurate. Yet the paintings
suggest otherwise, for they are not as flat as the dime-store
nihilism would suggest. The centenary exhibition shows that
Bacon’s work involves more than howls of horror and
exaggerated, distorted physical forms. The fundamental role of
the grotesque endured to the end for Bacon as the source of
aesthetic power. As many other artists have recognized, in a
world without transcendent truth, horror and suffering can
provide a dark universal to energize the imagination.
“Bacon,
however, differs from the usual weekend patrons of the grotesque
whom Perl finds so tedious. As Bacon’s work evolved and his
commitment to realism deepened, he added layers of tender regard
for the fragility of our humanity to his fascination with pain
and suffering. Human life—even human life devoid of any
religious or transcendent faith—does not end quickly and
simply. It’s not just birth, copulation, death, end of story.
We must actually live our lives, and do so in the vulnerability
of our flesh. This Bacon saw and portrayed, which is no mean
artistic achievement.”
Now
look whimsically at the ugliness and brutality of the Philippine
condition. And see it the way Bacon—and Kiukok—painted. Do
you agree that the fanciful outlook offers a view of our being
Filipinos in our time as a less painful, less seemingly
purposeless and, happily, more meaningful experience?
Metropolitan
Museum of Art's Francis Bacon exhibit shows artist's grim
outlook on life
By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic, St Petersburg Times, Sunday, June 21,
2009
NEW YORK
Francis
Bacon took no prisoners. His reputation as one of the foremost
painters of the 20th century is based on his grotesque view of
humanity and nihilist disbelief in life's meaning or purpose.
His work
sounds pretty grim.
And it is,
on one level, as you wander through a retrospective at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art with 66 works spanning his career.
Bodies like carcasses, howling faces, sex as degradation, death.
Just try
to look away.
He compels
us to gaze long and hard, because from the carnage he wrests
uncompromising art that is beautiful.
Bacon
(1909-1992) was entirely self-taught, but classifying him as a
Naive Artist would be laughable. The Irish-born Briton grew up
amid privilege, had little formal education because he was
severely asthmatic and was banished from home in 1926 because
his father found him dressed in his mother's underwear. For many
years he lived a fairly rootless life, gambling, drinking,
seeking out rough-trade sex. And learning how to paint, which he
wanted to do after seeing a Picasso exhibition in Paris in 1927.
He dabbled in other things for more than a decade, including
interior design. An older artist taught him how to use oil-based
paints (his first works were drawings and watercolours), which
really kick-started his career. He had several shows and sold
paintings but later destroyed work from the 1930s and disavowed
anything before 1944.
A few have
survived, including Crucifixion, a 1933 harbinger of
several thematic and technical hallmarks. The classic pose is
assumed by a figure that seems more animal than man in a shroud
that appears to hang from a ceiling in a dark room.
Bacon
revisited the crucifixion theme a lot in the 1940s, and Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was
considered a breakthrough. Its Christian reference is
misleading; the artist was more intrigued with the idea of
ritual sacrifice and suffering than religious doctrine, as
indicated by three bestial figures confronting us in an
apocalyptic nightmare. Bacon painted another version in 1988
using the same creatures.
His early
masterpiece, though, was Painting (1946), which
consolidated the torturous imagery Bacon had introduced earlier.
It was Bacon's response to war's carnage and meaninglessness:
Though Bacon was medically unfit for active duty, he was a
rescue volunteer in London during the blitz and saw firsthand
plenty of mayhem. It, too, is a crucifixion — this time it's
obviously a side of beef — in front of which sits a
black-suited man holding an umbrella. His mouth gapes as a
hideous black maw with perfect teeth (lots of those in later
paintings also). The room has windows looking out to a void
colour both of dawn and cured pork, partially covered by window
shades of majestic purple, a colour he would also use in his
famous portraits of Pope Innocent X after Velazquez. The pulls
hanging from the shades, a small, seemingly irrelevant detail,
take on greater meaning as you see their repetition throughout
the show as ironic, pathetic touches of domesticity offering no
protection from a cruel world.
So there
you have Bacon's basic world view, which would remain unchanged:
Human existence has no more meaning than any other animal. Life
is a brutal journey, after which there is nothing. We're dead
meat.
Yet Bacon
gives grandeur to this vision: If we are animals in a continuing
state of decay, we do not go easily or quietly. And we're
intensely interesting as physical specimens, victims of or
slaves to our physical needs and desires.
He drew
inspiration from many sources. He fixated on Velazquez though he
apparently never saw the original works. In fact, photographic
and pictorial reproductions from books and magazines were his
favourite sources, littering his studio and lining his kitchen
walls. He never painted from life, even the portraits of his
friends. He used photographs of them he scrunched or tore to
produce the fractured effect he wanted. He admired the eccentric
19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge's sequential
photos, appropriating the idea in his paintings by using blurred
paint to approximate motion.
Bacon was
interested in the challenge of representational art in a
photographic age. His paintings deconstruct the literal image,
which was a common approach beginning in the early 20th century.
But Bacon concentrates on representing the psychological
encounter, "not respecting the representational truth of
form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make
representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass
directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the
brain," as he once said.
In
considering his depictions of male nudes we have to take into
account the times. Bacon was openly and unapologetically gay
when being so was not only illegal but still prosecuted in
England, so sex always carried a whiff of danger. For him it
never seemed the stuff of romantic encounters but rather, brutal
couplings. Yet there is still tenderness: Two Figures in the
Grass are locked in a rapturous embrace, finding fugitive
solace in hiding.
His most
profound relationship was with George Dyer, a good looking petty
thief and alcoholic who was prone to depression and with whom
Bacon had a tempestuous relationship from 1964 to 1971, when
Dyer committed suicide in a Paris hotel room he was sharing with
the artist two days before a major show of Bacon's work.
Bacon
poured his guilt and grief into a series of posthumous portraits
of Dyer, very different from those done when he was alive, that
transform him into something of a heroic figure, as close to an
emotional statement as Bacon would ever come. Triptych — In
Memory of George Dyer was the first, painted the same year
as Dyer's death, and the most charged. The background of the
side panels is a sweet pink. On the left, a boxer falls,
vanquished; on the right, Dyer's distinctive profile is captured
on a slab as in a photograph, and his image is also reflected on
a tabletop. The table's pedestal and base become a stream of
blood puddling on the floor. In the center panel, Dyer stands in
shadow at the foot of a shabby hotel staircase, the carpet the
color of bacon, looking toward a room with a bare lightbulb as
his muscular arm unlocks a door. A triptych two years later
presents a more graphic portrayal of Dyer's final agonies by
drug overdose: He sits on a toilet, vomits into a sink and
collapses into dark shadow above the lightbulb. Death is still
clinical and ugly, but now it's also personal.
During
this mourning period, he also turned more to self-portraiture,
seating himself in the same bentwood chair he had often used in
painting Dyer. In one from 1973, he revisits that sink, now
detached from the wall, the lightbulb a vague apparition above
it, his legs coiled around themselves. He wears a watch and is
deep in thought, as if willing himself to retain a fading memory
as time ticks by.
In later
work, Bacon abandoned the frenzied brushstrokes in favour of
greater refinement. The violence is mitigated. The composition
is simplified. Thick, blood-red pigment becomes discreet washes.
He was criticized for losing his edge. Maybe he did, but it
seems a conscious shift. He returned to themes and images he had
explored throughout his career but wanted this new work to have
a classic monumentality. The bodies look more modelled and
sculpted with less suggestion of movement; violence is only
represented as a splatter of blood on pavement in a landscape
with overtones of Mark Rothko's minimalist colour field
paintings.
I admire
their finesse from the hand of a painter in complete control.
But I don't love them as I do those from the late 1950s and into
the early 1970s. In one of his last works, Triptych (1991),
the two side panel figures are legs and partial torsos stepping
into a black void. A head, painted to resemble a photograph, is
pinned to the half-bodies; one of them is Bacon's. In the center
panel, the body has collapsed into the dark frame. The symbolism
is obvious: Bacon knows he approaches death. But no blood and
guts are involved, just flesh becoming smooth and waxy. Bacon
referenced T. S. Eliot frequently, a poet who wrote of postwar
disillusionment. But I think of another British poet who was
Bacon's contemporary, W. H. Auden, and lines such as these from
his Lullaby:
"Mortal,
guilty, but to me
The
entirely beautiful."
Lennie
Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com or (727)
893-8293.

Francis
Bacon's Triptych 1991 at a press preview on May 18th 2009
Writer
Peppiatt
revisits Francis Bacon
Kenneth
Baker, Chronicle Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle,
Friday, June 19, 2009

Francis Bacon with Michael Peppiatt
British
writer Michael Peppiatt first published his widely appreciated
biography of painter Francis Bacon in 1997. Since then, he has
kept abreast of everything he could find, published and
unpublished, concerning his notorious subject, who died at 82 in
1992.
Beginning
in the 1930s, the largely self-taught Bacon made a reputation -
underground at first, then increasingly public - as a gay sexual
adventurer, in times and cities that then still treated
homosexuality as a crime. What he saw on the down-low, and many
other sources, informed the grotesque vision of his art.
Apprised
well in advance of the internationally touring Bacon
retrospective currently at New York's Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Peppiatt produced an even more absorbing revised version of
his book, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Skyehorse;
456 pages; $16.95).
He
discussed it with me by phone from his home in London.
Q:
Was it an advantage or a disadvantage to have known
Bacon while you were writing about him?
A:
For me, it was essential. I'm not a biographer as such. ... It
came out of my fascination with the man and it was done partly
to explain that fascination to myself. ... I've met lots and
lots of interesting people but never anyone as compelling as
Bacon. ... It was a terrific stroke of luck to meet somebody
like that when I was 19. I come from a kind of conventional
background and I'd never met someone so free and daring and
outrageous and inventive. I was at Cambridge studying art
history at the time... He sort of excited me about life in way I
had never been before. He did all kinds of things I had never
done and had no interest in doing but he impressed me by the way
he lived and the way he painted.
Q:
How did
the book originate?
A:
I'd met a literary agent, and when Bacon died, she was on the
phone with me immediately. ... He'd told me all these things
over the years and I'd noted them down. I did do a sort of
ghastly literary portrait early on - never published, thank God
- and I showed him bits of that and he thought then that it was
too indiscreet. But I had that whole manuscript to draw on.
Q:
Should
readers expect to recognize the new material for what it is?
A:
Well, there's a new introduction and a postscript which takes
the story up to now in the Bacon world. But all the way through
I've threaded in things that I've thought of since, or that have
come to the surface, some very minor, some very important. I've
sort of unstitched and restitched the whole thing.
I went
through and introduced many things, such as his relationship
with and debt to Picasso's work, because I've gotten more
interested in Picasso recently.
Also, a
lot of people who were in Bacon's world are now dead, and I
couldn't speak freely about them before - Valerie Beston, for
example, who looked after his business affairs and really
managed his whole personal life for years, and (critic) David
Sylvester.
There were
people who were a bit tongue-tied before Bacon's death who
became looser after. I talked to his doctor quite a bit,
something I didn't feel I could do while he was alive. ... Dr.
Brass said some very interesting things about Bacon.
Also, I'm
no longer in awe of Bacon, and he's no longer here to keep me in
awe.
Q:
Did Bacon
and Picasso ever meet?
A:
No, though they sort of knew each other through their common
friendship with Michel Leiris.
Bacon met
Giacometti, though, and they struck up quite a lively
friendship.
Q:
Some
years ago, Bacon's London studio was dismantled and
reconstructed in Dublin. Did you learn anything through that
process?
A:
That made no sense to me, just because he happened to be born
there. His home is in London or Paris, not Dublin. ... But I
consulted on it a bit and was able to see some of the excavated
material - notes to himself, descriptions of dreams,
photographs.
Q:
Was the
Bacon "enigma" in any sense a failure of
self-knowledge on his part?
A:
I did a show a couple of years ago called Bacon in the 1950s
- before he knew he was Bacon, you might say. They're the
roughest, clumsiest pictures but there is the extraordinary
feeling in them of someone not knowing what he's doing ... as
though he was tapping into something he didn't understand
himself. ... So in a sense lack of self-knowledge was an
advantage at that point.
The
content of the painting, the pain and suffering of it, remain an
enigma for me. Bacon was a very robust, energetic, life-loving
person. He could have black moods, usually brought on by a sort
of waterfall of drink. But I find going through the current
exhibition that the sense of pain and loneliness is so strong.
He used to say, "I'm optimistic, but about nothing."
Q:
Have you
made any discoveries since the book went to print?
A:
There's always something bubbling up. In Venice last week
somebody presented me an invitation to a show of supposed Bacon
drawings. ... I walked for a long, long time and couldn't find
it. But I know if I had, that I would have had serious
misgivings about what I saw.
I know
that there are letters that will one day surface and give more
information.
We need a
good film about him. ... There is a fascinating attempt called Love
Is the Devil. The actors were brilliant, but it just didn't
capture the feel of the man.
Q:
Would you
consider taking part in such a project?
A:
Oh yes, it's one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th
century.
This
article appeared on page R - 20 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Francis Bacon’s Strange Sizzle
By Mario Naves, The New York Observer, June 19, 2009
Francis Bacon, a
retrospective timed to the centenary anniversary of the
artist’s birth (he died in 1992 at the age of 83) is on
display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hs toothy monsters,
humping, anonymous men and slabs of meat installed directly off
the European wing, a stone’s throw from Rembrandt, Goya and
Velazquez.
Bacon would have
been pleased by the proximity. Though his contorted figures owe
a significant debt to Picasso—their roiling distortions being
an almost sculptural equivalent of Cubism’s pictorial
fracturing—Bacon’s charnel-house dioramas are, in pivotal
ways, unmodern. (Given Bacon’s distaste for abstraction, the
pictures could be considered anti-modern.) The ready-made
gravitas and epic nature inherent in the tradition of Western
painting suited Bacon’s flashy ambitions—hence, the bald
reliance on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,
Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and the heaving
musculature of Michelangelo’s nudes.
But Bacon was,
if not a strict Modernist, then certainly a creature of the
modern age. A niggling strain of Surrealism infiltrates the
work, as does the collage aesthetic: His compositions are
piecemeal affairs, with their uninflected planes of flat color,
malleable forms and decal-like figures. His philosophical mien,
a lean variant of Nietzschean atheism, is reflective of a
more-jaded-than-thou postwar intellectualism. “I haven’t got
any morals to preach,” Bacon stated. “I just work as closely
to my nerves as I can.” A miserable narcissism permeates the
work.
Then there’s
the almost Warholian poaching of mass media. Bacon mimicked to
startling effect the filmed image—his gauzy slurs of oil paint
take on a ghostly, cinematic allure. His sources ranged from
Eisenstein’s Battlship Potemkin and Eadweard
Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion to beefcake
magazines like MANifique and Man-O-Rama, newspaper
clippings of Himmler and Goebbels and photo-booth
self-portraits. You can see actual examples of Bacon’s image
stockpile at the Met, much of it grubby with paint. It’s a
devastating testament to Bacon’s paintings that the reference
materials are sometimes more diverting than what he made of
them.
The
Met show is fairly selective, but it’s endless all the same.
How much designer Grand Guignol does one person need?
Bacon’s vaunted embrace of chance incident—that would be the
ejaculatory blurts of paint flung directly from the tube—are
no less false than the late triptychs, wherein we see an artist
who’s become a sheepish victim to his own style. It’s the
overweening calculation of Bacon’s art, its soulless
theatricality, that marks him not as a descendant of the Old
Masters but as a progenitor of corporate nihilists like Damian
Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Jenny Saville. Like them,
Bacon makes a provocative first impression, but then leaves us
with little more than a cold rush of artifice.
mnaves@observer.com
[“Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until August 16th]
Francis Bacon
A Biography
1.
Author: Annalyn Swan
2.
Authors: Mark Stevens
3.
Category: Non-fiction Biography/Autobiography
4.
Publisher: Fourth Estate (UK)/Knopf (US)
5.
Length: 100,000 words
About Francis Bacon
Many visual artists made startling, demonic images during the
course of the dark, foreboding 20th century but none did so with
more authority than the painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992). His
paintings of the 1940s bore witness to the shattered psychology
of the time and shot him to prominence that hardly diminished
over the next fifty years. He captured sexuality, violence and
isolation in his unflinching depictions of the anxieties of the
modern condition.
He became the modern master of the monstrous; an iconic figure
in Western culture.
That emblematic ‘mastery’ makes Bacon a particularly
important subject for a biography: His paintings capture both
the futility and the furies of post-war life. But he also became
an emblematic figure in gay history; an essential advocate of
the ‘outsider’s’ perspective in Western society. ‘I live
in, you may say, a gilded squalor’, Bacon said of his life,
which oscillated between elegant lunches and dinners and
nocturnal adventures in the dark corners of London. Even his
celebrity, which could seem, at times, like a trashy halo,
conveyed something important about the surrounding society. He
represents much more, in short, than just another painter’s
idiosyncratic view of the world.
Today, the fascination with Bacon shows no sign of diminishing.
In 2008, a triptych sold at Christie’s for $51.7 million. And
2008 sees a major retrospective of Bacon’s work at Tate
Britain, which subsequently will tour the world.
Mark and Annalyn bring Bacon to life on the page; capturing as
precisely as possible the character of the man and his world.
Relying on the work of earlier writers and their own
comprehensive new research, they put this remarkable life into a
rich panorama, bringing together the personal and the emblematic
sides of Bacon.
About the Author
Annalyn
Swan is the co-authro of the acclaimed DE KOONING biography.
Conville
& Walsh Ltd, 2 Ganton Street, London, W1F 7QL
bringing home the bacon
museums
& galleries
by Michael Slenske, NYCGO, 9
June, 2009
Study for a Portrait
1953 Francis Bacon
Beleaguered
businessmen. Warmongering dictators. Images of human beings in
agony. Sound familiar? These all could have been front-page
topics in The New York Times in recent weeks. They're
also subjects that artist Francis Bacon explored in the
provocative brand of figurative painting he developed after the
end of World War II. Largely chided by American critics in the
'50s and '60s for his rejection of abstract expressionism, the
painter is getting his full due at the Metropolitan Museum of
career-spanning exhibition Francis Bacon: A Centenary
Retrospective.
The show,
which began on May 20, is the first major retrospective of
Bacon's work since his death 17 years ago at the age of 82.
Bacon was born in Ireland and worked in London during his
career. As an introduction to the artist, the show documents the
painter's explosion onto the European art scene in 1945 with the
compellingly violent triptych Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion, which shows mutated,
anthropomorphic figures undergoing some kind of severe agony.
Then in chronological fashion, the exhibition journeys through
Bacon's famously animalistic figure studies and self-portraits
from the '50s, '60s and '70s—one of which sold at auction to
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich last year for $86
million—without overlooking the artist's technically
proficient, if slightly less provocative, reinterpretations of
his own earlier work that he painted at the end of his career.
"There's
an amazing continuity in Bacon," says Chris Stephens, the
curator who originally conceived the show and selected the work
for its first incarnation at London's Tate Britain gallery last
fall. "What he's seeking to express is pretty much the same
at the end as it was at the beginning. But the way he paints
changes fundamentally. After 1952 his painting becomes much more
extravagant, much more baroque, whereas in the '50s it's
surprisingly subtle. That prompted us to reinforce this sense of
stylistic and technical development."
Bacon's
work remains utterly relevant today: his figurative distortions
have inspired a spate of contemporary artists, including Damien
Hirst, and the scenes and situations he depicts have an eerie
resonance with the issues of our own era.
Fascinated
with the advent of the camera as the primary medium for image
reproduction, Bacon slavishly distorted photographic images from
newspapers and magazines for his paintings. He also rendered an
iconic series of thoroughly modern interpretations of Diego Velázquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X that have a vitality and
emotional edge similar to those of live performance.
The
exhibition presents Bacon's oeuvre while providing a sense of
the context in which he was working, his working method and
artistic influences. "The crucial development was the
opening of his studio and the revelation of the archive,"
says Stephens of the piles of reference materials that were
found in Bacon's studio after his death. Though these materials
have helped to demystify some of the more inscrutable aspects of
Bacon's work, pulling back the curtain on the wizard can also
have its drawbacks.
"I
think it's great for visitors to see what kind of images he
collected and think about how they were transformed into his
pictures," says Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Gary
Tinterow. "But it's not at all what Bacon wanted, and I
don't think in any way it's necessary for a person to know about
or experience the archival material in order to fully appreciate
his pictures. I think they stand completely on their own."
The studio
materials are presented much as they were at the Tate
exhibition, but, Tinterow says, the Met hung the show in a much
more chronological fashion and included some self-portraits and
"Pope" paintings that weren't shown in London or at a
subsequent show at Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado. The Met
exhibition also includes references to Bacon's homosexuality—a
fact largely brushed over by 20th-century American critics—in
the exhibition text and acoustic guides.
"I
think there's a sense that both his way of painting and subject
matter and his proclivities didn't fit the American story of the
history of art," says Stephens. "He was a masochist.
He enjoyed having people beat him up, frankly. He's sort of a
seedy character. In Britain he kind of prided himself that he
could shift from dealing with the aristocracy to dealing with a
gangster from the East End and a bit of rough trade. Something
about that works in London but doesn't translate maybe to New
York."
There's no
denying Bacon's work will strike a visceral chord or two. The
fact that his entire range of work—much of which focused on
the animalistic tendencies of humankind—is being shown as our
politicians are busy debating the effectiveness of torture will
undoubtedly evoke its fair share of intellectual responses as
well. "We opened our show [at the Tate] the week Lehman
Brothers collapsed—the beginning of the meltdown—and there
was a weird suitability about it," recalls Stephens.
"But it was hugely successful—not just the numbers of
people but the buzz around the show. It really hit a
nerve."
Tinterow
reflects that this is precisely what Bacon intended to evoke
with his work. "Just in the way you can hear something on
the radio and it can make you cry, and you're not sure
why," he observes, "I think Bacon wanted his imagery
to hit you in that same way. Not in an intellectual and knowing
way, but in a strong, emotional way."
Defining
Moment:
Francis Bacon joins the Colony Room Club, Soho, December 1948
By Rob Crossan, Financial
Times, June 13 2009

The Colony Room I 1962 Michael
Andrews
On
December 15 1948, Muriel Belcher, a notoriously acid-tongued bar
owner whom jazz singer George Melly described as “a benevolent
witch... who loved money” opened a tiny room at the top of a
staircase on Dean Street in Soho.
Decorating
the bar in dark green paint and bamboo, she called it the Colony
Room Club, partly in tribute to her female Jamaican lover. One
of the first people to climb the stairs was a penniless,
39-year-old, Dublin-born artist called Francis Bacon.
The
two bonded instantly. They reached a deal whereby Belcher would
give Bacon £10 and free drinks in return for the artist
persuading his wealthier friends to come and spend money in what
quickly became regarded as the most intimidating members bar in
London. That reputation was down entirely to Belcher’s
personality, which careered between generous affection and
tirades of abuse towards her customers. Despite this, Bacon once
remarked that Belcher had “a tremendous ability to create an
atmosphere of ease”. In Michael Andrews’ The Colony Room
I, 1962, reproduced above, Belcher sits in the centre
wearing a blue dress, while Bacon is on the right, his back to
the artist.
Belcher’s
arrangement with Bacon gave him the relative stability to paint
– at that time his work was barely known outside a few small
London galleries. Nine years later, a shocked art world saw his
pained, distorted and unremittingly bleak studies of Van Gogh
for the first time. Fame and controversy followed him for the
rest of his life.
Bacon
remained a regular patron of the Colony Room until his death in
1992, and the venue was used for his wake. Belcher had died in
1979. On the club’s 60th birthday, in December 2008, the
Colony Room closed for the last time, supposedly to be turned
into a private apartment.

Carmel, Muriel & Francis
The Tip Of
The Iceberg - Francis Bacon's Drawings -
53rd Venice Biennale
by Edward
Lucie-Smith and Alberto Agazzani
Art Daily, Friday, June 12, 2009

Francis Bacon, Untitled, cm. 100x150.
|
It
is organized on occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale but
it is a unique event with an extraordinary character; Cà
Zenobio degli Armeni, Venice, seat of the Pavilion of the
Syrian Arab Republic 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.
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.
Twenty among those authentic drawings will be exhibited in
Venice, 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.”
The exhibition catalogue is published by Christian Maretti
Editore and includes critical texts by Edward Lucie-Smith
and Alberto Agazzani.
The exhibition is organized by Bit Art Gallery with the
contribution of Sofisa. |
La
Punta Dell’Iceberg
I disegni di Francis Bacon
Curator
Edward Lucie-Smith and Alberto Agazzani

Francis Bacon and the Act of Drawing
Edward Lucie - Smith
I.
There
are numerous people, both in the contemporary art world and out
of it, who will think I am crazy to venture into this particular
piece of territory. In an area always rent with controversies,
the subject of Francis Bacon and drawing is especially
contentious. There are several reasons for this. The first is
that, factually, there are now quite a large number of sheets
that claim to be drawings by Bacon’s hand. The second is that
Bacon himself, often and very explicitly, denied that he drew.
The third, closely linked to this latter, is that the idea that
their idol “didn’t draw” has become an article of faith
with the majority of the artist’s most impassioned admirers.
It is deeply embedded in their concept of what he was and did.
The notion that Bacon never made drawings stems in the first
place from a celebrated set of interviews between Bacon and the
British critic David Sylvester, which were first published in
book form in 1975, and which have been several times reprinted.
In the first of these interviews, recorded thirteen years
earlier, in October 1962, there can be found the following,
often-quoted exchange:
DS And you never work from sketches or drawings, you never do a
rehearsal for the picture?
FB I often think that I should, but I don’t. It’s not very
helpful in my kind of painting. As the actual texture, colour,
the whole ways the paint moves, are so accidental, any sketches
that I did before could only give a kind of skeleton, possibly,
of the way the thing might happen.
In his preface to the collected interviews, Sylvester goes out
of his way to stress that he had always quoted Bacon’s actual
words. He is still regarded as the artist’s chief interpreter,
a critic with uniquely privileged access to Bacon’s thoughts.
Bacon was clearly not uncomfortable with what he had said, since
he repeated his assertion, with even more emphasis, to a French
journalist almost exactly twenty-five years later. “I love
drawings, but I don’t make them.” [“J’adore des dessins,
mais je n’en fais pas.” – interview with Henri-François
Debailleux, Libération, Paris, 29th September, 1987.]
Since then, it has gradually emerged that Bacon did in fact make
drawings and oil-sketches. A handful of these were included in
the posthumous retrospective, curated by David Sylvester, held
at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. The catalogue stated that so few
items of this kind existed that it was impossible to assign them
a definite place in the artist’s work. Almost immediately
after that, the Tate Gallery in London purchased two groups of
Bacon drawings, gouaches, and oil-sketches, totaling 42 sheets
in all, for a total of £400,000. Some of the funding came from
the National Art Collections Fund, which published two examples
in its 1997 Review. In his note on the purchase, Richard Morphet,
Keeper Emeritus of the Tate’s Modern Collection, said: “
Though few postwar works on paper by [Bacon] are known, it has
become clear that this is not because he did not make any, but
rather because he did not wish their existence to be known
beyond his own circle. It is also known that he ordered numbers
of them to be destroyed in his lifetime.”
Some of the drawings purchased by the Tate came from the estate
of the poet Stephen Spender, a friend of the artist. The rest
came from Paul Danquah, a half-Ghanaian lawyer, actor and
financial consultant, with whom Bacon briefly shared a flat in
Battersea in the 1950s, and whom he later saw frequently in
Tangiers.
The Danquah material included a number of drawings made on top
of illustrations torn from news and sports magazines. Especially
significant, in the present context, were two items listed in
the NACF’s 1997 publication. They were described as follows:
These drawings formed part of a series devoted to boxers. Other
examples from the series can be found in the great mass of Bacon
material that surfaced in the hands of Barry Joule at about the
same time that the Tate Gallery made its purchase. Joule is a
Canadian who was friend, factotum and general handyman to
Francis Bacon during the last fourteen years of the artist’s
life. Joule says that Bacon, by that time old and unwell, told
him to clear them out of the chaotic Reece Mews studio in South
Kensington that was the artist’s final habitation. The
Bacon’s exact words, quoted by Joule himself in a television
programme, were simply “You know what to do with them, don’t
you?” Another individual, aware Bacon’s secretiveness, and
in particular of his frequent denials that he ever made
drawings, might have interpreted this remark as a command to
make a bonfire, but Joule chose instead to understand it as a
request to preserve what he had been given for posterity.
It is not going too far to say that the appearance of the Joule
archive caused consternation amongst those who saw themselves as
experts on Bacon’s work, and protectors of his artistic
heritage. David Sylvester’s attitude to the material was
particularly curious. At first he accepted its authenticity, and
indeed used slides of a number of the sketches to illustrate a
lecture. Later, he reversed his judgment, saying in a letter to
Joule that, while the material “undoubtedly emanated from
Bacon’s studio” he himself was “amongst those who cannot
see Bacon’s hand in these pages”. Sylvester had on some
previous occasions been subject to sudden reversals of opinion.
Perhaps the best known of these took place when he first praised
James Lord’s vivid but not entirely flattering biography of
Giacometti, another artist whom Sylvester knew well, then,
later, apparently under pressure from the sculptor’s widow
Annette, condemned it roundly.
Other Bacon intimates, chief among them Michael Peppiatt, one of
the artist’s biographers, contended that the archive
couldn’t be genuine because Bacon was careless with
possessions, and would certainly not have hung on to items of
this sort as he moved restlessly from studio to studio before
finally settling in Reece Mews in 1961. It should perhaps be
added here that a number of the Joule sketches, like the
drawings of boxers cited above, refer to events and even to
actual Bacon compositions that belong to periods earlier than
this.
However, there happens to be convincing proof that Bacon did in
fact cling tenaciously to even the most trivial items of
reference material, long after their usefulness might seem to
have passed. Sylvester’s book of interviews offers an
illustration of a plate from a book by one Marius Maxwell,
entitled Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa,
published in 1924. The illustration is cited in the critic’s
second interview with the artist (undertaken in 1966). Bacon and
his interlocutor discuss the fact that, in Bacon’s words
“the texture of a rhinosceros skin would help me think about
the texture of human skin”. The discussion relates to a
portrait of Sylvester himself that Bacon had painted in 1955.
If one looks at the photo-credits for the Sylvester Interviews
one sees that “Photographs, unless otherwise credited, were
provided by Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd.” Marlborough,
of course, were Bacon’s dealers for the whole of the later
part of his career. No exception is made in the case of this
particular image, and one can therefore assume that it came
directly from Bacon himself. Nine years after the interview and
twenty after the completion of the painting being discussed, the
artist knew where to find this battered piece of paper in the
chaos of his studio. There is more. The photograph has
non-accidental markings – lines and blotches – that relate
it closely to some of the more crudely ‘improved’
illustrations in the Joule archive.
A number of items in the Joule collection connect directly with
Bacon’s established oeuvre. There are sheets linked to the
celebrated series of Popes, based on Velazquez; to the Portraits
of Van Gogh (1957); to Two Figures in the Grass (1954); to the
Study of a Baboon (1953), and to the portrait of George Dyer on
a Bicycle (1962). There are also things that seem to have
nothing to do with Bacon as we know him from the painting –
for example, a number of multiple image collages that, blown up
on a large scale, would look like Robert Rauschenberg combines
from the late 1950s. These collages, however, are based on
elements we know to be intimately linked to Bacon’s art and
biography. Several use images apparently cut from the textbook
on Diseases of the Mouth that Bacon said he bought from a Paris
bookstall. One collage combines these illustrations with
photographs of a woman wearing spectacles who is pretty
certainly Bacon’s beloved nanny Jessie Lightfoot, who kept
house for him during the earlier years of his career as a
painter. In the circumstances one can see why David Sylvester
had to concede that the material in Joule’s possession
definitely came from Bacon’s studio. It might have been
possible for a fraudster to assemble appropriate magazine pages,
such as those featuring boxers, by combing the shops in London
and Paris that sell old periodicals to collectors, but the
personal photographs must undoubtedly have been in the
artist’s own possession.
If Bacon didn’t create this body of material, who did? The
Joule sheets seem to cover too long a period, in terms of the
paintings they relate to, to be the work of one of Bacon’s
successive live-in lovers, such as Peter Lacey or George Dyer.
And what motivation would either of these have had to make them?
Probably no-one else had sufficiently continuous access to
Bacon’s closely guarded studio. Dyer, the only even remotely
likely candidate among Bacon’s male lovers, was an
unintelligent, uneducated drunk, notoriously disorganized, and
any such activity on his part would soon have become known to
Bacon’s entourage. It is hard to imagine him as the author of
a fraud of Proustian elaboration, based on meticulous and
sometimes brilliantly imaginative research into Bacon’s
oeuvre, plus the use of a wide range of cleverly selected studio
debris.
Joule himself has also sometimes been accused, on occasion in
extremely vituperative terms, of creating the archive himself.
Arguments against this are first the sheer volume of material;
second, as has already been said, the variety of the materials
used and the difficulty in sourcing some of the more recondite
of them, and third, and perhaps most compellingly, the absence
of any convincing motivation, financial or other. Barry Joule
consistently said that what he had was not for sale, and that
his aim was to steer the archive into a museum as a gift. In the
end, he accomplished just that. His reward for his generosity
was to be abused for undermining Bacon’s own reputation for
veracity, and for spoiling enthusiasts’ dreams about Bacon’s
paintings being the product of a series of totally spontaneous
magical gestures.
The clinching proof of the genuineness of the Joule material
came from the careful deconstruction of Bacon’s Reece Mews
studio when this was taken apart for transfer to the Hugh Lane
Gallery in Dublin. The operation was conducted rather like a
major archaeological dig, and took three years to accomplish.
Among the finds in the compacted layers that filled the studio
were drawings very similar to those that finished up in the
hands of Barry Joule. In the face of the accumulated evidence
provided by the Joule archive, and the material offered by the
Reece Mews campaign, it is really impossible to deny that Bacon
drew prolifically.
The reluctance of Bacon’s admirers to admit this nevertheless
remains profound. When drawings from Reece Mews were exhibited
in Dublin in 2000, the Bacon estate insisted that they be
described as “work attributed to Francis Bacon”. The same
condition applied to the exhibition of items from Joule’s
holdings held at the Barbican Art Gallery, London in the
following year, and the show received generally hostile reviews.
In 2004, when the Tate acquired the entire Joule collection as a
gift, the Bacon estate was still at pains to stress that the
gallery’s acceptance of the material was not to be seen as
authentication. In other words, the whole archive remains in
limbo – it is, in official terms, neither Bacon nor not-Bacon.
It is, however, a time-bomb that must one day blow apart
currently established ways of approaching Bacon’s legacy.
Future scholars will not be able to resist such a potentially
rich source of information, though the explosion must probably
wait till the Bacon copyright expires. For the time being,
critics and scholars cling to an increasingly fictional
orthodoxy.
When, for example, Rachel Campbell-Johnson, the art critic of The
Times of London, reviewed the major retrospective that
opened at Tate Britain in September 2008, she spoke
enthusiastically of the way “[Bacon’s] images short-circuit
our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the
nervous system and hijack the soul.” This, as I have suggested
above, is the established interpretation of Bacon’s work –
one that was promoted by the artist himself. Campbell-Johnson
was less enthusiastic about a documentary section that included
a few of the sheets from Dublin, advising her readers to “pass
over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings
do their work.”
It strikes me that there is a strong element in this, and other
similar reactions, of “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”
II.
It may be wondered why I have devoted so much space to material
that is not included in this exhibition. The answer is surely
obvious. The series of drawings presented here takes on a very
different dimension if one can demonstrate, as I believe I have,
that the artist who supposedly produced them, far from refusing
to draw, or producing drawings only in very limited quantity, as
an occasional, rather shame-faced exercise, in fact regularly
made drawings as part of his process of production. The fact
that he regularly prevaricated about his process of production
is beside the point. Bacon was not the first artist, and will
not be the last, to mislead both the critics and the public
about matters of this kind. He wanted his work to be seen in a
particular context – philosophically speaking that provided by
the Existentialist doctrine that was at its height when he first
fully came on to the scene as an exhibiting artist. He also, I
suspect, wanted to fit himself into the myth of genius first
propagated by Michelangelo’s contemporary biographers Giorgio
Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, and much elaborated later on by the
19th century Romantic Movement. Bacon’s assertion that he
‘didn’t draw’ was essentially false modesty. If he made no
drawings then the implication was that that his images appeared
on the canvas of their own accord, as the magical products of a
shamanistic act of will. None of his rivals, not even Picasso,
could claim that.
An additional complication, in a situation that is already
complicated enough, is that there has been a tendency, even
among those who do in fact believe that Bacon made drawings, to
put the two bodies of work – the Joule archive, plus other
associated sheets in Dublin and in the Tate collection, and the
drawings from the Cristiano Ravarino collection – in
opposition to one another. If you believe that one group is
genuinely by Bacon, so they think, you can’t believe in the
other.
Though the two groups of works are evidently very different,
this seems to me absurd. The Ravarino drawings, if one accepts
them as genuine, are clearly ‘presentation’ works, made as
independent entities. They are not preparatory studies, but
things complete in themselves. That is, they occupy the same
position as the drawings Michelangelo presented to friends such
as Tommaso de’Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna during the last
years of his life.
The Ravarino group of drawings has a public history that is
quite extensive, though still little known outside of Italy.
There was a long-drawn out court case in Bologna concerning them
which lasted from 1997 to 2004. A number of the drawings were
seized and Cristiano Ravarino was accused of making and selling
forgeries. The case concluded with an acquittal, and the seized
items were then returned to their owner. The verdict amounted to
a double negative – essentially what the court said, having
heard a large amount of evidence, was that it was impossible to
prove that the drawings were not by Bacon. Understandably, those
conducting the trial did not see their role as being that of
professional art experts. The nearest the court got to this was
in hearing the evidence of a graphologist, who testified rather
confusingly that, while some of the signatures on the drawings
were undoubtedly in Bacon’s hand, others seemed to him less
certain.
The essentials of what the trial established have been
summarized as follows by Umberto Guerini, the lawyer who
undertook Cristiano Ravarino’s defence:
1) It is true that Francis Bacon was in Bologna in 1982 and it
is true that in that circumstance he met with Cristiano Ravarino.
2) It is true that in 1982 during his stay in Bologna, Francis
Bacon gave a drawing as a present to Carlo Gaggioli who owns a
winery where Bacon and his friends had been to have drinks.
3) It is true that Francis Bacon and Cristiano Ravarino were in
Cortina d’Ampezzo together, and in that occasion Francis Bacon
gave or had someone give for him some of his drawings to two
ladies from Cortina owners of two well known restaurants where
he and his friends had been to.
4) It is true that Cristiano Ravarino and Francis Bacon were in
Venice together at the end of the 80s, they were seen by
professor Lucchesi at a party in one of the most famous
buildings on the Canal Grande.
5) It is true that the drawings given as presents to the three
people mentioned are identical to those object of the trial and
in some cases they have the same signature.
6) It is true that part of the 165 signatures found on the
drawings that the trial dealt with belong to Francis Bacon.
To expand a little on this, Cristiano Ravarino clearly knew the
artist intimately for the decade before his death in 1992. There
are a number of photographs of the two of them together that
supply convincing proof of this, quite apart from any testimony
given at the trial. While the bulk of the drawings in the
‘presentation’ category I have described remain with
Ravarino, a scattering of others were donated elsewhere –
sometimes, it seems, as an apology for drunken behaviour in
various Italian restaurants.
It is at this point that one has to ask oneself what this group
of drawings might signify within the general context of
Bacon’s oeuvre? In fact they are quite narrowly focused. They
all show single figures, nothing more. Some of these are
variations on the images derived from Velazquez’s Portrait of
Pope Innocent X. Others show what seems to be a crucified
Christ, though without the cross. The paintings of Popes belong
to an early period in Bacon’s career – the very late 1940s,
and the 1950s. They are some of his best-known and most
accessible works, but in later years Bacon expressed his
dissatisfaction with them. The Crucifixion theme preoccupied him
throughout his life, although he was a declared atheist.
Speaking to David Sylvester, Bacon said, when discussing his
paintings on this theme:
I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses
and meat, and to me that belong very much to the whole thing of
the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which
have been done of animals just being taken up before they were
slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course,
but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of
what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt
to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that
kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing
of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians,
the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a
non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour to another.
It is clear, I think, that the Crucifixion drawings in the
Ravarino group are heavily influenced by Michelangelo’s late
drawings on this theme. Cristiano Ravarino explains this by
saying that it was Bacon’s frustrated ambition, at this late
point in his career, to begin making sculptures. For him, it
seems, making drawings was a kind of carving out of forms on
sheets of paper, free of the complications introduced by colour.
The Pope drawings seem to have a different purpose. They are a
regretful late meditation on a theme that the artist now felt he
might have done better. In this instance I think it is important
to look at the very simple linear settings Bacon supplied for
each figure. These are much more visually rational, less
complicated, than the boxes in which he often confined his
original Popes.
I am of course speaking here from a belief that the drawings are
in fact genuine – a matter about which many Bacon experts and
lay aficionados will continue to disagree with me. If you accept
the Joule archive and the Dublin drawings as being by Bacon’s
hand, and then these Ravarino drawings as well, it upsets a
whole vast edifice of Bacon scholarship and connoisseurship. The
accepted interpretation of Bacon’s career is turned upside
down. Bacon is no longer a magical Existentialist shaman, but
something much more closely resembling a ‘normal’ kind of
artist. He is also revealed as congenital liar, who deliberately
obfuscated the way in which he worked.
There remains, too, where the Ravarino group is concerned, the
not-so-small matter of why Bacon chose to leave someone to whom
he had such close links what he must have known was a poisoned
legacy.
Cristano
Lovatelli – Ravarino
I
cannot really explain exactly what I feel about Francis Bacon,
the only way to do that is to use the words of David Sylvester
who wrote about him after his death.
Bacon was not only one of the greatest painters, maybe the
greatest, of his century, but also an extraordinary man. Daniel
Farson the journalist, poet and playwright and Bacon's old
friend has tried to explain why, but since he was in
unreciprocated love with Francis, this unbalances his otherwise
outstanding biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
by stressing Bacon's prickly and ferociously cruel nature, which
was however only a part of the whole.
As you see, I am here to speak about the drawings that Francis
gave me, yet already I am talking about him, about the Bacon
persona and not about the universally praised and almost
venerated painter.
Why, if Francis Bacon was an absolute genius as an artist…as a
man he was even greater? A possible reason in my opinion was
that his temperament, one of the most extreme that I have ever
known was also one of the most complex. At any given time one
could see him obsessively pouring over an old Greek grammar book
in order to read Eschilo in the original language and then
immediately after and with a great sense of finesse, immersed in
a sea of sparkling gossip about a mutual friend's idiot lover.
Or stealthily giving a large amount of money “under the
table” to a homeless old woman in the French Bar and yet
compulsively lamenting for months on end about an alleged wrong,
a misplaced adjective, a smile, a mistaken gesture. Physically
speaking, Francis was himself a masterpiece, at least from the
perspective of anatomic originality…this face, as I always
used to tell him, resembling the face of an alien attempting to
inhabit the form of a vicious rose… do you know of a more
incredible face in the history of modern art?
Bacon was surely the artistic genius of the last century, but
let me remind you how creative he was even in the most banal
acts, the way that he melodramatically flung his forearms either
side of his shoulders when listening to some brilliant
discourse, his way of stopping suddenly and throwing his head
backwards at a ninety degree tilt if something impressed him,
and the way that he closed himself like a vulva and raised
himself up on the tips of his toes, becoming flushed when he
(very rarely!) felt inadequate in front of another person or
painting.
About the drawings… I really understand the various reasons
that people are fascinated by them, but at the same time
shocked, I understand a kind of incredulity on the part of the
English public opinion which is completely ignorant of Bacon's
real life… not only the one described in the press, but also by
his lovers and those in the Colony Room. I always say, that
having the drawings given to me by Francis in Bologna is the
same as if a 500 square meter fresco by Morandi was discovered
in London. And maybe the frowning institutional guardians of his
memories might actually concede that this last hypothesis would
in fact be somewhat stranger.
In reality, the biggest conundrum of modern art history would be
if the greatest painter of the century was the most incompetent
draftsman, if indeed the only drawings he made are those in the
Barry Joule Archive, so quickly rendered and coarse, even if
sometimes revelatory and illuminating. It's a little like saying
that Bjorn Borg couldn't play ping-pong or Michael Schumacher
couldn't ride a bicycle. The reader might concede at this point
that my story, instead of making the history of the drawings
more heretically deviant, actually elucidates it. When I hear
people talking about forgeries, I feel like someone is telling
me that their own legs are fake or that their memories are being
controlled by outside forces.
However, this is not the place in which to defend the many
drawings that Bacon gave me, because in fact I believe that they
defend themselves, but I beg your indulgence in allowing me to
underline their irritant invisibility, their splendid
provocativeness (which apparently never having existed before!)
emerged as if from thin air. Literally from nowhere, on the
other hand, materialized the Barry Joule Archive (that I believe
to be definitely more important under a philological profile
then under an iconic one) even if I can understand that it is
more convenient for the public to believe in a person who was
Bacon’s neighbour, driver and handyman. I would like to remind
you at this point about the drawings that were known of and
spoken about many years prior to Bacon's death. In 1981 (at
least twelve years before), Marlborough's Italian seat wrote a
letter to the magazine Bologna Incontri, one of the oldest and
most prestigious cultural magazines in Emilia (a letter that I
still have by the way!), asking for an explanation about certain
points that were made in a very offensive interview with me
suggesting that I had stolen the drawings. What can I
say…better stolen than fake! Or for example another interview
with the painter (conducted by me in the same period and
published in Italian Penthouse which has a very wide circulation
in the UK) that was mentioned by Bernardo Bertolucci in my
video-interview with him, who knew Bacon and received great
praise from him for the film Last Tango in Paris and who
confessed to me that my interview was even more fascinating then
the ones conducted by Bacon's closest friend David Sylvester! In
the early eighties, an ill-considered exhibition (because
unauthorized by Bacon) held by my tennis partner and well known
Bolognese gallery owner Nerrio Nanni, comprised small and
incomplete drawings, that admittedly the painter asked me to
destroy, but at the time regretfully (and anyway under the
insistence of Nanni), I didn't…and today have to acknowledge,
that it is in fact a blessing that they weren't!
I want to say in all honesty that certain people had nearly
twelve years to ask Bacon for an explanation about my drawings.
It is true that the painter had to respect the exclusivity
agreement that Marlborough cultivated with an extremely
inflexible diligence, so that certainly Bacon couldn’t
proclaim Urbi et Orbi that he gave me an extraordinary body of
graphic work, one with which he surely wanted to bind us
together, I who had refused to go an live with him in Reece Mews
when we first met in 1977 at the farewell party of Balthus in
Villa Medici! These drawings in my opinion were certainly
another way to renew his expressive talent and at the same time
pay homage to the renaissance culture (many times he declared
Michelangelo and not Picasso as his ideal) in which the act of
drawing (not as in modern art) was a fundamental creative
operation.
Also I don't want to linger here adding others to the long list
of close friends… important art historians of the great
masters of modern art who, after initial scepticism in front of
the drawings themselves, literally burst into tears from the
emotions that they experienced from them at a later date. For
someone who is honest, with an open mind and who has no interest
in defending pre-conceived ideas, it is easy to discover amongst
my writings and also amongst the numerous and uninformed stories
about my life, more than enough elements of the truth to
completely eradicate any accusations of charlatanism in regard
to the authenticity of the drawings.
When Jesus Rodriguez director of the art section of El Pais,
asked me how I took the photograph that shows Bacon in Sicily
with his very timid and reluctant Spanish lover, even if all of
the most important Spanish magazines had been trying for years
without results to obtain a photograph with them together, the
answer was very easy: because I was the only one in the world to
whom he revealed their whereabouts!
I would prefer that there were more people who understood the
very complex reasons (apart from his being a simple soul?) that
Francis did the drawings in the first place and then made me an
incredible gift of them: to bind me to him in an affectionate
way, to renew his expressive talents with simple gestures that
was fundamental during the Renaissance period, as a form of
revenge against the suffocatingly bourgeois environment
surrounding him and which he knew was impossible to escape from
(" If I had lived in Italy, I would have painted my own
Sistine Chapel", he used to say to me obsessively) and to
succeed at last with an incredible sense of precariousness, in
playing the roulette of life. Thanks to his drawings it is out
of the question that he died in order that the world could
deceive itself in the almost criminal act of codifying him for
all time as a modern master that couldn’t draw.
I hope that an exhibition such as this will demonstrate that I
have never had the intention of disrespecting any formal
authority, but due to the fact that the painter simply gave the
drawings to me, the experts in control of the history of Modern
Art and in my opinion displaying a very real lack of respect
towards Bacon’s numerous admirers, will continue in conspiring
to keep the drawings hidden, semi-clandestine and concealed from
the eyes of the world.
As Joseba Elola wrote in El Pais on the occasion of
Bacon's death in the Ruber Clinic in Madrid, the painter died
virtually alone, attended only by a solitary nun from the order
of The Servants of Mary and suffering in horrifically agonizing
death throes for at least forty-eight hours. It is impossible to
imagine a more Baconian scenario then this. If I could be
permitted to use this metaphor: the painter’s last terrifying
masterpiece was the unspeakably dreadful way that he died. I
hope that the enormous attention that these art works will
surely provoke (even if it could be read as polemic), will be
seen as a belated way for all of those concerned to apologize to
Francis for completely deserting him in those last few days.
Alberto Agazzani
The
issue is undoubtedly enthralling, enough so to inspire a refined
and sensitive writer like Giorgio Soavi to pen a mystery novel
about it (the only mystery the Italian writer ever wrote). The
details have become common knowledge: in 1996 in Bologna, Italy,
Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, an “ex-handsome young Italian
American,” presented a thick sheaf of drawings he claimed had
been created by none other than Francis Bacon, the great English
painter, with whom the ex-handsome young man had reputedly
enjoyed an ambiguous friendship. Thus far, there was nothing
particularly strange to report: art history is rife with
fortunate and chance events, just as it is with surprising
attributions, often the subject of heated debates that can last
decades and even centuries. The element that transformed this
apparently simple event into the plot of an original and
thrilling mystery novel was born of another (presumed) fact:
Francis Bacon didn’t make drawings, and if he did, he
immediately destroyed them afterwards. At least that’s what
everyone has always believed, and what the painter himself often
claimed. But the little “if” contained in the preceding
sentence highlights a contradiction that remains
unresolved.
If
Francis Bacon didn’t make drawings, then how is it possible
for him to have destroyed his drawings? In reality, some
drawings made by Bacon do exist, and it makes little difference
that they bear little or no resemblance to those that
Lovatelli-Ravarino presented as the master’s. These drawings
were mostly studies, figurative notes, sketches and rough
outlines that were far from the solid (and often monumental)
drawings found in Bologna. And the Bologna drawings were
accompanied by countless testimonies, notes and paperwork from
people who had not only seen Bacon’s drawings in his studio
when he was there (or in other, entirely unambiguous
circumstances), but had even been given drawings directly from
the master as gifts. Some of these testimonies were even from
fully prestigious, and therefore precious, sources.
For
example Alberto Giocometti who, returning from a visit to
Bacon’s studio in London, wrote a friend to say that while he
wasn’t particularly enamored of Bacon’s paintings, he really
liked his drawings… This constituted such incontrovertible
proof that the extremely prestigious Marlborough Gallery in
London, where Bacon’s artworks are kept safe under lock and
key (and who had always ferociously maintained that the Bologna
drawings were fakes), made an abrupt about-face, pulling out
their own Bacon drawings and thereby contradicting the
assumption that lies at the heart of this mystery. The entire
affair continued to develop in the courtroom, along with a range
of entertaining testimony, passionate claims and searches for
this or that element of proof; events that became the subject of
a thorough and carefully-conducted narrative by Umberto Guerini,
the lawyer who earned a courtroom victory for Lovatelli-Ravarino
and his drawings. Entitled La punta dell’iceberg (The Tip
of the Iceberg , Christian Maretti Editore in Cesena, 2008),
the book provided the spur for this important project.
At this point, let me set aside my disguise as narrative
raconteur and return to my more appropriate professional sphere:
art criticism.
I saw several of Francis Bacon’s Bologna drawings for the
first time at the house of my friend, Giorgio Soavi, in spring
of 1997. He called me out of the blue and, with that sense of
mystery that I would soon come to love, summoned me to his house
in order to show me “something extraordinary.” This was a
habit of his: every time he purchased some new masterpiece for
his collection, Giorgio felt compelled to share the beauty of
his acquisition – along with just a pinch of barely-concealed
pride – with his friends. Therefore I found myself in Via
Santa Cecilia 5, the Giorgio Soavi address rendered immortal by
Folon, looking at an unspecified number of pages both large and
small, all containing drawings adorned with Francis Bacon’s
unmistakable signature. I was more than a little surprised, not
only by the evident beauty of the drawings, but especially by
the knowledge that I was facing a small, secret treasure. Soavi
told me about the entire affair that had developed around the
drawings up until that point, speaking of the “ex-handsome
young Italian American” (who at the time I had not met), and
asking me what I thought of the drawings, even though I
obviously had never had the opportunity to view drawings certain
to come from Bacon’s hand before.
The
first question I asked myself was: if Bacon made drawings, what
would they be like? The sketches on these paper were undoubtedly
made by an extremely talented artist: the lines tracing drapery,
anatomy and physiognomies betrayed a sureness of hand that could
not be faked, and which was emotionally very similar to the
angry, rapid lines that express the strength of Francis Bacon on
canvas. The faces revealed deep emotions, counterbalanced by
imperceptible subtleties created by erasing some lines and
overlaying others with a strength of talent that was as
exceptional as it would have been difficult to improvise. If
these were not drawings by Francis Bacon, then I was undoubtedly
looking at the work of a grand and masterful artist.
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. 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. In this sense, Bacon was the
most merciless infector of the twentieth century, capable of
giving visible form to monsters, unsettled feelings and
distress. He was able to capture not only or not simply the
monstrosities and strong emotions of an entire era, but of
humanity on the whole, amplifying the power of feeling and its
contagious nature through his own paintings. This was well
understood not so much by those involved in the art world in
Bacon’s day, but first and foremost by thinkers and
intellectuals like Gilles Deleuze, who in his Logica della
sensazione (The Logic of Feelings) demonstrated how
formal limits are overcome in Bacon’s paintings in favor of a
ruthless and inexorably Beckett-esque expressivity.
The drawings I was looking at had the same corrupting strength,
albeit expressed in a different manner. They had the same viral
charge of the artist’s paintings, capable of insinuating
themselves into the soul, afflicting it with a nameless illness
for which there is no cure. The gallery of characters drawn by
Bacon is, in many cases, easily connected with his models, and
therefore almost too easy to recognize on the surface of things.
But those gazes staring back out at us do so with ferocious,
inescapable glares; the eyes that ferociously leap out of a
morass of signs and erasure marks only apparently formless or
chance, are simply something more than a mere “Baconian”
technique. In those deep, highly-defined gazes, at times
sparkling with withheld tears, we find the same savageness and
feral core that Bacon painted onto his famous canvases. It is a
purely irrational feeling, one without explanation nor
possibility to prove, but which within his inconsistent
expressive force is easily worth more than any official
certification.
Most likely the doubts surrounding the authenticity of Cristiano
Lovatelli-Ravarino’s Bacon drawings will not subside during
this edition of the Venice event. But an open, free and direct
encounter with those sheaves of paper can undoubtedly bring us
closer to some new element, which while it may not lead to a
certain, ironclad answer, will at the very least enrich an
enthralling mystery with a Venetian episode that is expected to
be dense with suspense.
CHRISTIE’S
Post-War Art and Contemporary
Art Evening Sale
30 June 2009 London, King Street
Study
for Portrait 1986-88 Francis Bacon
Sale
Information
Lot
26 - Sale 7738 7
Lot
Description
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Study for Portrait
oil on canvas
21¼ x 18½in. (54 x 47cm.)
Painted circa 1986-88
Estimate
£800,000
- £1,200,000
($1,292,800
- $1,939,200)
Price
Realized
£870,050
($1,436,453)
Special
Notice
No VAT
will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be
added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT
inclusive basis.
Pre-Lot
Text
THE
PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
Provenance
The Estate
of Francis Bacon, London.
Galerie Lelong, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000.
Exhibited
London,
Faggionato Fine Arts, Francis Bacon, Paintings from the
Estate 1980-1991, June-August 1999 (illustrated in colour,
p. 35).
Lot
Notes
Study
for a Portrait
is a powerful and surprisingly tender portrait made in the
second half of the 1980s that relates closely to an important
series of paintings Bacon made of his friend and companion John
Edwards. Originally intended as part of a larger work, perhaps a
triptych, it is one of a relatively small number of portraits
that Bacon, a well-known destroyer of his work, clearly
considered worthy of keeping in its own right.
John Edwards (1950-2003) was Bacon's closest companion,
confidant and friend from the mid-1970s until the artist's death
in 1992 when he became the sole beneficiary of Bacon's will. An
illiterate East-End barman who first met Bacon in 1974 and
impressed the artist, forty years his senior, with his frankness
and straightforwardness, Edwards became like a son to Bacon and
the subject of several of his most important late paintings
including two major triptychs in 1985 and 1986-7.
Much of Bacon's work from this period is distinguished by the
artist's strong simplification of his subject matter in favour
of a starker concentration on the singularity of the image
itself. 'With experience', Bacon told Michael Peppiatt at this
time, 'you're more conscious of the fact that nine-tenths of
everything is inessential. What is called 'reality' becomes so
much more acute. The few things that matter become so much more
concentrated and can be summed up with so much less.' (Francis
Bacon cited in Michael Peppiatt, 'An Interview with Francis
Bacon: Provoking Accidents, Prompting Chance', Art
International, Paris, Autumn, 1989, pp. 28-33)
John Edwards' no-nonsense character and straightforward manner
may have been an influence on Bacon in this respect, and,
perhaps in reflection of this overriding aspect of Edwards'
character, and the tender, even paternal, nature of his feelings
towards the man, Bacon's portraits of him are, for the most
part, also notable for their directness and simplicity. Study
for Portrait seems to be such a case in point and bears a
strong resemblance to a photograph of Edwards standing in front
of his cameras wearing a dark sweater and shirt circa 1980 that
Bacon himself may well have taken.
Regularly asked to cook breakfast for Bacon and to accompany him
on his late-night gambling sprees, Edwards, though not Bacon's
lover, became an integral part of the artist's daily life and as
important to him as anyone had ever been. He soon became, like
Bacon's former lover George Dyer before him, one of only very
few people whom the artist allowed not only to watch him paint
but also encouraged to sit for him. These parallels between Dyer
and Edwards even came to be invoked in the style and manner of
Bacon's work who, like many great artists, began in his later
years to re-explore the motifs, compositions and themes of some
of his earlier work.
Bacon had first met Edwards in 1974 while still in the process
of obsessively painting out his grief over Dyer who had
committed suicide on the eve of his Paris retrospective in 1971.
The comparative comfort, ease and apparent stability of Bacon's
non-sexual relationship with Edwards seems to have proved an
antidote, if not a cure, to the trauma and guilt he felt over
Dyer. In the mid-1980s, Bacon began to incorporate portraits of
Edwards into his work depicting him wearing only underpants and
sitting in exactly the same pose on a chair with one leg raised
on the other, as he had painted Dyer. It is possible of course,
that Bacon was perhaps still interested in the strange dynamics
of this pose, but his ability to effectively replace the figure
of his dead former lover with that of Edwards also surely
reflects the degree to which his relationship with Edwards had
helped to exorcise this distressing ghost from the past.
As in Triptych, August of 1972, for example, in most of
Bacon's portraits of Edwards', the features of the sitter are
presented isolated against a stark black rectangular background,
not unlike the tormented face of Dyer in the so-called 'black
triptychs'. It was of course, a common practice of Bacon's to
depict his subjects in this seemingly existential
life-versus-death manner, as if highlighting the contrast
between living flesh and the black inert emptiness of the void.
It is also in this respect that Study for Portrait
relates closely to these works and to such major paintings of
the 1980s as Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards
of 1984, the Triptych of 1986-7 and Portrait of John
Edwards of 1988. In each of these paintings, as in this
work, one of Bacon's primary concerns has been with the
isolation of the figure against a rectangular frame-like
background. In the triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of
John Edwards this frame was rendered solely with a graphic
outline around Edward's head and shoulders, while in the central
panel of Triptych and in the 1988 portrait, the figure is
powerfully backed by a solid black rectangle. Here, in Study
for Portrait Bacon has combined the effect by drawing a
frame in flesh-coloured paint around the portrait head which
itself seems to emerge in half-light out of the darkness of a
black rectangle that here constitutes the entire portrait.
Echoing the kind of diagrammatic frame drawn by a magazine
editor as an instruction to crop the image, this box-like
structure regularly appears throughout Bacon's oeuvre as a
pictorial device aimed at intensifying the singularity of the
image and the vitality and uniqueness of its living presence.
Whereas in many of his portraits of George Dyer and in other
portraits of Edwards, it was with the direct contrast of the
figure and its clear outline set against the emptiness of the
black background that Bacon seemed to be interested, in this
painting its figure seems to emerge from the darkness as if
briefly illuminated by a passing light. In this, this remarkably
straightforward portrait recalls the more intimate and inquiring
manner Bacon often used in painting his own face and is
reflective of much that he admired in Rembrandt's
self-portraiture as well as of his own early 1950s portraits of
the haunted almost ghost-like faces of lone besuited men sitting
in empty boxes.
Surprisingly gentle and tender in its portrayal of the sitter
slowly turning his head, with this slight movement anchored by
the sharp white curvature of his shirt collar, the vitality of
the image is made real by the fine blood-red mist Bacon has
sprayed using an air brush over its surface. Splattering the
more illustrational image beneath, the spray of red over the
surface of the sitter's face, bestows the image with all the
essential immediacy and vitality of life that Bacon considered
so necessary for a successful image. Effectively replacing the
throwing of paint that Bacon practiced for a while in the late
'60s and early '70s, here the combination of chance in the blown
spray of paint invigorates the portrait with a subtle violence
that is both simple and devastatingly effective.
Den Mother to the Louche and Famous
By
Geoffrey
Wheatcroft,
The New York Times, June 5, 2009
Studies
(1963) by Francis Bacon for a portrait of George Dyer, his
companion
A VISITOR to the magnificent Francis Bacon exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art might easily pass by an alcove filled
with photographs of Bacon’s friends. Among them is a tiny,
yellowing snapshot of a striking woman gazing at the camera,
taken around 1965. But then few Americans would even recognize
the name of Muriel Belcher, or know about the part she played in
Bacon’s life, as his den mother of sorts, and about the club
she ran as his refuge.
She was the greatest of Soho hostesses, from 1948, when she
opened the Colony Room Club on Dean Street here, until her death
in 1979. The place we all called Muriel’s was a drinking club,
a salon, a little community of its own (and one about which this
reporter is regrettably well qualified to write, having spent
too much of his early life there). What makes the story more
poignant today is that not only have most of the players
departed, but also the stage itself is dark. Muriel and Francis
are no more, and neither is the Colony.
So we’re left with memories, of the kind novelists convey
better: “It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its
folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5, 1922.’
But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a
better impression than my generalities of those who accepted
Gatsby’s hospitality.” On another old timetable I can still
read the names of those who drank at Muriel’s in July 1972.
Among them were writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed
aristocrats and petty criminals, maybe more Anthony Powell than
F. Scott Fitzgerald. But you could also find some of the most
famous painters of the age, and Muriel’s deserves at least a
small footnote in the history of art.
In those days Soho was full of clubs, though very different from
the haughty gentlemen’s establishments of St. James’s Street
and Pall Mall. They existed partly to refresh thirsty
“afternoon men” at a time when the pubs were obliged to shut
from 3 to 5:30 p.m., but each had its own character. Gerry’s
on Shaftesbury Avenue was for actors (more likely “resting”
than working). The Kismet, a k a the Iron Lung, on Cranbourn
Street, also in a basement, had two bars for two clienteles.
Back in the ’60s, in the more bohemian bar on the left, I
briefly met “the Roberts,” the inseparable painters Robert
Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, while in the other bar somber men
in raincoats and hats stood drinking and talking quietly: this
was the London underworld and the plainclothes police meeting on
equal terms.
But Muriel’s was sui generis. You passed through a door beside
an Italian restaurant, climbed stairs smelling of damp or worse,
and entered a dark green room with a bar to the left. The walls
were covered with pictures, from a cartoon of Muriel by the jazz
musician Wally Fawkes (a k a Trog) to a conversation piece set
in the Colony by the painter Michael Andrews.
Nothing was more striking than the hostess herself, perched
birdlike on her stool, drink in one hand and cigarette in the
other, with one eye on the door to block unwelcome visitors and
the other on customers to make sure they were spending enough.
And all the while she kept up her machine-gun chatter:
sarcastic, witty, scabrously obscene.
Her family was Birmingham Jewish, or so I believe. She had made
her way to London and the demimonde, and during the war opened
her first club, the Music Box, whose core membership seems to
have been the better sort of homosexual officer in the Brigade
of Guards (not as small a constituency as you might think).
Then she moved to that upstairs room on Dean Street. Although
Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and
Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t
too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of
Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel;
it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced
with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the
Somme.”
Before long most of what would later be known as the School of
London congregated there, including Frank Auerbach and Lucien
Freud as well as Bacon and Andrews. That painting by Andrews
showed the names on the schedule in effect in the mid-1960s.
Clustered around Muriel are her companion Carmel; Jeffrey
Bernard (dropout, boozer, wit and later Spectator columnist);
Henrietta Moraes (also much painted by Bacon); Lady Rose
McClaren (the déclassé sister of the Marquess of Anglesey);
and John Deakin, who took the photograph of Muriel, as well as
several others in the Bacon exhibition at the Met.
Also Bacon and Mr. Freud, whose friendship had been commemorated
years before in another painting, Mr. Freud’s haunting small
portrait of Bacon. They could often be seen talking together in
the corner, a study in contrasts: Mr. Freud reserved, ironic,
abstemious (and conspicuously heterosexual — Muriel’s was
very camp, not to say lewd, but far from merely what was then
called a “queer club”); Bacon more expansive, especially
while the drink flowed.
As it did when he was around. “Champagne for your real friends
and real pain for your sham friends” was his favorite Irish
toast, and he meant it, both ways. He said superfluously that
Muriel’s was “a place where we came to dissolve our
inhibitions,” and his were very solvent.
Even after a long drinking session Bacon might still be genial.
Though he did once tear open my shirt front, that wasn’t
anger, or lust, but simply because he couldn’t quite stand
upright and was trying to break his fall.
But obstreperous on occasion veered toward obnoxious. Late one
evening he was so truculent that Ian Board, Muriel’s barman
asked me to get him out of the Colony, which I did by taking him
down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell
rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum.
If Bacon was by turns
affable and abusive, Muriel herself was “a benevolent
witch,” in the words of the writer and musician George Melly.
Her humour
was certainly distinctive. A friend once surprised us all by
getting married and begetting a son. We lunched to celebrate,
before climbing the stairs for a postprandial drink and to tell
Muriel about this happy event. Her own slightly deflating mode
of congratulation was to say, “It’s amazing what a poof can
do when she tries.”
A portrait of Ms. Belcher by John Deakin.
Writers and moviemakers as well as painters have portrayed
Muriel. Rodney Ackland’s play The Pink Room opened in
London in 1952, but not for long, since critics were shocked by
the frank picture of inebriation and sexual variety in a club
very much like the Colony. But the play was revived and
televised many years later as Absolute Hell, with Judi
Dench as the formidable hostess, and very good she was, if too
ladylike for Muriel.
In the 1998 biopic Love Is the Devil, Bacon is played by
Derek Jacobi, his companion George Dyer by Daniel Craig (whose
fans can see more of him anatomically here than in his later
James Bond films), and our hostess by Tilda Swinton. Although
she doesn’t sound anything like Muriel, she looks curiously
like her, and the tricksy-arty cinematography through a fisheye
lens captures the atmosphere of the Colony rather well.
Not everyone loved Muriel and her club. I once took my friend
Shiva Naipaul — younger brother of V. S. Naipaul and a
brilliant writer himself, who died suddenly in 1985 at 40 — up
to the Colony for a digestif. After a few minutes he said:
“Can we please leave? I find this place infinitely
depressing.”
But many others were captivated by that room, and not just the
people you might expect. The Labour member of Parliament Tom
Driberg might be found talking to one of the journalists who
liked to look in at Muriel’s, like Peter Jenkins, the liberal
columnist, and, more surprisingly, the radical turned
conservative Paul Johnson.
Now we can look in no more. Muriel died barely into her 70s, and
by the time Bacon died in 1992 he and Mr. Freud had fallen out,
quite why I never knew. To make it sadder, that beautiful
portrait by Mr. Freud was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin
and has never been seen since.
After Muriel died, the Colony was kept going by Mr. Board, and
after his death in 1994 by Michael Wojas. But he closed the club
some months ago, and sold the contents. Great efforts were made
to save the Colony, which had acquired a newer membership, some
of them well-known younger artists, and a fund-raiser was held
before Christmas, but to no avail. This is not the place to
describe the acrimonious and litigious upshot, and although
there are some plans to reopen the Colony, almost certainly in
some other location, it will not be the same.
Many years ago Jenkins gestured round him, and
said fervently he hoped places like this would never vanish. But
Muriel’s has, and for some of us Soho today is a place of
ghosts, grey names from a green room.
Say
AHHHHHHHH!
People
feel duped by Francis Bacon; such is our prejudice toward the
scream.
By Morgan Meis,
The Smart Set, Drexel University, 5th June, 2009
Francis
Bacon is a scream. He will always be a scream. Just think of the
roar from that fleshy maw under the umbrella in Painting from 1946. Bacon didn’t just paint screams.
There are "religious" triptychs, portraits, angry
animals, and the ongoing presence of raw meat. But Bacon would
not be Bacon without the screams. How you feel about the screams
is, I think, the essence of how you'll feel about every Bacon
work.
And the
man — whose most influential paintings now date back more than
half a century — can still stir things up. The current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, has inspired the full
gamut of critical response. People are falling over themselves
just to disagree. Jerry Saltz, of New York Magazine,
likes the early work and the screaming but thinks Bacon became a
parody of himself over time. Saltz writes, "But in the end,
he seems less a modern painter than the last of a breed of
Romantics — one who, in his final interview, plaintively
stated, 'I painted to be loved'.”
Roberta
Smith over at The New York Times takes the
opposite view. Smith dismisses the early work, focusing on the
greater emotional complexity of the later paintings. "[T]he
Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art
declined, indicating that it often improved as his colours
brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity,” she
writes. “It was equally important that he began to focus on
people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem
simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably
individual."
At The
New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl gives Bacon grudging respect
for being a major artist of the 20th century, but admits that he
can't stand the work on any personal level. "Francis Bacon
has long been my least favourite great painter of the 20th
century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective,
which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum,
seethe with indignation, which I will now try to get over."
I focus
here on the critical disparity and unease for one simple reason:
It shows the deep distrust of Bacon among those who think and
write about art. This distrust, I pose, can be traced back to
the scream. Critics tend not to believe in the scream. They
think they're being manipulated and they don't like it. Nobody
likes to be a sucker, critics least of all. The more the critics
witness the public’s adoration of Bacon's work, the more they
smell a rat.
Arthur
Danto, writing on Bacon for The Nation back in 1990,
summed up the feelings with his typical intellectual
incisiveness.
So … these depicted screams seem to entitle us to some
inference that they at least express an attitude of despair or
outrage or condemnation, and that in the medium of extreme
gesture the artist is registering a moral view toward the
conditions that account for scream upon scream upon scream. How
profoundly disillusioning it is then to read the artist saying,
in a famous interview he gave to David Sylvester for The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, "I've
always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet
painted a sunset." … It is like a rack maker who listens
to the screams of the racked only as evidence that he has done a
fine job…. We are accordingly victims ourselves, manipulated
in our moral being by an art that has no such being. It is for
this reason that I hate Bacon's art.
There is nothing worse, in Danto's eyes, than a scream that means
nothing. It amounts to the destruction of the moral realm in the
name of aesthetics. The key scream painting in Bacon's oeuvre is
probably Study after Velazquez (1950). Bacon takes Velazquez' famous
Portrait
of Pope Innocent X (1650), in which the Pope is a
study in cynicism and power and transforms it into one of his
blurred, terrifying, screaming heads. The impulse is always to
explain this, and other screams through personal history or
politics. Bacon was reacting to the horror of his times. Bacon
was reacting to the horror of his family life and his later
relationships (with their sometimes violent and destructive
characteristics). Bacon was reacting to the repressive
atmosphere in England regarding his homosexuality. Danto, I
think, is correct in rejecting this kind of reductionism. So was
Bacon. When asked about his interest in Velasquez' famous Pope
painting, Bacon replied, "I think it's the magnificent
colour of it." He also stated flatly that, "I have
never tried to be horrific." Danto can never forgive Bacon
for this sleight of hand.
But Danto, and by extension many other critics, miss a key
distinction when they focus on the meaninglessness of the
screams. Bacon retreated to the language of pure painting and
aestheticism in order to resist the specific meanings often
attributed to his works. None of his paintings were explicitly
about the wars and genocides of the 20th century. His Pope
paintings are not a criticism of the Catholic Church. His more
abstract screams are not an expression of Existentialist
philosophy.
In fact, Bacon constantly decontextualized his screams (and other
portrayals of violence and terror) in order to cut the causal
links and to make the screams more general. He was interested in
the form and structure of a scream. He wanted to figure out what
makes a scream a scream. Painting the scream onto Pope Innocent
X heightens that sense of disjunction. It doesn’t make sense
that the Pope is screaming. But that makes the scream all the
more pure, all the more screamy in its screaminess.
In the aforementioned interview with David Sylvester, Sylvester
asks Bacon about the prevalence of violence in his work. Bacon
responds with a disturbing account of the ways that, since a
small child, he had been constantly surrounded by violence and
war. He ends by observing, rather laconically, "So I could
say, perhaps, I have been accustomed to always living through
forms of violence." The way he calls it "forms of
violence" jumps out at me. The artist in Bacon responded to
the specific experience of violence by stepping back and
exploring the forms of violence as such. In its structure, this
is not unlike many of the abstract painters who were his
contemporaries. They stepped back from specific acts of
representation in order to study the form of visual perception
itself.
It is still possible to accuse Bacon of being blithe and cynical
in exploring the forms of violence on one hand while tweaking
our ingrained emotional response to images of violence and
terror on the other. He is having his cake and eating it, too.
That's the essence of Danto's critique. Bacon hits us with these
incredibly powerful and moving images and then claims, la di da,
that he was only interested in the colour orange all along.
But why shouldn't artists get to explore the forms of violence
just as they explore all other forms? With all due respect to
Edvard Munch, I can't think of another artist who so perfectly
expressed the Platonic purity of the scream, the scream as
scream. There are plenty of artists who exploit our specific
attraction to beautiful bodies or landscapes in order to explore
more general aesthetic questions about shape, or color, or
beauty itself.
Something about Bacon's exploitation of horror arouses an
indignation not usually expressed in these other cases. Perhaps
we resent that Bacon makes us take pleasure in our more
troubling emotions, in our fascination with violence. I don't
know if Peter Schjeldahl "seethes with indignation"
because he deplores the amorality of Bacon's imagery of violence
or because he deplores the pleasure he finds himself taking in
such amoral imagery of violence. It could be a mixture of both.
I always take very seriously the way that teenagers look at
Bacon. They see the purity of that scream and they respond to it
immediately. They know that it is right, that Bacon got that
scream absolutely right because he formalized the subject matter
and not because it points to any outside meaning. They stand
before those paintings in an open display of their own essential
desire, revulsion, lust, anger, fear. There it is. Scream. •
Rough Stuff
A Francis
Bacon retrospective at the Met.
by Peter
Schjeldahl, The Art World, The
New Yorker, June 1, 2009
The
new Francis Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely
installed at the Metropolitan, seethes with indignation. Vamped
with an eclectic mix of Expressionist tactics and decorative
longueurs, Bacon now looks more prophetic than the Abstract
Expressionists do about subsequent developments in art, starting
with Pop and continuing through the so-called Pictures
Generation. The key is his pioneering use of photographs and
printed sources for his subject matter.
While
Bacon’s work is routinely celebrated as an authentic reactive
to the horrors and the dislocations of the Second World War, it
can come off as a pageant of hangovers and refractory lovers.
Bacon’s striking formal innovations, in handlings of pictorial
space, include swiftly limned cubical enclosures and evocations
of proscenium stages, in which painted figures leap to the eye.
His paintings, despite their extraordinary visual drama, thus
lack a de Kooningesque sense of scale, which knits marks to the
shape of the canvas and relates that shape to the viewer’s
body.
The
Met exhibition regards Bacon in the light of Pop art and of
later grapplings, by artists including Picture crew, with the
tyranny of mechanical reproduction in contemporary culture. The
most crucial tension of Bacon style, between life mediated by
received images and life suffered in the flesh, can be awfully
heady. His insistence that all paintings be displayed behind
glass, in gold frames works as a prosthetic gloss to unify his
lurchingly fragmented surfaces. But upon witnessing, at the Met,
the gleaming parade of his career, one begins to understand the
policy as a poignant gesture that weds decorative chic to fierce
inspiration.
The Raw
Vision of Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon at
100.
By Christopher Benfey, Slate, Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The
Met's reverential celebration of English artist Francis Bacon,
who was born 100 years ago and died in 1992, feels more like a
coronation than a retrospective. It's as though after years of
painting howling popes and grisly crucifixions, the bad-boy
sinner had finally been rewarded with a puff of white smoke from
the Holy See. Bacon's impact on younger painters has never been
greater; Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, which stunned viewers in war-ravaged London in
1945, helps us see why. In this grim triptych, more Abu Ghraib
than Gethsemane, Bacon preserved the visceral impact of
religious painting while emptying it of overt spiritual baggage.
Three genetically modified life forms are the eyeless spectators
at "a crucifixion," as though such things happen every
day. Lampreylike and bandaged against a lethal orange
background, they look as though they could survive anything. A
lifelong atheist, Bacon once said that he wanted his pictures
"to look as if a human being had passed between them, like
a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace
of past events as the snail leaves its slime."
"I kinda like this one," says Jack Nicholson's
nihilistic Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman as he
mows through an art museum defacing paintings. The painting he
spares is one of Bacon's famous popes, flanked by slabs of
flayed meat. Loosely based on Diego Velázquez's Portrait of
Pope Innocent X (1649-50), which Bacon claimed to know only
in reproductions, Bacon's open-mouthed popes have elicited many
interpretations, from the personal (Bacon was severely
asthmatic, and the pope is gasping for air) to the existential
("This is the black night of the 20th-century
soul. …"). But it's doubtful that Bacon had any specific
interpretation in mind in creating such images. Intensity was
what he was after—and jarring incongruity. Like a chemist in
the lab, he combined unstable substances—in this case, a
familiar portrait of a pope with a still of a screaming nurse
from Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin—to
see what explosive compound might emerge. The results can be
oddly divergent in their emotional impact. Head VI, the
earliest surviving version of the series, may invite an initial
sense of horror, but it also looks surprisingly like a
triumphant college graduate with a tassel dangling from his
mortarboard. Teeth and gums are lovingly painted, a miniature
symphony of mauve and white. Bacon once told art critic David
Sylvester that he always wanted "to paint the mouth like
Monet painted a sunset.
Bacon recombines the meat, the teeth, and the tassel in his
monumental Painting, another crucifixion for modern
times. With its echoes of Rembrandt and Soutine, masters of the
painted carcass, Painting is a "masterpiece"
in the old sense of the word: a work that displays what an
apprentice has learned in mastering his craft. Bacon had little
formal schooling and none in art; he learned what he needed to
know from museums and fellow artists. Born in Dublin into a rich
Protestant English family that divided its time between Ireland
and England, Bacon was kicked out of the house at 16 when his
father, a horse trainer and official in the War Office,
discovered him wearing his mother's clothes. He drifted among
professions (gentleman's valet, interior decorator) and lovers
(his first was a Tory politician) before finding in
art—especially the paintings of Picasso he saw in Paris on a
visit during the 1920s—a staging ground for emotional and
sexual intensity. While Bacon's biomorphic forms superficially
recall Picasso's Surrealist period, his working methods, the
subject of intense research since his studio was made available
to scholars after his death, align him with Warhol. Bacon
painted primarily from a horde of photographs, many of which are
displayed in the Met exhibition. Painting is based in
part on an image of the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels, behind a bank of microphones.
Bacon
based many paintings on Eadweard Muybridge's stop-action studies
of animal locomotion from the 1880s. "It would be very
difficult for me," he once said, "to disentangle the
influence of Muybridge from the influence of Michelangelo."
Michelangelo was a great religious painter, while Muybridge was
a secular scientist. But for Bacon, both Muybridge and
Michelangelo were thesauruses of suggestive physical poses,
available for recombination, and trailing old meanings like a
snail trailing slime. There is probably some man-as-beast
analogy in Bacon's dogs and baboons, but Bacon didn't insist on
the metaphors. Sometimes a dog is just a dog.
During
the 1950s, Bacon's toothy popes morphed into toothy businessmen
in grey flannel suits, often portrayed in cagelike bedrooms with
heavy blinds lowered. These have been interpreted, predictably,
as commentaries on Cold War bureaucratic uniformity and sexual
repression—"the hollow men, the stuffed men," as
Bacon's favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, might have called them. But
these men in blue are weirder than that. In Study for a Portrait, the gaping mouth is based on a book
about oral diseases that Bacon had bought in Paris. If Bacon
painted gaping mouths like Monet sunsets, here the lush blues
and blacks resemble Whistler's nocturnes. As in many of Bacon's
strongest paintings, our emotions and our eyes are pulled in two
directions at once: a disturbing image of grinning derangement
and a reassuring harmony of blues and greys.
There's
a kindred tension between horror and harmony in Bacon's
hallucinatory riff on the life mask of William Blake, originally
cast by London phrenologist James Delville in 1813, when Blake
was 56. Working, as usual, from a photograph, Bacon reanimated
the mask. The seemingly flayed head looms in the darkness like
an actor delivering a soliloquy. The spectral image bears an
uncanny resemblance to Marlon Brando reciting Eliot's The
Hollow Men in Apocalypse Now. Bacon is also inviting
a comparison between his own visionary work and that of an
outsider artist like Blake. The painted planes of the face are
hauntingly beautiful, a jagged map of human presence at the
border of life and death.
Bacon's
work slackened during the 1960s, and there are too many
flamboyant triptychs of theatrical and sexual goings-on,
hurriedly (and reportedly drunkenly) painted. Smaller portraits,
often in sequences like strips from a photo booth, retain their
intensity. Bacon liked to quote Cocteau's quip, "Each day
in the mirror I watch death at work." He claimed not to
like self-portraiture: "I loathe my own face." But by
the late 1970s, he had lost so many friends—along with his
longtime lover, George Dyer, dead of a drug overdose (and
commemorated in many, many paintings)—that "I've nobody
left to paint but myself!" Across the mouth, Bacon applied
paint with ribbed fabrics, giving a strangely striated texture,
like Eliot's Sweeney (the subject of a late Bacon triptych) with
"zebra stripes along his jaw."
The
bleak paintings of Bacon's lonely last years have titles like A
Piece of Waste Land (Eliot again) and Blood on Pavement.
This picture may, as the wall-text claims, be based on "a
night when the artist encountered evidence of a brutal act in
the street while walking home." And yet there's nothing
brutal about the painting, with its calm, Rothko-like swaths of
colour. "You have to abbreviate into intensity," Bacon
believed, and this picture takes abbreviation to the edge of
abstraction. Like the related Jet of Water, with its
white paint splashed across the canvas, Blood on Pavement
seems to be about the act of painting, the mysterious process by
which seemingly arbitrary marks assume emotional power.
Lovingly
preserved in a Dublin gallery, Bacon's studio is now a site of
pilgrimage as well as a live archeological dig. When American
art historian Sam Hunter visited Bacon during the early 1950s,
the creative clutter already threatened to engulf the studio.
"At one end stand his paintings, unique and extremely
personal inventions," Hunter wrote. "At the other are
tables littered with newspaper photographs and clippings, crime
sheets. … Violence is the common denominator of photographs
showing Goebbels waggling a finger on the public platform, the
human carnage of a highway accident, every sort of war
atrocity." During Bacon's lifetime, critics often noted the
eerie ways in which his paintings seemed to predict public
events. His slaughterhouse motifs were displayed as the first
shocking images from the Nazi concentration camps emerged.
Eichmann on trial in his glass cell recalled Bacon's popes in
their kindred cages. In our own era of enhanced interrogation
techniques, it feels as though Bacon, whose life spanned the
century of total war, has dreamed it all before us. "I'm an
optimist," Bacon liked to say, "an optimist about
nothing."
Slaughterhouse
Francis Bacon: A Centenary
Retrospective
Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Jed
Perl,
Self-Portrait 1973 Francis Bacon
Is
there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there
is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the
artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has
been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist
melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of
old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at
the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a
wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for
adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists. He
zeroed in on those moments when Van Gogh and Picasso were
pushing their glorious anarchic energy to the brink of
incoherence. This would have been fine, except that Bacon
willfully ignored their ordering intelligence, preferring to
sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism.
What Bacon produced are not paintings, at least not satisfying
ones. They are little more than rectangles of canvas inscribed
with noirish graffiti: angst for dummies. Bacon turned his
clever little quotations from the masters, old or modern, into
the twentieth century's most august visual claptrap.
There is nothing surprising about an artist feeling like a
romantic outlaw, and Bacon and his supporters can cite a long
tradition of more-or-less alienated creators, winding back to
Caravaggio, who actually killed somebody. The trouble with Bacon
is that he has not attached himself to a tradition of
picture-making but to a tradition of attitudinizing. In this
wrongheaded tradition, Caravaggio is admired not because he was
a good painter but because he was a bad boy - which is a pretty
accurate characterization of the career of Francis Bacon, too.
This is not to say that artists are under any obligation to be
conventionally respectable members of society. The fact is that
an artist's outward behaviour has no fixed relationship to the
development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this
fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept
also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is
devalued when it is not entirely rejected. The Bacon mystique is
not grounded in his paintings so much as in a glamorous list of
extenuating circumstances. (The exhibition, which has already
been seen at the Tate in London and the Prado in Madrid, was
organized by Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan together with
Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale of the Tate.)
Francis Bacon's paintings arrive in New York at a moment when
wrongheaded traditions are the only ones that are widely
esteemed, and the freestanding value of art has more or less
been stood on its head, leaving us with the freestanding value
of anti-art. So it is no wonder that Bacon is receiving a warm
welcome among some of the newer painters who have been praised
for turning the grand manner on its head, producing
impersonations of traditional painting and campy send-ups of the
masters. Before the Bacon retrospective opened, Vogue asked
a number of artists to comment. "What's profound about his
work is that it's not settled," declared Lisa Yuskavage,
who paints bimbos with floppy hair. "It's too big. It's
like a bomb dropping." George Condo, our thrift-shop
Picasso, observed that "each one of his paintings is like a
very elegant, bad hangover." And John Currin, who has made
misogyny safe for high-end collectors, believes that "the
feeling you get from Bacon is something akin to a stately
mansion that you can't pay the taxes on, and you can't afford to
heat. And yet, with his poverty of means - simple,
unsophisticated techniques - he's able to do grand painting,
completely."
Yuskavage, Condo, and Currin know, like Bacon, how to make
mawkishness look cool. The trick of managing to be
simultaneously empty and canny is something else that they share
with the Englishman. Here is part of what Bacon had to say in
the catalogue of a 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The
New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors: "I
would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed
between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human
presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves
its slime." The Guggenheim or the New Museum ought to
organize a survey of painting from Francis Bacon to Lisa
Yuskavage and call it Snail Slime.
In any event, Bacon knew exactly what he was doing when he said
that. He was giving mid-century intellectuals and jet-setters
just the kick in the pants that would persuade them that he was
the leader of their very own avant-garde. Bacon wants to have
things every which way, and this makes him a perfect pied piper
for our have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too art world. His work is
old- fashioned and newfangled, a carefully calculated mixture of
literalism and obscurantism. Sometimes he transcribes his own
face or the face of a lover more or less directly from a
photograph, so that a painting becomes a bulletin board on which
to pin a few images. At other times he savagely distorts a
photograph, treating the head of his friend Isabel Rawsthorne as
if it were made of silly putty, twisting it into a crenulated
grotesque. Or he will reconstruct a scene from the life of
somebody close to him. When he visualizes his ex-lover, George
Dyer, slumped on a toilet in a Paris hotel, dying of an overdose
of alcohol and pills, he gives his work a tabloid frisson. Bacon
likes body fragments, partly erased figures, and heads that have
been reduced to pulp. He takes autobiographical material and
plays with it, running signs and symbols through the shredder,
producing puzzles and enigmas, flotsam and jetsam floating in a
chic void. He is especially fond of paintings that come in
threes, so that the composite compositions take on a sort of
religious or dramatic implication, the tangled plot line of a
hellish holy trinity.
Alienation no longer has the hipster appeal that it had a
generation ago, so that Bacon's version of the
man-all-alone-in-an-unfriendly-world routine takes on a retro
appeal. I would not be surprised if there are visitors to the
Metropolitan who are knowingly mumbling, "Oh, that
again." They may be remembering Sartre, or just Last Tango
in Paris, which begins with some paintings by Bacon. Confronted
with a prestigious retrospective at the Metropolitan,
museumgoers are reluctant to gainsay the authenticity of the
artist's feelings--but they may also find themselves a little
weary when confronted with yet another exercise in high modern
angst.
There is something rather cool about even Bacon's most violent
images, and this emotional dissonance fits right in with a
postmodern taste for muddleheaded irony. The early paintings,
especially the shrieking Popes based on Velazquez's portrait of
Innocent X, have a howling 1950s look, and visitors who know
their cultural history will find themselves thinking of a
traumatized postwar Europe and the dive-glamour of London's
Soho, which has gained a special historical aura in recent
years, as England is again hailed as a literary and artistic
hotspot. By the 1970s, Bacon's surfaces are smoother, at times
looking almost airbrushed. The stretches of flatly applied paint
in tan, grey, pink, and orange suggest the streamlined chic of
the 1970s, when furnishings and clothes were done up in
Ultrasuede. These paintings are high- style bummers, bad dreams
with fashionable upholstery.
Going through the Bacon retrospective, I find that everything
changes and everything remains the same. For his admirers, this
may be the point. There is always that tormented figure,
represented by a face, an entire body, or just some body parts.
Bacon likes to paint people in cages or boxes, which are
indicated with a few perfunctory lines. Sometimes he drops a bed
into one of his nowhere spaces, and then drops a person or maybe
two people on the bed. If it is one person, then the theme is
loneliness. If it is two people, then the themes are sex, love,
and loneliness, with elements of aggression mixed in for good
measure. Around the figures the stage is bare or nearly bare,
with the line between wall and floor suggested, if you are
lucky, and the emptiness done up in red or tan or grey,
depending on Bacon's mood. The message is that we are all
prisoners, we are all locked in place, we cannot get up from the
chair, we cannot walk through the door. In order to underline
their inability to flee the isolation cells that Bacon has
contrived for his allegedly archetypal figures, the artist
sometimes gives one of these freakish victims an appendage that
looks like a club foot, or scrambles the head so badly that you
wonder if a man could even see his way through the door. What
Bacon's work brings to mind are the shock tactics of the most
literal Surrealists, the photographs of disfigured dolls by
Bellmer, and Dali's Technicolor porno dreams.
Earlier this season, in what amounted to a curtain raiser for
the Bacon retrospective, the Gagosian Gallery mounted a show
pairing work by Bacon and Giacometti. There could not have been
a better demonstration of the poverty of Bacon's method. There
is a coarse methodical belligerence about Bacon's work, and when
the paintings are gathered together a museumgoer may be put in
something like a trance state. Perhaps visitors come to accept
the muffled horrors, repeated in nearly endless variations, as
the sum total of artistic possibilities in the modern world. But
when Bacon's paintings are juxtaposed with those of Giacometti,
who was also working in the postwar years and was equally
susceptible to the dark shadows that World War II cast, you can
see how limited Bacon's range really is. The Gagosian show,
titled Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers, saluted their
admiration for Isabel Rawsthorne, a figure in artistic and
literary circles in London and Paris with whom Giacometti was
for a time passionately involved. Giacometti and Bacon liked
each other, but according to James Lord, in his biography of
Giacometti, "concerning aesthetic objectives, the two
artists did not see eye to eye. In private, Alberto expressed
dislike of the chance effects and crafty sleights of technique
so beloved by Francis."
In his paintings Giacometti draws on many themes that we also
encounter in Bacon's work. Giacometti is interested in feelings
of unease, in our sense of the unknowableness of our own bodies
and the trouble we sometimes have in finding our place in the
world. But when Giacometti paints, using the brush with a
graphic precision, articulating the nose, the eyes, the mouth,
the cheekbones, he is at once disassembling the face, insisting
like Bacon that we see things from some fresh perspective, and
putting the pieces of the puzzle back together, creating a head
that is as inviolably whole as a statue in an Egyptian tomb,
something of which Bacon is incapable. While there is vehemence
about the frontality of Giacometti's portrait subjects, there is
also tenderness, and a changeableness that registers in the
surprising qualities of light and air, the infinite variety that
he discovers in his Parisian greys. Giacometti does not prejudge
experience in the way that Bacon does. When Giacometti suggests
that a man or a woman is caged or imprisoned, he also insists
that they are capable of movement, of struggle - that they still
have a chance of controlling their own destiny. Freedom is a
possibility in Giacometti's universe, and this can pose a
daunting challenge, especially for museumgoers who expect to be
told what to feel.
Bacon wants the gravitas of the old masters, but he refuses to
understand that the authority of Rembrandt or Goya is grounded
in their avid engagement with everyday experience. Bacon never
really had any interest in working directly from life. He did
not do any drawings to speak of, which is especially strange for
an artist who aims to reconceive the human figure. And I think
that photography, which played a useful role in the paintings of
Vuillard and Bonnard and other artists, is a big, baleful
problem in Bacon's work. His blurred or distorted faces and
bodies are nothing more than photographs seen in a funhouse
mirror. He depends far too much on the fixity of photographs,
which he uses to give his paintings a creepy freeze-frame
fascination. The photographic image serves as a source of cheap
sensation, a defence mechanism, a way of shutting down any
feelings that might arise directly from experience. The result
is Pop Art seen through a glass darkly, Warhol's Electric Chair
paintings without the silkscreen technique. And when Bacon
chooses to blur these photo-derived figures, the results are as
calculatingly sentimental as anything in Gerhard Richter. The
organic nature of painting, the end-to-end logic that
characterizes all painting, whether in Rembrandt or in Mondrian,
is rejected in favour of a modernist re-staging of a fin-de-siecle
freakshow.
If the Bacon retrospective is a hit with the public, it will be
because visitors are convinced that there are demons pursuing
this artist. His art is presented as a high form of black magic,
a way of vanquishing the forces of evil in our times. The wall
labels make a point of reminding visitors of Bacon's gambling,
his tough-guy lovers, his whiskey-soaked nights in Soho. And
near the end of the show the curators leave biography behind and
plunge straight into hagiography, devoting an entire gallery to
photographs and other assorted talismans that Bacon kept around
his studio. Here, along with movie stills, newspaper clippings,
and photo-booth self-portraits, we are shown the photographs of
friends and lovers on which Bacon based many of his paintings.
This dimly lit gallery, one wall of which is plastered with a
photomural of Bacon's famously messy Reece Mews studio, is the
show's sanctum sanctorum, the place where visitors can peer at
all the rumpled mementoes and imagine that they are witnessing
the black magic taking place. After galleries full of lifeless
paintings, the curators have had the bright idea of introducing
some bits and pieces of the artist's life - which turns out to
consist of a heap of photographic images. This is what
museumgoing is coming to in the age of reality TV.
We
live in a world where the actual matter of art - the artisanal
concerns, the structural assumptions - are all too often seen as
reactionary and academic, something for pedants and
conservatives to bother about. Why go the Giacometti route? Why
bother to construct a face in detail, developing expressive
distortions that are based on a painstaking study, hour by hour,
day by day, of an actual person? Why go to all that trouble when
you can simply take a photograph and fancy it up with some
distortions that amount to little more than third-hand Picasso?
It's not just that it is difficult - actually, it is nearly
impossible - to do what Giacometti did. The resistance goes even
deeper. There is a revulsion here against the sincerity of
painting--an unwillingness to see that what is truly disturbing
or challenging in painting comes out of that sincerity.
Bacon, with his prefab contortions, is the real academic - a
pasticheur and parodist of avant-garde attitudes. Like all
modern poseurs, he believes that biography is the ultimate trump
card, that the art is more or less a reflection of the life, and
in this he is again on the frontlines of a wrongheaded tradition
- the tradition that values the artist above the art. In the
literature about Bacon, too much is made of the terrible story
of the opening of his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971,
on the eve of which Dyer died of an overdose of drugs and
alcohol. It is perfectly understandable that this terrifying
event became the subject of some of Bacon's compositions. The
paintings, however, are so bloodless that all they can possibly
do is send you back to the story itself. There is nothing in the
paintings themselves to hold you there. In Bacon's work, content
trumps form every time. The emotion is as formulaic and
pre-digested as in any Victorian picture of a dying child.
As the subject of a big retrospective, Bacon's life certainly
has a narrative power. And without anything by Giacometti or
Picasso to remind us of the poetic power that can be discovered
in the anti-naturalistic figure, Bacon's brutalist paintings are
going to strike many observers as the only representational
alternative available to an artist in our terrible times. The
lack of delicacy or sensitivity - the lack of imagination in the
handling of colour or line--becomes not the artist's weakness
but ours, a reflection of the troubles of the age. Bacon's work
is a blunt instrument, and museumgoers who begin to feel
threatened or manipulated may well conclude that this is what
Bacon intended. They may not be wrong. The Bacon retrospective
reminds me of the Bruce Nauman show that toured the country a
decade ago. Bacon is another specialist in sensory deprivation.
There is a Stockholm Syndrome quality about these exhibitions.
They give us so little, and what we are meant to discover is
that we could not possibly be satisfied with anything more.
To the writer Michael Peppiatt, who over the years has produced
a substantial literature devoted to Bacon, the artist observed
near the beginning of their acquaintance, "You remember
that steak we ate just now? Well, that's how it is. We live off
one another. The shadow of dead meat is cast as soon as we are
born. I can never look at a chop without thinking of death -
that probably sounds very pompous." Well, yes it does; but
then Bacon's modus operandi always involved being simultaneously
pompous and profane. Early in the retrospective there is a
painting in which a figure is flanked by beef carcasses. And in
1962 Vogue ran a photograph of a bare-chested Francis
Bacon posed in front of two carcasses. By the end of the show,
museumgoers may feel as if they are in a slaughterhouse, with
each painting presented like a carcass hanging on a hook. The
Bacon retrospective is the most fashionable slaughterhouse in
the world. What we are witnessing is a nihilist blood sport, the
hideous spectacle of an artist in the process of eviscerating
the art of painting.
Jed Perl is the art critic at The New
Republic.
Francis Bacon: A Centenary
Retrospective
The original British bad boy of art takes over
the Met.
By Howard Halle, Time Out, New York, June 4 – 10, 2009

Head VI, 1949, Francis Bacon
There are
many adjectives—dark, brutal, homoerotic—one could
use to describe the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909–1992),
though popular wouldn’t seem to be among them. His
work can be hard to take, and sometimes, given the histrionic
tenor of his canvases, hard to take seriously. Yet on a recent
Friday, visitors could be seen thronging through this survey
(edited from the one that originated at London’s Tate Gallery)
marking the 100th anniversary of the English-Irish artist’s
birth. From all appearances, people were raptly taking in Bacon’s
iconographic panoply of screaming popes, slabs of beef and male
nudes grappling in heated contortions of love, hate and personal
destruction. Perhaps years of exposure to Jason and Freddy
Krueger have conditioned viewers to accept Bacon as some sort of
high-toned master of horror whose greatest monster was his own
bad self.
Certainly
Bacon’s backstory fits the mould of the classic reprobate: The
second of five children born to a wealthy British family in
Dublin, Bacon, who was gay, was kicked out of the house at age
17 after his father discovered him wearing his mother’s
clothes. He spent the 1920s and ’30s idling around London,
Paris and Munich, supporting himself as a gentleman’s
gentleman (under the name Francis Lightfoot) before finding some
success as an interior designer. But his destiny lay in
painting; indeed, though his career really didn’t take off
until after the war, he first exhibited in 1933. One of his
compositions of the time was purchased by an important collector
and was even featured in the book Art Now by the
influential British critic Herbert Read. Still, Bacon was
dissatisfied by the critical reception to his works and wound up
destroying many of them. He produced little during the war
years, spending most of his time in pubs and betting parlous. He
was famous for his drinking, and was a founding member of the
Colony Room, a private bar for artists in London’s Soho
district.
Bacon wasn’t
wise when it came to matters of the heart, either. Both of the
major loves of his life, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, were drug
addicts prone to violence, whether physical or emotional.
Although their relationship had ended, Dyer accompanied Bacon to
Paris in 1971 for the painter’s triumphant survey at the Grand
Palais; the former wound up ODing in the bathroom of their hotel
on the eve of Bacon’s opening. Talk about drama queens.
Like his
life then, Bacon’s canvases are kind of a mess, an amalgam of
abstraction and figuration, postwar angst and recondite
old-master references. Self-taught, Bacon betrayed little
interest in the conventions of avant-garde art at the time.
Propelled by an autodidact’s restless curiosity, he borrowed
freely from a wide range of source material, including
photography and cinema. He mixed together references to
Velázquez, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and Eadweard
Muybridge’s stop-motion studies, a strange thing to do in the
late 1940s, though quite normal now. It’s been argued that
Bacon’s import lies in being the first openly queer artist,
but it’s also the case that he was one of the first to
foreground the photograph as a subject matter for painting.
Bacon drew the parallel between the photographic blur and the
painterly stroke well before Gerhard Richter did the same,
though his penchant for portentousness also gave license to the
bombast of contemporary artists like Damien Hirst.
The output
that first gained him notoriety in the aftermath of the war has
been described as “religious painting for atheists,” and
there’s undoubtedly some truth to this, given the surfeit of
shrieking pontiffs—notably Head VI (1949), Study
After Velázquez (1950) and Study After Velázquez’s
Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)—and allusions to
crucifixion. Taken together, these canvases create a metaphor
for Europe’s experience of the conflict as a collective
Passion that disproved the existence of God. But these works
also suggest that Bacon, as frank as he was about his
homosexuality, may have found his sexual orientation a cross to
bear.
In any
case, by the late 1960s, Bacon increasingly turned to portraying
himself and his circle of friends and lovers. Expanses of bright
colour became a hallmark of his work, and if these vivid hues
signal the return of the decorator’s eye, Bacon’s subjects
could still be indecorous, albeit heartfelt. Triptych,
May–June 1973 depicts Dyer’s ignoble death on the
toilet, flanked by walls painted vermilion rich enough for a
monarch’s robes. Individually, paintings like this are hard to
beat, but seen en masse, they are somewhat oppressive. In art as
at breakfast, a little Bacon goes a long way.
Jewish Art
With (Francis) Bacon Drippings
by Eric Herschthal, The Jewish Week,
New York, Wednesday, June 3, 2009
When
the influence of Francis Bacon is talked about today, it’s
usually in relation to the generation of painters immediately
following his, the so-called Young British Artists who are now
middle-aged: Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Cecily Brown. But what
seems to be overlooked, particularly in the blockbuster Bacon
centenary retrospective that just opened at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, is his influence on his peers. It’s not the
better-known ones, like Lucien Freud and David Hockney, who go
without mention, but the specifically Jewish British artists
whose art owes a huge debt to him.
Leon Kossoff,
Frank Auerbach and, most importantly, the deeply committed Jew
R.B. Kitaj: all of these made up the School of London artists
that dominated British art from the 1950s on. All of them count
Bacon as their patron saint. At a time when abstraction reigned
supreme, they fought for the centrality of the human figure.
They merged painterly techniques favoued by the Abstract
Expressionists — the horizontal colour panes of Rothko, the
scraped impasto of de Kooning — with a return to art’s
traditional focus on telling human stories.
Bacon was, as he told his biographer David Sylvester, walking
“a tightrope between what is called figurative painting and
abstraction ... an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto
the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.” It
must have worked. In the past 20 years each of the
aforementioned School of London artists have received canonical
treatment with solo shows at The Met, MoMA, The Tate in London
and prominent museums elsewhere.
In fact, it was R.B. Kitaj who gave the school its name. In
1976, Kitaj wrote the introductory essay for the catalogue of a
group exhibition he organized called The Human Clay,
where he dubbed the group “the School of London.” He cited
Bacon, Hockney, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff and himself as its
chief practitioners. While Bacon and Freud were already well
established, the show and Kitaj’s shrewd marketing of it
helped secure the reputations of the others. Perhaps more
importantly, it put an army of artists behind the lone
figurative giant — Bacon — at a time when his grotesque,
garish images of screaming popes and rabid dogs stood out as
much for their visceral power as for their sheer uniqueness.
Of course, it was more than painting human figures alone that
bound Bacon, who died in 1992, to Kitaj. Both artists saw
themselves as social outcasts — Bacon as an openly gay man
when homosexuality was a crime in England, and Kitaj as an
American-born Jew living in London. Bacon was one of the first
artists to publicly display homoerotic images in England, as he
did with the muscular entangled forms that make up Untitled
(Two Figures in the Grass)” (1952), also on view at the
new exhibit.
For his part, Kitaj used his Jewishness as a symbol for the
quintessential role of the artist in society — a perpetual
pariah. In the First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), a book
he published with illustrations, he stated this parallel
explicitly: “[M]y Diasporist painting ... owes its greatest
debt to the terms and passions of my own life and growing sense
of myself as a Diasporist Jew,” he wrote. David Myers, a
professor of Jewish history at UCLA who advised Kitaj on his Second
Diasporist Manifesto (2007) and recently organized an
exhibition on Kitaj in Los Angeles, added that Kitaj saw his “Jewishness
as a license for iconoclastic innovation.”
Though Bacon, born in 1909, was 13 years older than Kitaj and
was closer both in time and space to the Second World War, both
artists were urgently concerned with the fate of man in the
postwar era. At the Met, there is hardly an image of Bacon’s
that is not dripping in dark, if not black, hues. With his focus
on teeth, skulls, bloodied carcasses and distorted or erased
human faces, it is almost impossible to walk away not feeling a
sense of dread.
One of Bacon’s prominent early works, Painting (1946),
is modelled on the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,
whose half sawed-off head speaks from a podium that is flanked
by fleshy red rib cages. His words betray the slaughterhouse to
come, Bacon seems to say. A common motif in Bacon’s work, the
space-frame — a rectangular box that encases figures like the haunting
Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
— was also derived from the Nazi era. They were meant to mimic
the bullet-proof boxes used for war criminals at the Nuremburg
trials.
The Holocaust had a heavy claim on Kitaj’s work too, though it
did not appear until at least 20 years after Bacon’s. Kitaj
moved to England in the late 1950s to study at the Ruskin School
of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, on a G.I. Bill scholarship.
At the time, he was married to a non-Jewish artist named Elsi
Roessler, who committed suicide in 1963 (the same fate that met
Bacon’s lover George Dyer). But soon after Roessler’s death,
Kitaj met Sandra Fisher, a Jewish artist who critics and
associates say had a profound influence on his turn towards
Jewish history.
“It was something that she brought out in him,” said Tracy
Bartley, Kitaj’s studio assistant in Los Angeles, where he
lived from 1997 until his death a decade later. Bartley said it
was after meeting Sandra, whom he married in 1983, that Kitaj
became “obsessed with this idea of Jewish art ... and why
there was no great Jewish artist.” It was Kitaj’s aim,
Bartley said, to become one.
Kitaj’s first major Jewish-related work was If Not, Not
(1976), which revamped Giorgione’s Tempesta for modern
times. The gates of Auschwitz, most tellingly, hover ominously
in the background. But his works ventured well beyond Jewish
history and into the realm of ideas. He was a careful student of
Martin Buber, whose philosophical tract “I and Thou” lent
the title to a Kitaj painting of a boy studying with an aging
man. Buber’s Eclipse of God gave the theme and title
to another late work, too.
In that painting, on view at The Jewish Museum, Kitaj inverts a
Renaissance painting by Paolo Uccello that showed Christians
breaking into a Jewish home whose owners allegedly bribed
churchgoers for a Eucharist wafer and wine. In its time, viewers
understood the Jews in the painting to be villains who intended
to burn the bread and drink the transubstantiated wine. In Kitaj’s
modern version, the roles are reversed, with the Christian
figures rendered as an angry mob, and a Jewish man, his wife,
and two children standing frightened behind the door. Kitaj also
paints a figure whose back is turned to the viewer, with the
name “God” written on his neck, that shows the artist’s
use of an idea taken from Buber’s text: that God does not show
his face in times of crisis.
Religious thought connects Kitaj to Bacon as much as it divides
them, though. Bacon’s postwar view was essentially Beckettian:
an existentialist who thought religion was a hoax, life had no
inherent meaning and everyone must therefore invent one for
himself. As Bacon liked to quip to critics that said his
bleakness bordered on suicidal despair: “I’m an optimist
about nothing.”
That was not the case for Kitaj. Though he was secular, his
theological beliefs took on the air of kabbalistic mysticism,
and he held firm to the Buber-inspired idea that God was the
ultimate Unknowable. Where Bacon saw the Second World War as
proof of God’s nonexistence, Kitaj saw it as proof of only his
absence. As the kabbalists taught, God’s infinitude demanded
that he retreat from this world in order to make room for human
life.
Many critics point out the shared fascination with the Western
canon — both its art and literature — as key parallels. As
The New Republic critic Jed Perl, who knew Kitaj personally and
reviews the Bacon retrospective in the current issue, said: “[Kitaj]
was a man who loved the past and the richness of human
experience and achievement.” His paintings often referenced
quotes by Pound, Eliot, Goethe and Gombrich, while his imagery
borrowed from masters of both the Impressionist and Renaissance
periods.
But it may also be the case that their embrace of the Western
canon stemmed from wholly different places. To be sure, both
were drawn to representational painting in large part because
they loathed abstract art and its inability to evoke tangible
human life. But Bacon’s aim in re-rendering a Velaszquez pope
or the head of William Blake was ultimately to subvert their
original meanings. The church sowed hate, Bacon suggests in his
Innocent X painting; the Sublime existed only in human reality,
if it even existed at all, could be the message in Bacon’s
death mask painting of Blake’s head.
Kitaj wanted, on the one hand, to reclaim the West’s former
glory. Its achievements should not be blamed for its crimes, its
luminaries not for its lunacy. The art historian James Aulich
argues in Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj (2000)
that the acute sense of loss felt by secular Jewish
intellectuals in the wake of the Holocaust may have intensified
their search for the West’s better past. “For many, their
biographies speak for an intimate knowledge of the collapse of
tradition to which they consciously or unconsciously,
persistently and obsessively, refer,” he wrote.
If this psychological reading of Kitaj is projected back onto
Bacon, it could be argued that, with his deep ancestral ties to
Christian Europe, he wanted nothing more than to escape it. He
did so not by running away from its traditions, but by
attacking, subverting and calling out its lies. Kitaj, the
perennial Jewish outsider on the other hand, wanted nothing more
than to be let in. With Bacon now having his retrospective at
The Met, and Kitaj having his there back in 1995, it seems safe
to say that both are now honoured members, for better or worse.
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is on display at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212)
535-7710. Through Aug. 16.
Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artopia
– John Perreault’s art diary, Arts Journal, May 31, 2009
Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946
Bacon
Fat
When
it comes to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), less is more. The current
Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan, on view
through Aug. 16, is ample proof. One picture at a time can be
quite effective, but seeing any Bacon that once might have taken
your fancy (perhaps out of some deep-seated perversity) along
with others of the same or far too similar ilk destroys any
credence he might once have had as a major artist.
A
deep appreciation of Bacon's fat is greatly helped if you are
13. That was probably when I myself saw a reproduction of his
famous Painting, 1946, owned by the Museum of Modern Art:
the side of beef, the open umbrella, the mouth full of teeth,
the microphones. And later I saw, in other paintings, nude men
doing unmentionable and possibly erotic things to each other.
Were the figures taken from Muybridge's blatant studies of
scantily clad male wrestlers? Of course. That made them even
more naughty. Back then there was nothing worse than copying
from photographs. Hmm. No, there was something worse: copying
other artists. Bacon's major inspiration was midcareer Picasso,
all bloated body parts and sometimes screaming mouths. And Bacon
did copy Velázquez.
Bacon's
screaming Velázquez popes? Anyone growing up gay in the '50s had good reason to
hate the church, even if one had not been molested by the parish
priest. Surprisingly, Bacon tried to deny that his work was in
any way autobiographical. He denied personal expression. He
denied story-telling. In art, loud and frequent denials are
sometimes proof. During his checkered life, our artist of the
moment - now brought back from the dead - stopped one biography
from being published; but he was not above exploiting notoriety
for career's sake. Bacon tried to have it both ways.
The
love of his life, the chunky George Dyer, was a thief, and Bacon
loved to say that he first met him when he caught him robbing
his apartment. He painted Dyer over and over, for, you see, the
artist had discovered early on that the best insurance against
blackmail was to be truthful to all about his personal life. Or
personal lives.
Nevertheless,
in 1977 Bacon stopped the publication of what was to be Michael
Peppiatt's Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, finally
published in 1996. "As with several other projects to
which Bacon initially lent his support," writes Peppiatt,
"he drew back at the last moment, fearful - for all his
recklessness - of revealing 'too much' about his life." It
is my main source here.
Minus
all the tedious art-world details and descriptions of the art,
the book could be made into a movie, a horror movie.
Bacon: Study After Velázquez, 1953
Where's the Bacon?
If
only I could like the paintings. If only I could be 13 again.
And anguished. But contrary to the rule in most fiction, I
wasn't anguished about my sexuality. Even I knew that the
self-punishing homosexual was a self-hating, self-indulgent,
literary invention by Proust, Gide, and yes, even Genet. Was I
the only one who had read Walt Whitman? I was anguished because,
down on the farm, I could not get any. I wanted love. I wanted
action. Not torture and slabs of meat.
If
Bacon's paintings are really about anguish in general and not
about homo-anguish in particular, then I can live with them.
Otherwise, they stand to confirm a demeaning text: gay men are
not men, they are guilt personified.
So
do we delight in the fact that Bacon let it slip that he liked
to wear women's underwear? That he had a collection of twelve
Rhino whips? Yes, we do. And we sort of wish these facts were on
the Met's august walls. Instead, one text actually suggests that
the paintings, done by an avowed atheist, are what the world
looks like without God. Viewers stand in front of this
so-scholarly assertion looking puzzled.
It
would be more accurate to say that the paintings are what the
world looks like without art criticism. Bacon let it be known
that he destroyed a lot of his own paintings, apparently as part
of his down-to-the-line studio practice. If nothing else, this
exhibitions proves he did not destroy enough.
BLT
(Blatant Lascivious Teasing)
But
I want more details on those wall texts. I want to know if Bacon
liked wearing bras or panties or both? How British. And in terms
of what was once called the English Vice, I want to know who was
handling those whips, exactly what was being done with them, and
how often. That would be more interesting than the proclamation
of Bacon's atheism. After all, technically speaking, Buddhist
too are atheists.
But
please, if a new wall text goes up detailing Bacon's sexual fun
and games, I would urge that it be spelled out that, at least in
Great Britain, more heterosexual men wear bras and panties and
use whips than gay men do.
Why
was Bacon so over the top? Surely, if you are treated like a
criminal, you will act like one. Bacon operated largely during a
time when homosex could result in life imprisonment even if you
were already in prison. (And before that, the gallows.) If you
have everything to lose, than what the hell? This may explain
some of Bacon's carryings on: gambling, rent sex, lipstick and
dyed hair, and sex with his uncle - in Berlin, where said uncle
was supposed to make a man of him. This was set up by Papa
Bacon, soldier, horse-breeder and man's man.
Papa
Bacon simply could not understand why Baby Bacon broke out in a
horrendous, possibly life-threatening asthma attack every time a
dog came near or when he was forced to visit his father's
much-cherished stables.
The
bad thing about Bacon's paintings is that they may be used to
affirm the crazy notion that all gay men are heavy drinkers,
high-stake gamblers, sadomasochists, high-society hanger-ons,
interior decorators (which is how our Bacon began, along with
designing modernist tubular furniture and rugs), homebreakers,
walkers, and self-hating exploiters of the working-class hunks
and handsome second-storeymen who are wandering around
everywhere looking for someone rich to buy them a few beers.
I
assure you, we are not. Some of us are even married - to other
men, at long last, much to the relief of the guardians of house
and home and much to the profit of the matrimony industry.
Although
yours truly in his youth also had a second-storeyman as a lover
(this is true), it was only briefly. Bacon kept George on for
years, declaring him the most handsome man he had ever met and
made him pose for the photos that became the paintings now so
celebrated for their "anguish." Poor George. Judging
by the paintings, he earned his keep, then died of an overdose.
Tellingly, the run of portraits that proliferated after George
was out of the picture are simply not as good: horror for hire,
bread-and-butter bunk
But
more about Bacon's childhood, if you can stand it. In some
sense, his childhood lasted all of his life.
The
Nanny
Not
only did Papa Bacon throw Baby Bacon out of the Bacon Irish
Manor House when he was a mere teen, Mama Bacon didn't like him
much either, telling him he was so ugly no one would ever like
him. He was indeed a pie-face. Photographs do not lie. Possibly
in revenge, he later "adopted" his childhood nanny,
who had the thrillingly picaresque name of Jessie Lightfoot. She
stayed on board until her death.
When
times were hard, Nanny Lightfoot became Nanny Lightfingers
and utilized her shoplifting skills to put food on the
table. She would also vet the propositions Bacon received from
ads offering his services as a "gentlemen's
companion," which means exactly what you think. However,
she was an avid advocate of capital punishment and "longed
for the day when the gibbet would be re-erected at Marble Arch,
with the Duchess of Windsor as the first public enemy to be
hanged, drawn and quartered there."
Hanged,
drawn and quartered? Sounds like something you might see in a
Bacon painting.
Here
Comes the Judge
Artists
are sometimes judged by their influence on other artists.
Unfortunately, we would be hard put to come up with any painter
influenced by Bacon -- except perhaps his friend, the older and
very dreary Graham Sutherland. That artist's signature
thorn-forms were clearly a reference to you-know-whose crown of
thorns, but only under Bacon's influence did Sutherland attempt
a crucifixion or two.
Brit
critic David Sylvester's book of edited interviews (1975)
reveals how dumb Bacon actually was, or at least pretended to
be. He was certainly smarmy. And if he was trying to put himself
across as an Abstract Expressionist who hated abstraction, or as
a Surrealist, he failed. Sir Roland Penrose, when he was only
Roland Penrose, rejected Bacon for his 1936 International Survey
of Surrealism for being "insufficiently surreal."
You
can catch two segments of the actual interviews on YouTube,
notable now for the leading questions continually proffered by
Mr. Sylvester. With a friend like that - artists beware of
critics with microphones - you don't need an enemy.
Married
a Queer From Outer Space
Desperate
for something to watch, I recently turned to TCM on Demand and
found, of all things, I Married a Monster From Outer Space,
Gene Fowler Jr.'s crazed 1958 exercise in paranoia, with art
direction by Henry Bumstead and Hal Pereira. I could not believe
my eyes
The
movie's about a takeover of small-town husbands - one by one -
by an alien all-male race that needs to find females to
reproduce. It is really about gay men taking over the world. The
"husbands" sulk and brood, bond with each other, and
disappear in the middle of the night to go on long walks. But
the "real" men - breeders who have sired children and
who own rifles and hunting dogs - get them in the end.
Which face is the artwork?
[Scroll
to end for answer.]
In
spite of the socially and family-induced self-loathing, his
acting out and acting up, and his profligate ways, Bacon has a
life story and psychology (if you dare call it that) that are
vastly more interesting and more entertaining than his ghoulish
illustrations now on view at the Metropolitan. Although torture
never goes out of fashion - thanks to Cheney and Bush - Bacon's
dated specimens of beef, beefcake, and blood are at best
paint-smeared, writhing footnotes to The Age of Anxiety. He
would have loved waterboarding but have used it as titillation,
not condemnation, or as just another metaphor.
Wouldn't we rather see a Leon Golub show at the Met?
Answer to photo quiz:
Left: Tom Tryon with alien face, I Married a Monster From
Outer Space, art direction by Henry Bumstead and
Hal Pereira.
Right: Francis Bacon: Study for a Self-Portrait 1969.
El estridente mundo de Francis Bacon
Llegó
al Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York la retrospectiva de uno de
los artistas más provocadores del siglo XX.
Por:
Álvaro Corzo / Nueva York, El Espectador (Colombia) 30 Mayo
2009

La
exhibición de 130 de las obras de Bacon estará hasta el 16 de
agosto en Nueva York. Foto:
Álvaro Corzo
Decenas
de lienzos regados por el piso, paredes convertidas en enormes
paletas de color, botellas de champaña desportilladas por cada
rincón del oscuro recinto, todo un panteón de pinceles estériles
y pinturas disecadas por el paso del tiempo. Así era el estudio
del maestro. Con miles de fotos, recortes de revistas y todo
tipo de ornamentaciones gráficas estaba tapizado el piso de
madera de su pequeña guarida. Allí la mirada atenta de un
enorme espejo le servía como única e irreemplazable compañía,
junto a la silla, donde su amante de turno, tomaría simbólicamente
el asiento para ser deformado por sus exuberantes y grotescos
trazos.
Bacon
vivió toda su adultez artística en el número siete de la
calle Cromway de South Kensington, en Londres, un microcosmos
perverso donde trabajaba y vivía. Un catre, una cocina y un baño
eran su única interfase con la realidad, en medio de una
cotidianidad que se partía escuetamente en dos. La pintura y la
bohemia; marca indisoluble de su enigmática obra. La cual, para
el agrado de muchos y después de una espera de casi 20 años,
se ha trasladado desde el Viejo Continente para refugiarse
durante todo el verano en las paredes de la sala honorífica del
Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York.
Aquí,
en los anaqueles que replican el siniestro y particular lugar
donde trabajó Bacon por más de 40 años, se pueden encontrar
las reproducciones del erótico diccionario visual de Eadweard
Muybridge, piedra angular de su obra. La devoción por los
rostros deformados y desenfocados no eran tan sólo una muestra
del estado catártico y violento en el que vivía el pintor, —quien
comenzó su carrera como diseñador de interiores en Berlín—,
sino toda una respuesta semántica al encuentro con el dinamismo
de nuestra naturaleza; herencia de los estudios voyeristas del
movimiento humano y animal que estremecieron al mundo del arte
en 1885.
Bacon,
quien dedicaba metódicamente la mitad de su día al casino y a
la bebida, siempre utilizó el mismo enfoque para sus retratos,
no importaba si eran viejos amigos, animales, clérigos, hombres
de negocios o sus propios amantes. El díscolo artista no
soportaba trabajar con modelos, según él, no podía pintar con
nadie a su alrededor, pues se robaban toda su energía creadora.
Por lo tanto, utilizaba sus fotografías como bocetos, dejando
en su memoria y en el destello del papel gelatinoso el curso de
su obra.
En
una de las solapas de los tantos libros que se trajeron para la
exhibición se puede leer en su desgalamida imprenta azul, que
lo fascinante de su oficio era que sabía dónde comenzaba, pero
nunca sabía de su destino final. “Los trazos cobran vida
sobre el lienzo, uno solo se convierte en instrumento de sus
propios instintos”. Lo que no sabía Bacon es que diecisiete
años después de su muerte y gracias a John Edwards, su último
amante y heredero, las puertas de ese mundo hermético, sombrío
y calado de retórica existencialista en el que vivía, iban a
darse a conocer, develando las musas de tan retorcidas y
codiciadas piezas de arte.
“No
creo en nada, sólo en el momento y en el ahora”, está
consignado en otros de sus amarillentos escritos en una de las
vitrinas de la exhibición que estará hasta el próximo 16 de
agosto en Nueva York. A su lado, obras de Nietzsche, Camus y
Satre rellenan las repisas de madera, pues Bacon como muchos
otros artistas de la época era un existencialista de primer
orden, profesaba que la vida no tenía ningún valor intrínseco,
que no había nada más allá de la muerte, por eso la necesidad
de perseguir todo sentido de placer en el presente. De esa
fuerte presencia del nihilismo en su vida nació, según sus
críticos, uno de los temas más icónicos y recurrentes de toda
su obra, los crucifijos.
Con
Bacon seguramente desintegrado en el frío sepulcro y por ende
sin nadie a quién refutar, cuelga en la mitad del salón de la
exhibición su Mágnum Opus o su obra maestra, la pintura que lo
dio a conocer al mundo entero, Painting (1946), el
controvertido crucifijo ensamblado a partir de los sangrientos
rieles de la cavidad torácica de una res que cuelga del cielo,
sobre la cual se posa una
oscura
y virulenta ave de rapiña que ofrece, a quien detenidamente la
observa, sangrientas dádivas de color púrpura que dejan un
murmullo de completo asombro y desconcierto.
“Lo
amas o lo detestas, es como ver pornografía, es una sensación
irreemplazable, pero a la vez moralmente perturbadora”, dice
uno de los cientos de visitantes a la exposición que abrió sus
puertas este 20 mayo. Así es, su obra tiene mucho de coito, de
carne, de sexo truculento entre amantes, de crítica al poder,
de todo lo que refutara las convenciones de una sociedad que
obligaron a este hombre a vivir en la clandestinidad, en una
época en que en Inglaterra ser homosexual merecía, cuando
menos, la cárcel. Para muchos de sus críticos toda una
sodomía artística que merece la más detenida atención,
siendo esta obra muestra de ello.
No
obstante, y debido a la fragilidad de esta pieza de dos metros
de altura por dos de ancho, Painting (1946) es la única
obra de este maestro del empirismo artístico que no ha acompañado
el recorrido de la exhibición que celebra el centenario de su
natalicio, el cual comenzó en los salones del museo Tate, en
Londres, el pasado mes de septiembre, seguido por el Museo del
Prado, en Madrid.
Pero
si esta obra abre un apetito insospechado por una retórica
oscura, de trazos fuertes y grumosos, sobre gigantescos lienzos,
los 130 trabajos que la acompañan —entre éstos 65 pinturas—,
serán para quien goce de esta exhibición toda una cena a
manteles.
Las
series de 1950, inspiradas en la obra de Velásquez sobre el
papa Inocencio X, son otras de sus más ricas muestras, en la
cual la figura del Pontífice y su aura de poder son
magistralmente desmistificadas por el trazo del artista. “Son
repelentes, feas, sacrílegas y hasta mal pintadas, pero no
puedo dejar de mirarlas”, me dice entre risas Lois Bourain,
profesor universitario que vino expresamente desde Washington
para la tan esperada exhibición.
También
están presentes sus famosos trípticos, las series de tres
piezas expuestas como una sola, formato insignia de toda su
carrera, donde Bacon indagó los sujetos de su interés artístico.
El contacto del cuerpo masculino, la supernaturalidad de la boca
humana y las relaciones de poder, las cuales logró transformar
como ningún otro ha podido, en bizarras y llamativas
composiciones de colores poco cálidos. La serie Triytych
(1976) fue vendida en 2008 por U$86,6 millones en la casa de
subasta Sotheby's al multimillonario ruso Roman Abramovich.
No
en vano hoy Bacon, quien sostuvo una extraña relación de
atracción física por su propio padre, es considerado junto con
Picasso, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Dalí y Buñuel como uno de los
grandes artistas del siglo XX. Sin duda esta retrospectiva a la
obra y vida del gran pintor figurativo del siglo XX es todo un
privilegio para el que la pueda ver. “La muerte siempre está
presente, cada vez que me miro al espejo la veo trabajar
intensamente”: Francis Bacon.
‘Painting’,
un accidente
La
ambigüedad y la presencia del cuerpo como un objeto que
mutilado regresa a la animalidad son algunos de los elementos
que han convertido a Bacon en un referente de la pintura del
siglo XX. En una entrevista dijo lo siguiente sobre su obra
maestra Painting: “Ella llegó a mí como un accidente. Yo
estaba pensando en hacer un pájaro ardiendo en un campo y esto
debe haber estado vinculado en alguna manera con las formas que
había representado antes. Pero de repente la línea que dibujé
me sugirió algo completamente diferente y surgió esta pintura.
No tuve ninguna intención de hacer este cuadro, nunca pensé en
él en ninguna manera, fue como si un accidente se montara en
otro y luego en otro”.
The
'degenerate' road to totalitarianism
The
wonder and appeal of art is its mutability
Gary
Clement, National Post, Thursday, May 14, 2009

Study for
Self-Portrait
1952 Francis Bacon
On
July 19, 1937, a singular, notorious art show made its premiere
in Munich. Entitled the Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art
exhibit, it featured over 650 drawings, paintings, sculptures,
prints and books collected by the Nazis from German artists and
museums that had been confiscated on the grounds that the works,
and by extension the artists that created them, represented
un-German - or worse, Jewish - forms of expression and ideology.
The
show featured such well known degenerates as Paul Klee, Max
Ernst, Max Beckman and Marc Chagall, to name but a few. The
works themselves were derided for being insulting to German
women and farmers, revealing the Jewish racial soul and just
generally presenting the view of sick minds. The exhibit has
since become a major reference point for anyone requiring a
handy example of institutional intolerance at its most absurd
... and most dangerous.
Barbara
Kay argues that the work of artists like Francis Bacon finds its
"aesthetic inspiration in humiliation, filth, disease,
deformity and sadism." She further states that this
"so-called art is degenerate" and that "the
so-called cultural elites' fascination with it [is]
indecent." Ms. Kay, naturally, has every right to dislike
whatever she wishes - far be it from me to dictate taste. I do
believe, however, that the ice starts getting pretty thin when
one begins labelling art one doesn't approve of as
"degenerate."
The
wonder and appeal of art - the reason for its durability as a
form of human expression - is its mutability; its ability to
satisfy an enormous amount of demands and to be reinvented by
each new generation of artists. We turn to art for pleasure, for
intellectual challenge, for stories, for mystery, for
provocation. Sometimes we even get it all in a single piece of
work.
There
are those who prefer to look at art that will be pleasing to the
eye and nothing more and, hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
There are of course others who want to see work that will, to
borrow a phrase form my parents, grab us by the kishkas - in
other words, deeply affect us. I'm talking about the kind of
work that will inspire thought, debate, emotional outbursts and,
heck, maybe even outrage. Work like Francis Bacon's, for
example.
Historically,
when institutions, governments - the authorities in general -
have tried to mandate what we should and shouldn't be looking at
in the way of paintings, books, theatre, etc., based on, for
example, moral grounds, the skid toward totalitarianism is
pretty easy to discern. There were not, as I recall, too many
gallery openings in Kabul under the Taliban.
Francis
Bacon has long since moved on from outraging audiences to
delighting them by the hordes. The show that Barbara Kay speaks
of was at the Prado in Madrid when I was there recently and I
can assure her that it was doing brisk business indeed. And I
don't believe I saw a single degenerate in the crowd.
-
Gary Clement is the editorial cartoonist for the National Post.
Barbara Kay,
Note to kneejerk liberal art critics:
Nazis and
homophobics don't own the word "degenerate"
The surge of
reaction, some very angry, to the column I wrote May 13 about
artist Francis Bacon and others of the "abject" or
"disgust" school of art, surprised me. I often get
feedback that disagrees with my opinion, but when I get hate mail
suggesting I should be banned from writing in newspapers and that
it is "obscene" for me to query the words of an expert
art critic (this person is known to me - a good liberal except for
his totalitarian views on those who disagree with his liberal
views), I realized I have been, sob, misunderstood.
There were
three strands of criticism that emerged from my personal mail and
the letters to the editor.
One assumed
that I thought Bacon's artwork should be banned or not shown in
public because I consider adulation of shock artists
"indecent." Well I do consider it indecent, but I
consider a lot of things in life indecent. Indecency is a choice
and I'm all about choice and free speech - unlike certain liberals
I could name.
The second
misunderstanding was that I seemed in some people's eyes to be
suggesting that Bacon was untalented. I didn't say that either. I
said his art was degenerate and reflected a degenerate mind. He's
obviously very gifted, but talent in the service of prurience is
no defence of what emerges.
Because of its
history, the real problem was the word "degenerate."
Some people saw the word and immediately assumed I was importing a
lot of historical baggage I had no intention of referencing. A
slew of writers to me personally, and in particular, Gary Clement
in today's Post, accused me of doing to Bacon what the Nazis did
to Jews in the thirties. More than a few accused me of homophobia,
simply because Bacon happens to be gay. This is illogical and
unfair. As I wrote back to one such critic, I don't care whether
Bacon and other disgust artists are gay, straight, trannies or
polygamists from Utah: It isn't them I hate, it's their work,
because their work is degenerate in its focus.
The Nazis took
the exact opposite view from mine. They assigned the word
degenerate to beauty because it came from the hands of a despised
group, and they banished it. I don't hate these artists and
I don't want their work banned. So it is both irrational and
polemically irresponsible to align me with evils I am quite as
appalled by as they are. (I can't help noting in an ironic aside
that if anyone's association with the Nazi era is suspect, you
have to wonder why Bacon had iconic pictures of Himmler and
Goebbels in his studio. Inspiration? Well, he was a sado-masochist,
so who knows?)
Finally some
critics triumphantly pointed to the popularity of Bacon's art as
an apparently knockout rhetorical blow. Gary Clement argues that
Francis Bacon's work delights the public. That is no argument
against its degeneracy. Plenty of great artists went unloved and
unseen in their creative years, so surely who is going to exhibits
to see whom is a very weak argument for its morality. The public
is notorious for flocking to exhibitions that feature shock art.
Body World, which I cited in my column, has drawn over 20 million
viewers to see its plastinated cadavers. That doesn't make it
moral or any the less a violation of human dignity. In ancient
Rome, stadiums were full of crowds watching people being torn to
pieces by wild animals. Fascination with the dark side of our
nature is no argument for its morality, which is what troubled me
the most. Why can't critics be honest and simply admit it: Hey,
it's disgusting and self-loathing, and we are attracted to it. If
you like it, go see it, but don't gussy up your impulse in moral
finery. There's nothing moral in mocking the symbols of
Christianity (we get it already, you artists don't like religion,
but how come we never see any screaming imams in cages, only
screaming popes?) going on in these paintings.
Furthermore,
to answer another criticism that misunderstood my argumentation, I
was not suggesting all art must be about sweetness and light.
There are all kinds of artistic ways to show despair without
dipping crucifixes in urine, smearing blood and feces on artefacts
and in general highlighting the loathsome aspects of material
life. The artist Andrew Wyeth, a near-contemporary to Bacon,
illuminated despair as well as any artist I know of, and did it
with respect for the dignity of his subjects.
It is fine and
good that artists should experiment with new forms and materials
and perspectives in their struggle to comprehend the world and
translate it to the canvas. It is a narcissistic indulgence to
look at skin disease manuals for inspiration and call it a moral
impulse.
He
made despair glamorous, but was Francis Bacon truly great?
Sebastian Smee, The
Boston Globe,
May 24, 2009
Study for Portrait I, 1953 Francis Bacon
NEW
YORK - Embarrassed by our former selves, we often recoil from the
art we loved as adolescents. Artists we ardently fall for in our
teens are frequently - and sometimes savagely -
"dropped" later in life as our tastes become more
sophisticated (or so we think).
In
literature, such writers as J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and
Raymond Carver routinely suffer such a fate, while in art, Edvard
Munch, Egon Schiele, and Vincent Van Gogh are perhaps the classic
cases.
Francis
Bacon, too, belongs in this category. For those who succumbed
early to an infatuation with his violent and glamorous work, as I
did, the question of whether he is really any good can be as much
a test of respect for our former selves, and the special
receptiveness of youth, as it is of Bacon himself.
Widely
regarded as a - if not the - leading figure in postwar British
art, Bacon, who died in 1992, is the subject of a major
retrospective here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over
the years, he has been received in America with am bivalence. His
first work to enter a public collection was bought by New York's
Museum of Modern Art in 1948. And the Met made Bacon the first
living artist from Britain to be accorded a solo show in 1975.
But
many leading US critics, offended, perhaps, by his disdain for
abstraction - the idiom that established American ascendancy in
art after 1940 - failed to give Bacon the lavish praise he was
accorded in Britain and France.
Gary
Tinterow, a curator at the Met, suggests another cause. In the
catalogue for Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, he
writes that Bacon's "overt homosexuality was incompatible
with the disguised Puritan and overtly macho ethos of many of his
American contemporaries . . . at least until the 1980s" when,
he says, feminism and queer studies introduced more sympathetic
attitudes.
Tinterow's
claim is as ridiculous as it looks (homosexuality was far from
unknown in American art between the 1940s and the 1980s). But it
is fair to say that Bacon's psychological complexity, his
combination of intense charm, queeny wit, and instinctive
perversity, can seem very British (although he was actually born
in Ireland) and, to some American observers, perhaps, alienating.
The
Met show, which originated at London's Tate Britain last year,
does not make an open-and-shut case for Bacon's greatness. It
includes too much early work, and too much late work. The early
paintings, from 1944 to 1962, which made such a big impression on
observers at the time, look histrionic and bloated (big canvases
with not much going on). The late ones lack tension, depending on
arbitrary mannerisms and sensation-craving effects.
But
there are two rooms filled with works of devastating force - and
that ought to be enough for anyone.
Part
of what makes these works, painted between 1962 and 1976, great is
Bacon's introduction of bright, saturated colours to his carefully
designed and fastidiously painted backgrounds.
The
early works, including the series of screaming popes that Bacon
later dismissed, quite rightly, as "very silly," tended
to set isolated figures in transparent enclosures against black or
gray backgrounds, often with vertical striations, vaguely
suggestive of veils, prison bars, or the rows of spotlights used
as ghostly extensions of architecture at Nazi rallies.
The
contrast between the near-monochrome sobriety of this early work
and the sumptuousness of the post-1962 colours is extreme. But
nowhere in the lamely dutiful introduction to the catalogue by
curators Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens is colour discussed.
Certainly
it is strange to think of this supreme painter of human agony and
despair as a connoisseur of royal purples, lush spring greens,
phallic pinks, perfumed mauves, and commercial oranges. But Bacon
was a great colourist who, like Matisse, came to understand the
impact that large areas of saturated tints could have.
In
paintings like Lying Figure (1969), Triptych - In Memory
of George Dyer (1971), and the Matisse-like nude Henrietta
Moraes (1966), Bacon set up thrilling tensions between the
rectilinear areas of flat, unmodulated colour he used for his
backgrounds; the liquid, bulging outlines of his figures, which
cast shadows like spilled blood; and the scumbled, layered
brushstrokes he used to convey flesh.
The
commentary on Bacon focuses always on the flesh. Bacon was, after
all, a connoisseur of mortality and an avid student of gruesome
medical textbooks, scenes of cinematic violence, and photographs
of abattoirs. But in his great period, all these elements are
splendidly interwoven.
A
gambler, Bacon liked to play up his reliance on chance. But his
orchestration of all the various elements in his paintings was so
carefully controlled that the operations of chance were surely
minimal. He began his creative career as a designer of modernist
rugs and furniture in the vein of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and
Eileen Gray, and it's hard not to see the carefully plotted
designs of his later canvases, especially the great triptychs, as
vestiges of this period.
The
fund of remarkable anecdotes relating to Bacon's life is almost
inexhaustible, and not entirely incidental to the impact of his
paintings. One such is told by Picasso's biographer, John
Richardson, in his memoir, The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Richardson
described seeing Bacon "ensconced in front of a mirror,
seemingly making up his face. In fact he was rehearsing those
heavily loaded brushstrokes that would give his portraits . . .
their sumptuous gyroscopic spin."
Bacon,
he continued, would "let his beard grow for a few days"
and "then cake pads with different shades of Max Factor's
pancake makeup and apply them, this way and that, across his
stubble in great swoops . . . It was as if the surface of his face
were the page of a sketchbook."
With
this in mind, get up close to one of the smaller portraits in the
show, such as the 1966 Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne or the
1967 Study for Head of George Dyer. You see the attention
Bacon lavished on his subjects' skin - the remarkable feeling for
different textures, the sense of volume and motion conveyed by
shifting speeds of brushstroke, the embrace of arbitrary colour as
a correlative not of atmospheric light, as in the Fauves, but of
the arbitrariness of life itself.
For
Bacon's portraiture was not just about degrees of physical
likeness. It was an attempt to capture a psychological, an
existential condition. The weakness of his art as he got older was
that he tended to subordinate a sense of specific presence - a
shiver, a spasm, a convulsion of hatred or ecstatic release - to
more abstract, generalized notions about the condition of being
alive.
I
have no doubt that, for Bacon, these ideas were more than just
philosophical musings; he clearly experienced them down in the
core of his being. But as he got older, he seemed unable to find
new ways to communicate their urgency.
In
the famous interviews Bacon conducted with the critic David
Sylvester (published in the book Interviews with Francis Bacon),
which have had an incalculable influence not only on artists but
on novelists, playwrights, poets, musicians, and filmmakers around
the world, he said: "You see, all art has now become
completely a game by which man distracts himself. . . . What is
fascinating now is that it's going to become much more difficult
for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any
good at all."
Regrettably,
Bacon, in his last two decades, seemed unable to find ways to
deepen the game.
Similarly,
he used the word "illustrative" as a powerful pejorative
- a quality to be avoided at all costs. A great work, he said,
must hit the "nervous system" directly rather than have
its emotion conveyed via "a long diatribe in the brain."
But
a lot of his work, with its teasing arrows and ashtrays, its
syringes and swastikas, seems coyly involved in games of
storytelling, and his drawing frequently feels flatly descriptive
- exactly like illustration.
Despite
all that, I remember well the effect Bacon's work first had on me,
as well as its impact on several friends who have gone on to
become artists. His paintings combined abject violence with a kind
of immaculate beauty in ways that teenage boys are probably
predestined to find alluring. I may be fussier in my mind about
what succeeds and what doesn't now, but I remain in awe of that
early union of Bacon's imagery and my own teenage hunger for
maximum impact.
This
show is an important retrospective by an artist who could seize
you by the throat as almost no other 20th-century artist could.
But it fails to settle the case of his greatness.
If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would
Shriek
Roberta
Smith, The New York Times,
May 21, 2009

Francis
Bacon: a Centenary Retrospective The
exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features a triptych
inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem Sweeney Agonistes. The show
originated at the Tate Britain last fall.
Francis
Bacon is an artist for our time. You may love or hate his work,
which is still vigorously polarizing after all these years. But
more than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World
War II, his work tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of
the moment.
For
nearly 50 years, until his death in 1992 at 82, Bacon worked the
fault lines dividing abstraction and representation and sometimes
photography, where many contemporary painters from subsequent
generations have staked claims of one kind or another.
His
contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his
flanks of beef and crime-scene gore, and his wrestling lovers
bring to mind any number of video-melodramatists, most quickly
Bill Viola, reflecting a taste for hokey humanism, spectacle and
sensationalism that often seems pervasive today. His emphasis on
loaded narrative over form, which can make his art seem formulaic
and repetitive, is now nearly epidemic.
The
stately if cursory survey of Bacon’s paintings that opened
Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests a more
lasting pertinence: Bacon’s depiction of the love that until a
few decades ago dared not say its name, much less demand the right
to marry. Bacon convincingly painted men having sex and sometimes
making love. Whether this makes him a great painter, it certainly
secures him a place in the history of both painting and art. He
emphatically turned the male gaze toward males.
Bacon
did for men in lust or in love what his hero Picasso had done for
men and women in the same spot — or at least for Picasso and
women. He turned sex and genuine passion into a pictorial event,
using paint on canvas with finesse and no small sense of drama and
without getting clinical. He operated, like Picasso, under cover
of modernism.
Picasso
often diagrammed an itinerary of heterosexual engagement by
mapping the female orifices and curves in a flattened Cubo-Surrealist
style. Bacon specialized in blur and atmosphere; he captured the
tumult of homosexual sex in motion by borrowing from photographs,
film stills or images of other art, conveying a sense of
athleticism and sweat, violence and tenderness, furtiveness and
shame. Homosexual sex was a criminal act in Britain, where he
lived most of his life, well into the 1960s.
The
show, which originated at the Tate Britain last fall, has been
slightly reconstituted and installed at the Met by Gary Tinterow,
the curator in charge of 19th-century modern and contemporary art.
It is freshest where it delves into Bacon’s use of photographs,
not only those clipped from magazines and books but also images he
had taken of friends and lovers. He often blew up images and used
their cut-out forms as templates. (You can see this especially
with George Dyer, his handsome, distinctively profiled companion,
whom he painted often in the 1960s and ’70s.)
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
begins in full cry. First come the screeching fiends of Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the triptych
with which Bacon announced himself to the London art scene in
1944. Against bright orange grounds that would become something of
a signature, gape-mouthed furies — part human, part monster, and
one per canvas — foretell postwar deprivation, rage and
existential doubt. The dogs of war are not going to be leashed
anytime soon; the world itself is on the cross.
These
overwrought creatures work better in movies, like Alien.
Their screams continue in the next gallery, where the open,
dentally precise mouths gradually migrate to human heads, mostly
from 1949, and the first of Bacon’s famous, often glib screaming
popes, after Velázquez, arrives. The Museum of Modern Art’s Painting
from 1946 is also here, encapsulating much of the Bacon
repertory: matching slabs of meat that might be said to couple, a
seated male, a half-hidden screaming face and the luxurious
surface and colour. Even so, his mastery was more than a decade
away.
Only
in the third gallery does this show dial back the hysteria and
risk real emotion, in particular the tenderness passing between
two men in Untitled (Two Figures in the Grass), from
around 1952. Pale, soft-fleshed and naked, his back to us, one
sits with his legs tucked beneath him, bowing his head over the
other, who apparently lies in the grass, his presence indicated
mostly as a pair of bent knees that are, ominously, faintly
touched with red. Theirs is a sorrowing intimacy stolen amid a
gale of blue-black strokes. The faint outlines of a bed and room
hint at an imagined interior, a safe, private haven.
Bacon
later said that he regretted having wasted so much time while
young. Instead of learning his craft, he was often drinking,
gambling, sleeping around and having a brutal affair with a
violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted sadist named Peter Lacy that
sometimes made his friends fear for his life.
This
show concurs by bringing on more popes, along with screaming apes,
slinking dogs and mute businessmen. Scant of surface and image,
with glancing, uneasy brushwork, they imply a divided attention
and a reliance on pictorial short cuts and ambiguities to disguise
limited skills. Although they are some of Bacon’s best-known
works, they barely pass muster as paintings.
Yet
the Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art
declined, indicating that it often improved as his colours
brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally
important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared
about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged
out of wet clay and recognizably individual.
Bacon
may have been saved by the physicality of van Gogh’s art, as
evidenced by the 1957 Study for a Portrait of van Gogh VI,
with its thick, troweled paint, raking light and a plowed field
that resembles a butterflied slab of meat marbled with red and
green. In the same room Three Studies for a Crucifixion
from 1962 announces Bacon’s maturity: in pulsations of red,
orange and black we see two assassins; the bloody pulp of their
victim, curled on a striped mattress; and a hanging side of beef
— with human teeth — that suggests a saint’s martyrdom.
In
the show’s second half Bacon paints from his life, his
imagination or somewhere in between, uncoiling new, ambiguous
narratives that were often enhanced by the expansiveness of the
triptych format. These paintings may not always work, but it is
rarely for lack of trying. Sex, both violent and not, takes place;
crimes are committed; guts are spilled. Colours become
electrifying, textures enrich. The curved shelf of space that
becomes the norm circles around, implicating us as intimates,
voyeurs or unwilling witnesses.
Often
we seem to see people posing in the studio, fidgeting, ready to
jump out of their skins (even though Bacon didn’t paint from
life, only from photographs). In Two Studies for a Portrait of
George Dyer, the subject sits near a canvas that is pinned
with a nude picture of him, which is truer to Bacon’s working
method.
An
especially fraught 1967 triptych that Bacon allowed to be named
for T. S. Eliot’s poem Sweeney Agonistes has two
scenes of lovers on low platforms raised above grass-green carpet.
They flank an interior in which a hideous partial carcass is
propped up before a window. One imagines it as the remnants of a
man who, from loneliness, has literally howled out his heart to
the implacable black sea visible beneath a violet sky. Except that
the violet plane is a window shade, a regal colour commensurate
with the sacrifice. Whatever Bacon’s mangled, solitary or
coupled beings meant to him, they starkly remind us that, while we
look at the painting, others are dying, seizing up with loneliness
or having sex.
I’m
not sure that this show will do much to alter the polarities of
opinion around Bacon; that will take much more curatorial
precision and imagination. But it is always bracing to see his
work and to realize that part of its energy derives from its
refusal to go softly in art history. He reminds us that in the end
very little about art is fixed, and that we should always be ready
to turn on a dime.
FRANCIS
BACON’S HORROR SHOW
Francis
Bacon believed there was beauty in the colour of meat, and it was
possible "to be optimistic and totally without hope."
This year, the centennial of his birth, is a fine time to revisit
his insights on art, writes Megan Buskey ...
Special
to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
Megan
Buskey,
Intelligent
Life Quarterly Magazine, The Economist, Spring 2009
If
you were in London in the 1960s and wanted to chat up Francis
Bacon, all you had to do was head to the Colony Room, a junky club
on Dean Street in Soho, where he routinely held court. He was such
a fixture there that the Colony’s owner and den-mother, a crass
woman named Muriel Belcher, called him “daughter”. As Bacon’s
critical reputation grew, so did his financial means, and he was
known for covering the tab for his friends and leaving lavish
tips. What he valued more than money was conversation, and he was
as comfortable telling a dirty joke as he was discussing
Aeschylus.
In
1962 David Sylvester, an art critic and friend, decided to bring
Bacon’s pontifications to a wider audience. These long-form
recorded interviews proved popular, largely owing to Bacon's
insight, and in 1975 they were compiled as a book. The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon shed
welcome light on Bacon's work, which many found inscrutable, if
not disturbing.
Bacon
is now enjoying a lot of attention, particularly since a few of
his paintings sold for record-breaking
prices in 2007. To
celebrate the centennial of his birth this year, a
grand retrospective of his work opened at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York on May 20th (travelling from the
Tate Britain via the Prado in Madrid). As a new generation
struggles to come to terms with his dramatic, searing paintings,
Bacon’s conversations with Sylvester are freshly relevant.
Interviews
is rare for the way it addresses big questions about the purpose
and process of artistic creation. Which art is more true? Work
that proceeds from a preconceived idea or work that comes from
impulse? Is abstraction more powerful than figurative
representation? What causes artists to fixate on certain subjects?
Artists and writers regularly praise these interviews for Bacon's
candid, plain-spoken perceptions of so tricky a subject. "I
read and re-read the interviews and have carried on devouring
them, like a bible to a believer," Damien Hirst has written.
"[I]t was the way into art for me."
The
answers “didn’t always come on the spur of the moment,”
Sylvester wrote in Looking Back on Francis Bacon, a
critical study he published after Bacon’s death in 1992. “Right
up to the end of his life I would get a telephone call at eight in
the morning trying out some formulation of a thought.” It’s
true that Bacon sometimes struggled to express himself—he didn’t
have much in the way of formal education. But his earnestness and
self-awareness made up for his deficits in eloquence.
Bacon
attributed the origins of his successful work to “accident[s]”
born of impulse:
When I was trying in despair the other day to
paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and
a great deal of paint, and I put it on very, very freely, and I
simply didn’t know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly
this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was
trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it
anything to do with illustrational painting.
Just how an artist made certain choices beguiled
him, though he recognised that talent and dedication had
influence. Bacon held that it was through “profound sensibility”
that a master like Rembrandt decided to “hold onto one
irrational mark rather than onto another.” Balancing impulse
with more deliberate aims was a challenge; Bacon thought it was
easier to create when under the influence of drugs, alcohol,
exhaustion or, in his case, “despair.”
The
central question for Bacon was “how do I feel I can make this
image more immediately real to myself?” Forms still had their
purpose, but he arranged them in a way that courted an emotional
response. Observe the mangled figures in Bacon’s paintings, with
their misplaced arms, ears, legs and elbows. Blank backdrops, on
the other hand, provided “a very clear background against which
the image can articulate itself”. He used certain colours until
he grew bored with them and moved on. The idea was to make work
that “brought the figurative thing up onto the nervous system
violently and poignantly.”
Bacon
searched widely for inspiration. His chaotic studio on Reece Mews
was carpeted with heaps of paint-splattered images culled from
random sources. (He once had nicer digs in Roland Gardens,
but he felt “absolutely castrated in the place” and summarily
moved.) When he was painting a portrait of Sylvester, he
constantly consulted photographs of wild animals. “One image can
be deeply suggestive of the other,” Bacon said. “Rhinoceros
skin would help me to think of the texture of human skin.” He
credited Sigmund Freud for inspiring his careful play between
reality and eerie dreamscapes. “I don’t think I’m
gifted," he reflected. "I just think I’m
receptive."
Recurring
motifs in Bacon’s work, such as animal carcasses, black
umbrellas and the detritus of drug use and illness, convey
self-destruction. Bernardo Bertolucci described his portraits as
“faces eaten up by something that comes from within”, and sent
Marlon Brando to a Bacon exhibition at the Grand Palais during the
filming of Last Tango in Paris.
But
Bacon resisted the idea that his work was principally about
inspiring horror. Horror was part of life, but not its sole
constituent. “You must not forget the beauty of the colour of a
piece of meat,” Bacon said. He acknowledged that his early life
in Ireland and his adolescent forays into Berlin's harsh
homosexual underworld made him “accustomed to always living
through violence.” Yet he claimed his art was not a reaction to
these fraught experiences.
He
did concede that his subjects appeared “doomed” and “in
moments of crisis,” as Sylvester put it. Yet Bacon preferred to
think of them as exhibiting their “mortality”, the inescapable
condition that he could never stop thinking about. “If life
excites you, its shadow, death, must also excite you," he
said. "You can be optimistic and totally without hope.”
Sylvester
was sceptical: “It’s not altogether stupid to attribute an
obsession with horror to an artist who has done so many paintings
of the human scream.” But Bacon maintained that his paintings of
screams reflected his obsession with the aesthetic of the human
mouth. The screams he most admired were in Poussin’s Massacre
of the Innocents and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
I’ve always wanted and never succeeded in painting the smile.”
If
that sounds glib, it’s on account of the risk that comes with
Bacon using language to explain what he believed could only be
conveyed through art. Yet his efforts to express himself in Interviews
are nothing short of profound. “I remember looking at a
dog-shit on the pavement when I was 17 and I suddenly realised,
there it is–this is what life is like,” Bacon told Sylvester.
“It tormented me for months. I think of life as meaningless; but
we give it meaning during our own existence. We give this
purposeless existence a meaning by our drives. [Art] really comes
from a feeling [that] it’s impossible to do these things, so I
might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees
what happens.”
Bacon
NY exhibit portrays brutality
By
Nick Olivari Reuters
UK, Tuesday May 19, 2009

Francis
Bacon sits in the Tate Gallery on May 16, 1985.
NEW
YORK (Reuters) - A Francis Bacon retrospective starting at the New
York Metropolitan Museum on Wednesday is not for the
faint-hearted.
The
self-taught British painter (1909-1992), who denied the existence
of God, portrays the brutality of humanity in subjects from popes
to a paralytic child walking on all fours. His images illustrate
that without God, humans are subject to the same urges of
violence, lust and fear as any other animal.
"His
wider appeal is a morbid fascination with the expression of
violence in human nature," said Gary Tinterow, principal
curator of Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, which
is the first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to the
artist and includes works from throughout his career.
Bacon,
an existentialist, saw man as an "accident of
evolution," said Tinterow, adding that contemporary artists
consistently vote Bacon as one of the great influences of the
current era.
Though
he drifted aimlessly early in his career, Bacon found his voice as
World War Two ended and rose to prominence over the next 45 years.
With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's art was
dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body.
He
painted heads with snarling mouths, images of men as pathetic and
alone, and a human figure portrayed as bestial, conjuring up the
demons he may have lived with.
Suffering
from an abusive father, he later relived that pattern with some of
his homosexual lovers.
"His
early sexual experiences came by older men who were cruel to
him," Tinterow said. "His familiarity with cruelty is
strongly expressed."
The
exhibit also includes archival materials found in Bacon's studio
and only available after the death of a man who hated to paint
with anyone present, including the subject. These objects include
the pages he tore from books and magazines, photographs and
sketches, all of which were source materials for finished
paintings on view.
The
exhibit, which runs until August 16, was formed in partnership
with London's Tate Britain and Madrid's Museo del Prado, and
previously appeared in both of those venues.
Sacred
Monster
On
the eve of the Met’s giant retrospective, a critic asks: Was
Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth
century, or just a fascinating mess?
By
Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, May 17, 2009

Francis
Bacon in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton.
Francis
Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of
Art retrospective opening this week, is the Irish-born English
artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero
rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word
of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind when thinking about
his paintings and tumultuous life: “Rage.”
Those who knew the artist—some
of them his friends—described him variously as “devil,” “whore,”
“one of the world’s leading alcoholics,” “bilious ogre,”
“sacred monster,” and “a drunken, faded sodomite swaying
nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho.”
Bacon was no kinder: He called himself a “grinding machine”
and “rotten to the core.” This hasn’t stopped admirers and
critics alike from proclaiming him “the greatest painter in the
world,” “the best … since Turner.” Never one to spare
hyperbole, Robert Hughes wrote, “This painter of buggery,
sadism, dread, and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the
most implacable, lyric artist in late-twentieth-century England,
perhaps in all the world.”
For me, Bacon—who may be
the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat—has
always been more of a cartoonist. He’s an illustrator of
exaggerated, ultimately empty angst. His early accomplishments are
undeniable, and the Met’s survey of 66 paintings and a cache of
never-before-seen source material is peppered with high points,
especially the signature paintings of the forties and fifties:
Canvases with twisted masses of faceless flesh and otherworldly
homunculi, creatures of the id posed in living-room wastelands and
Stygian prisons. The best of this work shrouds you in a sulfuric
gloom where strange powers transform human souls into delirious
monsters. These paintings make audiences stare as if they were
looking at animals in a zoo, trying to come to terms with these
merciless inhuman presences. You’ll see this at the Met: people
blankly gaping in wonder.
To
understand Bacon’s impact, look no further than the young Brits
emulating him. Jake and Dinos Chapman place tortured figures in
glass cases; Jenny Saville’s contorted Gargantuas are direct
descendants of Bacon’s golems; Tracey Emin works with blood and
guts; Sarah Lucas gives us spooks and deformities. Damien Hirst
not only makes vitrines straight out of Bacon—he puts meat and
carcasses in them. Like Dalí and Munch, Bacon is an artist we
love when young. Tantalized by the urgency, angst, weirdness,
blood, sex, and bodies, we think, That’s me! That’s how I
feel!
You might have reconsidered
feeling like Bacon if you’d lived in his skin. His love life is
a study in emotional privation and degradation. “We are meat,”
he often remarked—understandable, given his adolescence. Bacon,
who was given morphine as a child for his asthma (the ailment that
contributed to his death in 1992), always knew which way his
erotic compass pointed, which is not to say that he approved of
its inclination: He called his homosexuality “a defect” and a
“limp.” And no wonder. When Bacon was 16, his father—the
artist derisively called him “a failed horse-trainer”—caught
the boy wearing his mother’s underwear. (“Fishnet stockings
were an essential part of the artist’s wardrobe for most of his
life,” one biographer notes.) As punishment, the father had him
horsewhipped by the stable hands, whom, Bacon later claimed, he
then had affairs with. Bacon Sr. asked a family friend to “straighten
the boy out” by taking him to Berlin. The man complied—and
subsequently bedded the younger Bacon, then abandoned him in the
city that W.H. Auden called “a bugger’s daydream.”
Endless liaisons with rent
boys and society types followed, until Bacon’s predator-prey
notion of love and his “desire to suffer” reached new heights,
in 1952. At the age of 43, he met a former RAF pilot, Peter Lacy,
in London’s Soho. They spent a lot of time in Tangier, a refuge
for gay men looking for freedom. “I’d never really fallen in
love with anyone until then,” Bacon said. “Of course, it was
the most total disaster from the start.” Bacon couldn’t live
with or without him: “Being in love in that extreme way,” he
said, “being totally obsessed by someone, is like having some
dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” They
experimented with the far reaches of S&M. The end was horrid,
too. On the day before his first Tate retrospective opened, in May
1962, Bacon learned Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from
drinking.
Less than two years later,
Bacon met George Dyer—reportedly when Dyer broke into his studio
to rob him. For the next seven years the relationship rocketed up
and down, then history repeated itself. On October 25, 1971, the
day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris
opened, Dyer overdosed and died in their Paris hotel room. Bacon,
then 61, was again devastated. No wonder he talked about “the
destruction” of love.
Bacon's lover George Dyer in
the artist's studio circa 1964
All
this manifested itself in his art, which rattled the cage of
English painting like nothing before it. Compared with the
prevailing emphasis on the literary and the anecdotal (the sappy
Victorian painter George Frederic Watts is considered “England’s
Michelangelo”), Bacon came out of nowhere. His unfinished
surfaces, saturated color, and nonstories make him a near anomaly
in the history of his country’s painting. He never attended art
school—he was entirely self-taught—but he devoured art
history, and you can easily spot his influences: Cubism,
Romanticism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Chaim Soutine, Goya’s
late paintings, and the figures of Michelangelo.
In
1927, a year after he was banished from home, Bacon went to Paris,
where he saw a survey of over 100 Picasso drawings. The show
tattooed itself on his brain and left him thinking that Picasso
had come closer than anyone in the century to “the core of what
feeling is about.” He became “the reason I paint,” Bacon
said, “the father figure.” Tellingly, the show consisted
mainly of Picasso’s classical drawings; there were no Cubist
works on hand. Thus Bacon’s rendezvous with modernism was fairly
un-modern. Like Balthus, another insider-outsider type, he’s an
artist who never went abstract or painted in the visual idiom of
his time.
In
1929, back in London, he set himself up creating furniture and
rugs based on modern French design. He tentatively showed a few
paintings in his own home, but it wasn’t until April 1933, when
he was 24, that Bacon exhibited his first painting, at the Mayor
Gallery in London’s West End. Interest was immediate and word
spread. Within months, a painting of his was reproduced opposite a
recent Picasso in art historian Herbert Read’s book Art Now.
That
work, Crucifixion
(1933), which vibrates off the walls at the Met, Bacon claimed to
have finished “in about a fortnight when I was in a bad mood of
drinking.” [sic]*
It’s a haunted little thing, with
no sense of devotion to anything except painting—an ectoplasmic
alien shape with phosphorescent wings and outstretched arms
standing in a murky monochromatic ground demarcated by lines
forming invisible planes. The macabre work was influenced by the
almost unknown Catholic Australian painter Roy de Maistre (Bacon’s
mentor and lover) and owes much to Soutine and archaic altarpiece
painting. Yet it also epitomized Bacon’s astonishing description
of what a painting should be: “a snail leaving a trail of the
human presence.” Crucifixion radiates what Deleuze
called “cosmic dissipation.”
But
just as it appeared that he would take the English art world by
storm, Bacon’s trail dissipated. He exhibited works the
following year, to little attention and bad reviews. Stung, he
destroyed every painting from the show. By the late thirties, he
had quit painting. He “abandoned himself with a vengeance to
drifting, from bar to bar, from person to person … setting up a
series of private—and totally illegal—gambling clubs,” says
his biographer Michael Peppiatt.
Then
came the “night of the world”: the Second World War. In April
1945—a month of simultaneous relief and unimagined horror—Mussolini
was hanged upside-down, Hitler committed suicide, Roosevelt died,
and the nightmares at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were revealed.
And Bacon, then 35, exhibited a painting that still induces
shudders. Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a
triptych depicting howling, deformed, harpylike goblins. There are
intimations of real space, but these raving underworld visitants
mostly exist in a universe of animal instinct. A lamentation for
the dead and living, a retaliation for his personal traumas, the
painting exudes venomous visionary force. Reviewers were shocked
and awed: “Images so unrelievedly awful that the mind snaps
shut,” wrote John Russell after first seeing Three Studies.
“We had no name for them, no name for what we felt about them.”
(Years later, in 1953, the Tate had to be persuaded to accept the
painting as a gift.)
Bacon
had broached a new door, and to his enormous credit, he kept doing
that for fifteen years. Painting, from 1946 (bought by
the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 for £280), was an even bigger
breakthrough. In this coagulated masterpiece, a grinning or
grimacing man—only the bottom of whose face is seen—is jammed
between splayed cow carcasses and what looks like a witness stand.
An umbrella is over his head. Here, Bacon hits on many of the
themes, techniques, and formal concerns that occupied him for the
rest of his life: Man, animal, and meat merge. There is no
narrative, just a conjuration of some malevolent force. As with
countless subsequent figures, Bacon isolates this one within an
enclosure in the middle of the canvas. The space feels
hallucinatory, menacing, sullen, shallow. Best of all, the paint
is physical and visceral—clotted, smeared, wiped off, applied
with rags and fingers and brushes or straight from the tubes.
Intense lilacs, pinks, and magentas multiply the effect. Within a
few years, Bacon was applying great unbroken fields of orange,
apricot, and red. Some of this color is so intense and modern it
keeps even the worst of his oeuvre alive.
By
the fifties, Bacon had hit his stride, painting what he called “figures
… [in] moments of crisis … [with] acute awareness of their
mortality … of their animal nature”—truths hauntingly
self-evident in his large pictures of naked beefy men crouching in
transparent cases, making love with or attacking one another; dogs
cowering on dark streets; sphinxes; businessmen; and howling
monkeys. Adding to this symphony of hatred, longing, and pain are
his many portraits of popes.
This
period of Bacon’s paintings was revolutionary for two reasons,
both hard to see now. First, an openly gay man was painting gay
subjects at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime in
Great Britain. (Sodomy laws remained in effect there until 1967,
and sentencing could involve hard labour.) Introducing overtly
queer subject matter into grand painting without dressing it up in
classicism or coy kitsch was as unheard-of as it was dangerous,
and not just in England. One of Bacon’s first solo exhibitions
in New York in the fifties included a painting of two naked men
grappling on a bed. It had to be installed out of the way, on the
gallery’s upper floor, in case of a police raid.
The
other striking invention is his use of photography. Unlike his
contemporaries, he didn’t project (or paste) photos onto canvas,
and he freely admitted his hatred for working from life. His
visions came mostly from stacks of photos he kept for decades:
images from radiography textbooks; Muybridge pictures; Sergei
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; Grünewald
paintings; pictures of Nazis, athletes, friends, lovers, and his
own face, which he claimed to loathe.
In
1957, while going though one of his tumults with Peter Lacy and
with the pressure of an imminent solo show building, Bacon, who in
his own words was in a “bad way mentally and physically” and
was trying to avoid a crackdown on homosexuality in Tangier, tried
to make a move in his work. This, for all practical purposes, was
the last time he’d attempt to break from predictability. He
painted a series “at high speed,” based on Van Gogh’s The
Painter on the Road to Tarascon, experimenting with more
viscous surfaces and strident light. The colour is flamboyant and
brassy; space is flatter, less reliant on perspective; subjects
are outdoors. In the one Van Gogh painting at the Met—a stunner—you
can see him giving up his tricks, breaking out of his style to
fantastic effect. But when the series first appeared, some of his
most ardent supporters turned away. Russell called them “clamorous,”
“hectic,” “perhaps the weakest” he ever did; Lawrence
Alloway dismissed the series as “an outburst from a gypsy
violin.”
Bacon and his work were
becoming parodies of themselves.
‘‘I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.”
I
believe the Van Gogh series marks the beginning of the end for
Bacon. It’s true that he painted for another 35 years, and that
in the sixties and seventies he produced arresting triptychs of
bloody figures—in fact, it’s doubtful that Bacon would be
nearly as famous without them. Bernardo Bertolucci based scenes in Last
Tango in Paris on them. A so-so 1976 example sold in 2008
for $86.3 million, setting an auction record.
But
the Metropolitan’s retrospective, like most Bacon shows, makes
it clear that he kept working his theme until it became a gimmick.
The calculated pictorial repetitiousness and lack of formal
development wear thin. Except for a number of fabulous portrait
heads and the astounding Jet of Water—made in 1988,
just four years before his death, featuring an enormous streak of
blue paint across an interior—Bacon’s formula had grown
stagnant by 1965.
Once
you’re aware of this point, it becomes all you see. He has no
idea what to do with the edges of his paintings. Everything that
happens in Bacon’s work happens in the middle of the canvas; at
times you don’t have to look anywhere else. The bottoms of his
paintings are always the same, too—a receding plane curves up at
the sides, like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens or from
inside someone’s eye sockets. He neutralized his paintings
further by insisting they be framed behind glass. (“I even like
Rembrandts under glass,” he once said.)
Last
fall, when I saw this Bacon retrospective at the Tate, it ran
concurrently with a Mark Rothko show. Rothko and Bacon were
virtually the same age; both worked away from Paris and took “anguish”
as their subject. Yet compared with Rothko’s glowing blank
Buddhist television sets, Bacon’s work seems mannered,
conservative, simplistic. Bacon said that “only by going too far
can you go far enough,” yet in giving up all the conventions of
painting, Rothko went further. When I saw the Bacon show again at
the Prado this past winter—near the galleries full of Velázquez
masterpieces—Bacon’s work seemed dead and canned. His
supporters often refer to the rousing chaos of his studio (Cecil
Beaton noted its “discarded paintings, rags, newspapers, and
every sort of rubbish”). If only his late work had some of that
anarchy.
What’s
especially poignant about Bacon is that he knew he’d built his
own prison. As early as 1963, he referred to “my rigidness.”
He talked about the “drawback” of his style and how he used
painterly tics as a “device.” In 1970, drama turned to
tragicomedy when Dyer falsely accused Bacon of marijuana
possession. A police raid was followed by arrest, public
humiliation, and trial and acquittal. By then Bacon and his work
were becoming parodies of themselves. You can see this at the Met;
the bright chalky colour in his work is vibrantly alive, but
everything else is flat. And he seems to have recognized that. He’d
sealed himself off from the art of his time. “I stay here in my
cage,” he said. Bacon disliked abstract art, saying it was “too
weak to convey anything, and had “nothing to do with the
avant-garde.”
When
you watch the 1985 BBC film of Bacon being interviewed in that
grubby studio and hear him spout bromides he’d repeated for
decades (he was “an optimist about nothing,” he said again and
again), one of his self-assessments seems apt: “I am the most
artificial person you’ll ever meet.” The more one looks at his
long career—especially the last 25 years of it—the more Bacon
strikes you not as an artist unafraid of the darkest within
himself but as an artist who didn’t go to that source enough.
Bacon wanted to “remake the violence of reality itself,” and
for a time he succeeded. But in the end, he seems less a modern
painter than the last of a breed of Romantics—one who, in his
final interview, plaintively stated, “I painted to be loved.”
[sic]*
Bacon's
"bad mood of drinking" refers to the Three Studies
for a Crucifixion (1962), and not to the Crucifixion (1933).
Ref:
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact - Interviews with
Francis Bacon, 1987: page 13.
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New
York May 20, 2009 – August 16, 2009
Three Studies for a Self-Portrait 1979 - 1980 Francis
Bacon
The
first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis
Bacon (British, 1909-1992) - one of the most important painters of
the 20th century - will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City from May 20 through August 16, 2009. Marking
the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, Francis Bacon:
A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most
significant works from each period of the artist’s remarkable
areer. Drawn from public and private collections around the world,
this landmark exhibition will consist of some 65 paintings,
complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from
the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist’s
career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole
U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.
The
exhibition is made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita
Brodsky Foundation. The exhibition was organized by The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London, in
partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. It is
supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and
the Humanities.
“Bacon
is more compelling than ever: despite the passage of time, his
paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has
this work been more relevant to young artists,” noted Gary
Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s
Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.
“For these reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a
retrospective spanning his entire career to our viewing public.”
Entirely
self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in
British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45
years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of
his generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon’s
oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the
human body that are among the most powerful images in the history
of art.
The
exhibition’s loosely chronological structure will trace critical
themes in Bacon’s work and explore his philosophy about mankind
and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The
earliest group of works, from the 1940s and ’50s, focuses on the
animalistic qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with
snarling mouths (Head I, 1947-1948, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art); images of men as pathetic and alone (Study for
a Portrait, 1953, |