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.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

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, 5^th 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 20^th-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, The New Republic, 17 June 2009

 

      

                           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"