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It was early beatings by his father for slipping into his mother’s dresses and underwear that Bacon attributed his taste for sadomasochism, so it’s no surprise that he’d be familiar with Deleuze’s text on Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. For Deleuze, sadism and masochism are not complementary qualities, but two separate entities. Masochism, Deleuze argues, is more subtle and complex than simply the enjoyment of pain, and that any ‘punisher’ must be first educated and seduced into behaving in a way that he terms ‘quasi-sadistic’.

Each fall, highly collectible artworks go up for sale at New York’s elite auction houses. Collectors bid millions on coveted pieces, such as the $90 million that was spent in November 2018 on a David Hockney. Next month, however, among this season’s investment-grade collectibles, are three pieces that have people talking for all the wrong reasons.

When the Francis Bacon painting “Pope” hits the auction block at Sotheby’s on Nov. 14, it is estimated to fetch $6 million.

But the late painter didn’t even want the 1958 work to be seen. According to text furnished by The Estate of Francis Bacon, the artist, whose similarly sized work has gone for as much as $82 million, gave “Pope” to his pal Nicholas Brusilowski under the notion Brusilowksi would paint on the opposite side of the canvas. Instead, he kept it as is.

It made its way to collector Olga H. Knoepke, who gifted “Pope” to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981. The next year, Bacon wrote to the museum and called the painting “a throw-out . . . I would prefer if it were not exhibited.”

But Grégoire Billault, the NYC head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art department, insists it’s OK to go against Bacon’s presumed wishes. “This is an amazing discovery. It has not been much exhibited by the Brooklyn Museum. A lot of artists do not like their early period . . . But it does not work that way.”

NICOLAS SMIRNOFF | REVIEW | ART IS ALIVE | SINCE 2007 | FRIDAY 25 OCTOBER 2019

What is left to say about Francis Bacon? A lot apparently, according to Bacon: Books and Paintings presented at Centre Pompidou in Paris until 20th January 2020.

Bringing together around sixty paintings including twelve triptychs, the exhibition highlights the influence of literature on Bacon’s stunning paintings. “They are the things I like doing most. And I think this may be related to the thought I have sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images captured on three different canvases.” Francis Bacon said about his development of triptych painting.

Extending the scope of the pictorial surfaces and subject matters, the impressive presentation offers an immersion into some of Bacon’s favourite authors – Bataille, Leiris and Nietzsche’s texts among others – read in site-specific rooms by actors Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Marc Barr and more. Curated by Didier Ottinger, one room of large-scale gold-framed paintings alternates with one room of subtle audio texts here by creating a pleasant and logical narrative as a whole

The last major French exhibition of Bacon’s work was held in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou. More than twenty years later, Bacon: Books and Painting features paintings ranging from 1971, the year of his critically-acclaimed retrospective staged at the Grand Palais. Two days prior to this opening, Bacon’s partner George Dyer notoriously committed suicide in a Paris hotel, traumatizing the Irish-born British artist and marking his life and art forever

Prestigious private and public collections loaned some of Bacon’s best works for this show including Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Fondation Beyeler – Beyeler Museum, Tate Gallery, Esther Grether Family Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and more. The rare Study of a Bull (1991), inspired by Michel Leiris’s writing about bullfighting, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983, and In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, brilliantly dialogue with Triptych inspired by T.S Eliot’s poem, Sweeney Agoniste, 1967.

“How are you going to trap reality? How are you going to trap appearance without making an illustration of it? That is one of the great fights, of the great excitements of being a figurative artist today.” Bacon said. In this spectacular exhibition, viewers are definitely excited to be confronted with a genius. The exhibition ends with a room showcasing interviews with the artist, here by instilling concrete meaning to Bacon’s grandiose art.

The “throw-out” painting is estimated to fetch up to $8 million (£6.2 million) at Sotheby’s New York next month

BY COLIN GLEADELL | LUXURY | ART | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY 23 OCTOBER 2019

A painting by Francis Bacon that the artist described as "a throw-out" and gave to a friend to paint on is estimated to fetch up to $8 million (£6.2 million) at Sotheby’s New York next month. The painting is one of at least 50 he made depicting a seated figure on a throne, based on the famous 1650 painting of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez.

The Sotheby’s painting dates from the late Fifties, when Bacon was often in Tangier, Morocco, where his lover, the former fighter pilot Peter Lacy, was living. Their relationship ended in tears. Bacon destroyed much of what he made in Morocco, partly because he was not happy with it and partly in an effort to delete the memory of Lacy, whose presence haunts the paintings.

The example at Sotheby’s is one of only six Tangier paintings that survived the cull. One is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. The artist gave the other five to his friend, the artist Nicolas Brusilowski, to use for his own paintings.

Almost inevitably, Brusilowski kept and sold them. They should have been included in Ronald Alley’s 1964 Bacon catalogue raisonné, but Alley was never told about them. Had he known, he would, no doubt, have included them in his section on Bacon’s "abandoned paintings", which neither the artist nor his gallery, Marlborough, would exhibit or sell. Thus demoted, they would have had little value.

It was not until 10 years after Bacon died in 1992 and control of his estate moved away from Marlborough to the artist’s lover, John Edwards, alongside two dealers appointed by the executor to represent the estate in the market, that Bacon’s abandoned paintings gained some credence. Many, after all, were inherited by the estate, which, by the time Edwards had spent most of his inheritance, needed income.

Then, in 2006, the estate began work on a new catalogue raisonné, and works that had not been approved of previously were reinstated, without the previous "abandoned" stigma.

Some sold for impressive sums on the open market: in 2007 and 2008, two Tangier Pope paintings that had been given to Brusilowski appeared at auction in Paris, bearing certificates of authenticity from the Bacon estate’s authentication committee.

One sold at Christie’s above estimate for €6.9 million (£4.7 million), and another at Sotheby’s for €4.6 million. Grégoire Billault, the Sotheby’s expert at the sale, was, coincidentally, previously a researcher for the Bacon estate, and is now presiding over the latest Tangier painting sale in New York.

Here, the seller is the Brooklyn Museum, to which it was gifted by a private collector in 1981. Because Bacon never gave it a title, the museum called it "Personnage". But since then – and since the publication of the catalogue raisonné in 2016 – its title has been changed to Pope, which lends it more status in connection with Bacon’s famous series.

In its sale catalogue, Sotheby’s describes Pope as "akin to the greatest portraits the artist produced". And, yet, when Bacon discovered that the painting he had given to Brusilowski to paint on had been donated to Brooklyn, he wrote to the museum, stating: "It was a throw-out, and it depresses me [Brusilowski] did not destroy the image as he undertook and that it has, years later, found its way on to the art market, and I would prefer if it were not exhibited." The letter is quoted in the printed version of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, but not in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue.

Sources in the art market who prefer not to be identified have rated the painting as of inferior quality. Apart from being poorly constructed, they say, it is covered in a thick varnish, something Bacon would never have approved of. This, and Bacon’s attitude to it, explains why it is valued at nearly one tenth of a smaller, but finished, screaming Pope painting that sold in May for $50 million.

But, it’s still a Bacon. For a collector who is not fussed about the quality or what the artist thought, it has the full approval of the estate and could, therefore, be seen as a bargain. Certainly, someone shares that view – the painting comes with a third-party guarantee, so is effectively already sold.

The painting dates from the late Fifties, when Bacon was often in Tangier, Morocco

Brooklyn Museum Is Trying to Sell a Francis Bacon Painting the Artist Wanted Destroyed

During his lifetime, Bacon wrote the museum that “It was a throw-out and it depresses me […]

that it has years later found its way onto the art market and I would prefer if it were not exhibited.”

There’s something very curious about the Francis Bacon painting that is slated to go up for auction at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening sale on November 14. First of all, it’s terrible. And yet auctioneers predict that the work, which is currently in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, will sell for $6–8 million. If you think I’m being harsh, well, it turns out that the artist thought so too.

According to an older version of the museum website, in 1982 the artist wrote the Brooklyn Museum directly about the work, which was donated to the institution in 1981. Today I tried to visit the museum’s library to see if I could see the letter. Sadly, the library didn’t have a copy and the archivist wasn’t in, and I got an email that said requests would be dealt with in 6–8 weeks (yes, they appear to be underfunded, like most archives).

The painting’s info page, no longer listed on the museum website, told a fuller story of this painting. The listing on the Sotheby’s website only hints at Bacon’s distaste for the artwork, and the “official” auction house story has been parroted by many in the art trade media (which loves to republish press relates). It suggests this about the painting’s curious origin (emphasis mine):

In 1959, Bacon gifted five of his six Tangier Paintings, completed in this storied period, to his friend Nicolas Brusilowski; Bacon hoped his friend would somehow be able to reuse the canvases. Instead, Brusilowski preserved the paintings, which later found their way to private collections around the world. The present Pope was sold to Swiss dealer Jan Krugier; and in 1967, American collector Olga H. Knoepke subsequently acquired the work from Krugier’s gallery. A renowned businesswoman, Knoepke amassed a significant collection of contemporary and American art in her lifetime, which she gifted to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981. Now, for the first time in over fifty years, Pope will once again change hands; all proceeds from the sale will be used to support the museum’s collection.

But that’s not the whole story. In 1982, the museum received a letter from the artist himself, which is listed on an older version of the museum website and featured at the top of this article (thanks, Wayback Machine!). But the contents of the letter aren’t fully clear, and it seems curious that the museum doesn’t have it easily accessible considering the high profile sale. Then again, we can probably agree that the auction house probably sees no benefit in revealing this, since the type of capitalism Sotheby’s and other blue-chip auction houses play is a form of smoke and mirrors (just think about the ‘Salvator Mundi’ that is reputedly by Leonardo da Vinci … yeah, sure). After a quick search in the museum’s Francis Bacon folder, which contains the relevant catalogue raisonné entry, it appears the work was catalogued with the title “Pope” even though the museum had it listed as “Personnage” on their website. But it also has a revealing quote from this infamous 1981 letter:

“It was a throw-out and it depresses me he [Nicholas Brusilowksi] did not destroy the image as he undertook and that it has years later found its way onto the art market and I would prefer if it were not exhibited.”

While the museum has exhibited the painting at various times since they received that letter, it was never extensively shown. Most people I’ve asked, even regular Brooklyn Museum-goers, had no idea a Bacon existed in the collection.

So, the art market is trying to gin up a bad painting (which looks terrible, admit it) and find someone to fork over millions for something the artist didn’t want in circulation. Respecting an artists wishes seems like it should be central to exhibiting this type of work.

I asked the museum if they had any comment on the situation, particularly the artist’s intention, and they provided the following response:

“While the work is exceptional, post-war European art is not a focus of our collection. As part of ongoing collection review, we’ve chosen to sell this particular work and use the proceeds to more sharply focus on institutional collection priorities.”

It doesn’t seem like they want us to know the whole story. Also, I find it strange that an encyclopedic museum like the Brooklyn Museum doesn’t think post-war European art is a focus of their collection, considering so much contemporary art references it, but that’s their call. Let’s see if they find a chump collector to buy this terrible painting.

The Spanish-born independent dealer discusses working with Larry Gagosian and

ANNA BRADY | INTERVIEW | ART DEALERS | THE ART NEWSPAPER | WEDNESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2019

“If there’s a boy that everyone wants to go out with, but he won’t take any girls out, it’s very exciting. Everyone wants to go out with them. But if it’s a boy that has asked every girl on the street to go out, then, well… it’s not so exciting. It’s the same with a painting.”

In an age of over-exposure, Pilar Ordovas likes her art to play hard to get. That is why she refuses to do fairs, art’s equivalent of speed dating, of sell-and-tell. Ordovas prefers the intimacy of the private viewing room

“I go to Art Basel and see identical booths that I’ve seen in five locations. I prefer to keep out of it – instead of exposing my works in that way, and burning them if they don’t sell. I prefer to do a few exhibitions a year in London and New York,” says Spanish-born Ordovas, her IWC Schaffhausen watch offset by a broken finger – she fell while running to meet her husband, the film producer Simon Astaire, for breakfast in Los Angeles. But, she reassures me, her phone was ok. Ordovas is polished, stylish, but with the grit of a doer

Ordovas has stuck to a discreet path ever since she opened her sleek Savile Row gallery in London’s Mayfair neighbourhood with a show called Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt in 2011. For that, she persuaded the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence to lend Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Beret (around 1659). It was a loan show, nothing was for sale, setting the tone for the scholarly exhibitions that have followed, including Painting from Life: Carracci Freud, staged in collaboration with the Dulwich Picture Gallery, bringing together head studies by Lucian Freud and Annibale Carracci.

A newly independent dealer launching their first commercial gallery with a show in which nothing is for sale seems contrary and begs the question: how it is viable? “The way that my exhibitions work is that there is not necessarily something for sale on the walls,” she says. “I do need to sell things and, of course, on the back of the exhibition, I’ll be selling something. I might have a Bacon and Rembrandt show that is only loans, but I’ve sold a large Bacon triptych that you will never know about.” Sometimes she will have already sold a work, and then does a related show. “It doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand, but there’s always some sort of relationship,” she says, but adds, “you, as a member of the press, will never know if something is for sale.” She smiles openly but her dealings are a closed book.

Such secrecy is at odds with increasing calls for transparency and yet, as auction price data becomes ever more accessible online, there are those – such as Ordovas – who continue to value privacy. Keeping the price of a work confidential, and restricting access, safeguards it, she says. But, how? In Ordovas’s view, knowing the price of a work might encourage chancers to “start shopping that piece around to other people, sending images, approaching auction houses. It is a responsibility that one has when one is handling something really important, to keep it protected and fresh”

Ordovas cut her teeth in an auction house. After graduating from Edinburgh University, she joined Christie’s as an intern in the Modern British art department and left 13 years later as international director and deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art in Europe. Christie’s was a “roll up your sleeves and learn” experience. When she joined the contemporary department, “there were four or five people in Europe”; by the time she left the company, there were 100. “The wonderful thing about starting when the market was much smaller was that I got involved in so much more.”

Recognising she needed a niche, Ordovas decided early on to concentrate on two artists, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. “I got to know where all the works were, who collected them. That’s one of the things that really changed my career.” She met Freud after consigning to Christie’s a landscape that he had painted in the 1970s and had not seen since. “He invited me to his studio, that’s how our friendship started. I started bringing works for him to see. His knowledge on Bacon was phenomenal. He was the only person that really went on a regular basis to his studio. I would take Lucian’s own works to him, but I would also take works by Bacon and others that I knew he was interested in. He loved horses and he was always interested in seeing drawings of horses by Degas.”

Freud would, Ordovas says, make her “look at things in a completely different way, that way of showing you things in a very practical way, like ‘stand here, look at it without this. What do you see?’”.

That concentration paid off – while at Christie’s, she consigned Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) which set a record when it sold for $33.6m (with fees) in 2008 and Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1974-77), which sold the same year for £26.3m (with fees)

Little surprise, then, that Larry Gagosian started calling, asking her to work with him and “develop the secondary market side” at his London gallery. In 2009, as supply of major works dwindled post-Lehman Brothers crash, she did. “The auction world really slowed down” Ordovas says. “Christie’s wanted me to do more private sales but, well, when you spend all your professional life trying to persuade people to sell at auction and then you have to tell them ‘no, sell privately’… it didn’t feel right.”

Freed from the auction treadmill, Ordovas spent six months planning her first show for the gallery, about Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacometti. Gagosian’s managing style was “very hands off – as long as you are making him money, he doesn’t really get involved. He is very hands on in terms of putting pressure on all his team to produce. But if you produce results, you have pretty much all the freedom you want”. That said, Ordovas started wondering what was stopping her from doing it alone. So, in 2011, she opened on Savile Row, followed by a New York space in 2015.

Some long-term clients had been wary when she joined the Gagosian stable. “He divides opinion, he’s very American and ruthless. I almost had to justify that I was still personally looking after them and not to worry,” she says. “So, it was sort of easier when I was on my own.”

The secondary market is Ordovas’s bread and butter – she does not represent living artists, though equally she does not rule out the possibility. She did represent one estate, that of the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida, but lost it to Hauser & Wirth in July last year. That hurt. “It was hard, but I understood. They’re a family of eight, it was going to become a huge family issue. In some ways, looking back on it on with a bit of distance, they took a huge problem off my hands, but it was also a great sadness.” Hauser & Wirth’s gallery is immediately opposite Ordovas’s – on leaving I remark on its proximity. She smiles ruefully.

Though from Madrid, Ordovas went to school and university in the UK, where she has spent her whole professional life. Inevitably, I ask her about Brexit. She sighs heavily: “I have built my life and my career in this country, I employ lots of UK citizens. And I don’t even get to have an opinion because I am a Spanish citizen. I am a child of the EU, so I am very upset about what is happening in the country that I love.”

She adds: “I hope I won’t have to move, but I do think...let’s see what happens. I mean, we don’t even know what’s going to happen with regard to the free circulation of works of art. There are still a lot of question marks.”

We live, she reflects, in strange times: “I spent a lot of time in America and this sense of disbelief, of uncertainty, I feel it now on both sides of the ocean for different reasons. Economically things are very stable over there, but you hear the news and you want to cry.”

Ordovas’s next show, opening on 24 September, commemorates Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, opened just around the corner at 30 Cork Street in 1938. The gallery was only open for 18 months, its life cut short by the Second World War, and the building was later bombed. “Peggy came to London with no business experience not knowing whether she wanted to open a bookstore or a gallery,” Ordovas says. “London was a really crucial experience, because she realised that she wanted to open a museum. One year really shaped who she became afterwards.”

The show will tell the story of the gallery through paintings and sculptures by Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy – two artists championed by Guggenheim – including some loans from the National Gallery in Scotland and the Hepworth Wakefield, alongside vitrines of archival material. Perhaps some will be for sale but, if they are, Ordovas is not telling me.

The painting, estimated to fetch as much as $8 million, is one of only six surviving

The Brooklyn Museum is selling off a rare and major painting by Francis Bacon next month to raise money for its collections fund.

The eerie work being deaccessioned, Bacon’s Pope (1958), is one of just six surviving canvases made by the artist while he was living in Tangier. It will hit the auction block at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening auction in New York on November 14.

Sotheby’s estimates that the painting will rake in $6 million to $8 million, though there’s a good chance it will fetch a higher sum. The last time a work from this series came to auction was 11 years ago when another Pope painting sold for $7.3 million at Sotheby’s Paris, more than doubling its $3.2 million low estimate. This spring, an earlier “screaming pope” painting by the artist brought in $50.4 million at Sotheby’s during New York auction week.

The museum declined to comment on what, specifically, it will do with the proceeds from the sale, saying only that it will use the money to “more sharply focus on institutional collection priorities.”

“While the work is exceptional, post-war European art is not a focus of our collection,” a representative from the museum said.

In the mid 1950s, Bacon made several trips to Tangier, where his lover, Peter Lacy, had recently moved. Though the artist is thought to have produced a great deal of work during this time, he destroyed much of it after his notoriously tumultuous relationship with Lacy dissolved. Of the six paintings that survived from the period (Bacon gave the entire suite to his friend, Nicolas Brusilowski), four are now in private collection.

“Pope offers an exceedingly rare glimpse into Francis Bacon’s psychological state during a prolific but ultimately tortured time in his life and career,” Grégoire Billault, the head of Sotheby’s Contemporary art department in New York, said in a statement. “Tangier represented the artist’s first travels outside of Europe, and the promise of an open life with Peter Lacy. But their relationship proved volatile and violent, which found expression in Bacon’s anguished Popes of the period.”

The painting was acquired from Brusilowski in 1967 by New York businesswoman Olga H. Knoepke, who in turn gifted the work to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981.

Pope will go on view to the public at Sotheby’s New York starting on November 1.

Exclusively for Numéro art, the actor Bill Skarsgård, who played the child-killer clown Pennywise in the “It” films, poses in digitally revisited versions of some of the Francis Bacon paintings currently on display at the Centre Pompidou, which is showing a major retrospective of the late artist’s works realized between 1971 and 1992.

Bill Skarsgård is diabolical. At any rate the 29-year-old Swedish actor seems to like taking on rather perverse parts. He first became known internationally for his role as a vampire in the Netflix series Hemlock Grove, but it was in his portrayal of the child-killing clown Pennywise in the movies It (2017) and It Chapter Two (out this September) that he took Hollywood by storm. Yet he remains sanguine about his career choices, joking in an interview that “there was something rather strange in saying to myself that my acting would be judged on my ability to traumatize children both on set and in movie theatres.”

Skarsgård consequently seemed a natural choice to reinterpret Francis Bacon’s tormented figures in our homage to the late British artist’s work: the Swede’s chiselled features and ice-blue eyes, not to mention his ability to convey hidden emotions with the utmost economy of means, make him an ideal candidate for the exercise. One of eight children (of whom four others are actors) born to Swedish star Stellan Skarsgård (who has worked with Lars Von Trier, starred in the Avengers saga and will feature in Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming Dune), Skarsgård started out young, at just nine years old. Nothing can therefore frighten him in a movie business from which he deliberately takes a step back.

To play the role of the killer clown Pennywise in the new adaptation of Stephen King’s novel (which follows on the heels of two cult telefilms made in the 90s), Skarsgård had to get his head around a rather abstract character. “He’s not human, which made playing him easier in a certain way. It would have been a lot more difficult for me to take on the role of a real psychopathic human.”

Instead, Skarsgård has used his humanity to satisfy the demands of photographer Tim Richardson for Numéro art, who skilfully blends real shots and digitally produced images in his Bacon-inspired series.

Bill Skarsgård: I did my first role, playing Alex’s little brother, in a movie called järngänget in Sweden. I was nine years old.

For me, it was doing justice to Kings iconic character and at the same time, reinventing what Tim Curry already did so well.

I tend to like psychological horror. Polanski’s Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. Kubrick’s The Shining. And, just so I don’t come off as a complete pretentious buffoon, Hour of the Wolf by Bergman.

What kind of mood/feelings did you want to convey by playing a Bacon’s character?

Seems like his portraits are paralyzed in a moving state of despair or maybe truth. Mostly I just listened to our photographer, Tim Richardson.

They are paintings conveying an emotional truth. Not how we’re physically seen, but how we’re really feeling on the inside. And Francis’s inner self revealing itself on the canvas. How are you doing, Francis? You all right?

I wouldn’t say I have an interest in art. I appreciate it. I love P.S Krøyer. No one captures Scandinavia more idyllically.

My family and my friends. They all live in Stockholm and I can’t stay away too long.

I play Willard in Antonio Campos’s new movie, The Devil All The Time. This will be released next year. I also play Dane in Chase Palmer’s first feature, Naked Singularity, as well as Kane in Edson Oda’s first feature, 9 Days.

L’acteur Bill Skarsgård photographié par Tim Richardson pour Numéro art.

The Brooklyn Museum is hoping to bring in the bacon—by selling some of its own. The museum is deaccessioning a Francis Bacon painting from its collection, and it will be offered at Sotheby’s contemporary art evening sale on November 14th in New York. The work is expected to bring in between $6 million and $8 million.

The painting, titled Pope (ca. 1958), is one of only six surviving canvases from the British painter’s “Tangier Paintings” body of work; Bacon painted the series during visits to see his romantic partner Peter Lacy in Morocco in the 1950s, and he destroyed most of them after their relationship ended. This is the first time since 2008 that one of the “Tangier Paintings” has come to auction. In May, another of his paintings of a papal figure, Study for a Head (1952), surpassed its high estimate of $30 million to sell $50.4 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

Proceeds from the sale will go toward supporting the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. According to the institution’s online collection database, it owns one other work by Bacon, a lithograph from 1984.

In a statement, Grégoire Billault of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York (and a former researcher for the Bacon estate) said:

“Pope offers an exceedingly rare glimpse into Francis Bacon’s psychological state during a prolific but ultimately tortured time in his life and career. Tangier represented the artist’s first travels outside of Europe, and the promise of an open life with Peter Lacy. But their relationship proved volatile and violent, which found expression in Bacon’s anguished Popes of the period—of which precious few survive.”

The Brooklyn Museum is deaccessioning, a Francis Bacon painting from its collection, Pope (ca. 1958), and offering it for sale at Sotheby’s in New York next month in order to raise money to support its collection. It is estimated to make between $6 million to $8 million on the block.

A museum parting with a high-profile work is something of a rarity, though industry guidelines allow sell-offs in cases where the resulting funds are used to buy more work or care for the collection. The Brooklyn Museum has not detailed its exact plans for the proceeds. It said that “while the work is exceptional, postwar European art is not a focus of our collection. As part of ongoing collection review, we’ve chosen to sell this particular work and use the proceeds to more sharply focus on institutional collection priorities.”

Over the past couple years, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have made headlines by parting with prominent works in order to raise funds to diversify their collections.

The Brooklyn Bacon heading to Sotheby’s for its November 14 sale of contemporary art is one of six “Tangier Paintings” that the artist painted in that Morocco city. The American collector Olga H. Knoepke acquired this work in 1967, and gave it to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981.

The Brooklyn Museum still holds one Bacon in its collection, according to online collection database: a 1984 lithograph titled Oedipus and the Sphinx that is based on his 1983 painting of the same name, which is held by the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon.

SYLVIA EDWARDS DAVIS | CULTURE | MUSEUMS & GALLERIES | FRANCE TODAY MAGAZINE | MONDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2019

As an undisputed trailblazer of the 20th century, Bacon’s raw, uncompromising large format depictions of contorted flesh and limb are as overwhelming as they are haunting. The Centre Pompidou approaches this new visit to his work, 23 years after his last exhibition here, through the words that inspired and influenced the latter part of his career in about sixty masterpieces, including 12 triptychs, notably the three heart-rending tributes to George Dyer, never displayed side by side before.

Francis Bacon was an avid “reader of everything” from Greek drama to modern poetry. He said that literature represented a powerful stimulus for his imagination, but that rather than giving shape to a story, reading inspired a “general atmosphere”. He was deeply interested in the works of Aeschylus, which he claimed to know by heart, adding that he only ever really read texts that evoked “immediate images” for him.

The exhibition ‘Bacon en Toutes Lettres’ explores the influence of literature on his paintings, focusing on his output during the last two decades of his creation starting in 1971 – a turning point for Bacon. Just as he had achieved international acclaim, a mere two days before the opening of his retrospective at the Pompidou – a recognition that had only been granted to one other living artist, Pablo Picasso – Bacon’s world was ripped apart by the tragic loss of his partner George Dyer. The selection of works follows his evolution from this crucible of the heart through to his death in 1992.

Split into six areas, the Pompidou exhibition includes famous voices reading excerpts of texts from Bacon’s famed library, including works by Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Bataille, Leiris, Conrad and Eliot, all of whom had a direct influence on Bacon’s choice of subjects and form of expression. To enrich the experience there are accompanying podcasts available via web and mobile.

Good to know: Due to the extremely high interest in this event and in order to improve access, the Pompidou implemented a system of mandatory reservations, with a choice of time slots.

Bacon en Toutes Lettres Until January. Open every day from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Late opening until 11 pm on Thursday. Closed on Tuesday.

In Daniel Farson’s 1954 photograph of Lady Caroline Blackwood and Cyril Connolly, the writer, heiress, and muse stands next to the critic and editor at the entrance to Wheeler’s fish restaurant in Soho. Here we are at the capital of bohemian London in the 1950s. Blackwood smokes. Connolly appears bemused (he has a laundry case by his feet). Both knew unhappy marriages. Blackwood, then only 22, had just separated from her first—the painter Lucian Freud—while Connolly, 50, would carry on unhappily with Barbara Skelton, who in her unkind memoir of 1987, Tears Before Bedtime, revealed that he would soak for an age in his bath and wail about the fading of his talent, until they divorced in 1956.

Wheeler’s was a place where guests, whether they drank to dissolve their sorrows or to gild their successes, did so as if there was no tomorrow. It was Freud’s favorite restaurant. Francis Bacon’s, too. Both men gave paintings to the owner, Bernard Walsh, so as to settle debts. The British painter Michael Wishart once said to Caroline Blackwood that he thought Bacon had two major ambitions: “He wanted to be one of the world’s best painters,” Blackwood recounted in The New York Review of Books following Bacon’s death in 1992, “and he wanted to be one of the world’s leading alcoholics. Whereas most people discovered that these two ambitions were contradictory and self-defeating, he felt that Francis had pulled them both off.”

“Shot in Soho”—an exhibition of Soho scenes taken from the mid-1960s to the 2000s—opens at the Photographers’ Gallery next week. Like Farson’s photograph of Blackwood and Connolly, the images are a reminder of how little lasts in Soho, although when was low life ever invested in institutions? Wheeler’s has gone. So has the Colony Room Club, whose long-reigning governess Muriel Belcher’s way with a welcome was to swear at the membership. The French House, a pub on Dean Street, its walls covered with old photographs, remains. So does Ronnie Scott’s, the jazz club, along with Andrew Edmunds’s print gallery, restaurant, and upstairs club, the Academy. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s favorite lamppost is on Carlisle Street, near Soho Square—earlier this year she pointed it out to an interviewer from Vogue.

Nostalgia and complaint are often two sides of the same coin: It’s as easy to say Soho isn’t what it was as it is to disparage those who appear to be changing it forever—developers, arrivistes, etc. But when wasn’t Soho a place of transactions, or trans-action, cash and cashing in? Hasn’t it always been both?

I used to play on Harold Pinter’s cricket team, the Gaieties, named after a West End theater of the 1930s. For a number of years, Pinter, who was eternally generous, hosted an annual supper for his team at a private room in the Groucho Club, in Soho. The drinking was of Hogarthian proportions. The next day no one remembered the night before, and I am confident that while drinking no one thought too much about the drinkers of another Soho era—Freud or Bacon, Blackwood or Connolly. There are no footsteps to follow if you drink as if there will be no tomorrow.

Traditionally the genre of portraiture relied on mimetic representation of the unique subjectivity of the person portrayed. Portraiture assumed that there was an implied unity between the sitters’ outer expression and their inner essence, an illusion that dictated the construction of the traditional portrait. This meant that mimetic representation of the subject remained the main goal of the genre, attempting in this manner to capture the true essence of the sitter (Woodall 1997, 1). In the late 19th century, avant-garde artists challenged the conventional notion of the mimetic portrait, arguing that physical appearance was not representative of the inner essence of the subject. For this reason, at the turn of the century, portraiture became referential (where the subjects were evoked by referential symbols and not portrayed in a mimetic manner), rather than representational (van Alphen 2005, 25). Nevertheless, the genre still aimed to bring forth the unique subjectivity of the sitter, meaning that portraiture claimed for the subject a clearly graspable identity that could be fully understood by the viewers. This led to a standardized way of interpreting portraiture, where the viewers received concrete, comprehensible information about a stable subject.

When looking at Francis Bacon’s portraits, one does not immediately recognize the subjects depicted. Moreover, while there are visible traces left of elements reminding of the subject’s appearance (in Bacon’s own words he wished his pictures looked “as if a human had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of a human presence” – Peppiatt 2008, 10), Bacon’s works are far from mimetic depictions. Through a close reading of selected portraits, I will argue that by evading conventional mimetic representation through the use of specific visual tools, Bacon blurs the boundaries between object and subject, the portrait and its viewer, in order to remodel conventional notions of portraiture which relied on mimetic representation and likeness to evoke subjectivity. I will first analyze the significance of the genre of portraiture in Bacon ’s works and will further draw on Ernst van Alphen’s theory of the “loss of self ” (1992) experienced by the viewers when looking at Bacon’s paintings. Referencing Gilles Deleuze’s book Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (1981; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 2003), I will re-interpret this theory through the prism of Buddhism, arguing that understanding the works on the basis of Buddhist practices opens up the possibility of a complete transformation of preexisting concepts that traditionally shaped portrait making. I will specifically analyze similarities shared by Deleuze’s interpretation of Bacon’s works and Buddhist philosophy and how the reading of these Bacon compositions through these lenses exposes a new functioning potentiality for the genre of portraiture.

In this first section I will explain the role of portraiture in Bacon’ s work by elucidating what it is not. In his book Face and Mask: A Double History (2017) Hans Belting clarifies that in a traditional Western portrait the represented face is reduced to a fixed state, and therefore transformed into a mask (78). Diminished to a rigid format that can no longer change expression, the face is exchanged for a façade. He further argues that as the real face is ungraspable, fleeting, transitory, and multifaceted, the mask can never become a living face. When portraits become masks, they reference an outer state that they cannot reproduce. Belting considers that the first time the mask became a self-referential object was at the end of the nineteenth cen[1]tury when the new death mask emerged (78). In this case, the face became the image by referring just to itself, as it had nothing else to represent (given that its original face model was absent after the making of the death mask): “only when the face is transformed into its own mask can it become – and remain – entirely an image” (78). In this way, clarity has finally been reached through a stability that was missing from the face of the living. “The death mask became a totemic object that permitted the creation of a nostalgic cult of the timeless, authentic face” (78). Belting elucidates this concept of the death mask as an object that can become self-referential (and therefore not relying to an outside reality) discussing L’Inconnue de la Seine (Unknown Woman of the Seine) (1900), whose death mask was countlessly reproduced in plaster and photographs around 1900 due to the apparent beauty and deceptive smile it carried. This death mask, again, was not alluding to the deceased but was rather an image of death itself (80). Belting quotes Maurice Blanchot in saying that “in the otherness of the corpse one could also see that of the image, which produces a new kind of similarity, by referring to nothing more that itself ” (80). In the context of a time when the face’s claim to authenticity was being questioned, this type of self-referential image offered a new refuge (80).

In opposition to the mask, most of Bacon’s portraits are painted in (a deforming) motion rather than a fixed state. I will explain at a later moment what is being depicted through that motion in these portraits when discussing Gilles Deleuze’s theory about Bacon and the depiction of bodily sensations. Nevertheless, not all works are made through utter deformations. In stark contrast to other portraits of the time, Bacon’s series of death masks after William Blake’s life mask (mask that has been cast while Blake was still alive) are the only ones that do not seem to have undergone significant bodily deformations. As noted by Belting, Bacon did not change much from the original when painting the mask. However, everything seems to have come out different in his works. In a similar vein, van Alphen argues that Bacon’s representation seems to be imbued with life rather than death through such details as expressivity, the mouth slit, and the eyelashes (1992, 105). While Blake’s mask freezes life in a rigid state, Bacon’s works revolt against the mask and through his signature style they create the appearance of life (Belting 2017, 156). Bacon’s works therefore are not traditional portraits that transform faces into masks, but through motion and blurring, they transcend a rigid fixity on the way to create a new type of portraiture. To further the understanding of Bacon’s relationship to the genre of portraiture, I will also draw upon van Alphen’s analysis of Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1968), a work depicting a dressed version of George Dyer posing in front of a canvas that shows a nude version of himself. Van Alphen explains that by presenting the resulting portrait of the posing Dyer as naked and pinned down to the canvas, Bacon hints at the fact that Dyer has been sacrificed for representation. The naked painted portrait in the background seems to suggest the sacrificial nature of portraiture, and hence that of conventional representation (van Alphen 2013, 70).

Three Figures and Portrait (1975) is another example which supports this reading. The three moving figures are seen in clear opposition to a nailed down portrait: while the figures seem alive, the representation is static and immobilized by a nail in the wall, figuratively pinning the subjects within the canvas space. These examples seem to suggest that portraiture, through representation, attempts to pin the body down. The nails hint at the sacrificial nature of portraiture, meaning that portrait depictions sacrifice something of their sitter. The sacrifice in this case is that of subjectivity, as traditional portraiture promised to deliver a representation of the unique subjectivity of the sitter. Consequently, the genre of portraiture – with its traditional conventions – is not able to completely render subjectivity. For this reason, portraiture as a genre needs to re-determine the conditions that originally shaped it in order to be able to construct a novel manner in which portraits can be understood.

While Bacon’s works critique mimetic representation – and therefore traditional portraiture – as an attempt to annihilate subjectivity, his works still make use of the genre. Why does he fall back on portraiture if portraiture is not able to render subjectivity (keeping in mind that Bacon’s aim was to render someone’s “emanation”)? Bacon himself offers a first hint at how to interpret his works by referencing Diego Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–1651): “If you don’t understand the Rokeby Venus, you don’t understand my work” (Bacon 2018). He therefore suggests that his works – in a similar fashion to the Rokeby Venus – cannot be read in a straightforward manner, but rather require a careful visual contemplation To this day there are several interpretations to Velazquez’s masterpiece hanging in the National Gallery in London, but it is a well-known fact that at first most viewers do not fully grasp the painting’s subtle details. The scene shows Venus lying in her bed with Cupid holding up a mirror in front of her. Given the way in which the mirror is being held as well as the pink decorative elements, there is no doubt that the mirror is used for grooming or vanity purposes. “The problem is that the vantage point from which the scene is represented (as well as the vantage point of the viewer, were they to differ) is different from the vantage point of Venus. Therefore, if we see Venus’ face nicely framed inside the mirror, she must see something quite different. If the painter reproduced what he saw, then the model must have seen the painter in the mirror” (Bertamini, Latto, and Spooner 2003, 593–599). This means that Venus is looking at the viewer who is looking at Venus, thus the whole works revolves around the act of looking and being looked at. This same principle operates in Bacon’s works as well. Van Alphen explains the use of the motif of the mirror in Bacon’s work through a close reading of Study of a Nude with a Figure in the Mirror (1969). While the female nude is exposed to the viewer in a similar fashion to traditional nude representations, the mirror on the right side of the figure is also turned towards the viewer. This positioning seems to create an analogy between the seated figure reflected in the mirror and the viewer. The exposed female nude, however, replicates the same leg position as the male figure, meaning that these two figures share the same feature. The viewer does so analogously, whose function is represented by the male character (2013, 69). Thus, the viewer becomes contaminated and part of the composition, the cycles of looking and being looked at.

This situation is further complicated by Bacon’s specific instructions on always presenting his works behind glass (Sylvester 2000, 23–24). When looking at the works, the viewers at first see themselves. It takes effort and good positioning to see the figures behind the glass, and even so, the onlookers are continually confronted by their own reflection. I will refer to this aspect of Bacon’s practice (in the same manner as I have done when discussing Munch’s hybrid portrait genre) as “framing the viewer” (2019, 133–153). Reflection theory as well as the physical reflection of painting behind glass is a crucial tool for interpreting Bacon’s portraits. It is through such devices that Bacon frames the viewers to become part of the compositions and eventually identify with his figures.

In Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (1992) van Alphen explains the identification of the viewer with the figures through the theory of the “affective” quality of Bacon’s works in terms of violence done to the viewer by the works: the particular moving quality, in a literal sense (11). Van Alphen argues that Bacon’s works oppose narrativity in a story-conveying sense, however they do not fully rid themselves of narrativity. He argues that Bacon’s works focus on the activity of the narrative process: “This process is not repeatable; it cannot be iterative because it takes place, it happens, whenever ‘story’ happens” (28). He further argues that while the paintings are not narrative, they are experienced as such because they appear to be in motion: “Bacon’s narrativity, the illusion of narrative his work arouses, does not so much involve the representation of a perceived sequence of events, but the representation of perceiving as a sequence of events, which are embodied, not illustrated, by the figures” (30). Therefore, the viewers experience the figures in motion, in such a way that they are “moved” in the same way as the figures.

The mirror and the lamp in Bacon’s works are not used in accordance with Western traditions of representing these elements. Regarding the problematic reflection of the mirror images, van Alphen discusses the possibility of negative hallucination, either from the viewer or the subject itself (75). Nevertheless, the uncertainty about the experience of the hallucination fosters an instability of vision and thus instantiates an instability of identity. “Identity, selfhood, seems to depend on who sees what. When the mirror image is stable, the figure has a demarcated identity. Identity gets blurred when the mirror image cannot be identified as mirror reflection” (75). This identity crisis is further reflected in the motif of the double, the “Doppelgänger”: because there are two identical figures there is too much identity (van Alphen 2019, 174). “In opposition to the lack of identity between mirror reflection and mirrored object, and the eroded identities of the deformed dissolving bodies, the motif of the double can be read as an artificial strategy for establishing or reinstating identity” (1992, 76).

Identity overall is unachievable for Bacon’s subjects. They are confined to closed spaces and positions that do not allow them to see their own bodily (self) perspective in the surrounding world. Due to fragmentation – bodily and spatial, that of the space that surrounds the body – Bacon’s figures cannot be perceived as whole by the viewers. As wholeness depends on the gaze of the other, as soon as one is seen by the other, one becomes whole. Since in this case neither figures nor viewers can become whole, they both equally experience a loss of self. “He leaves figures, as well as onlookers, with their lack of self, which is paradoxically the only situation in which the idea of self, not defined by others or by the surrounding space, can be felt and kept alive” (162). This suggests that a way of maintaining one’s subjectivity is clear delimitation from the other by “loss of self.” As long as one is at a safe distance from the other’s unifying and at the same type stereotyping gaze, they are able to maintain their own subjectivity. Nevertheless, I propose here an alternative manner of sustaining subjectivity, not by escaping from the other, but rather by identifying with the other.

When discussing Munch’s strategy of “framing the viewer” I have argued that through carefully chosen compositional devices such as the insertion of landscape into portraiture, Munch frames the viewers to directly interact with the subject of the composition. The landscape in these paintings is intelligently constructed around the subject in such a way that it propels the figure into the arms of the onlooker. In Bacon’s case when dealing with landscape and portraiture, van Alphen has argued that there is no delimitation between the figure depicted and the surrounding landscape. In works such as the studies for Van Gogh’s portraits, both figure and landscape are executed with large strokes of thick paint, whereas normally Bacon clearly delineates between the figure and its perfectly smooth surrounding. Van Alphen argues that in these compositions Bacon makes the space that surrounds Van Gogh a metaphor of the body – “the landscape is in fact a bodyscape” – where the two form one continuity. The lack of difference between body and space blurs the line between the conceptual categories of inside and outside (142–147). “The space of representation is an ambiguous zone. Just as the line between inside and outside cannot be drawn, so also the distinction between model and representation is fluid” (152). As there is no homogeneous space that could give form and identity to the subject within it (152), a clearly definable and graspable subjectivity cannot be represented in such a composition. I will argue at a later stage however that it is at the convergence of inside and outside where pre-conceived concepts of a stable and depictable subjectivity can be completely re-modeled.

The ambiguity of ontological dimensions in Bacon’s work can be elucidated through a close reading of Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch (1965). In this composition Moraes is depicted on a blue couch that seems to be at the same time inside and outside of the opening door (a door that is also made of two parts). There is also a circular object on the pillow that could represent a mirror. Even if it does not reflect anything, it could possibly allude to Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus. Here again we are brought back to the act of looking and being looked at, but in this case the viewers cannot tell whether the subject is inside or outside of the painting they are viewing. As the work is behind glass, the viewer sees his or herself projected on the canvas, factually becoming part of the composition, through his or her representation inside the glass of the picture frame. Depending on the angle, the gallery space where the painting is hanging is also reflected back into the work, creating the impression that the reclining female figure is in the same physical space as the onlooker. Bacon therefore frames the viewers to appear in the same ontological space as his figures: the viewer’s image appears next to the image of the figure or the figure appears next to the onlooker. They are both in the portrait meaning that they are in fact both portraits.

Bacon sees mimetic representation as sacrificing the subject, therefore he evades this by representing his subjects in motion. In addition to the moving bodily deformations experienced by the figures, Bacon manipulates the way his figures are perceived by onlookers. Nevertheless, he does not stop here, but rather further stages a direct identification between the figures and the onlookers, making the viewers part of the compositions. The viewers become the subjects of the portraits. But what do these portraits depict and how do they influence and manipulate the perception of the viewer?

In my argument I will further refer to Gilles Deleuze’s book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003) to explain the states experienced by the subjects in Bacon’s portraits. Deleuze explains that in his works, Bacon avoids the illustrative in order to escape narrative stories that would appeal to the intellectual understanding of the viewer. Bacon appeals instead to the “figural”, where he isolates the Figures (when referencing Bacon’s works Deleuze capitalizes the word figure in order to make a clear distinction between Bacon’s Figure and the figure seen from a representational, figurative approach in painting) in large fields of uniform colors that co-exist on the same level with the Figure. Their common limit, the Contour, is the place of double exchange between Figure and Structure. This exchange results in movements that are real passages and states, physical and affective and which constitute sensations and not imaginings. Bacon’s goal therefore consists of recording the fact, what Deleuze names the “sensation”, which is transmitted directly to the senses, avoiding the detour of the story which passes through the brain. When the Figures experience sensations, a zone of indiscernibility arises. According to Deleuze this creates a moment of deep identity with the Figure, more profound than any sentimental identification, which is the process of becoming. He concludes that what is rendered in Bacon’s works are invisible forces made visible and which need to be acknowledged and accepted rather than being distracted by them. Through this visibility the body affirms the possibility of triumphing over these hidden forces.

There have been previous attempts at reading Deleuze’s philosophical writings through the prism of religion. Few studies have made a parallel with Buddhist philosophies however, Simon O’Sullivan traces similarities between these two philosophies in his article interpreting Deleuze’s reading of Bergson and Spinoza (O’Sullivan 2014, 257–261). He starts by explaining that Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative book Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (1980; A Thousand Plateaus, 2004) has explicit resonances with contemporary Buddhism. With the emphasis on pragmatics, as “A Thousand Plateaus is a book to be used and not just read, advocating for the subject’s transformation which affirms Becoming over Being” (257). O’Sullivan’s definition of Buddhism builds upon concepts such as the ontological conditions of existence and the transitory state of beings, rather than a strict religious doctrine indebted to a Buddha (or any other form of God or Divinity). “Buddhism offers an ethical programme aimed, ultimately, at a kind of self-transcendence, at least of a self that is fixed and set against the world” (258). O’Sullivan links this modus operandi to Deleuze’s ideas from Différence et Répétition (1968; Difference and Repetition, 1995) and brings these ontological terms together under the concept of immanence: “In Deleuzian terms we might say, Buddhism provides instruction on how to access – and in a sense determine – this groundless ground of our being: meditation, for example, that allows for a contact with an infinite potentiality that lies behind our habitual, and finite, being” (259). He further states that Buddhist meditation allows access to an outside realm from which our subjectivity has itself been formed and it is at the convergence of the inner and outer domains that meaning is produced. In Deleuze’s reading of Bergson it is suggested that this point can be accessed through the gap between stimulus and response.

This in-between point – between action and reaction – is the key moment when the cycle of self-repeating unsatisfactory actions can be broken. Meditation cultivates awareness of the bodily sensations occurring continuously and at any given time, and the mindful observation of events called insight or vipassana is what leads the med[1]itator in liberating their selves from an ongoing world-process (Prebish and Keown 2010, 120). By not reacting to the sensations, or “hesitancy” to reaction in Bergsonian terms, a certain creativity replaces the old impulsive-reactive modes of behavior, liberating the organism from predetermined patterns of action.

Buddhist meditation, this time as insight practice (vipassana), allows an experimental encounter with this other place – of forever changing elations of intensities – that in itself produces a self-overcoming […]. This “knowledge” – of impermanence–insubstantiality–interconnectedness – is not solely intellectual but is, precisely, bodily. It is a direct experience, registered on the body – of the rising and fallings, the comings and goings, of sensation (Prebish and Keown 2010, 261).

Deleuze interprets the bodily deformations in Bacon’s works as reaction to sen[1]sations experienced by the body. Buddhist practices always advocate for a conscious engagement in the observation of the sensations acting on the body. In Deleuze’s reading, the experiencing of these sensations creates a zone of indiscernibility which has a transcendental potential (between man and animal, but also between the viewers and the Figure, as the viewer identifies with the Figure, meaning that the viewer as the same experiences as the Figure). Similarly, in Buddhist practices, meditation allows an experimental encounter with another place that in itself produces a self-overcoming. Thus far, Deleuze ’s reading of Bacon’s works shares many similarities with certain Buddhist concepts.

In another essay comparing writing on art and the Buddhist puja, O’Sullivan proposes a case study of what the puja does rather than what it is (a concept similar to Deleuze and van Alphen’s understanding of Bacon’s works in terms of what they do rather than what they mean) (2001, 115–121). The puja is a ceremony centered around an arrangement of objects related to the figure of the Buddha. It is a ritual but also an immersive space, where all senses are engaged, and one that attempts to operate as a portal to other worlds in which the invisible (that which lies outside the human register) can be made visible (116–117). Besides sensations, the puja also involves becoming. Buddha, understood as a presence, “works as a border guard/ guide between worlds and also as a manifestation of the possibility of moving into these other worlds. […] The Buddha then is the possibility of what we can become (a vision and aspiration). […] Human but also transhuman” (117). Meditation, the grounds for the arising of “Enlightenment,” leads to self-overcoming that is the goal of the puja. In this ritual there is a certain surrendering of one’s self to that which lies beyond oneself. The puja “celebrates this line of flight from the self as an affirmation of the potentiality of all beings to become more than what they are (to transform themselves)” (118). What the puja and Buddhist practices add then to the possibility of self-overcoming is the potentiality of complete change/transformation, a moment of complete creativity that allows re-writing and re-determining of the old self.

To return to Bacon’s works, Deleuze’s identified state of indiscernibility achieved in Bacon’s works corresponds to the key moment in meditational practices between action and reaction when the cycle of self-repeating unsatisfactory actions can be broken. Both refer to a self-transcendental (self-overcoming) potential. In Buddhist practices, this point between action and reaction goes a step further, asserting that this is the moment when pre-determined conditions can be re-determined. At this point one can create him or herself anew, no longer accepting previously created and accepted values or assumptions. As Bacon’s works are mostly portraits, it is the portrait in his œuvre that offer the possibility of self-overcoming for both subject and object. What is added to the genre of portraiture in Bacon’s works when reading it through the prism of Buddhist practices is the opening up of the potential of complete transformation of pre-determined conditions of the genre.

If we analyze Bacon’s works through Deleuze’s interpretation and its similarities to Buddhist practices, we understand that the figures’ bodily deformations are a result of their experiencing the continually arising and passing sensations which occur in all beings at any given time. The deformations, just as the sensations, are continuously changing and therefore materialize as diverse bodily distortions. The whole body – or “emanation” as described by Bacon – is a continuous flow of energy. The body, as a mass of energy, is in continuous interaction with the outside world through its sense organs – interactions which trigger a bodily reaction. Once a sensation has occurred – of aversion or pleasure – and has been interpreted as positive or negative, an immediate reaction will follow (I hit my leg and as a result I will scream out in pain). If this reaction were to be represented in painting, it would be narrative, a narrative sequence, as whatever would be painted would be the direct effect of a cause. The reaction would entail a movement that would lead to a logical course of action. As Bacon’s figures seem to be in movement, they are interpreted as reacting to a situation that they are experiencing in the moment. Bacon’s figures, however, are not responding to external actions. As explained by Deleuze, the movement they are undergoing is due to the sensations exerted upon them from the inside. Nevertheless, they do not engage in coherent action. The facial expressions and grimaces the figures display inform the viewers about the type of sensation they are experiencing.

Bacon seems to have depicted a great number of figures experiencing sensations that create aversion, hence the screaming and grinding of teeth so often encountered in his paintings. Nevertheless, these expressions are in fact motionless: they are mute screams; screams that only mimic the action of screaming. Deleuze explains: “What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by the wind or deformed by an aspiration, but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. “To make the spasm visible” (Deleuze 2003, XI). In such works as Landscape with Pope/Dictator (1946), Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) or Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) – the scream is immobilized on the figure’s face through the act of representation. When one screams in pain one’s face will be contorted to accommodate the very physical action of screaming. Bacon’s figures however only open their mouth to show the way a scream would occur. These figures seem to receive the sensation, they evaluate it, yet they do not act out fully the reaction. Moreover, at times Bacon’s figures seem to experience positive sensations as well. In the portrait Study for Head of George Dyer (1967) the depicted head has a peaceful expression. Numerous forces are acting upon this face, creating contortion, deformation, and movement, nevertheless the head seems to be at peace in this moment, with the eyes closed, in what seems to be a serene moment of contemplation on the forces being exerted upon it. Regardless of its positive or negative nature, it is this moment of intense sensorial experience and observation that is depicted in Bacon’s works.

The question certainly remains why such figures in Study After Velazquez (1950) or Study for Head (1952) seem actively engaged in the act of screaming, with contracted facial muscles completely absorbed in the action. Deleuze explains that “in the end, Bacon’s Figures are not racked bodies at all, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. A man ordered to sit still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume contorted postures. The violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit, but also of a hysterical, involuntary smile…” (x). When comparing this reading to Buddhist meditation practices, one knows that while complete awareness and equanimity are desired in meditation, physical pain, even if closely monitored, can still act out. These are the moments during meditation when one changes position, sneezes, coughs, cries, or laughs. These works could therefore be interpreted as studies that capture the moment of distraction that escapes close scrutiny and allows for the acting out or experiencing of the sensation exerted upon the body. As one advances in the meditation practice and becomes more familiar with the technique, one gains more control over the reaction process and becomes less distracted by strong sensations. In the 1940s and 1950s, Bacon’s figures seem to be at the beginning of their meditative process, as they are depicted blurrier, murkier and agitated. By the end of Bacon’s career his figures become much clearer in execution (such as Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988, or Two Studies for a Portrait, 1990), with less distortions, contractions, and movement. It seems that with the passing of years, Bacon depicted figures that have more control over their reactions and can remain neutral despite their bodily sensations. Deleuze explained this as the affirmation of the possibility of victory over the deforming invisible forces that are now visible, and therefore graspable: “When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force, or even befriending it” (62). Befriending, therefore, can be seen in Bacon’s case as an acceptance of the forces acting upon the body at all times.

To further develop my argument, I propose considering this common moment of in-betweenness the figures are caught in as the very moment when transformation can occur. The instance that Deleuze identifies as the moment of becoming and which in Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s works concerns a deep identification between man and animal/Figure and viewer, in Buddhism corresponds to a point of maximum awareness, where self-transcendence can be taken to a further level. This is not only a self-transcendent moment of interaction with another, as Deleuze suggests, but also a moment when one can access an outside realm from which subjectivity has itself been formed; it is at the convergence of inside and outside where pre-conceived concepts of a stable and depictable subjectivity can be completely re-modeled. When one looks at a portrait, one tries to understand this based on a pre-supplied set of rules for understanding a portrait. Nevertheless, in this moment of becoming there is a possibility of re-determining the way a portrait can be understood. The re-determining begins at first at a formal level where the Figures are neither figurative nor abstract; they are rather in a state of indiscernibility. Before Bacon there were no portraits where the subjects were captured in this in-between moment, which transforms the work into what Deleuze also calls neither subject nor object. In Bacon’s works the figures are not presented in a moment that speaks of their individuality, neither are they caught in a moment of complete absence of individuality, but rather in a state of transition, of becoming. As neither subject nor object, the portrait enters a state of in-between where its pre-determined parameters can be re-determined. In this moment it does not need to represent or evoke for the viewer, nor to solely engage and interact with the viewer. The portrait does not now consign the Figure to immobility but, on the contrary, renders apprehensible a kind of progression, an exploration of the Figure’s potentiality. In this moment of re-determination the portrait in Bacon’s works does not fall back on the concepts of clear distinction between portrait and viewer, rather it becomes one with its viewer.

In his essay “Making Sense of Affect” van Alphen explains that the invisible reality made visible in Bacon’s works touches the viewer as much as the Figures, through affects: “that is, by the surface layers, which are senseless as such, but are put into motion by the painter in such a way that they touch us” (2013, 67). Affects and percepts activate and stimulate the viewer’s senses to a point where the “viewers are touched directly and almost violently by the material presence of his paintings. It is as if our skin is penetrated by affects generated by the presence of what we see: not a mediated story, but the material reality of the painting” (66). The deformations going on in the painting are therefore not only directed to the Figures, but also to the viewers, where the deformations are brought onto the Figures and the viewers alike. Van Alphen further explains that “how he wants to affect the viewer imply that the figures in Bacon’s paintings can be seen as representing viewers: the bodies in the paintings exhibit the kind of responses that the viewer is also intended to have. His figures are hit by sense perception in the same way as the viewers of Bacon ’s paintings are” (73). Bacon’ s works therefore become portraits of the viewers who are intended to experience the same bodily sensation as the figures depicted.

Consequently, the portrait does not just represent – it creates. Through entering the painting (similar to entering the puja) both the viewer and the Figures have the capacity to transform themselves – to become more than what they already are. The portrait is no longer a fixed point, a reassuring mirror of (one’s own) subjectivity, but an experiment in exploring what lies beyond a fixed subjectivity. The portrait is a zone of transformation, an aesthetic zone in which boundaries between subjects and objects are blurred. In Bacon’s works as well as in Buddhist practices, interest lies in affects rather than meanings, experience rather than understanding, and transformation rather than representation. All of this is a call for participation in accessing something outside one’s own boundaries of subjectivity. This does not limit the de-coding of the portrait but rather opens it up for further interpretation. The portrait becomes an event, where determinate relations between the portrait and the viewer disappear.

Subjectivity is therefore rendered in the process of transformation as one has no stable identity. We can only hint at the changing nature of identity through change – one needs to transform, to become, in order to realize this. One can only grasp transformation via transforming oneself: through the process of becoming, while viewing these portraits. Portraiture therefore does not remain a stable composition that can render certainty, rather it becomes a fluid process that adapts alongside the viewer. These portraits show subjectivity in transformation in order to reflect reality. There is no such thing as a portrait that fully encapsulates inner features or characteristics. The portrait is something in continuous change, which cannot be pinned down. The only way to create a truthful portrait is to render the change. The only way to understand the change is to identify with it. Through becoming – in a Buddhist sense – one transcends his or her own self. One no longer perceives subjectivity as something stable, belonging only to oneself, but rather understands it as being ungraspable and in continuous change.

Alphen, Ernst van. 1992. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion Books.

Alphen, Ernst van. 2005. Art in Mind. How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Alphen, Ernst van. 2013. “Making Sense of Affect.” In Francis Bacon: Five Decades, ed. by Anthony Bond, 65–73. London: Thames and Hudson.

Alphen, Ernst van. 2019. “Reading for Affects: Francis Bacon and the Work of Sensation.” In How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, ed. by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa, 163–176. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Belting, Hans. [2013] 2017. Face and Mask. A Double History. Trans. by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bertamini, Marco, Richard Latto, and Alice Spooner. 2003. “The Venus Effect: People’ s Understanding of Mirror Reflections in Paintings.” Perception 32, 5: 593–599.

Deleuze, Gilles. [1981] 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. by Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. [1980] 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. Lelik, Timea Andrea. 2019. “Framing the Viewer: Edvard Munch’s Hybrid Genres.” In Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference 7: 133–153.

Peppiatt, Michael. 2008. Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Prebish, Charles S. and Damien Keown. 2010. Introducing Buddhism. London and New York: Routledge.

O’Sullivan, Simon. 2001. “Writing on Art (Case Study: The Buddhist Puja).” Parallax 7, 4: 115–121.

O’Sullivan, Simon. 2014. “A Life between the Finite and Infinite: Remarks on Deleuze, Badiou and Western Buddhism.” Deleuze Studies 8, 2: 256–279.

Sylvester, David. 2000. Looking Back at Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson.

Woodall, Joanna. 1997. “Introduction: Facing the Subject.” In Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. by Joanna Woodall, 1–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Le Centre Pompidou réunit de façon magistrale l’œuvre peinte après 1971 — date du suicide de son compagnon George Dyer

— par l’artiste des couples en lutte. Et l’éclaire subtilement à travers six des auteurs de sa vaste bibliothèque d’autodidacte.

Ce «Bacon en toutes lettres» n’est pas seulement un Bacon entre les lignes et en très grands formats. C’est aussi, selon la volonté affirmée de son commissaire Didier Ottinger, le Francis Bacon (Dublin 1909-Madrid 1992) au sommet de sa maestria. Le peintre d’après 1971, qui a été auparavant plus qu’expérimental et qui est désormais capable de reprendre ses tableaux devenus iconiques pour les réinterpréter totalement. Study of Red Pope, 1962, Second version, 1971, sorti d’une collection particulière, et Second Version of «Painting 1946», Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971, provenant du Musée Ludwig de Cologne, ouvrent donc ce chemin d’excellence. Il fait de Bacon le terrible, jouisseur fasciné par les étals de boucherie et l’élan bestial de la chair, ce peintre presque subliminal qui pose des fantômes de corps sur des fonds rose tendre, bleu céleste, mauve anglais, orange de plein été.

Ce rendez-vous au sommet avec Bacon commence par un Autoportrait de 1976, donné au Musée Cantini de Marseille, flanqué de ses deux préfaciers français, Michel Leiris dès la première exposition parisienne en 1966 à la galerie Maeght et Jacques Dupin qui prend le relais à la mort de Leiris, pour la Galerie Lelong. La série des Papes, la plus célèbre et la plus célébrée de Bacon, n’est donc ici que de manière allusive, comme une introduction au génie, ce marginal.

Les trois premiers triptyques, qualifiés par un critique anglais de «triptyques noirs», quoique roses et mauves, par leur inspiration - le suicide sordide de son compagnon George Dyer, mélancolique au passé de boxeur, deux jours avant la rétrospective du Grand Palais en 1971 —, ouvrent large l’éventail des thèmes et des formes, ce code de lecture que le visiteur acquiert ainsi d’un bloc.

Une palette qui explose d’intensité après le drame, «un moment de libération technique et psychologique», souligne Didier Ottinger. Il y a un récit dans ces tableaux qui ont quelque chose de sacré par leur taille, leur trio, le bois doré de leurs cadres. Un conte effrayant de la condition humaine. «Bacon en toutes lettres»? Ce récit en images, si pictural, est confronté six fois à des auteurs et des livres qui ont appartenu à la vaste bibliothèque de Bacon l’autodidacte. De petites salles vides, en retrait comme des confessionnaux, où des textes — brefs mais éloquents — sont lus par des comédiens, sont l’écho de sa mémoire. Certains face-à-face sont évidents et explicites, comme le Triptyque inspiré par L’Orestie d’Eschyle, 1981, venu de l’Astrup Fearnley Museet d’Oslo. Parfois, c’est plus allusif, comme l’intérêt pour la tauromachie venu de Michel Leiris (Étude pour Corrida II, 1969, prêté par le Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon ou Étude d’un taureau, 1991, collection particulière).

La marche de Bacon, des corps de lutteurs photographiés par Eadweard Muybridge au XIXe, qui lui servent de modèles, vers le tableau accompli, le «tableau immaculé», est le fil d’Ariane de cette superbe rétrospective (la métaphore sexuelle assez claire de Water from a Running Tap, 1982, collection particulière). L’extraordinaire netteté et précision du tableau l’emporte dans cette vision très muséale d’un homme à l’atelier légendaire par son chaos et sa crasse, à la vie plus que tumultueuse dont les excès dépassent l’imaginaire du commun des mortels.

Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Rue Beaubourg, côté rue Saint-Merri (IVe). Tél.: 01 44 78 12 33. Horaire: tlj de 11 h à 21 h, sauf le mar. jusqu’au 20 jan. 2020. Catalogue: «Bacon en toutes lettres» (Éd. du C. P., 42 €).

LARA MARLOWE | CULTURE | ART & DESIGN | THE IRISH TIMES | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2019

Francis Bacon met George Dyer, the man he most painted and most desired, when Dyer, a petty criminal from east London, dropped through the skylight of Bacon’s mews house one night in 1963, intending to commit robbery.

“You’re very clumsy for a burglar,” Bacon allegedly told Dyer, who was 25 years his junior. “Take your clothes off. Come into my bed, and afterwards you can take whatever you want to.”

Bacon’s tender and brutal relationship with Dyer lasted eight years, until Dyer died from an overdose of alcohol and barbituates in their Paris hotel room, two days before Bacon’s retrospective was to open at the Grand Palais, in October 1971.

Bacon was by then world famous, attracting prices that rivalled Picasso’s. Distraught though Bacon was, he hushed up Dyer’s death to prevent it distracting from his crowning achievement.

Francis Bacon: Books and Paintings, a major exhibition spanning the last two decades of Bacon’s oeuvre, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until January 20th, 2020, does not dwell on Bacon’s love life, although his sadomasochistic homosexuality is omnipresent in the paintings. Nor does it mention the astronomical prices commanded by his works. (The record was set by Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold for €106 million in New York in 2013.)

Instead the Pompidou show, curated by Didier Ottinger, focuses on Bacon’s literary inspirations and his late goal of recounting his own life, intertwined with the history of the 20th century. The later paintings are characterised by intense colours, including pinks, mauves, yellows and oranges, and a more precise and spare style.

“After the Paris exhibition I am determined to get started on the painting of my autobiography,” Bacon said, referring to In Memory of George Dyer, his 1971 triptych. “I hope by means of this series to crystallise time, in the same way as Proust did in his novels.”

Bacon was consumed by guilt about Dyer’s death. “Not an hour goes by, of course, when I don’t think about George,” Bacon told his biographer Michael Peppiatt. “I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn’t gone out, if I’d simply stayed in and made sure he was all right, he might have been alive now.

Bacon was born on Baggot Street in Dublin and spent most of the first 16 years of his life in Ireland. Barbara Dawson, director of Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, acquired the contents of Bacon’s London studio, including more than 1,000 books from Bacon’s library, for Dublin in 1998. The studio was reconstructed down to the tiniest details inside the Hugh Lane. A maquette is included in the exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.

Ottinger took the unprecedented approach of comparing Bacon’s oeuvre to prose by six writers who inspired him. The curator borrowed books by Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, TS Eliot and the French writers Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris from the Hugh Lane. Each book is presented in a glass case inside a darkened room. An actor’s voice reads excerpts, in English.

“It may be that Francis Bacon’s literary passion came from his Irish learning,” says Ottinger. “Ireland is the country of poets. Yeats was fundamental for him.”

Ottinger perceives “a profound affinity” among the six writers in their tragic sense of history and Nietzschean philosophy, “by which I mean Dionysus and Apollo, form and meaning, light and shadow, life and death, Eros and Thanatos, civilisation and barbarianism.”

In The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s trilogy of tragic dramas, Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra, who killed her husband, Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia. Bacon was fascinated by the tale, and by Eliot’s modern version in The Family Reunion.

Bacon used the Furies from Aeschylus to symbolise the guilt that gnawed at him about Dyer’s death. In 1988 he painted the Furies as surreal creatures resembling disembodied organs. The first seems to crouch over itself in pain and grief. Two others are threatening and screaming human mouths mounted on neck-like stems.

Bacon’s nightmarish orifices remind one of the mouth that appears on Samuel Beckett’s pitch-black stage in Not I. The painter traced their inspiration to a scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. “I hoped to make the best painting of a human scream,” he told the British art critic David Sylvester. “I wasn’t able. Eisenstein’s is much better.”

Meat carcasses are another recurring theme. “A friend from Bacon’s youth later recounted how Bacon would stop at a butcher’s shop in Kildare on the cycle ride back from Naas tennis club,” Barbara Dawson recalls.

“If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal,” Bacon later told Sylvester. Like Aeschylus, Bacon favoured the triptych as a form of expression.

In Memory of George Dyer, from 1971, shows Dyer as a boxer who has suffered a knockout blow, writhing on the floor. In the middle panel, a dark figure stands before the staircase to their room in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères. Torn newspapers, another recurring theme, are Bacon’s nod to cubism. A disembodied arm is wrapped around the dark figure’s back, and turns a key in a lock.

Bacon borrowed the image of the arm from Picasso’s Bathers of Dinard, which he had seen in a 1927 exhibition at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris. Bacon worked as a decorator at the time. Picasso’s surrealist canvases made him want to be a painter. In 1936 he tried to join a surrealist exhibition in London, but he was rejected on the grounds he was not surrealist enough.

In the right-hand panel of In Memory of George Dyer, Bacon’s dead lover is framed in profile. Dyer appears cleaved in two at the chest. His mutilated trunk falls forward from the portrait and lands like a reflection on a blue tabletop. White paint is smattered across Dyer’s chest. Bacon marked paintings that held an erotic charge for him with sperm-like stains.

Triptych May-June 1973 recounts the circumstances of Dyer’s death. On the left, a male figure is crouched on the toilet, the position in which Dyer was found. In the centre, black shadows seep from Dyer’s anguished figure, beneath a naked light bulb. On the right, Dyer vomits into a sink. Again, Bacon marked the triptych with smears of white paint.

Bacon identified with the tragic sense of history he found in Aeschylus and Conrad. In the 1970s he determined to paint the history of the 20th century, as well as his own life story.

Triptych 1986-1987 portrays historic figures, including Woodrow Wilson descending the steps of the French foreign ministry after agreeing to the treaty that would lead to the second World War. The site of the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico appears in the same triptych, also inspired by a newspaper photograph. John Edwards, Bacon’s friend, surrogate son and heir, appears seated, naked and oozing pink liquid, in the central panel.

Bacon’s art is too brutal, some might say ghastly, to be immediately accessible or pleasing. The excretions, suppurating wounds, raw meat and carrion are unsettling. But Bacon claimed there was nothing morbid or hard about his painting, “only the violence that surrounds men at every second of their lives”.

“Birth, sex and death. He gets it by the throat,” says Dawson. “It’s visceral. And yet he manages to make it quite beautiful. He creates the most beautiful colours, the most interesting compositions. They can be tender, in the way that a bruised face can be tender.”

There was “a lot of anguish, a lot of torment” in Bacon, Dawson continues. “He said he shared with the Irish a certain exhilarated despair, or a desperate optimism.”

Ottinger, the curator of the Pompidou exhibition, also bridles when I suggest that death and barbarity are the dominant features of Bacon’s oeuvre. “Look at the mastery of the execution,” he says. “Look at his deployment of geometric forms. Bacon was fascinated by perfect forms of geometry. He painted polyhedrons everywhere.”

Polyhedrons are solid figures with many plane faces, usually more than six. They often frame or encase Bacon’s figures.

Bacon developed his concept of immaculate painting in his last decades. The term means, literally, spotless, but it took on an almost metaphysical meaning for him. He told Sylvester that his Water from a Running Tap, from 1982, was the most immaculate of his paintings.

Art historians long considered Bacon’s final 20 years to be his weakest. Ottinger believes they were his best years, “because they appear so to me, and because Bacon said it”. What was so special about them? Ottinger replies with one word: “Immaculate”.

Francis Bacon: Books and Paintings is at the Pompidou Centre, in Paris, until January 20th, 2020

Sotheby’s upcoming Contemporary Art Evening auction features an important early work by Francis Bacon

Throughout the extraordinary oeuvre of Francis Bacon, the human figure is incessantly undone and brutally laid bare: reformed and transposed into primeval animalism, man and beast habitually appear as indistinguishable, if not entirely interchangeable.

This impetus to confront the bestial reality of the human form lies at the very centre of the remarkable early painting, Figure with Monkey. Executed in 1951, this work heralds an incipient moment in Bacon’s career. Following a stay in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, during 1951 alongside numerous visits to South Africa throughout the 1950s, Bacon produced a cycle of wildlife landscapes and animal paintings, including a small series of caged screaming monkeys.

Comprising four paintings in total, three of which prestigiously reside in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Figure with Monkey stands as the very first from this extraordinary corpus, and the only one left in private hands. The sheer force of Bacon’s painterly invention here commands a magnificent coalition of the artist’s unbridled fascination with wild animals and his inimitable impulse to expose the primal nature of man.

Dramatically fixed around the open-mouthed bestial scream – the quintessential Baconian leitmotif – Figure with Monkey represents a unique and pioneering articulation of the dialectical "zone of indiscernibility" between man and animal vitally intrinsic to Bacon’s astounding artistic legacy (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16).

"This key notion in Bacon’s art, that man is an animal, was explored in numerous paintings throughout the 1950s in which humans and monkeys are depicted as interchangeable, if not almost indistinguishable: both imprisoned in dark cages with their mouths opened in screams."

MICHAEL PEPPIATT IN: EXH. CAT., NORWICH, SAINSBURY CENTRE FOR VISUAL ARTS, AND TRAVELLING, FRANCIS BACON IN THE 1950S, 2006, P. 24.

Despite fiercely avoiding contact with domestic pets owing to severe asthma, Bacon remained captivated by wild animals. Littering the floor of his infamously chaotic studio, a vast and disparate matrix of visual and photographic resources provided an instant well-spring of creative inspiration. Among the various books, magazines and photographs at his disposal, Eadweard Muybridge’s paradigmatic Animal Locomotion, 1877-78, and Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa published in 1925 have been cited as distinctly influential, while smudged, paint smeared and oil-stained depictions of monkeys on torn pages from Life History of Orang-Outan.

Hutchinson’s Animals of All Countries also contributed to the broad array of visual stimuli called forth and transmogrified into Bacon’s inimitable canon. Nonetheless the desire to see for himself and photograph such wildlife in situ, most notably at Kruger National Park, was a major driving force behind the several trips Bacon made to see his mother, who had moved to South Africa in the early 1950.

Remembering these trips Bacon declared: "I felt mesmerised by the excitement of seeing animals move through the long grass"; an enthusiasm that translated to a memorable body of work including the magnificent Elephant Fording a River from 1952 (Francis Bacon cited in: Michael Peppiatt, Exh. Cat., Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 2006, p. 26). Although undeniably related, Bacon’s series of monkey paintings are starkly differentiated from the safari styled telephoto-reportage of Elephant Fording a River. Snarling, writhing and contorted, these encaged beasts bear a more immediate affinity with Bacon’s treatment of the human subject.

Bacon outlined his interest in monkeys as stemming "from the fact that like humans they are fascinated with their own image, and that their interest in themselves is displayed with an abandon and relish rarely equalled by men" (Francis Bacon cited in: Martin Harrison, In Camera Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 200). This 'abandon' is expertly deployed in Figure with Monkey via the focal lure of the monkey’s glinting-jawed shriek. Bacon depicts a moment of volatile release; frightening, spontaneous and primal, the scream is the epicentre of drama and the point at which both animal and man converge; "...everything is in flux, unstable, as Bacon weaves another mystery" (Martin Harrison, Ed., Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II. 1929-57, London 2016, p. 233).

The formidable dark silhouette of the encaged screaming beast is tentatively reached for by a faceless suited man. Here, Bacon imparts a projection of the elemental nature residing behind Man’s veil of appearance. Nominally segregated by the field of criss-cross fencing, the visual connection between man and monkey nonetheless incites a reading of Bacon’s assertion that "we nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens" (Francis Bacon cited in: Exh. Cat., Norwich, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, op. cit., p. 26).

In this regard, Figure with Monkey beautifully illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s crucially groundbreaking philosophical elaboration on Francis Bacon. As propounded by Deleuze, "Sometimes an animal [in Bacon’s work] is treated as the shadow of its master, or conversely, the man’s shadow itself assumes an autonomous and indeterminate animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we have been sheltering. In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecideability between man and animal" (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London 2003, p. 16)

Distended and intimidating, the incomprehensible monkey appears as a shadow out of which the dramatic locus of the painting emerges: the monkey’s terrifying scream. Simultaneously shrinking away, the figure of the suited man tentatively extends his grasp towards the unnaturally contorted gape of looming razor-sharp teeth; here the monkey gives violent expression to the faceless and mute primal shadow of Man. In other works of the later 1950s, rather than depict the bipartite relationship between man and monkey, ape-like forms are carried over to many of the hulking male nudes, choosing to favour the prehensile crouch of the primate for an evocation of primordial physicality.

The aggressive and contained animality of Figure with Monkey underlines an obsessive preoccupation with the mouth as bestial centre and agent of the primal scream – a motif that would later find its ultimate manifestation in the career defining series of Popes after Velazquez’s 1650 masterpiece Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Immediately presaging the very first Pope paintings produced that same year, this work emerged at the outset of a pivotal period which was to define Bacon as a major artist.

To quote Michael Peppiatt, "by focussing on what was most animal in man – the primal scream – Bacon had found the single image which was to define his vision" (Michael Peppiatt, op. cit., p. 24.

Indeed, the 1950s denote a period of experimentation in Bacon’s career through which thematic aspects would later filter into the Man in Blue series, which featured foreshortened spatial interiors contained within a delineated scaffold. Figure with Monkey represents an innovative disclosure of Bacon’s interest in such framing devices: engulfed by the encompassing field of mesh fencing, this work delivers an early intimation of Bacon’s employment of 'space-frames' – the term coined by David Sylvester to denote the structural and psychological framing device used to convey the haunting spectacle of man’s alienation and defamation.

Today, Figure with Monkey represents one of the earliest and fully realised examples of Bacon’s explicit and nightmarish interchangeability of man and primate. Bacon famously apprehended the human race as inherently savage and nowhere is this more apparent than in the present work.

The Irish-born, British figurative painter Francis Bacon was clear: ‘To write about my life would only amount to a bit of gossip.’ It is perhaps for this reason that the artist’s estate, in conjunction with publisher Thames & Hudson, has decided to inaugurate its new series of books on the artist with this one, comprising five essays by contributors from across the fields of art, psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroarthistory and neuroaesthetics. Instead of looking at the outer life and biography of the artist, the authors seek to reconstruct salient aspects of his neural formation and explore their role in his creative process.

Bacon frequently stated that his imagery came directly from the unconscious, and this is picked up throughout the volume, particularly by psychoanalyst Steven Jaron, who cites the artist, referencing his favourite poet TS Eliot, as speaking of painting as ‘the pattern of one’s nervous system being projected on the canvas’.

Artist Christopher Bucklow’s lyrical contribution proposes that Bacon’s work, in particular Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), represents not only his own psychosomatic symptoms, but those of an entire culture. He argues that the artist’s style is deliberately sketchy so as to circumvent conscious deliberation and allow him to represent not the reality of his subjects, but their reality for him.

British psychoanalyst Darian Leader looks at French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his ‘mirror stage’ in the development of the self, relating this to Bacon’s distorted imagery (some other theories, however, seem less plausible), while professor of neuroaesthetics Semir Zeki offers a truly fascinating essay on Bacon’s obsession with deformity and violence and his desire to create a ‘visual shock’, looking at the brain’s facility for facial recognition.

Some essays require more knowledge than others, but, overall, this is a fascinating and fresh take on a much-analysed artist, providing input from a new range of voices from different and exciting scientific fields.

Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology. Edited by Martin Harrison, The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, £28

Family Skeletons was not a description of the milieu in which Henrietta Garnett was raised as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, although there were enough skeletons there to fill several cupboards. Rather it was the title of her first novel, a strange, haunting and somewhat gothic tale of a beautiful, isolated young girl’s struggle to come to terms with the many tragedies that almost overwhelm her.

It appeared in 1986, by which time Garnett was 41. “The book took me so long to write because I knew it had to be good,” she told an interviewer from The Times. “I wanted the book to be like going to a very good party, where you are entertained, but also kept slightly in suspense.”

Readers might have been disappointed in the lack of autobiography within its pages, but this paper’s critic was largely positive, declaring: “Henrietta Garnett has a natural gift for story-telling, and much of this novel is so good that it is easy to forgive the occasional archness and pretentiousness . . . [She] is particularly adept at expressing that elusive emotion, tenderness, even if sex provides too many easy answers in the latter half of the book.”

It would be 18 years before Garnett put pen to paper again. The delay was perhaps because she felt that her true vocation was as an actress, but she had been beaten by sibling rivalry. “My elder sister went to drama school and it was felt that I couldn’t just follow in her footsteps,” she said. “In fact, my sister was the natural writer, and I was the natural actress. So I had to learn my craft slowly and painfully. I had to feel anything I published had individual merit. Now I find that, although the act of writing is difficult, it’s something I can’t not do. It has become addictive.”

This second venture into print was as a biographer, with Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the tale of William Makepeace Thackeray’s daughter, whose friends included anyone who was anyone of the late Victorian years, including the Dickens family, the Tennysons, Browning and Ruskin.

In 2012 Garnett published her third and final book, Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and their Muses, which brought fresh interest to the subject of the pre-Raphaelites by focusing on their lovers. Although Garnett had not set out to find a 19th-century equivalent of the Bloomsburys, she told the BBC that she could not help but notice the “distinct resemblances between the two groups”.

Henrietta Catherine Garnett was born in 1945, the second daughter of David Garnett and his wife, Angelica (née Bell; obituary; May 7, 2012), a painter and writer who was the niece of Virginia Woolf. It was a complex family background, not least because David had once been the lover of Duncan Grant, Angelica’s father. Henrietta’s elder sister Amaryllis drowned in the Thames in 1973 aged 29; a younger sister, Nerissa (Nel), died from a brain tumour in 2004; and Nerissa’s twin, Frances (Fanny), lives in France.

The sisters were brought up at Hilton Hall, a Jacobean manor near St Ives in Cambridgeshire, and were educated at Huntingdon grammar school. “I’ve been damned lucky in my family, to have grown up in beautiful houses, to be surrounded by people at the forefront of so many avant-garde literary and political movements,” Garnett once said. On another occasion, however, she wrote to her cousin Virginia Nicholson: “I never received either one ounce of formal education or of mental discipline in my life.”

Holidays were spent at Charleston, home of the Bloomsbury Group in East Sussex, where Garnett recalled being painted by Vanessa Bell, who would sit behind her easel “mixing the colours on her palette, glancing first at me and then at the portrait, gently stabbing the canvas, so that one could see its back quiver from the impressions she made on it. The glances she sent across the room were extraordinarily intimate and reassuring: an observant nod, an amused smile, in order to encourage me to keep still.”

Garnett once wrote of Charleston that it “had the most powerful identity of any place that I had known. It reeked of itself: of turpentine and toast, of apples, damp walls and garden flowers. The atmosphere was one of liberty and order, and of a strength which came from its being a house in which the inhabitants were happy . . .”

While her contemporaries were preparing for their A levels, 17-year-old Henrietta was married, became a mother and widowed — all within a year. Her husband was Burgo Partridge, the son of Frances Partridge and her half-brother’s cousin. Burgo was nine years her senior and she described him as “the most beautiful man I have ever seen”. A year after their wedding, while she was in the bath and their three-week-old daughter, Sophie, was sleeping in her crib, Partridge suffered a fatal aortic aneurysm during a telephone conversation with the journalist Peter Jenkins.

Garnett recalled being in a state of shock. “My father took me to lunch to try to cheer me up, and gave me a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” she told The Times in 1986. “It was kindly meant, but the last thing I wanted at that time was any kind of liaison. Although our marriage was so brief, it was very happy. I felt I could not stay in England any longer, so I went to Spain with my daughter. It was much less touristy and more beautiful then.”

Burgo left her £10,000, which meant she had no immediate financial worries. “I did some writing in Spain,” she said. “But actually I found it much easier to read and be a bookworm and lark about. I used to dance a lot in those days and went to many nightclubs.” She then drifted somewhat. Her cousin described “glamorous days, with the young widow rediscovering her joie de vivre among the peacocks, fashonistas, rock stars and artists of 1960s London”. Yet there were also “vagabond days in Cumbria and Ireland with the aristocratic dropouts, or chequebook hippies as she later called them, who took to the road in painted caravans”.

Garnett told The Times: “I suppose I hoped that travelling would help me forget my grief. But in the mid-1960s I came back to England and had a truly wonderful time, meeting pop stars and musicians and living it up. I became very much a part of the Swinging Sixties, but then got bored with the life and toured the country with my daughter in gypsy caravans.”

In 1967 Frances Partridge (obituary, February 7, 2004), Garnett’s mother-in-law, observed how “Henrietta cooked magnificently, played Bach on the piano slowly and lovingly, and spoke in favour of Buddhism and marijuana”. Partridge kept a watchful eye on young Sophie and helped to pay for her granddaughter’s upbringing and education. Garnett is survived by Sophie, who trained in alternative medicine and had her own family.

As the years went by, Garnett enjoyed the company of several lovers and married her second husband, John Couper, an art dealer. In 1977 she attempted to take her own life by jumping from the roof of a London hotel, resulting in permanent injuries. Only then did she knuckle down to writing her novel.

While recuperating in France she met a musician who told her: “You have to understand that your body is now permanently damaged and it is now time for you to use your brain instead. It’s obvious you’re a writer, you always have been, and now you must get on and write.”

Her third marriage, in 1986, was to John Baker, a writer of technical articles and brochures. They had first met on a train a dozen years earlier and felt drawn to each other, but he was married with a young child and they agreed that an affair would be “impossibly shoddy”.

When Family Skeletons was published Baker read an interview with Garnett in The Times and wrote to her. They met in Dieppe, where she was living, and were married 14 days later in St Pancras register office, “in front of a fake Canaletto” as she recalled. Their “love at first sight” was the subject of a BBC Two programme in November 1987, by which time the marriage was effectively over.

Garnett, whose Gauloises habit contributed to the bewitching huskiness of her musically purring voice, moved to France in 1990 with Mark Divall, a former gardener at Charleston. After 12 years they went their separate ways and she settled in a mews house in Chelsea, while a few years later he returned to gardening at Charleston.

Her cousin concluded: “Sometimes she tried our patience — especially after a glass or three of red wine — with her famously uninhibited interventions: a lack of reserve characteristic of her later years. Backstage in the green room, in the convivial familiarity of her grandparents’ house, she was usually the last to leave the party.”

Henrietta Garnett, author, was born on May 15, 1945. She died from pancreatic cancer on September 4, 2019, aged 74

Henrietta Garnett in the late 1980s, after the publication of her first novel, Family Skeletons

When William Burroughs met Francis Bacon a lot of tea was drunk, cigarettes smoked, a few secrets shared but very little was revealed about the two men. At times, this “historic meeting” of two great minds in 1982 is like the old class reunion where two former pupils meet up only to find they have very little in common other than they once shared the same classroom together.

The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell. Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacy who used to beat him with a leather studded belt. Bacon once remarked in a documentary that he had lost all of his teeth to his lovers—Lacy was the boyfriend who knocked most of them out.

It was Allen Ginsberg who first introduced Bacon to Burroughs as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote. Ginsberg had also wanted Bacon to paint his portrait in the act of having sex with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Bacon wondered if Ginsberg would be able “to keep it up” for the duration of the sitting. In the 1960s, Ginsberg again asked Bacon to paint his portrait. Bacon demurred claiming he had an aversion to long hair and beards and preferred painting short-haired, clean-shaven men because he could see the skull underneath the skin.

“[Bacon] likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

This meeting between the two men was filmed by Mike Southon at Bacon’s studio/home 7 Reece Mews for a documentary on Burroughs directed by Howard Brookner. Burroughs appeared slightly standoffish, self conscious, and occasionally looks bored though he almost warms up when he riffed on some of his favourite subject matter—Jajouka, Mayans, and immortality. He also looked far older than Bacon, but was in fact five years younger. Bacon is waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy, and delivers the best lines (Jackson Pollock is “a lacemaker,” Mary McCarthy is “a bitch”).

According to Burroughs, when the pair first met in Tangiers they had several conversations about art though Bacon feigned not remembering the details. Burroughs reminded him that he had dismissed the then popular trend in art Abstract Expressionism as “mere decoration.”

Bacon recalled their mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles, going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).

Burroughs seemed a little ill-at-ease having a camera crew film his every word. The pot-bellied Bacon seemed more relaxed (he’s on home turf) and even made the occasional dig at Burroughs. When discussing painters Bacon asks “Do you mean Monet or Manet?” like Lady Bracknell.

This is the unedited footage of something that (understandably) ended up being but a few minutes in Brookner’s finished documentary. I suppose one would have (perhaps) expected something far more scintillating and IQ-raising when two great artists meet but Burroughs and Bacon skate around subjects and stick to those things that obsesses them without revealing too much—even if they can’t always remember people’s last names or who or what it is they’re exactly talking about.

Although she was born with ink in her veins – her illustrious literary lineage stretched back several generations on both her paternal and maternal sides – Henrietta Garnett, who has died from pancreatic cancer aged 74, became a writer only in middle age. Among the eminent Victorians in whose world she subsequently immersed herself she found an escape from her own often turbulent existence.

Her first book, and only novel, an engaging if occasionally implausible tale of romantic awakening published in 1986, bore the resonant title Family Skeletons – of which she had enough to fill several cupboards. It was not a roman à clef but, given her Bloomsbury background, some readers inevitably sought biographical clues in its knotty storyline, with its intimations of incest and suicide.

Henrietta was the second of four daughters of the novelist David Garnett – author of Lady Into Fox and Aspects of Love – and his second wife, Angelica. At the time of Angelica’s birth, her father, the artist Duncan Grant, and her future husband were lovers and both living at Charleston, the farmhouse in Sussex that was one of Bloomsbury’s rural outposts, with her mother, the artist Vanessa Bell; Angelica was brought up as the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive and did not discover her true parentage until she was 18.

Henrietta’s childhood home was Hilton Hall, a splendid though fearfully cold Jacobean house near Huntingdon, and she went to Huntingdon grammar school (now Hinchingbrooke school), but many holidays were spent at Charleston, where she sat for long, happy hours for its resident painters. Charleston, she wrote, had the most powerful identity of any place she had known: “It was an extraordinary treasure chest overflowing with familiar curiosities, beauty, ideas, people and jokes.”

She was upset when, in an acidic memoir, Deceived With Kindness (1984), Angelica later revealed some of the dirty linen buried at the bottom of the chest. Henrietta became fully aware of her complicated inheritance only on the eve of her own marriage.

That marriage, when she was barely 17, grafted a further branch on to Bloomsbury’s already tangled family tree. Henrietta’s husband was Burgo Partridge, the son of her parents’ friends Ralph and Frances Partridge (Frances was also the sister of David Garnett’s first wife, Ray Marshall), 10 years her senior. A year later their daughter, Sophie, was born. Sophie was four weeks old, asleep in her Moses basket while Henrietta took a bath, when Burgo, in the middle of a telephone conversation with his friend the political journalist Peter Jenkins, dropped dead of an aortic aneurysm.

As a teenage widow, Henrietta cut a figure at once tragic and glamorous. She was soon swept into the carefree, hedonistic whirl of the swinging 60s. For a while she led a nightclub life in Marbella. Later in that decade she joined a band of aristocratic drop-outs led by Mark Palmer – “chequebook hippies”, as she later described them – who drifted around Britain in a cavalcade of horse-drawn Gypsy caravans in search of love and peace.

There followed numerous boyfriends and eventually two more husbands: John Couper, an art dealer, and John Baker, a writer. Henrietta’s initial encounter with the latter, in a train carriage, led to a memorable appearance in a BBC 40 Minutes documentary about love at first sight – although by the time the programme was broadcast the marriage was effectively over.

At times she struggled with her demons and in 1977 she tried to take her own life by throwing herself from the roof of a London hotel, which left her with long-lasting injuries. In the early 80s she settled in France, first in Normandy, then in Provence, with Mark Divall, who had been the gardener at Charleston.

In 2001 Henrietta returned permanently to the UK, to a mews house in Chelsea, London, and latterly also a cottage in Sussex. She had always been fascinated by the 19th-century milieu of Bloomsbury’s forebears.

Anny, her 2004 life of Thackeray’s daughter Anny Ritchie continued a distinguished tradition of family biography: Ritchie was the sister-in-law of Henrietta’s great-grandfather Sir Leslie Stephen and the indomitable “Aunt Anny” immortalised by Virginia Woolf as Mrs Hilberry in her 1919 novel Night and Day. It was also an example of an author and subject perfectly matched, resulting in a wonderfully vivid likeness of her scatty, extravagant and unconventional ancestor.

Her gift for elucidating character through quirky but telling details of dress, thought or behaviour was similarly deployed in Wives and Stunners (2012), her group portrait of the muses, models and mistresses of the pre-Raphaelites – though it was a little over-reliant on secondary sources – and in the pungent memoirs she occasionally wrote of her grandparents and their circle.

None of life’s vicissitudes could dent Henrietta’s bewitching beauty. She was droll, mischievous and uninhibited. She could be exasperating – a menace, even, after one glass too many of red wine – but she was also deeply affectionate and intensely loyal. Quiet courage was perhaps her most impressive quality, a stoical refusal to succumb to self-pity which she maintained till the end.

As Bacon returns to haunt the French capital, we recall a tragic, game-changing show

Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial piece of 70s art cinema, begins with an oil painting of a man on a red bed wearing just a T-shirt, flashing fleshy legs as his face explodes in inky smears. He’s in a room with a green carpet and yellow walls. For a few moments, Bertolucci shows just this portrait – of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon – then a sensual jazz score slowly starts, and the film’s opening credits roll alongside this unmoving canvas. It is succeeded by a brutally dissected female figure sitting on a wooden chair – another Bacon portrait, this time of Henrietta Moraes. Eventually, the two paintings are seen side by side. Then we cut to Marlon Brando in a camel overcoat on a Paris bridge, yelling: “Fucking God!”

Behind Bertolucci’s eerie use of these oil paintings is the shocking story of an art exhibition that gripped Paris, established Bacon as the great European artist he had always dreamt of being – and left a man dead in a hotel toilet. Bertolucci was so astounded by Bacon’s solo show at the Grand Palais – which opened in October 1971, just as he was preparing to make his film in the French capital – that he took Brando to see it. He urged the actor, he later recalled, to “compare himself with Bacon’s human figures because I felt that, like them, Marlon’s face and body were characterised by a strange and infernal plasticity”.

This unsettling quality did not limit itself to those two works. The seedily magnificent Three Figures in a Room, a triptych of two-metre-tall canvases painted in 1964, has enough infernal plasticity to fill anyone’s nightmares. On the left, a man sits naked on the toilet with his back to us. He seems to have no bones except for a line of vertebrae that poke out through his pink, orange and blue skin, which struggles to contain a spilling spread of relaxed muscle. The man’s buttocks fit like a plug into the white porcelain.

The first visitors to the hit retrospective had no idea how uncannily relevant this seven-year-old image was to Bacon’s private anguish. Three Figures in a Room was one of many paintings of the artist’s lover, George Dyer, that stole the show. But on 24 October, two days before the exhibition opened, staff at the Hôtel des Saints Pères found Dyer’s corpse slumped on the toilet. He died from a deliberate overdose.

The peculiar impact Bacon’s art made in Paris, and the violent death that shadowed his success, made this exhibition the defining moment of his art and life. Its spectre is now returning to haunt Paris. This autumn, the Pompidou Centre is mounting a new Bacon blockbuster. It starts by revisiting the Grand Palais show and explores how, from that point until Bacon’s death in 1992, he meditated on Greek tragedy and modern poetry as he repeatedly painted triptychs in memory of Dyer.

It was Georges Pompidou, the cultured former president of France whose memorial is the much-loved arts centre, who officially opened the Grand Palais exhibition and was given a tour by Bacon. It’s hard to imagine former British PMs Harold Wilson or Ted Heath taking a similar interest in these outrageous paintings of the tragic human creature. Margaret Thatcher allegedly called Bacon “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”. But this was France. And Bacon and Paris were made for each other.

In this city, with its rich and sleazy avant-garde traditions going back to poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud in the 19th century, Bacon was seen in a completely different context from the grey and conservative Britain, where he’d made his name in the 1950s. Like his beloved friend Lucian Freud, he was adept at appealing to British taste with portraits that, however radical, were recognisable and so more acceptable to the sceptical postwar British audience than, say, the abstract American paintings he himself sneered at as “old lace”. But in Paris, the true modernity and extremity of his art needed no humanist veneer. In the city of sex and death, Bacon was completely at home.

A photograph of Bacon at the Grand Palais opening offers a glimpse of the French tradition of dirty modernism he so easily slid into. It shows him chatting to two white-haired surrealist painters, Andre André Masson and Joan Miró. Such titans of the prewar Parisian scene were still alive in 1971 – but Masson connects us with a much earlier outrage. When the wealthy psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan bought Gustave Courbet’s The Oigin of the World, he decided this almost anatomical painting of a woman’s sex organs should have a “cover”, just like erotic paintings in earlier ages.

So Masson painted a ghostly outline of Courbet’s nude on a wooden panel that slid over the then secret masterpiece. It’s an episode that typifies the way sex, preferably of a highly disreputable variety, was cherished as a subversive force by French artists, writers and intellectuals from Courbet to the surrealist movement to its epitaph in Last Tango in Paris. Bacon was intensely aware of this culture, which connected left-bank bookshops with fleapit hotels. His friend and model, the artist Isabel Rawsthorne, even had an affair with the decadent surrealist writer Georges Bataille, whose 1928 novel Story of the Eye climaxes with the eyeball of a murdered priest being used as a sex toy.

In short, Paris was ready for Bacon, and he gave it what it wanted. He included his own equivalent of The Origin of the World among the 100-plus paintings at the Grand Palais: Two Figures, which has the feel of a revelation. A door has opened on a dark bedroom where, on roughly painted white sheets, two naked men have been caught having sex. The man on top leers out of the painting as he and his companion enjoy themselves with animal abandon. It’s one of his greatest paintings, and it could be appreciated in Paris in a way that was still difficult for Britain in 1971.

However, it was Bacon’s more recent paintings that defined the show. The star of many of these was a small-time criminal from London’s East End who became Bacon’s lover in 1963. George Dyer came from such a habitually law-breaking family that he remembered his mother trying to rob his pocket money. But he was too “nice”, lamented Bacon, to be a successful criminal.

The artist could easily afford to keep Dyer out of trouble. Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon didn’t see artistic success until he painted his wartime nightmare of twisted gargoyles, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. This was around 1944. By the 60s, with a string of screaming popes behind him, he was rich. Working in a tiny bedsit studio in Kensington, London, he spent his earnings on champagne, fine wines and seafood feasts for his Soho friends. Dyer became part of this slightly desperate bohemia. He went from being a good-looking, well-dressed, would-be gangster to a depressed and clingy alcoholic. As Picasso’s women had found, being a muse sucks.

And there was Dyer’s physique smeared all over the Grand Palais in blue, black and livid red. In the triptych Three Studies of the Male Back, Dyer sits naked in a swivel chair in front of a small, hand-held shaving mirror and a larger rectangular one. Two of the paintings in the triptych show his reflected face as he shaves: it is sharp and hooked, with slicked hair and eyes narrowed and turned away from us. Bacon famously based his popes on Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X – and this enigmatic face in a mirror echoes another Velázquez painting that was kept just a short stroll from Soho: Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery.

Dyer’s back in this triptych is a loose, curvaceous landscape of bone and flesh. It looks as if his skeleton is not joined together but floats independently: a shoulder blade, a spinal column, bulging out of skin that’s soft white and rose, or bruised grey. His neck is massive, his legs roly-poly, his muscles both soft and hard. It is an unabashedly erotic study of male beauty that takes direct inspiration from some of Bacon’s favourite works of art: the drawings of Michelangelo, in which the male back is similarly idolised.

Casually erudite references to Velázquez and Michelangelo go naturally with views of people on the toilet in Bacon’s art. He said his was a “gilded gutter life”, veering between luxury and squalor. That is also true of his paintings as they mix base details with subtle textures and colours, all in sumptuous canvases that echo the old masters. At the Grand Palais, he was striving for greatness, determined to secure a place in the pantheon of high art. He may have chatted to various famous artists at the opening, but there was only one living painter he really wanted to be compared with: Picasso.

Bacon’s critical champion in Paris, who wrote the key essay in the exhibition catalogue, was the surrealist writer Michel Leiris, who was also a close friend of Picasso. According to Leiris, there was a clear connection between the two artists. A 1936 Picasso canvas called Sleeping Nude Woman, which belonged to Leiris and is now in the Pompidou collection, reveals how the men shared a visceral, even obscene surrealism. Picasso distorts female anatomy at will to get a view of his model that’s sheer sensual graffiti. Bacon does the same in his views of Dyer. But he took on Picasso more directly in the years before his Paris show.

Realising that he couldn’t bid for the Spaniard’s crown unless he painted the female body, Bacon got in training. To help him prepare for his 1966 nude Henrietta Moraes, a work that would stun visitors to the Grand Palais, the hard-drinking photographer John Deakin took a series of “candid” pictures of her – including ones he sold around Soho, much to her amusement. The resulting painting is one of the greatest nudes of the 20th century – and a bizarrely empowering one. Moraes lies with her feet towards us on a bed, her hips majestic, her right arm slung back, her animal-mask face unmistakably echoing Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avigon.

Bacon was bidding to be recognised for what he was: the most visionary painter of human beings since Picasso. He was not going to let a private tragedy spoil that. His relationship with Dyer was all but over. He had been giving his broken muse money to make up for the end of their affair. But it seems Dyer was eager to see so many paintings of himself on show in Paris, and they patched things up – briefly. When Dyer was discovered dead, Bacon’s friends worked with the French authorities to keep the suicide secret. The conspiracy was so effective that until 2016 Bacon’s biographers were repeating the fiction that he heard of the horror only on the day of the opening. He actually kept his cool for a full 36 hours before the launch, to save the show – and his career.

Was Dyer’s death intended as an act of sabotage, motivated by revenge? Or was the reason for his suicide pure grief? Bacon did go on to give Dyer his due, and more, in tragic paintings that return obsessively to that death in a Paris hotel, but there’s no need to sentimentalise him or his art to see his greatness. The truth is that when the news broke, this sad death seemed only to confirm the desolate, harrowing vision so powerfully laid bare at the Grand Palais.

Bacon, an avowed atheist, shows human life as pure animality. We’re bodies without souls. His modernism is pitiless. And at that momentous show in Paris in 1971, it thrust him into the pantheon of European art.

Bacon en toutes lettres is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until 20 January.

The artist’s friend Barry Joule says it was his physique that helped inspire a 1980s series of cricket nude.

They were some of the most arresting images Francis Bacon created: a series of paintings mainly featuring a male torso and legs, naked except for sports shoes and cricket pads.

The model for the “cricket” paintings, which first went on display in the 1980s, has never been identified. Now, one of the artist’s friends claims he was the man on whom the images they were based.

Barry Joule says he has decided to come forward because one of the works from the series was in a major new Bacon exhibition in Paris and attitudes had changed since the 1980s, when the explicit images were deemed shocking by many.

Joule recalls: “I didn’t want everyone – my Canadian protestant family included – staring at and talking about my private parts. It might seem fairly ridiculous now, but not back then.”

When he saw the original composition, he says he was upset that he was recognisable: “Francis, annoyed at me complaining of a fairly good likeness of myself naked in the cricket portrait, at the last minute chopped off – ie, painted out – my head … casually yet sarcastically informing a stunned me the next day: ‘There, now I think you look much better this way – just the essentials here … and absolutely no head to worry about. I hope you are happy now.’ So, somewhat dejected, I found myself headless.”

Bacon created a series of seven paintings, one of which is on display in a Bacon exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

For Joule, the show has brought back memories of the day in 1982 when Bacon, he says, raised the idea of a cricket series, suggesting: “Perhaps you might be interested in being the model.”

Joule says he dismissed the idea, arguing that he had only ever watched one cricket game and “didn’t like it much, finding it very slow and as boring as watching paint dry”. Bacon, he says, replied: “Not my paint.”

The artist then revealed that inspiration for the composition had come to him the previous year when, on a warm summer’s day, he had watched from his window as Joule and two “muscular sporty Canadian chums stripped down to their shorts” were playing with a bat and ball in the cul-de-sac outside.

Joule says he was unaware that they had a spectator at the time. He recalls: “Francis said ‘the memory of your game … quite possibly gave birth to an idea [of a] cricket series’.”

Joule says that Bacon liked the cricket paintings so much that he stuck photographs of them on his kitchen wall. Bacon then photographed him in 1987: “I had wanted Francis to ‘proudly pose’ with these reproductions, but the modest painter said no, ‘much better you photograph me making a cup of tea’. So I did.”

Joule jokes that David Gower, the former England Test captain, had been suggested as the model, although he had never met Bacon.

Joule was described in Andrew Sinclair’s 1990s Bacon biography as one of “two very good-looking people” who had served as the model for the paintings, though he denied his involvement at the time. “I was prudishly not ready to come out of my ‘total nudity closet’. However, as these are a very important group of pictures, maybe now is the time to reveal all,” says Joule.

He recalls sitting for Bacon in his Reece Mews studio in London’s South Kensington: “I must admit to being slightly apprehensive that very hot July day in 1982 when Francis asked me to strip right down, then to put on gleaming white sports shoes and heavy cricket pads and finally climb up on a rather rickety wooden table.”

He says that the late John Edwards, then Bacon’s lover and companion, flew into a jealous rage when he realised that Joule had modelled for the artist. Joule claims Francis believed Edwards did not have the suitably athletic body for the series of cricket pictures. “Edwards discovered the nude photos of myself posing in the cricket gear,” says Joule. “Furious, he subsequently destroyed them.”

In 2004, Joule gave the Tate some 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio, then valued at £20m, one of the galleries’ most generous gifts. A small selection are on display at Tate Britain until the end of September.

JEAN-PAUL GAVARD-PERRET | CRITIQUES | ARTS | LINTERNAUTE | 12 SEPTEMBRE 2019

Personne mieux qu'Yves Peyré pour synthétiser le sens de l’œuvre de Bacon. Le poète a compris le geste salvateur d’un homme qui s’étonne chaque matin d’être encore en vie et qui s’effraie et se réjouit à la fois de ce que le jour lui réserve. Et l’auteur permet de ne pas se tromper sur le propos et l’ambition d’une œuvre capable des plus grands effacements des standards de représentation mais aussi des plus magiques "coagulations" pour reprendre un mot du peintre lui-même.

Peyré souligne ce qui saute d’abord aux yeux dans toute l’œuvre de Bacon : une fascination morbide pour la destruction et la violence. L’horreur est là et bien là jusqu’à ces cris muets qui traversent les toiles. Flaques de chair, fœtus avortés, charognes prévisibles dans des décors de boucheries ou de chambres trop froides, tout dans l’œuvre appelle aux cauchemars.

Mais tandis que habituellement dans les visions macabres "classiques" ce sont les squelettes qui perdent leurs viandes, chez Bacon c’est à l’inverse la chair qui perd ses os en laissant glisser le corps - du moins ce qu’il en reste - en des séries d’effacements qui provoquent une liquéfaction synonyme d’une liquidation (l’inverse est d’ailleurs vrai aussi).

Néanmoins au-delà de la fascination répulsive, Peyré souligne combien quelque chose d’autre est en marche qui attise et attire le regard. Bacon, en effet, n’est pas de ceux qui jouent avec l’exhibitionnisme gore dont le cinéma américain d’horreur s’est fait une spécialité. Surgit en effet une sorte de joie salvatrice qui plus que par la thématique foncièrement violente - dans laquelle　la question d’être ou ne pas être, d’en être ou ne pas en être torture les corps - vient des formes et des couleurs, de cette emprise d’une énergie qui lutte contre l’atrophie, l’immobilisation, la dégradation.

C’est là sans doute la "mesure de l’excès", le paradoxe et la force insubmersible et subversive de l’œuvre. Plus que par sa puissance de "document" ou de cauchemar, celle-là inquiète et déstabilise par le tremblement des formes. Les convulsions nous forcent à voir un jamais vu qui ne se résume pas seulement à l’écorce apparente de l’atrocité. La déformation signifiante, en effet, pousse à d’autres découvertes moins spectaculaires mais plus spectrales.

Travaillant à l’éponge, au chiffon, labourant les traits, écorchant les parties saillantes des visages et des corps, le peintre est celui qui a le mieux mis à bas la dichotomie toute relative et bien désuète figuration/abstraction, il est celui qui a sorti l’ombre de la tanière des images toutes faites. Rappelons-nous à ce propos son aveu (et même si le peintre ne pensait pas, et pour cause, à ce que nous connaissons aujourd’hui) a propos de la virtualité de nos univers : "Nous vivons presque toujours derrière des écrans - une existence voilée d’écrans. Et je pense, quelques fois quand on dit que mes œuvres ont un aspect violent, que j’ai peut-être été de temps en temps capable d’écarter un ou deux de voiles ou écrans."

Yves Peyré, Francis Bacon ou la mesure de l’excès, 240 x 290, Gallimard, septembre 2019, 336 p.-, 49 €

Francis Bacon | A Paris show exploring the painter’s love of Greek drama and TS Eliot

JACKIE WULLSCHLÄGER | ARTS | FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND | 14 SEPTEMBER/ 15 SEPTEMBER 2019

“Assume I’ve read everything,” Francis Bacon would warn interviewers. It was a lead, but no one quite penetrated the extent to which literature infused the work of this defiantly non-narrative artist. The Centre Pompidou’s stupendous exhibition Francis Bacon: Books and Paintings, launched this week and marvellously inaugurating Paris’s autumn season, is therefore a revelation, and also a ruse.

In this first Paris show for nearly 25 years, exploring Bacon’s love of Greek drama and modern poetry is to celebrate his own epic scale, compositional grandeur and voluptuous expressiveness, for a generation unaccustomed to those qualities in painting.

“Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus” hangs at the centre of the show: a tragic vision radiating across the Pompidou’s expansive top floor galleries. Greeting you on the left is a large dangling biomorph with an impasto knot of coagulated blood in its ear; malevolent, absurd — the visual source was a photograph of a diving pelican — this Fury flutters over a doorway where blood seeps forth, heralding slaughter. In the middle panel, murdered Agamemnon is a collapsed figure of transposed body parts, topped by buttocks, carrying his head in a cauldron, set against an unfurling crimson carpet, regal but menacing.

Embodiments of guilt, “the Furies were a personal reality for Bacon”, says his biographer Michael Peppiatt. “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion”, an imagining of the howling, prowling Furies as surreal bird-beasts, launched the artist’s oeuvre in 1944. The composition is here in its immaculately smooth 1988 reworking, the background altered to bloody red, with more space around the figures, throwing them into a deep void. Colour, structure, apocalyptic aura are redolent of altarpieces; this was Bacon’s bid for gravity and sensation in a secular, disillusioned age.

Thrillingly, the Pompidou has gathered a dozen such monumental triptychs, beginning in 1967 with the closest to literal illustration, “Triptych”, inspired by TS Eliot’s verse drama Sweeney Agonistes. The outer panels of writhing couples with gaping mouths evoke precisely the brothel of Eliot’s poem “Sweeney Erect” — “this oval O cropped out with teeth:/The sickle motion of the thighs” — where manipulative tarts outmanoeuvre Mr Pereira. He calls, pays the rent, remains offstage: Bacon depicts him on the telephone, a pathetic voyeur reflected in a curving mirror.

The central panel, by contrast, is a sumptuous depiction of a Wagons-Lit compartment — Bacon loved the Paris-Côte d’Azur train — after a crime: forced door, heap of blood-drenched clothes, ransacked overnight bag, the sharp teeth of its zip comically echoing the toothy figures on the beds. “Any man has to, needs to, wants to/Once in a lifetime, do a girl in,” chants Sweeney

The visual connection is tenuous, which is the point: Bacon experienced poetry as a “compost” which “bred” images, atmosphere, associations. Many came from Eliot, the great fragmentary modernist. Bacon also paralleled his working process, mingling sources high and low, accumulating in his mind, as Eliot did, “numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles . . . unite to form a new compound”

A famous instance is Bacon’s “Popes”, drawing equally on Velazquez’s lavish portraits of power and Sergei Eisenstein’s yelling nurse in Battleship Potemkin. In “Study of Red Pope” here, Bacon adds the thuggish face of George Dyer, his lover. This work opens the show, and leads on to three Dyer triptychs in high key violet hues, all declaring Parisian connections

Dyer modelled the fleshy, sculptural nudes in “Three Studies of the Male Back”, which was also inspired by Matisse’s bronze “Backs”. The painting is given detail by revisiting Sweeney, “addressed full-length to shave/Broad-bottomed, pink from nape to base”. The right-hand panel shows Sweeney/Dyer drawing a blade along his calf, as he “tests the razor on his leg/Waiting until the shriek subsides”. It was selected by Bacon as the cover image for the catalogue of his 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais. On the opening evening, Dyer committed suicide in the couple’s Paris hotel

Months later, the melodramatic triptych “In Memory of George Dyer” presents Dyer as a tragic hero trapped on the staircase of this hotel, fumbling with a lock — he was a burglar — in a gesture which, Bacon explained, recalled Eliot’s Thunder God in “The Wasteland”: “I have heard the key/Turn in the door . . . We think of the key, each in his prison”.

Now the Furies were uncontainable. Among several triptychs of guilty mourning, “Triptych May-June 1973” features Dyer framed by tomb-like black slabs, his shadow leeching away in the shape of a vast flapping bat.

“The reek of human blood smiles out at me”, uttered by the Furies as they surround Orestes, was Bacon’s favourite quotation from Aeschylus. The line suggests his own painterly attempt to appeal to all the senses and a relish for horror that threads through this show like clues in a detective story: a trail of blood on a deserted pavement, a vehicle speeding away in “Street Scene (with Car in Distance)”; a “Sand Dune” cropped to resemble a close-up slab of bruised flesh. Monochrome backgrounds are scarlet, cadmium orange — warm, sonorous, “smiling” colours contrasting with their grim subjects.

Seeking an art that “returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation”, Bacon chose his community of writers accordingly. Aeschylus — his plays “open the valve of sensation for me” — was pivotal, but Bacon fused his imagery with diverse modern references. The trio of Furies in “Triptych 1976”, for example, are watched from the outer panels by two long, sombre faces — politician Austen Chamberlain and photographer/adventurer Peter Beard, just released from jail in Kenya. These equivalents of altarpiece patrons urge a political, colonialist reading, and Bacon said this triptych was inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Among living writers, Bacon’s closest friend was the surrealist Michel Leiris, whose portraits he painted from several angles — distorted but wonderfully lively, focused on a single eye. Leiris’s belief that “masochism, sadism, all the vices, in fact, are only ways of feeling more human” paralleled Bacon’s conviction that figurative painting must become more extreme, visceral, physical to remain persuasive. Leiris’s “Miroir de la Tauromachie” was the stimulus for Bacon’s 1969 “Bullfight” pictures: violent virtuosities of flamboyant impasto and ejaculatory spurting pigment, where the artist, like a toreador, courts excitement, danger

Leiris died in 1990; Bacon’s final finished painting, the monochrome, vaporous “Study of a Bull” (1991), paid tribute. On a raw canvas sprinkled with dust, the grey beast, cornered, recedes through a white mirror and black void. The doomed bull is now a symbol of the artist, intransigent and confrontational to the end of this superb exhibition.

A new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris looks at how literary figures like Eliot,

BY CODY DELISTRATY | ART & DESIGN | THE NEW YORK TIMES | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

PARIS — If good artists borrow while the great ones steal, then Francis Bacon was a particularly savvy thief. His list of artistic influences is a mile long, from Diego Velázquez’s dark Catholic imagery to Picasso’s fragmented perspectives.

But perhaps more than any painterly influence, literature shaped Bacon’s art. He thrived off the tragedies, the ideas and the fictions of others

“I call it my imagination material,” he told the French photographer Francis Giacobetti in 1991, during his last interview, referring to his immense collection of books and photographs. “I need to visualize things that lead me to other forms, that lead me to visualize forms that lead me to other forms or subjects, details, images that influence my nervous system and transform the basic idea.”

Bacon: Book and Paintings, a new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through Jan. 20, brings together about 60 of the artist’s paintings to investigate how literature influenced his work.

“I had the sense that some of these books, put together, could give a real sense of Bacon’s project,” said Didier Ottinger, the show’s curator. “I thought, ‘Wow, this man is not using books as decoration.’”

Bacon had an enormous library in his London studio, where books were scattered among shelves and on the floor. Since his death in 1992, about 1,300 of them now belong to Trinity College in Dublin.

Bacon read, marked up and often memorized the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Balzac, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Proust and others. In a 1966 interview with the British art critic David Sylvester, the painter said he knew some of them “by heart.”

Michael Peppiatt, a friend and biographer of Bacon, said in a telephone interview that, “Like his taste for the very great artists, like Michelangelo and Velásquez, his literary icons also tended to be monuments.”

Mr. Peppiatt, who befriended Bacon in 1963, added that some of the painter’s favorites — Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” — were “isolated peaks of literature, and Bacon was his own kind of isolated peak.”

A thread that connects the writers he loved is that they stood against the values of their time, opposing dogmas, whether religious or political. Like Bacon, they wouldn’t be dictated to.

For the artist, this was perhaps because his early life was stifled by conformity. Bacon was born into a posh family in Dublin in 1909: His father, Anthony Edward, was a military captain, and his mother, Christina, an heiress to a coal and steal fortune.

Family relations were tense, especially with his father, who discovered the teenage Bacon dressing in women’s clothes several times. Bacon left home on poor terms with his family, in 1926, and settled in London two years later.

His homosexuality and, later, his atheism would keep him at odds with his conservative family throughout his life. He was in near-constant search of a father figure, using prostitutes and lovers in this quest and frequently entering into abusive relationships.

Books became a way for the painter to create a new version of himself and to find guidance where he had little.

“He quite liked stark, tragic stories because he thought of his life as quite a stark, tragic story,” Mr. Peppiatt said. “He looked for other people who’d also looked down into the darkness.”

Bataille’s writings helped open Bacon to his sexuality; Nietzsche gave him a path to existential meaning without religious conviction; and Aeschylus gave Bacon a grand way to conceive of his own personal tragedies, which included the death of his partner of about eight years, George Dyer, of a drug and alcohol overdose.

Aeschylus, in particular, had a special place in Bacon’s life. No writer, he believed, captured tragedy quite as he did. In 1985, he told an interviewer on British television that a phrase from the Greek playwright, “The reek of human blood smiles out at me,” evoked in him “the most exciting images.”

Bacon’s “Second Version of Triptych 1944,” from 1988 — a triptych of disembodied mouths and sets of ghoulish teeth that’s on show at the Pompidou — combined Bacon’s love for Aeschylus’ violent phrase with the sexual frankness of Bataille’s writings. Mr. Ottinger said this painting was, like so many of the works in the exhibition, an indirect investigation of Bacon’s personal demons: in this case, his sexuality and Dyer’s death

Bacon was sometimes explicit about his literary inspirations, as with “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus,” 1981, which depicts the three-part tragedy with mutilated bodies, flayed backs and a dead body that appears to hold a doe’s head on a plate. At other times Bacon’s influences show more subtly.

Mr. Ottinger said that in “Study from the Human Body and Portrait,” from 1988, Bacon took inspiration from Eliot’s multiplicity of poetic fragments in “The Waste Land” to make a multilayered painting with aerosol paint and a dry transfer lettering. This mirrored the epic poem’s “fragmented construction and its collage of languages and multiple tales,” he said.

Catherine Howe, an art historian who specializes in Bacon, said in a telephone interview that the painter was “interested in this kind of Modernist rule-breaking, how one formally goes about altering painting to convey a sensation.”

“He used to quote from Valéry and say, ‘I’m conveying the related sensation without the boredom of its conveyance,’ which is a very modern notion of bypassing narrative,” she added.

This means that sometimes the artist’s literary references are basically inscrutable, as in “Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’,” from 1967. In two panels of the three-part painting, lovers cavort on a green carpet, while in the central section an animal carcass rests against a window. It is erotic and disturbing, but what this has to do with Eliot’s unfinished verse drama is hard to say

“He didn’t like a singular interpretation of his work,” Ms. Howe said. “So I don’t think Bacon would have wanted a direct text-image comparison. It was more about the impression it had on him. But that impression was entirely personal.”

Mr. Peppiatt recalled that in the mid-1970s, he helped Bacon secure an apartment in Paris, where Mr. Peppiatt was working as an arts writer and editor. They had long, languorous lunches together, and Mr. Peppiatt remembered the artist spending hours at home, flitting between stacks of photographs, magazines, books, “any old stuff,” he said.

Around that time, he said, Bacon described himself as being “like a grinding machine: Everything goes in and gets ground up very fine.”

Bacon had a bleak outlook on life, Mr. Peppiatt said, and his favourite books and poems confirmed this.

The lesson of the literature Bacon loved, Mr. Peppiatt added, was “that we don’t really know why we’re here, that we invent our purposes, that we invent our drives and aims. And then, suddenly, we’re gone.”

Looking at Lucian Freud: photographic portraits of the artist

The British painter was a compelling subject for photographers from Cecil Beaton to Henri Cartier-Bresson

ROBIN MUIR | WEEKEND LONG READS | THE FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE | FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2019

“Painter Working, Reflection” (1993), which he completed at the age of 71, was not Lucian Freud’s last self-portrait but, at full-length and frontally naked, it was an unexpected one. Bruce Bernard, his oldest friend, wrote of him preparing as if for a final reckoning, wearing only his painting boots, “defiantly brandishing the tools of his trade as well as his own private vulnerabilities”. Despite his best efforts, those vulnerabilities had been on display for much of his long life, captured by the camera, exposed by film, and now a new book, Lucian Freud: A Life, presents his biography in pictures. It chronicles an extraordinary life from first to last: from Freud as an eight-year-old in 1930, a snapshot from Weimar-era Berlin, to the 88-year-old in London in 2011, the year of his death, laid out on his sofa like an El Greco saint.

“Our mission was to make a cumulative portrait of the man,” explains Mark Holborn, the book’s co-editor, who knew Freud well and has published several surveys of his work. “The material was always there. We simply found it. But the truth is: it’s down to Lucian in the same way as it would be down to Picasso. There are few people you encounter in life who fulfil the word ‘charismatic’. They have a presence and they have a scrutiny, they look at you in a way that penetrates.”

Of five Freud paintings reproduced in the book, two are portraits of photographers: John Deakin and Harry Diamond, acquaintances from Soho in the 1950s and 1960s, when Freud, on the evidence here, was at his most mercurial and evasive, balancing high and low life with equanimity. Glimpses of other works can be seen in the studio photographs made by Bernard in the 1990s and, from 2002, by David Dawson, Freud’s assistant and friend of 20 years, model for seven paintings and, with Holborn, co-editor of the book.

Freud’s attitude towards photography was not ambivalent. He disliked it. He could not use it in his work; photographs did not give him the right information, he said. He wanted his portraits to be of his sitters, not like them. Where a printed image might have helped, still it fell short. The posthumous portrait “Small Head of Leigh Bowery” (1995), for example, was done from memory.

Furthermore, Freud told the critic Robert Hughes, being sized up for the camera made him feel that “something disagreeable” was about to be done to him. In his later years, he was gripped by the need for privacy for himself and his sitters, arranging things so that he would never be bothered by photographers. There was an early precedent. His first word, according to his mother, was alleine — “Leave me alone”.

So it is surprising to discover that somebody who managed latterly to present such an enigmatic and unapproachable public face should have been portrayed so often and so well in the years before. But it was, after all, a very long life and a very famous surname.

Lucian Freud was born into middle-class comfort in Berlin in 1922, the second of three sons of Ernst, an architect, and the grandson of Sigmund (that Freud’s paintings might contain psychoanalytical intuition was a perennial misreading of them). Early photographs of Lucian and his brothers, Stephen and Clement, hand in hand, show a fraternal affection that did not endure.

Ernst’s family, Austrian Jews, fled Germany for England in September 1933; that February, the Reichstag had been set ablaze and young Lucian saw its smouldering ruins as he negotiated a way around it to school. He saw Hitler, too, but only once, a tiny figure with, he recalled, “huge people on either side of him”.

In 1935, Lucian made a brief return to middle Europe to visit his grandfather in Austria. Sigmund himself would finally leave for London in 1938. Lucian was photographed with him in Hampstead later that year, probably the only existing photograph of the two together. His grandfather died the following September.

Freud had arrived in England as an outsider, barely able to speak the language. His formal education at progressive Dartington Hall School, in Devon, was at best sporadic. Bryanston, in Dorset, where he was briefly sent in 1938, provided little further stimulus. He was proficient enough at drawing to be accepted, at 15, to London’s Central School of Art and Design but lasted barely a term before leaving for Essex and Cedric Morris’s recently opened and unorthodox East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.

He began to cultivate influential friends and future patrons: Cyril Connolly, who published a Freud self-portrait in the third issue of Horizon in 1940, and Stephen Spender, who would publish Freud’s manifesto “Some Thoughts on Painting” in Encounter in 1954. “My object in painting pictures is to try and move the senses by giving an intensification of reality …” it began.

Freud’s unconventional charm, coupled with that famous surname, opened doors. Another Rimbaud, young and gifted, he appeared exotic and otherworldly too, unheeding of social convention. All sorts of people found him attractive. His second wife, Caroline Blackwood, recalled him around this time as “fantastic, very brilliant, incredibly beautiful, though not in a movie star way. I remember he was very mannered; he wore these long side-whiskers, which nobody else had then. And he wore funny trousers deliberately. He wanted to stand out in a crowd, and he did.”

Another former girlfriend said simply, “When I was with him I felt there was life around. When he failed to elude them, photographers found Freud a compelling subject, inherently photogenic. The list is an impressive one. Francis Goodman, like Freud a German in London, photographed him informally in 1945, capturing something of the stubborn sullenness that would soon mark him out. Goodman’s pictures are now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Vogue sought him out early on, in 1947, dispatching Clifford Coffin to his Paddington studio. He obliged the man from Vogue by standing awkwardly with his pet sparrowhawk and wearing a thick merchant seaman’s sweater, a souvenir of his brief war service. He had also worn it, along with a pair of tartan trousers, to a first meeting with Picasso in 1946, an outfit that prompted Picasso, perhaps thinking of Allied battalions, to start singing “Tipperary”. Freud admired Picasso’s ways of palming off unwelcome visitors, leaving him to live his life exactly as he pleased.

Brassaï, Picasso’s most trenchant observer, photographed Freud in 1952 in Paris, again for Vogue, but the French edition. Freud was working on “Hotel Bedroom”, completed in 1954, a claustrophobic double portrait of the artist — tense and impatient — and of Blackwood, his second wife-to-be, in bed, anxious-looking and ill. Brassaï had them mimic the work in progress.

“Isn’t it odd,” Freud recalled later, “that the most convincing photographs are staged?” The photographer gave Freud a print. He would later cut it in two, severing himself from Blackwood. There is a complete version in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Freud’s first wife was Kitty Garman, who married him in 1948, a few months after they met, when she was 22. The illegitimate daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein, she was the wide-eyed and captivating model for several of Freud’s most significant early portraits, including “Girl with White Dog” (1950-51). The two lived the bohemian life that Cecil Beaton found so attractive when he first met Freud around this time

When her husband was taken up by the haut monde, Garman, who was unworldly but unimpressionable, saw her marriage fall apart. It was at a party given by Ann Rothermere that Freud met Blackwood, daughter of a marquess and heiress to the Guinness fortune.

Beaton photographed Freud on four occasions between 1948 and 1956. The first was en plein air near Beaton’s Wiltshire home. The young artist had come to sketch him. “The boy is charming and unexpected,” Beaton wrote, “and it was nice to have him about the place.” Beaton would go on to describe Freud as “a true artist and a true Bohemian in the way he lives … his black curly hair, intensely restless eyes, bright woollen scarf or checked trousers of a decidedly zazou cut have become a landmark in the artistic life of London.”

Though Beaton admired him and promoted him widely, he caught glimpses of the young man’s cruelty. “I considered all his bad faults,” he wrote in his diary, “and came to the conclusion there is every reason for those who do saying he is a wicked character.”

The last session took place in 1956 at Coombe Priory, the Dorset house Freud shared with Blackwood. The pair had eloped to Paris in 1952 and wed in 1953, but the marriage was now on the rocks. In the background, Blackwood looks on apprehensively at her husband’s standing figure; on the wall is Francis Bacon’s “Head” (1951).

Freud had known Bacon since 1944. It was an intense friendship and they saw each other daily. In time, Bacon’s bold, expansive gestures helped Freud loosen his precise and detailed line. He talked of the older painter “packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke”, which provoked Freud to action as much as Bacon’s fearlessness in life.

Bacon made at least six single paintings and five triptychs of Freud, finding his friend an absorbing figure. The first portrait, a full-length, dates from 1951. Though initially Freud sat for him in the studio, the process broke down and Bacon, who had no qualms about appropriating photographs, finished the painting using a torn-out image of a young Kafka. Subsequently, he based most of his Freud portraits on photographs he commissioned from John Deakin.

Freud painted his large “standing portrait” of Harry Diamond that same year. “Interior in Paddington” (1951) finds his subject tense and clench-fisted as if in conflict with the giant potted plant in front of him or the virulent red carpet at his feet. Freud was now justifiably, as Herbert Read would declare, “the Ingres of existentialism”.

“He took up photography,” Freud said of Diamond, “like someone finds Jesus.” Diamond’s snapshots of the painter are still little known despite exposure at the time, as is much of his work (he also took memorable portraits of Bacon and Frank Auerbach and vignettes of the London jazz scene). His archive is now held by the National Portrait Gallery.

Though Diamond would drift in and out of Freud’s life, Freud thought highly of him and throughout the 1970s he was the favoured photographer, intermittently making pictures of the painter and his family. They share the same informality that David Dawson would bring to his document of studio life some 20 years later. “It’s odd how the character of the photographer enters into things,” Freud said of Diamond.

Another Soho photographer, John Deakin, photographed Freud many times, not least for the raw material upon which Bacon based his contemporaneous portraits. In 1963, Freud began a portrait, “John Deakin” (1963-64), a study in miniature of rancour and vanquished hope (Deakin’s own career as a painter had never taken off).

Nevertheless, Deakin subsequently termed himself “The Mona Lisa of Paddington” and, in an unpublished manuscript, made his own observations of Freud: “When I said only the bad ones grumbled at my portraits I should have excepted Lucian Freud, whose work I admire so much. But perhaps his grumbles were just part of his act: he’s such a strange, fox-like person …”

“There’s an air of mystery about him and he’s had to pay for that,” said another friend and sitter, Francis Wyndham. The perceptive would sometimes see through it to act quickly and decisively. When Henri Cartier-Bresson came to photograph Freud in 1997, they met at the studio, talked briefly and went out to lunch. “Well, when do you want to make the photograph?” Freud reportedly asked the Frenchman. “I already have,” came the reply. In 1992, Bruce Bernard, who had known Freud since his schooldays, and then from the Soho scene, agreed to sit for his portrait. He had previously demurred but knew from first-hand observation that the painter had now quickened his pace and it might not, after all, mean months in the studio. “There’s certainly something grand about him,” announced Freud on completing the portrait, the first of two.

Bernard had been The Sunday Times Magazine’s respected picture editor, a writer on art and, in the days when the term was hardly common currency, a photographic historian. To this he added the practice of photography. Freud was not his first artist, but his series of photographs of Freud in the studio coincided with the artist embarking on a significant body of new work.

Freud had met the performance artist Leigh Bowery and was impressed enough to ask him to sit, which he did with regularity from 1990 for the next four years. When he arrived at the studio, Freud realised Bowery would be the subject of more than one picture. “I found him perfectly beautiful,” he told Bernard. Bowery’s impressive bulk demanded a monumental response and Bernard was permitted to memorialise it by photographing Freud at work. The photographs, unhurried, formal and dignified, reflected the large-scale works in progress.

While Freud found he did not mind being photographed by Dawson, whose point-and-shoot aesthetic was blessedly swift, with Bernard, as he told Sebastian Smee, “I certainly did … [He] made everything pretty painful. We were good friends … Although he loved photography, he didn’t like photographing — he just thought he was no good.” Bernard’s record of these sittings is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At the end only Dawson, with his extraordinary and privileged access, was recording him, pinning down for history Freud’s uncompromising artistic practice. “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait,” Freud once observed. As Holborn puts it, “It is all about looking: us looking at him who in turn is looking out at the world with that penetrating stare. He was oblivious to anything else. Which is why it’s a heroic life.”

“Lucian Freud: A Life”, compiled by Mark Holborn in collaboration with David Dawson, is published by Phaidon. “Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits” is at the Royal Academy, London, October 27-January 26 2020

Freud (right) with (from left) Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, in London, 1965

Freud and his second wife Caroline Blackwood, photographed by Cecil Beaton (1956)

Exhibition at the Centre Pompidou focuses on the artist’s post-pope period,

FARAH NAYERI | PREVIEW | EXHIBITIONS | THE ART NEWSPAPER | FRIDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2019

To present-day museum goers, the name Francis Bacon evokes images of screaming popes. Bacon’s pope series, inspired by Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (around 1650), has featured extensively in exhibitions and auctions in recent years, and is considered a high point of the Irish-born British artist’s career.

A new exhibition opening at Paris’s Centre Pompidou takes a different view. Bacon: Books and Painting examines the last couple of decades of Bacon’s career, between 1971 and 1992, when he had stopped painting popes. And the show’s curator Didier Ottinger is presenting those paintings as “the best works that Bacon ever produced”.

“The aim is to change the image of Bacon completely,” says Ottinger, who masterminded the Pompidou’s recent David Hockney and René Magritte blockbusters. “If we’re putting on a show at the Centre Pompidou, we need to make an original proposition. Otherwise, anybody could do it.”

Among the exhibition’s 60 works will be 12 triptychs. Visitors will get a rare chance to see the three so-called Black Triptychs—which were painted after Bacon’s lover George Dyer died in 1971—gathered in one place. They include Triptych August 1972 (1972), on loan from the Tate, and Triptych May-June 1973 (1973) from the rarely shown Esther Grether Family Collection in Basel.

“There is a qualitative chasm between the end and the beginning” of Bacon’s career, Ottinger insists. “We’re practically not talking about the same artist.” Bacon himself once said on camera (in an interview that will be shown at the Pompidou) that, prior to 1970, he failed at everything he undertook.

The turning point in Bacon’s career appears to have been his retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, which opened in October 1971. Bacon became only the second living artist to be given a show in that hallowed hall. He received instant international recognition, and an invaluable opportunity to look back at his own career. Yet two days before the opening, his partner George Dyer died by suicide in a Paris hotel. The context was, for the artist, life-changing.

And yet late Bacon has so far not been examined closely, no doubt, explains Ottinger, because David Sylvester—the late critic and curator who was considered an authority on Bacon—did not rate works from this period as highly as the paintings that came before.

Ottinger got the idea for the exhibition in 2016 after visiting the Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture show at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, where he found the late Bacons to be the standout works. While researching the exhibition, he discovered that whole strands of Bacon’s work were inspired by books that he was reading. As a result, the show will have a literary flavour. It will contain six enclosures, each dedicated to a different author: Aeschylus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot.

Works such as Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981), Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem “Sweeney Agonistes” (1967) and a 1976 triptych inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will be on show next to the enclosures where excerpts from those texts will be played. The exhibition will end with Bacon’s final painting, Study of a Bull (1991), which, according to Ottinger, was inspired by the reading of Leiris’s texts on bullfighting

For Ottinger, Bacon is, after Picasso, “the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century”. Nobody comes close, he says, and the last two decades of his career were his apotheosis.

The show is supported by the auditing multinational PwC and the real estate company Nexity.

Bacon: Books and Painting, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 11 September—20 January 2020

their due in this richly obsessive film about the making of a sci-fi classic

PHIL HOAD | DOCUMENTARY FILMS | REVIEW | THE GUARDIAN | FRIDAY, 30 AUGUST, 2019

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

In addition to the visually hyper-literate Scott and concept designer HR Giger, whose “mystic” intuition gave us the phallus-mawed xenomorph, the unsung hero of Alien is its screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. He was the weirdy-beardy Missourian iconoclast who channelled a childhood diet of pulp comics into a promisingly chilling first act of a script, originally titled Memory. Though he hit a wall on page 29 trying to devise the method by which the extraterrestrial hitches a ride on board the space vessel, until the film’s executive producer Ronald Shusett woke up from an afternoon nap with a brainwave: “I have the answer – the alien fucks him!”

With the same obsessive attention he brought to bear on Psycho’s shower scene in his 2017 documentary 78/52 (if not quite an equal level of interviewee firepower), director Alexandre O Philippe relates the film’s mythic genotype to the phenotype of what finally emerged. His light catches the outline of several wondrous realisations: the morbid influence of ancient Egyptian iconography on Giger; how both he and O’Bannon worked on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abortive Dune before distilling their vision into something more singular and lethal; how Scott steered Giger to Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as obscene inspiration for one of the most famous entrances in 20th-century cinema.

The later production history is interesting, but has been extensively detailed elsewhere. It’s Philippe’s deeper psychological excavation that really bears fruit, even if his bibliography gets a bit too indiscriminate (the influence of HP Lovecraft seems more relevant to Alien’s icky soulmate The Thing). He joins the dots from Bacon to the Greek Furies, who often hounded children who committed crimes against their creators, their parents; the implication being that the xenomorph is a scourge for over-reaching humanity. Scott, of course, has picked up such Promethean themes in his recent sequels, but it was only the primal power he helped uncork in the first instance that has powered him through these mangled new incarnation.

You know the scene. We’re almost an hour into Ridley Scott’s original, slow and seemingly sombre space movie Alien when John Hurt, as the ship’s officer Kane, tucks into some very stringy coleslaw and remarks: “The first thing I’m going to do when I get back is to get some decent food.” To his right his fellow diner, Parker (Yaphet Kotto), makes a crude pun about oral sex (“I know what I’d rather be eating!”), while the rest of the seven-person crew munch away obviously.

Kane suddenly starts to cough. He flips over on to the table, jerking left, then right. Parker, suspecting a fit, tries to ram the handle of a spoon into Kane’s mouth. Kane wriggles, Parker struggles, then Kane screams, a high-pitched howl. He arches his back and his chest explodes. The blood-spattered crew leap away in terror as a slimy phallic creature, drenched with intestinal gore, emerges from the chest cavity, before looking around, unleashing a piercing squeal, then darting across the table and out of the room. A horror classic is born.

The scene is brutally effective and the stuff of nightmares. It has become, alongside the “Rosebud” reveal in Citizen Kane and the hilltop spin in The Sound of Music, one of the most iconic moments in cinema. Why, even after four decades, does it retain such primal power? It’s because of Francis Bacon, obviously.

A new documentary called Memory: The Origins of Alientraces, with watertight credibility, an influential line from the 1944 Francis Bacon triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the film’s famous “chest-burster” scene, revealing how Scott introduced the painting to Alien’s art designer HR Giger and suggested that Bacon’s imagery (snapping mouths on sticks) could serve as the visual reference for Kane’s undoing. The documentary, however, which is written and directed by the 46-year-old Swiss filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe, goes deeper still and delves into Bacon’s creative world view and his obsession with depicting mouths (“I’ve always been very moved by the movement of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth,” Bacon says in an archive interview).

It notes that the figures in Bacon’s crucifixion study, currently on view at Tate Britain in London, are the Furies from Greek tragedy, and that the Furies are avengers designed to restore order, and that, circling back to Alien, the phallic chest-burster that leaps out of Kane is a modern space Fury who quotes, in piercing squeals rather than words, the famous line of Aeschylus, cherished by Bacon: “The reek of human blood smiles out at me.”

Fanciful? Not at all, says Philippe, who previously analysed the Psycho shower scene in equally minute detail in his brilliant 2017 documentary 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene. The profound power of Alien is intrinsically connected to Bacon, he insists.

“When I was researching the movie there was one story only that I kept thinking about,” he says. “And it was Ridley Scott showing the Bacon triptych to HR Giger, and basically saying, ‘This is what I’d like the chest-burster to look like.’ And when I realised that the Furies had essentially hijacked Bacon’s crucifixion painting I knew that what I needed to do was to make a mythological film about Alien. And I want to make clear that I’m not suggesting that the chest-burster is lifted directly from Greek mythology. But that myth is still very much alive in our minds, our imaginations and our collective unconscious.”

Philippe’s documentary, a must-watch for sci-fi fans and armchair film buffs alike, begins by stitching together the narrative influences on the Alien screenplay, co-written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. It points to a comic-book adventure called Seeds of Jupiter that features a navy sailor tricked into swallowing a seed that matures into an octopus that needs to be cut from his chest. It nods to a 1966 B-movie called Queen of Blood about an alien distress signal that lures human astronauts to their doom.

Philippe’s film also reveals how O’Bannon’s screenplay was stuck for years on page 29, unable to overcome the seemingly trifling problem of how the alien, when first encountered, sneaks on board the human spaceship. The solution came to Shusett in a dream. “I woke up and I said, ‘I have it. I have the answer!’” says Shusett in the documentary.

“‘The alien fucks him! Jumps on his face, sticks a tube down his throat and implants a seed that’s going to grow inside him and burst out of his chest in the middle of the movie!’”

This leads to the sections of Philippe’s film that discuss the psychosexual implications of the movie and the idea that Alien disturbs us not because it is, you know, scary, but because it’s tapping into deep and dirty subconscious fears and desires. One contributor, with reference to the alien’s forced penetration of Kane, simply describes the elevator pitch for the film as “a male rape movie in space”. Philippe, it transpires, is on the same page. “The symbolism of male penetration, male rape, male pregnancy and birth? Those are the main reasons why Alien shook people to their core when it came out,” he says. “Even though it was on a subconscious level.”

It helps that most of the talking heads in Philippe’s film back up these assertions, with even Scott claiming that he was attracted to the art designs of Giger because they were “beautiful, not just threatening, and had lots of sexual connotations”.

There are other parts of the film, however, where you can feel the connective threads of argument beginning to fray and, in some cases, snap. Alien, for instance, as a critique of US imperialism (the spaceship, the Nostromo, is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s critique of imperialism in his novel of the same name)? Alien as an expression of angst over the end of the American family (the Nostromo crew are, er, a surrogate family)? Alien as serial-killer fear? And Alien as patriarchal guilt (see male rape) and an expression of the need for feminism? All these readings are in Philippe’s film, and he stands by them.

“Look, Alien was not supposed to be a hit in 1979. Back then we already had Close Encounters, and we were ready for E.T. and the cute and cuddly alien. The fact that this film resonated so deeply means that something happened and it’s important for us to ask, ‘Why?’ It’s not just a haunted-house movie in space. It’s more significant than that.”

In the end, Philippe, who is working on a mythological examination of The Exorcist called Leap of Faith, says the only way to truly appreciate Alien is to keep watching it.

“The reason you have to rewatch it is because it is an extraordinary, complex and layered movie,” he says.

“The more you watch it, the more you can unpack. And yet, somehow, you can never get to the bottom of Alien. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

Memory: The Origins of Alien is screening at the following locations from September 12: Cinema Nova, Melbourne; Sydney Underground Film Festival (from September 14); Nat Film & Sound Archive, Canberra on September 20; Mercury Cinema, Adelaide; and Brisbane International Film Festival from October 3.

Forty years on from the sci-fi classic, a new film examines the genesis

of its horrifying monster, Kevin Maher reports

You know the scene. We’re almost an hour into Ridley Scott’s original, slow and seemingly sombre space movie Alien when John -A- Hurt, as the ship’s officer Kane, tucks into some very stringy coleslaw and remarks: “The first thing I’m going to do when I get back is to get some decent food.” To his right his fellow diner, Parker (Yaphet Kotto), makes a crude pun about oral sex (“I know what I’d rather be eating!”), while the rest of the seven-person crew munch away obliviously.

The scene is brutally effective and the stuff of nightmares. It has become, alongside the “Rosebud” reveal in Citizen Kane and the hilltop spin in The Sound of Music, one of the most iconic moments in cinema. Why, even after four decades, does it retain such primal power? It’s because of Francis Bacon, obviously.

A new documentary called Memory: The Origins of Alien traces, with watertight credibility, an influential line from the 1944 Francis Bacon triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to the film’s famous “chest-burster” scene, revealing how Scott introduced the painting to Alien’s art designer, HR Giger and suggested that Bacon’s imagery (snapping mouths on sticks) could serve as the visual reference for Kane’s undoing.

The documentary, however, which 1 is written and directed by the 46-year-old Swiss film-maker Alexandre O Philippe, goes deeper still and delves into Bacon’s creative world view and his obsession with depicting 1 mouths (“I’ve always been very moved by the movement of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth,” Bacon says in an archive interview).

It notes that the figures in Bacon’s crucifixion study are the Furies from Greek tragedy, and that the Furies are avengers designed to restore order, that, circling back to Alien, the phallic chest-burster that leaps out Kane is a modem space Fury who quotes, in piercing squeals rather than words, the famous line of Aeschylus, cherished by Bacon: “The reek of human blood smiles out at me.”

Fanciful? Not at all, says Philippe, who previously analysed the Psycho shower scene in equally minute detail in his brilliant 2017 documentary 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene. The profound power of Alien is intrinsically connected to Bacon, he insists.

“When I was researching the movie there was one story only that I kept thinking about,” he says. “And it was Ridley Scott showing the Bacon triptych to HR Giger, and basically saying, ‘This is what I’d like the chest-burster to look like.’ And when I realised that the Furies had essentially hijacked Bacon’s crucifixion painting I knew that what I needed to do was to make a mythological film about Alien. And I want to make clear that I’m not suggesting that the chest-burster is lifted directly from Greek mythology. But that myth is still very much alive in our minds, our imaginations and our collective unconsciousness.”

Philippe’s documentary, a must-watch for sd-fi fans and armchair film buffs alike, begins by stitching together the narrative influences on the Alien screenplay, co-written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett It points to a comic-book adventure called Seeds of Jupiter that features a navy sailor tricked into swallowing a seed that matures into an octopus that needs to be cut from his chest It nods to a 1966 B-movie called Queen of Blood about an alien distress signal that lures human astronauts to their doom.

Philippe’s film also reveals how O’Bannoris screenplay was stuck for years on page 29, unable to overcome the seemingly trifling problem of how the Alien disturbs us because it taps into deep and dirty fears and desires, the alien, when first encountered, sneaks on board the human spaceship. The solution, ultimately, came to Shusett in a dream. “I woke up and I said, ‘I have it. I have the answer!’ ” says Shusett in the documentary.“ ‘The alien fucks him! Jumps on his face, sticks a tube down his throat and implants a seed that’s going to grow inside him and burst out of his chest in the middle of the movie!’ ”

This leads to the sections of Philippe’s film that discuss the psychosexual implications of the movie and the idea that Alien disturbs us not because it is, you know, scary, but because it’s tapping into deep and dirty subconscious fears and desires. One contributor, with reference to the alien’s forced penetration of Kane, simply describes the elevator pitch for the film as “a male rape movie in space”. Philippe, it transpires, is on the same page. “The symbolism of male penetration, male pregnancy and birth? Those are the main reasons why Alien shook people to their core when it came out,” he says. “Even though it was on a subconscious level.”

There are other parts of the film, however, where you can feel the connective threads of argument beginning to fray and, in some cases, snap. Alien, for instance, as a critique of US imperialism (the spaceship, the Nostromo, is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s critique of imperialism in his novel of the same name)? Alien as an expression of angst over the end of the American family (the Nostromo crew are, er, a surrogate family)? Alien as serial-killer fear? And Alien as patriarchal guilt (see male rape) and an expression of the need for feminism? All of these readings are in Philippe’s film, and he stands by them today.

“Look, Alien was not supposed to be a hit in 1979. Back then we already had Close Encounters, and we were ready for E.T. and the cute and cuddly alien. The fact that this film resonated so deeply means that something happened and it’s important for us to ask, ‘Why?’ It’s not just a haunted-house movie in space. It’s more significant than that”

In the end, Philippe, who is working on a mythological examination of The Exorcist called Leap of Faith, says that the only way to truly appreciate Alien is to keep watching it.

“The reason you have to rewatch it is because it is an extraordinary, complex and layered movie,” he says. “The more you watch it, the more you can unpack. And yet, somehow, you can never get to the bottom of Alien. I’m absolutely convinced of that”

How Francis Bacon made $5m gift

to the Tate to spite his dealer

FRANCIS BACON was so furious that his dealer had sold one of his triptychs to a US museum without consulting him that he cancelled the multi-million-dollar sale by donating the work to the Tate, the artist’s friend Barry Joule has revealed.

Bacon was further irritated by his dealer’s insistence that its title should bear the word ‘crucifixion’ when it was nothing of the sort.

He fell out with the late Valerie Beston, of the Marlborough gallery in London, over his Second Version of Triptych 1944, a nightmarish depiction of three howling creatures, part-man, part-beast, tormented and twisting against a deep maroon background. It was a 1988 reworking of his 1940s masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion, also in the Tate.

Although the earlier work’s title has the word “crucifixion”, the atheist painter told Mr Joule: “I have only ever used a crucifix as a device to hang or surround my figures on… But I have never painted a crucifixion per se… never pinned anyone outstretched on a cross… and certainly never a Christian one… Right now, I am having a tiff with Valerie Beston over the… title of this new triptych as she insists on using the word crucifixion.”

Bacon added that titles should be “simple” with “no element of story-telling”. After much heated discussion, Bacon got his way on the 1988 triptych.

While his paintings sell today for tens of millions of pounds, they had already reached seven figures when Beston was planning her 1988 sale. The Tate was able to acquire the masterpiece at no cost, after the artist’s fiery arguments with Beston.

Mr Joule, who lived next to Bacon’s studio and home in South Kensington, is now revealing the triptych’s three-year “torturous route” to the Tate, based on previously-unheard conversations that he recorded with the artist and his own first-hand recollections.

He told the Telegraph: “When the ‘finished’ triptych first arrived at Marlborough in mid-1988, Beston promptly named it with ‘crucifixion’ in the title and informed Francis they had a major museum that wanted to buy it. The picture likely would have sold for around $5 million, with Marlborough taking their hefty share...

“That’s when the long-standing fairly even relationship between Beston and Bacon broke down. She had mostly governed Francis like a Nazi storm-trooper, so she was not happy when, in the autumn of 1988, ‘her artist’ wanted the painting returned for more reworking,… and insisting on dropping ‘crucifixion’ from the title...

“He also let the bombshell casually drop that he possibly would donate the picture to the Tate — this now touching on a raw nerve.”

Mr Joule was at the artist’s studio at 7 Reece Mews when Beston turned up in a chauffeured car, banging loudly on the door. As Bacon did not want to be disturbed from reworking the triptych, Mr Joule opened the mews’s first-floor 'hay-door' and looked down on a “furious” Beston: “She yelled up at me… ‘Get Francis here immediately’...

“The grumbling painter eventually appeared. Very agitated, Francis wasn’t about to budge an inch about allowing her inside. His round face reddening up, he was furious that Beston had sold the picture without checking with him first. She further yelled… He pretended not to hear.”

Beston gave his door a “thump” before retreating, leaving Bacon stunned and shaking. “In a final twist of the knife”, Mr Joule said, she “furiously screamed the words ‘Remember Zurich’”. That was taken as a threat, a reference to Bacon’s tax affairs.

Bacon made regular 'business trips' to the Swiss city, enjoying the food and seeing friends. “It was also possibly a place where the proceeds of a painting recently sold could be stashed away in a secret Swiss bank account”, Mr Joule said.

Swiss friends included Gilbert de Botton, the artist’s private banker and a noted Bacon collector, who died in 2000. He was also a Tate trustee, who encouraged Bacon’s donation, realising that the new triptych would be displayed perfectly with the earlier version.

Mr Joule said: “Doubtless it would take a courageous man to stare down the board of Marlborough and inform them that possibly millions of dollars wouldn’t enter their financial books that year. Francis was a brave man, and was supported by De Botton and the gallery’s then director, Sir Nicholas Serota.”

In 2006, Sir Nicholas wrote to Mr Joule: “I worked closely with Gilbert on persuading Francis that the Tate was the right location for the second triptych. Marlborough, not surprisingly, dragged feet at every turn saying that it could come ‘as a bequest’ (very little chance, I thought).”

Bacon recalled that, in informing Beston of his final decision, “her tight face dropped like a wet sponge.”

She was not invited to De Botton’s celebratory supper for four at the Bibendum restaurant in Kensington. When the banker called for the bill, he was informed that Bacon had settled it — a vast bill exceeding £800.

In 1978, Mr Joule was repairing a neighbour’s television aerial and Bacon invited him in for champagne, sparking a friendship that lasted until the artist’s death in 1992. In 2004, Mr Joule gave the Tate some 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio, then valued at an estimated £20m, one of the Tate’s most generous gifts. A small selection of them are on show at Tate Britain until the end of September. Exhibits include that Bibendum bill.

PARIS, Aug 13 — The Parisian museum held its last major exhibition dedicated to the Irish painter in 1996.

More than 20 years later, “Bacon: Books and Painting” will focus on works produced by Francis Bacon in the last two decades of his career.

It will feature 60 paintings spanning from 1971 to 1992, including 12 triptychs, a series of portraits, and self-portrait.

The last two decades of Bacon’s career were particularly significant, as they were marked by a simplification and intensification of his painting style. His colours acquired new depth, drawn from a unique chromatic register of yellow, pink, and saturated orange, as seen in his 1983 canvas “Sand Dune”.

The death of his long-time partner George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971, left haunting echoes in Bacon’s ensuing paintings. His “Black Triptychs” series, which was painted in memory of his deceased lover, notably depicts two seated figures and their coupling in a life-and-death struggle.

The exhibition “Bacon: Books and Painting” will also examine the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s oeuvre. Curator Didier Ottinger included several recorded readings of excerpts of texts taken from the painter’s library. Among them are works by T.S. Eliot, Mathieu Amalric, Nietzsche, Bataille, Valérie Dreville, and more. These authors had a considerable impact on the Bacon’s work, inspiring recurring images and motifs such as the Furies of Greek mythology. The influence of the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus is particularly visible in the 1944 painting “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” as well as in 1981’s “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

“Bacon: Books and Painting” will be on view from September 11 through January 20, 2020 at Paris’ Centre Pompidou.

Alongside books from Bacon’s vast library that greatly influenced his paintings

The historic Centre Pompidou in Paris will host a major survey dedicated to famed Irish-born painter, Francis Bacon. Simply titled “Francis Bacon: Books and Painting,” the landmark presentation will spotlight a selection of his emotion-charged portraiture spanning the years between 1971 and 1992. A total of sixty paintings (portraits and self-portraits) including 12 triptychs will go on view.

Accompanying the original works is a collection of books culled from Bacon’s personal library that has made an impact on the artist’s practice. From Nietzsche’s ‘Backwards’ to Bataille’s ‘Low Materialism,’ key excerpts will be read during the exhibition to show how “these authors directly inspired Bacon with works and motifs,” said Pompidou in a statement.

“Francis bacon: Books and Painting” will run through September 11 until January 20, 2020. Visit Centre Pompidou’s website for further details.

The last major French exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work was held in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou. More than twenty years later, Francis Bacon: Books and Painting presents paintings dating from 1971, the year of the retrospective event at the national galleries of the Grand Palais, to his final works in 1992. Didier Ottinger is the curator of this innovative exploration of the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s painting.

After the exhibitions showcasing Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, André Derain and Henri Matisse, the Centre Pompidou continues its re-examination of key 20th century works by devoting a major exhibition to Francis Bacon. The last major French exhibition of this artist’s work was held in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou. More than twenty years later, Francis Bacon: Books and Painting presents paintings dating from 1971, the year of the retrospective event at the national galleries of the Grand Palais, to his final works in 1992. Didier Ottinger is the curator of this innovative exploration of the influence of literature in Francis Bacon’s painting.

There are six rooms along the visitor route, placing literature at the heart of the exhibition. The event includes readings of excerpts of texts taken from Francis Bacon’s library. Mathieu Almaric, Carlo Brandt, Hippolyte Girardot, Denis Podalydes and Laurent Poitrenaux read from Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Bataille, Leiris, Conrad and Eliot. Not only did these authors inspire Bacon’s work and motifs directly, they also shared a poetic world, forming a ‘spiritual family’ the artist identified with. each writer expressed a form of ‘atheology’, a distrust of any values (abstract beauty, historical teleology or deity, etc.) likely to dictate the form and meaning of thinking or of a work. From Nietzsche’s fight against the ‘Backworlds’ to Bataille’s ‘Base materialism’, Eliot’s fragmentation, Aeschylus’ tragedy, Conrad’s ‘regressionism’ and Leiries’ ‘sacred’, these authors shared the same amoral and realist vision of the world, a concept of art and its forms liberated from the a priori of idealism.

The inventory of Francis Bacon’s library, undertaken by the Department of History of art and architecture at Trinity College Dublin, lists more than a thousand works. While denying any ‘narrative’ exegesis in his work, Francis Bacon, nevertheless admitted that literature represented a powerful stimulus for his imagination. rather than giving shape to a story, poetry, novels and philosophy inspired a ‘general atmosphere’; ‘images’ which emerged like the Furies in his paintings.

Bacon confided to David Sylvester his interest in the works of Eliot or Aeschylus, which he claimed to ‘know by heart’, adding that he only ever really read that which evoked ‘immediate images’ for him. These images owed more to the poetic world, existential philosophy or form of literature that he chose, rather than to the stories they told.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, dating from 1944, testifies to the impact of Aeschylus’ tragedy on his work. in 1981, Bacon produced a triptych which was explicitly inspired by the Oresteia. in addition to his own motifs, Bacon drew on the T.S. Eliot poem The Waste Land for its fragmented construction and its ‘collage’ of languages and multiple tales. (Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem "Sweeney Agonistes", 1967 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington.) among his contemporaries, Michel leiris was the writer who was closest to Francis Bacon. He was the French translator of the painter’s interviews with David Sylvester, and was the only artist with whom the painter envisaged creating an illustrated publication (Miroir de la Tauromachie, published in 1990.

The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou focuses on works produced by Bacon in the last two decades of his career. it consists of sixty paintings (including 12 triptychs, in addition to a series of portraits and self-portraits) from major private and public collections. From 1971 to 1992 (the year of the artist’s death), his painting style was marked by its simplification and intensification. His colours acquired new depth, drawn from a unique chromatic register of yellow, pink and saturated orange.

1971 was a turning point for Bacon. The exhibition at the grand Palais earned him international acclaim, while the tragic death of his partner, just a few days before the exhibition opened, gave way to a period marked by guilt and represented by a proliferation of the symbolic and mythological form of the erinyes (the Furies of greek mythology) in his work. The ‘Black’ Triptychs painted in memory of his deceased friend (In Memory of George Dyer, 1971, Triptych–August 1972 and Triptych, May–June 1973), all presented at the exhibition, commemorate this loss.

Here is an intense fifty minutes of drama that provides insights into the minds and lives of the famous 20th century painter Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer.

We begin with Bacon (Jude Martin) at his easel, but uninspired. Dyer arrives, at first just seeking money, but Bacon is fascinated by him, and Dyer is lured into greater closeness. Dyer (William Leckie) is at first repelled, and engages in some homophobic abuse, but his life is hollow and purposeless, and he despises the people he spends his time with, and becomes more and more attached to Bacon.

The background of both characters is fed in during their interactions, and we never feel we are being given information for its own sake. We learn of the horrors in Bacon’s life that feed into the horrors on his canvases. Bacon’s agent, Mary (Elly Murray Brown), tries to cope with this new force, the hostile Dyer, whilst continuing to promote Bacon.

With Dyer as inspiration, Bacon achieves an international exhibition, but Dyer has declined into drunken dependence. The relationship moves to a tragic conclusion.

Jude Martin well conveys Bacon’s rapid enthusiasm for Dyer, and his unusually keen reaction to an intruder. William Leckie ably shows us Dyer’s confusion, his distaste for the violence Bacon insists that he use on his body, and his increasing childlike dependence on Bacon.

For anyone who has seen photos of Bacon’s studio and the state of it, it will be possible to imagine the effect on Bacon and Dyer’s clothes when they roll on the floor, fighting and making love in that environment. A backdrop photo of that room would have been enlightening.

See this play for a short, intense view of a deep but troubled and ultimately impossible relationship.

D. J. TAYLOR | DIARY | BIOGRAPHY | LITERARY REVIEW | AUGUST 2019

Just over a year ago I found myself standing in the drawing room of a ground-floor flat in Cadogan Place, Belgravia. Here, strewn all over the carpet, in crates, packing cases and capacious box files, were the possessions of Janetta Parladé, who had died a few days before at the age of ninety-six. Parladé had several claims to fame, but literary history will probably remember her as the last of the ‘Lost Girls’, as defined by Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase (1980): rackety, well-bred and emotionally damaged young women who hung around the fringes of literary London in the 1940s, worked on Cyril Connolly’s monthly magazine Horizon, had affairs with everyone from Lucian Freud to Arthur Koestler and were inexorably drawn into the web of myth that Connolly projected around his own complex romantic life.

While Janetta tended to play second fiddle to better-known convives such as Barbara Skelton and Sonia Brownell (soon to become the second Mrs Orwell), this isn’t to diminish her importance to Connolly and his circle. She was, for example, present on the occasion when the the word ‘bugger’ (in a short story by Julian Maclaren-Ross) had to be struck out by hand from six thousand copies of a Horizon number by the magazine’s staff after the printers objected to it. A horrified Evelyn Waugh, to whom she once opened the door without having put on her shoes, christened her ‘Mrs Bluefeet’ and gave her a minor role in Unconditional Surrender (1961). As Sonia’s bosom companion, she visited Orwell as he lay dying at University College Hospital and was a witness at their wedding.

A small matter of seventy years later, courtesy of two of her daughters, there I was, present at what turned out to be the literary equivalent of an unexpected banquet. Much to everyone’s surprise, Janetta turned out to have kept countless mementos from her long and colourful life. ‘Is there anything you’d like to borrow?’ somebody asked. I escaped into the Belgravia sunshine with a file of Connolly’s letters, a folder full of correspondence from the mid-1940s, an eye-popping late 1970s lament from Sonia in which she complains of being swindled by Orwell’s accountants, and a suspicion that Lost Girls, the book I had just finished writing about this tantalising part of the Blitz-era demographic, might need a radical rethink.

Historians sometimes talk about ‘Bentley’s luck’. Richard Bentley (1662–1742) was a celebrated classical scholar and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who fell out with his colleagues and would probably have got the sack had the bishop commissioned to investigate the case not dropped dead the night before the inquiry. The morning spent in Janetta’s flat was, I realised, an example of ‘biographer’s luck’, which might be defined as encountering some vital new source just before the manuscript is about to disappear into the production process.

Some examples of biographer’s luck? Meeting a friendly art dealer with a hitherto unknown scrapbook that Thackeray had compiled in the 1830s. Sitting by a fax machine at three o’clock in the morning as it began to pump out several letters that Orwell had written to Malcolm Muggeridge, run to earth at an obscure Midwestern Bible college. Being granted access to the diaries and letters of Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby – parents of the notorious Elizabeth – in which the activities of the Bright Young People are remorselessly laid bare and the echt-Victorian Dorothea wonders how on earth anyone could find Vile Bodies amusing.

Naturally, there are times when biographer’s luck runs out. The Pathé footage of the Eton wall game from 1921 that contains Orwell’s only appearance on film turned up three months after Orwell: The Life came out. And I felt a pang of solidarity for the audience at a Laurie Lee memorial evening at Gloucester Town Hall some years ago who were informed that the organisers had arranged a special treat. At a particular point in the proceedings the lights would be dimmed, the mayor of Gloucester explained. When they came back on, the original ‘Rosie’ of Cider with Rosie would declare herself. Amid an expectant hush, the lights flicked off and then on again, whereupon it was revealed that no fewer than four elderly ladies had clambered eagerly to their feet.

Where do biographers get their inspiration? Novelists are usually happy to admit to a sudden flash of insight (Orwell got the idea for Animal Farm by watching a small boy goad a carthorse along a country lane), but for life writers it is more often a case of gradual immersion. You are interested in a particular subject; basic research hardens this interest into an obsession, after which the subject becomes an unshiftable part of your mental furniture. Curiously, Lost Girls developed out of a single incident. Talking to the daughter of a Lost Girl in her north Norfolk kitchen, impressed by the number of appearances her enigmatic mama had racked up in the literary autobiographies of the postwar era, I made a rather naive remark about the glamour of being born into a world where the man snoozing in the deckchair at the bottom of the garden might turn out to be E M Forster.

My friend rose up out of her chair and loomed over me. ‘You have no idea,’ she said, ‘quite how awful my childhood was.’ Suddenly, the ghosts of Forster, Connolly and Waugh receded and I was left with the vision of a small, terrified child. I later discovered that she had been sent to a children’s home at the age of two for fear of what her stepfather might do to her.

With biographer’s luck comes biographer’s responsibility. The Lost Girls may all be safely dead, but many of their descendants are very much alive. The materials from which this communal life was reconstructed are sometimes startlingly intimate. In particular, the letters that Connolly’s ex-girlfriends Lys Lubbock and Diana Witherby wrote to him in the aftermath of his crack-up make uneasy reading. The girls know Connolly has behaved badly to them. They know he has exploited their good natures and serially betrayed them. And yet the lure of his personality makes them desperately regretful, well-nigh drowning in remorse and self-abnegation.

How would Lys and Diana have felt about the details of their relationships with Connolly being made public? When dealing with a literary decade dominated by men, there is an argument for giving the women who typed their letters and went to bed with them a voice. Janetta Parladé turned out to have left behind an unpublished memoir that contains, among other highlights, an eyewitness account of the Orwell wedding. ‘She wanted this to be read,’ one of her daughters explained. That’s good enough for me.

Jaime and Janetta Parladé with Francis Bacon at the Museo del Prado in 1990

José Berardo relinquishes trove including works by Miró, Mondrian and Bacon

Portugal has seized a trove of contemporary artwork, including paintings by Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian, from its debt-riddled owner, the government has confirmed.

For months, three Portuguese banks had tried but failed to seize the art collection from Portuguese businessman José Berardo. The 75-year-old had offered the works as collateral for his debt which totalled nearly €1bn. (£920m).

The modern art collection of more than 900 works which includes, besides Miró and Mondrian, other famous artists such as Gerhard Richter and Francis Bacon, was valued in 2006 at €316m euros. But the collection could have doubled in value since then given the growth in the art market. Bacon’s Self-Portrait, for example, sold for over €17m when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s last month.

Much of the Berardo collection has been on display to the public in Lisbon’s museums since 2006, under an agreement between the businessman and the galleries, which put them out of the banks’ reach. It is unclear if the lenders will obtain possession of the collection, which for now remains in the state’s custody, according to Portuguese media reports.

It is not the first time Berardo’s assets have been seized. According to the media, Portugal had already taken a property of his on the island of Madeira which he had left in 1963 to make his fortune in South Africa.

Berardo had borrowed a total of €962m from the state bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos the Banco Comercial Português (BCP) and the former bank Espírito Santo, now Novo Banco. He acquired shares of BCP to become its third largest shareholder.

Francis Bacon’s work has always been instantly recognizable. "Nightmarish horror" was how art critic David Sylvester described it in 1954, citing the general critical response to his paintings. Raw, dark and visceral, Bacon’s images were disquieting from the outset.

Just look at 1944’s "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion," his first masterpiece. Here was an early example of what became his favored form: a triptych of disturbing imagery featuring distorted limbs, eyeless heads and open snarling mouths – the teeth bared and ready to savage – all painted on a glowing orange backdrop.

Bacon was already in his mid-30s by then – "a late starter," as he put it. Yet this single painting dramatically announced his arrival as a major artist. At the time, London was being bombarded with V-1 and V-2 rockets from Nazi Germany but Bacon drew his inspiration from elsewhere. The image transcended traditional religious iconography.

Stylistically, Bacon was freed up to experiment, his artistic identity shaped by the radical work of his early hero, Picasso (whose 1927 show in Paris left a profound impression on the Irish-born.

Just as importantly, he was inspired by Greek tragedy; he was obsessed with the playwright Aeschylus and the Furies of his "Oresteia" trilogy. Tellingly, when he talked about the Furies, goddesses of vengeance in classical mythology, Bacon would habitually quote a passage from the plays: "The reek of human blood smiles out at me."

In his famous 1944 work, Bacon – consciously it seems – painted the Furies and gave us an indelible image of menace, anguish, terror and revenge. The triptych somehow sears into the brain. Seen in the flesh, it’s an image that is hard to get out of your head. The painting was first exhibited in April 1945, in the final months of World War II. The allies were just liberating the Nazi concentration camps, and haunting images were emerging – grotesque piles of bodies and pitifully emaciated prisoners. Bacon’s masterpiece jangled a nerve. It still does.

Bacon painted largely from memory and photos, in a small, chaotic studio in London’s South Kensington (the studio has since been reconstructed, complete with its original contents, at the City Gallery in Dublin). We know the artists he especially admired: Michelangelo, Velázquez, Degas, Van Gogh and Ingres. But critics have also identified some of his direct sources. A life mask of the poet William Blake, for instance, served as the basis for a series of small portraits in 1955.

Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering 19th century photos of human and animal movement, notably of men wrestling, had a more enduring impact. The resulting paintings are sometimes intensely sexual – or, to be more precise, homoerotic. Bacon knew that he was gay from an early age. His authoritarian father threw him out of the family home in Dublin for wearing his mother’s clothes, and he took himself to London aged 17.

Today in the British capital, the Gagosian gallery is exhibiting what it describes as "two of the most uninhibited images that Bacon ever painted." They were executed long before homosexual acts between men was decriminalized in England in 1967. "Two Figures" (1953) depicts two naked men, blurred and grappling like wrestlers on crumpled sheets. Is one pinning the other down? Is this agony, ecstasy or a bit of both? Their faces are distorted – we can’t tell for sure.

"Two Figures in the Grass" (1954) is a passionate coupling with lots of pinky-white flesh. Buttocks, a leg, an ear and hair, all half-hidden in the blades of grass. The patch of grass is fenced in. Bacon often liked to frame the space – thin vertical and horizontal lines within his paintings – to somehow intensify the image, to box it in.

Another key inspiration came from one of silent cinema’s best-known sequences: a still image of a screaming woman, her glasses smashed and her face bloodied, stood on Odessa’s famous steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin."

Bacon’s series of screaming popes, meanwhile, were inspired by Velázquez’s "Portrait of Pope Innocent X." The paintings helped establish his reputation in the early 1950s. In Velázquez’s original (circa 1650), the papal mouth was clamped firmly shut. But in most of Bacon’s versions, of which there were around 50, he is screaming and caged. In interviews, Bacon said that he was "always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth," and that he had "always hoped to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset."

The fact is, Bacon fundamentally altered figurative painting in the 20th century. His aim wasn’t so much to create a likeness, but a sense of presence.

Sometimes, he just did this viscerally. Viewing his work, we feel like we’ve stumbled into a human abattoir. At other times, his figures appear like apparitions, wraiths. Most of his subjects were his friends and lovers, his small circle of intimates or his companions from the Colony Room Club, the private members’ club he frequented in London’s Soho (where he was known to consume a lot of champagne).

Although Bacon was never filmed painting, we know more about his practice than perhaps any other important 20th-century artist. And this is for one simple reason: his friendship with the aforementioned critic and curator, David Sylvester.

Sylvester wrote about Bacon with rare acuity and accessibility over a period of some 40 years. His interviews with Bacon, first published in 1975 and later expanded, remain a primary source for understanding the artist’s work. Sylvester’s conclusion was, he wrote, that "everyone feels (whether they like the work or not)" that Bacon "is saying something that matters about the times in which we live."

Sylvester felt that Bacon achieved his greatest work in 1974. A sudden and shocking bereavement reinforced his artistic identity. George Dyer, a handsome small-time crook who’d become Bacon’s lover, was the subject of many portraits after the pair met in 1963. Dyer’s suicide in a Paris Hotel in 1971, just days before a Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais, triggered a series of searing triptychs. In them, Bacon aimed to convey what he described as "all the pulsations of a person." In Sylvester’s view, they are perhaps "the most moving things he ever did."

Here was a conscious act of exorcism by Bacon – paintings created in memory of Dyer. One of them, "Triptych May-June 1973," is absolutely unsparing, a painting of pity and terror.

Each of the three images is framed by a door. In the left panel, Dyer is doubled up on a toilet, just as his body was found. On the right panel, he is depicted throwing up into a sink. In the center panel, Dyer’s figure crouches in the darkness beneath a hanging, naked light bulb. He casts a shadow – a bird of prey perhaps, or a Fury. Sylvester thought that this was probably Bacon’s greatest painting.

Bacon’s market value has risen by leaps and bounds since his death in 1992. Damien Hirst collects, telling the Guardian in 2006 that he owned five of his paintings. In 2013, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" (1969) sold at Christie’s in New York for $142.4 million, then a world auction record for a work of art. From September 2019, the Pompidou Centre in Paris is putting on a new show of Bacon’s work.

Bacon told Sylvester that "no artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years to sort itself out." But he was nonetheless aware that he had made an impact. Three retrospectives were held during his lifetime: in 1962 and 1985 at Tate Britain, and the 1971 show at the Grand Palais.

I was filming the 1985 Tate exhibition when Bacon and his then companion (and later heir) John Edwards suddenly wandered into the space. Bacon quickly spotted the camera and they swiftly turned around. We missed the shot. Francis Bacon was essentially a private man who wasn’t remotely interested in celebrity. But he definitely wanted his work to be seen.

Francis Bacon: Couplings is on at the Gasogian in London until August 3, 2019. Bacon: Books and Painting opens at the Pompidou Centre on September 11, 2019.

"A restaurant should be somewhere you take someone you want to sleep with!" Ivor Bakar, owner of the Gunton Arms, is explaining his theory of where dining out has gone wrong.

"There used to be a romantic side to eating out. Restaurants were originally designed so you could have a tète a tète, with private booths where you could draw the curtain across, with candlelight which would make even the ugliest partner, male or female, seem sexually desirable at the end of the evening," he says. "Now they’re designed by people who are only thinking of their own design, who show you everything in the room immediately.

"Our restaurants are either a pale pastiche of a French brasserie or they have a white-tiled, slightly lavatorial Italian look. That’s nice but it doesn’t make you want to sleep with the person you’re with! It’s all too open and brightly-lit! You don’t go there to get laid! The magic, the charm, the mystique of taking someone special somewhere romantic is fucked!"

He stops for a moment and looks around him. "I hope this place isn’t like that," he says. "I hope it’s sexy. Sexy and mysterious.

When Braka, who lives in a nearby gatehouse, bought the place he says, "it took two years to strip it back to its bones. I wanted to recreate an illusion that you could be walking into another world, another century.

"We rubbed dirt into the paintwork - some people complain and say, 'why is that wall dirty?' It’s actually fake grime! Now, if we have a genuine leak, we leave the mark. A certain sort of person likes everything squeaky-clean. We didn’t want to cater to that kind of person, we wanted it to feel comfortable and not intimidating, very inclusive.

His next move was hiring Simone and Stuart, who had been working for Braka’s close friend, the chef restaurateur Mark Hix at his celebrated Oyster And Chop House in Smithfield Market. "Mark is my guru, a pioneer in championing British seasonal food," says Stuart. "When I grew up in Rochdale, which was not a culinary Mecca, British food was the laughing stock of the world, something to be sidestepped. Overcooked roast beef and fish and chips. When I was learning my trade, Mark was the first to dig into the archives and start redelivering classic British dishes. Many have followed him.

"Mark was a big part of the Modern British Artist movement; he was very good friends with Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas – a wealth of talent – as well as with Ivor. He would put on these high-spend dinners at Ivor’s house, and Simone and I noticed Ivor would often spend more time in the kitchen talking to us than he would with his guests. We shared a vision: bringing back the great English traditional pub, offering the punters reasonably-priced food and good ale in an environment which doesn’t take itself too seriously."

While Simone and Stuart planned food and the vibe of the reworked pub, Braka brought his own talents and finance to the project. Inspired by family friend Andras Kalman, he’s been an art world fixture for the past four decades, becoming noted as an early adopter of Francis Bacon before prices for the British artist went stratospheric.

"When I started my first Francis Bacon cost me £26,000," he says. "I sold the same picture for $1.5million maybe 15 years ago. Today that picture is worth about $15million. The most expensive picture I’ve sold is a Bacon, one of his Popes, for $50million."

"But the biggest sense of exhilaration – panic and fear, really – was buying a Bacon at auction for half a million dollars and I hadn’t got the money to pay for it. And my friend John Erle-Drax, who runs the Marlborough Gallery, rang and said 'have you heard, some fool has just paid half a million for a Bacon', and I said 'John, it was me'. And I thought, 'oh my God'. That was 1984 and I sold the painting about 15 years ago for $5million. Today that picture is south of about $40million."

Braka says he doesn’t mind the huge profits his buyers often make from reselling paintings he once owned. "Some people can’t bear other people making money from them; I’m delighted by it. You shouldn’t try to bleed your buyers. A friend of mine says, and it’s a good philosophy to have, 'always leave something for the cat.

"In the early days I used to dislike making a profit at all, I felt weird and wrong buying something for one price and selling it for another. It took me years to get over that feeling. Even now I am far more enjoy buying than selling, I love what I deal in too much.

Part of Braka’s collection is now installed at the Gunton Arms, though walk through the front door and you’re in what looks like the fairly conventional hallway of a fairly conventional country pub. "I wanted it to dawn on you gradually that the artwork is maybe not what you expect," says Braka. "So when you walk in the first pictures you see are 18th century prints of livestock and family paintings of the Suffield family, who owned the estate. I’m lulling you a false sense of security. Then you notice there’s an old portrait of an 18th woman, but it’s been doctored to make it look like it she has a black eye. And then we get into the bar, where there’s a print of Landseer’s Monarch Of The Glen, a piss-take because here you are probably going to eat our venison. And gradually you see the little bondage whip in the window.

There’s more challenging stuff – including provocative photographs of the American supermodel Kristen McMenamy, who Braka married in 2016 – throughout the Gunton Arms and he accepts that not all of it will be to everyone’s taste. "You can’t please them all," Braka says. "I didn’t want the art here to be anodyne, I didn’t want too many still lifes; bits of fruit on a plate or pretty girls romping through the Cromer sands, or views of Cley windmill. That’s boring as hell. I didn’t want cheesy pictures, I wanted pictures which would make people think.

"The big themes are life, death, sex," says Simone. "At first we were a bit frightened about negative reaction to some of the art but now we realise so many people accept it and like and the minority of people who do protest, we just let it wash over us.

Despite all of it – the huge photorealist imagining of dinosaurs copulating, the 10,000-year-old elk skull, the fake 'moving painting' of Venice by Monet which turns out to be a TV screen on a loop – the Gunton Arms is playful than pretentious. "We don’t take ourselves too seriously," Stuart says. "From the start we all shared the belief that a pub should be for everybody to enjoy, not just the landed gentry but the guy who’s just finished his shift down the road. That we could have a vibrant locals bar next to a successful restaurant delivering top-notch seasonal food from our doorstep in an environment with incredible art. No fancy fine dining. When we opened the doors we had no idea how successful it would be. We did it just wanting to create the kind of pub we would all like to go to."

In some ways, Simone thinks, the Gunton’s art operates on a similarly subversive level to the pool table in its bar, or the fact that none of its 16 rooms comes with a television. "We deliberately do things to quash expectations. Sometimes people want this to be a country house hotel. I’ve been called up to somebody’s bedroom at 11pm and they can’t believe there is no television and they’re threatening to leave. And I say, 'it’s too late to go anywhere else, how about you sleep on it, have breakfast, go to the coast in the morning and then come back and tell me how you feel:

"The vast majority of the time people come back and say, 'we’ve had a great night’s sleep and we get it, we’re staying'. We had one man who said the next morning, 'do you know that last night, my wife and I did a jigsaw together for the first time in 30 years'. And I thought, 'oh, is that what you call it?' "

Ivor Braka listens to this and with the satisfaction of a job well done, the advocate of sexy food laughs and laughs.

1976 | Francis Bacon se raconte en français dans cet entretien diffusé dans "Les après-midi de France Culture" à l’occasion de l’exposition qui lui était consacrée au Musée Cantini de Marseille. Il aborde sa relation aux autres arts, l’importance de l’instinct dans sa création et de l’ordre irrationnel.

Invité de l’émission "Les après-midi de France Culture" durant l’été 1976, Francis Bacon commence la visite de son exposition au musée Cantini de Marseille, en lançant une mise en garde, "on ne peut pas expliquer la peinture. Il y a des images qu’on peut interpréter, chaque personne peut les interpréter comme il veut. Moi, je ne les interprète jamais. Mes tableaux je ne les interprète pas mais je n’interprète pas les tableaux des autres, même je ne sais pas interpréter Rembrandt. Parce que l’art plastique c’est un côté du système nerveux qui parle tout de suite sans interprétation."

Francis Bacon revient sur son parcours artistique et parle des expositions qu’il a vues à Paris, en particulier l’exposition de Picasso en 1927, qui l’a décidé de se lancer dans la peinture qu’il n’avait pourtant jamais étudiée. "Avec cette exposition, je commençais vraiment à regarder les tableaux de Picasso. [...] Je crois que Picasso était un homme qui absorbait tout autour de lui."

Francis Bacon dit aussi son admiration pour Rembrandt, Velázquez, Cézanne. Au sujet de la période cubiste de Picasso, il révèle que ce n’est pas ce qu’il préfère chez Picasso même si c’est compliqué car "c’est un génie qui est toujours tellement intéressant". Pourtant, il lui semble que "le cubisme est une décoration sur Cézanne". Il évoque également la technique si particulière de Vincent Van Gogh, de la "violence" dans sa peinture.

Peintre portraitiste, il explique pourquoi il aime tellement peindre des portraits, "c’est la chose la plus difficile à faire maintenant dans la peinture, de faire des traits qui ne soient pas de l’illustration complètement, c’est horriblement difficile." Il développe cette idée : "Avec la photographie maintenant, c’est tellement facile à enregistrer un portrait de quelqu’un, on peut en faire une illustration. Mais pour refaire le portrait par des taches irrationnelles, ça rend — si ça marche et je ne sais pas pourquoi — ça rend le portrait beaucoup plus vrai et beaucoup plus ressemblant. Ce n’est pas quelque chose qui passe par l’intelligence, mais ça vous choque tout de suite sur l’instinct. Un portrait, c’est plus mystérieux si on peut le faire sans l’illustrer."

Puis, le peintre de l’irrationnel explique une de ses idées fixes actuelles: "Je voudrais faire la bouche comme Monet a fait les couchers de soleil. Je n’y suis pas arrivé, malheureusement." Il poursuit sa réflexion sur l’ensemble de sa peinture, "je voudrais tout renouveler, travailler d’une autre façon. Je le sais dans mon instinct, mais je ne peux pas l’expliquer." Il s’exprime sur la violence qu’il sait que l’on ressent devant ses tableaux, il lui semble ainsi évident qu’ "il ne faut jamais oublier qu’un tableau ne peut pas être aussi violent que la vie elle-même, et la vie est tellement violente..."

Le peintre à succès dit qu’il peint avant tout pour lui-même et il s’étonne d’ailleurs que ses toiles puissent intéresser d’autres personnes, "c’est une sorte d’accident quand qu’on a commencé à vendre des tableaux, je les ai faits pour moi-même parce que la peinture me passionne." Mais cette célébrité ne l’a pas rendu "moins solitaire" pour autant. A la fin de l’entretien, Francis Bacon livre son avis assez pessimiste sur la peinture, "peut-être la peinture va mourir" car l’art conceptuel prend le dessus sur l’art plastique.

Francis Bacon en Septembre 1987. • Crédits: Raphaël Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho

The exhibition Francis Bacon: Couplings (Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, until 3 August 2019) allows viewers the chance to see some of Bacon’s best paintings in a space which is very suitable. The generous size of the galleries and the ambient décor of medium-dark wooden floor and gray walls allows the colour to come out strongly without having to fight against the white walls that often impair the viewing experience.

The paintings are from the 1950s to 1970s and include a classic triptych and some very well-known paintings. The paintings feature couples copulating or single figures. There is one painting (Marching Figures (c. 1952)), showing many figures rendered stick-like, which depicts marching figures which deviates from this. These are by no means all of the paintings on the subject. Bacon had trouble creating multiple-figure compositions. His most frequent and successful involve depictions of sex, usually homosexual. These began in a time when homosexual acts were illegal, so his paintings had a frisson of danger. When the earliest paintings were exhibited in London they were shown in rooms with curtains.

Painting (1950) has travelled from Leeds. It shows what could be one figure seen twice or two figures, perhaps in a shower or bathroom. It goes well next to Two Men Working a Field (1971) and near the latest painting in the show, Two Figures with a Monkey (1973). The colours of the copulating figures are offset by the malachite and viridian block below them. The painting features the tubular metal armature that recalls Modern furniture, railings or the equipment of physical therapy rooms. Despite the charge of perversity or eccentricity, it does succeed as a picture. The monkey adds to the air of unpredictability and balances the vertical format.

There is a rare chance to see one of Bacon most anomalous paintings, Figures in a Landscape (1954). It is oil paint on cardboard and is unusually small. The uncharacteristic size and support, rough technique and unclear subject (the nude figures in the grass could just as likely be one) show this as a test painting. It was catalogued in the Ronald Alley catalogue raisonné as an abandoned painting and it looks completely authentic, though odd experimental piece. It fits the period when Bacon was painting in a rich way and developing areas of grass with multiple rich hues, generally on a dark stained ground. The tawny grass is a recurring aspect in Bacon’s paintings of the 1950s.

An underappreciated work is Two Men Working a Field (1971). The lack of prominence of this picture in literature is partly due to the fact it has been in private collections. Additionally, it is probably overlooked because the subject is atypical for Bacon, showing as it does figures involved in work. It belongs to a small group of works from the early 1970s when he painted doubles – figures who not only look alike but mirror each other’s posture. The best known examples are the lying figures in the Tehran triptych (Two Figures Lying on a bed with Attendants (1968) and the more accessible Triptych (1967) at the Hirshhorn. The subject seems to be the loss of self – the way intimacy of sex or the efficiency of work leads to bodies echoing each other. This was not a subject that Bacon developed to such a degree as he might have. The few paintings he made are not seen as a discrete group but they warrant further consideration because they are unusual and arresting. The soil shows Bacon indulging his painterly side by creating a loam soil through brushing impasto burnt umber, ochre, sienna with a few dashes of crimson. This has been vigorously over-brushed, blurring the original application, adding more complexity to the areas.

Portrait of a Man Walking (c. 1953) is a painting of the artist’s most famous critical champion and lead interviewer, David Sylvester. The work is from the time of the men in dark blue rooms. Though these paintings are atmospheric, as paintings they are little lacklustre, with the artist tending to rely on an established format. Marching Figures (c. 1952) features what is commonly interpreted as a polar bear surmounting a phalanx of marching soldiers (or SA Stormtroopers) probably derived from photographs of Nazi rallies. It was recovered from a collection in a Chelsea warehouse after Bacon’s death. The paintings with which he was dissatisfied he sent to his colourman for the stretchers to be reused. The canvases were not destroyed but kept without the artist’s knowledge. The heavy-gauge canvas used for this painting was also used for Figures in the Grass (1954). It shows a homosexual copulation in a field.

Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972) is a triptych of figures having sex in brightly lit rooms (or a single room). It features a mattress from photographs given to the artist in Tangiers by Allen Ginsberg. To Bacon Ginsberg gave a series of photographs of Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky having sex, hoping Bacon would paint them. Bacon did not care for the figures but claimed to appreciate the “squalid” mattress, which he subsequently included in this triptych. Observation shows that rollers were used on carpet but not on the other areas. In the areas of brushed and stained paint, broken bristles are present, showing the use of cheap brushes or a lack of care for the brushes. For the figures one finds places where Bacon has blotted with textured fabric. Brown aerosol paint has been applied over the motif.

The female nude in Lying Figure (1959) fails, the motif being too congested and to sharply delineated. It seems to have no connection to the sofa and wall. The shape overall is ugly and uninformative, telling us little truthful about the nature of lying and the qualities of a lying figure and this figure in particular. Likewise, the horizontal lying male figure on a couch (Sleeping Figure (1959)) is also a failure. The face has become a caricature and the anatomy is ugly and uninvolving. The format suggests it was cut down from a larger painting in a standard Baconian upright format. This picture has little value. These are the only two disappointing pictures in a show of a high standard.

The final gallery holds the most celebrated painting in the display, Two Figures (called The Wrestlers) (1953), loaned from the Estate of Lucian Freud. It shows Bacon’s flexibility as a painter. The canvas was stained and the forms brushed in afterwards. The flesh of the figures is based on pale violet. The sheets are white, which has been applied impasto, in places with a palette knife. The same knife was used to scrape down that white, leaving the dark ground to create a speckled effect through the white. The head and base boards to the bed are illustrated, rather daintily and with a degree of clumsiness, setting the figures in a definite situation. Flickers of dilute monastrel (phthalocyanine) blue has been added last, heightening the pallor of figures and sheets. It is a marvellous sustained effort of execution and effective conceptualisation. It is justly regarded as one of Bacon’s finest works

The decision not to include supplementary material benefits the exhibition. Over recent years there has been a tendency to include drawings, photographs, sources and archival material. While this is stimulating and important for understanding Bacon’s methods and approaches to creation, it also distracts from the power and independence of the paintings. Most of the time we are better off looking at and thinking about the finished paintings of an artist

This exhibition is beautifully laid out and a chance to see Bacon at his carnal best. A full catalogue will be published in October

SKYE SHERWIN | ANATOMY OF AN ARTWORK | FRANCIS BACON | THE GUARDIAN | FRIDAY 5 JULY 2019

This is one of Bacon’s most acclaimed but little-seen paintings. It was created at the cottage of his violent ex-fighter pilot boyfriend, Peter Lacy, where, according to biographer John Richardson, the artist spent a lot of time in bondage.

Bacon’s classic mix of sex, death and animal instincts explodes directly through the buzzing vertical lines, the corpse-blue flesh and rictus of pleasure and pain.

The sadomasochistic pose was apparently inspired by wrestling magazines. But that interpretation might have been a Trojan horse for a work made when gay sex was illegal and in the news.

The quaint antique bed and black, curtained box of a room offer a defiant message to its audience, too. This is less a private boudoir than a triumphantly sordid theatre. The couple stare down their onlookers, grimacing at them. Manet’s Olympia – a reclining but far from traditionally demure nude prostitute – is the ghost in the room.

Part of Francis Bacon: Couplings, Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, to 3 August

‘I just like men. I like their brains, I like the quality of their flesh,’ declares a cheerful Francis Bacon, getting steadily more drunk with an equally pissed Melvyn Bragg, in Bragg’s revealing 1985 South Bank Show documentary on the artist. Bacon, a selection of whose paintings are currently on show at Gagosian London, tended not to make his sexuality a particularly public matter, but nor did he go out of his way to hide it. Coinciding with Pride month, the Gagosian show mostly homes in on those of Bacon’s paintings which depict two (male) bodies together, from the 1950s to the 70s, pivoting around 1967 – the year of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. It’s an intriguing curatorial proposition, not least because it allows one to consider Bacon’s strange and striking approach to figuration in the frame of what could and could not be shown, of bodies, sex and desire, when admitting it was something criminal.

Veiled suggestion is the what drives the earliest paintings here – the famous Two Figures (1953), transposing male wrestlers to the scene of an unmade bed, and Two Figures in the Grass (1954), both retain the intense charge of innuendo, of provoking the viewer’s recognition of something going on that’s not quite visible, but somehow happening in plain sight. Perhaps that’s why Bacon’s gallery didn’t exhibit it publicly when it was made. It’s hard to imagine a time when showing Two Figures could be taking a genuine risk, or that two visitors to Bacon’s 1955 show at the ICA could have reported Two Figures in the Grass to the police.

Thinking of Bacon’s paintings as constantly touching on and circling around what can and cannot be shown, what can and can’t be revealed, opens a different perspective on the artist’s shifting, fugitive representation of the human body. Rather than be explicit in works only shown in private, Bacon was hinting and suggesting in public – a different kind of risk at a time when gay men faced social stigma and criminal punishment. The year that Bacon was painting Two Figures in the Grass, pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing committed suicide, after having suffered a course of ‘chemical castration’, the penalty (instead of prison) for having been prosecuted, two years earlier, for his homosexuality.

Turing’s ‘crimes’ were ones committed in private, behind closed doors. Bacon’s paintings, for their part, continuously transgress the demarcation of public and the private realm, the inside and the outside. The Two Figures may be lying in the grass, but the grass is inside a black, interior space. In the astonishing triptych Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972), the beds and the figures having sex on them are set up outdoors, or are perhaps indoors behind windows, looking out to what might be buildings on a street, or a beach, against a dull bluish sky. Here, five years after decriminalisation, the sex is as explicit as Bacon gets, erect penises painted unambiguously between the convulsing, intermingling figures on these exposed, hard beds, electric lights above them burning inexplicably in daylight. And just so we get the point, Bacon flecks a squirt of white paint across the middle canvas, a crude, ironic approximation of ejaculation (and a little joke at Jackson Pollock’s expense).

Decades later, Bacon’s paintings remain disconcerting and beguiling, playing subtle games with what we see and what we want to see, with painting’s voyeuristic impulse, the nature of publicness and intimacy, of hiding and exposing, and the ambiguities of human desire. They’re also a reminder, as they hint, suggest and wink at us through their shifting gauzes of paint, of how bad things once were, and how far society has come since.

Francis Bacon: Couplings at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, through 3 August 2019

There was a lack of fizz at Sotheby’s post-war and contemporary sale in London last night— literally and figuratively.

Gone were the usual glasses of champagne being handed out at the entrance to the sale room, forcing thirsty clients to forage for refreshments elsewhere. A spokeswoman assures us this is because of renovations to the front of the building and not part of any cost-cutting exercise.

The sale itself was solid, if unremarkable. It brought in £58.4m (£69.6m with fees), sneaking just above the low pre-sale estimate of £58m, but a steep drop of almost 40% on last year. The sell-through rate was a healthy 90

Profit margins will be squeezed by some of the 16 lots guaranteed by third parties, with seven works selling on a single bid, most likely to the financial backer. They included sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Donald Judd, as well the most expensive lot of the night, if not week: Francis Bacon’s small but penetrating 1975 self-portrait, which fetched £14.35m (£16.5m with fees)—more on that price late

However, Sotheby’s will cash in nicely from the only lot guaranteed in house: an unusual painting by the enigmatic German artist Otto Wols who died aged 38 of food poisoning. Vert Strié Noir Rouge (Green Stripe BlackRed) (1946-7) sparked what the sale’s auctioneer Ollie Barker called the “bidding competition of the night”, vaulting 7.5 times over its high estimate to sell on the phone for a record £3.8m (£4.5m with fees) to Sotheby’s head of Impressionist and Modern art, Helena Newman. Underbidding came from a dogged Japanese client.

Unlike Christie’s sale on Tuesday evening, which tended towards fresh material by young artists, Sotheby’s stuck to a more tried and tested auction format. “Our sale was a bit more classical, it was really the great artists we know and love,” said the head of sale Emma Baker.

But even blue-chip artists are not immune from being flipped. The Bacon self-portrait last sold at Sotheby’s in London in July 2015 for £15.3m with premium, just before the market faltered. By art market standards, £1.2m over four years for such an artist is a poor return.

Profits were slim where Robert Ryman and Rudolph Stingel were concerned, as Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina pointed out on Twitter. The seller of Ryman’s 1963 oil on a scrap canvas, Untitled #32, paid $1.1m at Christie’s Paris in 2017, but sold it for $1.08m last night, after trying to offload it at Lévy Gorvy last summer for $1.8m. Meanwhile, even Stingel’s exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel could not lift his prices. His untitled oil and enamel on linen from 2012 went below estimate for $1.3m ($1.6m with fees) on a single bid to Gagosian, having fetched $2.9m at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2017.

Gagosian has been heavily promoting another of its artists, Albert Oehlen, and that strategy paid off last night, with a record for his disconcerting and rare self-portrait with flaming orange background. Selbstportrait mit Leereden (Sen Hanlf-Portrait with Empty Hands) (1998) has not been on the market for 20 years, prompting three bidders to battle it out over six minutes. In the end, the canvas went to the London dealer Per Skarstedt for £5.35m (£6.2m with fees).

Sotheby’s announced after the sale that it is sponsoring a major show of Oehlen’s work at the Serpentine Gallery in London this October.

Women accounted for nearly 20% of Sotheby’s March contemporary sale in London, but in last night’s auction, less than 12% of lots were by female artists. Emma Baker described it as “the nature of the secondary market to be predominantly male”.

Most prominent and accomplished among the works by women was Jenny Saville’s Shadow Head, executed over a period of six years between 2007 and 2013. The painting sold to the London dealer Tim Taylor in the room for £3.5m (£4.2m with fees; est £3m-£5m). Acquired from Gagosian in 2014, the canvas is the absolute fleshy antithesis of the heroin chic look worn by Kate Moss in the 1990s, during which time Saville and the rest of the YBAs were taking the art world by storm.

The other woman on the block to garner attention was Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose Compound Leaf, a pensive work on paper from 2017, more than doubled its high estimate to sell for £380,000 over the phone, a record for the artist. Works by young black women are proving popular among collectors in search of the “next big thing”, as was seen with Tschabalala Self at Christie’s on Tuesday evening. The question is always one of market speculation.

Phillips picks up the baton this evening with a rose-hued collage on canvas by Self, carrying a similar estimate to the Christie’s work. With collectors hungry for fresh talent, we could see more records tumble.

26 Sept-23 Feb. Rome’s Chiostro del Bramante will host a major exhibition dedicated to the School of London, featuring paintings by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, organised in collaboration with the Tate in London.

The show, which runs from 26 September until 23 February 2020, unites the works of Bacon and Freud for the first time in Italy, highlighting one of the most significant chapters of international contemporary art in the 20th century.

The exhibition will comprise 45 paintings, drawings and engravings by six artists: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Paula Rego, in addition to Freud and Bacon.

The figurative works span more than seven decades, from 1945 until 2004, and are described by Chiostro del Bramante as "direct, shocking, and no-filter."

The works share raw and emotionally-charged subject matter, with themes including the fragility of the human condition, war, immigration, excesses and the search for truth. In the case of Bacon and Freud, the works. examine the artists’ friendship as well as their relationships with their models.

Highlights of the show will reportedly include Bacon’s Study for a Portrait (1952) and Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966), and Freud’s Girl with a White Dog (1950) and Standing by the Rags (1988).

The term ’School of London’ was coined by artist R.B. Kitaj to describe a group of London-based artists pursuing forms of figurative painting in the face of avant-garde approaches in the 1970s.

Curated by Elena Crippa, the exhibition sees the Chiostro del Bramante continue its important collaboration with The Tate, following its hugely successful Turner show in 2018.

This evening in London, Sotheby’s hosted its June contemporary art evening auction, which brought in £69.6 million ($88.4 million) across 43 lots, a result that was within the sale’s estimate of £58 million to £82.8 million ($73.5 million–$105 million) with the addition of buyer’s premium.

Sotheby’s had secured itself a measure of success before the sale’s start, with 17 lots holding guarantees, whether from a third party or the house, meaning that their purchase was assured. The sale saw only four pieces fail on the block—works by Glenn Brown, Anselm Kiefer, Christopher Wool, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—for a solid sell-through rate of 91 percent.

The top lot was a 1975 self-portrait by Francis Bacon—the artist’s face caught in a swirling blur atop a purple background—that went for £16.5 million ($21 million), just above its low estimate of £15 million ($19 million), a figure that is calculated sans premium.

A few other portraits performed well: Jenny Saville’s Shadow Head (2007–13) brought in £4.18 million ($5.3 million), squarely within its estimate of £3 million to £5 million ($3.8 million–£6.35 million), and Albert Oehlen’s fiery 1998 Selbstportrait mit Leeren Händen (Self Portrait With Empty Hands), 1998, broke the artist’s auction record, selling for £6.23 million ($7.87 million), just above its £6 million high estimate ($7.58 million).

Speaking of records, a new one was also set for the mid-century German painter and photographer Wols, whose frenetic abstraction Vert Strié Noir Rouge (Green Stripe Black Red),1946–47, blasted through its £400,000-£600,000 estimate ($505,000-$757,000), selling for an astonishing £4.53 million, or $5.72 million.

Two other artist records were set tonight, for works by Toyin Ojih Odutola and Pascale Marthine Tayou. Odutola’s pastel, charcoal, and pencil on paper piece Compound Leaf (2017) tripled its low estimate, bringing in £471,000 ($594,000), and Tayou’s set of mixed-media sculptures Poupées Pascale, Les Sauveteurs (2007) netted £312,000 ($396,000) on an estimate of £250,000 to £350,000 ($317,000-$444,000

Takashi Murakami—or at least the consigner of a Takashi Murakami sculpture—also had a good night, with a work depicting a panda bear standing atop a Louis Vuitton trunk selling for £1.21 million ($1.54 million), double its high estimate of £600,000 ($760,000

JACKIE WULLSCHLÄGER | COLLECTING | FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND | 22 JUNE 23/JUNE 2019

“Why ever change the subject?” Francis Bacon asked. “You could go for the whole of your life painting the same subject.” So, dominating postwar figurative pataining with enthralling virtuosity and infinite variety, he did: almost all his compositions feature a figure, recognisable but blurred, distorted, convulsed, within an airless, confined space. Rigorously, there is no narrative.

Two figures, though, caused Bacon trouble, because “you immediately come on the storytelling aspect of the relationships . . . I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative”. These magnificent, complex double figure paintings, some unseen in London for 50 years or ever, star in Francis Bacon: Couplings, the outstanding current exhibition at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill venue.

Highlights include the sensationalist “feelthy pictures”, as Bacon’s early gallerist Erica Brausen called the explicit works she kept hidden behind a curtain at her Hanover Gallery in London, and sold at reduced price

The writhing copulating men, adapted from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of wrestlers, in “Two Figures in the Grass”, provoked public complaints to the police when shown in 1955; the lyrical/savage composition declares man’s untamed, instinctual nature, and was inspired by a visit to Africa where Bacon said he “felt mesmerised by the excitement of seeing animals move through the long grass”.

“Two Figures” (1953), one of Bacon’s most voluptuous yet brusque paintings, made at the height of his violent affair with pilot Peter Lacy, sets bruised flesh against crisp, crumpled white sheets, derived from those in Manet’s “Olympia”. Striations from a background curtain continue through the two heads, at once diffusing and enlivening the embrace/assault. What Bacon called the “bed of crime” is aggrandised into a fraught, classical interior. Lucian Freud owned — and surely learnt from — this painting, and refused to lend it for Tate’s 1985 retrospective; it has not been exhibited since Bacon’s 1971 show at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Sourced from private and public collections, the “couplings” here span Bacon’s most significant two decades, building up to and immediately following that landmark Paris exhibition, and trace with concentrated flair how he unpacked and reinvented art history around his essential themes of sex and death.

Mexico’s Museo Tamayo has sent — how does Gagosian manage this? — the rarity “Two Figures with a Monkey”: the animal leaps out from beneath the couple thrashing on a tabletop to snarl mockingly at us, voyeuristic observers, while a free-floating pillow, painted with exquisite delicacy, offsets the brutish figures. The uncharacteristic “Lying Figure” is double in that it is androgynous; unusually too it is placed against abstract horizontal planes in changing sea colours — it was painted in St Ives, when Bacon lived next to Patrick Heron, whose abstractions he loathed.

Exhibited only once, at a New York commercial gallery in 1968, is the intimate contorted “Two Figures on a Couch”, from 1967, the year homosexuality was decriminalised for those over 21 in England. The deeply private, claustrophobic rendering probably reflects Bacon’s reservations about this: the frisson of the forbidden thrills through his oeuvre.

The earliest work, “Painting” (1950), features a twisting muscular nude, based on Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave”, and its shadow of death; the heavy, slow pair pass before a bright striped screen hung from a brass rail, suggesting the scene is a bath house. “Figures in a Landscape” (c1956) merges crouching nudes with a photographic image, a cameraman mauled by a lion in Africa, within a geometric, transparent golden throne as in Bacon’s screaming pope paintings. “Three Studies of Figures on Beds” (1972) commemorates Bacon’s lover George Dyer, who committed suicide hours before the opening of the Grand Palais exhibition.

Bacon outlined thick circles, drawn around dustbin lids, to direct the eye to sexualised encounters — a penis and a bondage black leather belt are clearly delineated — on bare mattresses in two panels; the last contains only Dyer’s encircled profile: Eros and Thanatos inseparable again.

The palette brightens in the 1970s but the mood of isolation and meaninglessness darkens. Bacon’s working title for “Two Studies from the Human Body” was “The Last Man on Earth”: the central figure stumbling on a blank green surface is mirrored/shadowed by a hunched ape-like form with a cormorant’s head. “Two Men Working in a Field” is a one-off: twinned naked workers plough a furrowed ochre terrain of scumbled impasto coursing with watery lilac rivulets. The muddy corrugations parallel Bacon’s familiar shuttered screens, and are held within an ellipsis surrounded by expanses of unnatural deep blue. Seen from above, the field is shaped like a vast eye running with tears; it is also a gaping abyss, pointlessly, repeatedly, raked over by the men, just as Bacon poured paint into the voids of his canvases: creation wrought from the bleakest vision of futility.

Forthright and often disturbing, Francis Bacon’s “male couplings” are also ambiguous, and it is this disjunction that gives them their power. Erotic, violent and yet so often tender, these 14 works from the 1950s to the 1970s restate Bacon’s pre-eminence: surely no other artist has locked together sex and violence with such conviction.

Bacon explores the relationship between two bodies, and specifically two male bodies – though gender is often left in doubt – with a frankness that feels like a physical blow. Vulnerability and intimacy are brought up short by brute strength: primal, animal, but very recognisably human.

Among the photographs, torn-out pages and press cuttings used by Bacon as visual sources, the motion studies of wrestlers by 19thcentury photographer Edweard Muybridge are key. Bacon’s Two Figures, 1953 (Main picture), are wrestling alright: in fact in 1953, 14 years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK, some viewers were content to see it as a painting of wrestlers and no more. It’s ironic then that though the wrestling figures once gave the painting a semblance of respectability, their adversarial embrace is what makes the painting so unsettling. Their faces, contorted in a blur of ecstasy or agony, look out to us in a plea of need and desperation. Romantic ideas about sex are tossed aside: for Bacon, sex is power and there must always be a victor. In these scenes of battling, copulating figures the remorseless trajectory of a relationship bound for destruction is described in bodily fluids and a tangle of sheets.

Sometimes, only one figure is discernible, as in Figures in a Landscape, c.1956. Here two bodies resemble only one, painfully contorted, or perhaps a collection of dismembered body parts, with the second figure overwhelmed by the first and reduced to a pair of legs. It’s as if sex – the “bed of crime” as Bacon called this theme – requires the annihilation of one or other party, the wrestling match that precedes it not so much a rough game, as a battle for survival (Pictured above right: Two Figures on a Couch, 1967).

Bacon’s “male couplings” are inevitably inflected with autobiography, and his two most significant love affairs, with Peter Lacy in the 1950s and then George Dyer in the 1960s were both violent, his dominance of Dyer so complete that according to Bacon scholar Martin Harrison, Dyer’s personality was “cancelled out”. However such characteristics resonate through Bacon’s work, it would be a mistake to think of him simply diarising his relationships, or documenting his pathologies. Instead, fundamental preoccupations, such as the destructive alchemy of human relationships find new voice in paintings like the walking man. Here we find ourselves confronted by a ghostly, besuited man who walks directly at us. Insubstantial and frankly two-dimensional as he is, it is an intimidating encounter with a malign and voracious presence: a black hole in human form.

If one person can obliterate another, so an individual can be broken into fragments, with multiple figures representing aspects of a personality. Animal figures serve to disrupt and reveal: in Two Studies of a Human Body, 1975, we might be looking at a man and his (approximate) mirror image. The seated figure with his back to us though is distinctly ape like, a somewhat more advanced version of the heavily muscled body in the foreground. In Two Figures with a Monkey, 1973 (Pictured left), a screaming monkey makes a terrifying inquisitor, apparently demanding a reaction from us as it crouches between us and two lovers on a clinical green table.

In this painting, a strange, disembodied shadow lurks under the table, a presence that seems substantial and unsettling enough to be counted as a further figure in this already overcrowded scene.

One of Bacon’s most intriguing works, Painting, 1950, also uses a shadow to create uncertainty and the sense of a lurking, other presence. Here the shadow is clearly that of a man, and yet it does not belong to the indeterminate, though probably female figure before us, whom we see, illicitly, through partially closed curtains. Named after his own occupation, the work casts the painter – and viewer – as voyeur, complicit in the exertion of power over the painted subject. Confused spatial arrangements and an ambiguous narrative begin to set out some of the possibilities and limitations of the art of painting and in doing so serve as a reminder that however horrifying and apparently pertinent Bacon’s personal life was, it is ultimately through his paintings that we must consider him.

Francis Bacon: Couplings at Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill until 3 August

‘It is no easier to make a good painting,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, than it is ‘to find a diamond or a pearl.’ He was quite correct. Truly marvellous pictures are extremely rare. To make one, Vincent went on, you have to ‘stake your life’ (as he, indeed, was doing).

Well, there is just such a jewel of a painting — only one by my count — in Francis Bacon: Couplings, an exhibition at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill. In some cases, the title of the show is literal. Several pictures depict two naked men in a ferocious sexual tangle. As a subject, this is perhaps still slightly daring today; it would have been astonishingly outré in 1953 when Bacon produced this dark masterpiece, ‘Two Figures’.

Its imagery was borrowed from a photograph of wrestlers in action by Eadweard Muybridge. But there is no suggestion in the painting that these naked men are taking part in a sporting contest. Bacon transferred the action to a bed. The lower figure’s mouth is pulled back in a spasm, whether of agony or ecstasy, it is hard to say.

Unsurprisingly, it was unsold when Bacon’s exhibition came to the end of its run, so the young Lucian Freud was able to buy it for £80. In comparison with Bacon’s current auction record — $142.4 million — that certainly seems like a bargain (though Freud liked to point out that 80 guineas was quite a sum in 1953).

There are several good Bacons elsewhere in the exhibition — ‘Two Figures in the Grass’ (1954), and ‘Painting’ (1950) — in particular. But none of them has the punch of the wonderful but fearsome ‘Two Figures’. Quite rightly the Gagosian gives it a room to itself.

What is the quality that makes it ring out? Bacon himself didn’t quite know how he achieved his results. He would work and rework a particular idea in the hope that eventually the magic would happen, and he’d paint a picture that satisfied him. Occasionally it did, partly — he insisted — by sheer chance.

Bacon once told an interviewer: ‘I can’t explain my art, or even my working methods. It’s like the person who asked Pavlova, “What does the dying Swan signify?” and she answered: “If I knew I wouldn’t dance it!”’

There is an eye-witness account of Bacon painting numerous pictures of naked men in the grass — much, presumably, like the one in the show. Then one day he slashed 20 or so of these canvases to ribbons. Presumably, the works at Gagosian survived a similar winnowing process.

The new Francis Bacon show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill is something of a landmark event. It contains a sumptuous array of top-quality works. Only a very few of these come from museum collections, so see them while you can.

Entitled Couplings, the show is brutally frank about Bacon’s homosexuality, and about the role that his sexual orientation and interests played in his art. While the overwhelming majority of the paintings currently on view have been seen in public before, their sexual content has never, I think, been so firmly emphasised. The exhibition organisers take pride in the fact that two of the works, produced in the mid-1950s, at a time when homosexual activity was still a criminal offence in Britain, are the most openly recognisable images of sexual activity between men that Bacon produced. At the time when they were made, they were proclamations of the artist’s outlaw status.

Now you can look at them quietly, no entrance fee required, at one of the grandest commercial galleries in London. The mind reels if you try to tot up the collective financial value of the paintings on view. It comes to hundreds of millions of pounds. If that’s the way your mind works, go to Gagosian just to look at the money. And then think about what the figure you come up with has to tell you about the way in which society has changed, in the space of just a bit more than half a century. Bacon died in 1992, having gone to Madrid in pursuit of a male lover who had discarded him. He was vehemently atheist, and his body was left to science. If his corpse still existed, it would probably be rolling rapidly in its grave.

Bacon’s strategy, so he always claimed, was not to paint from life. The models for these figures were, he said, images of wrestlers made by Eadweard Muybridge, an eminent Victorian photographer who analysed the motions of men and animals by making sequential images of them as they walked, ran, or engaged in athletic activities. They were thus conveniently distanced from the awkward realm of real life. This distancing was partly true, and partly a convenient fiction. It provided a convenient, legally protective, pretext for his coupling male figures. If you chose to see them as representations of lovers engaged in what was, at the time when Bacon first started to make these compositions, a shameful activity, condemned by the law, also by all members of so-called ‘decent’ society, then that was up to you, the viewer. It was your choice to look at them, and also your choice as to how to interpret them.

Now all that is conveniently settled. The shift in interpretation is automatic because society has changed. We go to Gagosian to look at the show, and we know exactly what we are looking at – painted representations of muscular men fucking. The thrill of the illicit has not, however, entirely gone. That is the power of figurative art of a certain type: to make us see more than we are capable of seeing for ourselves, unaided. Bacon ramps up the power of the illicit, even now, when the barriers that once existed have fallen. The pictures – dare one say it? – Are charged with his sense of guilt, embedded in the psyche of a homosexual man of his generation. This is the unsettling gift that he offers to us. Great art has always tended to do this kind of thing, and artists don’t have to be nice human beings to do it. Look at Bacon’s copulating male lovers. Look at Caravaggio’s alluringly, ambiguous street urchins. Would the world, in each case, be better off without these unsettling images? No, I don’t think it would. They both have something quite profound to tell us about human nature.

The authority of Francis Bacon’s art is papal. I am not referring to the paintings inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X that made him famous. It’s just that walking into Gagosian’s immaculate selection of his paintings feels like exploring the art treasures of St Peter’s and the Vatican, so sublime is this display. If these pictures really were in the Vatican, though, they’d have to be veiled, perhaps even in a secret room where only cardinals could peek. For this is a sustained exploration of how Bacon saw sex.

An imaginary curtain swooshes back as you enter a chapel-like space to see Two Figures, painted in 1953 and last exhibited in Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. It has the sense of some supreme revelation. Two men make love on a bed that’s an expanse of crumpled white sheets. As they do it they look out of the canvas at us – but their faces are distorted, blurred. One might be grinning into a camera. It’s as if they are gleefully showing us their crime, their identities disguised for their protection. When Bacon painted this in the 1950s, he really was portraying a crime. That thrills him. The white bed is enclosed in a transparent box whose outline in perspective draws you towards the central act. It resembles the glass booths that enclose those renowned paintings of popes. Yet it has the opposite meaning.

Bacon’s popes are trapped in a hellish prison. Two Figures, painted in the same style, in the same era, is their antithesis. This transparent box does not confine. It opens on to a stormy space filled with rushing vertical lines. It’s as if the bedroom contains the cosmos. These lovers have an entire universe of beauty and terror at their command, their bed is a stage where anything can happen.

Bacon once said he wanted his art to “unlock the valves of feeling”. It’s an odd metaphor, as if the human self was a Victorian steam engine that needed its pistons greased. But this incredible painting, a baroque masterpiece painted in the 20th century, unlocks them all right. But it would be sentimental to say it’s a proudly gay artwork or claim Bacon as any kind of a role model. His art glories in chaos and torture. In one later work here, lovers copulate on a kind of operating table raised on one of the horrible art deco tubular frames he frequently painted – and that he’d designed as a young man in the 1930s – while a monkey looks out from under the table with hilarious nihilism.

Sometimes Bacon sees much more than the beast in us. His 1959 painting Sleeping Figure explores the contours and soft secrets of his lover Peter Lacy’s unconscious flesh. It is a mighty depiction of the nude, a curvaceous pink landscape of desire resting on a blue sofa that resembles a plinth. As Lacy sleeps, Bacon can contemplate him gently. It’s natural to compare Bacon’s paintings of the male form with the western tradition of the male nude: his cluttered paint-spattered studio had books on Michelangelo among the “physique” magazines. But looking at this enrapturing nude, I don’t see the toughness of Michelangelo so much as the melting colours of Titian. Just like the pinks that delicately waft a Titian Venus into being, Bacon’s reds and whites create a swirling mist of flesh.

In his 1959 painting Lying Figure, that painterly ambiguity becomes openly hermaphroditic as a nude spreads her/his legs in the air. Bacon indulges a summer afternoon daydream in which anything and anyone is possible. He painted this idle fleshy reverie by the seaside in Cornwall but the blue sea could as easily be Picasso’s Med. This exhibition makes a great case for Bacon as the Spanish genius’s true heir: the only artist who could add to Picasso’s metamorphic lexicon of the human figure. Three Studies of Figures on Beds, the most disturbing work here, was painted in 1972, a year before Picasso died. Its monstrous mashup of buttocks, limbs and heads is a turbocharged reply to the impossible orifices in Picasso’s late nudes.

Speaking of buttocks, this exhibition has some of the best I’ve ever seen. The lover on his front in Two Figures in the Grass, from 1954, displays two big hemispheres of rose and purple with a giant shadowed cleft. Other anatomical details emerge with similar precision from these storms of colour. Bacon painted penises much more exactly than he ever portrayed faces. In his 1967 painting Two Figures on a Couch, two men are locked in a fleshy grapple. Your eye flinches at their violent contortions. Ah yes, you think, almost with a weary sigh, another coupling. Then your attention rests on the clenched fist of one of them. It is a tight ball of pure feeling.

Bacon was an artist capable of flamboyant allegory. From 1940s paintings of demonic gargoyles to late canvases decorated with meat and swastikas, he threw symbols about with generous abandon. This exhibition deftly strips away the excess to reveal his true greatness as an artist of our vulnerable human pulp.

You can’t imagine that having sex with Francis Bacon was very pleasant. And if this jaw-dropping little collection of paintings of male bodies pre-, during and post-intimacy is anything to go by, it definitely wasn’t gentle.

The figures Bacon depicted in these works – some of which haven’t been seen since the 1970s – are writhing fleshy masses, their teeth bared, muscles taught. The men here are paralysed in wrestling holds, caught between violent pain and physical ecstasy. Their ‘coupling’, Bacon’s word, doesn’t happen anywhere romantic, but on hospital and prison beds, single light bulbs hovering overhead, white stains streaked across the ground.

The works with single figures show them balled up on a couch, walking facelessly in a suit, left in a puddle of sweat on the floor.

These are violent, aggressive works; they view love as a boxing match, sex as war. It’s not pleasant, but it is utterly, totally brilliant. Bacon could convey so much tension, so much physicality. He’s such an obscenely visceral painter. You can almost feel the bruises, smell the sweat, sense the heady mixture of fear and desire.

This is Bacon at his most illicit, and with the exception of two slightly duller works, this is him at his best.

When Marty Feldman met Francis Bacon drink was involved. Before he became internationally famous for his performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman was a very successful and hugely influential comedy scriptwriter with his long-time writing partner Barry Took.

One night in London, sometime during the almost swinging sixties, Feldman and Took had been working late finishing off another episode of their hit radio show Round the Horne. It had been a good day, a productive day, and now Feldman was on his way home to see his wife, Lauretta. As he walked through the city he heard jazz coming from an art gallery. The band were playing “Night in Tunisia.” It piqued his interest. Feldman had started off as a jazz musician when he was fifteen playing trumpet with his own band and occasionally filling in with other combos. He wandered towards the gallery. A small crowd stood around clinking glasses. Ah, jazz, art, and free booze.

Feldman snaffled a couple of cocktails and had a look at the paintings. Not bad. Interesting. Certainly different but not really to his taste. Against one bare white wall there stood a man who looked like he was losing his battle to keep himself or the building up. He had the look of an aged choirboy gone to seed. A round turnip head, with dyed hair slicked back, and just a hint of rouge on his cheeks. He wore a leather jacket, a white shirt (top button undone) and blue paint splattered denims. Feldman thought he looked familiar but wasn’t quite sure where from?

What was said, we can only imagine, but it apparently began with the man against the wall commenting on Feldman’s distinctive face.

“I could use that face,” he might have said
“Well, I’m using it myself at the moment,” Feldman replied in our imaginary dialog.
“Your eyes,” returned the first.
“Yes, they’re my eyes.”
“You don’t understand, I. Have. To. Paint. You,” almost like Edith Evans’ “handbag” in The Importance of Being Earnest.

The man against the wall leaned towards Feldman as if attempting to capture something invisible between them.

“I,” he continued, “must paint you. You look the sort of man I could do something with.”

Feldman thought what sort of things this man might want to do with him then decided this strange character was trying to pick him up.

“Here, take my number,” the man said. He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Feldman took the paper and watched the man who was no longer holding up the wall stagger off into the night.

The next morning, over breakfast, Feldman told his wife Lauretta about the man at the gallery who had tried to pick him up. “He wanted to paint my portrait, ” he added.

Feldman retrieved the slip of paper and said, “Francis. That’s all it says.”

Lauretta asked Feldman to describe this painter. He did. Lauretta then suggested her husband had met Francis Bacon.

Moving forward a few months: Feldman spent the day writing with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a local pub. It was a long day’s writing and drinking into the night. Eventually, the threesome were “poured out of the place hammered” trying to remember who they were and where they lived. Somehow they got lost and ended up (surprise, surprise) at another art gallery party.

Once again, Feldman tucked into the cocktails, this time joined by the equally drunk Cook and Moore. And once again, there was that man Francis holding up a wall. As Feldman recounted the incident in his autobiography Eye Marty:

“I spotted my old pal Francis standing at a distance and pointed him out to Peter, who knew my story because I had become obsessed with what-ifs. Bacon’s work was fetching high prices and it would have been fun if he’d painted a portrait of me and I hadn’t told Lauretta, just inviting her to a gallery and pretended it was no big deal.”

Without hesitation, Dudley went up to Bacon and told him that Marty was now ready to be painted.

Unfortunately, the temperamental Bacon told Moore that he had “never seen or talked to [Feldman] in his life.”

Though Bacon may not have known Feldman, he was bound to be at least acquainted with Cook and Moore, as he had often visited Cook’s Establishment Club, and had been at parties also attended by Pete ‘n’ Dud. Perhaps, as Feldman suggested, Bacon saw the state the trio were in and thought they were just “a bunch of drunken wankers.”

A few days later, Feldman received a letter from Bacon in the post, asking him to drop by his studio. At first convinced this was Lauretta, Cook, or Moore winding him up, Feldman considered ignoring the missive. However, that night, after another long day toiling over the typewriter with Barry Took, Feldman decided to “throw caution to the wind” and call round at Bacon’s studio. As Feldman later wrote:

“I knocked at the door and was let in by a rather strange bloke who left me to wait for ages in the hallway. Bacon finally appeared and was very apologetic. He explained that he was readying a show and his agent had been hounding him. I told him I didn’t want to disturb him, and before I knew it I was sitting sipping cognac surrounded by his work. He was such a lovely man and he told me that after the night when Dud had approached him at the party he did remember me but was too embarrassed to do anything about it. It turned out that one of his pals was a fan of Round the Horne, and when he told Bacon I was one of the writers of Julian and Sandy, he was very excited to meet me.”

The Julian and Sandy characters were two gay actors played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, who each week offered their bona services to the show’s host Kenneth Horne. Julian and Sandy spoke polari, the secret language of the gay community, and were out gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England.

“[Bacon] sat there sipping his drink and would suddenly burst into dialogue from our show. Hours passed and when I got up to use the bathroom I realised I was plastered. As I was leaving, he couldn’t stop hugging me and saying all sorts of silly things when he suddenly stopped and said, ‘Mart, we’ve spent all this time together and I still haven’t painted you. You must take a painting with you.’ I declined his kind gesture but he just grabbed one, thrust it at me and threw me out the door.”

Ideally, this would be the place to leave Marty’s story: Feldman’s solved the riddle of the painter Francis and although he has not had his portrait painted, he has at least been gifted a canvas by the great artist Bacon himself. But no, that would be too easy.

The next morning: Feldman woke up to find his wife Lauretta standing over him demanding to know where he had got the painting from. Feldman explained about meeting Bacon and being given a picture. Unfortunately, Lauretta did not believe him and called him “a fucking liar” and threatened to destroy the painting unless he told the truth. But, but, but…. It was a no-win situation as Lauretta thought her husband was just winding her up. Feldman took the painting over to Cook’s house while he decided what to do with it. Eventually, they decided to return the painting back to Bacon. Cook agreed to help. The pair were in a pub getting very drunk. Around closing time, they decided to return the painting.

“We made our way back to Francis’s house with the painting in the pouring rain—I threw my coat over it and we took turns to carry it, trying not to drop it. When we finally got to his house and rang his doorbell, we found nobody was home. Pete thought the best idea was to leave the painting at the door with a note saying, ‘Thanks but I simply couldn’t accept it.’

I said we should leave it at his back door because it had an awning and we didn’t have a pen or paper and it was fucking lashing on us.

Pete helped me over the wall, then threw the painting over to me and I placed it carefully under the awning, leaning against the back door with my coat still on it. The painting was a distorted portrait of maybe a man, maybe even Bacon himself, and I figured a spot of water couldn’t make it any more distorted. I tried to climb back over the wall but couldn’t manage it. Lanky Pete had to scramble over and push me back. I was sure I’d broken some part of my body.

When Pete was on my side of the wall again, he straightened himself up and said ‘All right, Mart, see you tomorrow, mate,’ and was gone.

I never heard from Francis, and Pete never spoke of it again, but every time Sotheby’s puts another of his paintings up for sale, Lauretta always says, ‘What if, Mart!’...”

Conman faces jail for pretending to have solved one of art’s great mysteries

The original, Portrait of Francis Bacon, was stolen from an art museum in 1988

A conman who put a fake Lucien Freud portrait for sale on eBay for £3,000 is now facing jail after being convicted of fraud by false representation.

Vincent Dyer, 66, from Greenford, claimed the painting had been given to his father and was kept in ‘secure storage’ for years.

The original painting, Portrait of Francis Bacon, was stolen from Berlin’s National Gallery in 1988 and the Kray twins have since been linked to its disappearance.

The artwork, worth millions of pounds, is still missing. Freud, whose most expensive painting sold for £22.5million, even offered a £100,000 reward for the recovery of the stolen portrait.

Dyer advertised the counterfeit artwork on eBay three times, twice in 2017 and once in 2018, claiming it was genuine. But he was later discovered to have bought it in 2012, knowing it was fake.

He denied three charges of fraud by false representation but was convicted by a jury last month and is due to be sentenced tomorrow at Isleworth Crown Court.

According to the Evening Standard, CPS prosecutor Marie Olo said: ‘Dyer dishonestly tried to sell a replica of a well-known Lucian Freud painting to make a gain for himself.’

'He claimed the false advert had only ever been a ‘sales pitch’ to attract interest but the prosecution was able to prove that he had deliberately aimed to mislead the public into believing he was selling a famed original.

‘Art fraud is illegal and the CPS will prosecute those who seek to deceive the public.’

In May last year the Mail on Sunday revealed that Bacon received a ransom demand for the painting in 1989 and was apparently poised to recover the work – only for the operation to be wrecked by a police blunder.

Barry Joule, Bacon’s close friend and neighbour in London’s South Kensington, has now revealed that the artist received a phone call in his studio from ‘a tough-sounding East End man, probably an associate of the Krays’.

Bacon believed that the recovery operation failed because the gangsters saw police officers at the scene.

For weeks afterwards, Bacon 'remained paranoid that the Krays and associates would be ‘out to get me for grassing to the police’,’ said Joule, who added: ‘If it wasn’t for policemen sitting in their car right outside the building, Francis might have got the stolen painting back.’

In a recorded interview with Joule three months after the ransom blunder, Bacon spoke of ‘how much the police have gone down in my estimation’.

Freud later plastered Berlin with 'Wanted' posters of the image, offering a £100,000 reward for its recovery so he could include it in a retrospective of his work.

Although the Tate has never claimed the insurance money, because it has hoped to be reunited with the painting, Bacon, who died in 1992, was more pessimistic. ‘Most likely it was burnt,’ he says on the recording.

In 2004, Joule gave the Tate 1,200 Bacon sketches. They were then valued at about £20million.

A Francis Bacon painting considered one of his most important left in private hands has sold at auction for more than 50 million US dollars (£39 million), Sotheby’s said.

Study For A Head (1952), from Bacon’s “screaming popes” series, had been estimated to fetch between 20 to 30 million US dollars when it went under the hammer in New York on Thursday. Instead it was sold for 50.4 million US dollars.

The painting had remained in the collection of Richard E Lang and Jane Lang Davis since 1975 and had only been exhibited in public once before now in its 57-year history, Sotheby’s said. The identity of the buyer was not immediately available.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, to British parents, Bacon took up painting in his 20s and went on to become a world-leading artist and one of the most prominent of the 20th century.

According to Sotheby’s, Study For A Head is Bacon confronting his disciplinarian father, who expelled him from the family home after catching him wearing his mother’s underwear. The painting shows a screaming man. It is one of six from the collection, which was inspired by Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Gregoire Billault, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York, said: “Study For A Head is the very best of six portrait heads completed by Francis Bacon in 1952 and one of only two of the artist’s iconic ‘screaming popes’ executed in this head-and-shoulders format.

“The painting contains all the elements of the artist’s best-known works from this period – broken pince-nez glasses, a purple mozzetta and of course the reverberating scream – and draws inspiration from the works of Velazquez, Munch and Poussin, as well as Bacon’s lifelong exploration of the human condition.”

Other works from this series now reside at Tate Britain, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Bacon died from a heart attack in 1992.

Study For A Head (1952) is considered one of Bacon’s most important left in private hands.

BEN MORGAN | LIZZIE THOMSON | ARTS | THE EVENING STANDARD | FRIDAY 17 MAY 2019

A Francis Bacon painting considered one of his most important left in private hands has sold at auction for more than $50 million (£39 million), Sotheby’s said.

Study For A Head, from Bacon’s “screaming popes” series, was estimated to fetch between 20 to 30 million US dollars when it went under the hammer in New York on Thursday.

The painting had remained in the collection of Richard E Lang and Jane Lang Davis since 1975 and had only been exhibited in public once before now in its 57-year history, Sotheby’s said.

The work, which depicts a screaming man, is one of six from the collection which was inspired by Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. These six pieces helped to establish Bacon’s reputation in the 1950

The other five artworks can be found at Tate Britain and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.

According to Sotheby’s, Study For A Head is Bacon confronting his father, who banished him from the family home after catching him wearing his mother’s underwear.

Bacon’s works attract some of the biggest prices for any early 20th century artist — a work of his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud was sold for $142m (£89m) in 2013, a record at the time.

Born in Ireland, Bacon took up painting in his 20s, and went on to become one of the most influential painters of his time. He’s best known for his experimental, emotionally charged works.

Led by works by Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction on Thursday, May 16 netted $341.9 million. Phillips’s Evening Sale of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art, which was also held Thursday night, hauled in $99.9 million. The auctions concluded New York’s spring contemporary art evening auctions, during which a total of $981 million was spent on artists such as Jeff Koons—who smashed the auction record for a work by a living artist at Christie’s on Wednesday—Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Willem de Kooning.

“Tonight we saw a resounding response to a very fresh sale, with nearly 80 percent of the works on offer making their auction debut,” Grégoire Billaut, head of the Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York, said last night. “It was an honor for us to be entrusted this season with collections that have been hidden away for decades, and bidders from around the globe were ready to compete for treasures like Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope—without question one of the best works I have ever handled in my twenty years at Sotheby’s.”

Bacon’s Study for a Head, 1952—part of his “Screaming Pope” series—fetched $50.4 million following a four-minute battle between five bidders, well exceeding its $30 million high estimate. Other highlights of the auction included Rothko’s Untitled, 1960, which sold for $50.1 million; Willem de Kooning’s colorful Untitled X, 1975, which went for $12.6 million; and Lee Krasner’s The Eye is the First Circle, 1960, which achieved $11.7 million—a record for the artist. Other records were set by Carl Andre, Charles Gaines, Barkley L. Hendricks, Rashid Johnson, Kenneth Noland, and Dana Schutz. Only seven of the night’s sixty-three lots failed to sell.

At Phillips, the top lots included de Kooning’s Untitled XVI, 1976, which netted $10.3 million; Basquiat’s Self Portrait, 1983, which sold for $9.5 million; and Mark Bradford’s Helter Skelter II, 2007, which raised $8.48 million. While the auction brought in $99.9 million from forty-five lots, the total for the night was down from last May’s

Francis Bacon’s Study for a Head, one of his iconic paintings of the Screaming Pope series, fetched $50.4 million including fees ($44 million at the hammer), following a four-minute fierce battle between five bidders at Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art in New York Thursday night.

One of a series of six small paintings in the head-and-shoulders portrait format completed by Bacon in 1952, the painting had a high presale estimate of $30 million.

Bacon’s Study for a Head is “without question one of the best works I have ever handled in my 20 years at Sotheby’s,” says Grégoire Billaut, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York. “Its result tonight is a tremendous recognition of the painting’s quality, as well as the eye of Richard Lang and Jane Lang Davis, who presciently acquired Study for a Head nearly 45 years ago.”

Mark Rothko’s 1960 Untitled, offered on behalf of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), achieved $50.1 million including fees ($43.75 million at the hammer). The sale is to benefit the institution’s Acquisitions Fund, allowing it to diversify its artworks.

On the strength of the aforementioned paintings, Sotheby’s realized a total of $341.9 million from its evening sale of contemporary art. Out of the 63 lots on offer, more than three-quarters made their auction debut Thursday night. The sell-through rate was close to 89%.

“Of the seven record works, six were brought to auction for the first time, and the enthusiasm for such a diverse range of artists is a very encouraging sign of the strength of our current market,” says David Galperin, head of Sotheby’s evening auctions of contemporary art in New York.

Gagosian is to present Couplings, an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s double-figure paintings. Bacon’s disturbing images—his portrayals of friends and fellow artists, and the deformations and stylistic distortions of classical subjects—radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century. In Bacon’s paintings, the human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred, watchful figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which male and female bodily traits are transposed or fused. This selective exhibition explores a theme that preoccupied Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological.

At the heart of the exhibition are two of the most uninhibited images that Bacon ever painted: Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). These interrelated works have not been seen publicly together since the major retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971. After completing Two Figures in the Grass, Bacon did not return to the subject until 1967, the year that homosexual acts in private were decriminalized in England and Wales. That same year he painted Two Figures on a Couch (1967), which was last exhibited in London in 1968 and is also included in Couplings.

Finding that the physical presence of his subjects could prove inhibiting, Bacon painted his figures and portraits both from memory and from photographs—his own, as well as Eadweard Muybridge’s dynamic studies of people in motion, including male wrestlers. Although Bacon was sometimes reluctant to specifically identify the subjects of his paintings, a number of the works in Couplings (a term the artist himself used) were inspired by his fraught, often violent and passionate relationships. His affair with Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot whom he met in 1952, cooled off after Lacy moved to Tangier, Morocco, in 1956, where Bacon visited him every summer until 1961. But even after Lacy died in 1962, Bacon continued to paint portraits of him, recalling intensely intimate moments in their relationship. In 1963 Bacon met George Dyer, a petty criminal from London’s East End. Dyer succeeded Lacy as Bacon’s lover and model and was the inspiration for many of Bacon’s grandest and most emotive paintings of the male nude. Three works in Couplings suggest a startlingly erotic and sometimes violent relationship between two men, such as the one Bacon and Dyer had: Two Figures on a Couch, the triptych Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972), and Two Figures with a Monkey (1973)—the last two painted after Dyer’s suicide in 1971.

FRANCIS BACON Couplings Opening reception: Thursday, June 6, 6–8pm June 6–August 3, 2019 Gagosian 20 Grosvenor Hill, London

Pictures at 1957 exhibition in London were still wet and stained attendees’ clothes after they leaned against them

There is nothing more dull than watching paint dry, but great art cannot be rushed. Francis Bacon was irritated that his dealer put him under huge pressure to finish paintings inspired by Vincent van Gogh for his London exhibition of 1957, according to a previously unheard recording that has come to light.

But Bacon got his revenge because his pictures were still wet when guests leaned against them at a crowded preview event, ruining their clothes. His dealer had to pay for dry cleaning and replacing a dinner jacket covered in streaks and smudges of red, blue and yellow oil paint.

The recording, which dates from 1985, was shared with the Guardian by Bacon’s friend Barry Joule. In their taped conversation, the artist can be heard telling Joule about his unhappiness over the tremendous pressure from his dealer, Erica Brausen, to finish paintings for an exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London.

With mischievous chuckles, Bacon says: “Two of the Van Gogh pictures were still freshly wet when delivered … and later several people came away from the opening bitterly complaining they had paint smeared all over the back of their jackets … They sent Erica the dry cleaning bill. It serves her right for putting so much pressure on me to finish up.”

Joule, speaking to the Guardian, recalled that Brausen’s partner, Toto Koopman, later joked about the episode with Bacon: “Koopman told us how displeased Erica was with the painter for having to fork out for the cleaning bill. Amusingly … Francis’s hands shot up, declaring his innocence: ‘Nothing to do with me – it’s all Erica’s fault for bombarding me with hurry-up non-stop messages.’”

Brausen also had to buy a new dinner jacket for one of the guests, Lord Broughshane, who had been pressed up against a still-wet picture.

Glistening oil paint created “long streaks and smudges” over his jacket, Joule said. “An immaculate dresser, he was oblivious to what had happened, except for the giggling party and stares coming his way – then turned furious when Koopman pointed it out to him. He stormed up to Francis and told him off.

“Bacon just sat there red-faced and took the abuse until rescued by Erica Brausen. Broughshane tried having the oil paint clean off with turps ... It didn’t work ... Brausen latter paid for a new dinner jacket.”

“Francis went into the closed Hanover the very next day with his paintbox and perfectly touched up to ‘re-figure’ – Francis’s own wording – the two messed-up Van Gogh paintings and Koopman duly put a fencing-off cord around the area of the two still wet pictures as the Hanover had to reopen the next day.”

Bacon’s 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold in 2013 for a record £89m. Joule recalled Koopman pointing out, even all those years ago, that perhaps Broughshane would have been much wiser to keep half a Bacon abstract painting on his dinner jacket than trying to scrub it away.”

Joule lived near Bacon’s studio in South Kensington. They struck up a friendship from 1978 until the artist’s death in 1992. Bacon agreed to a series of recorded conversations, insisting only that Joule wait 12 years after his death before making them public. The artist also gave him artworks, including 1,200 sketches from his studio, whose value was estimated at £20m in 2004 when Joule donated them to the Tate, one of its most generous gifts.

Some of the material is in Tate Britain’s new Francis Bacon Archival exhibition. It includes a handwritten note that Bacon gave to Joule in 1978 to explain how he felt about Van Gogh because, he said, “it will be much better if I write it down”.

Bacon’s pictures form part of the Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain, as part of a section celebrating the influence of the Dutch artist on 20th-century British painters.

Three modernist rugs and a painted screen produced by Francis Bacon worth a total of more than £3 million have been banned from export The screen was completed in around 1930, at the start of Bacon’s career, and was his first work in triptych, in which a picture or relief is produced on three panels and usually presented as an altarpiece. Valued at £2.5 million, it is his earliest surviving large-scale artwork.

The mgs, which were sold separately at auction, are considered among the finest modernist carpets in existence and described as “rare survivals of a very limited production of a group of mg designs” by Bacon. Each valued at between £146,000 and £186,000, they were made by the Royal Wilton company in 1929 to Bacon’s designs. Michael Ellis, the arts minister, said: “Francis Bacon is one of our most respected and renowned artists, whose works had a huge influence on modem art It is right that we try to keep these outstanding works in this country.”

Experts on the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art recommended that the items be kept in the UK because of their “outstanding aesthetic importance”, as well as their value to the study of Bacon. The artist was bora in Dublin, to British parents, in 1909. He took up painting in his twenties and became one of the most prominent artists of the 20th century. He died in 1992.

Richard Calvocoressi, a member of the committee, said: “Given how much of his work Bacon destroyed, it is crucial that we try to retain these rare early examples in this country. Bacon’s first short career as an interior designer, of modernist furniture and mgs, informed so much of his later painting.”

The export bar runs until July but may be extended if a serious attempt is made to raise funds to buy the items.

UK government places temporary export bars on £2.5m screen and three rugs by artist

LANRE BAKARE | ARTS & CULTURE REPORTER | THE GUARDIAN | FRIDAY 26 APRIL 2019

The government has placed temporary export bars on four works by Francis Bacon – including one of his earliest existing paintings – to ensure they are not sold to foreign buyers.

A painted screen by Bacon valued at £2.5m and three rugs, described by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as among the “finest modernist carpets in existence”, will not be allowed to leave the UK for the time being to give public institutions the chance to raise funds to buy them.

The art minister Michael Ellis said: “Francis Bacon is one of our most respected and renowned artists, whose works had a huge influence on modern art. It is right that we try to keep these outstanding works in this country, where they could inspire our next generation of world-class artists.”

Export bars can be placed on work which the government deems should be “saved for the nation”. In 2012 Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus was sold to a foreign buyer for £28m at auction before being put under a temporary export bar and eventually sold to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for £7.8m. In January 2018, Ellis put an export bar on the JMW Turner painting Ehrenbreitstein to allow UK buyers more time to meet the £18,533,750 asking price

The Bacon screen print was created around 1930 and was his first triptych, presented as an altarpiece and carved on three panels. The rugs were hand-knotted at the Royal Wilton carpet factory in 1929 and designed to be hung

Richard Calvocoressi, who was part of the committee that recommended the export bars, said the pieces needed to be protected because Bacon had destroyed so much of his early work

“It is crucial that we try to retain these rare early examples in this country,” he said. “Bacon’s first short career as an interior designer informed so much of his later painting.”

Ministers have stepped in to keep four rare early works by Francis Bacon — worth a combined total of £3 million — in the UK.

A painted screen valued at £2.5 million, believed to be the figurative painter’s earliest-surviving large-scale work and his earliest-surviving figure painting, is one of the items being blocked from export.

The screen was completed at the start of Bacon’s career in around 1930 and was his first work in triptych, in which a picture or relief is carved on three panels, attached together and usually presented as an altarpiece.

The other items placed under an export bar are three rugs that were sold separately at auction, each considered among the finest modernist carpets in existence and described as "rare survivals of a very limited production of a group of rug designs" by Bacon.

Arts minister Michael Ellis said: "Francis Bacon is one of our most respected and renowned artists, whose works had a huge influence on modern art.

"It is right that we try to keep these outstanding works in this country, where they could inspire our next generation of world-class artists.

Experts on the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) recommended that the works be kept in the UK because of their "outstanding aesthetic importance" as well as their value to the study of Bacon.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, to British parents, Bacon took up painting in his 20s and went on to become a world-leading artist and one of the most prominent of the 20th century.

RCEWA member Richard Calvocoressi said: "Given how much of his work Bacon destroyed, it is crucial that we try to retain these rare early examples in this country.

"Bacon’s first short career as an interior designer, principally of modernist furniture and rugs, informed so much of his later painting - not least his feeling for space and structure."

A decision on the export ban will be made in July and may be extended if a serious intention to raise funds to purchase the items is made at the recommended price for each item.

LILIYA TIPPETTS | INTERVIEW | LUXURY MAGAZINE | NUMBER 101 | MONDAY 15 APRIL 2019

Majid, how did your passionate Francis Bacon journey started before you inaugurated the foundation in Monaco?

My first encounter with Francis Bacon’s oeuvre goes back to my academic years in London in the early 1990s. While pursuing my academic studies in business and international relations, I enrolled in a short course in history of art. During a visit to the Tate Gallery, I was confronted with Bacon’s enigmatic triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944), which challenged interpretation and triggered in me the need to explore his world. My immersion into the artist’s work, life and creative process started in those years and continues to this day.

What does Francis Bacon as an artist mean to you and what is so special in the artist’s work that triggered you to establish the foundation in his name?

I always admired Bacon’s uncompromising attitude both in his life and in work. He confronts you with the human presence, the human condition, the human drama. What is fascinating when looking at a Bacon painting is the fact that you are often confronted with a duality between life and death, the sacred and the profane, the aggressor and the victim. I have been fascinated by the sacred-monster personality of the British artist. This ferociously talented artist allowed nothing and no one to get in the way of his work. I have always perceived Bacon as a loner and disciplined man. He was a loner who loved parties, an atheist obsessed with religious subjects, a generous and charming man who could also turn cruel. I admire the fact that this self-taught artist has remained, throughout his career, committed to exploring the dark corners of human existence.

How did you come up with the idea of creating the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation and what is its mission? And why did you initiate the Foundation in Monaco and not London or Paris, which have been also important cities in the artist’s life?

I discovered early on in my reading that Bacon started visiting Monaco at the dawn of the 1940s. It became his main residence from 1946 and a regular destination until the early 1990s. Contemplating Bacon’s attachment to and fascination with Monaco, and after having studied the poignant, timeless work of the British painter for a number of years, I started to dream of a concrete project in his memory. The creation of a Foundation in Monaco, dedicated to this singular artist, seemed obvious to me. In 2010, I initiated the project thanks to the pivotal support of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Monegasque authorities. The Estate of Francis Bacon encouraged this unique initiative and Martin Harrison, editor of the artist’s catalogue-raisonné, is on the Foundation’s board. On 28 October 2014, the Sovereign inaugurated on the anniversary of the painter’s birth, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation. Our foundation is dedicated to promoting a deeper understanding of the work, life and creative process of Francis Bacon worldwide; with a particular focus on the time the artist lived and worked in Monaco and France. It is open to researchers and to the public throughout the year, by appointment only. It provides a singular way for visitors to immerse themselves in Bacon’s oeuvre, by offering them a free guided tour through which they can discover about one hundred pieces of my collection. Since its opening, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation has supported a variety of projects, which are part of her mission: it has awarded scholarships to researchers and artists, published books on Bacon and taken part in various exhibitions and lectures dedicated to the British painter, in conjunction with local and international institutions.

How did the time he lived in Monaco affect Bacon’s work? What new and special aspects have appeared in artist’s work during this period?

It was in Monaco that Bacon began to concentrate on the representation of the human form, a decisive step that would lead him to be recognized as one of the major figurative artists of the twentieth century. It was also there that Bacon embarked on his papal figures (mainly inspired by the Diego Velázquez “Portrait of Pope Innocent X”) and his ‘head’ series, and initiated new working practices such as painting on the unprimed side of the canvas

A review of the School of London exhibition

BY AARON JAMES WENDLAND | ARTS & LIFE | THE MOSCOW TIMES | SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2019

Humans are embodied like all other animals, but according to Plato we are distinguished from the beasts through our possession of a sacred attribute: reason. This attribute is manifest in our ability to contemplate the nature of reality and reflect on how we ought to act. Thinkers from Plato to Steven Pinker have placed great faith in our capacity to overcome our savagery and create a better world through the exercise of divine rationality.

In a powerful and startling series of paintings that make up the Pushkin Museum’s School of London exhibit, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and several of their 20th century contemporaries question the potency of our rationality by focusing on the bodily nature of our existence. Specifically, Bacon, Freud, and their colleagues push back against Plato and Pinker’s utopian vision of reason through an open and honest study of our animated bodies, our gnawing anxieties, and our unspeakable atrocities.

The exhibition begins innocently enough with a wedding-day portrait of the painter, R.B. Kitaj, his wife Sarah Fisher, and several artists who were part of the so-called School of London. Kitaj himself came up with the School of London moniker when he curated a controversial exhibit at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. In that show, Kitaj displayed the work of Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews and other figurative painters who were keen to challenge the abstract art dominant at the time, and the dancing characters in Kitay’s colourful “The Wedding” exemplify the attention paid to the human body in the rest of the Pushkin Museum’s exhibit.

A lively and teeming mass of humanity is the subject of Kossoff’s most celebrated work in the Moscow show: “Children's Swimming Pool.” Kossoff spent several seasons at the Willesden Sports Center in London teaching his children how to swim, and the pool was the subject of numerous paintings and sketches that now reside in some of the U.K.’s most prestigious galleries. The bright colors and energetic atmosphere of Children’s Swimming Pool illustrate the fun to be had at a public pool on a warm Sunday afternoon. Yet mania and the sheer amount of flesh on display conjures a certain amount of angst, and viewers ought to be forgiven if the scene reminds them of modern-day factory farming.

For every bit as hectic and public as “Children’s Swimming Pool” is, Michael Andrews’ “Melanie and Me Swimming” is quiet and private. This life-size painting was based on a photograph taken by Michael’s friend, Jean Cornet, when Michael and his family were vacationing in Scotland. The painting itself depicts Michael supporting and stabilizing his daughter as she splashes and swims away. It clearly captures an intimate moment of love and affection, but the painting is also imbued with an existential weight that is indicated by the black surroundings and the vulnerability of Michael’s daughter, Melanie.

Intimacy and vulnerability characterize Lucian Freud’s 1950-51 masterpiece, “Girl With a White Dog,” and this painting alone is worth taking a rush-hour metro to the Pushkin Museum. In the portrait, Freud’s first wife, Kitty Garman, is sitting upright on a couch with a white dog resting its snout in her lap. She is wearing a pale-green dressing gown and one of her breasts is exposed whilst the other is covered up by her hand and the edge of the gown

Stylistically, “Girl with a White Dog” exhibits the clean lines and meticulous detail found in the art of the French Neoclassicist, Jean Ingres, but Freud avoids the idealized body typical of Ingres’ work. Indeed, the hesitant expression on Kitty’s face, along with the vulnerability of her exposed breast and the imperfections in her figure, suggest both the openness and anxiety one might expect if she were about to sit down with Lucian’s grandfather: Sigmund Freud. Alas, Lucian’s work never explores the dark reaches of the human psyche, and he leaves an analysis of the horror of human existence to the star of the School of London show: Francis Bacon.

Famous for his paintings of disfigured bodies and screaming Popes, Bacon came of age as an artist during the Second World War and his signature style emerged just as images of the Nazi terrors were surfacing in England. In his 1945 portrait “Figure in a Landscape,” Bacon presents his lover, Eric Hall, snoozing on a park bench. However, much of Eric’s body is distorted or painted-over such that the viewer is drawn to a black void in the middle of the portrait. Bacon’s lover also appears to be holding a microphone reminiscent of those used by Nazi leaders when they were delivering their speeches, and Bacon is clearly calling attention to the barbarity of calculated political violence. Indeed, far from being endowed with divine rationality that distinguishes us from the beasts, Bacon’s paintings show us just how savage the exercise of reason can be.

This theme is taken to the extreme in the centerpiece of the School of London exhibit: namely, the second version of Bacon’s 1944 “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” Here we are presented with a series of fleshy, disjointed, and screeching demons that stand out from a blood-red background. The implication seems to be that we have killed off the utopian fantasy of a benevolent god within us. And if anything, the atrocities of World War II teach us that our embodied existence is demonic.

Perhaps this is hyperbolic. But still, everyone ought to make their way to the Pushkin Museum’s all too human School of London exhibit before it closes on May 19.

MICHEL LEIRIS | FROM THE ARCHIVES | THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT | NUMBER 6053 | FRIDAY APRIL 5 2019

In the second of his published conversations with his friend David Sylvester (Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, 1975), where he is most revealing about both his life and his art (as they appeared to him between 1962 and 1975, to be exact, because neither the life nor the art are yet complete and the person concerned is not someone to be taken in by the belief that he has discovered some truth once and for all), Francis Bacon introduces what is, I think, the key term that enables us to “place”—in so far as one can place an artist whose exhibitions display how capable he is of renewing himself—a painter recognized as one of the greatest of our time and yet hard to characterize because he departs from the beaten track.

The game of questions and answers which the two partners are ostensibly playing quickly comes round to the crucial problem of figurative and non-figurative art. Bacon claims explicitly to be a figurative artist, but in the course of the discussion he several times stresses his distrust of what he calls “illustration”—that is, a too literal transcription— declaring in his own words;

You see, I believe that art is recording; I think it’s reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there’s no report, there’s nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There’s never any tension in it.

“Tension”; it is this idea, introduced into the discussion by the painter himself, which could act as a guideline for anyone who wants to discover what it is about the work and personality of Bacon that is so extraordinarily fascinating, A tension, first of all, between these two poles: on the one hand, the determination to be figurative and so not to be abstract; on the other, the determination not to “illustrate” and thus to make an image removed from the representation considered normal by common sense and hence relatively abstract. As a result of this twofold desire, Bacon’s work takes on the appearance of a battle conducted on two fronts, perpetually under threat of allowing itself to be dominated by one or other tendency and to fall either into abstraction or into illustration.

To paint figuratively without being illustrative is, if one sets about it rigorously, like trying to square the circle. For a long time Bacon attempted to solve this problem by speculating on what might be called the subjugation of chance. Chance intervenes in two ways: as pure accident, in the necessary uncertainties involved in the handling of a pencil or brush, and as provoked accident, whereby the painter would project paint on to his canvas more or less at random, and rub or smear those shapes that were becoming too lifelike and so restore chaos. Bacon exploited these effects either directly or by adopting them as suggestions, and they helped him to avoid an unduly straightforward figuration.

This, however, had to be counterbalanced by a concerted effort to adhere to the motif—whether it be the motif he had started out with or some other motif that had presented itself along the way—since, if it did not refer to something real or representable, the image could be nothing but a futile assemblage of shapes and therefore not even a true image. Hence that enhanced tension peculiar to Bacon’s work, as he not only steers his course between two tendencies he knows to be contradictory, but also employs irrational means in order to achieve a “recording” which he wants to be faithful and which he hopes will be all the more “poignant” (a term quite without sentimental connotations for Bacon) for having been obtained by a kind of loser-take-all.

Bacon’s entire oeuvre, his portraits and figure paintings as well as his large compositions, is the answer to this more or less deliberate search for the highest possible tension; the compositions are less stage-sets on which some narrative might be developed than confrontations between human beings or objects which strike us by their presence and do little except to be there, without anything transpiring between them in the least, dramatic or anecdotal (except when, among other images of struggle or fusion, copulation often unites two of these creatures, who are then fused into a single, indivisible motif by love, or in other words by the very essence of tension and ambiguity).

Although drama and tragedy have too strong a narrative element and are therefore excluded on principle from Bacon s art, it cannot be denied that tragedy flares up openly in such disturbing works as the posthumous portraits of George Dyer, which are the unrestrained expression of an intimate grief, or the imposing triptych of 1976 which, as much for the brutal formal contrasts of which its severe architecture is the setting as for its central theme (a man, our contemporary, at grips with a vulture), achieves a sombre power enabling us to see it as the Promethean apotheosis of those earlier paintings which Bacon called “Crucifixions”...

It is not at all surprising that in life Bacon should have a passion for gambling (not for chess, like Marcel Duchamp, but for that wilder game, roulette, played without the support of any mathematical system). Indeed, it could be said that he conducts his work very largely in the way in which one chances one’s luck, hoping, admittedly, for the jackpot, but enjoying above all the risks. For it is Bacon’s view that the art of our own time can be nothing more than a game because it lacks myths to justify or nourish it, and that if the artist wants to produce something valid then he must “deepen”.

To have a passionate love of life and to live it avidly, knowing all the while that life is meaningless and that one can give it meaning only for oneself and for a terribly limited space of time: this is the awful conviction which seems to endow Bacon with a surplus of energy, such (so far as we can judge from what he himself has said) is the fundamental tension which makes him personally so fascinating. Tempered by his despotic desire always to be painting more, and by an instinctive prudence which saves him when others would have gone under completely, Bacon’s furious desire to live and to deny himself nothing goes with a lucidity that deprives him of all hope. A situation to make the mind reel, but it means surely that this effervescent yet controlled man, whose violent outbursts go with a great delicacy of manner, ought to be taken literally when he confides to Sylvester that he feels himself spinning between life and death like a coin that has been tossed in the air in a game of heads or tails.

Bacon is a painter who wants to be nothing other than a painter (and perhaps a sculptor, as he says he dreams of being), but who could never be content to be merely a brilliant manipulator of shapes and colours unanimated by any demon; he is a painter who will not allow himself to dramatize and who aims at nothing but a certain “immediacy”, yet who is constantly in the stranglehold of the tragic. The creations which result are all the more striking for the absence of any sly attempts to attract our attention, or of lyricism, or demagogic trickery. They are quivering, at time strident creations, and always taut to the point of disintegration; in every case their coherence is the obvious product—narrowly and precariously achieved, but all the more vital for that of a positive altercation between intelligence and impulse, between the phlegmatic and the frantic, between balance and unbalance.

An edited article by Michel Leiris first published on March 18, 1977. The TLS historical archive, 1902-2014, is available free.

Francis Bacon’s work is most notable for its pure emotion and raw confrontation. It is fitting, then, that the Hatton Gallery has chosen his celebrated ‘Study for Portrait VI’ (1956-57) as the stimulus for their Francis Bacon | Ellen Gallagher exhibition. It constitutes the visceral, palpitating heart in a new strand of programming that aims to provoke synergism in the Hatton collection. To open proceedings, Bacon’s dark, intense oil paintings are juxtaposed with the strikingly fragile paper works of Gallagher.

From start to finish, the exhibition evokes an uncomfortable feeling. The white washed walls, lack of windows and bright white light shine on to Bacon’s claustrophobic creations and Gallagher’s nervously delicate paper pieces. ‘Study for Portrait VI’ is the first work to anxiously greet the viewer, and the entrapment of the figure in the painting, between narrow walls and a low ceiling, mirrors the large black metal structures that frame Gallagher’s ‘Morphia’ (2008-12) series. These large structures are considerably higher than the eye level at which they are met, fortifying an overarching sense of claustrophobia as one moves amongst the consternation of Bacon’s paintings and the metal structures that buttress Gallagher’s ephemeral collection. This sentiment is reinforced by ‘Figure Turning’ (1959-62), a figurative examination of contorting bodies that follows the viewer’s circular and twisting route through the exhibition.e

The uneasy and somewhat jarring presence of the works stimulates the human psyche, opening hearts and minds to the emotional and psychological energy imbued within Bacon and Gallagher’s work. The clarity of the gaping mouth in ‘Head VI’ (Bacon, 1949) is unnerving as it bawls against isolation, imprisonment and erasure. Gallagher’s beautiful, gossamer creations are comparable to the ink blot shapes used in the Rorschach test, and elicit similarly incongruous thoughts. The intriguing detail of her minutely precise cut outs, textures and even the invisible thread holding the works to the structures generate a conversation with the indefinite lines, surfaces and figures in Bacon’s work, creating a tension in the space that adds to the apprehensive atmosphere.

Both artists address the profound feelings of those that endure political, social or/and cultural upheaval. Whether that is the start of World War II for Bacon or the plight of African Americans for Gallagher, both artists manage to capture a societal angst and articulate it with the intimate vulnerability of the personal. Despite the discomfort of the viewing experience, these complicated bodies of work translate together into an environment and time that is, arguably, more socially and politically aware. The unification of this work creates a reconciliatory space to confront perennial demons, destructive legacies and the personal battles that none should fight alone. Francis Bacon | Ellen Gallagher is a challenging and unsettling exhibition, one that – whether you like it or not – you will find yourself consciously, and subconsciously, returning to time and again.

Francis Bacon / Ellen Gallagher, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 26 January – 18 May 2019.

Sotheby’s sells Study for a Head 1952, important work seen in public only once

MARK BROWN | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | ART & DESIGN | THE GUARDIAN | FRIDAY 29 MARCH 2019

A painting considered one of his most important left in private hands, part of his terrifying “screaming pope” series, is to appear at auction.

Sotheby’s said on Friday it was selling Study for a Head 1952, part of a collection inspired by Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, which helped to establish Bacon’s reputation in the 1950s.

It will be up for sale in the US on 16 May, with an estimate of $20m-30m. Grégoire Billault, head of the auction house’s contemporary art department in New York, said it was one of the greatest paintings Sotheby’s in decades.

The work was bought the year it was painted by the novelist and critic BH Friedman, Jackson Pollock’s biographer. That makes it one of the earliest Bacons to enter a private American collection.

It was acquired in the 1970s by the Seattle couple Richard Lang and Jane Lang Davis, who assembled one of the world’s most important private collections of 20th-century art. Lang Davis died in 2017 and works from the collection, with the Bacon as a star, are being sold to benefit the charitable foundation that looks after them.

The screaming pope has been exhibited in public only once, as part of a show that travelled o the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, Norfolk, in 2006.

Bacon’s screaming pope series has been described by his friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt as “not only the centrepiece of all his paintings in the 1950s but a centrepiece of the whole of 20th-century art”

They are seen as a vehicle for Bacon expressing the pain and suffering of post-war humanity. He was directly influenced by Velazquez’s Innocent X, saying he was “haunted and obsessed by the image … its perfection”; as well as a still of a screaming nurse shot though the eye from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Bacon’s works attract some of the biggest prices for any 20th-century artist. A triptych of his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud was sold for $142m (£89m) in 2013, at the time a record.

Twelve gelatin silver prints. Two portraits of Susan and John Paine signed in pencil in the margin, ten unsigned portraits of Francis Bacon. All Francis Bacon’s portraits framed.

Susan and John Paine portraits: These prints are in overall extremely good vintage condition. Corners slightly bumped, away from image. A couple of indentation marks across prints only visible under raking light. Francis Bacon: These prints are in very good vintage condition.

Each taped to mount with masking tape on the verso. Each prints with various handling marks and very fine scratches which are mostly visible under raking light. A few prints with additional issues such as a water stain, a crease and pressure lines.

The first of his magisterial four-volume study (subtitled The Prodigy) was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread prize; the second (The Cubist Rebel) appeared five years later; while the third (The Triumphant Years) was delayed until 2007 because of financial demands from the Picasso estate for reproductions of the artist’s works that ate up his advances and outstripped any royalty income.

Richardson enjoyed telling of the artist’s tactile nature. “Regardless of whether you were male or female, young or old, he would always stroke you,” he said. They would go to bullfights together, including one in Nîmes where he spotted Ernest Hemingway.

His difficulty was that Picasso rarely spoke of the content of his work. “He didn’t talk about his things at all,” Richardson told The Sunday Times in 2017. “He never explained anything, he gave you a clue.” Another problem was that whatever he wrote about Picasso, the opposite was also true. “It’s no good just taking the line that Picasso was a misogynist monster,” he said, “because, although there was that side to him, he also adored women, and he could be very compassionate and very thoughtful, and very affectionate.”

Long after Picasso’s death in April 1973, Richardson remained great company, fluctuating between gossipy, charming, teasing and wicked. “You mustn’t tell anybody that,” he would giggle after revealing another delicious and probably libellous morsel. “It will get me into the most awful trouble.”

John Patrick Richardson was born in London in 1924, the son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, DSO, whose own father had been born in 1817 during the reign of George III. Sir Wodehouse had been quartermaster-general during the Boer War, founded the Army & Navy stores and, at the age of 70, married Patty (née Crocker), John’s mother, who was from a family of servants. They had two sons and a daughter in quick succession. When Richardson was knighted in 2012 he delighted in telling the Queen that her great-grandfather, Edward VII, had knighted his father.

Young John was five when he was told that his father had left for Africa; he was devastated to learn later that the old man had in fact died. His mother sold their villa in Crystal Palace and moved the family to a smaller house in South Kensington, although there were sufficient funds to send him to Stowe School, where his sexual initiation was witnessed by the hunt club whose hounds had picked up his scent.

His art classes were run by a couple whose collection of avant-garde magazines introduced him to Picasso’s work. As a schoolboy he was profoundly moved by seeing Guernica, the artist’s anti-fascist masterpiece, in a Mayfair exhibition. However, his mother was horrified to learn that he had committed all his pocket money to a Picasso print from Zwemmer’s shop on Charing Cross Road. Had she not obtained a refund, it would have netted him a substantial sum years later.

At the outbreak of war the family were in France, whence they moved to Jersey, but within a year they were in England. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, which was evacuated to Oxford, and learnt the hard way that his talents would be better suited to writing than to art itself. An equally pivotal moment was his elopement with a young Catholic lady called Diana, who demanded he adopt her faith, but would not give up her virginity; he transferred his affections elsewhere.

Richardson’s army service similarly went unconsummated: a week after being accepted by the Irish Guards he contracted rheumatic fever and was invalided out, thus being spared probable death in Italy. He returned to South Kensington, where his mother lived opposite Francis Bacon. He also got to know Lucian Freud and both artists would later depict him in their works.

After the war he was briefly in Paris as factotum to “a not very gifted Russian pianist and prince” and then scraped a living reviewing for The New Statesman. In 1949, while at the London launch party for Paul Bowles’s book The Sheltering Sky, he found himself being stalked by “a stout pink man in a loud checked suit” who turned out to be Douglas Cooper, an art historian and collector 13 years his senior. Richardson, who had arrived with a boyfriend, was whisked away in Cooper’s yellow-and-black Rolls-Royce.

The couple eventually repaired to the crumbling Château de Castille near Avignon, where they were surrounded by Cooper’s cubist collection. The older man introduced Richardson to Jean Cocteau, WH Auden and Tennessee Williams — as well as their neighbour Picasso, who would give them art for Christmas. That changed one year when Picasso “came round with a kilo of caviar for us, saying, ‘My pictures are getting too expensive to give you. Caviar is much cheaper.’ ”

When Picasso’s friends took a dislike to Jacqueline Roque, the artist’s new lover (and later his second wife), Richardson wisely befriended her and was duly admitted to the inner circle.

His relationship with Cooper crumbled, as he once explained: “I said to Douglas, ‘I am by nature promiscuous; don’t be surprised if I wander off.’ ‘No, it doesn’t matter so long as you tell me.’ Of course, the first time I told him, there were shrieks and screams and suitcases thrown out of hotel windows and chases down the streets.” On another occasion they were staying on the island of Ischia with Auden, who observed Richardson enjoying an alfresco dalliance with another house guest.

They parted acrimoniously in 1960 and thereafter had little contact, although Richardson dedicated the first Picasso volume to his former lover. His irreverent memoir The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1999) was crammed with illuminating details of postwar gay life, vivid vignettes of the artists and collectors of that era, and the tragicomic tale of his life with Cooper, whose bedroom demeanour he memorably said was “as rubbery as a Dalí biomorph”.

Settling in New York, Richardson indulged his promiscuity to the full. He recalled arriving at a party given by the journalist George Plimpton, where somebody gave him a cannabis joint and, “after the guests had left, I tore off my clothes and tried to force myself on a lady novelist from the South who was sleeping in the next room. She was horrified. To recover from this rebuff, I went off to a downtown bar and ended up making friends with young writer called Robert Rushmore . . . I moved in with him a few days later.”

Richardson, a popular walker for social matrons, organised a Picasso retrospective in 1962 and one for Georges Braque two years later. He then spent nine years building Christie’s US auction business, before joining the Knoedler gallery and eventually becoming managing director of the art fund Artemis. All this ended in 1980 when he turned to writing

Known for his dapper blazer, wry charm and sharp wit, Richardson accumulated a wide collection of friends, partying with Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and “Baby Jane” Holzer at the infamous Studio 54 nightclub. When Warhol, who once portrayed him in raffish black leather, died in 1987 Richardson delivered the eulogy at his memorial service.

Richardson had towered over the diminutive Picasso. He was tall, handsome and blessed with a leonine head. He lived on Fifth Avenue in a panelled lair of disparate clutter with a stuffed leopard, a hoard of Picasso prints and a bizarre 3ft doll of Donald Trump that he had been given. A recent profile in The Art Newspaper described how “a whale penis measuring some eight feet in length pokes out of a potted palm”. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 series Picasso: Magic, Sex and Death (2001) and curated Picasso exhibitions for the Gagosian galleries, including Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors in 2017, which The Times described as “a viscerally stirring show”.

The fourth volume of Richardson’s magnum opus promised “much new stuff, major, major discoveries”, but the book — which only goes up to the war years, leaving almost 30 years of Picasso’s life undocumented — is unfinished. Like all his works it was being written by hand. “Just when I said, ‘Now it’s all done, thank God,’ my researchers find a cache of letters that Olga, his first wife, wrote to Picasso,” he said despairingly in 2017. “So I have to rewrite the whole goddam thing.”

Sir John Richardson, FBA, art historian, was born on February 6, 1924. He died on March 12, 2019, aged 95

Sir John Richardson, who has died aged 95, wrote a monumental multi-volume biography of Pablo Picasso.

It was a task that Richardson was well qualified to undertake. He had a lifetime’s knowledge of Picasso’s work, first-hand experience of collecting, many years of friendship with the artist and the support of Picasso’s family and friends, as well as a collaborator in Marilyn McCully. The result was an expert blend of the artist’s work and life, an account that was lucid and comprehensive, and at the same time discriminating and detached.

The first of four planned volumes was published in 1991; it took Picasso’s life to 1906, when he was 25 (he lived to be 91). By then it was already some years since Picasso had mastered conventional painting and drawing, and he was about to begin work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his revolutionary painting of five women, supposedly in a brothel, which some regard as marking the start of modern art. Hailed as art history at its best, the book won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1992

Volume II (1996) covers the crucial cubist years, 1907 to 1917. Until photography came along, painters and sculptors had monopolised representation. By incorporating multiple viewpoints into a single image, cubism – the new pictorial language invented by Picasso and Georges Braque – firmly reasserted the artist’s distinctive role, enabling him to represent things in ways which the photographer could not. A face, for instance, could be shown simultaneously full frontal and in profile.

Volume III, The Triumphant Years (2007), at nearly 600 pages, reached the year 1932, with Picasso aged 51, and was received ecstatically by critics. Writing in the Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager hailed it as “an unrivalled masterpiece among artists’ biographies … wearing its learning lightly, and an enormous, gossipy pleasure to read”.

The books contained a wealth of new material, not least about Picasso’s wives, prospective wives and mistresses. For instance, Richardson pieced together Irène Lagut’s story for the first time, and he revealed the role played in Picasso’s life by Eugenia Errázuriz, the rich Chilean beauty who took over from Gertrude Stein as the artist’s mentor.

“What makes Richardson unique among Picasso biographers,” wrote Hilary Spurling, “is that the central narrative drive comes from behind the closed doors of the studio.”

Philip Hensher, reviewing the third volume in the Telegraph, alluded tactfully to the question of whether the author would live to complete his great work: “I just hope Richardson is eating his royal jelly every morning.” Volume IV was expected to cover the war years, but in 2016 Richardson would only say that he was “up to 1939” and that “nobody knows all the details”. It is reportedly due to be published later this year.

John Patrick Richardson was born on February 6 1924, the elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, a former Army officer who had fought in the Ashanti Wars and at Omdurman, and who during the Boer War had been Director of Supplies. In his last year at Woolwich, Wodehouse Richardson had teamed up with 11 fellow cadets and founded the Army & Navy Stores as a co-operative society. On leaving the Army, he turned the Army & Navy into a substantial department store.

Sir Wodehouse married late. At nearly 70, he fell in love with one of the store’s employees, Clara Pattie Crocker, half his age, whose job was to retouch photographic portraits; they married in 1923 and were blissfully happy. After John, they had a daughter and another son. But then Sir Wodehouse died in 1929, leaving meagre provision for his family. John – who adored his father and would continue to miss him for the rest of his life – was sent to boarding preparatory school, where he was bullied and intensely unhappy, and then on to Stowe, where the art school there quickly became the focus of his life

Robin and Dodo Watt, a progressive Canadian couple who ran the art school, introduced the young man to such avant garde art magazines as XXe Siècle, Verve (“I knew Verve by heart,” he recalled) and Minotaur. These triggered, as Richardson later said, “an obsession with Picasso”, and encouraged him to try his hand at modern art – producing what he called “dumb daubs”.

One school holiday, in Zwemmer’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, he reserved a copy of Picasso’s latest – and greatest – print, Minotauromachie. But his mother refused to advance him the £50 purchase price, tearing a strip off Mr Zwemmer and threatening to report him to the police for trying to swindle small boys of their pocket money. Copies of the print have since fetched as much as $1·5 million at auction.

When war broke out in 1939, the Richardsons were on holiday at Dinard in Brittany. They went to Jersey and then, as things looked bad, returned to England. John, nearly 17, enrolled at the Slade, which had already been evacuated to Oxford; his fellow students included Geoffrey Bennison and James Bailey, both of whom became firm friends.

Aged 18, he was called up and joined the Irish Guards, but after a week was struck down with rheumatic fever and invalided out of the Army. He spent the rest of the war in London, working as an industrial designer by day and on call as an air-raid warden and fireman at night. Not long after the end of the war he was invited to a party in London co-hosted by his friend, Viva King, and someone whom she described as “a sinister bugger” – the critic and art collector Douglas Cooper – who had promised to pay for “the booze” if she would “round up the boys” and do the sandwiches.

“Towards the end of the evening,” Richardson recounted, “I spotted Douglas Cooper bearing down on me in a meaningful way.” Hot-footing it to the safety of his mother’s house, he “passed a youngish man with a luminous face, who was often to be seen prancing about the neighbourhood”, carrying canvases through the door of the house opposite. It turned out to be Francis Bacon.

Richardson got to know Bacon well, and found that the mention of Douglas Cooper would set him off. Eschewing, as was his habit, the masculine pronoun, Bacon admitted to having “known that treacherous woman”, and warned: “She’s even more loathsome than she looks.” (Cooper, who had promoted Bacon and his work in earlier days, had subsequently dropped him.)

Richardson asked Bacon’s opinion of Cooper’s collection. “Too Museum of Modern Arty for my taste, but there are some wonderful things,” said Bacon. “Take a look at your own risk. She’ll try to lure you into bed, and then she’ll turn on you. She always does.” Richardson would later reflect: “Francis’s predictions had a way of coming true.”

By the time Richardson met Cooper again two years later, he had given up any idea of being a painter and was reviewing books for Cuthbert Worsley at the New Statesman. One evening, in 1949, Worsley took him to a party for Paul Bowles’s new book, The Sheltering Sky, and there Richardson realised he was being “stalked by a stout pink man in a loud checked suit”.

“You may not remember me,” he said. “We met at the house of that Poufmutter, Mrs King. My name is Douglas Cooper.” Richardson said he would like to see Cooper’s pictures. “Right now, my dear, if you can tear yourself away from these hideous mediocrities,” Cooper replied, and the two men made off for the house Cooper shared with Lord (Basil) Amulree.

Cooper showed Richardson his pictures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Juan Gris. “That very evening,” Richardson recorded, “he found a promising neophyte in me, and I a potential mentor in him.” Cooper made a pass at him and, “out of courtesy and curiosity”, Richardson, drunk on framboise, “lurched upstairs after him”. He stayed the night and soon moved in.

For the next 12 years, Cooper took over Richardson’s life, including him in everything he did. He introduced Richardson (13 years his junior) to his smart, art-world friends; showed him museums, galleries and private collections on the Continent; and took him to hob-nob with the great painters of the day and to live in Provence, at Château de Castille, near Uzès.

Picasso lived within striking distance, and from 1952 Cooper and Richardson would get together with him every two to three months. Richardson had already by then begun cataloguing Picasso’s portraits – initially of the artist’s wives and mistresses – and Picasso seems to have recognised the sleuth in Richardson, readily helping him to explore the mysterious creative process.

“I took notes with Picasso,” Richardson explained. “I already saw myself writing about him. I asked a lot of questions. I identified a lot of subjects. As so often with Picasso, there’s more than one person in a portrait.” Picasso, then in his early seventies, became a kind of father figure to Richardson, offering approval, encouragement and friendship.

As well as Picasso, in the late 1950s Richardson was studying Georges Braque; this led to a book and several articles about Braque’s work, including a lengthy piece on his great Atelier series (1949-56). It helped that Richardson’s study at Castille – soon being dubbed “Le Château des Cubistes” – was lined with some of Braque’s best paintings, and that he came to know the hermit-like Braque and his wife Marcelle extremely well

Work aside, there was a lively social life at Castille. The roll-call of visitors included Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Lord and Lady Harewood, Cyril Connolly, George Weidenfeld, Angus Wilson, Anthony Blunt, Nancy Mitford, the Richard Wollheims, and Isaiah and Aline Berlin, to name but a few. When the Queen Mother paid a visit, she was able to stay only for a short time. “We queens,” she confided to Cooper, “are at the mercy of a very tight schedule.”

In late 1958, Richardson paid a visit to New York, which left him feeling exhilarated and with a desire for greater independence. He began to drift away from the ever-difficult Cooper – “an ugly man with an ugly temperament”, he said – and returned to New York.

Then in December 1960, after an unpleasant Christmas at Castille, he resolved to settle in America for good. Not long afterwards, Cooper lit a bonfire in the park at Castille, burning all Richardson’s remaining clothes, papers, photographs and other personal effects – including a pair of ivory hairbrushes that were the only memento Richardson still had of his father.

But Richardson quickly settled down in America, and became friends with the likes of Andy Warhol, at whose memorial service he delivered the eulogy. W magazine described Richardson, a gifted raconteur, as ‘the man all New York wants to sit beside at dinner”.

In 1962 he put together the spectacular exhibition in New York, Picasso: an American Tribute, and 1964 saw the publication of his Pablo Picasso: Watercolours and Gouaches, a volume of plates with a perceptive commentary by on each picture. And then in 1965 he became Christie’s representative in New York. “Christie’s picked me out of the blue,” he said with pleasure. “I’ve never had a nine-to-five job before.”

Thereafter, he went from strength to strength, remaining with Christie’s until 1972, when he was appointed director of Contemporary Art at Knoedler’s, the long-established New York commercial art gallery which was owned by Dr Armand Hammer, the Occidental Petroleum magnate.

Later the managing director of Artemis, an art investment fund, he built his own large collection of objets, some bought at Christie’s, others discovered in junk shops and flea markets around the world.

In 1995 Richardson was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. In 1999 he published a volume of memoirs, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, brimming with detail of the artistic, social and homosexual worlds in which he had moved. In 2001 he brought out a collection of essays, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters: Beaton, Capote, Dali, Picasso, Freud, Warhol and more.

In 2011 John Richardson was admitted to France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the following year he was appointed KBE.

Douglas Cooper, Pablo Picasso and John Richardson in Vauvenargues, France, 1959.

One year in prison for person who tried to sell fake Francis Bacon paintings

KIEL BONHOMME | ART & CULTURE | MONACO TRIBUNE | WEDNESDAY 13 MARCH 2019

The Italian retiree who tried to sell fake Francis Bacon paintings has been sentenced to one year in prison. In October 2017, he commissioned two men, who, according to them, were supposed to sell the two counterfeits. The experts at the Monaco Auction House quickly realized the ruse.

“These works are of an infantile preposterousness,” said Frédérique Garibaldi-Ribes, lawyer of the civil party. The two (real) paintings by Francis Bacon, Portrait of a character wearing glasses and Portrait of a character on a red background were estimated between 700,000 € and 900,000 €. They are currently exhibited in museums in Sydney and Toronto. Two other paintings were part of the lot.

Today, works by famous British portraitist Francis Bacon fetch considerable sums. Of course, fake certificates accompanied the two counterfeits. Nevertheless, the experts of the auction house were not fooled: the reproduction was grotesque, with a grid that was visible to the naked eye. The first substitute prosecutor would request 18 months in prison for the retiree from Forte di Marme. According to the defense, the old man had not come to sell the works, but to have them appraised. The verdict fell: one year in prison and 8,000 € in damages. The convicted party plans to appeal.

John Richardson, an art historian and curator best known for his prodigious scholarship on Pablo Picasso, died at his home in New York today at the age of ninety-five, reports the New York Times. Richardson opened the New York branch of Christie’s in 1960 and went on to serve as vice president of M. Knoedler & Co. and managing director of the art investments firm Artemis.

In the 1990s, Richardson’s focus became more academic, and he joined the British Academy and taught art at the University of Oxford. He published his first biography on Picasso, Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906, in 1991; it was followed by Life of Picasso: The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917 (1996) and Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (2007). A fourth volume is expected to be forthcoming.

In the December 1999 issue of Artforum, Robert Rosenblum wrote of Richardson’s books: “The prose is so swift and nimble that, even if this were merely a life of the mayor of Málaga, we would read it breathlessly; but given the titanic subject, every precise and gossipy detail about friends, artists, dealers, and lovers casts new light.

Unlike most artist biographies, this one needs—and gets—hundreds of images, producing a seamless weave of life and art. I am cliff-hanging for Volume 3.”

Richardson was born in London in 1924. The son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, a Boer war general who cofounded the Army and Navy stores and was knighted by King Edward VII, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before beginning to write for the New Statesman.

Throughout the 1950s he lived with his former partner and the journal’s theater editor, Douglas Cooper, in a château in the south of France, where he met Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, and others. (Those in Richardson’s social orbit over the years also included Peggy Guggenheim, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Andy Warhol, whose eulogy he delivered in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1987.)

In 2008, Richardson began working as a consultant for Gagosian Gallery in New York, where he also organized six exhibitions on Picasso. In the November 2012 issue of Artforum, Robert Pincus-Witten described the 2012 exhibition “Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris 1943–1953” as “jaw-dropping and, disputatiously, eye-opening.”

“I’m always interested in the ways that people’s views over the years change,” Richardson said in a 2018 interview in Gagosian Quarterly. “I think one should always question things. Everything never makes sense and shouldn’t make sense.”

Last month, in Sotheby’s 2018 earnings call, CEO Tad Smith teased a “very strong pipeline of potential consignments,” adding that there was “still much being competed for right now, especially for New York in May.” Today, the auction house revealed one of the consignments in the pipeline for its May sales in New York: 37 works from the collection of the Gerald L. Lennard Foundation, the charitable organization established by the eponymous copper magnate, who died in March 2018.

The marquee lot in the group of works is Francis Bacon’s final portrait of his lover George Dyer, Study for Portrait (1981), which is expected to fetch between $12 million and $18 million—another of Bacon’s Dyer portraits, from 1977 sold for $49.8 million at rival house Christie’s in May 2018 on an estimate of $30 million.

Gerald Lennard was a devoted collector who actively sought works of extraordinary emotional and psychological weight, which ultimately demonstrates their essential humanity. His personal integrity and honesty are matched by these grand explorations of the human condition—upon entering his New York apartment, visitors were immediately greeted by a fantastic trilogy of works by Guston that fully embodied this ethos

Works from the consignment are on view at Sotheby’s London salesroom through Friday, and will go on view in the auction house’s revamped New York Galeries ahead of the sales in May.

He left six paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland in a will written in 1985, but by the time Garech de Brún died unexpectedly last year he had sold five of them to a family trust.

Last week the trustees of his estate said that the paintings, including works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, “were disposed of by Garech during his lifetime to Barbican International Corporation Ltd, and, consequently, did not form part of the estate at his date of death”.

Barbican International is a Guinness family trust which also owns Luggala, the Wicklow estate where de Brún lived, which is on the market for €28m.

Among the paintings left to the National Gallery were a portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Bacon, two pencil drawings of Bacon by Freud, lithographs by Edward Delaney and portraits by Edward McGuire and Barrie Cook. The Bacon drawings were sold by Christie’s last autumn, making €679,000 and €567,500 apiece.

De Brún also bequeathed a portrait of himself by Freud to the gallery. Head of a Boy, painted in 1956, hung near the fireplace in the sitting room at Luggala for more than 50 years. While he still owned the work at the time of his death, de Brún’s will of 1985 gave his trustees “absolute discretion” over whether to give the portrait to the National Gallery.

Last week the trustees said: “The executor of the estate has consulted with the trustees and . . . have determined that, as Head of a Boy is the primary asset in the estate and it is necessary to proceed with its sale for the furtherance of the broader trust objectives and, in the interests of the principal beneficiaries, the trustees will not . . . make the discretionary bequest to the National Gallery.”

Instead the painting will go on sale on Tuesday at Sotheby’s in London with an estimate of £4.5m-£6.5m (€5.2m-€7.5m). The trustees say the National Gallery has been informed of its decision.

Eamon Delaney, a son of the sculptor Edward, said the gallery should still be given the lithographs by his father, as one of the country’s most important modern sculptors and a close friend of de Brún. “Such a donation would also partly compensate for the strange decision by the gallery in 2009 to decline a life-sized sculpture entitled Anna, of a begging woman,” he said.

“After the gallery’s refusal to accept the piece, it subsequently sold at Adam’s auctions [for €38,000] as part of a record price for Irish sculpture.”

De Brún, also known as the Hon Garech Browne, updated his 1985 will only once, adding a minor codicil five years later, even when named beneficiaries, including his father and mother, subsequently died

He gave each of his two nephews a vintage Rolls-Royce, and left one of the original gates from Galway’s wall to the city’s council. His books have been bequeathed to Marsh’s Library in Dublin, and his collection of horse-drawn carriages to the Irish nation, providing they are open to public view on suitable occasions. The Office of Public Works is understood to be in discussions with the trustees about their fate.

De Brún also left instructions for his funeral: “My mortal remains are to be cremated by a fire of sandalwood and cow dung, according to Hindu rites.”

Josepha Madigan, the heritage minister, has been put under pressure from several quarters to buy Luggala, which comes with a 5,000-acre estate. The executive council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions wrote to Madigan in October, saying it was “vital” that public access through the estate was maintained.

Madigan has said, while the Luggala estate would be a significant addition to the publicly owned heritage properties, her department would consider buying it only if the asking price fell into a certain range, “or in the context of a donation or bequest”. The minister has written to the vendors saying she hopes access to a popular walking route through the estate will continue under any new ownership.

By LUCY DAVIES | BOOKS | CULTURE | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2019

Paris is catnip to walkers, especially writers, for whom a plunge into the city’s streets, where cobblestones glint, shuttered facades loom and the sour odour of the Metro billows up from the grates, is a chance to shrug off the usual mundane business of life, unmoor the mind and set it afloat.

For Michael Peppiatt, whose new book, The Existential Englishman, recounts the decades in which he lived in Paris between 1966 and 1994, the practice was crucial; a near-physical craving to be repeatedly indulged, in the manner of a love affair. “I like to do it at night, furtively,” he writes. “Then the city opens out in front of me… when a wind is blowing hard I come as close as I ever come to exultation.” Throughout the narrative he traipses and drifts. He is, he says, “like a beast pacing”. He thinks often “of all the poets who have walked there: Hugo… A green but unpleasant land awaits Baudelaire”.

He is right, of course, and we could add many others to that list, like the novelist Balzac, or the photographer Brassai. But it was Henry Miller, the American author whose own nocturnal wanderings in Thirties Paris were vividly chronicled in Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy, whom Peppiatt reminded me of most often. Both men are expats, living “among the artists”, longing to be published novelists. Both live frugally, drink heartily and fornicate dedicatedly.

You’ll know Peppiatt as the confidant and respected biographer of Francis Bacon, the artist whose “basilisk stare” and epicurean appetites (partridge, Crozes-Hermitage, fizz) hover here, at the book’s edges. At its middle is a sort of bildungsroman that follows Peppiatt from his first inclinations toward Francophilia at the tender age of nine to being booted over to France aged 24 by his father, who, exasperated by his Cambridge-graduate son’s layabout, polo-neck-wearing ways, found him gainful employment at the French monthly Réalités.

That Peppiatt arrives “with a battered suitcase full of Becketts and Joyces, Kafkas and portable Nietzsches”, and mooches through the early chapters in a vintage Navy reefer jacket, gives you clue enough to how the story will go: from journalist to editor to magazine owner; from unprepossessing small hotels and blowsy landladies to apartments in the Marais with Versailles parquet and cashmere throws; from being too timid to knock on Giacometti’s studio door to hanging out with Hockney and the bods at Hermès.

It sounds insufferably smug, doesn’t it? Strangely, it mostly isn’t. Yes, Peppiatt can come across as feeling “frightfully clever to live in Paris!”, as one shop assistant he meets back in London has it, and, particularly in the final chapter, mostly his weighing up of things, the descriptions slip mauve-ward. But do skim over all that, because I think overall Peppiatt leans much more toward his misses than his hits, and he can be très drôle with it. I relished his sketches of ratcatchers and thugs and the deafeningly flatulent neighbour he comes close to punching. He confesses to the times he was put in his place by Parisian hauteur; the fist-fights that erupted in his office; regrettable drunken nights out, ensuing grimy hangovers.

And there’s his love life. The girlfriend he had to hide from in doorways, the one who demanded a Cartier watch. But there’s also the one he became obsessed with, who made him miserable, and later committed suicide. Great chunks of the book deal with his “gnawing frustrations” as a writer, which make him “sick at times from the tension and self-loathing they induce”.

He is haunted by the idea that he is only the hanger-on, that “obscure young man”, as Sonia Orwell once witheringly called him, or just a “playboy critique d’Art”, as one Paris girlfriend has it. The spectre of “the man of letters… that pallid, incomplete figure I have always dreaded who has published the odd minor novel and book of essays… eking out his career with reviews and prefaces" is always with him. He toys with ideas, has moments of flow, loses them, worries again.

I suspect the book was a bit of final accounting for Peppiatt, who, at 77, is one of the last men standing from his Paris art-world crew, “a survivor in the wilderness piecing together echoes of their voices, fragments of what they left behind.” And they are mostly fragments, the best being, unsurprisingly, about Bacon (who slept, we learn, between purple and orange sheets). When Peppiatt meets, for example, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder, he remains an observer. Sitting next to Marlene Dietrich, he learns only that her husband wouldn’t let her eat hot dogs. Of his encounter with Nancy Mitford, Peppiatt’s one remark is that she spoke in cut-glass vowels – hardly revelatory

When he exits this “solipsistic bubble” (his words) of art and books, he can be enthralling. His description of the 1968 uprisings, when the whole country was out of joint, is terrific: “I thrill to the exhortations to violence. I am out of character and liberated… We are all mad now, high on revolution, with the tear gas lingering in our mouths. We are like waves, moving up and toppling forward in the acrid air in a foam of flags and posters.”

I loved his digressions on bits of Parisian history, tales of elephant consommé and Templar Knights, of an antique dealer who kept her wig on with an elastic band and another who smashed her entire stock of china on learning her lover had betrayed her. Peppiatt is to the Marais as Peter Mayle was to Provence, sketching its oddball inhabitants, its decaying grandeur. The scent of woodsmoke fairly rolls off the page.

In the end, it is his “lifelong attachment to this bewitching, temperamental, exasperating city” that irradiates the book, as it does the story of his own life. “You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you,” he says. “The bones of the city brighten in the sunlight… it warms its flanks freely under the benign blue sky, slowly revealing all.”

Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt in David Hockney’s studio in Paris, 1975

WORKS OF ART | BARNEBYS MAGAZINE | STOCKHOLM | THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2019

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909. Rejected by his father because of his homosexuality, he went to London in 1926, then moved for a short time to Berlin and Paris before returning to London in 1928. Bacon later claimed that it was seeing an exhibition of Picasso at the Rosenberg Gallery while in Paris that inspired him to start painting.

Upon returning to London, Bacon rented a studio in which to work. His work was heavily influenced by Old Masters, such as Velázquez, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt, though he also employed aspects of cubism and surrealism in his work. In 1934, Bacon organized a presentation at the Transition Gallery, which was heavily criticized by the public; in 1936, his work was then rejected from the International Surrealist Exhibition. Due to his resulting feelings of dejection, he destroyed many of his paintings and no finished works of his exist from the years 1937 to 1941.

In 1945, Bacon’s first highly influential work Three Studies of Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion (1944) caused a scandal at the Lefevre Gallery in Paris. The disturbing imagery shocked the public during the final days and subsequent end of the Second World War. The trauma of this time is visible in the gnarled, tortured bodies which resemble dead, only vaguely human figures. Bacon became known for his startling, violent approach to depicting the flesh and form of living things. Gilles Deleuze remarks in his book on Francis Bacon about how he paints heads and not faces. Regardless, this marked a positive turning point in the painter’s artistic care

Shortly after selling Painting, 1946, Bacon used the proceeds to set off to Monte Carlo where he drank and gambled compulsively, often producing little profit. The persistent darkness of his paintings that resulted was unprecedented. In 1949 he began painting a series of popes after Velazquez which he would continue to rework for over twenty years. The resulting depiction of Pope Innocent X is one of undeniable horror and existential agony.

At the turn of the 1950s, Bacon met fellow artist Lucian Freud, with whom he started a close but volatile relationship with that lasted three decades. The two spent so much time together that Freud’s wife commented on how she saw Bacon at dinner almost every night. Their mutual scrutiny and harsh criticism of each other’s work resulted in many extraordinary pieces during their friendship. Numerous portraits and self-portraits of the two exist from this time depicting the extended pictorial evolution of each respective artist.

Bacon certainly did not deprive himself of pleasure and freedom during his lifetime. Inspired by Edweard Muybridge’s depiction of movement in photography, Bacon represented himself in full copulation with his lover, Peter Lacy, in Picture of Two Fighters. The scene illustrates his life of sex, violence and heavy alcoholism; he suffers from his experiences but he openly enjoys it.

In 1961, the artist moved to 7 Reece Mews in London, which he transformed into a haphazard amalgamation of thousands of brushes, canvases, magazines and other art supplies. To explain this he said, “Chaos suggests images to me“. Certainly, a theme of chaos is evident throughout Bacon’s body of work.

Bacon’s success as an artist was increasing. Nevertheless, he was falling deep into debt due to his gambling tendencies. To combat this, he signed with the Marlborough Gallery, which promised him a salary and an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, which took place in 1962. On the day of the opening, however, Bacon received news that his lover Peter Lacy had died due to alcohol-related circumstances the night prior.

In 1971, a similar tragedy occurred during the opening day of his retrospective organized at the Grand Palais, in which Bacon was informed that his lover George Dyer had been found dead on the toilet in the pair’s hotel room after having taken an overdose of barbiturates. This fact was hidden during the event so as not to jeopardize its success and thus Bacon’s career. He later painted Triptych, May-June 1973, which depicts George Dyer’s death and the painter’s own feelings of loss and regret.

By the end of his life, Bacon was famous in the art and contemporary world. The artist died of a heart attack while on holiday in Madrid in 1992, leaving behind a raw, true body of work that was reflective of how he lived. His emblematic triptychs are highly sought after on the market. In 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s New York, making it the most expensive work ever sold at the time.

By BOB COLACELLO | RIGHT NOW | GARAGE MAGAZINE | SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16 2019

I always thought Lee was the original and Jackie the copy, but who really knows about such things? Probably not even the sisters themselves. For me, Lee was the more beautiful, more refined, more ethereal, indeed one of the greatest beauties of her generation.

I met Lee when I met everyone, shortly after I started working with Andy Warhol in 1971, as editor of Interview. I remember going with Andy and Fred Hughes to interview Lee at her all-red apartment on Fifth Avenue, which Diana Vreeland pronounced the most fabulous apartment in all New York—"Such style! Such drama! Such luxe!" The first thing one saw upon entering the front hall was a very large and rather violent Francis Bacon triptych of what appeared to be one man devouring another, three times over. Bacon, Lee explained, had become a "great pal" in London, where she had been living with her second husband, Prince Stash Radziwill. Their marriage, however, was about to end, because Lee had fallen in love with Peter Beard.

Lee loved men, and men loved Lee. Women, not so much (unless they were younger, and played the protégé).

She was a true connoisseur of all of the arts—literature, film, theater, dance, painting, photography, architecture, fashion and design—and a real friend to those who created them. She was also loyal: she was one of the few society friends to stick by Truman Capote after the scandal set off by the publication of a chapter of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, in Esquire. Nureyev, Onassis, Warhol, Armani, Mark Shand, Reinaldo Herrera, William Ivy Long, Hamilton South—they all adored her. Yes, she could be affected, but her affectation was her armor; her chic, her attraction. But most alluring of all was her intelligence. She will be missed.

TIM SMITH-LAING | REVIEW | BOOKS | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | SUNDAY 27 JANUARY 2019

Though The Existential Englishman records the struggles with “creative writing” common to many a jobbing critic, it is hard to imagine Michael Peppiatt being lost for words. On the page, he remains probably one of the most eminent art writers of our time; off it, to judge by the swirl of parties, interviews, and chance encounters that fill this memoir, he is a gifted and indefatigable conversationalist. Even when he finds himself seated next to that doyen of silence, John Cage, at an embassy lunch, nervous and alarmed at his own ignorance of the composer’s work, he is able to charm him “out of his trance” with an anecdote of an entirely silent café in Barcelona, populated solely by deaf-mutes.

It is a typical anecdote in a memoir that revels in such encounters, and reminded me of that old joke credited to the harmonica player, Larry Adler. Adler too wrote his memoirs, but with a wry knowledge that most readers were only there for his anecdotes about the truly famous. After getting down all the stories about Sammy Davis jnr, Fred Astaire, Vivien Leigh and all the rest, he turned to his ghostwriter and said, “Why don’t we call it Name-Drops Keep Falling on My Head?”

In Peppiatt’s memoir of 28 years as an art critic based in Paris, the name-drops do not just fall on your head, they mount around you in tumbling heaps like snow drifts. As those familiar with his career will expect, the major name dropped is Francis Bacon, whom he first met through an interview for a student magazine in 1963. The relationship that ensued – from the “Champagne in grand hotels followed by extravagant dinners in Soho, skilfully orchestrated […] to introduce me to upper- and lower-class bohemia”, to the years of intimate confidences afterwards – has kept Peppiatt in meat and drink ever since. The results include, at a rough count, some five books dedicated solely to Bacon, including both the biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1997), and the more personal Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir (2015), along with sundry essays, exhibitions and articles.

Though Peppiatt meme is the central subject of The Existential Englishman, “Francis” pervades the book as the living incarnation of Peppiatt’s quite unbelievable good luck. After stumbling into Bacon’s world, Peppiatt seems to have led an astonishingly charmed life. Setting the pattern that follows, the opening pages of this book see him turn down an offer to become a salaried art critic at The Observer only to stumble into a position with Réalités in Paris – despite, he makes clear, his best efforts to bomb the interview by telling the editor “how little I cared for his beloved Paris”. The editor, whom Peppiatt assumes he must have met one evening or another with Francis, only asks him to start “as soon as is practicable”.

Torn from the arms of his new girlfriend – “a beauty all the more seductive for having a touch of the East in her blood” – the young Peppiatt sets sail for his new life, doomed to succeed. Soon he moves from Réalités to the English edition of Le Monde, who provide him with an interest-free loan to buy his flat in the Marais. Meanwhile, he accidentally becomes a “senior editor” of Art International, before inheriting the late owner-editor’s collection of first editions, and taking the magazine over for a single Swiss Franc. When Art International proves a devil to fund, an artist he meets at a party introduces him to a retired Italian actress who immediately stumps up enough for the magazine itself and a launch party at the George Cinq. At one point, Peppiatt’s “special interest in the ‘primitive’ arts” expressed in a single review for the Financial Times leads, naturally, to him being offered the post of “director of the National Gallery of Art of Rhodesia”.

Meanwhile, there are the freelance jobs “so alluring that there is no question of turning them down”, and all the names that go with them. “Could I interview Sophia Loren in the apartment she shares with Carlo Ponti […] Visit Franco Zeffirelli […] Join Louis Malle and Candice Bergen in their turreted manor house […]?” It would be otiose to list any more, since Peppiatt does so at such length in the book, along with all the famous people that they, in their turn, have known. Sadly, in contrast to his long relationship with Bacon, the artists and actors Peppiatt meets stimulate no deeper insights in this book; they remain mere name-drops in his own life story.

It is unclear how, in all this, Peppiatt has time for romance. But, before his marriage to art historian Jill Lloyd, he most certainly does. His conquests run the gamut from George Orwell’s widow Sonia, to “the French general’s daughter who plays squash vigorously”, to mysterious pseudonymous figures such as “La Polonaise”. At one point, he is told “You too strong lovemaking, you kill me.” Perhaps it is because he was in such a rush.

I searched for irony here, but if present it is so perfect as to be imperceptible. Despite a transient sense that he is, above all, “a fly on the wall […] getting into secret spaces and unusual situations without any real credentials or involvement”, Peppiatt seems to have forgotten that the fly is not generally the centre of interest. When it comes to this very lucky fly’s memoirs, it is hard to know what reaction a reader could possibly have beyond, “Well, good for you, I suppose.”

Francis Bacon (left) and Michael Peppiatt in David Hockney’s studio in Paris, 1975

ALEXANDER LARMAN | REVIEW | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY 20 JANUARY 2019

Michael Peppiatt’s memoir is subtitled Paris Among the Artists, but it could be called A Portrait of the Art Critic As an Older Man. Peppiatt, who is best known for his biography and memoirs of his friend Francis Bacon, has spent the greater part of his working life in Paris, and this book is a love letter to the city, although not an uncritical one. He writes in the preface that he will explore “my lifelong attachment to this bewitching, temperamental, exasperating city and the deep love-hate relationship that binds me to it”. Yet he is ultimately a romantic, and the scent that rises from these pages is a heady aroma of Gauloises and red wine. Peppiatt, as a young man, was rather fond of the bottle; this book, at its best, has a similarly intoxicating quality, if one allows for the inevitable moments of self-absorption.

Peppiatt was brought up to be bilingual, because his father believed that he stood a better chance of getting on in the world if he spoke French. His faith was rewarded when his son obtained a job at the culture magazine Réalités in 1964, from where he headed to the English-language version of Le Monde and then to Art International, which he both published and edited. He accomplished this, as well as writing numerous books about art, with an air of cultured insouciance. Yet, as he notes, “the luxuries, the grandeurs, have no meaning without the drudgery and misères of the daily round”. It must be said that Peppiatt’s luxuries and grandeurs are rather more grand than the rest of us might expect. When he writes about drinking champagne at the Paris Ritz, or being led on grand bacchanals by famous chums, it is hard not to feel that Peppiatt has led an unusually gilded existence.

This is a memoir in which names are not so much dropped as flung at the reader; it contains sentences such as “I also started going out on the town again with Francis Bacon.” (As in his other books, Bacon is a recurrent, often disruptive presence.) There is a vaguely Pooterish quality to some of Peppiatt’s adventures with the great and good. He fails to meet Giacometti, who lives in the studio next door to his lodgings and for whom Bacon has given him a letter of introduction, because the great sculptor is selfishly dying of stomach cancer in Switzerland. He meets Marlene Dietrich at dinner, but she drunkenly moans that her husband has forbidden her to eat hot dogs. Sonia Orwell dismisses him as an “obscure young man”. James Baldwin’s face is “full of suffering”, despite or perhaps because of Peppiatt collaring him for half an hour. He fails to speak to Samuel Beckett, despite sitting next to him, and is irked that a passing American (“complete with backpack”) is able to engage in a “brief, courteous” exchange.

Peppiatt has an aesthete’s love of life, and there are vivid descriptions of food, drink and romance here that both enrapture and inspire. This enjoyable book works best as an account of a lifelong love affair with the Parisian streets, of the ability to escape the madding crowd and lose oneself in a backyard cafe. In the epilogue, when he recounts how his wife and he have returned once again to live in Paris after two decades in London, there is a movingly elegiac quality to his description of how he is no longer a flâneur and boulevardier, but is content to be an observer instead. The Existential Englishman offers elegant proof that Michael Peppiatt’s powers of observation remain undimmed and acute

The Existential Englishman by Michael Peppiatt is published by Bloomsbury (£25).

‘An unusually gilded existence’: Michael Peppiatt at a gallery opening in 1975

Christie’s speaks up about legal case involving Francis Bacon’s painting

By SHIM WOO-HYUN | LIFE & STYLE | THE KOREA HERALD | FRIDAY, 11 JANUARY, 2019

Christie’s has spoken up about pending litigation that Korean gallery One and J filed in the New York County Supreme Court over the former’s sale of a painting by Francis Bacon in a private deal at what the Korean gallery claimed was a “bargain price.”

The two parties had remained silent over the matter since Jan. 2, when One and J filed the petition for a preliminary injunction.

In an email response to The Korea Herald and the Herald Business, Lavina Chan, Christie’s head of corporate communications, Asia, said, “Christie’s believes it has acted in accordance with its obligations under the UCC and its agreements with the Plaintiff.”

According to the Seoul-based gallery’s petition, Christie’s had agreed in 2017 to arrange “a private sale of the painting that would net the gallery at least $10 million.” At the same time, Christie’s agreed to loan around $4.9 million to the gallery with Bacon’s painting as collateral.

However, in September 2018, Christie’s informed the gallery that it had defaulted on the loan and that the former was entitled to sell Bacon’s painting “under any terms, at any time, as we see fit,” according to the petition. Two weeks later, Christie’s told the gallery it had sold the painting at a “fraction of the Painting’s fair-market value.”

According to the petition, the Korean gallery argues that Christie’s violated the Uniform Commercial Code – comprising a set of laws regulating sales of personal property and other business transactions – by selling Bacon’s work in a “commercially unreasonable manner.”

One and J had attempted to avoid the “fire sale” of the painting by offering $6.8 million to Christie’s. However, the latter rejected the proposal, which the gallery found “unreasonable” according to the petition.

The Korean gallery claims in its petition that Christie’s could have rejected the gallery as it had already made arrangements with “a valued or prospective Christie’s client who planned to participate in Christie’s fall auctions, and that Christie’s agreed to sell the painting as part of a larger ‘sweetheart deal’ for that unknown buyer.”

However, in Christie’s email response to The Korea Herald, Chan said, “Christie’s attempted to resolve this matter after years of non-payment. In good faith, Christie’s offered the Plaintiff an agreement to satisfy the long-term debt owed to Christie’s.”

“Unfortunately, the Plaintiff defaulted on multiple interest payments and was in breach of the agreed contract. Despite our best efforts to settle the matter with the Plaintiff, the collateralized painting was sold in order to collect on the amount owed.”

Seoul-based gallery One and J declined to comment on the current case, saying that the person in charge is currently on a business trip and would return to Seoul in two weeks.

The world is not short of anglophone memoirs about living in Paris, but the art critic Michael Peppiatt really had a whale of time after he moved there in 1966. Before long, in this fond account, he is spotting the playwright Eugène Ionesco (with his “pale, clown-like face”), and dining next to Marlene Dietrich, who keeps complaining that her husband “had never allowed her to eat hot dogs”.

The author is soon running the arts pages of Le Monde’s English edition, which in this golden age funds a beautiful flat in the Marais district. There follows a succession of flings with women – his ardent reminiscences of them are very much, to put it as charitably as possible, of their time – and much more name-dropping. Sonia Orwell, a quondam lover, pops up now again; there is an inscrutable appearance by John Cage. Peppiatt goes wine-tasting with Graham Greene, and once finds himself sitting next to Samuel Beckett on a cafe terrace. (Nothing, fittingly, is said.)

First among these luminaries is Francis Bacon, already the author’s friend before Paris, and with whom many spectacularly boozy meals are shared. “I have to be conscious of Picasso the whole time, you see,” Bacon mutters. “There’s no way round it.” Perhaps the most vivid character, however, is the chain-smoking French doctor who, when Peppiatt comes to see him complaining that he is tired, retorts: “Tired? Tired? You don’t think I’m tired seeing sick people for ten hours every day?”

As the decades roll on in a buzz of embassy invitations, freelance art writing and luxurious apartments, the book passes by easily in the manner of quaffable gossip. Stricter editing wouldn’t have hurt – and, existential or not, an Englishman ought to know that Cambridge does not have quadrangles (they are courts). Peppiatt left Paris for London in 1994, and the book ends with him returning in 2014, only to think the place now “lacking in identity and purpose”. As a one-time cultural migrant to the city myself, I’d suggest he needn’t worry: the Marais is now so expensive that the real Paris has simply moved elsewhere.

Existential Englishman by Michael Peppiatt (Bloomsbury Publishing, £25).

DUNCAN FALLOWELL | BOOKS | THE SPECTATOR MAGAZINE | SATURDAY, 12 JANUARY, 2019

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and visited Bacon for a student magazine. Something clicked and Bacon became his sugar daddy, immediately and for ever, though Peppiatt has said that no sex was involved.

One can see what Peppiatt got out of Bacon: not cash per se, but many opportunities for money, an entrée to the great art world, a raison d’être for his pen, as well as free entertainment on a lavish scale. This he acknowledges gratefully. But what Bacon got out of Peppiatt is never quite clear. It certainly helped that Peppiatt was young, bright, and could match Bacon’s drinking. He must also have been attractive in an obliging, even submissive way. Once Peppiatt was installed in Paris, Bacon used him as eyes and ears and plug-adaptor in the city which Bacon wanted to impress above all others. But it wasn’t an infatuation; there is no Bacon portrait of Peppiatt. By contrast, most of Peppiatt’s writing has been Bacon-centric.

This latest offering implies that the key to their relationship was its flexible lack of definition. It is a memoir, written entirely in the present tense, and it recounts Peppiatt’s life in Paris, to which he moved in 1966 at the age of 24. There is a hiatus near the end when, after a long series of ramshackle affairs and mental crises, he marries an art historian and returns to London to bring up his daughters, before Paris claims him again.

Peppiatt doesn’t have the calibre of John Richardson on Picasso, but he’s a lot warmer, more open-shirted, than the vain, thin-lipped James Lord who covered comparable territory. Inevitably his many Bacon books involve repetition; and since his prose is waffly, amiable, and loaded with familiar phrases, one is never quite sure how much of the material has been covered before. Bacon remains the presiding genius of The Existential Englishman: ‘When Francis leaves the high goes…’ What marks the book is an overriding sense that Peppiatt is being honest with us: ‘When I tried to cosy up to Nancy Mitford the other day I made no impression at all.’ His candour often takes on an exaggerated self-deprecation and one realises quite early on that there’s a fundamental passivity in him. Even his move to Paris was the result of his father finding him a job there in art journalism.

At one point he feels powerless to shake off a destructive relationship with a girl, ‘even though it’s harming me in all kinds of ways. I can’t understand why I don’t react strongly, decisively, since I have never detected any masochism or passivity in my make-up before’. Really? His love affairs, which he presents passionately, are all with women who appear more powerful than he. Bacon was a sexual masochist but a social sadist and is sometimes vile to Peppiatt. At one point Peppiatt decides to write a book about Bacon who gives him total clearance; but on the eve of publication Bacon pulls the rug and withdraws permission. Yet Peppiatt continues to trot faithfully along behind, instead of telling him to get lost.

My own experiences of Bacon were few, but one afternoon in Muriel’s he was pouring champagne and it spilled on to his hand. He turned and thrust it down the inside front of my trousers. When I yanked out his paw, Bacon said ‘I was only drying my hands’, with a weird, simpering expression and wobble of his head — it was like strychnine trying to smile. We were not meant for each other.

So I read Peppiatt to see if I’d missed out on anything — and I had. What I most enjoyed in the book was what I envied: Peppiatt’s short exchange visit to the Lycée Condorcet as an English schoolboy; being repeatedly waltzed around the best restaurants in Paris on the arm of a gifted homosexual with bottomless pockets; art-market banquets in palaces; and the various apartments he finds for himself and does up. The best flat, in a crumbling 17th-century hôtel particulier, is paid for by selling (with Bacon’s blessing) a picture which the artist had given him.

Almost all the characters along the way, including the painters, are expats. The French when they feature are mostly commercial: local shopkeepers and art dealers. When Peppiatt and his wife return to live in Paris, after a gap of 20 years, he finds the Parisians

come across as disenchanted, not to say depressed, in line with the ailing economy which is apparent right outside our building… Because of my intervening absence, I am acutely aware of how brutally downgraded, how lacking in identity and purpose this Paris appears. Welcome to the Paris of globalisation and Islamist terrorism.

Francis Bacon in front of his triptych at the Galerie Claude Bernard in the Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1977

EILEEN KINSELLA | ART & LAW | ARTNET NEWS | TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2019

It’s not every day that behind-the-scenes details of a multimillion-dollar art transaction are laid bare for all to see. But a messy three-way legal fight over Christie’s recent sale of a Francis Bacon painting valued in the eight figures has done just that.

A dissatisfied consignor who cried foul about the terms of the sale is now targeting both the auction house and the prospective buyers, dealers Christophe van de Weghe and David Rogath, in an attempt to halt what the consignor claims is an unfair deal. The consignor argues that somewhere along the way, Christie’s stopped representing its interests in order to curry favor with more valued clients.

It all started in late 2017, when South Korean art gallery One and J consigned a Francis Bacon painting to Christie’s for private sale. The title of the painting—which the gallery claims Christie’s had valued at $10 million—has not been disclosed in court papers and has been redacted in related exhibits so as not to diminish the work’s value, according to One and J’s petition.

As part of the deal with Christie’s, One and J used the painting as collateral for a loan, and the auction house advanced the South Korean business a total of $4.9 million. (It’s not unusual for major auction houses to loan or advance money when works are consigned for private sale or far outside of major sale weeks.)

Roughly a year passed; Christie’s had no luck selling the work. One and J also notes in the filing that during that time, it consigned an Andy Warhol painting for sale at Christie’s in Hong Kong with the understanding that the proceeds would be used to repay the loan. However, the painting was withdrawn shortly before the sale “based on a purported lack of interest,” according to the filings.

A Christie’s representative said the auction house does not comment on pending litigation. Judd Grossman, the attorney for One and J, declined to comment to Artnet News.

According to One and J’s account, Christie’s informed the gallery in September that it was in default on the terms of the loan and the auction house could therefore sell the Bacon “under any terms, at any time, as we see fit.” Less than two weeks later, according to the gallery’s petition, Christie’s revealed that it had offloaded the painting to an unidentified buyer for, in the gallery’s words, “a fraction of the painting’s fair market value.” The exact sale price has not been disclosed in court documents.

The gallery says it made a concerted effort to reclaim the painting fairly. According to its claims, it made a $500,000 loan payment, which it says Christie’s accepted, and attempted to stave off what it described as a “fire sale” by offering $6.8 million to get the Bacon back.

Bizarrely, however, Christie’s rejected the proposal as too low, the court papers allege. In the gallery’s telling, Christie’s took this unlikely step because it “had switched sides” and was no longer acting as the representative of the seller, but rather of the buyer. According to One and J, Christie’s agreement to sell the painting at a bargain price and then refuse the gallery’s purportedly higher offer was part of a larger “sweetheart deal” made to woo or retain an important client.

The gallery claims Christie’s breached its duties under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a set of laws governing the sale of goods, by selling the painting in “a commercially unreasonable manner.”

On January 2, One and J asked a New York court to halt the sale of the Bacon, arguing that Christie’s was not authorized to sell the work. The court granted the gallery’s request. There was just one problem: At the hearing, according to the gallery’s filings, Christie’s revealed that the painting had already been transferred in October to the then-unidentified buyer.

In addition to granting the gallery’s request to halt the sale of the work, the court also went one step further: It ordered Christie’s to disclose the identity of the “unknown buyer”—an extremely sensitive matter for any auction house, whose business relies on client confidentiality. Christie’s ultimately revealed that it had invoiced New York dealer Christophe van de Weghe for the sale of the painting, though it understood that Van de Weghe purchased the work jointly with David Rogath, of Chalk and Vermilion Fine Art in Greenwich, Connecticut.

On January 4, One and J filed suit against the two dealers for unjustly taking possession of the painting. Reached by Artnet News, Van de Weghe and Rogath’s attorney declined to comment.

Now, a settlement may be in sight. A judge signed off on a standstill order among the three parties on Tuesday. Until at least January 23, nothing will happen to the painting, and everyone involved has confirmed a “good faith” effort to amicably resolve the matter.

MANHATTAN (CN) – Accusing Christie’s of bad faith, a South Korean gallery claims in a pair of lawsuits that the storied auction house sold a Francis Bacon painting at a “bargain-basement price.”

The Seoul-based One and J art gallery redacted the title of the Bacon painting from its filings to avoid diminishing the painting’s value, saying in the Jan. 2 petition that its private agreement with Christie’s specified that the work would not sell for less than the $10 million.

Represented by attorney Judd Grossman, the gallery claims that Christie’s was supposed to sell the Bacon painting to the highest bidder but instead negotiated a “sweetheart deal” that would give the painting to two high-profile clients who planned to participate in Christie’s fall art auctions, Christophe Van de Weghe and David Rogathat.

“Here, Christie’s discretion does not permit it to sell the gallery’s collateral at a bargain-basement price as a ‘sweetener’ for a more favoured client doing other business with Christie’s, thereby frustrating the gallery’s rights under the contract,” the petition states. “As the gallery’s exclusive agent, and therefore fiduciary, Christie’s of course was obligated to seek to realize the maximum sale price for the gallery’s benefit.”

On Jan. 4, One and J brought separate claims against Van de Weghe and David Rogathat in a summons with notice. Both cases are filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The Korean gallery claims that Christies’ conservative appraisal for painting in October 2017 was $10 million. It also says that multiple Bacon works of comparable size have sold recently at auction for prices ranging from just under $20 million to just under $50 million.

At the same time that the auction house agreed to arrange the private sale of the Francis Bacon painting, Christie’s allegedly agreed to make a loan of approximately $4.9 million to One and J with the painting serving as loan collateral.

Christie’s wrote to the gallery in September 2018 to allege that it had defaulted on the loan, and that Christie’s was therefore entitled to sell the Bacon painting “under any terms, at any time, as we see fit.”

One and J reportedly offered to pay $6.8 million for the return of the Bacon painting, but Christie’s rejected the bid as too “low.”

One and J says it also tried to consign agreed an Andy Warhol painting to Christie’s with the sale proceeds to be used to repay the loan, but Christie’s withdrew it from the sale on the eve of the scheduled auction based on a purported lack of interest

“Especially given Christie’s role under the private sale agreement to act as the Gallery’s exclusive agent with regard to the painting until 2019, it was certainly reasonable for the gallery to expect that Christie’s would not actively negotiate against the gallery to help the Unknown Buyer reap a significant windfall on the painting at the gallery’s expense,” the petition states.

In a statement Monday afternoon, a representative for Christie’s said the auction house believes it has acted in accordance with our obligations under New York’s Uniform Commercial Code and its agreements with One and J.

“Christie’s sale of the collateralized painting (Bacon) at fair market value was an appropriate remedy after years of non-payment, defaults, and months-late payments on interest-bearing advance agreements,” Christie’s spokeswoman Lara Messerlian said.

Originally from Belgium, Van de Weghe was a former sales representative at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City from 1992 to 2000 who later opened the Van de Weghe Fine, specializing in top-quality, secondary-market works by post-war and contemporary artists.

Rogath is a seasoned collector and principal of the Greenwich, Connecticut-based contemporary fine art publisher Chalk & Vermilion Fine Arts.

Representatives for Van de Weghe did not immediately respond to request for comment Monday afternoon.

JESSICA HOLMES | ARTSEEN | THE BROOKLYN RAIL | DECEMBER/JANUARY 2018–2019

Francis Bacon, the indomitable twentieth-century painter whose gritty and chaotic life was expressed so eloquently in the turmoil of his canvases, was not known to make women the subject of his portraits. From his tortured relationship with his father, to his tumultuous love affairs, to his extraordinary friendships with other artists of his time and place—among them Lucian Freud, André Derain, and Frank Auerbach—Bacon’s life and work has been associated with his connections to other men. However, many women were significant influences on Bacon. Specifically, three who are the focus of Bacon’s Women, on view at Ordovas Gallery who were crucial to his life: Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, and Isabel Rawsthorne.

A series of photographic portraits of them, taken by John Deakin, a friend of Bacon’s, line the first floor gallery walls. The artist sometimes used Deakin’s images, which present Belcher, Moraes, and Rawsthorne in provocative, meditative, or mysterious poses, as source material for his paintings. Excerpts of film documentaries on Bacon, which feature these women speaking about their individual memories and relationships with the artist, accompany the photos, and provide a small sense of who these women were, beyond their individual relationships with Bacon.

Five paintings by Bacon, two of which are triptychs, are installed on the second floor. Four of the paintings portray Belcher, Moraes, or Rawsthorne, while the fifth, Triptych—Studies of the Human Body (1970) depicts a kind of “everywoman” in three different poses that each allude to an iconic work of art. Each of the three panels is painted a pink-lavender hue, like a summer sky at twilight. On each canvas, a curvaceous female figure perches on a white beam. On the left her positioning suggests Picasso’s woman in Female Nude in a Garden (1934), while the center panel has her arranged in the manner of the classical Belvedere Torso (c. 1st century AD). On the right, the most complex of the three panels, the woman contorts in an approximation of the figure from Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1597 – 1599), who gazes lovingly into his own reflection in a pool of water. Bacon’s use of space is deft and assured; the spare backgrounds lending preeminence to his bulbous, sensual, creeping figure.

The looming, archetypal woman of Triptych presides over four other paintings of the woman to whom we’ve been introduced downstairs. Isabel Rawsthorne, an artists’ model as well as a painter in her own right, is represented by one small portrait, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne (1967). Amongst the bohemian coterie of 1960s London, Rawsthorne was famously stunning, so beautiful that the otherwise homosexual Bacon even claimed he once tried, unsuccessfully, to bed her. His ardor is evident in the portrait. Bacon has set large, almond-shaped eyes that gaze off into a distance beyond the frame of the painting into an animalistic head with long flowing hair. There is a leonine quality to the face and the eyes, which suggest an all-knowing wisdom just beyond the viewer’s reach. The face, though distorted as nearly all of Bacon’s portraits are, is the most classically “beautiful” of the works on display, a testament to the spell Rawsthorne’s appeal must have cast upon Bacon. But at the center of the painting, a surprise. A thick, gooey splatter of white paint spilled across Rawsthorne’s face disrupts the otherwise adoring treatment. Rawsthorne is the most scantily represented among the archival materials, and of the three mysterious women, she remains the greatest mystery. The viewer is left wondering at this splash of violence.

Bacon’s treatment of Henrietta Moraes is even more haunted. Moraes, like Rawsthorne was a favored muse to a number of artists in 1960s London, a popular and beloved free spirit. But like Bacon, she was also an addict and occasional petty thief who even served time in prison for her unsuccessful crimes. The two, quite likely, were sympathetic to each other’s mental and personal tortures; perhaps Bacon understood her better than most. Two paintings of Moraes, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes and Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes (both 1969) capture this shared pain and drama. The former depicts her with a black hole or gash at the center of her face, which appears in three-quarter profile and like Triptych – Studies of the Human Body, accentuates the bare remainder of the canvas, painted a goldenrod hue. Downstairs, one arresting photograph of Moraes depicts her pensively gazing off into the distance, unaware of the camera. Bacon’s painting seizes upon this moment of reflection, the laceration down her face possibly an indication of her turmoil within. A version of this black hole appears again in Three Studies. Bacon had a lifelong obsession with open and screaming mouths, which came to dominate his thoughts to almost a point of obsession as a young man after both studying an illustrated, medical textbook of mouth diseases and watching for the first time Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, which features an iconic scene of a bleeding, screaming nurse. But in the center portrait of Three Studies, the face rests regally, chin lifted and eyes closed in quiet serenity. Though Bacon often seemed intent on capturing Moraes’s inner demons, this treatment of her affords her dignity, reminding us that no person ever contains only one person. We all contain multitudes.

Seated Woman (1961), a portrait of Muriel Belcher, is perhaps the most psychologically complex painting of the show. Beginning in 1948 when she opened the private club The Colony Room, until her death in 1979, Belcher was a celebrity of bohemian London. She ran her establishment with imperiousness, and had a knack for creating buzz around it by only allowing select members entrée. Though famous for her rudeness and crass language, she took an instant liking to Bacon, who was impoverished at the time of their meeting, and she funded him £10 a week to bring his artist friends and patrons to her club. Eventually she became a surrogate mother to Bacon, though they were contemporary in age. In Seated Woman, the body has no real face. It is instead a grotesque, open sore akin to those diseased mouths that haunted Bacon, existing where one expects a face would be. But aside from this jarring detail, the painting is full of grace. The nude figure leans over, fluidly pulling one leg up towards the body, as she leans comfortably on a plush sofa, its curves mimicking the curves of the Belcher’s painted body. Despite her distortion, Bacon has captured in this figure a sense of overarching authority, fear, and benevolence. In all, a mother.

Who are Bacon’s Women? That we are afforded the opportunity at all to become acquainted with Belcher, Moraes, and Rawsthorne is due in no small part to the fact of Bacon—a renowned, male artist—having painted them. But his nuanced treatments of these women indicate fascinating people with complex, inner lives. One can’t help but marvel at the lives of so many other fascinating women, now lost permanently to time by virtue of never having been championed by a man. This show positions these three women to shed the possessive. Belcher, Moraes, and Rawsthorne aren’t just “Bacon’s Women.” They are women.

ZINOVY ZINIK | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS | THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT | FRIDAY DECEMBER 14 2018

The backstory was something that gave the Soho soap opera such power”, says Christopher Howse in Soho in the Eighties. The interiors of his favourite drinking places seem a vital part of that back story. When writing about the French House on Dean Street he lovingly depicts “a glass water-dropper that screwed into the bar, with brass nozzles to dilute absinthe”. When writing about the Coach and Horses on Greek Street he records its soda siphons “of polygonal thick glass with shiny fittings and a cream Bakelite nozzle”, because the late Jeffrey (“Jeff’) Bernard — a patron of the pub and the central figure in Howse’s gallery of melancholics — was fond of vodka and soda. Bernard immortalized the pub’s proprietor, “London’s rudest landlord” Norman Balon, in his Spectator column “Low Life”; and Michael Heath, the cartoonist, would recreate the pub’s funny incidents in his comic strip “The Regulars”.

When the Coach and the French closed for the obligatory afternoon break (now obsolete), the whole crowd would move to the Colony Room Club. Howse lists every significant object there with the meticulousness of a museum guide, from the cistern with a chain in the loo to the ancient noisy cash register and the shiny black leather bag of Muriel Belcher, the Birmingham-bom founder of this “cabinet of curiosities”. Belcher had a sharp tongue and a quick wit; having discovered a loophole in the licensing law, she opened a private bar in an ordinary first-floor flat, painting the whole place racing green — the colour of envy and violent hangovers. To my surprise, Howse hardly mentions the last station in the daily peregrinations of Soho’s devotees, Gerry’s bar. As the clock struck eleven - the Colony Room’s official closing time — those who were still standing would all flock into Gerry’s downstairs at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Dean Street.

Francis Bacon, by that time the most famous and best paid of the “London school” of artists, ruled supreme in Soho, but Howse is particularly interested in the less glamorous players in this sad farce - such as the proprietor of the Colony, Ian Board, a kind-hearted but cantankerous man. In the chapter “What the Black Policeman Said”, Howse recalls the day Board physically attacked a visitor in the club for talking loudly on his mobile phone. (In the French mobile phones are still banned.) He also records a police raid that took place when Bernard set up an illegal betting parlour in the Coach and Horses. Howse’s catchy chapter titles could be appropriated for a period detective novel. Maps and plans of the places are supplied.

On one of my first nights in the Colony Room in the 1980s, I found a place at the bar next to a gentleman with a Victorian-style ginger beard. He greeted me benevolently; this, I would learn, was highly unusual for the place. In his hand he held a pint of transparent liquid. Could it be, I wondered, that gin or vodka are consumed here in such astounding quantities? “It’s pure water”, he replied. It was Christopher Howse. Perhaps his choice of drink helps to explain how he can recall his Soho watering holes so vividly.

Soho in the Eighties is, in fact, a book-length obituary of a quaint and idiosyncratic set of Sohoites whose gradual physical degradation and dissipation Howse describes with clinical precision, Proustian lyricism and macabre humour. Bernard on crutches, waving his artificial leg during verbal confrontations in the Coach; Paul Potts, the poet, barred from the French because he had become incontinent in public; the bizarre medical history of Board’s bulbous nose, which looked like a rotten beetroot and no doubt served as inspiration for some of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Some incidents I witnessed were less amusing than those depicted by Howse. On one occasion in the Colony Room a book editor I had been talking to spewed wine into the face of a woman who was fiercely defending her sexual escapades; he then turned to me and calmly asked my opinion of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.

Howse doesn’t state this explicitly, but all his main characters have one thing in common: they were born and grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Perhaps its horrors had penetrated their adolescent nightmares and, later in life, prompted their gestures of defiance and their rejection of both the false optimism of the 1950s and the infantile idealism of the 60s. In his Spectator column — or his “suicide note in weekly instalments”, as Jonathan Meades put it — Bernard had been chronicling his life-long fight with all kinds of idealistic demagoguery.

This book laments inadvertently the death of Soho’s spirit of anarchic dissent. “Bullshit”, said Michael Dillon of Gerry’s when I recently quoted Howse for him. “It’s always been like that; we’d heard that already from Jeff Bernard, and he was not the first to complain that Soho is not what it used to be, that it’s invaded by advertising executives et cetera. Buildings are built to be destroyed to be built again. Human beings are the same. Destroyed and then bom again. Think of Jesus Christ. Have a drink.”

Christopher Howse SOHO IN THE EIGHTIES 288pp. Bloomsbury Continuum. £20 (US $30). 978 1 4729 1480 4

By RACHEL RABBIT WHITE | SEX SCENES | ART | GARAGE | FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2018

Francis Bacon was always let down by the men in his life, and rarely let down by the women. His love affairs with men were tempestuous, traumatic, tragic, and tinged in a sadomasochism borrowed from his violent and masculine father who, rumor has it, had arranged for young Francis to be systematically whipped by stable boys.

The men in Bacon’s life came and went. Sometimes this was for truly tragic reasons, such as when a beloved boyfriend died a short time before an important show. It happened twice in Bacon’s life: In 1962, among the telegrams congratulating him for his wonderful Tate exhibition, he would receive news of Peter Lacy’s alcohol-related death. Almost a decade later, in 1971, George Dyer would commit suicide two days before Bacon’s triumphant retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. (Bacon still had to go to the event and pretend as though nothing had happened.)

This may explain the common ideas circulating around Bacon’s oeuvre: that it is a body of work that deals with violence, fear, and dread. In numerous interviews, Bacon distanced himself from these themes, attributing the typical interpretations to his pictorial rawness. Annoyed, Bacon would even comment: “People say my paintings are violent, but a painting can never be as violent as life. Life is violent.”

As an out gay man, the significance of the men in Bacon’s life is obvious—but it’s his relationship with women that provided the deep tender friendships and mutual admiration that lasted his lifetime. They were not so much modeled on his relationship with his mother, which Bacon often described as distant, but on that with his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot.

Lightfoot would move to London to live with the adult Bacon for the last 12 years of her life, while he was attempting to establish himself as a painter by supporting himself as a gentleman’s valet. According to Michael Peppiatt, Bacon’s friend and the author of the biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, “Jessie’s role included vetting Francis’s casual lovers and helping him run illegal roulette parties.”

As he reached fame, three of the women who would play major roles in Bacon’s life —Henrietta Moraes, Muriel Belcher, and Isabel Rawsthorne—would also become his muses, appearing again and again in his work. It’s these women who are at the center of Bacon’s Women at Ordovas Gallery on the Upper East Side, the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Bacon’s female subjects.

Moraes moved to London to be a bohemian muse, and stalked London’s bars with the explicit desire to meet Bacon and his friend Lucian Freud. She lived a dissolute lifestyle, documented in her wild autobiography about the art and poetry scene, full of sex and drugs—specifically LSD and, later, heroin. Her sensuality, ease, and glamorous sense of comfort in her body is apparent in the reference photographs taken by John Deakin. (Bacon always used reference photographs when painting—sometimes many at a time, his studio a collage of them.)

Belcher, owner of Bacon’s favorite bar, the Colony Room, used to pay the artist £10 a week (plus free drinks) for inviting new and wealthy patrons. She was a lesbian, a notorious wit, and worked hard to maintain her bar as an oasis for queer people. She never posed nude, but nevertheless, Bacon represents her with a Schiele-like voluptuousness.

The third woman is the intriguing Rawsthorne. While Bacon often described himself as a “exclusively homosexual,” the painter was the only woman in his life he attempted to have sex with, albeit unsuccessfully. However, the two remained close friends. Rawsthorne, a daughter of a sea captain, broke into the Parisian art world through art modeling and had lived among some of the most important cultural figures in Paris, traveling with Balthus and his wife, and dating Georges Bataille, the transgressive philosopher dubbed “the metaphysician of evil.”

As Bacon’s model, Rawsthorne undergoes a Picasso-like transformation in Head of Isabel Rawsthorne. In the painting, Bacon superimposed the head of a bull onto Rawsthorne’s frame to represent, in an androgynous way, her passion, elegance, and power. Years back, Rawsthorne had struck the fancy of Picasso, who became low-key obsessed when he saw her from a distance and began sketching. Maybe Bacon was a bit jealous that Picasso had painted his friend; the painting is also a polemical way for Bacon to step up by both inviting comparison to Picasso and using Picasso’s work to stimulate the viewer.

With few notable exceptions (e.g. Mick Jagger), Bacon only portrayed close friends and lovers. Working from the aforementioned photographs, Bacon aimed at capturing a certain essential likeness in his portraits. Through incredible brushstroke and control of color, Bacon wanted to use the defining characteristics and personality of his friends to stimulate and open the viewer’s capability for feeling (the “valves of sensation,” he would call them).

In Three Studies of Henrietta, Bacon went beyond Moraes’s sensuality to capture her easy and serene charm, portraying her as a masculine sleeping beauty. The viewer is made responsive to the extreme tenderness of the portrait, expressed by the carefully traced aura surrounding her silhouette and the mauve background.

Bacon’s interest in the female body is reflected in the most staggering work present at the exhibition: Triptych - Studies of the Human Body. The three large canvases reference classical works of art, rather than Bacon’s friends. The bodies are androgynous: they have breasts and Venus-like maternal curves but are also reminiscent of the carnal mass of Bacon’s The Wrestlers After Muybridge.

The references are, again Picasso, but also two feminized male subjects: the Belvedere Torso and Caravaggio’s Narcissus. In Bacon’s rendition, Narcissus even has his face, making the work an effective feminization of his own body. Bacon often commented in his interviews about the peculiar attention that homosexuals have in perceiving the body. Queerness not only allows for the eroticization of one’s own body, but also to perceive the broad similarities and infinitesimal differences between genders. Through these androgynous bodies, Bacon is capable of seeing the minimal difference needed to make the female body desirable to him, and his own body desirable to straight men.

Francis Bacon had a rare knack for harnessing our deepest, darkest emotions. His torrid paintings of wailing mouths and writhing figures embody primal human urges, like desire and release, and timeless sensations, such as heartbreak and horror. “I’ve always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can,” he told critic David Sylvester in 1966. “And perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people feel that that is horrific.”

Over the course of his career, from the 1930s until his death in 1992, the Irish-British artist became renowned not only for his spellbinding canvases, but also his sharp mind, stormy personality, and ravenous appetite for decadence. (He was known to booze and gamble across London into the wee hours, and paint in a chaotic studio strewn with paints, source materials, and empty champagne bottles.)

All of these characteristics are on full, candid view in a series of interviews that Bacon gave over the course of his life, with Sylvester and other critics. In them, he unearths the inspirations, rituals, and emotions that fueled his arresting paintings. Below, we highlight several of the tempestuous artist’s words of wisdom.

Bacon often credited the power of his paintings to accidents. “I want a very ordered image, but I want it to have come about by chance,” he told Sylvester in the same 1966 interview. He believed that through embracing spontaneity—and accepting “accidents” as integral aspects of the composition—he’d achieve true emotional candor. Spontaneous marks and images, for the artist, resembled the unexpected welling up of passionate, unbridled feelings

In another interview with Sylvester, Bacon described the unexpected imagery that emerged while creating one of his butcher shop paintings, a series depicting dripping cuts of meat. “I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field,” he said of his initial idea for the composition, “but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture.” Instead of forcing his original idea, he accepted the new form that had pushed through. He recalled that not only was it a powerful image, but it “suggested an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether.”

Bacon encouraged these productive accidents by beginning a work with a preliminary drawing, then leaving the direction it took up to chance. As Michael Kimmelman observed in a 1989 profile of the artist, he worked directly on unprimed canvases, “where a wayward brush stroke cannot easily be disguised.” Bacon favoured large brushes, which moved the paint in ways he couldn’t predict. “I don’t, in fact, know very often what the paint will do,” he once told Sylvester, “and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.”

Above all else, Bacon strove to capture raw feelings and sensations. “I want to create images that are a shorthand of sensation,” he said to Kimmelman. Spontaneity was one tool he used to achieve this, and the marriage of figuration and abstraction was another. In his most celebrated works, his figures of popes and naked lovers drip and contort, their forms manipulated to suggest pain and passion

Bacon described this dichotomy in his work as a “kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction.” He believed that distortion of legible figures and images revealed emotions in ways that straightforward representation could not. “One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive—or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation—other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do,” he told Sylvester. In another interview, he said to the critic: “It’s an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.”

While Bacon thrived in social environments and routinely hosted wild parties in his tornado of a studio, he also valued alone time. During these quiet moments, he found that he could sit with his emotions, letting them percolate and strengthen before channeling them through paint. “I find that if I am on my own, I can allow the paint to dictate to me,” he told Sylvester. “That is the reason I like being alone—left with my own despair of being able to do anything at all on the canvas.”

It was during periods of solitude that he fused his favourite reference materials with the feelings that churned in his own mind. The pain of the subjects in Nicolas Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (ca. 1625–32), and of the screaming, bloodied woman in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, mingled with and calcified Bacon’s own agonies (including the deaths of ill-fated lovers and rejection by his own family). It was this potent mix that he expressed on canvas, especially in his harrowing paintings of screaming popes.

“I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs,” Bacon told art critic John Gruen, for the 1991 book The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews With Contemporary Artists. “The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.”

Bacon often equated the process of conveying profound emotion to the pursuit of truth. For him, this meant not only exploring the deep-seated pains and passions of individuals, but also those of the era in which lived. Bacon was a child as World War I came to a close, and began painting in earnest as World War II ramped up; he came of age and matured in a society forced to reconcile with the horrors of both conflicts. He channeled these experiences into his work, as well.

“Bacon has admitted…that one of his goals is to meet the challenge of a violent age by reviving in a meaningful modern form the primal human cry, and to restore to the community a sense of purgation and emotional release,” wrote critic Sam Hunter in the 1952 article “Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror.”

His work was fueled by a desire to lay bare the difficult emotions and experiences that we have a tendency to bury, in favour of presenting more positive versions of ourselves and our society. As writer Robert Penn Warren put it in his book The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, Bacon insisted that “the end of art is to provide us with the fact, the truth of who we are.”

In his own words, Bacon explained this intent to writer Hugh Davies, in 1986: “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence—a reconcentration…tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time,” he said. “Really good artists tear down those veils.”

MATTHEW SPENDER | CULTURE | ART | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | FRIDAY 5 OCTOBER 2018

Of the many artists my father knew, Henry Moore came first. In the early Thirties, my father even attended the informal drawing classes that Moore and Barbra Hepworth gave in their adjoining studios in Hampstead. He posed for a series of portrait drawings Moore made of him – a rare aspect of Moore’s gifts that my father often said Moore should have developed further. In the Seventies, when Moore grew to become the most famous artist in England, my father said, “everyone talks about how successful Henry is. But he’s always been successful. Even when I first met him, he was a success.”

“Success” to my father did not mean financial or worldly success. It meant its possessor was living a creative life. The Roman virtue of auctoritas was what he looked for. Auctoritas has little connection with “authority”, as we now use the word. It has to do with personal self-confidence.

“It’s such a relief that Francis is a success”, my father said one day of Bacon, laughing. “Because he’d make an absolutely terrible failure.”

Bacon could have met my father in Berlin in the early Thirties, but they didn’t. Late in life, Bacon dismissed his “German period”, as art historians had tried to define it. When I tried to ask him about his debt to Max Beckmann, Bacon resisted with vigour. He was only there for a fortnight, he said, and most of the time he stayed in his bedroom in the Hotel Adlon, recovering from hangovers. He didn’t visit even one museum or art gallery. And he absolutely loathed Beckmann, he added defiantly.

Francis Bacon, in my opinion, was determined to dissemble when it came to any analysis of his art. He presented the flamboyant, all-or-nothing image of a painter who started working with a gesture of uncalculated despair. Painting was a struggle with unknown demons in the mouth of Hell. This suited the persona he projected at parties or in his Soho club, The Colony Room. (He took me there once. I found the place terrifying.)

But the surfaces of Bacon’s canvases do not confirm this. They are soft and tender, and they use a large repertoire of specialist instruments, such as a piece of corduroy to give the impression of a brushstroke when removing a layer of paint, or the top of a toothpaste tube of a certain size to imprint a perfectly round nipple.

I remember two paintings by Francis Bacon that hung for a while in my father’s study. They were portraits of Vincent van Gogh, and we all found them hard to live with, even my father. He tried to buy one, but he fell behind in the instalments and had to return it to the Marlborough Gallery. Two years later he tried again but it was too late. “You’ve had your chance”, said Bacon, somewhat cruelly – though pleased that the Marlborough had doubled his prices.

My father owned four smaller works that contradicted everything Bacon told the world about the way he painted, for they were preparatory studies. In Bacon’s self-image of the artist as a desperate man, preparatory studies were inadmissible. Usually he destroyed them. “I can’t draw”, Bacon would say with a flourish; and nobody contradicted him. My father had obtained at least one of these four studies deviously. He’d bought it from a lover of Bacon who’d presumably picked it up from the studio floor.

These drawings became the object of an elaborate game between Francis and dad. If Bacon were coming to supper, my father hid them behind the sofa. One day he forgot. Bacon looked at them for a long time, thoughtfully but without comment. My father knew exactly what he was thinking. No other works on paper by Bacon existed, and they shouldn’t, either. Next day he took them in a taxi to Bacon’s studio on Reece Mews in order to give them back. But Bacon was out.

“I took this as a sign that I could keep them”, he told Bacon at a lunch where I happened to be present. Bacon snorted and said, “Quite right.” As for the fact that one of the studies might have been stolen: “Oh, he was always nicking things”, said Bacon, tranquilly, of that long-gone companion.

Bacon often declared that the task of the artist was to avoid the twin perils of “decoration”, meaning overemphasis of paint, and “illustration”, meaning over-reliance on mere appearance. “I can see what he means,” said my father, “but I don’t think the idea can mean anything to anyone but Francis.”

In one of our evenings together, Bacon announced that artists’ lives didn’t matter. Either the painting worked or it didn’t. The person who made it was irrelevant. He gave as an example Egyptian art, which is not only anonymous but also bound by rules that had remained unchallenged for centuries. “And yet it’s marvellous.”

This idea contradicted one of my father’s strongest convictions: that a work of art is evidence of the genius of the person who had made it, and the mind of such a person was worth trying to understand. So he said, “But even if it’s not made by what we’d think of as artists, some Egyptian sculptures are much better than others.” Bacon shrugged. My father persisted. Surely there was a difference between a work of art and the idea that lies behind it, he said, so that sometimes one can feel an idea was good even though the painting itself might be a failure? To which Bacon replied merely: “No.”

By MICHAEL GREGORY | FRAME NOTE | PICTURE FRAMERS | ARNOLD WIGGINS & SONS | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2018

The surfaces of Bacon’s paintings are fragile. Un-varnished and often painted on the non-primed side of the linen canvas, his gestural brushstrokes in oil paint contrast with the rich flat colour fields he created with washes of oil colour and crushed pastel or raw pigment. Glazing his paintings protects this vulnerable surface.

It has often been suggested that reflections caused by glazing are an effect desired by Bacon and that they add in some way to the scrambling of forms. However, interviewed by the art critic David Sylvester in the early 1970’s, regarding reflections, Bacon is emphatic, ‘I don’t want them to be there’. He expands on the subject of glazing, stating that because of ‘the very flat way I paint’ with ‘no varnishes’, the glass helps to ‘unify the picture’

The paint surface is separated from the glass by a stained grey, quite thick, wooden slip with a bevelled inner edge. Bacon liked this effect of ‘the distance between what has been done and the onlooker that the glass creates’ and that this separation ‘enhanced the experience of looking at’ and ‘discovering the artwork’.

During Bacon’s lifetime there was not an alternative to ordinary glass with its inherent reflective qualities, as low reflective glass has only subsequently become available. Bacon stated that ‘to want the person reflected in the glass of a dark painting is illogical and has no meaning. I think it’s just one of those misfortunes. I hope they’ll make glass soon which doesn’t reflect’.

The excerpt quoted belongs to the Interview 3, which is based on three private recordings made in December 1971, July 1973 and October 1973 (Sylvester’s editorial note, 1993: 202). and published under the title The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon

You know you’re getting really old when a history book covers a period after your own.

My own Soho days were back in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Christopher Howse must have arrived three or four years later, in the mid-Eighties. By then, Soho had already begun its descent into trendiness – the slick Groucho Club, still a haven for fashionable media types, opened in Dean Street in 1985. Meanwhile art students dressed in black were descending on the surrounding pubs like ravens. By then, Soho was already losing its contrariness; its shabby, world-weary cynicism was under threat from bright-eyed can-do yuppies. These days, the area is awash with PR offices, fancy restaurants, film-editing suites and coffee bars offering 17 types of skinny latte.

But, broadly speaking, Howse’s experiences seem to have been much the same as mine: in fact, I was reassured while reading this book that the same people I had mixed with had still been there, drinking away, grumbling about the same sorts of things, and presumably standing in the same spots, when Christopher Howse came along.

‘I’ve never laughed as much as I did in that decade,’ he recalls. But the humour tended to be of the blackest sort, so bleak that innocent newcomers would have been unable to recognise it as humour at all, and may well have considered it closer to misery. A typical example of Soho wit concerns the photographer John Deakin, who is said to have named the painter Francis Bacon as his next-of-kin simply because he knew how much Bacon would hate seeing his dead body. When the time came, and Deakin died, Bacon was led into the mortuary to look at his corpse. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen Deakin with his mouth shut,’ he remarked, drily.

Back then, Soho was, says Howse, a radical democracy, open to rich and poor alike. He lists the inhabitants of the French pub in Dean Street on a typical day: ‘Painters and writers, ex-boxers, failed publishers, working prostitutes, old models, old poofs, stagehands, grocers, pornographers, photographers and a retired lamplighter’. But worldly success held no cachet. No one was ever permitted to play King Pin in a world where the only permitted greeting was an insult.

Francis Bacon’s own pre-eminence as a painter did nothing to shield him from abuse. Howse remembers seeing the foul-mouthed proprietor of the Colony Room Club, turning on Bacon one afternoon: ‘“You can’t fucking paint!” yelled Ian Board in a voice like a cheese grater, as he grabbed an umbrella hanging from the back of his stool and started to belabour the artist about the shoulders as he left by the dark, precipitous twisting stairway, with a volley of ballpoint pens bouncing off his leather-clad back.

As you can see, Howse has a sharp ear for the type of conversation that was commonplace in the Soho bars. ‘If you had to eat someone here, like those people in the air crash in the Andes, who would you start with?’ asked the journalist Jeffrey Bernard, a one-and-a-half-bottles-of-vodka-a-day man whose long-running autobiographical column in The Spectator was once described as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’. Bernard went on to dismiss the suitability of most of the regulars: ‘Not Richard Ingrams. He’d be like a bit of burnt toast’.

Soho in the Eighties was a far cry from Camberwick Green. It was aggressively unsentimental, and fuelled by alcohol. One French pub habitué took bets on who would be the next of the regulars to die, with Jeffrey Bernard the 6-4 favourite. As it turned out, Bernard lived much longer than expected, though when it came to the end, he’d had a leg amputated and was on dialysis. The kindly Howse visited him in hospital, and, after an hour, said that he had better get going. ‘Just go then,’ said Bernard. ‘All you did was keep looking at your watch anyway’.

Others have romanticised old Soho, but it is a danger that Howse does his best to avoid. He objects to the myth of the fun-loving prostitute, for instance. ‘The retired prostitutes that I came to know were not happy people. A quiet drink with one woman who generally presented a cheery face to the world always ended with helpless drunken tears and confused accounts of childhood abuse.

And any Soho novice would have to steel himself or herself against the prevailing smells, not least those emanating from my shabby old friend, the poet Paul Potts, who created a yard-wide cordon sanitaire of empty space around him, even on a crowded lunchtime. Howse says of one club, the Kismet, that ‘it was like drinking in a badly run public lavatory’, and of the upstairs room at the Coach and Horses, where for decades Private Eye held its fortnightly lunches, ‘it had an unconquerable air of desertion as though it was part of an abandoned house in a war zone’.

He is accurate, too, on how disgusting most of the food was. The sandwich shop he used to frequent served ‘large, strikingly pink slices of foreign sausage folded with slack lettuce; cold batter-coated bits of veal hammered into flaps. Like carcases on a Smithfield trolley, these pressed their sides against the walls of the glass display counter.’ At the Colony Club, Ian Board refused to serve slices of lemon in drinks – ‘Dirty, stinking, rotten fruit bobbing around. What’s the point?’ – largely because he couldn’t be bothered to go out and buy lemons from the market, just two streets away.

Delicacies were few and far between, and often more revolting than the sandwiches on offer. Joe the barman once invited me up to the out-of-bounds kitchen upstairs at the French pub with the promise of a great gourmet delight. The delicacy in question turned out to be a bright red, cold coxcomb, sliced in two, with vinegar poured over it. It tasted red and rubbery, like plasticine.

But where else in the world would you ever be offered a coxcomb? The pleasure of Soho lay in its unexpectedness. I also remember one quiet morning when the saintly proprietor of the French, Gaston Berlemont, produced a bottle of absinthe, vintage 1917, the year before it had been declared illegal, and invited me to join a little group of veteran Soho-ites for a sip. The group included Francis Bacon, an antiquarian book dealer and a man called Brian the Burglar, who had recently burgled jewellery from the then Secretary of State for Education, Margaret Thatcher. Brian expressed shock that her insurance claim was, by his reckoning, for a much larger amount than the jewellery was actually worth.

Some form of etiquette exists in even the most unconventional society, and Soho’s pubs and drinking clubs had as many unspoken rules as the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Bores were ostracised, measures were called ‘large’ never ‘double’, and conventional jokes, with a beginning, middle and end, were outlawed. Howse remembers Board insisting, ‘Don’t tell fucking jokes. It’s common. Say something witty.’ Incidentally, Board himself was not remotely witty, though his unbelievably crude insults could sometimes inspire a certain sort of nervous laughter in strangers.

Howse’s book is a wonderfully beady and evocative picture of a bohemian society – drunk and dissolute, irresponsible, individualistic, undeceived – that has now largely disappeared, erased by the advent of a healthier, blander, more corporate age. I wish, though, that he had told us more about himself. What drew him to Soho, and what made him decide to call it a day?

His book made me remember what had attracted me to Soho in my early 20s, but also why I left it. There was only so much dirty realism a man could take. Before long, I began to pine for fresh air, and I moved to the country. Others proved more resilient. ‘I wouldn’t like living in the country,’ Francis Bacon once said, ‘because of all the horrible little apple trees there.’

A painting by Francis Bacon, Study of Henrietta Moraes Laughing (1969), from the collection of the late publisher S.I. Newhouse is slated for sale at Christie’s New York on November 15 as part of its postwar and contemporary art evening sale. The piece, which measures just 14 inches by 12 inches, is estimated at $14 million to $18 million. It is a one-off sale from Newhouse’s collection, and has only had two owners in its 49 years: the media giant himself, and before that, the artist’s sister, Ianthe Bacon.

Newhouse, who was co-owner of Advance Publications, which includes the Condé Nast empire among its holdings, died last October at the age of 89. Shortly after his death, his family announced that it had hired former Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer to advise on his collection.

Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said in a release, “It is an honor for Christie’s to present Francis Bacon’s remarkable Study of Henrietta Moraes Laughing from the Collection of S.I. Newhouse. This consummate canvas by Bacon is a wonderful representation of Mr. Newhouse’s extraordinary eye for quality, that has been constantly reflected throughout his entire art collection.”

The vodka-fuelled bad behaviour of a lost era is lovingly recreated, says Robbie Millien

Service in pubs isn’t what it used to be. No one cheerily cries out, “Hello, cunt” when you walk into your local these days. This was the regular greeting of the “monstrous” Ian Board to his patrons at the Colony Room Club. “Open your bead-bag, miss” was his kindlier enjoinder for customers to cough up for another round. A fan of the TV programme Prisoner: Cell Block H, Board would shout at tardy drinkers: “Fuck off home. It’s time for Lesbians.” Woe betide someone who asked for a slice of lemon in their G&T — “It’s fucking disgusting. Dirty, stinking rotten fruit bobbing around. I won’t have it in the house.”

This camp, angry, stool-chucking man had an idiosyncratic approach to hospitality. Board would scatter coins in the urinals to see how low his hooched-up punters would go to raise the necessary money for a drink. Not that he was much better. He would wake, or rather regain consciousness, in the morning on the club’s fag-covered floor, have a “Vera Vomit” then calm his stomach with a port and brandy.

No one, though, could fault his flair for rudeness. Christopher Howse explains that Board’s “rasping torrent of invective” was “constructed, like oral epic poetry, from a selection of formulae”. “Look at y’self. You’re a sad and pathetic sight. You’ve got fuck all to say. You’re a dreary, boring id-iot. Just shut your fucking eakehole, etc.”

Still, you have to admire a man who shouted at Francis Bacon, “You can’t fucking paint!” and then belaboured the artist with an umbrella, until “he left by the dark, precipitous twisting stairway, with a volley of ballpoint pens bouncing off his leather-clad back”.

Bacon was no softie. His conversational approach was based on his belief that “if you can’t be rude to your friends, who can you be rude to?”; he would often use his exaggerated Mayfair cockney accent to intimidate and amuse. Picked up howling drunk by the police, he said: “I’ll have you know I’m a very fime-ous pine-ter.”

Bacon and Board are two of Howse’s “sacred monsters” of Soho. In Soho in the Eighties Howse chronicles a doomed world of “poets, painters, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts”, but mainly full-time drunkards who weaved their way through this rackety, disreputable corner of central London.

In the late Eighties Howse, a Daily Telegraph writer, put in hours of research boozing at the Coach and Horses, the Colony Club and the French House. He also takes us to drinking dens such as the Kismet; its alluring nicknames were “Death in the Afternoon” and the “Iron Lung”. (Someone once asked what the odd smell was in the Kismet: the answer, “failure”).

Howse summons up the “nightly tragicomedy” of Soho’s grotesques arguing, talking and drinking. There was Jeffrey Bernard, whose hobby “was to observe his own physical dissolution”. “I’m as weak as a kitten,” the Low Life columnist for The Spectator would say as he clambered onto a high stool at the Coach and Horses. Howse sees the actor John Hurt being wrestled down from the bar before he could chuck himself at a glass shelf of bottles.

Howse paints some alarming pictures, such as Graham Mason, known as “the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses”, who during one binge went for nine days without food. “Graham was a fearsome sight, his thin shanks wrapped round the legs of a high stool, he would swivel his reptilian stare behind him to any unfortunate stranger standing there attempting to be served, and snap: ‘Who the fuck are you?”’ Mason attributed his abrasive character to being conceived in a sand dune.

There were eccentrics such as Conan Nicholas, who made a living proofreading maths textbooks and writing pornography. Possibly more importantly, he invented cat racing. There was a gentle regular called Harry Kitto who said little beyond exclamations of “Shostakovich!” or “Oh, I say!”

The hacks of Private Eye would meet at the Coach and Horses. Howse recounts a story of how the distinguished if rather thirsty journalist Dick West was once asked by Richard Ingram, its editor, whether a story he had written was legally cast-iron. “Oh yes, it has got a very good source.” “Is it a really good source?” “Yes, yes, very good. As a matter of fact I made it up myself.” As a reporter in Vietnam, West once woke up in a field and did not know Where he was. He found a taxi and asked it to drive him to the nearest town. “Oh, by the way, what’s the name of the town?” The answer — Singapore.

“Soho in the Eighties was a love affair, if a dangerous liaison,” Howse says. He has lovingly recreated an era when journalists could sneak off for a lost afternoon of liquid oblivion, even providing a map of the inside of the Coach and Horses. He recalls some very funny stories, but by the end, however inclined one is to nostalgia, you will be relieved that this Soho is extinct. As the vodkas mount up it becomes clear how sad and twisted its inhabitants were, frittering their talent, wallowing in self-destruction.

BENJAMIN STUPPLES | SENIOR REPORTER | WEALTH | BLOOMBERG | TUESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 2018

How do you decorate a superyacht’s interior? If you’re anything like London-born billionaire Joe Lewis, you might start with the works of one of your country’s most famous painters.

Lewis’s 321-foot (98-meter) yacht, Aviva, has captivated the public since anchoring more than two weeks ago in the tourist-teeming docklands beside London’s Tower Bridge. While some passersby have asked who owns the vessel and ogled its gleaming exterior, those more familiar with Britain’s 20th century artists may have noticed what appears to be Francis Bacon’s “Triptych 1974-1977” hanging on its lower deck in golden frame.

Lewis, 81, bought the work - Bacon’s last triptych focused on the loss of his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971 - a decade ago for 26.3 million pounds ($34.3 million). The piece is now worth about $70 million, according to a person with knowledge of the asset. The vessel it graces is estimated at $257 million, according to Vessels Value.

The panels, each almost 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide, more recently formed part of an exhibition celebrating U.K. painters of the human form at London-based art gallery Tate Britain. An online guide for the exhibition, which closed on Aug. 27, identifies “The Lewis Collection” as the owner of the three paintings.

The piece is “a kind of landmark” for Bacon because of its beach backdrop, the artist’s biographer, Michael Peppiatt, told Christie’s in 2008. Bacon usually “has everything happening within four walls, and then for some mysterious reason, and I won’t pretend to know why, this takes place outside,” he said.

Bacon died in 1992 at age 82. In the central panel of “Triptych 1974 -1977,” Dyer’s disfigured body kneels on a blue-skied beach beside a black void. For the setting, Tate Britain said Bacon was “indebted” to Edgar Degas’s 1876 “Beach Scene”.

Lewis owns Tavistock Group, a Bahamas-based holding company that has stakes in more than 200 businesses worldwide. His investments include real estate, resorts and restaurants. The billionaire, who made his first fortune through currency trades during the 1990s, also owns North London soccer team Tottenham Hotspur. He’s the world’s 297th-richest person with an estimated $5.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He now spends most of his time in the Bahamas. On top of works from Bacon, his art collection includes pieces by Picasso, Freud, Klimt and Degas. Tavistock Group’s website describes his trove as “one of the largest private art collections in the world.”

Lewis is looking to offload a painting from one of the U.K.’s most celebrated living artists, David Hockney, 81. Lewis is seeking $80 million for “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which would make him the most expensive living artist at auction.

A sketch of Soho’s celebrated drinkers reveals bullies, charlatans and chancers

GRUB SMITH | BIOGRAPHY & MEMORY | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | FRIDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 2018

Opening this book is like walking into a heavy drinkers’ pub. You are immediately confronted by a surly, unwelcoming cast of alcoholics, bullies, charlatans and chancers. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and, this being 40 years ago, the food is awful: certainly, the only thing gastro about this pub would be “-enteritis”. Depending which chapter you dip into, the scene might be the Coach and Horses, the Colony Room Club, or the French. If you’re really unlucky, it might be the Kismet, known to its clientele back then as Death in the Afternoon. (“What’s that smell in here?” someone once asked. “Failure,” came the reply.)

Fortunately, the Virgil guiding readers through this particular hell is Christopher Howse, an elegant writer and journalist, who warmed a barstool in every one of these haunts back in the 1980s, and sat within earshot of his subjects as they behaved appallingly. When he recounts an anecdote about Francis Bacon dyeing his hair with boot polish, or John Hurt drunkenly launching himself towards a wall of glass bottles, it is usually because he was there at the time, or heard it directly from somebody who was.

There is no shortage of villains in Soho in the Eighties, a patchwork of biographical sketches. But the recurring hero is Jeffrey Bernard, famous for his Low Life column in the Spectator, memorably described as “a suicide note in weekly instalments”. While candidly admitting to Bernard’s many flaws, Howse is loyally in thrall to his talents as a raconteur and writer. Bernard’s listing in the index alone provides an insightful, if cautionary, piece of found poetry: “drunk at book launch . . . whisky . . . vodka . . . ignites tablecloth . . . leg amputated . . . nightmares of maggots . . . not drunk on 2 November 1987”. Howse also includes a bone dry joke at the expense of Bernard’s vanity. At a party in his flat, which was entirely decorated with photographs of “Jeffrey with Graham Greene, Jeffrey with Lester Piggott, Jeffrey in Red Square, a very young Jeffrey, Jeffrey with Richard Ingrams, Jeffrey with Keith Waterhouse”, a female guest inquired if this was Jeffrey’s room. “Either that,” replied his brother Bruce, “or someone who likes him very much.”

Less attractive, not least physically because of his booze-ruined “great swollen, pitted nose”, is Ian Board, the master of ceremonies at the Colony Room. It would be difficult to imagine a man more poorly suited to a career in hospitality than this vituperative, bitterly camp ogre. As Howse recalls, he would habitually wake up on the floor of his club, on the “asphalt carpet” strewn with fag ends and spilt beer, then revive his stomach with a “Vera Vomit” and his lungs with a cough “that would turn into a visceral retching”, before downing a large brandy for breakfast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he would greet his customers with the words, “Hello, cunt.”

As the day progressed, his behaviour seems, if anything, to have grown worse. His hobby was to “observe the self-destruction” of other people, and he would sometimes drop coins into the lavatory bowl, knowing that some poor drunk would stoop to pick them out. Such characters — and Board is by no means the least virtuous in these pages — barely deserve so fine a memorialist as Howse. He has a talent for nailing a description, whether referring to a raddled drinker’s “pickled onion eyes”, or recalling a profoundly hungover man complaining “of the noise the [snowflakes] made landing on his balding head”.

The Soho of these hacks, artists and has-beens has gone now, fallen victim to property development and an economy that is less forgiving of missed deadlines and liquid lunches. It had its charms and its occasional instances of nobility, but a reading of this book reinforces the opinion that it should not be viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. The worst crime in the small world of these soi-disant bohemians was to be a “bore”, an insult aimed in scattergun fashion at anyone who did not share their attitudes. But the truth is that they could not see how tedious they often were themselves, drinking to excess, fighting, threatening to hit women, cheating each other out of pathetically small sums of money.

The book’s title tips a hat to Daniel Farson’s Soho in the Fifties, which chronicled, among others, Dylan Thomas. The great poet once remarked, deep in his cups, “Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.” Despite Howse’s thorough and likeable attempt to salvage their reputation, there could be few more apt epitaphs for a generation that so squalidly wasted its time, and all too often its talent.

In the late 1980s, actress Isabella Rossellini brought the New York gallerist Leo Castelli to David Lynch’s painting studio in Los Angeles. About their first encounter, Castelli, a shrewd dealer known for his discerning eye, said at the time, “This man knows what he’s doing.”

Lynch had been making paintings, many of them depicting his nightmarish version of American suburbia, for two decades, though he was known then entirely for his films, among them the 1977 cult favorite Eraserhead and the 1986 absurdist murder mystery Blue Velvet. When Castelli gave Lynch a solo show at his SoHo gallery in 1989, the rest of the New York art world took its first look at the by-then-notable filmmaker’s paintings—though with reactions that split. One critic writing for Artforum called the show “eye-opening,” while Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, called the paintings “familiar, unoriginal, and slick.”

Decades later, it continues to strike some as a surprise that Lynch, an Academy Award–nominated director whose status is secure in Hollywood lore, has another significant practice devoted to painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, and more—so much so that a 2012 essay about his studio work in Hyperallergic took the title “David Lynch’s Art Doesn’t Suck.” But the art world has gradually warmed to Lynch. His paintings were the subject of a retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art—his alma mater—in 2014. A feature-length documentary about his art practice, David Lynch: The Art Life, followed in 2016. And this season, ahead of an exhibition opening in November at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Holland, Lynch’s art is on show at Los Angeles’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery, which has represented him since 2011. The exhibition, which showcases paintings, watercolors, and drawings under the title “I Was a Teenage Insect,” opens September 8 and runs into November.

So how does Lynch himself feel about his work getting such visibility at long last? “It’s OK!” he said, speaking by phone from his office in L.A. “But it’s just been recently OK, because they don’t really take painters seriously if you’re known for something else. You’re supposed to only do one thing, right? But now things have changed.”

Lynch’s paintings are logical counterparts to his films, with subject matter that is, to put it mildly, quite weird. The works in the new gallery show feature, among other things, an insect-person by a small house, a woman floating in the ether, a man gazing at a potato, and a person being chased by some nondescript evil force down a hallway. Lynch, who has often said he doesn’t consider himself all that strange, is content to keep his art mysterious, speaking in oneiric statements that may or may not hint at what’s happening in the work.

Text, in some cases, helps viewers along. The painting titled Big Sheep Did Eat My Brain (2018) features a note, scrawled in inky paint, reading “I have been here before. When?” With such words in the midst of a drawing of a clock, it recalls some of the time-traveling antics of Twin Peaks: The Return and Mulholland Dr. Another work, titled Every Girl’s Dream (2017), features a nude female figure embraced by a shadowy monster, along with the words “Sally said this NOT ME!”

Asked whether narratives play out in the paintings, Lynch said, “Yes, I love a narrative—a little story, a small story, as I say. I like to have something going on with the characters.” Prodded for more information, he continued, a little cryptically, “Sometimes the story comes first, but sometimes the narrative comes out of the work later. It depends how it goes, but again, I like to have the thing feeling a certain way. If it wasn’t for words, it just wouldn’t be complete.”

The paintings are raw and almost gross because of their chunky, tumorous-looking globs of material. “I use a bunch of different things,” he said. “I like this thing I call ‘organic phenomena’—when you mix this with that, you get a fantastic thing sometimes. It’s total mixed media—all different kinds of things in there.” What exactly constitutes such “things” remains a mystery: With a knowing laugh, Lynch declined to identify all his materials. “But I use a lot of glue, acrylic paint, watercolors, tempera, cigarette ashes,” he said. “I use, you know, a whole bunch of different things.”

Lynch has taken to calling his studio practice his “art life,” though his work in different mediums intersects. From an early age, long before he even thought of making movies, Lynch knew he wanted to study art. In high school, his friend’s father gave him a copy of Robert Henri’s book The Art Spirit, which theorized that art and life are one and the same, and that artworks are the records of creativity incited by unseen forces. He went onto study, from 1966 to 1967, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. One of his first major mature works, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), was a painting that featured the heads of a few men on a panel. It initially included a projection that made it appear as if the men were vomiting, all while a police siren wailed. In certain ways, it could count as Lynch’s first film.

He insists he does not know much about contemporary art. “I know nothing about the L.A. art scene!” he said. “I don’t know anything about the New York art scene, the Paris art scene, the German art scene. In the same way with film, I’m not a film buff.”

He does, however, favor certain artists and styles. “I like childish, bad painting,” he said in reference to the French Art Brut painter Jean Dubuffet. He dismissed conventional figurative work as “flat” and “like a furniture-store sort of thing,” and prefers instead Dubuffet’s “distortions.” Other artists he likes include Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, Edward and Nancy Kienholz, and Georg Baselitz.

And then there is Francis Bacon, whose work Lynch can distinctly remember seeing as a young man at New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1966. “He’s a huge inspiration,” Lynch said of the painter of meat slabs and tortured men in inscrutable rooms. In his show at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, he alludes to some of the formative Bacon works he saw, which were framed in gold and placed under glass. “It’s framed like a stage—you are looking through something to see,” he said. “This is thrilling to me.” His new works are similarly set in gold and silver frames he crafted himself.

Strange combinations of animals and humans recur. In one work, The Thoughts of Mr. Bee-Man (2018), a cartoonish person appears to have merged with an insect form, with a body that has become a stinger. What might he be thinking about when producing such hybrids of animals and humans? “I’m thinking about animals and humans,” he said, as if the answer said all that could be uttered on the subject. Certain hybridizations please him more than others. “I like dogs with a human head. I’ve done sheep with a human head. I like combos like that.”

Lynch explained that he paints every day. “That’s all I do, just paint in my studio,” he said. He also maintains a practice of Transcendental Meditation that aids in his work process. “People who have this ability to transcend start expanding consciousness with those all-positive qualities, and it serves the work,” he said. “Ideas flow more freely—you’re happier in the work. It’s a form of meditation that allows a human being to experience the deepest eternal level of life. And in the field that you transcend is unbounded creativity, intelligence, love, happiness, energy, peace, power. It’s a huge blessing, for the work and for life.”

How pub prophets, poets, local artists and above all booze created London’s little Bohemia

At the fag end of this at once elegiac and emetic memoir, Christopher Howse observes: “Obviously a painter like Francis Bacon would not have painted as he did if he had not fallen into Soho.” But I wonder if this is really obvious at all? Bacon was the standout celebrity of London’s little Bohemia, not only in the 80s, but the 50s, 60s and 70s as well – his was also a burgeoning international celebrity, such that in the years since his death he’s come to be recognised as the pre-eminent figurative painter of the second half of the 20th century. That it should have been this tight grid of streets – the area pretty much contained by Wardour Street to the west, Charing Cross Road to the east, Oxford Street to the north and Shaftesbury Avenue to the south – that engendered such genius would seem as preposterous as the assertion that it was the Bateau-Lavoir alone that inspired Picasso’s cubism.

But then all bohemian milieus are really the creation of their minor not their major figures – the big beasts cruise through, ships in the night, en route for more exalted destinations, leaving bobbing in their wake parasitic poetasters, ready to cash in. It would be unfair, perhaps, to class Howse as one such: his sensitive, well-drawn book does a good job of conveying a particular place at a particular time, without either undue reverence or the anachronisms that dog hindsight. In particular, Howse is flinty-eyed about what principally animated Soho’s high spirits during the 80s (and the previous three decades for that matter): alcohol.

If Bacon – a non-stop champagne tippler – was its presiding deity, standing a few feet from the bar of the Colony Room Club, above a crap trattoria on Dean Street, then Soho’s postwar prophet was indubitably Jeffrey Bernard, who succeeded Julian MacLaren-Ross as its best known chronicler. Bernard’s favoured hangout was the Coach and Horses on the corner of Romilly and Greek streets, which at that time was presided over by the self-styled “Soho’s Rudest Landlord”, Norman Balon. I never hung out much in the Coach – as it was known to Bernard, and its other regulars – or in the French, round the corner, where Gaston Bachelard’s waxed moustaches wavered over the bar like some signpost to a hipper future; but I knew the Colony Room Club well in the late 1970s and early 80s (giving me a little seniority over Howse), and can testify to the – for the most part – accuracy of his depiction of its crapulent denizens. Bernard, besides penning his celebrated Low Life columns for the Spectator, was also a career alcoholic – and it’s this, a sort of existential commitment to the ruination of chronic drinking, that marked out the Soho of this era.

There are still one or two illegal after-hours drinking clubs operating in the locale – remarkably, there also remain a few of the so-called “walk-ups”, brothels that occupy the upper storeys of the elegant Georgian houses that characterise the quarter. Meanwhile, the street-low-life component of Soho has been on the rise, such that the legendary “front line” for hard drug dealing has been resurrected around Shaftesbury Avenue and its environs. But for the most part, this Stygian cockpit is under assault – not from the guardians of morality, but the property developers who are the true arbiters of our age. Shiny developments on Archer Street and around the new Crossrail station at Tottenham Court Road seem to me to be silvery spikes hammered into Soho’s vampiric heart.

Howse regrets the crowds of youngsters in from the ’burbs, who filled up the pubs and clubs towards the end of his nominated decade – but neglects to mention it was the Blair government’s liberalisation of the licensing laws that made this possible, together with its obvious sequel: the superannuation of the afternoon and after-hours drinking clubs that had supplied its 60% proof lifeblood. He also, as I’ve noted, wishes to make a case for the Soho of these years as a crucible of creativity, and steps aside from his anecdotes about this or that pisshead to provide little disquisitions on painters and poets, who, with Bacon being the obvious exception, are mostly unknown to the wider world. Howse mentions the Groucho Club – which opened right next door to the Colony Room in 1985 – scarcely at all, remarking only that while Bernard et al despised the Groucho for its association with the worlds of “meejah” and advertising, they nonetheless availed themselves of its superior facilities and tolerant staff. Of that self-appointed Queen of Soho Julie Burchill we hear nothing – and that’s altogether a relief, because along with her contrarian, cocaine-fuelled grandstanding would have come the whole wider world of the 1990s, with Britpop, the Young British Artists and the final extinction of anything with any more than a pretence to be avant garde.

It was and is the micro-locales of Soho that preoccupy Howse – so much so that for two set-piece anecdotes of his era, he supplies diagrams of the interiors of the Coach and Horses and the Colony Room Club, so that those unfamiliar with the establishments can imaginatively place themselves at the centre of the action. He gives us the blow-by-blow of a raid conducted against Bernard for running an illegal horse racing book in the first establishment, and the constabulary attending the latter because its proprietor, Ian Board, had allegedly smashed up a customer’s mobile phone.

While only too happy to laud him as an enemy of these ghastly gadgets almost avant la lettre, I must state for the record that Board was a nasty piece of work, with a vicious tongue and little of the wit Howse ascribes to him, unless you consider peppering your discourse with “cunt” in all its possible variations – nounal, adjectival, verbal, conjunctive – to be hilarious. His predecessor at the Colony was Muriel Belcher, the original Queen of Soho, but while Board also aspired (on grounds of sexuality, at least) to the same title, the truth was that like most chronic alcoholics he was an embittered and resentful creep. He was a pander and a pimp as well. Howse seems to have been blinded – perhaps by his spiritual inclinations – to the truly dark side of Soho. I was privy to major drug deals that were set up in the Colony, as well as other genuinely criminal enterprises, rather than merely farcical ones.

Howse ponders whether the Bohemian mores of Soho inspired any real social changes, and suggests that it was in their contempt for money, vested privilege and worldly recognition that its devotees distinguished themselves. I have my doubts: he allocates a considerable portion of the book to the Private Eye crowd, who memorably lunched at the Coach; and while the journal may have an honourable tradition when it comes to speaking truth to power, at a social level it has mostly comprised a sniggering in‑crowd of ex-public schoolboy establishmentarians. No, if Soho was notable for anything during these years, it was that the former haven of out gay men – and a few women – was losing its singularity. While around the corner in Old Compton Street things grew gayer and gayer, with same-sex couples walking proudly hand-in-hand and gay-friendly businesses opening, inside the Colony Room Club things grew greyer and grimmer, as the dwindling handful of old Polari speakers, like some lost Amazonian tribe, faced their miserable extinct

But most miserably extinguished of all was the putatively straight (and really rather misogynistic, as Howse concedes) Bernard. Tiring of the endless physical depredations of his chosen lifestyle, which included by this stage kidney dialysis and an amputated leg, he effectively killed himself in 1997: inviting friends to a “party” that began when he forwent treatment, and ended with his death. Howse refused to attend, presumably because as a Catholic convert he couldn’t morally sanction an act of felo de se. It’s a strange coda to a book about bohemia, and I can’t help but see in Howse’s privileging of transcendent morality over personal amity a warped allegory of Soho’s own slow extinction by impersonal market forces.

A number of myths about the great 20th century British artist, Francis Bacon, have exploded since his death. That he never drew or relied heavily on photographic imagery are two; he was adept at covering up the traces of his creative process.

Another cover up was his tendency to destroy work he was not happy with. This is normal practice for any artist, but with Bacon, it almost eliminated that whole chapter of his life when he was an interior designer – prior to his sudden eruption on the art scene in 1945 as a fully-fledged painter of human anxiety.

Fortunately, Bacon’s attempt to eradicate his early design orientated production was foiled by his earliest patron, an art loving civil servant called Eric Allden, whom he met on a cross-channel ferry in 1929, aged just 19. Bacon had recently returned to London after a three-year jaunt around the hot spots of Paris and Berlin, and was setting himself up as an interior design.

Although Bacon had no official artistic training, he was consumed with enthusiasm for the fashionable artistic styles of the continent, from Art Deco to Synthetic Cubism, Surrealism and the Bauhaus movement. These he managed to fuse together in his neatly structured studio, and sell.

Through his friend, the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, he designed furniture for the likes of Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, Sydney, the art historian Douglas Cooper, and the writer, Patrick White. But he later dismissed it all, telling the art critic David Sylvester, they were “over-influenced by the French and not very original.”

However, Allden hung onto his pieces by Bacon, and sold them to a modern design enthusiast, Francis Elek, in the late 1940s. Elek then added a strikingly painted 1929 screen that had belonged to de Maistre and kept the collection together until he died in 2008. The following year they were lent by his family to Tate Britain on a long term loan. But last month, they were removed and handed to Christie’s, which is are to sell them next month

Few examples of Bacon’s work from this period remain extant; less than 10 are known to have sold at auction before. But they do not command such astronomic prices as his more familiar images of screaming popes and contorted portraits. While a 1972 painting of his lover, John Dyer, could make £20m in the same sale, the early works are estimated from £70,000 for rugs and up to £1m for a three-panelled painted screen.

The price disparity is largely to do with an art world snobbery which classifies design as a mere craft – inferior to the more elevated inspiration and production of fine art. The rugs with their interlocking forms are in the modernist idiom already purveyed by Eileen Gray or the Art Deco textile artist Ivan da Silva Bruhns.

The paintings have a more surreal content, influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Jean Lurçat with elements of Fernand Leger thrown in. The screen is perhaps the most impressive of these early works, anticipating the triptych format which Bacon adopted for his painting.

However original they may or may not be, Tate Britain clearly felt the whole group was of more than purely archival interest. To have accepted the loan and displayed the works, hanging them together with early paintings from Tate’s and Damien Hirst’s collections, indicated the importance attached to them.

A number of commentators have sought to establish links between these youthful works, and his later mature work. They point, as Christie’s does, to certain compositional devices: his use of geometric structures and ‘spaceframes’ which herald his later cage-like structures for the popes, for instance, and the narrative element and biomorphic figures of the screen panels which continues in his triptychs.

But there is a puzzle here. In the artist’s catalogue raisonné, in which the first four entries were all owned by Allden, there are just 20 works made between 1929 and 1936, and none between 1936 and 1944. What was Bacon making in all those years? And, while there may be some formal connection between the early and later works, what triggered the radical change in content from, as his biographer, Michael Peppiatt puts it, his ‘politely decorative’ designs to his signature ‘howling figures’? Was it the war, or some deep personal tragedy, or, as Peppiatt suggests, his desire to ‘surprise and astonish’, to make an impact.

Whatever the answer, the market now has its best ever opportunity to judge the import of Bacon’s earliest known works of art.

The Spectator’s Michael Heath and Christopher Howse on their time in the infamous Coach and Horses in the 1980s

MICHAEL HEATH & CHRISTOPHER HOWSE | FEATURES | THE SPECTATOR | THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2018

Christopher Howse has just written a book about Soho. He drank there regularly with Michael Heath, The Spectator’s cartoon editor, in the 1980s. Last week, in the editor’s office, they remembered a vanished world.

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE: Well, I don’t know if you’re entirely to blame for that. But you taught me a thing or two.

HEATH: There were such things as groupies for cartoonists in those days. There were girls hanging round you in Fleet Street waiting for you to finish the drawings for the following day and then they’d go off with the cartoonists and have meals or go to various clubs. The cartoonists were wealthy, really, because it was cash in hand. You couldn’t get a cartoonist who was stable. They didn’t have houses or anything like that because they spent freely. I came across a similar lifestyle in Brighton, where they were all criminals. I thought they were terrific fun, as long as you didn’t get on the wrong side of them. Some had razor blades stuck under their fingernails. It was very much like Graham Greene. They’d get angry and whack each other with billiard cues. The idea was to have a fight and you’d get whacked or slashed, claret would be all over the place. And they’d like that because it left them with a nice scar.

HOWSE: The barman at the Colony Room Club had a marvellous chiv right down his cheek. People would drink there because, until 1988, the pubs closed at three o’clock and didn’t open again until half-past five. What are you supposed to do until then? You had to spend the afternoon somewhere, so you had afternoon drinking clubs, the Colony Room Club being the best of them. They were all private members’ clubs, so they were perfectly legal. But there were some very nasty ones. There was one called the Kismet Club in Newport Street and it had two nicknames. One was ‘Death in the Afternoon’ and other one was ‘the Iron Lung’. It was underground with no windows, walls weeping with damp and bits of paint coming off them. The lavatory opened straight onto the bar with no intervening doors. It was run by a rather wonderful woman called Maltese Mary who knew what was what.

HEATH: Yes, the place where someone asked: ‘What’s that strange smell?’ Then gave the answer: ‘Failure.’ But the thing was, we all worked. It wasn’t like a crowd of drunks on a bombsite; you were surrounded by very intelligent people. These were professional circles; you had to come up with something to say.

HOWSE: The big sin was to be a bore, because then you were immediately victimised and your foolish remarks thrown back at you. Jeffrey Bernard used to introduce something that he was going to say with a phrase like ‘Do you know what your worst trouble is?’ and you knew it was going to come. Whereas Ian Board in the Colony Room Club would just go into a tirade of abuse that would last about 17 minutes. It didn’t happen to me because I defended myself by being weak and making jokes.

HEATH: A typical day would start at the Coach and Horses when it opened at the stroke of 11. Jeffrey would be sitting at the bar at one end and two other people standing next to him, real serious old barrow boys...

HOWSE: Charlie Clarke. He was mixed up with that business where somebody’s head was found in a public lavatory. But he was quite normal. There was a stage door-keeper, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, called Gordon Smith. He was given the nickname Granny Smith because he was like an old grandmother. He wasn’t a bore and he wasn’t subservient, but he didn’t show off. He was just there constantly.

HEATH: One of the things you couldn’t do was boast. You could never suggest that you might be somewhat happy, or that things were all right. You had to be in a total state of panic and despair about something or other. There was a whole lot of us: intelligent people, but we had failed this, that and God knows what else. Even Francis Bacon, who was earning then £76,000 a painting — huge money. But you could never talk about money. We were all amateurs, starting out all over again. And fearless, when you think of the booze we shifted. I was doing an average of 15 large whiskies a day. My liver and I ended up having separate bedrooms.

HOWSE: You didn’t show it. You never gave any signs whatsoever of being drunk. I drank a good deal too. We had drink in the office and we had drink in the pub, so it would go on from day to day. But some people were just astonishing drinkers. There was a man there called Bill Moore, he was a driver, of all things, God help us. He used to sit there at the bar with his sweater on and he would just sit there drinking double Bell’s whisky until it was closing time, then he’d drive home or drive to France or whatever it was.

HEATH: At opening time Jeffrey Bernard would be in the corner. Nobody’s saying anything. Jeffrey would sit there doing some terrible coughing, nose-blowing and all the rest of it. Then he’d have his first drink and he’d start telling some awful story, always to do with something of his rotting or falling apart.

HEATH: That’s right. ‘Somebody parachuted down from a plane and landed on a helicopter rotor. Can you imagine the noise and the filth and the smell…?’ Anyway, these three or so men just drank and drank. You’d go up and be involved in it, so it was your round and you’ve got four people to buy for. Then another person comes in and then he buys a round and so that’s five people. You couldn’t escape without being in serious trouble.

HOWSE: It was just great fun, despite the misery. It was funnier than any situational comedy could be, because you knew all the people. The things that happened were astonishing and it always ended in tragedy, breakdown of health, falling down the stairs. Death — that was the automatic ending. But in the meantime it was great fun.

HEATH: At some point Francis Bacon was bound to turn up. When he did, every-one jumped up and started hanging around him because he was enormously famous, even then. My feeling about him drinking is a bit odd, because he certainly was drunk some of the time. But he mainly got other people pissed. I think he liked seeing people falling apart. Though by the morning, I’d see him hanging on the bandstand.

HOWSE: Yes, he did get completely pissed. He used to speak in this very Cockney camp way. He was picked up for being drunk and disorderly in Old Compton Street and as he was put in the back of the Black Maria, he said to the constable: ‘I’m a very fime-ous pine-ter!’ There was always that air of terror with him.

HEATH: He had a doctor work on him because he liked being beaten up, seriously and regularly.

HEATH: Seriously beaten up. I was told the doctor had to put his eyeball back in once the following morning.

HOWSE: Marge Dunbar, a great friend of mine, she said that Francis Bacon was the funniest person she ever knew. She thought John Minton was great fun. He was a painter.

HEATH: Francis killed many people, just with words. Minton was doing very well after the war. His drawings would sell well to magazines and he was quite a star. He mixed with Francis and drank with that mob. Francis, when he was asked what he thought of Minton’s work, said: ‘He can’t paint. He’s a book illustrator.’ That went straight into Minton. He just gave up. Francis was always cutting when asked what he thought of people. Some could not take it. I knew people who’d been destroyed by a few words.

HEATH: I kept falling in love. I fell hopelessly in love with three women who all ruined me and took everything I had. But that was something to do with whisky, I think. There were a lot of women, but there’s something about their constitution. They can’t drink the way men can. They started the day with the rest of us and drank white wine and they’d be very jolly and sexual and all that, and by four o’clock they’re all crying.

HOWSE: It doesn’t do me much credit, but I’m afraid I was just an observer. I was a little bearded camera in the corner just fascinated by all these people. There were one or two whom you didn’t make jokes to. There were some pornographers who were quite dangerous, weren’t they? People were very disinhibited. John Hurt used to come to the Coach and Horses because he liked conversation and also because he got drunk there. And one Sunday evening he was so arseholed that he stood up on the bar. He was going to throw himself off as if he was crowd-surfing into the bottles and glasses on the back wall. It was going to be disastrous — he would have been cut to ribbons — but somebody had the presence of mind to catch his legs before he did it. Nobody made anything of it. And even though he was a very famous actor it never made it into the press, because you wouldn’t bother.

HEATH: We were all in the same boat. We were a mess. People were rude and horrible and outrageous, but they were fun, original, and their like does not exist anymore. With Jeffrey Bernard it was different. I couldn’t keep up. He used to say to me: ‘You haven’t got any guts!’ And I realised that you had to be pretty fit to drink yourself to death in Soho. Good-looking, nice, charming women would fall in love with him and they’d marry him. They didn’t seem to realise that they weren’t going to go the theatre, that they weren’t going to the cinema, just the pub. Occasionally they’d go out with him to dinner but he’d fall asleep in his soup, so it wasn’t romantic in any way. But the women kept coming back.

HEATH: In the end, he decided to commit suicide and invited me to do it with him. Well, not to commit suicide but to have a meal with him in his horrible flat behind the King of Corsica. It was like a huge ashtray. He smoked continuously.

HOWSE: And his artificial leg was standing in the bath, unused. He never had the strength or determination to use it. Next to that was a bucket full of under-clothes swimming around in disinfectant.

HEATH: I went up with him to the ashtray flat and there were two women there. They specialised in coming to look after him and bringing him the most expensive stuff from Fortnum & Mason to eat. And he’d mumble something rude to them, but they didn’t mind that at all. He’d eat all this food he wasn’t allowed to eat. He was on dialysis. He’d lost a foot and the other one was due to be taken off and he couldn’t take it any more. We sat there and choked while he ate all the wrong food, like Chinese, and drank all the booze he wanted to drink, vodka and stuff like that. Then he got these huge morphine tablets, and in front of us downed about eight and crashed. We carried him to bed, sat with him a bit until midnight when he woke up and said, ‘I feel great’ and then went back to sleep. I left and he died at about three in the morning. Sad endings.

HEATH: The idea in the war — blackout and everything else — was that everyone drank on the assumption it would be their last day. Women would sleep with men even if they loved their husbands. I’d grown up with that. You had American sailors, for God’s sake. Women would do anything to be with Americans. The clothing was enough to drive you mad. They had gabardine and aftershave. It was unheard of here. We were all walking around in mouldy old tweeds. And it sounds awfully soppy, but there was this decency about it. You needed some sort of class, regardless of what social class you came from. There were still criminals then. They did do awful things — you could be nailed to the floor and things like that — but still decent. The general malaise that we have now, depressing beyond belief, is the result of inertia and dim television. Mobiles have ruined our lives.

HOWSE: Everything’s changed. The difference was, and I’m not sure how healthy this was, but very odd people — they all sound like monsters, the way we talk about them — they did regard it as home. When Oliver Bernard, Jeffrey’s eldest brother, ran away at 16 just before the war, he found himself at home in Soho. People lent each other shillings and spoke about poetry and things that mattered; they didn’t talk about salaries and so on. One can’t idealise it, but there was something remarkable about the difference.

HEATH: I’d apply it here at The Spectator. Quite a few of the people we’ve been talking about worked here. I got Jeffrey Bernard into The Spectator. He did a racing column and then started the Low Life column. But that whole world we’re talking about has gone, vanished. And as far as we can gather, it can’t be resurrected.

HOWSE: I don’t think it can be. It would be nice to see something taking its place.

HEATH: On the whole, most of the people had an education and were very bright. They knew about things. I had no education, but I still knew what was what. You could make jokes about this, that and the other; make references to things. There was this assumption you should know about things, in a way that is different now.

HOWSE: People had stocked minds. They knew about poetry and art from having read and seen them, not from having looked them up on their mobiles. It’s a different way of thinking. It’d be marvellous to get some of the dreary management types you get now and take them back 30 years and put them in the Coach or the Colony Club. It wouldn’t make a man of them, but it might just make them think.

On the eve of Francis Bacon’s 1985 retrospective at the Tate Gallery, the English art critic Michael Peppiatt wrote anxiously about the “excessively philosophico-literary commentary” that he believed Bacon’s art provoked. Perhaps he had in mind the French theorist Gilles Deleuze, whose refreshing if challenging Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation had appeared in 1981. Deleuze had little interest in Bacon’s life. Instead of “gilded-gutter” reminiscences, he sought to connect the artist with a wider intellectual world—including the work of fellow theorists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-François Lyotard.

But this has not been the British way. Insular histories of post-war British art have mostly avoided theory in favour of direct witness, elegantly tracing networks and encounters based on personal anecdotes.

Such testimonies have taken many forms: they range from Peppiatt’s own touching Francis Bacon in Your Blood to the newly-anointed Daily Mail editor Geordie Greig’s record of a Johnny-come-lately friendship with Lucian Freud, Breakfast with Lucian to Catherine Lampert’s magisterial Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting.

In the background, there is David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, the rich but unreliable text that all Bacon scholars have to mine. These narratives focus on a male group of figurative painters often referred to as the School of London.

This was the phrase initially used by Sylvester in 1950 as a riposte to North American artistic dominance. It was taken up again in 1976 by the American painter RB Kitaj, who spent much of his life over here. He identified what he saw as “a number of world-class painters… a School of real London, England, in Europe” that included 48 artists whose drawings he had acquired for the Arts Council. He had particular admiration for Auerbach, Bacon and David Hockney.

At first sight the trio appear to have little in common. But together with Freud they all operated at a remove from avant-garde practice. All four continued to use the pictorial devices of traditional painting, working observationally, employing perspective, using colour in loose relation to the lived world. The results were varied explorations of reality—personal painterly interrogations.

But they were pushing against the tide. By the 1970s painting of any kind was no longer regarded as an essential—or even an interesting—way of making art. The handcrafting of pictures, what the Marxist art historian John Roberts has dismissively described as “a continuous process of pushing, dabbing and pulling of paint across the surface,” had been challenged early in the 20th century by Cubism’s use of found materials in collage, and by Marcel Duchamp’s advocacy of a directorial role in which the artist organises, selects, copies and directs rather than simply paints.

By the 1980s, however, painting was making something of a comeback. The 1981 show The New Spirit in Painting, reinforced by British Art of the Twentieth Century in 1987, both staged at the Royal Academy, convincingly reinstated figuration. Since then figurative painting has continued to be reprised as a radical practice in numerous exhibitions and publications.

Now we have Martin Gayford’s entertaining Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters and, as a coincidental companion, the current show at Tate Britain All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life.

Gayford offers a persuasive history of painting in Britain from 1945 to around 1970. His book belongs firmly in the personal testimony camp, being partly based on the author’s numerous interviews over a long journalistic career. Although wonderfully vivid, it suggests the losses as well as the gains peculiar to a biographical approach. It opens with the 2013 sale at Christie’s of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969).

At £89.6m, it became for a time the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction—more than a Van Gogh or Rembrandt. In the 1970s such stratospheric prices for either Bacon or Freud would have seemed highly unlikely. In Gayford’s account this trajectory reads like myth, as a tale of triumph over the odds, in which relative poverty and a measure of obscurity were ultimately vindicated by market recognition.

That representational art came back into fashion should come as no surprise. At its best such art helps us measure ourselves within the world. But there may be another reason for the retrospective success of painting from life. Much of the austere, abstract and conceptual art that had refreshed the art world in the 1970s has turned out to be ultimately less marketable, even if the 1990s saw Damien Hirst and the YBAs forge a more accessible and desirable brand of conceptualism.

One reason may be that such art, stripped of personal emotion and often focused on language, adds little to received ideas about the nature of artistic genius. Such ideas may be hopelessly stereotypical, but they are nonetheless remarkably potent and are usually communicated through well-honed anecdotes about the artist.

Anecdotes are more important than they sound. In 1934 the Austrian critics Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz identified a series of motifs that occur repeatedly in accounts of artists’ lives from classical times onwards. They include the idea of miraculous youthful talent that requires no training; the artist as dangerously rivalrous with peers; as socially alert, witty, and more intelligent than his critics and patrons.

Artists were seen to exercise unusual power over their models, and to be capable of great brutality in the service of creativity. Secretive about sources and techniques, they were committed to artistic labour to the exclusion of everyday concerns. The anecdotal approach was rejected by the modern discipline of art history in favour of documentary sources. But there is something undeniably haunting about such historico-mythic stories.

Gayford’s Modernists & Mavericks does include abstraction in his story of post-war painting, and argues persuasively for the porous nature of the abstract/figurative divide. But he also gives us stories in abundance that mostly relate to figurative artists.

So we learn of Freud, as a frighteningly precocious adolescent, opening the door naked to an important dealer. And of Bacon betraying no emotion as he attends his historic show at the Grand Palais, knowing that his lover and model has committed suicide. Hockney, at a loss at the Royal College of Art, embarks on a series of drawings of a skeleton with such skill that one fellow student—RB Kitaj—is overwhelmed.

In Gayford’s valorisation of genius women are in short supply. Even the greatest woman painter appears less likely to generate anecdotes of interlinking friendships and shared experiences of the kind that are chronicled here: so much turns on the male artist’s sometimes predatory relationship with his model. Pauline Boty blazes with beauty and talent for a few pages. Gillian Ayres (who died in April) and Bridget Riley find their place as great abstract artists and Prunella Clough, also ultimately abstract, is given a cameo role.

Does it matter? Gayford’s entertainingly seamless insights make outsiders feel like insiders. But on reflection much of what we learn is oddly familiar, part of the folk memory of the London art world—legend, myth and magic in the image of artist.

The current show at Tate Britain, All Too Human, is a helpful counterpoint to Gayford’s book. It adjusts a white male story by including the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza and, by coming up to the present day, includes five women: Paula Rego, given a room to herself, Celia Paul, Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a tempering of the ubiquity of the male gaze.

The strength of this exhibition lies in its focus on artists who offer an intense engagement with the observed subject, and its first rooms are dominated by the School of London. It is a show, almost without exception, of oil painting.

Acrylic hardly features save in one work by Michael Andrews (who worked lyrically with the medium) and another by Paula Rego, otherwise represented by some remarkable large pastels that reinstate the 18th-century conversation piece, stripped of gentility.

Bacon occasionally used acrylic emulsion for backgrounds, but as he explained to Sylvester: “I don’t think that generally people really understand how mysterious, in a way, the actual manipulation of oil paint is. Because moving—even unconsciously moving—the brush one way rather than the other will completely alter the implications of the image.”

This is, therefore, an exhibition about the mystery of oil paint, whether applied with great refinement in early portraits by Freud, or treated with anxious caution by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow, or worked in churning impasto by Auerbach, the images surfacing battered, evanescent, just readable.

Although they worked with traditional materials, it is significant that none of these artists were Royal Academicians. In the first post-war decades, the Royal Academy was the home of exactly the kind of -figurative art from which Bacon, and Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff wished to distance themselves. From today’s perspective, though, the gulf between the Royal Academy and the RA refusniks appears narrower.

As Andrew Brighton points out in the All Too Human catalogue, both they and the RA traditionalists painted as if Cubism never happened. And does not early Freud have a good deal in common with the largely forgotten Academician Norman Blamey? Can’t we make a comparison with Michael Andrew’s multi-figure compositions and those by Leonard Rosoman? Why have a show about British figurative painting and leave out Carel Weight?

Both Gayford’s book and this exhibition should be celebrated in the context of a boom time for fresh research into post-war British painting, proving that dissecting British art need not be a parochial exercise. But perhaps the time for testimony is over, in favour of attending to what was not said, and making the connections that artists themselves chose not to make.

The member of one on Britain’s most vaunted literary epochs lived an eventful life among cultural giants

Janetta Parladé, the Marquesa de Apezteguia, figured in the biographies of many of the Bloomsbury set and their extended social circle and also played a role in the lives of people ranging from Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon to Cyril Connolly and Paddy Leigh Fermor.

She was born in 1921. Her father was the Rev Geoffrey Harold Woolley, the first British Territorial Army officer to be awarded the Victoria Cross (at Ypres) and later chaplain of Harrow.

Her mother was Janet Beatrix, widow of Captain George Culme-Seymour, killed in 1915. Parladé’s half-sister, the daughter by her first marriage, was Angela Culme-Seymour, who died in 2012 and whose famous multiple marriages and liaisons overlapped disastrously with her own. The Woolleys also had a son, Rollo.

The Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge and her husband Ralph first met Janetta “as a very attractive girl of 14, in Spain at the start of the civil war. Young enough to be our daughter, she became instead one of our closest friends”.

Much of the published information about Parladé comes from her diaries. They were introduced in April 1936 by Frances’s friend, Gerald Brenan, who was so taken with Angela Culme-Seymour that he was eager to meet her mother. Jan Woolley’s marriage to Geoffrey was on the rocks and Janetta was finding her father stifling. Anne Chisholm, Frances’s biographer, describes the young Janetta as “lovely-looking, with dark blonde hair and long legs”. The Partridges’ “life at Ham Spray,” Chisholm said in her 2009 book Frances Partridge, “expanded to include Jan, Rollo and Janetta. They liked Jan – it did not seem to trouble Frances that she became, briefly, Ralph’s lover – and were always kind to Rollo; but for both of them, there was something irresistible about Janetta”.

She more or less lived at Ham Spray at half-terms and holidays, and Frances discussed her schoolwork and her hope to go to art school. At new year in 1939, Frances was too ill to go with Ralph and Janetta on a skiing holiday in the French Alps; it was inevitable the sexually unrestrained Ralph would make a pass at Janetta, but she rebuffed him and he became a confidant to her, almost as sympathetic as Frances.

The same year she fell in love with Humphrey Slater, a communist who had studied at the Slade, fought in the Spanish Civil War and later wrote a spy novel, made into a film staring Elizabeth Taylor. The Partridges felt Slater wasn’t “good enough” for her, writes Chisholm, and had fierce political arguments with him. Janetta admitted she was terrified by the air raids, and stayed in London solely because of Slater. They married in 1940 and in July he joined the Osterley Park Home Guard training school, as a guerrilla warfare instructor, but was sacked in 1941 for being a communist, whereupon he enlisted as a private in an anti-aircraft unit.

By 1942 the marriage was foundering and the next year Janetta, who now thought of herself as an artist, left Slater – who died in 1958 – as she was pregnant by another Spanish Civil War veteran, married left-wing doctor, Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit (1913-2003).

In his 2009 autobiography, Very Little Luggage, Sinclair-Loutit wrote: “She had straight hair, little make-up and a very economical and accurate vocabulary. She was beautiful, and she had, in her quietness, an immense presence... From the moment we had met there had been nothing casual about our reaction to each other – it was an immensely specific conviction of our shared sympathy and necessity for each other. The only difference was that she was then alone, and I was not.”

On 11 January 1943 Janetta’s brother Rollo was reported missing in North Africa – he had been killed in his Spitfire in early December – and on 16 February, her mother died. Again though, the Partridges disapproved of Janetta’s lover. They looked after her, though Frances recorded in her diaries that she was a little unnerved by the idea of Janetta, the free spirit, becoming a baby-obsessed mother. Before Nicolette was born that summer, Janetta changed her name by deed-poll to Sinclair-Loutit, only later getting divorced from Slater.

Kenneth was uncomfortable with Janetta’s friend George Orwell; their other London friends included Connolly, Stephen Spender, Philip Toynbee and Arthur Koestler. In 1944, Sinclair-Loutit was offered a post in the Balkans, and though Janetta objected strongly, he left in late July. When he came back a year later to collect mother and daughter and take them to Yugoslavia, Janetta refused to go.

She had fallen in love with the stunningly handsome Robert Kee, war hero, protégé of historian AJP Taylor – and passionately pursued by Taylor’s wife, Margaret – and a man who became an eminent broadcaster, journalist and writer. They married in 1948 and had a daughter, Georgiana, though Frances detected marital instability early on. Great friends with Connolly – editor of literary magazine Horizon, where Janetta worked and seemingly conscious of his rivalry with Ralph Partridge for her attention – Kee and Janetta were present at the hospital bedside wedding of Orwell and Sonia Brownell, and upon one weekend at Ham Spray in 1949, another guest was Donald Maclean, one of the Cambridge spies.

The following year Janetta went to France, leaving Kee and the two small girls and telling Frances she longed to be free. At the time both Connolly and Derek Jackson, the hyper-intelligent, right-wing, exceedingly rich News of the World heir, first-rate scientist, amateur jockey and – according to his biographer – “rampant bisexual” were courting her. Frances, who had known Jackson when he was married to Poppet John and then Pamela Mitford, tried to discourage Janetta. But when Janetta and Robert divorced in 1952, she married Jackson, and began to frequent “smarter, richer circles, “ in Chisholm’s words. At David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club in Dean Street, Soho, they met both Freud and Francis Bacon. However in the summer of 1954, while Janetta was in hospital giving birth to their daughter Rose, Derek ran off with her femme fatale half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour. Some 27 years passed before the sisters were reconciled.

Derek’s alimony payments made Janetta relatively well-off and she and the three little girls were established in a house in London. Her romantic interest was Ralph Jarvis. In 1955 Janetta arranged for the Partridges, their son, Burgo and the girls and their nanny to take an old villa on the Atlantic coast of Spain, near Coruña. They were joined by the Brenans, and on 21 August by a friend of Burgo, 22-year-old Jonny Gathorne-Hardy, and by another mutual friend, Jonny’s cousin Ralph Jarvis’s daughter Caroline. The younger members of the party went off, along with 33-year old Janetta, to Portugal for a few days.

Ralph Partridge was cross at seeing the attraction between Jonny and Janetta, and Ralph Jarvis was tortured by it. Janetta wrote to Jonny in Cambridge at the end of the first term of 1956, inviting him to supper at 27 Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge, and they began an affair, though Gathorne-Hardy did not move in until a year after he left Cambridge. In August 1958 they decided to separate. He married first Sabrina Tennant, in 1963; and then, in 1985, Janetta’s eldest daughter, the artist Nicky Loutit.

Janetta urged the ailing Partridges to spend the coldest part of the winter of 1957 in Spain and while there, she met the charming Jaime Parladé, whose family owned property nearby. He was bisexual, but very taken with her. In November 1961, Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack, Robert Kee summoned Janetta back from Greece and Frances stayed with her for a fortnight, before going to France and realising Janetta was the person she most needed and depended upon. Janetta suggested selling Ham Spray and Montpelier Square and finding a country house to share, but Frances realised Janetta would need a man to live with, not an elderly friend. Early in December, Janetta took Frances to stay at Chatsworth with her new flame, Andrew Devonshire, who had bought many pictures from Freud. Before that, said Geordie Greig in his 2013 book Breakfast with Lucian, Freud “had a brief dalliance with the beautiful painter Janetta…. Then, 40 years after his fling with Janetta, Lucian bedded her daughter Rose”.

Janetta was spending more time in Spain, and in the late 1960s she and Jaime created their house, Torre de Tramores, around the ruins of a Moorish castle – later bought by Jimmy Goldsmith. She went to Russia on 1970, with Frances and their close friend Mougouche Phillips, the beautiful American widow of Arshile Gorky. On 19 March 1971, Frances wrote in her diary, Janetta rang and said, characteristically: “Jaime and I are going to do that marrying thing tomorrow.” They made another splendid house for themselves at Alcuzcuz, where Jaime carried on his decorating and antiques business and Janetta, having returned to painting, made a spectacular garden and showed herself to be an accomplished watercolourist. Following Jaime’s death in January 2015, her daughter Georgie Kee took over the antiques business.

Janetta Parladé, Marquesa de Apezteguia, née Janet E Woolley, literary socialite, born, 31 December 1921, died 9 June 2018

When an exhibition brings together two modern artists who didn’t work together, never thought of themselves as part of a common movement, forged their careers in different countries and met for the first time only a few years before one of them died, one usually has misgivings of false connections and strained comparisons. With ‘Bacon–Giacometti’ at the Fondation Beyeler, however, the worry is that the two artists will go together far too well.

There may not have been an existentialist movement in art but, since the early 1950s, critics have been yoking Bacon and Giacometti together as the two pre-eminent illustrators of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. In some respects, their reasoning is clear. Placing a premium on individual freedom, existentialism sought to position itself in opposition to the abstract, essentialising conceptions of human life and its worth that, Sartre contended, linked the European philosophical tradition to the horrors of the concentration camps. By eschewing the contemporary predilection for abstract art, turning instead to the human figure, Bacon and Giacometti were understood as having involved themselves in the same project. But existentialism has often been reduced to a hackneyed vocabulary of the void, a kind of proto-gothspeak that renders the freedom of the individual a kind of isolation, and even a punishment – ‘Man is condemned to be free’, in Sartre’s oft-quoted phrase. By association, the art of Bacon and Giacometti has come to seem for many like two kindred howls into the abyss; Sartre himself likened Giacometti’s etiolated sculptures to the survivors of Auschwitz, while the critic David Sylvester, who was so influential in popularising both artists in the UK, writes memorably about Bacon’s ‘screams’.

However, any fears of finding oneself trapped in an existentialist prison at the Beyeler are dispelled in the exhibition’s opening room. Screams and cages seem to dominate at first – from a wrought-iron enclosure hangs the plaster head of Giacometti’s The Nose (1947–49), its mouth open in a frozen scream that finds an echo across the room in Bacon’s Head VI (1949), one of his grotesque interpretations of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X. Yet it soon becomes apparent that the two artists are interested in not only constructing prisons, but breaking out of them too. The Pinocchio-like organ of Giacometti’s sculpture punctures the imaginary partition of air that is established between skull and viewer by the bars; meanwhile, the bars in Bacon’s painting are as evanescent as his pope’s head and vacillate between white and black, presence and absence. Both works are, at first glance, terrifying manifestations of the human figure – but look a little longer, and they also reveal their creators’ shared obsession with fixing and unfixing the appearance of the figure in the perspective of the viewer, establishing and dissolving equilibrium.

In the airy, daylit galleries of the Fondation Beyeler, it is this formal restiveness that comes to the fore. Certain well-chosen biographical coincidences help to tie the show together – not least the influence on both artists of the painter Isabel Rawsthorne, who introduced them in the early 1960s. An encounter with Rawsthorne in the late ’30s was an important spur for Giacometti; he saw her at ‘some distance away’ on the Boulevard Saint-Michel one night, and embarked over the proceeding years on a series of sculptures, radically reduced in scale so as to ‘give her the size she had at that distance’. Rawsthorne also appears in a great number of Bacon’s arresting portraits of the ’60s, where the features warp and the flesh of the subject retains all of the viscous, fluid qualities of the oil paint that constitutes it. this meeting of contrasts – Giacometti’s upright, stony figures; Bacon’s prone, fleshly blobs – what impresses is how each art

As you follow the progression of both artists’ depictions of Rawsthorne, it becomes clear that the value of an exhibition like this is not in the search for similarities, which would risk collapsing what makes each artist distinctive. Rather, the exhibition brings their differences into focus, and celebrates the sparks generated by the friction of the encounter. This point is made most powerfully in the central room, where the power of Giacometti’s giant Walking Man sculptures is heightened both by the sheer amount of space the Beyeler has given them and by the vast canvases by Bacon on the walls. Most impressive is the Three Studies of Figures on Beds triptych of 1972; here, Bacon’s earlier use of cages to structure the picture space has given way to ambiguous spirals, which establish the wildly distorted positions of the lying figures as though the viewer is looking through a magnifying glass. The bodies appear rigid in their contortions – and yet, the spirals are pronged with cartoon arrows, inscribing signs of movement into the composition. In this meeting of contrasts – Giacometti’s upright, stony figures; Bacon’s prone, fleshly blobs – what impresses is how each artist has, on his own terms, managed to create an object that both moves and is still.

The show concludes with a slideshow of snaps from the two artists’ studios. It almost seems a bit of a let down. They’re projected in a darkened room – on to the floor, images of the scraps that littered Bacon’s home, all those reproductions of paintings and photographs he snipped out of books and magazines; across two walls, a life-size cross-section of Giacometti’s Montparnasse quarters that emphasises how cramped they were. Having done so much to release the two artists from the straitjacket of perceptions about their personalities, it’s as though the curators have strapped them back in at the final moment. But if a joint statement emerges from this impressive display of paintings and sculptures, it’s that the work of neither artist can submit to these constraints for long.

There was something about Janetta Parladé that captivated people. She was just 14, long-legged and already beautiful, when she arrived in Spain with her mother at the house of the Hispanophile writer Gerald Brenan and she “set his heart on fire”.

That same year, 1936, Frances Partridge, the dedicated diarist at the heart of the Bloomsbury set, instantly identified in Janetta a kindred spirit: they became best friends for life. “She has the most beautiful female body I have ever seen,” Partridge wrote, not at all surprised that her husband, Ralph, was later smitten by her young friend. Stephen Spender too was struck by his first sight of her in a shepherdess frock.

Parladé was clearly destined to have a walk-on, and even a grande horizontale role in the memoirs and biographies of 20th-century literary circles. She was a muse to Cyril Connolly, a witness to the marriage of George Orwell and Sonia Brownell, a wife four times over — and she accumulated six surnames, despite her aversion to holy matrimony.

The Bloomsbury group tended to foster susceptibility to instant bewitchments and she achieved an impressive turnover of admirers, including Lucian Freud, who painted one of her daughters, and a long-enduring affair with the Duke of Devonshire.

After decades of dalliances and shortlived marriages she met a handsome and charming young Spaniard named Jaime Parladé, and eventually married him, although even then neither had any intention of forsaking all others. Jaime was the eldest son and heir to the Marquis of Apezteguia. Rich, cultivated, anglophile and bisexual, he had been brought up in Tangiers. The couple shared a series of charming houses starting with Parladé’s Torre de Tramores, built with money from her third husband Derek Jackson.

Janetta Elizabeth Woolley was born in London in 1921, the daughter of Geoffrey Woolley, VC, who had been decorated at Ypres in 1915, and his wife Janet (Jan) Orr-Ewing. Woolley was a friend of Jan’s first husband, Captain George Culme-Seymour, with whom she had a daughter, Angela, and a son, Mark, and who had been killed on the same battlefield. In the year of Janetta’s birth Woolley was ordained and became chaplain at Rugby School and later at Harrow School. The amoral ways of Bloomsbury were anathema to Woolley, so he would always be at loggerheads with his spirited and independent daughter, whom he excluded from his memoirs.

Janetta was sent to school at Frensham Heights, but not for long: her formal education was minimal. In 1936 her mother took her to Spain where they visited the Brenan house in Andalusia, which had been lent to Angela and Mark Culme-Seymour. When Jan and Janetta found themselves caught up in the Spanish Civil War the governor of Gibraltar, a relation, sent a British destroyer to rescue them from Malaga. Once home Jan and Janetta went to stay at Ham Spray, the Wiltshire farmhouse home of the Partridges, where Ralph became Janetta’s next conquest.

But Partridge had a rival: Connolly, who met Janetta when she was 17. He drove her to Cassis in France, where her mother stayed, and was almost arrested for abducting a minor until the British consul rescued him. In The Unquiet Grave Connolly refers to this drive: “The plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yellowing with crushed midges, she with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair . . .” In the summer of 1939 she worked with Connolly on the first issue of Horizon.

This was the year that she fell in love with the man who became her first husband, Humphrey Slater, known as Hugh, a graduate of the Slade School of Art and communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been chief of operations for the International Brigades.

In the early years of the war Janetta’s mother died and her younger brother, Rollo, an RAF pilot, was shot down. By then she had left Slater for Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, a young left-wing doctor who had led the first British medical unit to Spain in 1936. They met at a party for Spanish Civil War veterans and he instantly left his wife for her. They did not marry but she changed her name to Sinclair-Loutit and he became the father of her first daughter, Nicolette. Nicky Loutit, as she is now known, is a painter and writer.

The Sinclair-Loutits shared a house in Regents Park with Connolly, who occupied the middle floor, but by 1945 they were separated, as Evelyn Waugh reported in a letter to Lady Diana Cooper, referring to Mrs Loutit as “Mrs Bluefeet” (after she had opened the door to him in bare feet).

In June 1945 at Ham Spray Parladé was introduced to a young man just out of a PoW camp: the dark, handsome and intelligent Robert Kee. The Partridges decided that he was ideal for their friend Parladé — Ralph having now accepted that she would never be his. But even before Parladé married Kee in 1948, and their daughter, Georgiana, was born in 1949, the relationship was troubled: they parted in 1950, but remained friends. Georgie Kee still runs Decoraciones Tartana in Marbella, the antiques business that Jaime Parladé started in the mid-1950s.

By now Connolly was pressing her to marry him (even though he was concurrently pursuing his wife-twice-over Barbara Skelton) but so was Derek Jackson, the atomic scientist, airman, horseman, and pioneer of radar defence systems. Jackson had plenty of money and two ex-wives — Poppet, daughter of Augustus John, and Pamela, one of the Mitford sisters. In 1951, Parladé married Jackson. When she was seven months pregnant she suggested that her half-sister, Angela, accompany Jackson to the 1953 summer ball of the Travellers Club in Paris. Within hours of the birth of Rose — Parladé’s third daughter, and Jackson’s only child from his (eventually) six marriages — Jackson telephoned Parladé from Paris to announce that he was leaving her for her sister. He never did actually marry Angela (but he did marry Connolly’s wife Barbara). Rose Jackson, now an architect, recalls being kissed goodnight by her mother “through an aroma of Gitanes, whisky and Chanel No 5”.

If tales of impetuous serial liaisons and neglected children baffle the modern reader, they were nothing new in this family. Angela, Janetta and their brother Mark accumulated 12 spouses altogether. Their maternal grandmother, Beatrice Hore-Ruthven, set off in 1894 from London to Scotland with her two children and their nurse, but got off the train at Crewe and abandoned them to fly to her next husband. She and Lady Idina Sackville featured in the Happy Valley set in Kenya, and inspired the Bolter, a character in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Angela Culme-Seymour wrote a memoir, The Bolter’s Granddaughter (2001) and Frances Osborne, wife of George and granddaughter of Idina Sackville, wrote a biography, The Bolter (2008). In this class, bolting seems to have been a pastime.

Parladé’s conquests continued, among them the music-loving, land-owning banker Ralph Jarvis; the glamorous Hollywood screenwriter/ director Ivan Moffat; and the Duke of Devonshire. She also befriended the homosexual Julian Jebb, the maker of documentaries for the BBC about such subjects as Virginia Woolf and the Mitfords. Jebb said he felt as near being “in love” as he had with any woman. Parladé, a good listener, was befriended by other young men such as Stanley Olson, the American writer, who was obsessed with Bloomsbury and, like Jebb, died suddenly when young. Throughout her life Parladé kept up her often secretive intimacies, never giving away names, especially when the truth was quite scandalous.

From 1987, the Parladés (now married) lived at his family’s Cortijo Alcuzcuz, in the foothills of Ronda, Andalusia, where they created a home of comfort and harmony, arranged around a courtyard with a fountain. Its shady terraces, hidden pool overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, scented walks and country-house drawing-rooms were much featured and photographed. The Parladé style — Jaime designed the Marbella Club and the hotels Guadalmina and La Fonda, where Parladé was chef and the Rolling Stones came to stay — had set the template for the Costa del Sol in its heyday, when it was a magnet for silver-haired celebrities and titled Europeans.

Alcuzcuz was loved by countless visitors and became a hospitable refuge for friends until 2015 when Jaime died. The widowed Frances Partridge had even considered moving in there with the Parladés. They continued to travel widely together and Parladé gave parties for Frances’s 90th birthday and also for her 100th.

For more than 20 years Parladé did not speak to her half-sister Angela after Jackson’s defection. But Angela’s son Johnny Culme-Seymour was one of those who enjoyed her sharp, humorous company in later life. Her young friends were treated to her excellent cooking (she was the first in the Sunday Times magazine’s Private Cooks series) and she was a confidante with whom they could discuss anything. Almost wholly self-educated, but sharply intelligent and succinct, she began at the age of 90 to read Roman history and the classics and liked to discuss these.

With the writer Caroline Moorehead she would go out to lunch or — obsessively — to films. After seeing God’s Own Country recently, Caroline wondered how Parladé had reacted to the explicit gay sex. She said she hadn’t minded a bit: “Bloomsbury knew all about buggers.”

Janetta Parladé, literary socialite, was born December 31, 1921. She died June 9, 2018, aged 96

Janetta Parladé, who has died aged 96, was a captivating personality in the literary and intellectual circles of her day, spending some of her earlier years in the company of Gerald Brenan, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell.

She also formed emotional relationships with a number of men, and married four of them. A lifelong friend of Frances Partridge, Janetta often stayed at Ham Spray, the house in Wiltshire associated with the Bloomsbury group. In her forties, having met and married her fourth husband, the interior designer Jaime Parladé, she remained with him in southern Spain until he died in 2015.

Born on New Year’s Eve 1921, Janetta was the daughter of the Reverend Geoffrey Woolley, an assistant master at Rugby School who went on to be chaplain at Harrow. During the First World War he had been awarded the Victoria Cross – the first territorial to be given the honour – for his action in the battle for Hill 60, near Ypres, in April 1915. After Woolley’s adjutant and friend, Captain George Culme-Seymour, was killed in the same battle, he took up with Culme-Seymour’s widow and married her at the end of the war.

While Janetta was still at school she turned against religion, thinking of her father as “bogus”; and when in 1963 Woolley came to write his memoirs, Sometimes a Soldier, he hardly mentioned his daughter, and not once by name.

Janetta’s mother removed her from school aged 14, left her husband and took her daughter to Spain, to a rented house in Torremolinos, which was then no more than a fishing village. They were neighbours of the author and Hispanophile Gerald Brenan and there met Ralph and Frances Partridge. Brenan would introduce Janetta as a little girl “who makes everyone’s heart beat faster” and “has set my heart on fire”.

Her early introduction to bohemian Bloomsbury life was cut short a few months later on the outbreak of civil war in Spain. Back in England, Janetta met Cyril Connolly, who offered her a lift in his car to the south of France, where her mother had taken a house.

During the drive Connolly was arrested by a suspicious policeman for abducting a minor, and a call had to be made to the British consul in Bordeaux before he was allowed to continue his journey. Wearing corduroy trousers and a French soldier’s cape, and carrying her belongings in a red-spotted handkerchief, the gamine Janetta must have looked even younger than her 17 years.

A few years later, in The Unquiet Grave, Connolly fantasised that he had been in love with Janetta’s “sad, grave, gem-like beauty … which I grasped and was not brave enough to hold”. He told his wife that she suited his “second adolescence”. George Weidenfeld described Janetta in his memoirs as “a wayward beauty who had been the Egeria to many remarkable men, some of whom she wed”. Her first husband was Humphrey Slater, a writer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Having spent time in the Soviet Union and in Berlin, Slater had gone to Spain as correspondent for a communist weekly, then became a political commissar in the International Brigades and took over command of a British anti-tank battery at the Battle of Brunete.

To the now politically conscious Janetta he must have presented a romantic, even heroic figure when they met shortly after the war ended; they were married before her 20th birthday. In his book Home Guard for Victory!, Slater propounded the view that this citizen militia should develop into a quasi-revolutionary People’s Army. The idea appealed to George Orwell, who reviewed the book and later wrote four essays for Polemic, the magazine which Slater founded and edited in the 1940s.

During their brief marriage Janetta continued to move in Left-wing former Spanish Civil War circles – Arthur Koestler was a friend – and she worked at Horizon, the literary magazine founded by Connolly and Stephen Spender. There she acquired the nickname of Miss Bluefeet because of her habit of walking barefooted around the office.

Sonia Brownell was editorial secretary at Horizon; when she and Orwell were married in University College Hospital in 1949, three months before he died, Janetta and David Astor were the witnesses.

Her marriage to Slater had ended in 1942, when she met another Spanish Civil War veteran, Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, who led the first British medical unit to Spain in 1936. He wrote that their meeting was for him “an immensely specific conviction of our shared sympathy and necessity for each other”. Together they had a daughter, Nicolette, but did not marry. (Evelyn Waugh described Janetta as “a dead-end kid [with] a baby by a communist doctor”.)

In 1944 Sinclair-Loutit was sent to Cairo en route for Belgrade, and by the time he returned to England a year later Janetta had fallen in love with the journalist Robert Kee, who had been a Bomber Command pilot and spent three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. They married in 1948, and a daughter, Georgiana, was born; but within two years Janetta was off again, this time with Professor Derek Jackson, an atomic physicist and friend of Oswald Mosley.

For Janetta this was also a political leap – when she married her communist first husband Jackson was a fascist sympathiser and married to Pamela Mitford. With her new lover Janetta spent time in Paris and, once their respective divorces had been finalised, they were married in London.

Frances Partridge had often lent a sympathetic ear to Janetta’s marital upheavals, and was bemused by this new relationship. However, the Right-wing scientist enjoyed the company of Janetta’s bohemian intellectual circle. Often boasting of his bisexuality, Jackson told Janetta that the last person he had been to bed with before her was Francis Bacon.

They rented houses in Ireland for a while, then moved to France when Jackson was invited to work in a spectroscopic laboratory outside Paris. Janetta became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Rose, in a London clinic. Within hours Jackson told her that he was leaving her for her half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour.

Angela was relentlessly promiscuous and, like her younger sister, would marry four times. Jackson was on his third marriage when he met Angela, and he would marry three more times during his colourful career.

Janetta was so shocked and angry that she filed a petition for restitution of conjugal rights, though she decided not to proceed with it. In spite of Jackson’s protestations, she divorced him in 1955, citing “a relative”, according to the Evening Standard. It would be 27 years before Janetta spoke to Angela again.

For the next few years Janetta’s life entered a more turbulent phase. She had three daughters to bring up, Robert Kee was trying to get back into her life, and, as Frances Partridge recorded in her diary, there were “frantic lovers sobbing down the telephone” at her house in Montpelier Square, London. The lovers included the Duke of Devonshire and Lucian Freud; she also had an extended affair with a man 11 years her junior who, two decades later, became her son-in-law.

Janetta returned to Spain in the mid-1960s, met and married Jaime Parladé, and with him ran a hotel, La Fonda, in Marbella. Jackson, with whom she was now on good terms again, bought a plot of land for her in the Andalusian foothills behind the coast, where she built a house, Tramores, with Parladé. With his flair for design and decoration it was, in Frances Partridge’s words, “a masterpiece … as if I had been confronted with a work of art”.

When they sold Tramores to Sir James Goldsmith, the Parladés moved to another ravishing property, known as Alcuzcuz, south of Ronda. Settled at last in middle age, Janetta spent more than half her life with Parladé in Spain.

JEROME BOYD MAUNSELL | IN BRIEF | THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT | FRIDAY, JUNE 22, 2018

Group portraiture, in writing as in painting and photography, is often a highly artificial exercise. Intensely relational, drawing out lines of connection and divergence, it throws its subjects into sharper relief than they appear on their own. Three artists are at the core of Martin Gayford’s book: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Around them swirl a host of other “London Painters” in a panoramic narrative, which moves from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s. Rather than any “School of London” (as R. B. Kitaj proposed there was in 1976), Gayford depicts the London painting scene generally over a quarter of a century, taking in Gillian Ayres, David Bomberg, Frank Bowling, William Coldstream, Howard Hodgkin and Bridget Riley, as well as many others. His text is brilliantly structured and admirably even-handed, alternating between individuals, pairs, trios and larger groups, movements, art schools, galleries and other spaces where painters congregated in overlapping circles, at the Colony Room Club, the Beaux Arts Gallery or the ICA, at Camberwell, Borough Polytechnic or the Slade.

Gayford clearly doesn’t want Bacon and Freud to govern his narrative, which holds off from dealing with Hockney until its later chapters. But they do dominate what still threatens at times to be a slightly overcrowded text; Gayford is most acute on their respective processes of portraiture. Where Freud liked working in the presence of the sitter, found invention hard, and eventually came only to portray, extremely slowly, what was in front of him while the sitter was actually there, Bacon worked alone, from photographs of people he knew well, aiming to “draw one more veil away from life”, frequently using distortions. The book’s larger theme — of a peculiarly London-centric artistic singularity, tradition and persistence coexisting with experimentation (above all in the perennially declared-to-be-obsolete form of painting) — is brought out by Hockney, who belongs, like Freud and Bacon, in Frank Auerbach’s view, to a line of British mavericks: “people who did exactly what they wanted to do”, irrespective of the Zeitgeist.

Gayford has mastered his own dance between figuration and abstraction in the relatively elliptical use of biography in this magisterial group portrait. Marshalling a vast cast of characters, he gives each painter just enough space to stand alone, showing how they did (or didn’t) fit in the post-war London scene. “Life and art, in Hockney’s view, are not easily separated”, he writes, and he does not try to separate them here. But, in a way that works extremely well for group biography, he is sparing with details, giving us selected anecdotes — even with Freud, who claimed his work was “purely autobiographical”. Baconhad an aversion to explaining the meanings of his paintings: “the moment the story is elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint”. This also applies, in a different way, to biography. With a nice resistance to pressing labels on his subjects or revealing too much about their lives, Gayford portrays them as individuals while the art of painting always takes centre stage.

Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews at Wheeler’s in Soho in March 1963

The works of two giants of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, are being exhibited together in a landmark exhibition at Fondation Beyeler. The outstanding creators’ works will be compared and contrasted at the Basel museum until September 3, 2018.

In this first-ever joint exhibition where the creative vision and powerful influence the two artists exerted are explored, illuminating the relationship between the two artistic personalities

Bacon and Giacometti did not meet until the early 1960s when they were introduced by British painter Isabel Rawsthorne. By 1965, their friendship had grown close enough for Bacon to visit Giacometti at the Tate Gallery in London, where he was setting up a retrospective. “Bacon — Giacometti” bring out both the similarities and differences that ran through the works of this artists. It presents around 100 thematically arranged works, spread across nine rooms

The exhibition juxtaposed the similarities in the works of Bacon and Giacometti as direct comparisons. Themes in the exhibition include the artists’ obsession with depicting the human head; the representation of movement in painting and sculpture; love and violence; and the use of cage-like structures to create space and perspective.

“Bacon and Giacometti were united by an unwavering belief in the importance of the human figure. They were intensely concerned with the role of tradition and the Old Masters, whom they studied, copied and paraphrased. Both of them engaged with the problem of the two and three-dimensional representation of space, integrating cage-like structures into their works as a means of isolating figures in their surroundings. Both occupied themselves with the fragmented and deformed body and shared an obsession with portraiture and the depiction of human individuality. Both claimed to be ‘realists,’ taking the human figure as their main point of reference, yet exploring — each in his own way — new extremes of abstraction, and thereby challenging the antithesis of figuration and abstraction that played such a central part in the history of Modern Art,” writes Fondation Beyeler

The exhibition brings together a selection of well-known works as well as rarely shown ones by both artists. A series of original plaster figures from Giacometti’s estate that have never been publicly displayed before and four triptychs by Bacon are special highlights.

The exhibition will be on view through September 2, 2018, at Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Basel, Switzerland.

BY REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR | ART & CULTURE | GALERIE MAGAZINE | THURSDAY JUNE 14 2018

The human body, in all its deformation and fragmentation, was an ongoing obsession for artists Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the former through sculpture, the latter in painting. Both were concerned with philosophical inquiry into the complex human psyche.

The varying handling of the subject by the two titans of 20th-Century art is on view side-by-side in “Bacon-Giacometti,” a fascinating comparative exhibition that recently opened at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, causing a stir among a hard-to-ruffle crowd during the opening this week of Art Basel

Curated by the director of the Giacometti Foundation Catherine Grenier, Francis Bacon specialist Michael Peppiatt, and German art historian Ulf Küster, the show comprises around 100 paintings and sculptures loaned from major museums and private collections in Europe and the United States as well as the foundation’s own collection, which holds important pieces by the artists. (Its founder, Ernst Beyeler, knew both artists personally.)

“We wanted to create an exhibition that brings both their work together because we find that there is not only a deep connect in their work but also their personalities—and not just because they knew each other,” the director of Fondation Beyeler Sam Keller told Galerie. “These kinds of exhibitions help you to discover through the work of one aspects in the work of the other that you wouldn’t otherwise see.”

The show kicks off with a selection of photographs and memorabilia from the life of both artists—photographs of Bacon and his lover George Dyer and Giacometti with painter Isabel Rawsthorne who was Giacometti’s lover and a model for both artists during different periods, and through whom the two artists are said to have met in the early 1960s.

Unexpected similarities between the work of the two artists are then laid out thematically in the exhibition. The artists both had an obsession with the portrayal of the human head, a reverence for restless movement in painting and sculpture, and a consistent depiction of themes of love, loss and violence—Giacometti in melancholic gray tones, Bacon’s in vibrant slashes of color.

“There are formalistic and intellectual connections, but most of all, it is amazing how the works resonate when you see them together—this obsession and torture,” said Keller. “I now see things in Giacometti that I didn’t see before.”

While Giacometti and Bacon both claimed to be “realists” during their lifetimes, there is an evident continuous exploration of abstraction. Their almost rhythmic manipulation of the human body revealed as much the emotional state of the sitter as it did new ways of viewing reality.

Giacometti’s large and prominent Le Nez (1947-49), a sculpture of a head with an elongated nose, greets the viewer in the next space, positioned on its own with Bacon’s Head VI (1949). The Pinocchio-like nose extends out to Bacon’s screaming painted head, giving the viewer a taste of the electrifying and evocative horror that is to come in the next rooms.

In a room titled The Cage, we find a sombre mix of works detailing both artists’ desire to better understand space and perspective. Here, many of Giacometti’s sculptures appear so emaciated that they threaten to vanish before our eyes. When placed with Bacon’s heavy, nearly black paintings, they are all but lost.

A series of films in an adjacent room detail the creative process of both artists.

“I work much better in chaos[…] chaos for me breeds images,” says Bacon in an interview. “What people call inspiration comes from regular work.”

When asked what he thinks about public’s disapproval of his work, the artist responds proudly: “Well, I’m very pleased to know they don’t like them because if they don’t like them then it means they (his paintings) are really doing something.”

The section Portraits Sans Fin (Portraits Without End) opens with Bacon’s Study for Portrait III (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1995) and Giacometti’s Grand tête mince (1954) and then proceeds to a series of portraits as well as triptychs by Bacon capturing the fragmented heads of several sitters in motion, including that of his lover George Dyer.

The largest room features a selection of monumental works by both artists. Giacometti’s figures towering over viewers in refined and stylized motion while Bacon’s large triptychs of fleshy figures twist and turn feverishly.

The show concludes with the section Ordre-Désordre, a smaller room of works positioning Giacometti’s female busts with their hungry gaze, and Bacon’s ever more abstract renderings of the human form. The finale is a human figure sprawled out on a bed—limbs twisted and distorted.

This electrifying pairing of Bacon and Giacometti raises questions on the nature of existence and the state of the tormented twentieth-century individual. Both artists grappled with life’s existence against the challenges of the Post-War period through unsettling creations that breathe a violent yet fragile beauty, prompting our continuous gaze.

By juxtaposing two of the biggest names in postwar art, this show risks covering familiar

JACKIE WULLSCHLÄGER | ART BASEL | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | WEDNESDAY 13 JUNE 2018

How to astonish the world’s most sophisticated art audience? Bacon-Giacometti, the Fondation Beyeler’s show during this year’s Art Basel fair, risks the familiar and transforms it into the sublime. Europe’s greatest postwar painter and greatest postwar sculptor have each been massively exposed lately; their dialogue with each other, and with this iconic gallery’s towering day-lit spaces, jolts us into a fresh experience of all three.

Bacon’s brutal swagger portrait “Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho”, a ferocious black-robed harridan before flashy motorists and spinning tyres, glares at Giacometti’s “Femme au Chariot”, a sculpture on wheels also based on a view of Isabel from afar: a moment of perfect visual affinity backed by biographical context — Isabel was both men’s lover (and Bacon’s only female partner).

A series of portraits in paint, pencil, bronze and terracotta spanning 1936-67 unravels how her strong features, prominent chin and high cheekbones offered the resistance which allowed each artist to savage her into an image at once monstrous and full of pathos.

Pity, horror, awe and supreme formal virtuosity: Bacon and Giacometti both had false start careers before World War II and emerged after it with a conviction, against the tide of abstraction, that only an art of Old Master gravitas, obsessively concerned with distortions and fragments of the human form, could uphold figuration after the Holocaust. Bacon’s sinister “Marching Figures”, an army of white silhouettes within a ghostly outline of a cage topped by a ghastly dictator’s bust, shimmer here against Giacometti’s huddle of massed figures, “La Forêt”. The desperate woman on a swing in Bacon’s “Study for the Nurse in the Film Battleship Potemkin” veers towards Giacometti’s filigree suspended figure, stretched out to suggest a crucifixion, in the delicate plaster frame “La Cage”.

The similarities, and the shared existentialist milieu, of these two deeply pessimistic artists are pronounced, but so are compelling contrasts, the drama of what makes each unique. In a gallery entitled “La Vérité Crainte”, two Bacon screaming popes imprisoned on their thrones, the privately owned “Study after Velázquez” and MoMA’s theatrical gold-encased “Study for Portrait VII”, face Giacometti’s hieratic, still, seated figures: the fragile, plaster “Homme à mi-corps” and the bronze “Eli Lotar III (assis)”, both with arms and huge hands so elongated that they seem to imprison their owners’ bodies. Hysterical versus mute anguish; voluptuous, violent colour versus bleached out, deathly pallor: difference within likeness of such high wire expressiveness makes each more affecting.

For from the initial salvo, Bacon’s early yelling “Head VI” and Giacometti’s “Le Nez” — a skull hung from a crossbar like a gallows, with extravagantly protruding nose suggesting a gun — both 1949, it is clear that Bacon brings out the subliminal menace in Giacometti, while Giacometti makes us aware of the monumental, sculptural ambition of Bacon’s painting from the start. “This is the man who has influenced me more than anyone”, Bacon said of the sculptor.

Although Giacometti drew then sculpted from life whereas Bacon, fearing preliminary drawing would detract from the spontaneity of the first fluid, loaded brush marks, fused mostly photographic sources, films here show close parallels in their ways of working: obsessive stalking of the motif, filthy chaotic hovels as studios, places which shape a sense projected by each of dark, claustrophobic interiors.

This aspect is flamboyantly offset by the lavish, light-filled Beyeler, its glassy façades giving on to broad vistas of cornfields, vineyards, ancient trees. The incongruity is sharp: the apogee of art world wealth and grace — Beyeler, a successful, influential, sympathetic dealer, was founder of Art Basel — versus the tough grit of the lone artist in his atelier confronting his demons. But then, Renzo Piano’s Fondation is among the brightest, most optimistic 20th-century galleries anywhere — “I have always perceived works of art as parables of creation, as an expression of joie de vivre,” Beyeler declared at the opening — and the demons, if aestheticised, roam thrillingly here as things of unlikely beauty and eloquence.

Go for the central gallery alone, amply accommodating three triptychs, five further huge Bacon canvases, and arenas of nearly a dozen large Giacometti figures. Crowds circle among the stately, enigmatic, upthrusting “Femmes de Venise”, take selfies, imitating the poses of various versions of “L’Homme qui marche”, and stand dwarfed by the10-foot “Grande Femme IV”.

The performative element in turn energises Bacon’s key paintings of movement gathered here, from the Beyeler’s own unruly, white on maroon, almost affectionate “Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle” — Bacon’s clumsy, vulnerable lover peering out suspiciously beneath a helmet — to the staging of birth, copulation and death as butchery and voyeurism in the Hirshhorn’s lime/midnight blue “Triptych” inspired by TS Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes”. Not since Tate and MoMA’s Matisse Picasso in 2002 has a pairing of modernist giants felt so apt and pleasurable.

From April 29, 2018 the Fondation Beyeler will be presenting two extraordinary protagonists of modern art. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992) were friends and rivals whose creative visions shaped art from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day.

This is the first time that a museum exhibition is being devoted to shedding light on these two artists and their relationship to each other. Although their respective artistic oeuvres differ greatly at first glance and appear autonomous, the exhibition reveals commonalities and amazing parallels between them. Presented together, their lives and creative personalities will be seen a new light.

While the individualists Giacometti and Bacon perceived each other like signal emitting lighthouses, the curators Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, Bacon expert and a personal friend of the artist, as well as Ulf Küster, curator at the Fondation Beyeler, make astonishing parallels visible in this exhibition encompassing circa 100 works.

Bacon and Giacometti shared an unshakable belief in the importance of the human figure and the role played by the old masters they both studied, copied and paraphrased. Both were interested in the problem of the two-dimensional and threedimensional representation of space, integrating cage-like entities into their works as a means of isolating figures in their surroundings. Both occupied themselves with the fragmented and deformed body and also shared an obsession with portraiture in addition to the associated depiction of human individuality. Both characterized themselves as ‘realists’. And although the human figure always served as a benchmark in their work, they each raised its level of abstraction to an extreme in his own way. By doing so, they called the antithesis of figuration and abstraction into question that was of such central importance for the history of modern art.

It has been possible to obtain loans of works by Francis Bacon from major private collections and renowned museums from around the world, including the Art Institute in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The Giacometti loans come almost entirely from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris. They include numerous original plaster sculptures from the artist’s estate that have never before been shown in public.

Bacon – Giacometti April 29 / September 2, 2018 FONDATION BEYELER Baselstrasse 101 CH-4125 Riehen/Basel

It is one of the art world’s great unsolved mysteries – the daring theft of Lucian Freud’s portrait of fellow artist Francis Bacon.

The masterpiece, Portrait Of Francis Bacon, disappeared without trace after it was removed from its wire frame and spirited out of Berlin’s National Gallery 30 years ago.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Bacon received a ransom demand a year later in 1989 and was apparently poised to recover the work – only for the operation to be wrecked by a police blunder.

Barry Joule, Bacon’s close friend and neighbour in London’s South Kensington, has now revealed that the artist received a phone call in his studio from 'a tough-sounding East End man, probably an associate of the Krays’. Joule recalls: '[The gangster] told him, 'If you want to get yer face picture back, get £100K together and wait by the phone for a call at noon exactly.' '

Francis called Joule who drove his black Porsche to pick up Bacon from his studio and take him to his flat. Even though he didn’t own the painting, Bacon then panicked and stuffed £140,000 into a satchel, reappearing 'sweating and nervous'. Instead he alerted the head of security at the Tate gallery, which had bought the picture in 1952 from Freud and had loaned it to the German museum in 1988 when it was stolen.

Then they went back to the studio to await the noon call, but it never came. Leaving the studio several hours later the two men spotted 'three undercover policemen' in a Ford Fiesta. Joule said they all had their 'heads buried in newspapers'. Convinced the gangsters must also have spotted them, Bacon shouted angrily at the officers.

For weeks afterwards, Bacon 'remained paranoid that the Krays and associates would be 'out to get me for grassing to the police',' said Joule, who added: 'If it wasn’t for policemen sitting in their car right outside the building, Francis might have got the stolen painting back.' In a recorded interview with Joule three months after the ransom blunder, Bacon spoke of 'how much the police have gone down in my estimation'.

The 7in x 5in oil on copper was one of the few Freud paintings Bacon really liked, so much so he kept a photograph of it in his kitchen. Freud later plastered Berlin with 'Wanted' posters of the image, offering a £100,000 reward for its recovery so he could include it in a retrospective of his work.

Although the Tate has never claimed the insurance money, because it has hoped to be reunited with the painting, Bacon, who died in 1992, was more pessimistic. 'Most likely it was burnt,' he says on the recording.

The Tate continues to list the painting in its catalogue, simply noting 'not on display'. In 2004, Joule gave the Tate 1,200 Bacon sketches. They were then valued at about £20million. He kept about 120 sketches, and he is lending some to an exhibition in Italy, at the Foundation Sorrento museum, in Sorrento, which opens today and runs until October 21.

JENNY UGLOW | NYR DAILY | THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS | SATURDAY 19 MAY 2018

The gripping and dramatic show “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” merits its title: it is “all too human” in the tender, painful works that form its core. But “a century of painting life” promises something wider—does it smack of marketing, a lure to bring people in? In fact, the heart of the show is narrower and more interesting, illustrating the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, and Paula Rego redefined realism. In defiance of the dominant abstract trend, they teased and stretched the practice and impact of representational art. “What I want to do,” Francis Bacon said in 1966, “is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” In this show, terms like “realism” and “human” take on new meaning and power.

The exhibition begins, cleverly, with some forebears of these London artists, pre-war painters who looked with intensity at the lives, settings, and landscapes that most affected them, and used paint in a highly personal way to convey not only what they saw, but what they felt. It feels odd, at first, to walk into a show that claims to be about “life” and find a landscape rather than a life-study, yet the urgent, textured use of paint in Chaïm Soutine’s earthy landscapes, as well as his distorted figures and the raw strength of The Butcher Stall (circa 1919), with its hanging carcasses, had a profound impact on Francis Bacon. In a similar way, all the works in this first room reach toward the future: Stanley Spencer’s portraits of his second wife, Patricia Preece, clothed and naked, stare out with the unpitying confidence of Lucian Freud’s early portraits. Sickert’s dark portrayals of London prostitutes—his attempt to give “the sensation of a page torn from the book of life”—anticipate the unsentimental nudes of Freud and Euan Uglow (no relation to me). David Bomberg’s layered, arid Spanish landscapes point toward the scumbled, perspectiveless scenes of Kossoff and Auerbach.

Nothing, however, prepares one for the tender ferocity of Bacon’s isolated, entrapped figures. In the earliest of these, the large canvas of Figure in a Landscape (1945), a curled-up, almost human form appears to be submerged in a desert—we see his arm and part of his body, but the legs of his suit hang, empty, over a bench. This is masculinity destroyed. The sense of desperation is even stronger in Bacon’s paintings of animals, such as Dog (1952), in which the dog whirls like a dervish, absorbed in chasing its tail, while cars speed by on a palm-bordered freeway, or Study of a Baboon (1953), where the monkey flies and howls against the mesh of a fence. In their struggles, these animals are the fellows of Bacon’s “screaming popes”: in Study after Velazquez (1950), a businessman in a dark suit, jaws wrenched open in a silent yell, is trapped behind red bars that fall like a curtain of blood. The curators connect Bacon’s postwar angst with Giacometti’s elongated statues, isolated in space, and to the philosophy of existentialism. Yet Bacon’s vehement brushstrokes speak of energy and involvement, physical, not cerebral responses. In Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955), you feel the urgent vision behind the lidded eyes. He cares, passionately.

This was a postcolonial as well as a postwar world, a point made abruptly by devoting a room to the work of F.N. Souza, who came to London from Bombay in 1949, and worked here until he left for New York in 1967. Despite Souza’s popularity at the time, and the range of sacred and profane references that link him uneasily to Bacon, his stark religious iconography feels out of keeping with the bodily compulsion of Bacon’s work and the new streams of influence shaping what R.B. Kitaj named “the School of London.”

One of these streams flowed from the Slade, where William Coldstream was professor of Fine Art and the young Lucian Freud was a visiting tutor. Here, in a very different way to Bacon, you feel the pressure of flesh. Coldstream believed that artists should work without preconceptions, through minute, painstaking observation, fixing “reality” with measurement, allowing the subject to emerge slowly on the canvas. His Seated Nude (1952–1953) was painted over at least thirty sittings of about two hours each—no wonder the model looks glazed. His pupil Euan Uglow adopted this technique, setting his figures against a geometric grid. It gives them an eerie physicality. (I’m not the only person to stand in front of his 1953–1954 Woman with White Skirt and say, “Paula Rego.”) Uglow is famous for telling a model, “Nobody has ever looked at you as intensely as I have.” Over time, his control of detail and setting became obsessive, but his piercing gaze and careful technique remained, rendering his subjects at once solid and dreamlike, their inner spirit elusive but embodied.

In the 1950s, Uglow’s belief in the value of minute observation was shared by Freud, who admitted, as Emma Chambers writes in the exhibition catalogue, to a “visual aggression” toward his sitters: “I would sit very close and stare. It could be uncomfortable for both of us.” His paintings from this period, delicately wrought with a fine sable brush, are almost hallucinatory in their detail, with a Pre-Raphaelite veracity of sheen and texture. We see the softness of material, the fur of the dog. And how exposed and alarmed his first wife, Kitty Garman, looks in the extraordinary Girl with a White Dog (1950–1951), in her pale green dressing gown with one white, veined breast revealed.

At the same time as Coldstream was instilling in his students the virtues of precision and measurement, David Bomberg was inspiring his pupils at the Borough Polytechnic in South London from 1946 to 1953 with a far freer, more tactile approach. To Bomberg, painting was about the “feeling” and experience of form, not its mere appearance. His own work conveyed the sense of mass in fluid, sensuous oils, and young artists such as Frank Auerbach, Dennis Creffield, Leon Kossoff, and Dorothy Mead flocked to his classes. Often working outdoors, as Bomberg did, Auerbach and Kossoff painted the settings they knew, showing a new London rising from the old, driving across the canvas in slabs of paint and thick encrustations. Auerbach’s Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962) and Kossoff’s Building Site, Victoria Street (1961) are so tactile that they make you want to trace the lines with your hand, while the sticky ridges of Auerbach’s Head of E.O.W. I (1959–1960)—so strong from a distance, so baffling up close—seem as much sculpture as painting.

Again and again in this exhibition, we move from the exchange of ideas and influences to the individual vision. Some works, indeed, are so drenched in emotion that they produce ripples of shock. The intimacy of Freud’s work is intensified when he moves, around 1960, from minute, close-up fidelity to large, expressive brushstrokes. In his later paintings, he catches the twist of muscles, the sweat on the skin, the pride and fullness of bodies in sleep, as in the great Leigh Bowery (1991), showing Bowery, a performance artist with a body of billowy corpulence, with his head slumped gently on his shoulder, or in Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996), where Sue Tilley—“Big Sue,” Bowery’s cashier at his Taboo night club and a benefits supervisor at the Charing Cross JobCentre—dozes safely before a predatory image.

By the 1960s, when Freud was subjecting his models to hours and days of sitting, Bacon was standing back, using photographs rather than live models. One room here shows a selection of portraits he commissioned from the photographer John Deakin. These are direct, intimate, and suggestive, but when Bacon explores the human form, the effect is very different. Bodies and heads become twisted, swollen, contorted. In his Study for a Portrait of P.L. (1962), painted in the year of Lacy’s death, after ten years of their turbulent, sometimes violent relationship, the internal and sexual organs seem to bulge through their covering. Two years later, his Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud emphasized the strong torso, the fierce expression, the unnerving clarity of Freud’s gaze. These are psychological as much as physical studies. In the moving Triptych (1974–1977), an unusual outdoor, light-filled work, the body beneath the umbrella writhes on the deserted beach, as Bacon mourns the death of his lover, George Dyer. But beyond them, the clear sky suggests a slow, painful coming to terms with loss—the promise of new life , or at least oblivion, in the deep blue of the sea beyond?

Bacon’s solitary figures are, paradoxically, imbued with a feeling of relationship. The same is true of Freud’s portraits, of his wife, his mother, his daughter, his friends. The intimacy of the family is also part of what it means to be “all too human.” Michael Andrews, for example, intrigued by Bacon’s use of photography, worked from a color photograph of a holiday in Scotland for his darkly beautiful Melanie and Me Swimming(1978–1979), spray-painted in acrylic. This feels like a moment swimming out of time into memory. And sometimes the sociability of London’s artistic life is itself commemorated. In Colony Room I (1962), Andrews painted the Colony Club, where Bacon, Freud, and Deakin drank with Soho’s artists and writers. “Life,” in the sense of a community, also fills R.B. Kitaj’s brilliant group scenes, such as Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees) (1983–1984). His crowded, colorful The Wedding (1989–1993) celebrates not only his marriage to Sandra Fisher but his friendships—with Auerbach, Freud, Kossoff, and David Hockney, among others.

Hockney’s work is inexplicably absent here, and so, up to this point in the show, are works by women, apart from a blurry, atmospheric nude by Dorothy Mead. But suddenly, you turn a corner, and there is Paula Rego. The streams of the London School flow together. Rego came from Portugal when she was sixteen to finish her education, and from 1952 to 1956 she studied at the Slade under Coldstream, alongside Andrews, Uglow, and her future husband, Victor Willing. As Victor slowly declined from multiple sclerosis, her painting became increasingly personal. The Family (1988), painted in the last months of his life, shows two women helping him take off his jacket—yet there is a strange undertone here: they seem to be shuffling him into the grave. The feeling is curiously sinister, perhaps reflecting Rego’s awareness that women—always the carers—are often so intimate with death. The little shrine in the background may show George slaying the dragon, but above him stands St. Joan, the martyred, martial saint.

Rego has often used stories to uncover the depths of our humanity, exposing the shattered dreams and desires of women across time. In Bride (1994), the bride lies back awkwardly, as if her wedding dress were a strait-jacket. In the trilogy The Betrothal: Lessons: The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage a la Mode’ by Hogarth (1999), Hogarth’s moral tale of greed and disease, a mockery of the dream family, is reworked in the fashions of her own childhood.

By contrast, the final room—apart from Celia Paul’s Family Group (1984–1986) and the powerfully interior Painter and Model (2012)—feels like a token addition, a nervous nod to gender and diversity. Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are fine artists, but they belong in a different narrative. A misstep, yet “All Too Human” remains an extraordinary exhibition, full of works of deep seriousness and bold, brave fidelity to life. For me, it ends with Rego’s bitingly honest work. With her bold, distinctive use of outline and color, and her mighty sympathy for human pain and longing, her paintings show life in all its senses.

“All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life” is at the Tate through August 27.

SARAH P. HANSON & GABRIELLA ANGELETI | NEWS | ART MARKET | THE ART NEWSPAPER | FRIDAY 18 MAY 2018

“It’s a bad time to be a white male artist”, quips the art advisor Lisa Schiff, but the joke rang true at the evening sales of post-war and contemporary art at Phillips and Christie’s on 17 May. The results confirmed the pattern set at Sotheby’s the previous night and in record-setting day sales this week: the market is strong, expanding and in search of freshness. “There is an appetite and a hunger for great things”, says the advisor Abigail Asher, of Guggenheim Asher, “but the energy feels different.”

Swivelling across Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center, the crowd seemed to lose some energy in the transfer, but Christie’s 64-lot post-war and contemporary auction realised $397.2m, just north of last year’s result.

The second lot, David Hockney’s oil on canvas Antheriums (1995, est $2.5m-$3.5m), sparked a three-way tussle that landed at $5.6m (with fees), a coda to the strong prices seen for Hockney elsewhere this week. But it was lot six that opened the floodgates—Joan Mitchell’s sunny, heavily daubed canvas Blueberry (1969; est $5m-7m), painted the year after Mitchell moved from Paris to the countryside of Vetheuil, which signalled a fertile period for the artist, at least seven bidders were in the chase, including contestants in the room and on the phone with Christie’s Asia head Rebecca Wei, before the hammer finally fell at $14.5m, or $16.6m with fees, a new record for the late artist.

Immediately after came Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait (1977), an anguished portrayal of the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971, in his studio. As head of sale Ana Maria Celis noted in advance of the auction, this the only full-length painting of Dyer to appear on the auction block since 2014, when Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966) made $70.2m at Christie’s London. This one, estimated around $30m, rang up $49.8m with fees, offered by a determined client on the phone with Renato Pennisi of Christie’s Milan. It was the highest price of the week for a contemporary work.

The Bacon was trailed by Andy Warhol’s silvered Double Elvis (Ferus Type) (1963), which had sold for $37m from Steve Wynn at Sotheby’s in 2012 and went for the same price to dealer Brett Gorvy, of Lévy Gorvy, on his cell phone in the room. He and business partner Dominique Lévy wound up bidding against each other on the priciest Richard Diebenkorn of the night, Ocean Park #126 (1984), which lodged just north of its high estimate at $23.9m with fees. The work was part of a passel of 12 Diebenkorns consigned from the collection of Donald and Barbara Zucker and sold to benefit their family foundation. Demand largely met that volume, though with a preference for the later abstractions over early figurative works. Altogether, the Zucker lots contributed $43m to the total.

It was not a great night for the postwar and contemporary titans who have dominated the category in recent years. A Donald Judd wall stack, a Dan Flavin “monument” for V Tatlin, and a sombre Clyfford Still were among the scant number of buy-ins. Works by Jeff Koons, Yves Klein, Damien Hirst, Christopher Wool, and Agnes Martin sold but on the low end of their estimates.

Anchored by a powerful Francis Bacon cover-lot portrait, Christie’s closed the season’s evening auctions in New York on Thursday night with a postwar and contemporary art sale in a subdued room that nevertheless brought in a strong $397.1 million, reaffirming its standing as the market leader over its arch-rival Sotheby’s.

The tally, including fees, surged past the auction’s $320 million presale low estimate, but Christie’s didn’t provide a high estimate for comparison, due to five lots being “estimate on request” as well as a general lack of transparency. Six of the 64 lots offered failed to sell, for a trim buy-in rate by lot of 9 percent, and the total hammer was $343.5 million.

Tonight’s result, including fees, trailed last May’s more robust $448 million sale over 68 lots, led by Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan (1962), which fetched $52.8 million.

Forty-eight of the 58 offerings that sold this evening made over a million dollars and of those, seven sold for over $15 million. Better yet, seven artist records were set.

A huge number of lots were backed by guarantees—37 lots from third parties and five from the house. In all, then, 42 of the 64 offerings had financial backing, assuring success.

(All prices reported include the hammer price plus the buyer’s premium, which is 25 percent of the hammer up to and including $250,000, 20 percent on that part of the hammer above $250,000 and up to and including $4 million, and 12.5 percent for anything beyond that number.)

There was also high-end action on the figurative painting front, with Francis Bacon’s searing and iconic cover lot, Study for Portrait (1977), bearing a ghostly likeness to the artist’s lover George Dyer who committed suicide in October 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon’s career defining-retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. It sparked a bidding battle between a trio of telephone bidders, finally going down at a hammer price of $44 million ($49.8 million with fees) against an estimate on request in the region of $30 million.

The seller acquired the painting from Marlborough Gallery in Vaduz, Lichtenstein, in May 1977, at a time when his paintings were selling for under $50,000 at auction. Market intel suggests the painting arrived at auction after making the rounds on the private market for a long stretch.

“It’s a really strong price and a very good subject,” said London dealer and Bacon expert Pilar Ordovas as she exited the salesroom, “but the subject [George Dyer] simply isn’t enough, as we know.”

Ordovas was referring to the fact that other Bacon portraits of Dyer have fetched as much as $70 million at auction, which is what Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966) made at Christie’s London in February 2014. Still, tonight’s Bacon ranks as the highest-priced postwar and contemporary works of the season.

The work is based on a studio photo by John Deakin in which Dyer is seated bare-chested in his white undershorts, his head swiveled to one side as if avoiding the gaze of the viewer. Bacon never painted from life, always from photographs.

A superb biography of the postwar painters whose fresh techniques and ideas energised

In 1942, which is roughly when Martin Gayford’s capacious new survey of postwar art begins, London was partially in ruins, many of its streets reduced to piles of rubble and buckled iron. “The silence, the absolute dead silence,” remembered Graham Sutherland f his first encounter with such desolation (commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to record the devastation of the blitz, he had travelled into the city from his house in Kent). Its buildings seemed to him to resemble living, suffering creatures; a lift shaft, twisted and yet still clearly visible in the remains of one structure, looked like “a wounded tiger in a painting by Delacroix”. Where, though, did art fit among all this? Even as Sutherland sketched, this must have seemed an impossible, not to say obscene, question. But of course there was, undeniably, beauty here, too: beguiling new silhouettes, sulphurous new colours. And quite soon, there would also be an opening sense of possibility. New energies were stirring, their shoots taking hold just like those of the pink willow herb that would shortly colonise the dead buildings.

It is these energies, daring, indomitable and deeply contradictory, that Gayford hopes to capture in Modernists & Mavericks – and as he begins, gamely describing the strange house in St John’s Wood that Lucian Freud and John Craxton began sharing in the same year (the floors were covered, for whatever reason, with broken glass, and the walls decorated with every possible kind of hat), you wonder how on earth he’ll do it. Flux is almost as hard to pin to the page as so-called genius. Try to ensnare the peculiar, perfectionist spirits of men such as Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, setting them in context and unpicking their mysterious, stubbornly unspoken processes, and you risk draining them of all their power, wringing them out like so many dishcloths. Somehow, though, he pulls it off. This is a panorama, one that feels in some senses definitive (largely, perhaps, because he has the guts to turn periodically away from the most famous figures of the time, the better to allow other names – David Bomberg, say, or Victor Pasmore – a look in). But it also swirls excitingly. Even the long, drawn-out conflict between abstraction and figuration appears here not as some dry, academic thing, but as the very air artists breathed – and on which some of them would end up choking.

Gayford takes a chronological path, finishing up at the back end of the 60s, with Bridget Riley and David Hockney; his interests lie solely with London, and with paint. Inside these boundaries, however, each movement, each important teacher, each plucky gallerist, stakes their own claim on the territory, however briefly. This is a book about community and influence; about the connections, sometimes powerfully strong and sometimes only thread-like, between artists of dizzying talent and wildly varying impulses. It is a pull-me-push-me kind of a narrative, its protagonists being much given to repudiating techniques and ideas – and, inevitably, to repudiating their various repudiations. In the end, you feel Auerbach sums it up best when he talks of borders that must be crossed not once, but again and again. To take one position or another is to hit a dead end. To be permanently in motion, on the other hand, is to touch the sky.

It’s also, being a book about the waxing and waning of reputations, an extended cautionary tale. People tend to forget, now, how low Freud’s star had fallen by the early 60s; how long his paintings then stayed in the racks at his gallery, how rapidly his gambling debts piled up (not that he cared: “I felt I was living on a private income,” he once said). Still, he kept going. Nearly all the artists in Modernists & Mavericks have what Walter Sickert, a presiding influence over many of them, referred to as “self-preservation in a talent”. They safeguarded their instincts and thus were able to break, almost unwittingly, the various artistic taboos of the day. Freud stuck to his process – factual, as he put it, but never literal – like glue, even as abstraction threatened to wipe out his kind entirely. “They were fascists,” recalled Gillian Ayres, of her brilliant tutors at Camberwell School of Art (she was taught by, among others, John Minton, a “dangerous” dancer, before he grew so sad and sour). Hockney filled his canvasses with love and happiness, emotions generally disdained by the avant garde. Patrick Caulfield, determined to retain his “own sensation”, proudly indulged his instincts for the decorative, then the dirtiest word in the studio. In the face of the popularity in the 60s both of grit and of glamour, Michael Andrews painfully turned out paintings so numinous, even other artists could not account for his “touch”.

Bacon, though, never went out of fashion; the idea that he ever will is preposterous. Gayford knew Freud: he could be said to have a particular connection with the artist, having famously had his portrait painted by him. In this book, though, it’s Freud’s one-time friend – his second wife, Caroline Blackwood, complained that she had dinner with Bacon every night for almost the entirety of her marriage – who appears as the abiding genius of the age: fast where Freud is slow, free where he is ever hunkered down, the “total consternation” people felt on seeing his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in 1944 still present and correct even when you stumble, as here, on a mere reproduction of it (confronted with it too suddenly, I can hardly move, the familiar adjectives rolling in like waves: appalling, terrifying, brilliant, unsurpassed).

Gayford deploys Bacon’s voice to brilliant effect, and you hang on to every word, from his conviction that he wanted his pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, leaving a trace of human presence “as a snail leaves its slime”, to his sudden, hungry observation, made one sunny day in Soho, that a horizontal shadow “eats into the figure, like a disease”. He painted from photos because he didn’t like people watching him committing “the injury that I did them in my work”. He wanted to combine the sense of reality that could be found in the greatest pictures of Velázquez and Rembrandt with the chance effects of, as Gayford puts it, “ceding conscious control”. In the early part of his career, his relationship with paint was so symbiotic, he mixed it on his arm (this habit eventually, by one account, gave him turpentine poisoning, at which point he switched from oil to acrylic). In Modernists & Mavericks, then, he is inevitably the star around which all the other planets orbit. Wherever you look, however wide your eyes, he is always calling; screaming, in fact. There he is, louder and more wondrous than ever: the fleshy embodiment of inspiration, the ne plus ultra of the heroic brushstroke.

Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by Martin Gayford is published by Thames & Hudson (£24.95).

Lovers’ quarrels rarely end in a police raid and drug bust, but George Dyer was not an especially rational or forgiving person. New tapes released by Barry Joules, one of Francis Bacon’s closest friends, reveal the artist’s lasting preoccupation with Dyer’s 1968 betrayal.

Bacon believed that Dyer had intentionally planted a marijuana stash in the base of an African carved statue at the artist’s studio as revenge after a particularly heated argument. On the recording, obtained earlier this month by The Guardian, Bacon recalls:

At the time of my arrest, and for a long time after, I stayed furious. To release some of the tension, I straight away went to my easel … did a large painting. He [Dyer] is sitting on a chair with the nasty flattened police dog at his feet sniffing towards the statue … which became George’s head.

The result of Bacon’s impassioned painting was Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog (1968), which now resides in a private collection. Rendered in one of the artist’s patently fraught psychological landscapes, the work underwent a series of revisions. At first, the sculpture in the painting’s foreground represented the statue where the pot was hidden. That eventually changed into the image of the police dog “sniffing towards the statue,” as Bacon described it. Then it finally became a depiction of George’s head.

The statue had actually been a gift from Dyer, who told Bacon that the Krays (British gangsters who were twin brothers) had given it to him. Bacon’s comments suggest that he knew Dyer kept his pot stash at the artist’s studio:

So, after giving it to me, then scraping the base covering away … he pulled the stuff wrapped in a thin foil out of the hollowed-out statue. … Then one day after we’d had a series of terrible rows in a great rage he reported me to the Chelsea drug squad. They raided the place here and their trained Labrador sniffed out the drugs in the statue. It was all a dreadful mess … but in the end Goodie [Arnold Goodman, a solicitor] defended me and I got off … finally paying a huge amount in costs. The judge didn’t like me much.

Bacon was acquitted of possession charges, but he still had to pay legal fees totaling £3,000. That’s over £50,400 at today’s rate, or nearly $68,500.

Three years after the drug bust episode, Dyer committed suicide while on a trip to Paris with Bacon, who was being honored with a major exhibition at the Grand Palais. Left behind at the hotel, Dyer consumed a large dose of sleeping pills and was found in the bathroom two days before Bacon’s opening. Although shocked by his lover’s death, Bacon continued prepping for his exhibition as normal. Dyer would continue to haunt Bacon’s paintings for years to come.

In March, Joules released another tape to The Guardian, which revealed Bacon’s extreme distaste for Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Expressing his bewilderment at John’s “False Start” (1959) selling for $17.05 million in 1988, Bacon stated: “The whole thing, it is nothing. It is just a series of a number of diagonal scratches going in different directions in red and blue.”

Bacon’s hostility to Abstract Expressionism has been well documented by art historians, but this new evidence comes directly from the artist’s mouth. He agreed to be recorded by Joules only on the condition that his friend not release any tapes until 12 years after his death. Bacon died in 1992.

Darren Coffield’s new book “Tales from the Colony: the Lost Bohemia of Bacon, Belcher and Board” is an authorised history of London’s most notorious arts club. The Colony Room Club was dominated, indeed created, by two personalities – its owner and founder, Muriel Belcher, a tough, sharp-tongued veteran of the Soho drinking club scene, who opened the Colony Room in 1949; and the artist Francis Bacon who was one of her first customers, and became Belcher’s co-conspirator when she paid him a retainer to bring in his rich pals. Ian Board served behind the bar at the Club for 46 years, first as Muriel’s barman and after her death as proprietor.

Ten years after it closed, and almost seventy since it opened, this book puts the record straight by drawing on a wealth of new material taken from audio tapes given to Coffield by the Colony’s last proprietor Michael Wojas. This includes previously unpublished interviews with Jeffrey Bernard, Daniel Farson, Ian Board and Francis Bacon, who, as one would expect, gives his outspoken opinion of some of the members. Coffield has also tracked down many leading habitués and conducted interviews that feature their personal reminiscences and memories that range from the poignant to the vitriolic. This wealth of material is accompanied by many unpublished photos from the Club. The Club has become the stuff of Soho myth, the truth often lost in a fuddled alcoholic mist, but Coffield explains: “the aim of this book is to give the reader a flavour of what it was like to frequent the Colony and its environs by using the authentic voices of those who were actually there.”

The draconian licensing laws, whereby the pubs were closed from 3 pm to 6 pm created a mid-afternoon vacuum filled by over 200 small members clubs and “bottle parties” in the West End. While many of these of these disappeared over time, especially after the introduction of all-day opening in 1988, the death knell for much of Soho, The Colony Room Club survived – a continuous party from 1949 to 2008 that you could drop in and out of.

Imagine a tiny room, the size of a modest living room, at the top of an undistinguished staircase behind an anonymous door on Soho’s Dean Street. The walls were a distinctive but rather bilious green, and there was a bar at one end and a single unisex toilet at the other. Coffield describes it as a “theatre of hate” where the vituperative regulars gave as good as they got. Strategically placed mirrors enabled both staff and drinkers to keep an eye on each other, and the modest space even hosted cabaret nights, giving many performers, the Magic Numbers, for instance, their first break. Soho regular Edwina “Eddi” McPherson sums it up:

“The club was like a performance space. They were being watched and were watching themselves in the mirrors. I would go to the club in the afternoon. The odd afternoon hours were always the best time to meet the most eccentric members – people who don’t actually work.”

The Club’s reputation for louche characters hurling insults at each other, and the owner’s habitual and convivial greeting of “hello cunty”, made for a perfect Soho mix of class, colour and status. The Aristocracy rubbed shoulders with poets, painters, writers, tailors, sailors, editors, African chiefs, Lords, landowners, barrow boys, musicians, singers, strippers, stagehands and petty crooks as the club’s membership ran the whole gamut of types, trades and professions who lived or worked in London’s West End. Purchased bottles of champagne were kept behind the bar, and a well-heeled member would often find their bottle mysteriously low, while a more impecunious member at the other end of the bar had a full glass, care of the caring bar staff. Noms de guerre were popular at the Colony: they included: Twiggy, Hitler, Brian the burglar and Butterlegs (apparently so called because they spread so easily!) People went there for sanctuary, and Coffield claims that 30 years on, he still doesn’t know what many people that he met there do.

Many other well-known artists drank in the club alongside Bacon, over the years: Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Edward Burra, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Patrick Caulfield, Joshua Compston, John Craxton, Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, R.B Kitaj, Jeff Koons, Leon Kossoff, Augustus John, Sarah Lucas, Eduardo Paolozzi, Edward Seago, Keith Vaughan, the list goes on and on.

The lethal triangle of The French, The Coach & Horses and The Colony were the staging points of the Dean Street shuffle, with occasional forays into other joints such as The Gargoyle or The Mandrake in the early days and The Groucho or Blacks at the end. During the period that Damien Hirst and other YBAs made it their watering hole of choice, clambering out of the toilet window and sneaking across the roof and in through a Groucho window was a popular jape.

Many Sohoites mourned the passing of the Colony, and the old refrain of “Soho isn’t what it used to be” is frequently heard. It has never been – Colin McInnes said the same thing around the time that he wrote “Absolute Beginners” in 1959. At a time when “Absolute Hell”, Rodney Ackland’s 1952 play, set in 1945, about another Soho drinking joint is playing to packed houses at The National Theatre, it is an appropriate time to take a nostalgic voyage through the salacious underbelly of the post-war art scene.

With a glass of Champagne in your hand, get laid with Lucian Freud, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, and pass out with Peter Langan. I well remember the neon sign that was propped up against the altar at the funeral of the Colony’s last proprietor Michael Wojas: DRINK UP / PAY UP / FUCK OFF – ah, happy days!

Artist told friend he ‘straight away went to my easel’ after police found lover’s cannabis

Francis Bacon was so shaken after the police raided his studio and found cannabis hidden in the base of an African carved statue that he vented his fury at his easel. To release his tension, the artist painted a portrait of his then lover George Dyer, to whom the drugs belonged and who had tipped off the police after a row, a previously unheard recording reveals.

Taken to trial after the raid in 1968, Bacon argued that someone must have planted them and that he was too asthmatic to smoke anything. He was found not guilty but had to pay costs of £3,000. The shock never left him, according to the recordings made by his friend Barry Joule in 1987, in which Bacon recalls “this dreadful drug bust episode”.

Joule said Bacon knew the drugs belonged to his lover. Dyer kept them in a large hole in a statue given to him by his gangster associates the Kray twins. Joule said that when they discussed the incident Bacon pointed to a photograph of a masterpiece titled Two Studies of George Dyer with Dog 1968, which is now in a private collection.

Bacon says on the recording: “At the time of my arrest, and for a long time after, I stayed furious. To release some of the tension, I straight away went to my easel … did a large painting. He [Dyer] is sitting on a chair with the nasty flattened police dog at his feet sniffing towards the statue … which became George’s head.”

The artist explains that he first depicted the statue on a table at the front of the painting, but changed it to show Dyer’s head. Joule said that although Bacon had argued in court that he would never break the law, the tapes revealed he had known the drugs were there and that they had not been planted.

In the recording, Bacon speaks of the African sculpture, which was a birthday present from Dyer. “He [Dyer] said the Krays gave it to him. I’m sure they did … I never smoked any dope as I have asthma, but George certainly did when he came here,” he says.

“So, after giving it to me, then scraping the base covering away … he pulled the stuff wrapped in a thin foil out of the hollowed-out statue … Then one day after we’d had a series of terrible rows in a great rage he reported me to the Chelsea drug squad. They raided the place here and their trained labrador sniffed out the drugs in the statue. It was all a dreadful mess … but in the end Goodie [Arnold Goodman, a solicitor] defended me and I got off … finally paying a huge amount in costs. The judge didn’t like me much.”

Although Bacon later claimed Dyer had planted the drugs, he had known all along that Dyer’s cannabis was in his studio and had “seemed little bothered by it until that shocking revenge day”, Joule said. Joule lived 20 metres from Bacon’s studio and home in South Kensington, and their friendship lasted from 1978 until the artist’s death in 1992.

Bacon, whose 1969 portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold in 2013 for a record £89m, agreed to be recorded on condition that Joule did not release the tapes until at least 12 years after his death. In 2004 Joule donated to the Tate 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio, then valued at an estimated £20m and described as one of the most generous gifts to the gallery.

Joule kept about 120 drawings. He is now lending about 70 to an exhibition in Italy, at the Fondazione Sorrento Museo in Sorrento between 19 May and 21 October. Bacon gave Joule the African sculpture, which he will show for the first time.

An immersive history of painting from 1945 to the 1970s draws on a huge archive of the author’s interviews

Martin Gayford has been talking with artists for 30 years. He doesn’t just nip into the studio with a notepad: he has a gift for sustaining conversations that unfold across decades. His friendship with David Hockney has inspired remarkable collaborations, and when he sat for a portrait by Lucian Freud he made in return his own version of Man with a Blue Scarf, a written portrait of the painter painting.

In Modernists & Mavericks he draws on a huge archive of interviews to piece together a history of postwar painting in London, from the Camberwell students of the 1940s, working in the ruins of a bombed city, to the pop artists who collaged images of shining new-made lives in the 1960s. Gayford starts with people, moments and meetings, standing firm in the belief that “pictures are affected not only by social and intellectual changes but also by individual sensibility and character”. Three cheers for that faith in individuals. Other studies have debated the effects of state art funding and cold war cultural politics; this one brings us the expression of Leon Kossoff as he moves through heaven and hell with each brushstroke, Bridget Riley introducing the whisker of white that makes a black painting live, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin talking hour after hour in the car down to Bath School of Art.

Many of the painters here were sceptical of interpreters pinning them down with words. But with each other they could be unstoppably voluble. Francis Bacon went around conducting “a mobile seminar”. Frank Auerbach (the most grippingly eloquent of the book’s voices) says that he and Bacon “talked, slightly drunkenly and wildly, for about 15 years”. As for Auerbach and Freud, the conversation went on for half a century.

The book’s span allows Gayford to plot several generations in relation to each other, and it’s striking how many of the most potent encounters involve forms of teaching. Simply walking down the street one day, Bacon pointed out to the young John Wonnacott how a shadow seemed to eat into a figure “like a disease”. “I rethought shadow,” says Wonnacott; it stayed with him all his life. There are dismal fallings-out at art school: Allen Jones, amazed that his tutors had omitted to mention the existence of Jackson Pollock, suggested suing Hornsey College for fraud. But David Bomberg emerges as a deeply valued teacher at Borough polytechnic, whose students inherited his convictions about the uncompromising effort that painting requires.

Effort and seriousness united the London artists. The Colony Room Club bar in Soho filled up after many a dinner at Wheeler’s, that’s true, as well it might after what Cyril Connolly called the “chopless chop-houses and beerless pubs” of the 40s. But the talk was never far from painting, and the next morning there was work. Gayford attends particularly to the relationship between long concentration and sudden achievement. For Kossoff, tirelessly painting a swimming pool in Willesden, north-west London, there would come a point when “conscious intention breaks up”. It was then that “the picture happened”

Kossoff and Auerbach stayed close to Camden; Freud thought it mad to travel when there were parts of London he had not visited. The particular environment of the city is perhaps most clearly felt in the account of what happened when Bacon ventured to St Ives, though the episode is also a welcome reminder of the vitality of British painting elsewhere. But the biggest news was coming from the US and everyone was forming some kind of relationship with the ideas coming from the new centre of the art world. Peter Blake posed in his Levi 501s, with American badges pinned to his jacket and Elvis magazine in hand, portraying himself as a gawkily dedicated fan. The picture has the wistful air of Watteau’s Pierrot, Gayford observes; there’s Gainsborough here, too, and Rousseau. It’s a beautifully complex self portrait of a young Englishman dressed for America.

New York and Los Angeles were the places to be; Hockney, Jones, Frank Bowling and Richard Smith all eventually went. But powerful work could come of not being there. The giant force of abstract expressionism intensified debates about whether external subjects had any role in the life of a painting. Was the “hard-edged abstraction” pursued by Robin Denny and William Turnbull a leap into the future or a dead end? If a Sandra Blow painting “put you in mind of landscape” was it then a figurative work? The conversations of Ayres and Hodgkin were charged by the fact of their work falling just (but decisively) to either side of the “invisible frontier” between abstraction and representation.

Ayres is a vivid presence and Gayford gives a fine account of her vast, tumbling, ever metamorphosing Hampstead Mural. He records her laughter as baffled onlookers wondered what she was doing. Ayres died last month, Hodgkin last year. The great figures of the 60s are passing – which is all the more reason to be grateful for a book that takes us right into their world.

• Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by Martin Gayford is published by Thames & Hudson

Martin Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf (2010), an account of sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, is one of the best books ever written about the art of painting. Freud used to take a notorious amount of time over a portrait. He needed to know, or get to know, his sitters personally in order to achieve what he called “truth”: the likeness of the whole person; the likeness of his own relation with them. He believed such things affected, indeed modified, appearance. He was pursuing, like Proust, an individual in a caught moment of time and he needed the experience of time to arrive there. When my old boss, Alfred Taubman, owner of Sotheby’s when I worked there, offered Freud a fortune to paint his wife, he was furiously rebuffed. “I do not know your wife.” That was that.

Now comes Modernists and Mavericks, a study of British painting in the second half of the 20th century. To create some lines of demarcation, Gayford borrows a phrase used by the American painter RB Kitaj, who settled in London in the 1950s. He talked of a “London School” composed of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews, Hockney and himself. These painters were active in the 1960s, when the phrase was coined. All lived and worked in the capital, though Hockney spent much time in Los Angeles, a city he in effect invented for painting. In order to extend the range of his study, Gayford turns London into a sub-text for his book, a device for leaving out a number of talented artists like the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon. And because one of the few characteristics shared by British painters during this half-century was each one’s idiosyncratic response to the new wave in American painting, specifically New York abstraction in the late 1940s and 1950s, Gayford is in effect recounting the fall of Paris as the adjudicatory centre, the supreme court, of modern art. From the Impressionists, to Cézanne, to Matisse and Picasso, Paris ruled. The scale, the sheer excitement of vast abstracts by Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock and others pulverised British and European abstraction for a time. Gayford’s heroes, mainly figurative painters like Freud and Bacon, seemed to be making the most viable response.

The book opens with a commercial phenomenon. In 2013 Christie’s sold Francis Bacon’s 1969 “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” for $142m. For over a generation now, art had moved intellectually, aesthetically and commercially to the English-speaking world. And the specifically English characteristic of this world was the reorienting of art from what was considered “modern”: that is, art as its own subject and first cause. Painters like Bacon, Freud and Hockney led the way back to matters human, messy, unpredictable, subjective.

It is an exciting story. This is not a book about plasticity, or tactile values, or the merits of one medium (acrylic, say) over another (oil paint, say). There are the necessary paragraphs about philosophical issues like the relation of draughtsmanship to painting or issues posed by Hockney’s fascination with what EH Gombrich called “the art of illusion”. But these are never allowed to slow down the narrative. If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be. This is not a picture book with commentary. The images are there for the text.

Although the book is primarily an account of how in reputational and market terms four great painters redefined the role of the human figure in modern art, Gayford does not allow his leading actors — Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Hockney — to hijack the action. Like a novelist, he has subsidiary characters who are considered in their own right and whose work is important to the story of what he clearly believes were five great decades of British art. Two considerable female artists, Bridget Riley and Gillian Ayres, rejected the human figure. Yet even a sentence like this one is conceptually dodgy. You cannot exclude the viewer, or human powers of perception. When she hit the big time in New York, Riley was furious at being taken up by fashionistas; at finding herself, literally, in vogue. Her mentors were Seurat and Renoir. She wanted to do things to, and with, light, not clothes. Ayres, who has just died, was capable of vast improvised works: multiple messy gestures on canvas. But if you squint at them, or take off your glasses, Rubenslike rhythms appear.

Gayford’s eye for the dramatic, his novelist’s approach, feasts upon events and stories. The super-talented Pauline Boty died of cancer at 28. Then three technically brilliant and once famous non-figurative artists, Richard Smith, Robyn Denny and Bernard Cohen, fell out of fashion. Gayford runs into an elderly Smith queueing at the Venice Biennale. Once he had most of the British Pavilion there to himself.

Gayford carefully avoids an elegiac note. This is because in spite of the Young British Artists who emerged at the end of the last century, the most interesting art of our own time may well be on the move, to China for instance. And for him, elegy would interfere with the narrative excitement of his account.

Yet it is difficult for the contemporary reader not to sing a lament for the makers. Bacon gone. Freud gone. Kitaj gone. And Sutherland, Turnbull, Caulfield, Hodgkin, Uglow, Scott, Heron, Hilton, Davie, Andrews gone. Sandra Blow, Gillian Ayres, Prunella Clough, all gone. Keith Vaughan, whom Gayford curiously neglects, gone. But Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Auerbach, Hockney (presiding, as I write, over a massive new show in New York) and Allen Jones are with us still and working.

All present something of a stand against young artists still very much in thrall to Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of conceptual art. The trouble with conceptual works is that they are, in effect, wisecracks. When you “get” them, that’s it. Oil paint carries an immense emotional radioactivity, a half-life dangerous and long-lasting.

Reviewing Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, WH Auden wrote that just occasionally he came across a book he could not help feeling had been written specially for him. As one who has earned his living in the art market, and been a “trading” collector as well, I feel the same way about Modernists and Mavericks. I have, as it were, shared rooms in my life over the years with many of the painters whom Gayford celebrates, and all of the major ones. His driving account of a miraculous time in British art may well prove its memorial.

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters, by Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, £24.95, 352 pages

Grey Gowrie is chairman of The Fine Art Group and a former minister of the arts

Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews in 1963 © John Deakin Archive

BY MARK BEECH | REVIEW | VISUAL ARTS | BLOUIN ARTINFO | THURSDAY, MAY 03 2018

Lucian Freud was at Graham Sutherland’s house in Kent one day in the mid-1940s. Freud asked his host who he thought was the greatest painter in England. The story is contained in the new book “Modernists and Mavericks” by Martin Gayford, who recounts that it would be natural for a major artist such as Sutherland to probably consider that he himself was the greatest painter.

However, Sutherland gave an unexpected answer. He said his choice was like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso: “He’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life. If he ever does a painting he generally destroys it.” The name of the artist was “Francis Bacon, and he sounded so interesting that Freud quickly arranged to meet this mystery man,” Gayford writes.

The subtitle of the book is “Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters.” If there were anyone qualified to write about these masters and many others, it is Gayford, who draws on 30 years of interviews.

He couples the Sutherland anecdote by noting that on the evening of November 12, 2013, Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucien Freud” went under the hammer at Christie’s in New York. After a lengthy bidding war, the work sold for $142.4 million. He writes: “A picture painted in London well within living memory became, for a while, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.”

This state of affairs would have been utterly unimaginable in 1969 when the picture was painted, let alone when the two artists first met. The price would stretch credulity even in 1992, the year in which Bacon died.

The book’s timeline runs from the Second World War to the 1970s. It is an intriguing story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences, rivalries and overlapping artistic concerns. The painters sometimes love and sometimes hate their fellows, friends and rivals. They variously work, rest and play together and especially drink together. The list of names is stellar was includes Frank Auerbach, Victor Pasmore, Bridget Riley, Patrick Heron, Richard Hamilton, Prunella Clough, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. It is especially good to see mention of Gillian Ayres, who has sadly just died. If these artists have anything in common it is that they were all obsessed with the question posed by Ayres of “what can be done with painting?” They all shared a belief that paint could accomplish work that other media – photography for example – could not.

The narrative has a constantly changing backdrop, from the post-war years through 1940s Soho bohemia, the confidence of the 1950s and “swinging London” in the 1960s. “Being born just before the outbreak of the Second World War, I just thought things naturally got better and better,” Jones is quoted as saying. “When the Seventies came along, it was a bit more real,” adds Sir Anthony Caro.

The book explores influences from other countries, ranging from Abstract Expressionist contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, through to Piero della Francesca, Picasso and Matisse. Despite all these external inspirations, the artist R.B. Kitaj suggested in 1976 that there was a substantial “School of London.” Gayford agrees, while adding that given the idiosyncratic art mavericks involved, it is a very wide-ranging, loose movement. There is no common factor apart from each of the artists was a modernist, sometimes crossing the frontier between figurative and non-figurative: “Several artists, notably Auerbach and Hodgkin effectively set up tents their tents on the border zone itself.” In addition, some are not truly London painters. Hockney for example moved to Paris and then Los Angeles, as well as keeping links with Yorkshire.

Flick through the pages and there are strong senses of how art was influenced by The Beatles and street style. Jones would put his twins into a stroller and perambulate down the King’s Road, past freakily-named and trendy boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip, while all the time soaking up colorful fashion inspiration: the ever shorter miniskirts and the ever higher heels.

The personal life of all of the main protagonists is enough for any number of books on their own – Freud’s lovers, the suicide of Bacon’s lover George Dyer and so on. Aptly, Freud is quoted as saying that he’s always liked the expression “the naked truth.”

There are constant insights which are amusing and revealing, such as about the creation of Bacon’s monumental “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” in 1962. The entire triptych was painted in a fortnight in what Bacon described as “a bad mood of drinking.” The book says: “Sometimes he was so drunk that he hardly knew what he was doing.” For all this, there is general agreement that the triptych was an important work, a turning point.

Whole books have been written about the Colony Room drinking den. Gayford cleverly cherry-picks the most important moments, right through to the creation of the Michael Andrews picture which contains many of the key dramatis personae. There was a time when the tiny shabby bar run by Muriel Belcher was the center of the city’s artistic world, (perhaps along with the Slade School) and here there are quotes from those who knew it or had first-hand experience of how the cultural world was changing. Paula Rego notes: “England gave me the freedom to be more myself.” Leon Kossoff says: London, like paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream.”

Gayford, art critic for the Spectator, has also written for Blouin Artinfo and its magazines such as Modern Painters as well as for Bloomberg News. He has had his portrait painted by Freud (resulting in his memoir “Man With a Blue Scarf”) and by Hockney (leading to the book “A Bigger Message.”) Gayford’s other books cover different periods – from nine weeks in the life of Vincent van Gogh, to seven years of John Constable’s romance with his wife-to-be, and a biography of Michelangelo and its centuries of influence.

The book was published in hardback by Thames & Hudson in April in the U.K. priced £24.95 with U.S. publication to follow on June 12.

BACON GIACOMETTI | FONDATION BEYELER | APRIL 29 — SEPTEMBER 2, 2018

In the spring and summer of 2018, the Fondation Beyeler will be presenting two extraordinary protagonists of modern art. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992) were friends and rivals whose creative visions shaped art from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day. This is the first time that a museum exhibition is being devoted to shedding light on these two artists and their relationship to each other. Although their respective artistic oeuvres differ greatly at first glance and appear autonomous, the exhibition reveals commonalities and amazing parallels between them. Presented together, their lives and creative personalities will be seen a new light.

The individualists Giacometti and Bacon perceived each other like signal emitting lighthouses. The curators Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti in Paris, Michael Peppiatt, Bacon expert and a personal friend of the artist, as well as Ulf Küster, curator at the Fondation Beyeler, make astonishing parallels visible in this exhibition encompassing circa 100 works. Bacon and Giacometti shared an unshakable belief in the importance of the human figure and the role played by the old masters they both studied, copied and paraphrased. Both were interested in the problem of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation of space, integrating cage-like entities into their works as a means of isolating figures in their surroundings. Both occupied themselves with the fragmented and deformed body and also shared an obsession with portraiture in addition to the associated depiction of human individuality. Both characterized themselves as ‘realists’. And although the human figure always served as a benchmark in their work, they each raised its level of abstraction to an extreme in his own way. By doing so, they called the antithesis of figuration and abstraction into question that was of such central importance for the history of modern art.

The painter Isabel Rawsthorne played a key role in the relationship between Giacometti and Bacon. She was a close friend of both artists and was also the former’s lover for a while. She posed for both and also served as their muse. Like Giacometti and Bacon, she was also fascinated by the abysses of the human character. The dark sides of sexuality, loneliness and melancholy, the tendency towards excesses: Giacometti and Bacon exude a fascination that not only comes together in the person of Rawsthorne but also has a much more far-reaching impact. The position of the artist as an extreme borderline figure in society is made particularly evident in the ‘Bacon Giacometti’ exhibition.

Their very small and sparse studios were very special places for Bacon and Giacometti; chaotic spaces from which great art emerged. It has been possible to obtain loans of works by Francis Bacon from major private collections and renowned museums from around the world, including the Art Institute in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The Giacometti loans come almost entirely from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris. They include numerous original plaster sculptures from the artist’s estate that have never before been shown in public.

This ambitious exhibition will be the first to study in depth the parallel, creative careers of two of the 20th century’s most influential artists: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

The Fondation Beyeler is open daily, also on public holidays, from 10am to 6pm and on Wednesday from 10am to 8pm.

FONDATION BEYELER
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CH-4125 Riehen / Basel
Tel. +41 61 645 97 00
Fax +41 61 645 97 19

Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon at Tate Gallery, London, July 1965. Photo: Graham Keen

In the Eighties, there used to be a dank underground drinking club, far enough north of Leicester Square to count as Soho, which had two nicknames: Death in the Afternoon and The Iron Lung. Once, when someone asked what the strange smell was in there, the answer was: “Failure”.

There is something of the same smell just now at the National Theatre, which is staging Rodney Ackland’s play Absolute Hell, set in a Soho drinking club at the end of the Second World War. It captures the lives of drunk and mostly unpleasant people. “You piss-begotten bastard of a bum-fucked whore,” shouts a film director at his male secretary.

Under its original title The Pink Room, this anatomisation of the inner loneliness of Soho habitués, many of them homosexual, was such a smash failure in 1952 that Ackland, a successful dramatist, never wrote a play for the West End again. Binkie Beaumont called The Pink Room a “libel on the British people”. Beaumont was an impresario who, the director Tyrone Guthrie said, could “make or break the career of almost any worker in the British professional theatre”. Ackland’s was broken.

It came too late for him when the play, which he had rewritten as Absolute Hell, was revived at the fringe Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 1988. Sitting up in bed in his giant-spotted pyjamas, with a cat on his lap, in his bleak council flat, he told the critic Nicholas de Jongh: “I’ve been rediscovered so many times by little theatres, that I might as well never have been discovered.”

Not long after the screening of an accomplished television adaptation in 1991, Ackland died, never to see the production at the National Theatre in 1995 that brought an Olivier for best actress for Judi Dench, as the drinking club proprietrix “rampaging around the bar as the mistress of these semi-suicidal revels”, as Sheridan Morley put it.

Much of the Soho of The Pink Room was dead by then, too. “It’s wicked when you come to think of it,” – one character remarks, as a prostitute walks past the window – “they don’t have to pay income tax.” The audience at the Lyttelton today still laughs, but it is no longer an everyday scene as it was in 1952. The prostitute’s Soho beat was done away with by the Street Offences Act of 1959. What makes this joke work is its smoky, sour, drinking-club cynicism. Perhaps it was the projection of this temper on to a nation trying to rally around the optimistic Skylon at the Festival of Britain that so disgusted Binkie back in 1952.

For me, Absolute Hell provoked a nostalgia for the Soho that has now disappeared. The Vie en Rose club in the play, like the watering holes I knew in the Eighties, was a version of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in which the only provisions left are bottles of spirits.

The fictional Vie en Rose, it is true, still went so far in its faded gentility as to serve food. It must, then, have been more like David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club (1925-52), on the corner of Meard Street, than it was like Muriel Belcher’s tiny Colony Room Club across the road in Dean Street, where not a peanut was to be had. If Francis Bacon wanted to buy Belcher lunch, they would go to Wheeler’s, round the corner in Compton Street.

Some thorough denizens of Soho in the Eighties found that meals interfered with their drinking. My friend Graham Mason, the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses, also to be found in the Colony Room Club in the afternoon, when the law closed pubs, once spent nine days without eating. His Soho was the refuge of the extreme: the extremely drunk, the extremely poor. This was not a tendency observable in Absolute Hell, which for all its decay is essentially a drawing-room drama.

Yet it was in the same period, the late Forties, that the poet Paul Potts devoted himself to what one of his few remaining friends, Stephen Fothergill, called his “marathon tapping stints”. Fothergill, with whom I would often drink in the French pub in the Eighties, ran into Potts one day in the Forties in the Swiss pub, now called Comptons. Potts swallowed in seconds any pint of Guinness bought for him.

After a few pints, he proposed buying Fothergill lunch at an Italian restaurant. Much of Potts’s spaghetti ended up on the cloth. At the end of the meal, he announced without embarrassment that he was broke. Fothergill paid. As they parted, Potts said: “Can you lend me half a crown, old boy? Bus fares, you know, and my entrance fee to the French tomorrow morning.”

The entrance fee meant the money for an initial half of bitter, which allowed anyone to join the Soho regulars at the French pub or elsewhere, so long as they didn’t reject him, like angry horned cattle, for being a bore, the one sure sin. By spectacular broadsides of insult, regulars in Soho pubs made their circle as exclusive, and excluding, as any private club.

London low-life has a complicated ancestry, but 20th-century Soho had inherited a peculiar strain of Bohemianism best represented by George Du Maurier, who in 1856 was living in a Parisian garret seeing if he could become a painter. (Instead, he became a Punch cartoonist, author of the celebrated Curate’s Egg joke.) Read his melodramatic 1894 novel Trilby for the flavour.

In London, this trend for Bohemianism was able to find an ecological niche in Soho because the tightly built area had come down in the world since the 1690s, when the grand square and streets were being developed and 60 or 80 peers proudly resided in the 53 acres of the parish. By 1740 there were 20 left, and by 1790 only seven. No great house was by then in single occupation. Instead, the French (two fifths of the parish in 1710), Greeks, and then the Swiss (the unlikely gangsters of the 19th century) lived in rooms off the main staircase up from the street door, which was left open.

In 1,400 houses, the number of people grew from 11,000 in 1801 to 17,000 in 1851 – more than 12 to a house. Germans and Italians arrived in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1903, 40 per cent of the people in the parish were Polish Jews. Already, the population was falling from its squalid height until, at the time The Pink Room was staged, overnight residents numbered no more than 2,777. By then, day-trippers, or night-trippers, had discovered the attractions of proper foreign food at low prices – from 1868, Kettner’s restaurant in Romilly Street (then called Church Row) familiarised a generation with French cuisine – and the parallel entertainments of pubs, theatres and prostitution.

Absolute Hell is, for me, too much of a middle-class make-believe Bohemia, consumed as a leisure activity. There is one destitute painter, violently and incoherently drunk, but that character seems undeveloped. Ackroyd misses an element of radical poverty that seemed to me in the Eighties a positive virtue in Soho: the recognition that painting and poetry meant more than money or success of a “suburban” kind. No one in Absolute Hell had laboured on a building site, as the poet Oliver Bernard was to, or taken a job as Paddington’s last lamplighter, as Fothergill did.

This radical poverty went with a kind of Bohemian democracy. In the real Soho, even in the Eighties, Bill Moore, a driver by trade, who had nowhere to sleep at night but a deckchair at his boss’s office, was often to be found at the bar of the Coach and Horses, wearing a jersey but no shirt and consuming scarcely believable quantities of whisky. He got on more or less happily with Lucian Freud, when he dropped in, and Jeffrey Bernard, every morning, and the monstrous gallery of painters, writers and layabouts who always guaranteed lively conversation, even if it ended in a shouting match.

Soho did continue to be characterised by simple and rococo insults. “It’s too bad that we should be bored to death by your friend and have to pay for his drinks, but now you have the nerve to come over as well, when you’re not invited,” Francis Bacon said to the writer Daniel Farson one day.

The tirades of Ian Board, the swollen-nosed proprietor of the Colony Room Club in succession to Belcher, would kindle like flames licking up a sheet of newspaper. “Look at y’self. Just look at y’self, you great lump,” he would roar hoarsely at some member who had lost his sympathy. “You’re a sad and pathetic sight. You’ve got fuck all to say. You’re a dreary, boring id-i-ot. What have you got to offer? Just shut your fucking cake-hole?”

All in all, I’m not sure I quite buy the thesis of Absolute Hell that a Soho drinking club really is hell, ultimately the hell of loneliness. Certainly the play does not present any variety of sexual liberation as a get-out-of-hell card. On stage, Ackland parades a monstrous, fat, ugly, bewigged lesbian drama critic (unforgettably played in 1991 by Betty Marsden of Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne fame), dominating her  companion, like Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. We seem to be expected to laugh at the moment of her utter undoing. I didn’t.

Those beguiled by the real Soho in the Forties, or the Eighties, were more likely to think of it as home, not hell. Even in Absolute Hell, the feckless hero Hugh Marriner (a character defined, ditheringly but not camply, by Bill Nighy in 1991) calls two things “home”: his boyfriend of nine years and the drinking club.

Of course, the nightly tragicomedy of Soho unfailingly ended in divorce or poverty, sickness and death, but while it lasted it was very, very funny, in a way no play could capture. “I’ve met all the people I’ve ever cared about in Soho,” Jeffrey Bernard’s elder brother Bruce remarked. “I just hung about too long – a couple of decades too long.”

Soho was never hell; it was just a florid form of the human condition. That, it must be admitted, can be painful. The fictional Hugh knows that the whisky-fed reality of his drinking club disperses nightly at 11pm, and everything crashes down when the club closes for the last time. All the monsters of La Vie en Rose and all the monsters of the Colony Room Club are dead now. I do miss them

Christopher Howse’s Soho in the Eighties (Bloomsbury) is out in September. Absolute Hell is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000) until June 16

The ambitious Bacon Giacometti exhibition is the first to study in depth the parallel, creative careers of two of the 20th century’s most influential artists: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966) and Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) had a decisive influence on the art of the twentieth century. This exhibition brings the two artists together for the first time. Different as their art may initially appear, the joint presentation of their work reveals many surprising similarities.

Bacon and Giacometti both take the human figure as their main point of artistic reference. Both occupy themselves with the fragmented and deformed body. Moreover, they devote themselves to portraiture and the depiction of human individuality in an almost obsessive manner. Both claimed to be “realists,” while exploring new extremes of abstraction.

Giacometti and Bacon worked surrounded by clutter, in exceptionally small and cramped studios. These two spaces, the centers of their creativity, have been reconstructed specially for the exhibition as full-scale multimedia projections that provide a vivid insight into the artists’ work environment.

The exhibition comprises 100 paintings and sculptures from major museums and private collections in Europe and the USA. It has been organized by the Fondation Beyeler in cooperation with the Fondation Giacometti, Paris, the administrator of the artist’s estate, which has made available most of the works by Giacometti presented here, some of which are rarely exhibited or have never been publicly displayed before. The exhibition is curated by Catherine Grenier, Michael Peppiatt and Ulf Küster.

Their small and sparse studios were very special places for Bacon and Giacometti: chaotic spaces from which great art emerged. The multimedia installation at the Bacon Giacometti show in the final room, devised specially for the exhibition in Basel, offers a fascinating insight into this personal cosmos. The studios of both artists have been reconstructed from historic photographs and brought to spectacular life in two full-scale projections across the walls and floors, created by Christian Borstlap, head of the Amsterdam design studio Part of a Bigger Plan.

Alberto Giacometti moved into his legendary Paris studio in rue Hippolyte-Maindron in 1926 and worked there for forty years, until shortly before his death. The video projection, lasting about two and a half minutes, shows thirty-seven photographs of the artist’s studio, dating from different periods and taken by famous photographers such as René Burri, Sabine Weiss, Robert Doisneau, and Ernst Scheidegger, who visited Giacometti in his working space. The photographs include images of his work and his models: in particular, his wife Annette, the Japanese philosophy professor Isaku Yanaihara, and the writer and anthropologist Michel Leiris. His gallerist Pierre Matisse is also to be seen in the projection. The projection, with an area corresponding to the studio’s original dimensions of 4.90 x 4.70 meters, conveys a vivid sense of the significance of this remarkable space, which no longer exists but was a creative powerhouse and a center of attraction for many celebrated personalities of Giacometti’s time.

Francis Bacon moved in 1961 to a new studio at 7 Reece Mews in the London district of South Kensington. This modest space, above a former stable and with only a skylight to provide natural light, was where the artist worked and lived until his death. Bacon’s studio was famously chaotic, cluttered with layer upon layer of old newspapers and magazines, books, crumpled and torn photographs and reproductions of art works, drawings and samples of painting materials. The plethora of images scattered seemingly at random around the room provided Bacon with many of his motifs and served as key sources of inspiration for his paintings.

The video projection shows the painted walls and the studio debris: again, the projection surface, measuring 4.80 x 8.90 meters, matches the dimensions of the original space. The film was created using fifteen images by the photographer Perry Ogden, which show the studio in its original state shortly after the artist’s death. It was subsequently dismantled and painstakingly recreated in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, where it can still be seen

The projections are overlaid with the voices of Bacon and Giacometti, speaking about their work and their studios. The Giacometti soundtrack is from a 1963 archive recording, subsequently edited by the film director Jean-Marie Drot for his documentary Un homme parmi les hommes: Alberto Giacometti (1992). Bacon’s comments are taken from a BBC film of 1966 (Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait) and a profile of the artist made in 1985 for The South Bank Show on what is now ITV London.

Whereas Bacon admitted only a very few outsiders to his studio, Giacometti received visits from countless contemporaries, including Jean Paul-Sartre, Michel Leiris and Marlene Dietrich. The video projections convey the studio atmosphere and provide a direct, unexpected insight into the artists’ working methods, opening up a further intriguing dimension of their work.

On this day, April 28, 1992, Irish-born artist Francis Bacon died. We look back on the facts of his life and why his biography includes some harsh words from Margaret Thatcher.

Once described by Margaret Thatcher as “the man who paints those dreadful pictures,” the artist Francis Bacon’s bleak view on life was often ascribed to his hard upbringing in Ireland, where his father once had him allegedly horsewhipped because he suspected he was gay.

He was born in 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, the son of an Australian-born Boer War veteran and a Sheffield steel heiress. Raised by a child nanny, Jessica Lightfoot, who became a major figure in his life, Bacon was sent to live with his grandparents in Abbeyleix, County Laois, after World War I though the family soon moved to Straffan, in County Kildare.

His love of dressing up and effeminate demeanour intensely irritated his father who had Francis horsewhipped by his groom. In 1924, at age 15, Bacon moved to Britain after his father threw him out of his house after finding him posed before a mirror in his mother’s underwear.

In Britain, he advertised himself as a “gentleman’s companion” and had a series of relationships with older men. In 1933 he painted his first masterpiece “The Crucifixion.” He was unapologetically gay at a time when such behaviour was usually closeted. He also loved to gamble, running several London gambling houses at one point.

Following his death in 1992 his paintings began to soar dramatically in price. In 1998 the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secured the donation of the contents of Bacon’s chaotic London studio for the Hugh Lane Galley in Dublin.

Back in 2013, a triptych painting by the Irish emigrant artist fetched a world record price of $142.4 million at an auction in New York. The triptych (three images painting), from 1969, is of his friend and sometime rival Lucian Freud sitting on a wooden chair. It was sold at Christie’s auction house after a frenzied bidding process between seven super-rich bidders.

Christie’s had originally valued the painting at $87 million. It surpasses the recent sale of Edward Munch’s “The Scream,” which sold for $112 million in 2012. The buyer was not identified but the painting was purchased by New York agent William Acquavella.

“I went to $101 million but it hardly mattered,” Larry Gagosian, the super-dealer told The New York Times. Gyu Shin, the director of the Shin Gallery, on Grand Street in Manhattan, told the Times he had bid for himself.

“I was expecting it to go for around $87 million ... I loved that painting and I couldn’t control myself,” he said. “Maybe someday I’ll have another chance.”

Super agent Michael Ovitz was said to be among those who were bidding for the painting. He was present during at the auction at Christie’s midtown salesroom.

AIMEE DAWSON | PREVIEW | EXHIBITIONS | THE ART NEWSPAPER | FRIDAY 27 APRIL 2018

A solo show of Francis Bacon or Alberto Giacometti alone is enough to draw in big crowds. But Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler is banking on a Bacon and Giacometti double whammy for its blockbuster this year, which will be on during Art Basel art fair.

Bacon and Giacometti were well acquainted and first met in the early 1960s, probably introduced by the British painter Isabel Rawsthorne, who was Giacometti’s lover and a model for both artists during different periods. Both strived to capture Rawsthorne’s famously alluring character, Bacon in paint and Giacometti in sculpture.

Other similarities between the two artists are laid out thematically in the exhibition, with works shown juxtaposed as direct comparisons. As well as a section dedicated to pieces modelled on Rawsthorne, themes in the exhibition include the artists’ obsession with depicting the human head; the representation of movement in painting and sculpture; love and violence; and the use of cage-like structures to create space and perspective.

While the similarities are highlighted, striking differences are also brought to the fore. Giacometti’s use of grey stands in stark contrast to Bacon’s lavish use of colour. Both artists used distortion in their work, but Bacon preferred a blurring of the face; Giacometti, on the other hand, attempted to eliminate the presence of the sitter.

The show’s co-curator Ulf Küster attributes these differences to Bacon’s tendency to work from photographs, while Giacometti liked to draw from life. “The differences and similarities deepen the understanding of the work of both artists,” he says.

Küster has organised the exhibition of around 100 works with the director of the Fondation Giacometti, Catherine Grenier, and the Bacon expert Michael Peppiat.

The idea for the exhibition came out of a discussion between Küster and Grenier that took place at the 2015 Venice Biennale. While the Swiss museum owns important works by Bacon and Giacometti (the museum’s founder, Ernst Beyeler, knew both artists personally), and has long exhibited the two side-by-side in its collection, the curators were surprised to find that no major institution had put on such a comparative exhibition.

The challenges artists faced after the Second World War prompted different responses in Bacon and Giacometti. “Both challenged traditional borders of aesthetics in a sometimes vicious way,” Küster says. “Bacon more outspokenly expressive, Giacometti more inwardly destructive.”

Martin Gayford neatly encapsulates the creative mayhem of Bacon, Freud and co

The story of art in the 20th century was meant to be the death of painting. Photography would emerge pre-eminent. The unsleeping eye of the camera would see off the smocked dauber in his atelier, or at least that’s what was in the script. Even when artists remained stubbornly attached to their palettes, the critics predicted that they would abandon figurative studies in favour of the splashy canvases of New York’s Abstract expressionism instead. But in a post-war London smashed to smithereens and on rations, where a straitened National Gallery put just one picture a month on display, painters somehow found a “confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvellous things”, according to Martin Gayford, the art critic of The Spectator.

The results can be seen in the current blockbuster show at Tate Britain, All Too Human, and in Gayford’s scholarly yet terrifically readable survey, which arrives just in time to serve as the exhibition’s unofficial guidebook. If it wasn’t clear already, we can see that our bombed-out capital, where the likes of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud got their start, was the unlikely cradle of an arts scene which would become the equal of anything going on elsewhere.

One measure of this is the prices achieved by members of the so-called London painters. Bacon expected short shrift from posterity and the art market. “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter,” the old hell-raiser told the proprietor of the Colony Room, the infamous Soho dive. But his Three Studies of Lucian Freud fetched almost £90 million at auction in 2013. As Gayford writes, “This state of affairs would have been utterly unimaginable in 1969, when the picture was painted, let alone in the mid-1940s when Bacon and Freud first met.”

Gayford’s sumptuously illustrated “group biography” of David Hockney, Bacon, Freud, Frank Auerbach, Bridget Riley and others covers the period from 1945 to 1970. It follows A Crisis of Brilliance (2009) by David Boyd Hancock, which did a similar thing for an earlier generation of British artists, including Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. But Gayford has the advantage that he has met and interviewed many of his subjects. He sat for Freud, for a picture and a book — both entitled Man With a Blue Scarf — and has published his conversations with Hockney. To imagine that he is an amanuensis to the London painters scarcely does him justice. He is more like their Vasari.

As Gayford explains, there never was a London school in anything other than name, no unifying technique or philosophy. While several pursued figurative painting, others like Riley and Gillian Ayres did indeed explore abstraction. Howard Hodgkin appeared to be in this camp, too, though he insisted his long brooded-over swathes of colour were autobiographical, based on moments in his life.

Several of Gayford’s characters, notably Hockney, weren’t even near the metropolis when they produced some of their finest work. It’s a mark of the author’s own talents that he has managed to herd such diverse and often unbiddable figures into a satisfying and insightful group portrait.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the lives of his artists are so colourful. Connoisseurs will admire the rich patina on Gayford’s anecdotes, such as the one about the fine dining experience chez Bacon, where as one guest put it, “the salad bowl was likely to have paint on it and the painting to have salad dressing on it”. Auerbach, the Escoffier of impasto, once told me that Bacon had introduced him to decent bottles of wine, and Freud had been his guide at the green baize tables of the casinos. Among this circle, alcohol was a more important solvent than turps. Whereas the Swiss artist Paul Klee famously took a line for a walk, the London painters took it on a pub crawl.

Modernists and Mavericks, Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters by Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson, £24.95)

When Francis Bacon asked a friend to destroy one of two paintings in his studio, he said it was the “one on the left”.

Bacon’s idea of left turned out to be as distinctive as his art, resulting in a disastrous mistake — the destruction of a painting that would now be worth about £35m.

The artist’s friend was Barry Joule, who lived close to his studio in South Kensington, London, and helped out with occasional odd jobs.

Joule revealed last week that he retrieved the painting on the left while Bacon was absent, cut it out of its frame and burnt it. Several hours later, however, Bacon telephoned in a fury, castigating Joule for destroying the wrong painting.

“In Francis’s mind, the one on the left was when you are standing with your back to the paintings,” Joule told The Sunday Times. “My left is on the left as you stand facing them. There was a huge volume of abuse.”

The problem arose from Bacon’s occasional insistence on destroying paintings he did not like, not least because he did not want people retrieving his rejects from his dustbin. So Joule was not surprised when Bacon called him in April 1986 with instructions to remove the “one on the left”. Bacon added: “I don’t like it. Get rid of it.”

The two pictures Joule found in the studio were both portraits of Gilbert de Botton, a prominent London banker and art collector whose son, Alain, is the well-known author and philosopher.

Joule said he admired both paintings but he could not ignore the artist’s wishes. He removed the picture on his left (but not, it turned out, on Bacon’s left), took a knife to the canvas, sawed through its wooden framework and took the mangled remains to a local rubbish dump, where they were duly burnt.

Joule went to bed, only to be woken at 4am by Bacon, who had just returned from a long night of gambling and drinking. The artist was screaming and swearing down the phone “at the top of his lungs”. With the foulest language, he accused Joule of having taken away the wrong portrait, screaming at him: “Any fool knows left is left with your back to it. You destroyed a very, very good painting.” Joule added: “I was close to him, and pretty cut up.”

Bacon refused to talk to him for the next few weeks, ignoring messages and an apologetic note. Eventually, he cooled off and invited Joule to lunch, and the friendship continued until the artist’s death in 1992 at the age of 82.

What makes the incident all the more painful is that Joule recalls Bacon describing the surviving portrait as “very second-rate, a rushed, hurried picture”.

De Botton, who died in 2000 aged 65, was a distinguished benefactor and collector who backed the artist’s retrospective at the Tate in 1985. Bacon offered to paint his portrait as a thank-you, although “he wasn’t all that keen and kept putting it off”, Joule said.

He claimed De Botton never knew about the destroyed portrait and was delighted with the version he received. This helped to smooth things over between Joule and Bacon, whose friendship began in 1978 after the artist heard a “thump” on his roof and called out to Joule from his window, asking him if he could see anything.

Joule spotted a fallen aerial, repaired it and was invited in for champagne. He said Bacon later gave him artworks, including 1,200 sketches from his studio valued at an estimated £20m in 2004 when he donated them to the Tate. He kept 120 drawings for himself, and is lending 70 to an exhibition in Italy, at the Foundation Sorrento Museum in Sorrento from May 19 until October 21.

Joule recalls that the portrait he destroyed depicted De Botton as a double body reflected in a mirror, grimacing in one likeness and with a “half Mona Lisa smile” in the other. The surviving portrait shows him open-mouthed. Bacon’s work is in such demand today that, in 2013, his 1969 portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for a record £89m.

It wasn’t the last time Bacon lost his temper over the world’s inability to understand his concept of left and right, and Joule recalls Bacon erupting again when they once posed together for a photograph on a visit to the artist Richard Hamilton.

“I said to Francis, ‘It’s better if you stand on my left,’ and the whole thing flared up again. He yelled: ‘Left! I know you know left and right from the terrible catastrophe of the painting.’ On and on, he blasted me again . . . It still gives me nightmares.” The photograph taken on that occasion shows Bacon in mid-rant.

With the big-ticket spring sales of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art in New York just about a month away, the auction houses have begun to trickle out news of their priciest offerings, and today Christie’s revealed that it has on tap a large Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait (1977), with an on-request estimate that is said to be in the region of $30 million.

The work is fresh to market, coming from the holdings of collector Magnus Konow, who acquired it from Marlborough Gallery in the ’70s and has held onto it ever since. Konow and Bacon were friends, and spent time gambling in the casinos of Monte Carlo, which sounds like a pretty great time. Measuring some 78 by 58 inches, the painting depicts Bacon’s lover George Dyer, who died in 1971. “Bacon would always talk about Dyer,” Konow said in a statement issued by Christie’s. “I think that he was the only man he really loved in his life. I find this work is so powerful—for me it is probably one of the best paintings of their mystical love affair, and that’s what drew me to it.

In November 2013, a 1969 Bacon triptych of fellow painter Lucian Freud sold at Christie’s in New York for $142.4 million, then a record for the most ever paid for a piece of art ever sold at auction (at least when not account for inflation). That figure has been eclipsed by works by Modigliani, Picasso, and, of course, Leonardo.

Half-a-billion dollars of 20th century art is hanging at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London for a few days this week, waiting to go to New York for sale next month. From Basquiat, Picasso and Monet, to Rothko, Warhol, and Giacometti, they are all there as a roll-call of the greats.

Carrying the highest price tag of around $70 million at Christie’s is a curvaceous 1930s polished bronze of the American heiress, Nancy Cunard, by Constantin Brancusi. A portrait of Elvis Presley, valued at $30 million, will test the Warhol market as it was bought six years ago for slightly more than that.

The latest addition to this line-up, announced today and on view in London for the first time since it was painted and bought in 1977, is a large figure painting by Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, also estimated at $30 million. The painting is thought to refer to the artist’s lover, George Dyer, who died six years earlier.

After a long period of dark paintings, Bacon here comes to terms with grief with a lighter palette, imagining Dyer’s reincarnation. It is being sold by Monaco based collector, Magnus Konow, with whom Bacon would stay when in the principality.

A painting by Francis Bacon of his lover and muse George Dyer will be shown in London for the first time in more than 40 years this week, ahead of its debut auction at Christie’s in New York in May.

Painted in Paris in 1977, Study for Portrait was last exhibited in London the same year in the Royal Academy group exhibition, British Painting: 1952-77. It is now on view from today, 9 April, until Friday, 13 April, at Christie’s London.

The canvas, which is estimated in the region of $30m, is described by Francis Outred, Christie’s chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art, as “a glowing, visceral celebration of Bacon’s most iconic muse”.

In 1971, six years before Bacon painted the portrait, Dyer had killed himself in the couple’s hotel room, just two days before the opening of Bacon’s first mid-career retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Tormented by grief, Bacon returned frequently to Dyer’s image in the ensuing years, producing a series of Black Triptych portraits in the early 1970s.

However, pierced by shafts of bright blue and yellow paint and smears of red pigment, Study for Portrait represents a shift in style for Bacon as he built a new life for himself in Paris.

The painting is being sold by the collector Magnus Konow, the son of a Norwegian Olympic sailor who befriended Bacon in the 1970s. During this period, Bacon regularly visited Monaco, sometimes with Lucian Freud, where he would stay with Konow, gambling in Monte Carlo’s casinos sometimes for days at a time. Konow bought the work from Bacon through Marlborough Gallery shortly after it was painted, and has kept the work in his collection until now.

Bacon’s market has rocketed in recent years. A triptych of the artist’s friend and rival Lucian Freud sold for $142m in New York in 2013, becoming the most expensive post-war and contemporary work of art ever sold at auction. And last May another triptych of Dyer sold at Christie’s for $51.8m.

But there have been minor blips too. In October last year, a 1971 study of Dyer and a Pope with an estimate of £60m failed to sell at Christie’s in London. Outred acknowledges this was “a disappointment”, but describes Bacon’s market as robust. “He has consistently been at the top of the contemporary art market throughout his life and since,” Outred says. Indeed, with a third-party guarantee, this painting has effectively been sold already.

We are greeted at the start of this exhibition by a painting of 1906 by Walter Sickert, “The Studio; The painting of a nude”. Positioned behind the artist, we watch as he pauses, paintbrush in hand, to study his subject: a naked woman who stands awkwardly in a dingy domestic interior. Dramatizing the act of painting and suggesting psychological tension between artist and subject, the picture is a well-chosen epigraph for what is to follow. It is among a group of works in which Sickert reinvented the nude, stripping it of conventional mythological and literary trappings and showing it in the raw. He deplored the routine idealization of bodies in contemporary academic art, comparing the “vacuous images dignified by the name of the Nude” to popular music-hall acts known as “living pictures” in which curiously lifeless models appeared in flesh-coloured body stockings. As the exhibition’s principal curator, Elena Crippa, points out in the catalogue, Sickert sought instead to capture what he called “the sensation of a page tom from the book of life”. This idea is at the heart of the exhibition – to explore how figurative painters since Sickert have sought to express, in paint, the messy, complex and unheroic realities of human experience.

The exhibition’s title — All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a century of painting life — is somewhat misleading in that it appears to suggest a progression through the decades of the twentieth century with a focus on the human figure, in particular the nude. Once in the galleries, however, it becomes clear that the exhibition’s scope is both smaller and larger. The “Century” is not an entire century: at the core of the show are paintings made between the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the 1990s, mostly by artists associated with the School of London. It is topped by an introductory section in which Sickert is joined by three other important figurative painters of the early twentieth century, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer and Chaim Soutine, and tailed by a final room of recent works by Celia Paul, Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. But, throughout, “Life” is defined broadly, to encompass figures clothed or nude, alone or interacting, animals, artists’ studios and urban surroundings.

To walk from the first gallery to the next is to be transported silently from one side of the Second World War to the other – the latest paintings in the introductory room date from 1935, the earliest in the next 1945. The curators' decision not to devote a section of the exhibition to paintings created by Official War Artists such as Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash is an odd one, especially as the urban environment features so strongly. If those ten years are passed over in silence, however, the works by Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti in the next gallery all but vibrate with their accumulated horror. The intense studies of isolation here pull us up short; the relationships between artist and subject depicted in the first room may have been distinctly uncomfortable, but at least they existed. These abrasive images from the immediate post-war years are of singularity, fear and pain. Bacon’s “Figure in a Landscape” of 1945 dominates the room, the bulky,figure with his folded hands both pitiful and horrifying, while the single, distressed animals in “Dog” (1952) and “Study of a Baboon” (1953) exude existential horror. In the centre is a single sculpture by Alberto Giacometti of an attenuated, painfully constrained female figure. Paintings and sculpture alike bear the traces of their making, retaining gestures made with brush and fingers. The next room contains fiercely provocative, even nihilistic paintings by a less well-known artist, F. N. Souza, including “Crucifixion” (1959), depicting Christ as tortured and malevolent, and the grotesquely sexualized, skullheaded “Black Nude” (1961).

At this point the exhibition takes a sharp,turn. After Bacon’s existential whirlpools and the choppy waters of Souza’s anguished expressionism, the next gallery offers millpond calm with works by William Coldstream, Professor of the Slade School of Fine Art from 1949 until 1975. Coldstream, represented here by two nudes and a still life, thought painting should coolly record the appearance of things, no more, no less, and he devised a system for transcribing what he saw onto the canvas that involved measuring spaces between different points and marking them with horizontal and vertical lines in a neurotic attempt to pin down reality. His fastidious dedication to close observation exerted a considerable influence on younger artists including Euan Uglow, his sometime student, and Lucian Freud, a visiting tutor at the Slade. Freud’s mercilessly detailed portraits of his first wife Kitty Garman, “Girl with a Kitten” (1947) and “Girl with a White Dog” (1950-51), both bear out what he described as his “visual aggression” with sitters; “I would sit very close and stare”, he recalled. “It could be uncomfortable for both of us.” I bet it could. But mostly, I suspect, for the sitter.

The next two galleries present another contrast, taking us from the studio out onto London streets, to comers of Spitalfields, Mornington Crescent and St Pancras in the company of Bomberg and his younger associates Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. These artists rejected Coldstream’s insistence on cool observation and precise execution (Bomberg dismissed it as “hand and eye disease”) in favour of a freer kind of painting that attempted to convey the full experience of being in a place: how it felt physically and emotionally. In their hands painting became more gestural and visceral and, as Auerbach’s “Head of E. O. W. I.” (1960) and Kossoff’s “Early Morning, Willesden Junction” (1962) both show, tantamount to sculpture in its surface quality.

Freud, too, responded to the possibilities of a more gestural approach to painting. In the late 1950s he abandoned the small sable brushes that had enabled him to paint with such minute precision and instead took up thick paintbrushes made of hog’s hair. The capacity for attention that enabled him to paint individual eyelashes with such rigour was now directed towards depicting flesh as he searched for a more profound way of representing the essence of a human being. “I’m not trying to make a copy of the person”, he said. “I’m trying to relay something of who they are as a physical and emotional presence. I want the paint to work as flesh does.” The curators have gathered fourteen paintings by Freud made between 1961 and 2004, and this gallery is a high point of the exhibition, offering a sustained exploration of a master at work. Paintings by Bacon in the next room include a portrait of Freud, exhibited for the first time since 1965. This is not so much a portrait as a contest between the two biggest beasts of the School of London: Bacon pinning Freud to the spot with his terrible scrutiny, Freud twisting and grimacing defiantly, feet up in a show of insouciance.

One of the stories the exhibition tells consistently well is of connections between artists and chains of influence from one generation to the next. School of London stalwarts Michael Andrews and R. B. Kitaj were each influenced by Bacon, and both were fascinated by interactions between multiple figures-Andrews’s “Colony Room I” (1962) even includes portraits of Bacon (with his back to us) and Freud (fixing us with a challenging stare) along with the Soho drinking club’s proprietor, Muriel Belcher. Enigmatic interactions within large figure groups also fuel compositions by Paula Rego, such as her triptych “The Betrothal: Lessons: The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage a la Mode’ by Hogarth” (1999). Rego studied at the Slade with Andrews and Uglow, but despite this shared background, her complex, emotional, storytelling pictures are fundamentally different. Surrounded by her work, one feels as though the volume has suddenly been turned up.

The powerful impact made by Rego’s compositions at this late stage, and the fresh recalibration required of the viewer, indicate a faultline that runs throughout the exhibition. Is there just too much here? A related issue is that the subject chosen by the curators is so vaguely defined that some choices seem arbitrary; it is possible to stand in front of many of the works here and ask: why this particular painting and not another? While in some cases the selection could not be more pertinent – Bacon’s portrait of Freud is a case in point, and the curators must be congratulated for securing the loan – in others it was evidently prompted by more pragmatic concerns (about a third of the paintings here are from the Tate). The exhibition’s ambitious scope and structural looseness, and the frequent interruptions to its narrative drive that are a consequence of this, have the effect of making it feel more like a sequence of permanent galleries than a temporary exhibition. To approach it expecting a satisfying, systematic narrative is to risk leaving it feeling distinctly disconcerted. Nevertheless, All Too Human succeeds in bringing together many important works and in making telling connections between them, and it puts forward a convincing case for the continuing vitality, relevance – and even necessity – of figurative painting.

The 20th century paint Francis Bacon wasn’t an abstract artist. As Professor Martin Hammer writes in our Francis Bacon book, “crucially for its wide appeal, Bacon’s aesthetic vision was figurative rather than abstract, possessing a very immediate visual impact.”

Bacon wasn’t especially fond of abstract art either. He once jokingly referred to the spots on the walls of his studio where he tested colours out, as his “few abstract pictures”.

Now a set of taped conversations, recorded by Bacon’s friend and driver Barry Joule towards the end of the artist’s life, offers some insight into Bacon’s views on one particular abstract work: False Start, an important 1959 painting by the American painter Jasper Johns.

That US work, created towards the end of abstract expressionism and the beginning of pop art, bridges both these movements and, as Professor Isabelle Loring Wallace writes in our Johns book, “blazes with celebratory hues, its energized aesthetic a striking complement to the title’s suggestion that something short-lived has come to an end.”

Bacon, however, took a different view. “It is such a ridiculous thing,” Bacon told Joule, prompted partly in air his views after the painting achieved a very high sale price $17 million at auction in 1988. “The whole thing, it is nothing. It is just a series of a number of diagonal scratches going in different directions in red and blue.”

Asked why he believed abstract works such as False Start were commanding such high prices, Bacon goes on to state, “it is the fashion. It is what the Americans are interested in; they are not interested in art. They are only interested in being talked about – about being mixed up in the latest thing … now it has become absolutely ridiculous in America.”

Andy Warhol was another artist whom Bacon dismissed. In the same set of taped recordings, which Joule was permitted to make so long as they were not shared publicly until 12 years after Bacon’s death in 1992, the painter criticised the Warhol works he had seen recently as part of the Royal Academy’s 1991 pop art exhibition. “These pictures are bad,” Bacon can be heard saying. “The Andy Warhols are very bad.”

Interesting, Hammer does draw comparisons, as well as distinctions, between Warhol’s work and Bacon’s.

“In common with that of numerous other artists in recent decades, Bacon’s work also utilizes elements from photography and film,” Hammer points out. “Yet in his case such allusions are not just recycled, as Warhol did, but transformed into visceral pictorial statements.”

Bacon himself wasn’t always pleased with these ‘statements’ in retrospect. Around the same time as these private converations were being taped, Bacon dismissed his Screaming Popes series as a failure, in a far more public BBC interview with the critic Richard Cork. “If you can’t be harsh about your own work,” Bacon said, “what else can you be harsh about?” Quite a bit, as it would turn out.”

We like to think of great artists as above the fray, even though by now we should know better. Tapes have just emerged of Francis Bacon slagging off his fellow artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol in 1991.

Told that an abstract painting by Jasper Johns has just sold for £12 million, the 81-year-old Bacon says: ‘It is such a ridiculous thing. The whole thing, it is nothing. It is just a series of a number of diagonal scratches going in different directions in red and blue.’

In fact, Bacon’s feelings towards Jasper Johns surfaced over 30 years ago. In 1986, he was filmed gossiping with the demonic writer William Burroughs. ‘I try never to think about Jasper Johns,’ he said. ‘I hate the stuff and I don’t like him either.’

He was equally dismissive of Andy Warhol. ‘These pictures are bad . . . very bad,’ he said. ‘It is dull really. I thought it might just have some superficial excitement, but it doesn’t even have that.’

Some think it astonishing that such a respected painter should be so bitchy about his fellow artists. But Bacon had a track record of camp put-downs of rivals. He once compared Picasso to Walt Disney and Jackson Pollock’s splashy abstract canvases to ‘old lace’.

At other times, he said Matisse painted ‘squalid little forms’ and, of David Hockney’s paintings, ‘there’s really nothing there’.

He was equally rude about some of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century. He pooh-poohed Samuel Beckett: ‘I loathe all those ghastly dustbins on stage.’ As a young man, he had been invited to lunch with Virginia Woolf. He remembered her as ‘a monster . . . she shouted all the way through lunch. She began by shouting and just carried on all the way through.’

Artists who considered themselves his friends were given short shrift as soon as their backs were turned. He complained that Lucian Freud was too cautious a painter, whose best work was behind him. He also put it about that Freud ended up as a heterosexual only because his private parts were too small to be of interest to the gay community.

But Freud was able to give as good as he got. He told his friend John Richardson that Bacon’s later paintings lacked inspiration.

‘What had been the subject matter of his pictures became paraphernalia,’ he said. ‘ . . . with the urgency gone, some elements just seemed to be in the way, like bits of gauze left inside a patient’s stomach by a forgetful surgeon.’

Such rivalry is nothing new, even among the very greatest. When Michelangelo visited Titian in his studio in Rome in 1545, he warmly praised his latest painting to his face. But when he left, he changed his tune. It was a shame, he said, that Venetian painters like Titian had never been taught to draw.

Around the same time, two sculptors, Cellini and Bandinelli, fell out over an ancient Greek statue. Cellini thought it magnificent; Bandinelli thought it useless. Their patron Cosimo de’ Medici asked Cellini to explain their difference of opinion.

‘Your Most Illustrious Excellency must understand that Baccio Bandinelli is thoroughly evil, and always has been,’ he said, as Bandinelli stood there in front of them. ‘So no matter what he looks at, as soon as his disagreeable eyes catch sight of it, even though it’s of superlative quality it is at once turned to absolute evil.’

Cellini recalled that during this monologue, Bandinelli ‘kept twisting and turning and making the most unimaginably ugly faces — and his face was ugly enough already.’ But by now Cellini had the wind behind him, and proceeded to write off every element of a particular sculpture by Bandinelli — head, shoulders, torso, arms, legs.

All in all, he concluded, it was sculpted ‘so clumsily and unskilfully that nothing worse has ever been seen’. All of which suggests that, in what Auberon Waugh used to term ‘the vituperative arts’, our own age lacks the magnificence of eras past. Compared to the great Cellini, Francis Bacon was almost sycophantic.

THIS NEW BOOK outlines Francis Bacon’s many links to Monaco and Paris. The title is published by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation of Monaco and edited by Majid Boustany, the foundation’s director. The foundation owns a considerable group of original works by Bacon, as well as original documents and photographs relating to the artist. This new bilingual English-French catalogue documents the British artist’s Francophilia.

Bacon’s love of French culture dated back to 1927. At the age of 17, Bacon stayed in Paris to learn French. A visit to an exhibition of Picasso’s new art inspired the young man to become a Modernist artist. To escape the bleakness of bomb-damaged London, Bacon spent most of the late 1940s in Monaco, making his livelihood from gambling. (The book includes a facsimile of Bacon’s handwritten 1947 form for a Monégasque identity card.) Bacon lived in hotels in Monaco with his elderly nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, and lover, Eric Allden. A map locates Bacon’s residences in Monaco from the 1940s and 1950s.

It seems the ambience of luxury, hedonism and risk was a stimulant to Bacon’s nervous system. The proximity of the beautiful sea and rugged severity of Mont Agel juxtaposed strongly with the heightened artificiality and cultivated isolation typical of Monaco life. Bacon’s paintings of jets of water breaking over machinery and sand dunes drifting around rigid geometric boundaries are the product of the juxtaposition of artificiality and nature.

Although few paintings from the 1940s survive, some were made in Monaco. Bacon wrote to Graham Sutherland in 1946 that he had started his first version of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X while in Monaco. In the 1970s and 1980s Bacon had an apartment in Paris, where he was more productive than in his Monaco period. He respected the opinions on art of the French above all others.

Short texts by experts and memoirs of acquaintances provide new insights into Bacon’s life and attitudes to art. The production quality is excellent and displays the attention to detail that makes the foundation building so striking. The cover is velvety grey and the end-papers are Baconian cadmium orange. High quality reproductions of private snapshots, original documents and paintings bring Bacon’s time in France and Monaco vividly to life.

• Alexander Adams is a British artist and writer. His latest book, On Art, is published by Golconda Books

British master calls Johns painting False Start ‘ridiculous’ and Warhol’s works ‘very bad’

They are two of the most revered American pop artists of the 20th century, but Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol were a source of derision for Francis Bacon, according to previously unheard recordings released to the Guardian.

The British master can be heard dismissing one of Johns’s paintings as “ridiculous” and calling Warhol’s works “very bad”.

His criticisms have come to light in private conversations taped by his friend Barry Joule, who lived 20 metres from Bacon’s studio and home in South Kensington.

The two men had struck up a friendship in 1978 when Bacon invited Joule for some champagne after he had repaired another neighbour’s TV aerial. The friendship lasted until the artist’s death in 1992.

Bacon agreed to be recorded on condition that Joule did not release the tapes until at least 12 years after his death.

On one of them, Bacon spoke of his astonishment that Johns’s 1959 abstract painting, a red, yellow and blue canvas titled False Start, had sold in 1988 for $17.05m (£12m).

“It is such a ridiculous thing,” he said. “The whole thing, it is nothing. It is just a series of a number of diagonal scratches going in different directions in red and blue.”

Johns, now 87, has been described as America’s foremost living artist, admired for his trademark images of flags and targets.

A major retrospective, titled Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth, was staged at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year, and is now in America, at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.

At the 1988 sale at Sotheby’s, False Start was reportedly purchased by New York art dealer Larry Gagosian, who ignored the pre-sale estimate of $4m to $5m

Subsequent reports suggest that, in 2006, the Johns painting was sold to a US collector, Kenneth Griffin, for $80m, while one of his signature 1950s flag paintings went to the US hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen for $110m

Bacon once told another friend: “When I die, my paintings won’t be worth anything, I’ll be forgotten.”

Yet his prices soared dramatically after his death. His 1969 portrait titled Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold in 2013 in New York for a record $142.4m. The buyer was rumoured to be the US billionaire art collector Elaine Wynn.

On the recording, Joule asked Bacon to explain why “some supposedly sane people will pay a huge sum of money for something like” the Johns painting.

Bacon replied: “It is the fashion. It is what the Americans are interested in … they are not interested in art. They are only interested in being talked about – about being mixed up in the latest thing … now it has become absolutely ridiculous in America.”

Bacon was no less scathing about Warhol. On the tapes, he can be heard dismissing the 1991 pop art exhibition at the Royal Academy. Having just returned from a visit, he said: “These pictures are bad. The Andy Warhols are very bad.”

Joule has a photograph of Bacon looking at one of those Warhols, the car crash imagery from the Death and Disaster series, reflecting Warhol’s obsession with news reports of violent death.

The whole exhibition had disappointed Bacon, who added: “It is dull really. I thought it might just have some superficial excitement, but it doesn’t even have that.”

The artist’s paintings are featured in Tate Britain’s current exhibition, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life. In 2004, Joule donated a collection of 1,200 sketches from Bacon’s studio, then valued at an estimated £20m, to the Tate. It was described as one of the gallery’s most generous gifts.

Joule has decided to release the recordings ahead of an exhibition of about 60 drawings which he kept and which he is lending to an exhibition in Italy, at the Villa Fiorentino museum in Sorrento between 19 May and 21 October.

Many critics—most notably Michael Billington, James Knowlson, Jane Alison Hale, Erik Tonning, and Peter Fifield—have discussed the painter Francis Bacon’s probable influence on the visual images in Samuel Beckett’s work for the stage, particularly the disembodied mouth in the 1972 play Not I.¹ This, however, is not the only way in which the work of these two artists is connected. Both men, each from an Anglican family residing in Leinster, shared an interest in depicting their exile from Ireland by superimposing two images on top of one another in their work.² Bacon depicted the “fragmentation of self ” that results from exile by superimposing two faces on one another in his portraits.³ “Distortion, or contortion, in Bacon’s pictures sometimes occurs by his superimposing one image on another,” and the resulting obscured faces, especially those in his celebrated self-portraits, evoke the idea that an exile is “distorted” by residing outside the country in which he or she was born and raised.⁴ In Beckett’s case, he depicted the psychological “distortion” engendered by geographical exile by superimposing places he lived as an adult on the greater Dublin of his youth. In the Four Novellas (written in 1946), Beckett performs, as Gerry Dukes has pointed out, “a kind of double exposure or montage in which he superimposes Paris and the river Seine on Dublin and the river Liffey.”⁵ Likewise, Scott Eric Hamilton has demonstrated that Beckett set the novel Murphy (1938) in a part of London laid out much like Dublin (even down to the repetition of certain placenames) to signify the confusion of the exile who, in many ways, resides in two places at once.⁶ Beckett also superimposes an English town or suburb on the Dublin suburbs in his 1960 radio play The Old Tune.

The expressionist painter Francis Bacon was born on Dublin’s south side in 1909. His mother was born in England but had Irish family connections; his Australian-born, English-raised father was a former British army officer who dealt in horses and was a strict disciplinarian. The family moved in the circles of the Irish gentry, and Bacon was raised in Big Houses in County Kildare (Cannycourt in Kilcullen and Straffan Court near Naas) and County Laois (Farmleigh in Abbeyleix, which originally belonged to Bacon’s maternal grandmother before it was purchased by his father). Around the time of his seventeenth birthday, Bacon was banished from his family home after his father discovered him modeling his mother’s underwear in front of a large mirror. The young man moved to London, where he spent most of his adult life (though he spent two years in Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s).⁷

Bacon’s conflicted relationship with his Irish identity is evident from his frequent evasiveness on the subject. He would occasionally insist that he was not in any significant way Irish, and he actually suffered panic attacks whenever he attempted to fly back to his native country.⁸ That said, Bacon would also regularly tell interviewers that it was important to remember that he was born and raised in Ireland when considering certain aspects of his work.9 Even moresignificant, throughout Bacon’s career, he fostered an image of himself as “the untutored lad, coming straight from the wilds of Ireland to produce a body of inexplicable, haunting images.”¹⁰ A notable example of this occurred before his first retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1962; he explained to Sir John Rothenstein, the director of the Tate, that “I had no upbringing at all . . . I used simply to work on my father’s farm near Dublin. I read almost nothing as a child—as for pictures, I was hardly aware they existed.”¹¹

Bacon’s sense of his own Irish identity can be seen from the fact that he “would always speak with affection and admiration about Ireland and the Irish,” that he had a great love of Irish writers (Joyce and Yeats, for example, but also the work of such contemporary writers as his friend Caroline Blackwood), and that he “hated . . . British [political] hypocrisy” as it manifested itself in the nation’s colonial misadventures. Indeed, according to his friend and biographer Daniel Farson, Bacon believed “that the English had been saved by the Irish and the Scots . . . [and] that it was the Celts that made Britain great.”¹² Bacon’s relative lack of respect for the British monarchy might also be considered an Irish aspect of his personality. He once booed Princess Margaret at a house party because she was singing badly, which appalled the English guests, but fascinated the proud Irishwoman Blackwood, who later wrote,

I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the Royal family in a private house. Among all the guests assembled in Lady Rothermere’s ballroom, more than a few were secretly suffering from Princess Margaret’s singing, but they suffered in silence, gagged by their snobbery. Francis could not be gagged. If he found a performance shoddy no conventional trepidation prevented him from expressing his reactions.¹³

Even if Bacon may not have always owned his Irish identity, he always recognized that his Irish upbringing was central to his work; he told Peppiatt on several occasions that he thought “artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people.”¹⁴Bacon traced the violence in his work back to the horrors he witnessed and the threats his family endured during the Anglo-Irish War and the civil war. Growing up on the Curragh shaped his love of landscapes as an adult. “I was brought up for much of my childhood on the edge of very flat marshlands full of snipe and plover,” he stated. “That’s the kind of country I find exciting.”¹⁵ And, in what Peppiatt calls “a rare admission of a direct influence,” Bacon acknowledged that the shape of many of Farmleigh’s rooms “may have been the origin of the curved backgrounds which occur in so many of his compositions.”¹⁶

Critics have noted other ways in which Bacon was shaped by his Irish upbringing.¹⁷ Particularly compelling is Peppiatt’s theory regarding the origins of “the tangibly violent sexuality that suffuses so much of [Bacon’s] imagery.”¹⁸ Francis said that his father used to discipline him by having the grooms in the training stables horsewhip him; he also claimed that his first sexual encounters were with his father’s grooms. If the same grooms were involved in the flogging and the sex, it is “tempting,” as Peppiatt notes, to suggest this as the source of Bacon’s interest in sadomasochism in both his personal life and his art.¹⁹Bacon’s view of his own sexuality was clearly shaped by his Irish upbringing. Bacon, who described himself as “completely homosexual” and who never doubted his sexual orientation (even from earliest childhood), was known, in darker moods, to refer to his homosexuality as “a defect” or “like having a limp.”²⁰ Being gay in a childhood home and society that was hostile to same-sex relations profoundly contributed to the obsession with identity that marks his work.

Bacon’s formative years were spent among the unique, culturally hybrid, Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. As a member of the Irish gentry—and, by extension, the wider British aristocracy—Francis was forced to participate in fox hunts and balls. He hated the hunts, developing a severe allergy to horses and once remarking to Blackwood, “Surely there’s nothing worse . . . than the dusty saddle lying in the hall.”²¹ By contrast, he loved the balls, sometimes going to them in drag in the company of his beloved maternal grandmother. At these hunts and balls, there was a keen interest in the social standing of attendees. When Bacon moved to London as an adult, he arrived with a pre-existing sense of the United Kingdom’s class system and social hierarchies. Though Francis may have socialized with Anglo-Irish and British elite society at these balls—and may even have engaged in risky gender-bending—he did not feel prepared by these experiences for life among the sophisticated and the risqué in the capitals of Europe. In later life, he often linked his social “gaucheness” as a younger man and his initial shock over the sexual liberation he witnessed in Berlin and Paris to his provincial, Irish upbringing. His Anglo-Irish background prepared him for certain aspects of English social life, but being raised in Ireland made him feel like an outsider when he first moved into English high society.

Bacon’s family, like many others among the Irish gentry, sent their sons to British public schools. Francis was sent to Dean Close in Cheltenham, where his older brother had gone. Accounts differ as to how long Bacon managed to hang on at the school (some say “a few months” and others say a year and a half).²²But all agree that Bacon hated it and “made no mark at school.”²³ His time there would compound his sense of having a dual identity; when he moved to London in later life, he could say that he—like some of the people he was meeting— went to a British public school. However, this brief experience scarcely made him feel more English; indeed, it may have simply been a foretaste of how it felt to be Irish in England as an adult, as his only friends at the school were—by his own admission—other outsiders: fellow gays and “a Persian boy.”²⁴

Francis’s father had volunteered for a position in the War Office during World War I. This resulted in the family living in London for part of the war. Francis fell in love with Hyde Park, because it was the only area near the family’s London residence that reminded him of the landscape back home in Ireland. Although Bacon usually ascribed the violence in his work to the revolutionary period in Ireland, he did once tell Farson that the violence in his work was also traceable to the sense of threat his family felt owing to the bombing carried out by zeppelins during the war.²⁵ In this sense, the aspect of Bacon’s work most frequently described as “Irish” had an “Anglo” aspect, as well. The adult Bacon was uncertain about his “true self.” According to one friend, he seemed to have “a mortal fear of being taken for someone he didn’t want to be, and of being unmasked as someone he didn’t suspect he was,” and this resulted in him being struck with “terror” at the idea of having “a clearly defined identity.”²⁶ This was the perhaps inevitable reaction of a sensitive man whose background, upbringing, and displacement rendered his identity too complex to be explained by simple signifiers like name, nationality, and religion. In Bacon’s paintings, he elected to visually depict this “fragmentation of self ”—that is, the psychological “distortion” created by having an Irish self and an English self, an Irish past and an English past—by creating portraits in which he would paint the same face twice, on top of one other but at slightly different angles.²⁷ The resulting “fragmented faces,” which often “evoke the idea of a doubly-exposed photograph,” offer “a superimposition of states in which certain characteristics of the person concerned appear with exceptional intensity while others are obliterated.”²⁸In the case of self-portraits, this is Bacon’s visual representation of the way in which personality traits that might be thought of popularly as “Irish” or “English” are exaggerated or obliterated by the geographical displacement of exile.

As Richard Dorment has noted, in Bacon’s portraits, he was always “searching for the essence of the person, that elusive and constantly changing element that is an individual’s identity.”²⁹ A good example of Bacon’s attempt to capture the “elusive,” mercurial nature of a fragmented identity is his Self-Portrait from 1974. In this painting, the superimposing of one face on top of another results in special emphasis being placed on Bacon’s mouth, and also causes one of his ears to disappear. A careful look reveals, too, that Bacon is hinting that he has more than one set of eyes. Many critics assume that the personality split that Bacon depicts in self-portraits such as this one relates exclusively to his conflicted feelings over his homosexuality and his physical appearance.³⁰ Yet issues arising from exile and hyphenated identity might also suggest why, in Self-Portrait (1974), Bacon chose to exaggerate or obliterate these particular facial features.

Bacon’s use of “double exposure” has resulted in one of his two mouths appearing to have very large lips, making it a mouth reminiscent of the one at the center of Beckett’s Not I, which most critics believe was influenced by Bacon’s paintings.³¹ This large mouth arguably represents the talkative side of Bacon’s personality—a trait that his friends (and even Bacon himself) associated with his supposedly Irish habit of drinking heavily.³² The second set of lips, beneath the larger ones, are smaller and literally “down in the mouth.” This second mouth may represent the more diffident side of Bacon’s personality, which inclines him, as an outsider in a country not his own, to speak quietly, perhaps even with shame or self-pity. Richard Dorment is correct in contending that the “self-pity” evident in some of Bacon’s portraits is clearly linked to “the tormented artist’s struggle for identity.”³³ The presence of the two mouths also suggests that exile has split and exacerbated these two aspects of the immigrant Bacon’s personality. Overall, Bacon’s decision to distort the faces in his self-portraits—many are battered-looking and some even contain black voids or are missing features—suggests that Bacon believes that the exile is harmed or diminished by having lived in two different places and under two different codes.

In comparing Bacon’s “fragmented faces” to Samuel Beckett’s radio play The Old Tune, two important parallels emerge. First, The Old Tune is built around two old Irish men, Gorman and Cream, reminiscing about their younger days, much as, in Bacon’s later portraits, the central faces are often haunted by the “ghosts of younger lives.”³⁴Gorman and Cream argue over the details of their past, particularly matters concerning place, because they are confusing the English place where they have lived as adults with the Dublin suburb where they grew up, and the two places are, naturally, an imperfect match. In the same way, Bacon suggests through his “distorted” self-portraits that the Irish self and the English self, the Irish past and the English past, do not entirely match up, creating an argument within the self.

Ever since The Old Tune was first broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme on August 23, 1960, critics have disagreed about whether the play is set in England or Ireland. The Old Tune is a free translation of French writer Robert Pinget’s 1960 radio play La Manivelle, and, in an interview in 1967, Pinget claimed that when Beckett offered to translate the play, he said that he intended to set the English-language version in Dublin.³⁵ Commentators agree that the play’s characters speak in a rich Hiberno-English reminiscent of O’Casey, but there has been debate over whether the action actually takes place in Dublin.³⁶ Vivian Mercier and T.P. Dolan have suggested that the play is set “somewhere in England.”³⁷ The promotional material for John Calder’s edition of the play states that the setting is “what could be pre-independence Ireland.”³⁸ The editors of the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett are certain that the play is set in Beckett’s native Dublin.³⁹ A 2006 production of the play at the Kilkenny Arts Festival advertised the piece as taking place in “rural Ireland.”⁴⁰ Beckett’s letters confirm that the play’s two characters are Irishmen living in England, and, intriguingly, he feigns surprise when informed by Barbara Bray that her colleagues at the BBC are confused as to where the play is set (he claims that he “can’t see . . . what [Bray] means” when she insists that “difficulties . . . might exist for English listeners” if the two characters speak with Irish accents but refer to English places).⁴¹ Beckett’s claim that he cannot “understand” the BBC’s confusion over the play’s setting is disingenuous, however; he deliberately included personal names, placenames, and historical references in the play that could be either English or Irish.⁴² In a letter to Bray dated December 1, 1959, Beckett tells her that he cannot clear up the confusion over the setting by placing the two characters in Ireland, because “the two old chaps have a displaced persons quality which is perhaps not without significance.”⁴³ As this coy remark indicates, Beckett wants to suggest in the play that the two “displaced” men are confusing the Ireland where they were raised with the England where they currently live. Beckett thus adds an extra layer to the play not present in Pinget’s original. Whereas the confusion of Pinget’s old men is ascribable to dotage alone, Beckett’s Irishmen are at the mercy of both senility and the disorientation created by geographical exile.

As Vivian Mercier points out, these two characters do not just speak HibernoEnglish, they speak “some of the purest Dublin dialect to be found outside the plays of O’Casey and Brendan Behan.” Mercier goes on to gloss many of their “specifically Dublin expressions.”⁴⁴ It is also clear that the characters spent their youth in the Dublin suburbs (and not Dublin City), and have spent their adulthood in a town or suburb in England (and likewise, not in a city proper), because the forgetful old men repeatedly confuse the two semi-green, semi-urbanized places. Gorman and Cream claim to remember that in their youth, the area where they are standing was all fields and was considered “the outskirts.”⁴⁵ The word from Pinget’s original play that Beckett translates as “outskirts” is banlieue, which can also be translated as “suburbs.” The men are remembering the area as getting more built up over time, something that undoubtedly happened in both the Dublin suburb and the English town where they have passed their lives.

The two men both moved to England when they joined the British Army. Cream recalls that he joined the army in 1903, followed by Gorman in 1906; the towns where they say they were stationed are all in England.⁴⁶ Their faultymemories mean that we cannot be sure exactly where they were stationed— they debate whether they were in Chatham, Chester, Caterham, or Chesham. (In fact, they are likely confusing all of these places with Catterick, a major garrison town in North Yorkshire.) Arguments over the layouts of these towns—especially whether it was Morrison’s Pub or Harrison’s Oak Lounge on the corner in Chatham—suggest that they do not know these places very well. The men’s unfamiliarity with these towns casts additional doubt on the play’s setting. Listeners might legitimately conclude that it indicates that the men are living in Ireland and only dimly remember the England they lived in for a relatively brief time many years previously.

Beckett also obscures the play’s setting through the men’s discussions of Cream’s son, the County Court judge, who is described as “ladling out . . . divorces” (OT 13) as part of his job. The outlawing of divorce in Ireland in 1925, and Cream’s use of the British title of “County Court” judge, would lead many listeners to conclude that the play is set in England. It is presumably these same references that led John Calder to suggest that the setting is pre-Independence Ireland, when Irish law and legal institutions still originated in Westminster. Yet the play cannot have taken place in pre-Independence Ireland: the men are too young to have been senior citizens then, and further, they discuss as contemporary many things that happened long after Irish independence, such as the media hysteria about sending someone to the moon. All this talk of space travel suggests that they are having their conversation in the same year that Beckett’s translation was completed, 1960. Similarly, the two men discuss “atom rockets” (OT 11), so the play takes place after the nuclear age began.

Unsurprisingly, Beckett does not completely allow the divorce references and the British job title to confirm that the men raised their families in England and still live there. The only actual divorce case mentioned in the script is that of Gorman’s niece, which he remembers as having taken place “thirty years ago” (OT 12) or 1930. We can readily believe that a man with such a faulty memory is confused as to how long ago the case took place. His niece’s divorce case could have taken place before the Irish ban on divorce, and the confused old men could easily be mistaken in thinking that Cream’s son still “ladles” out divorces as part of his job as an Irish judge. Beckett deliberately leaves this point, and the job title, uncertain and open to interpretation. Whether or not the men did return to Ireland after their military service in England, they are still confusing laws, nomenclature, and events that took place in both countries. In this sense, the men reside psychologically in both countries at once.

Beckett performs another type of double exposure involving Ireland and England by means of his characters’ names. Gorman and Cream, as we have established, were born and raised in Ireland, and therefore, Beckett gives them plausibly Irish names; Gorman is definitely an Irish surname, and Cream could be.⁴⁷Many of the characters they recall from their youth in the 1890s, such as “Da” Drummond, Molly Berry, and Eva Hart, have what seem to be Irish names. Others from that phase of their lives possess what seem to be Irish Protestant names, such as St. John Fitzball and his relations Hester and Victoria, Oscar and Helen Bliss, Rosie Plumpton, Nelly Crowther, Alfred and Gertie Crumplin, and especially Mr. Overend: the Overend family were the colorful and well-known owners of the Airfield Estate in Dundrum, County Dublin, during Beckett’s formative years in nearby Foxrock. And yet, these names could also be English, and the men, in their dotage, may be confusing Protestants they knew in Ireland with English people they met after moving to England. Adding to this uncertainty, the people whom Cream’s children have married also have names that could be either English or Irish Protestant. Cream’s daughter, Bertha, married a man called Rupert Moody, and their children are called Hubert, Johnny, Ronnie, and the royalist-sounding “Queenie.”

On the basis of such names, we might surmise that Gorman and Cream— like countless real-life Irishmen—met English women while in the army and settled with them permanently in England. But names from Beckett’s biography and the play itself mitigate against such a straightforward conclusion. “Queenie” may sound quite English, but Beckett’s Irish landlady in London was a Queenie Frost, making the name yet another conflicted reference planted into the work by its author. Likewise, in the play, a figure from the old men’s youth, “Da” Drummond, is described as having bought a rubber hose “after the war 1920 maybe” (OT 8), suggesting that Gorman and Cream may have moved back to their native Ireland after World War I. Later in the play, when discussing a contemporary court case about a sex maniac, the old men cannot remember if the defendant’s surname is Carton or Barton. Carton is an Irish surname, and the surname Barton also belongs to a famous Protestant family from North Wicklow, a family that would have been known to the Synges and the Becketts.⁴⁸ Theold men’s faulty memories prevent us from completely trusting their recollections of names, but the cultural ambiguity of the names being debated—as well as Beckett’s decision to use Mrs. Frost’s enigmatic first name—are enough to keep listeners confused about the setting.

The placenames Beckett employs generate further confusion. The men are firmly convinced that the places from their fin-de-siècle childhood, when their fathers served on the local town council, took place in the area that surrounds them in the play, and they provide us with several of these local placenames. What is curious about the plethora of names provided in The Old Tune is its departure from Beckett’s frequent practice, in his postwar work, of describing places that the discerning reader will recognize as being in greater Dublin but which Beckett leaves unidentified.⁴⁹ Such unnamed Dublin places include the two canals in the novella First Love (written in 1946); the narrator’s visions of the gorse fires (probably on Howth or Three Rock Mountain), and the river that flows in “the wrong direction” into a bay with four beacons including one lightship, in the novella The End (1946); there is the house on a canal where a mother is dying, and a jetty that is probably Dun Laoghaire (or possibly Greystones) pier, in the 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape; and there is a bow window looking west toward the mountains in the 1980 novella Company (probably Cooldrinagh’s view of the Dublin Mountains).⁵⁰ The Old Tune, by contrast, contains numerous placenames but none that can be fixed in either Dublin or England. The Irish-sounding names in the play could be in England; indeed, there are locations all over England bearing the Irish-sounding placenames found in The Old Tune. ⁵¹ For example, there are a few references in the play to the Sheen Road. The road could be in Ireland, but there are also Sheen Roads in Richmond in Surrey, as well as in Orpington in Kent and in Eastbourne in East Sussex.Cream’s confusion of the Sheen Road with the Marston Road at one point may also suggest an English setting; there are seven Marston Roads scattered throughout England and none in Ireland.⁵²

But two things hint that Beckett meant an Irish road. One is the remarktthat Gorman’s father owned a place out on the Sheen Road in the 1890s, which makes it unlikely that it is a Sheen Road they only came to know after their move to England. Second, the Sheen Road in the play is described as being “out beyond Shackleton’s sawpit” (OT 8). The Shackletons were a prominent Kildare and Dublin family, the most famous of whom is the explorer Ernest Shackleton. But we still cannot be confident regarding the setting, because there are three places named Shackleton in London—Shackleton Court, Shackleton Lodge, and Shackleton House—and there is also a Shackleton Close in Ash Dale in Surrey. As far as listeners are concerned, when Gorman says that they did not get running water into the house on the Sheen Road until 1925, he might be accurately remembering that he had it put into the house he inherited from his father after he moved back to Ireland after World War I, or he might be remembering getting running water into his house in England and confusing it with the house he grew up in back in Ireland.

Another place named in the play is Cruddy. It is unclear from the text if it is the name of an area or the name of a house, such as “The Turrets,” mentioned later in the play. Gorman says that his family were still out at Cruddy in 1895, so it once again seems to be a place from the mens’ Irish childhoods, but, although Cruddy is an Irish surname, it is also a word in the English language. Thus, it could be a place in England that Gorman mistakenly remembers having been in the Ireland of his boyhood. A third seemingly Irish placename that may, in fact, be in England is the house referred to as Marrable. The men remember that this house burned down during their Irish youth in 1897, and, according to census records, there were two Protestant Marrable families living in south County Dublin in Beckett’s youth.⁵³ The son of one of these south Dublin Marrable families, Francis Arthur Marrable of Druid Hill, Cabinteely, died in World War I.⁵⁴ However, the Irishness of the play’s Marrable reference is compromised by the name Marrable itself, which is of English origin, and both of Francis’s parents were born in England. A personal connection between this family and the Becketts would be difficult to establish, but the Marrables did attend the Kilternan Church of Ireland near Foxrock. Francis’s mother, Mary Ann, is buried in the Kilternan church grounds, and, interestingly, several of the Anglo-Irish first names mentioned in The Old Tune appear on tombstones in that graveyard, including Queenie, Hubert, Hester, Victoria, Alfred, and Helen.⁵⁵ All of the deceased bearing these names were contemporaries of Beckett.

A mention of Swan’s Bookseller is another conflicted reference. If Swan is the owner’s surname, then it is another location with a name that could be either Irish or English. There have been prominent people named Swan in Dublin for centuries, including seven families in south County Dublin during Beckett’s youth. There was no Swan’s Bookseller in Dublin in Beckett’s time, but there was and is the famous Swan Bar, established in 1897. There is also a famous bookstore in Upminster in Essex called Swan Books. That said, Swan Books was established in 1937, more a year after Beckett left England (he lived in London intermittently between 1933 and 1935).

The final Irish-sounding place name that may actually be in England is Saint Theresa’s boarding school. Gorman and Cream say Nelly Crowther was sent to this convent school, where her manners were polished and where she was taught French. The name is ubiquitous throughout Ireland in relation to Roman Catholic institutions, sometimes in tribute to the French Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower of Lisieux, and sometimes in honor of the Spanish Saint Teresa of Ávila. (Beckett, of course, elects to reference the French saint when choosing the spelling for the boarding school in his play.) Beckett most likely chose the name because it seemed like a good generic name for a Catholic girl’s school and because its French resonances appealed to him.⁵⁶ If, however, he was thinking of an actual Irish or English institution, St. Teresa’s was, in Beckett’s youth, the name for what is now the George’s Hill Presentation Convent in Halston Street in Dublin 7. On the other hand, there is a St. Teresa’s boarding school for girls in Dorking in Surrey. If the Sheen Road mentioned in the play is the one in Richmond, then the men’s reference to Nelly being sent “out” to the school would work better than if the play were set in a Dublin suburb, because, in that case, Nelly would have been sent “in” to the St. Teresa’s in the Dublin city center.

The final place name mentioned is Pollox Street, an English-sounding name that could also be in Dublin. There is no Pollox Street in either England or in Ireland, but there is one in the fictional London of A.T. Quiller-Couch’s popular collection of horror stories Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (1900). Although we lack evidence that Beckett read this work, it is the type of lowbrow book that he often read in order to relax.⁵⁷ Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts would have been especially interesting to Beckett, as it was not only written by a man who used the Beckettian pseudonym of Q, it also deals with themes that obsessed Beckett throughout his career.⁵⁸ In the preface, Quiller-Couch writes that “The stories in this book are of revenants: persons who either in spirit or in body revisit old scenes, return upon old selves or old emotions, or relate a message from a world beyond perception.”⁵⁹ Haunted characters languishing in a purgatorial space are familiar figures in Beckett’s works such as The Unnamable (1953) or Play (1963).

In addition to embedding conflicted personal names, placenames, and historical references into the play, Beckett also creates confusion through the men’s repeated insistence that the Irish childhood and youth they reminisce about took place near the spot where they are standing in the play. For example, Gorman is convinced that the first motor car he ever saw as a youth was a Pic-Pic at the very corner of the street where the men are standing. Cream corrects him, saying the car in question was a “Dee Dyan Button” (OT 7). As it happens, Beckett’s father was the first person to own a De Dion Bouton in Ireland, and, as Beckett revealed in the semi-autobiographical novella Company (1980), his father sat in the car in the coach house while May Beckett was in labor with her famous son in April 1906. On the other hand, De Dion Bouton was the leading car manufacturer in the world by 1900 and this period of 1900 to Beckett’s birth in 1906 overlaps conveniently with Gorman and Cream joining the military and going to England—so, despite Beckett’s connection of the car to his Dublin childhood in Company, the sighting of the De Dion could easily have taken place after both men moved to England. Moreover, the Pic-Pic and De Dion argument also appears in Pinget’s La Manivelle.

Although the De Dion Bouton reference may not confirm an Irish setting, an Irish connection related to cars appears in the play in Beckett’s decision to use the surname Overend. Letitia and Naomi Overend, two remarkable sisters who resided at Airfield in Dundrum throughout Beckett’s Irish years, were well-known throughout Dublin for their love of automobiles. In making a free translation of a play consumed with automobiles (in addition to the Pic-Pic or De Dion debate, the stage directions refer repeatedly to the sound of cars passing), Beckett obviously recalled the familiar sight of Letitia driving her Rolls Royce and Naomi driving her Austin Tickford around south County Dublin in high style.⁶⁰

It appears then, that—although Beckett knows he is writing about two Irishmen living in England—he deliberately sabotages any attempt by listeners to pin down the location of play. In doing so, Beckett represents the mentality of people in exile. For these two old and clearly confused Irish men, the town where they grew up is fusing with the places in England where they have lived as adults, making them residents of both and neither at the same time. To invoke an overused and frequently misapplied concept, Gorman and Cream reside in a “liminal space.” Just as Beckett depicted psychological exile in the Four Novellas by superimposing “Paris and the river Seine on Dublin and the river Liffey,” and just as he set the novel Murphy in a part of London that was laid out in a similar fashion to Dublin, he has placed an English town or suburb on top of a Dublin suburb in The Old Tune. 61 Gorman and Cream are psychologically torn between Ireland and England—as are numerous other figures in modern Irish literature.⁶²This sense of being psychologically adrift between England and Ireland was well understood, not only by Beckett’s characters in The Old Tune, but also by Francis Bacon, as an artist from an Anglo-Irish background who spent most of his adult life in London.

Beckett and Bacon share more than a sense of exile from the Ireland of their birth; the work of both men is more Irish than critics often admit, particularly that of Bacon. But both artists allowed some ambiguity into their Irish identities, by acknowledging the British aspects that are necessarily part of an AngloIrish Protestant identity. In Bacon’s case, this Irish-British cultural hybridity is implicit in his tendency to emphasize, or alternately, to hide, his Irish origins in interviews and conversation. As for Beckett, The Old Tune is not the only example of his linking English and Irish culture, and English and Irish placenames, in his work. During Lucky’s speech in the English-language version of Waiting for Godot (1954), there is a reference to the Irish field game “camogie” butalso to what the Gaelic Athletic Association has traditionally regarded as “foreign games” (football, tennis, and “hockey of all kinds”), and Beckett changes the entirely French placenames from En Attendant Godot (1952) to “Connemara” but also to the greater London railway stations “Peckham Fulham [and] Clapham.”⁶³ Likewise, in the 1953 novel Watt, Jimmy Shannon (the name of the postman from Beckett’s youth in Foxrock) is renamed Mr. Severn, replacing Ireland’s longest river with England’s. Beckett also came close to conflating “English” and “Irish” in Watt, when the narrator mentions “what I think the English call six of one and half a dozen of the other” and then wonders, “or do I confuse them with the Irish?” ⁶⁴

It seems likely, too, that Beckett was critiquing the abrupt severing of ties between the two countries in his original choice for the cover of Murphy (1938), a novel in which he is scathing about the cultural and political narrowness of the Irish Free State. Beckett’s preferred cover was a photo of two monkeys playing chess, which featured the caption: “What! You are giving up your Queen? Sheer madness!”⁶⁵ His repeated topographical linking of (and his muddying of the differences between) England and Ireland are an Irish Protestant’s attempt, post-Independence, to suggest that the tie between the two countries is not severed as easily as narrow-gauge nationalists would like.

Beckett and Bacon may have acknowledged Irish-British cultural hybridity, but there remains something quintessentially Irish—and definitely not British—about the preoccupation with exile that marks so much of their work. For Bacon, this preoccupation with exile results in portraits mimicking photographic “double-exposure” to reveal the “fragmented” identity of the sitter. In Beckett’s case, it frequently takes the form of Irish characters living outside of Ireland, confusing Irish places with the place where they are currently residing. One of his most interesting examinations of exile is the brief picture we get of the two Dublin men in The Old Tune—perhaps Protestants, and clearly veterans of the British Army—who are torn between the Ireland and the England they have physically and psychologically served and where they have humbly passed their lives.

1. See: Michael Billington, One Night Stand: A Critic’s View of Modern British Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 23; James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 83; Jane Alison Hale, “The Impossible Art of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 111 (1988), 268–74; Erik Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 120; Peter Fifield, “Gaping Mouths and Bulging Bodies: Beckett and Francis Bacon,” Journal of Beckett Studies 1–2 (September, 2009), 57–71. In this essay, the dates used for Beckett’s work—with two exceptions—refer to either the first publication or the first production, whichever came first. Exceptions are the Four Novellas (First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, and The End) and Mercier and Camier; for these, I have given the date of composition, as their publication occurred up to twenty-four years after they were written.

2. In using the term “exile,” I am fully aware that Beckett’s “exile” was self-chosen, as he could have remained in Ireland as a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. Like Joyce, however, he felt that he needed “silence, exile and cunning” to accomplish all that he wanted to artistically. Bacon’s “exile” was more extreme than Beckett’s and was essentially involuntary, as he was banished from his Irish home by a father who disapproved of his sexual orientation. In choosing to refer to Beckett, Bacon, and others as “exiles” in this essay, I am using the term to refer to people who felt that they had to leave Ireland, whether due to external pressure or to pursue personal ambitions that they felt would have remained unfulfilled in Ireland.

3. Steven Leuthold, “Light, Colour, Interiority and the Aesthetics of Enchantment,” in Analecta Husserliana, vol. 65: The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts, ed. Marlies Kronegger and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 75.

4. “Entry on Francis Bacon,” Current Biography Yearbook: 1985, ed. Charles Moritz (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1986), 16.

5. Gerry Dukes, “Introduction,” in Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 3.

6. Scott Hamilton, “Beckett, Exile, Politics, and 1930s Dublin,” Emerging Perspectives 1, 1 (Autumn, 2010), 36–37.

7. Although Beckett and Bacon never met, they were both living in Paris in late 1928.

8. Caroline Blackwood, “Francis Bacon (1908–1992),” New York Review of Books, 24 September 1992.

9. See, for example, Richard Cork, “Home Thoughts from an Incurable Surrealist,” The Times (Saturday Review), 16 March 1991; Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Constable, 2008), 16–20.

12. Peppiatt, 4; Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 14. For Bacon’s love of Irish writers, including Joyce, Yeats, and Blackwood, see Peppiatt, Anatomy, 46; Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 47–49, 186–87, 260, 287; Farson, 16. Bacon’s preference for Celts over the English may have been what led him to repeatedly describe his beloved nanny, Jessie Lightfoot (a surrogate mother figure who even lived with him during his twenties in London), as a “Cornishwoman,” despite the fact that there is evidence to suggest that she was from Lancashire. Peppiatt, Anatomy, 11, 419.

16. Peppiatt, Anatomy, 17; see also Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood, 323.

17. See especially Lynn Brunet, A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials: Bacon, Beckett and Spurious Freemasonry in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009); Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (New York: Crown, 1993), esp. chapter one; Farson, chapter two; Peppiatt, Anatomy, chapter one.

28. Brunet, 23; Richard Dorment, “A Fresh Side of Bacon,” Telegraph, 22 June 2005; John Russell, quoted in Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon: ‘Taking Reality by Surprise’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 121.

30. Bacon claimed to “loathe” his own face, yet he painted it repeatedly. As one critic notes, his explanation that he only did so many self-portraits because he “had nobody else to do” was “wilfully disingenuous.” Rachel Campbell-Johnston, “‘I Had Nobody Else to Paint,’” Times, 26 May 2006.

31. Bacon is believed to have seen Not I in London two years before this portrait was painted. In an interview, Bacon said that his favorite works by Beckett were the short pieces starring Billie Whitelaw that he saw in London. It is not known for certain if he saw some or all of these productions, which included Play (1962), Footfalls (1976), Rockaby (1981), and Not I. See Fifield, 57–71.

32. See, for example, Tadeusz Rózewicz, “Francis Bacon or Diego Velázquez in a Dentist’s Chair,” Ambit 150 (1997), 17–23.

33. Richard Dorment, “The Body and Soul of Francis Bacon,” Daily Telegraph, 2 February 1998.

34. Isla Leaver-Yap, “Francis Bacon at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,” Culture 24, 22 June 2005.

35. When Randolph Goodman interviewed the French playwright in 1967, Pinget explained that Beckett “offered to put my play into English. As he only translates his own material, I considered his offer a great kindness. Beckett wanted to set the scene of the play in Dublin and turn my Parisians into Irishmen; I gave him my permission to do so. It is a model translation.” Quoted in Randolph Goodman, From Script to Stage: Eight Modern Plays (San Francisco: Rinehart, 1971), 550. Curiously

36. On the play’s Hiberno-English, see Vivian Mercier, “Beckett’s Anglo-Irish Stage Dialects,” James Joyce Quarterly 8, 4 (Summer, 1971), 315; T. P. Dolan, “Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Use of HibernoEnglish,” Irish University Review 14, 1 (Spring, 1984), 55; Barry McGovern, “Beckett and the Radio Voice,” in Samuel Beckett: 100 Years: Centenary Essays, ed. Christopher Murray (Dublin: New Island Books, 2006), 132. Much as Synge’s translations of Petrarch and Villon change relatively straightforward phrases in Latin and French into exceptionally ornate Hiberno-English, Beckett changes Pinget’s spare—though certainly colloquial—language into a more verbose Dublin argot. Beckett even adds bits of dialogue for “Irish” comic effect. A good example is when one of Pinget’s old men recalls of a friend, “Il est mort en 14.” (“He died in 1914.”) In Beckett’s version, this becomes, “He died in 1914. Wounds.” The addition of this one word adds dark, Irish humor to the line. Robert Pinget, La Manivelle: Édition bilingue avec texte anglais de Samuel Beckett, suivi de Lettre Morte (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1960), 57–58.

38. Calder Publications Ltd. Product Description details for the 1999 edition of The Old Tune. See also John Calder, Postface to The Old Tune, by Samuel Beckett (London: Calder Publications, 1999), 24.

39. Chris Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to his Works, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 277.

41. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 258; 261. See also Beckett, Letters, 260, 265.

44. Mercier, 315. 45. Samuel Beckett, The Old Tune, Free Translation of La Manivelle, by Robert Pinget (London: Calder Publications, 1999), 6; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (OT 6).

46. As Dublin-born British Army veterans, Gorman and Cream can be compared to Mercier and Camier (from the 1946 Beckett novel of the same name), who are Irish veterans of the Boer War. Other Irish-born British Army veterans in Beckett include the park ranger from Mercier and Camier, and perhaps Mrs. Lousse’s late husband from Molloy (1951). The ranger, who fought in World War I, “sometimes felt it would have been wiser on his part, during the great upheaval, to devote his energies to the domestic skirmish, the Gaelic dialect, the fortification of his faith, and the treasures of a folklore beyond compare. The bodily danger would have been less and the benefits more certain.” Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier (London: Calder Publications, 1974), 14. Mrs. Lousse informs us that her “dear departed” had “fallen in defence of a country that called itself his and fromwhich in his lifetime he never derived the smallest benefit, but only insults and vexations.” Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable (London: Calder Publications, 1994), 33

47. There is a married couple called Gorman in the novel Watt (1953), which is set around Foxrock. If the elderly man in The Old Tune is the same Mr. Gorman—that is, if Gorman is one of the “gallery of moribunds” who resurface repeatedly in Beckett’s fiction (Murphy, Watt, Mercier, Malone, etc.)—then it is further confirmation of the men’s Dublin origins and could lead listeners familiar with Beckett’s work to assume a Dublin setting for The Old Tune. Beckett, Trilogy, 138.

48. This was the Barton family that raised the English-born Irish patriot Erskine Childers after the death of his parents. The confusion over the name Barton also reminds us of Beckett’s novella The Calmative (1946), in which the narrator cannot remember whether the story his father told him as a child was about Jim Breen, bearer of an Irish surname, or Jim Breem, bearer of an English—or Irish Protestant—one.

49. Of course, this is not really a deliberate departure from previous practice on Beckett’s part. The idea of old men remembering and misremembering numerous placenames comes straight from Pinget’s La Manivelle.

50. Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 69. For other unnamed locations readily identifiable as Dublin and Wicklow landscapes, see Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986).

51. Of course, for every Dublin place with an Irish-derived name like Kilbarrack or Carrickmines, there are places with deeply English names like Shrewsbury Road or Heytesbury Street. England, too, has placenames of Irish origin, such as Ranelagh Gardens and Great Ormond Street (both in London).

52. The seven Marston Roads in England can be found in Wolverhampton, Oxford, Stafford, Salford, St. Neots, Hellidon, and Ilford.

55. See the list of tombstones in the Kilternan Church of Ireland graveyard.

56. In Pinget’s original play, the school is called Saint-Maxerde’s, and the girl is taught English. Pinget, La Manivelle, 54.

57. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996), 372.

58. In some thirteen Beckett plays, characters have names which are simply letters of the alphabet. In most cases, however, Beckett reveals what these letters stand for, either in the stage directions or through the dialogue. 59. A.T. Quiller-Couch, Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1973), v. 60. For more on the Overend sisters (and their mother, Lily) see Bernadette Larkin, “The Overend Women: Independent Women of the 1900s,” The Women’s Museum of Ireland.

62. It is easy to compile a list of such figures, such as the laborers in Timothy O’Grady’s novel I Could Read The Sky (1997) and Mary Lavin’s short story “The Girders” (1944), as well as key characters in the work of Martin McDonagh, Jimmy McGovern, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, Leland Bardwell, Tom Murphy, and John B. Keane, not to mention the songs of Shane MacGowan. The ruffians in “Boys from the County Hell” (1984), by the London-Irish McGowan, are tellingly “from” a place that does not exist in either England or Ireland. Pato Dooley, from Martin McDonagh’s play The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), sums up the feelings of several of the characters created by these writers when, on a trip “home” to Ireland from England, he muses: “When it’s there I am, it’s here I wish I was... But when it’s here I am... it isn’t there I want to be, of course not. But I know it isn’t here I want to be either.” Martin McDonagh, Plays 1: The Beauty Queen of Leenane / A Skull in Connemara / The Lonesome West (London: Methuen, 1999), 22

65. Between pp. 174 and 175 of Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (London: Vintage, 2002)

Garech Browne (sometimes calling himself Garech a Brun, or de Brun), who has died aged 78, was one of Ireland’s most colourful and influential figures in the fields of art, poetry and music.

He lived and entertained at Luggala, an enchanting house on the shores of Lough Tay, Co Wicklow, set in Ireland’s most beautiful valley. To this gem he invited an eclectic group of friends, ranging from Brendan Behan and Kofi Annan to the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson. In 1959 he founded Claddagh Records, which produced the band the Chieftains

Bald in later life, straggle-bearded, and with long hair fixed into a ponytail by a velvet ribbon, Browne was sartorially individual, owing to his predilection for three-piece suits, variously pinstriped or peacock coloured. There was elegance in his eccentricity.

He wore full-length pale grey topcoats reaching to the ankles, favoured hand-knitted Aran sweaters and sported a pocket watch. If the colour of his clothes was unusual, the cut of his suits was traditional, tailored by Lesley & Roberts in Savile Row, shirts made by Turnbull & Asser, ties from Hermes, Charvet and Lanvin.

He was a generous host and an inspiration to many, but he could create a stand-offish impression on first encounter. Astute observers, however, detected an untrained intellect and considerable staying power in his character.

Eamon Delaney noticed that he “combined the aristocratic with the native, so that these Yeatsian polarities could truly integrate and flower.”

Browne could afford to be eccentric. His father, Dom, was Lord Oranmore and Browne, who lived to be 100 and sat for a record 72 years in the House of Lords without ever addressing the chamber. His mother was Oranmore’s second wife, Oonagh Guinness, the youngest of the three famous Guinness sisters.

His maternal grandfather was Ernest Garech Domnagh Guinness was born at Glenmaroon, the Guinnesses’ house in Dublin, on June 25 1939, and christened in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Because war broke out soon after his birth, his childhood was spent between Castle MacGarrett in Co Mayo, where his father farmed, and Luggala.

Young Garech was sent to Castle Park, a prep school in Dalkey, a suburb of Dublin. He was 10 when his parents separated and his father allowed him to choose with whom he lived. Opting for his mother, he was then brought up at Luggala.

Failing common entrance first time round, he was sent to Le Rosey, in Switzerland, where a fellow pupil was the Aga Khan. He hated school and even then knew that all he wanted to study was music, literature and real history. He escaped by sending himself a telegram: “Unforeseen circumstances. Come home immediately. Your loving mother.”

He was then sent to Bryanston on the recommendation of Lucian Freud, but again escaped and at the age of 15 was to be found in his mother’s apartment in Paris, studying French civilisation at the Sorbonne. He emerged wholly un-institutionalised.

As a child he had absorbed it from his transistor radio, and he later became an avid listener to the radio broadcasts of Ciarán Mac Mathúna. This developed to the point where he started Claddagh Records, converting himself from playboy to dedicated symbol “of resurgent Celtic culture”.

The record company was inspired to counter what Browne considered “the pretty frightful noise” being made by itinerant bands all over Ireland. It was launched at his Dublin mews house with prodigious quantities of Guinness at a party that extended till dawn.

Their first album, 40 minutes of Leo Rowsome playing the pipes, sold out. The company specialised in a mixture of music and the spoken word, with John Montague, the poet who was on its board, involving figures such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Samuel Beckett. Their success was in part due to the imaginative record covers and erudite sleeve notes.

Browne made friends with the piper Paddy Moloney and in 1962 asked him to create the label’s third album. Moloney formed the Chieftains, taking their name from Montague’s collection of poems, Death of a Chieftain. Their success was crowned with their version of Women of Ireland to Leonard Rosenman’s Oscar-winning score for the 1975 film Barry Lyndon.

Erskine Childers, later President of Ireland, asked Browne why he wanted to issue recordings of “squealing pipes and old women wailing songs” when they were trying to promote a more modern Ireland to the world.

Bono of U2 was more perceptive: “What Alan Lomax did for American folk music, Garech Browne did for Irish folk music … He understood that in so many ways the Irish had sung themselves into being.”

Between 1964 and 1973 Browne was partly based at Woodtown Manor in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, a 1750 house where he could entertain in the same style as his mother had at Luggala.

Tragedy hit in 1966 when Garech’s brother, Tara, was killed in a car accident in South Kensington. A legendary figure of the 1960s, his 21st birthday party had been attended by Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and John Paul Getty. John Lennon read of the death and was inspired to write A Day in the Life, featuring the famous lines, “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed”.

In 1970, in a mission to avoid tax (which failed), his mother Oonagh left Luggala and went into voluntary exile in Jersey, and Browne took it on. Luggala is an 18th-century jewel of a house, set in 5,000 acres, which had been rented by Ernest Guinness as a shooting lodge. He bought it from Viscount Powerscourt in 1937 and gave it to Oonagh, his youngest daughter, as a wedding present.

Here Browne expanded on his mother’s renowned hospitality. The visitors’ book contains the names of many movers and shakers from the artistic world of the 1960s and later.

Browne himself listed them as “painters, poets, pipers, playwrights, performers, philosophers, presidents, princes, princesses, priests not excluding parsons, and photographers”. They included the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, John Hurt, Brendan Behan, Liam O’Flaherty, Robert Graves and Sting.

Life at the house was erratic, with meals served late and guests arriving only to find their host asleep in bed. But when it thrived, it thrived. Browne was so well known for his lapses over time, that a friend once invited him to a late lunch to ensure that he arrived at a reasonable hour for dinner.

As custodian of Luggala, Browne undertook extensive restoration, including renovating the Gothic arch windows, reinstating chimneys, realigning battlements into better proportion and recreating a long-lost wing.

He was a great planter of trees, and the grounds can be seen in numerous films, including John Huston’s Sinful Davey (1969), Zardoz (1974), starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, and Braveheart (1995). When Oonagh died in 1995, Browne arranged a high-Anglican funeral at St Mary’s, Bourne Street. Mourners were adjured to wear mourning dress, and one lady was so heavily veiled that it was impossible to tell which way round she was.

Despite the solemnity of the occasion, which included a poetic valediction from John Hurt (“Oonagh was like a maypole, and at one time or another, we all held the ribbons and ran round”), Brendan Behan’s brother informed one beautiful young Guinness that he admired her legs: “They’re the gateway to Heaven.”

A generous wake followed at the Ritz, with Browne and the hard core of mourners prolonging the revelries well into the weekend.

Browne was not devoid of female company, embarking on his romantic life with a maid at Luggala. His conquests included the Jamaican designer and actress Tessa Welborn and “Tiger” Aiyar (one-time Countess Cowley).

Though described in 1977 as Ireland’s most eligible bachelor, he married, in 1981, Princess Harshad Purna Devi of Morvi, youngest daughter of the Maharaja of Morvi (a former princely state in Gujarat). As a result Browne, an inveterate traveller, spent much time in India.

Lately Luggala was put on the market, one of Browne’s stipulations being that he should be allowed to spend three months a year there. It remained unsold at the time of his death.

His best epitaph was a premature one, words, again spoken by John Hurt, from John Boorman’s 1991 short film, I Dreamt I Woke Up: “He is the custodian of this valley of Luggala. He nurtures it as he nurtures Irish music and poetry …

“Here he collects poets and pipers, Druids, drunks, landed and stranded gentry. He likes to have his friends about him, and when they die he keeps their death masks close at hand. And indeed their hands. His own likeness by Lucian Freud is a death mask of his youth.”

‘One of life’s original characters has been lost’

– cousin Rory Guinness

The death has occurred of The Hon Garech de Brun, one of the most colourful characters in Irish cultural life over the past 50 years. He was aged 78.

The eldest of the three sons of Dominick Browne – the 4th Lord Oranmore and Browne – and his second wife, Oonagh Guinness, he lived most of his life at Luggala in Co Wicklow, a house made famous by his parties, which were attended by many musical luminaries of the 1960s, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

In 1962, he set up Claddagh Records and asked his friend, uileann piper Paddy Moloney, to form a group to record a one-off album. Paddy responded with the first line-up for The Chieftains.

Last night, Mr de Brun’s cousin Rory Guinness, of the famed brewing dynasty, paid tribute.

"One of life’s original characters has been lost," he told the Sunday Independent.

"He was so passionate about the arts in Ireland throughout his life, and had been working with the OPW on an exhibition at Farmleigh despite his declining health.

"I remember my mother Miranda always being in awe of the parties at Luggala. Whilst my parents were busy looking after the worlds of politics and business at Farmleigh, Garech was looking after the musicians and writers, the creative arts, that was drawn by the beauty of Luggala and his own innate charm. Garech’s talents bought joy to so many," he said.

Another former house, Woodtown Manor, near Dublin was for many years a welcoming place for Irish poets, writers and musicians and was associated with the traditional group Clannad, who made several recordings there.

He also made a number of recordings of the poets Richard Murphy, Seamus Heaney, John Montague and others reading their works. He was a friend a patron of artist Francis Bacon.

His father had the rare distinction of sitting silently in the House of Lords for 72 years until his death, aged 100, in 2002, without ever having spoken in a debate.

As both his parents were married three times, he has had two stepmothers and two stepfathers and also has a number of elder half siblings.

His only full brother, The Hon Tara Browne was a young London socialite whose death at age 21 in a car crash in London’s West End was immortalised in the song “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles.

Last night, film producer Noel Pearson said; "This is very sad news. He was an exceptional man. He was really great company and he could be very funny and amusing. It’s very sad indeed to hear he has died."

As striking new exhibition at Tate Britain looks afresh at the “school of London”

In 1935, Kenneth Clark, then just 32 but already the director of the National Gallery, wrote an essay in The Listener entitled “The Future of Painting”. If it had one at all, he suggested, then it was irredeemably grim. “The art of painting has become not so much difficult as impossible,” he said, set around, as it was, by decaying old art peopled by “belated impressionists… who correspond to liberalism in politics”, over-civilised post-impressionists, brutalist Germans, and surrealism and abstraction with their “extreme reliance on theory”. Clark’s view of art was an offshoot of his view of society: both stood, he believed, at “the end of a period of self-consciousness, inbreeding and exhaustion”.

Clark wrote at a time of dark clouds gathering, but he was airing an old idea. The phrase “painting is dead” was first recorded in 1839 as issuing from the lips of the French salon darling Paul Delaroche. Delaroche was wrong (within 35 years the impressionists redefined what painting could be) and Clark was wrong too. The postwar years did indeed see the growth of anti-painting – conceptualism, abstraction, performance, the found object and photography – but they also witnessed the reinvigoration of the old tradition of putting oil on canvas. The idea that painting was brought back to life though is misleading: for all Clark’s gloomy prognosis, it was never in extremis in the first place.

Just what happened in British painting after the Second World War is the subject of Tate Britain’s wonderfully enlightening survey “All Too Human”. The exhibition comes with a degree of throat clearing about artists who set out to capture “what it is that makes us human”, but really shows how painters from Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud to Leon Kossoff and Paula Rego made realism – defined as unsentimental objectivity – both new and personal. There is no room for Clark’s theory-reliant modes of art; this is an exhibition about paint.

In fact, paint itself was seen by some artists as a means of salvation, the drug through which to quieten the anxious postwar frame of mind. Leon Kossoff described endlessly painting the streets of London, many of them war damaged, because they conjured “a faintly glimmering memory of a long-forgotten, perhaps never experienced childhood, which, if rediscovered and illuminated, would ameliorate the pain of the present”. Freud, meanwhile, was less existential, stating simply that: “I want the paint to work as flesh does.”

What all the artists in the exhibition seemed to have felt was the intimacy involved in moving paint about on a surface and how that was in itself a way of processing their personal and intense individual experiences of life. In this they represent the opposite of modernism, with its belief in the rational and the progressive.

The exhibition takes the form of a family tree with, as its roots, a cluster of pre-war painters who embodied this distinctive vision: David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert and Chaïm Soutine. One of the many strengths of this show is the way that their work echoes through the rooms – Bacon and Freud’s nudes being inadvertant reworkings of Sickert’s unsparing and sexually unsettling paintings of naked models and prostitutes; Kossoff and Frank Auerbach’s paint-encrusted London landscapes recalling the fractured Spanish landscapes of Bomberg; the unwavering stare of Spencer’s second wife, Patricia Preece – both naked and clothed – re-emerging in Rego and Jenny Saville.

The links are not coincidental but in many cases were made directly. Between 1945 and 1953, for example, the financially struggling Bomberg (who had himself been taught by Sickert) was a teacher at Borough Polytechnic and both Kossoff and Auerbach were among his students. What they imbibed from him was that traditional representation was a “hand and eye disease” and that painting should seek to transmit “the sense of touch” and “the illusion of the third dimension”, that is the experience of forms rather than simply the look of forms.

Meanwhile, at the Slade School of Art, William Coldstream (who had attended Sickert lectures) taught both Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow and invited Lucian Freud to become a visiting tutor there. What they learned from him was how to fix their sitters on the canvas, like a pinned butterfly, and get to the truth of them through the exact representation of what they saw: as Uglow said to one model, “Nobody has ever looked at you as intensively as I have.”

This interrelatedness also manifested itself in the friendships between the leading artists. In 1976, in the introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition called “The Human Clay”, the American painter and honorary Londoner RB Kitaj christened the Bacon, Freud, Andrews, Kossoff and Auerbach circle, “the school of London”.

The artists drank together in Soho – where Andrews showed them in his Colony Room I of 1962 – and painted each other (Freud’s portrait of Auerbach, 1975-76, and a Bacon painting of Freud from 1964 are both included).

What the exhibition does is expand Kitaj’s school of London to include all the painters present, with mixed degrees of success. It is elastic enough to include, for example, the Indian painter FN Souza, who arrived in London in 1949 determined to be a modern artist but whose work didn’t begin to gain traction until the mid-1950s. His pictures have a painterly affinity with the thick impasto of his British peers – indeed Two Saints (After El Greco), a masterly study in shiny and matt black of 1965, is a bravura (if irreproducible) display of paint handling – but his subject matter is completely at odds with theirs.

Souza’s work draws heavily on his Christian upbringing and is peopled with Christ and the saints. This appeal to an older and overtly religious tradition may be his response to the anomie of the age, but the other artists in the show all take reality as their starting point rather than metaphysics. Souza may have been in London painting at the same time as his fellows but he doesn’t belong with them.

The same is true of the Portuguese-born Rego, another of Coldstream’s pupils. A genuinely significant artist, her work is based in the realm of the imagination and suggests a narrative. Typically dealing with family or folk- and fairytales, her paintings are invariably ambivalent and there is always something at work in them, often with sinister or sexual overtones.

The Family of 1988, for example, shows a man seated on the edge of a bed being undressed by two women while a third looks on from a distance. The expressions of the women are rapt and complicit and the image carries the frisson of violation. In fact it refers to Rego’s husband, the painter Vic Willing, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, and the women are mother and daughters helping an invalid out of his clothes, rather than overpowering an unwilling man.

Rego has said that, “Stories are just as important as if they existed in reality; it makes no difference.” But while that may be true for her it is not necessarily the case for the viewer. The question prompted by her paintings has nothing to do with observation and intimate realism but is rather more straightforward: what is happening here?

More representative are the early Bacons which, despite the familiarity of the “Screaming Popes” (one version here has a businessman in place of Innocent X, his very anonymity making it all the more relevant), still have the ability to shock.

Strangely, it is his paintings of animals that most potently express some of the agonies of the human condition. Dog (1952) shows a near-feral animal, tongue hanging out and panting exhaustedly after endlessly circling, as if in a rage at itself, while in the background cars stream unheeding along an American coastal freeway. Study of a Baboon (1953) is an image of a howling creature conjured up in feathery brushstrokes that belie the violence of the image: the monkey’s bared teeth, exposed in a primal scream, are no defence against existence. As images of loneliness and pain they outmuscle even Bacon’s grief-infused Triptych 1974-77, in which he tries to work out his feelings about the suicide of his
lover George Dyer.

Where Bacon worked best at one remove from his subject, using photographs as inspiration and compositional tools, Freud needed endless hours in front of the live model. From the painstaking, miniaturist works of the 1950s such as Girl with a White Dog (1950-51), in which every hair of both woman and animal is shown with the care of a medieval manuscript illustration, to the slumped form of the plus-size “Big Sue” Tilley, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996), Freud was haunted by flesh.

In most cases the sitters do not look at the artist and there is no engagement between them: these are essentially paintings without a meaning. If they have a subject, it is the corporeality of individual human beings and the infinite variety of skin tone and colour. The sitters have bodies but not personalities. And if Bacon’s paintings are full of the sound of screaming, Freud’s are eerily silent.

Perhaps the most effective of the mini-retrospectives offered by the exhibition are the London paintings of Kossoff and Auerbach. Their pictures of streets and buildings use paint so gravity-defyingly thick that it is almost sculptural, and the ceaseless movement of their brushstrokes mimics the vibrations of the city. They faithfully followed Bomberg’s stricture to look for mass and structure and found them everywhere: Auerbach described London in the immediate postwar years as “a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags, full of drama formally”. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Kossoff’s 1961 Building Site, Victoria Street, a painting of a hole in the ground that uses only viscous slatherings of black and brown but that could be painted in mud or London clay.

The one maladroit step in the exhibition is the curators’ attempt to update the predominantly white, male and venerable story of postwar British painting by co-opting women (and young ones if possible) into their expanded school of London. The last room shoehorns in Celia Paul (1959), Cecily Brown (born 1969), Jenny Saville (born 1970) and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977).

Saville has a strong claim to membership – her huge and frank paintings of the naked female body (here her massive self-portrait, Reverse, 2002-2003) clearly belong to the Freud-Bacon bloodline, and indeed they expand the possibilities of rendering the human body in paint. The presence of the others is harder to justify and makes a curatorial rather than an authentic
artistic point.

This, though, hardly detracts from an exhibition that looks afresh at a period seemingly dominated by American abstract expressionism and pop art, and European heavyweights from Picasso to Gerhard Richter, and teases out a distinctive and important British strand. In 1966, Bacon defined it when he said, “What I want to do is distort the thing far beyond the appearance but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” Reality through distortion became the British way.

Tate Britain in London is hosting an exhibition that portrays the contrasting visions of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in “All Too Human,” a thrilling survey of human figures in British art spanning 100 years.

Francis Bacon made a figure painting titled “Figure in a Landscape” as the war was ending in 1945. He was 35 years of age during the time. The painting portrayed details of a seated man in a flannel suit, and the man was thought to be Bacon’s then lover, Eric Hall. The painting shows the struggle of the figure to emerge from the center of the picture from the surrounding tunneled blackness, yet it doesn’t quite resolve into a human form. In the painting too, there is the specter of a yawning mouth, which could have been a toothy vacancy prefiguring Bacon’s famous painting “Screaming Popes” – but the whole doesn’t quite add up. Rather, it returns the viewer to an unsettling no man’s land. During the time, Bacon was only initiating to paint in earnest and he seems to be unsettled with the idea of depicting a human figure with any confidence. It was when the full extent of the holocaust was filtering into British newspapers. It was the time after the liberation of the camps when London still remained a bomb site and violent abstractions in art was more than a temptation. It was the time when like Bacon, every British painter wanted to connect the postwar British art to what had gone before.

The exhibition at Tate Britain tries to portray how some of the British painters maintained their fidelity to human figures through the dehumanizing times and put up a thrilling and thoughtful display of the exhibition curated by Elena Crippa.

The painting by Bacon, created in 1945, is placed in a room of the painter’s works which showcases, as its centerpiece, one of Giacometti’s spindly bronze figures, created back in 1956, both upright and insubstantial, reflecting the shape of things to come. And the Swiss sculptor with his insistence on the human form, however diminished, was Bacon’s great inspiration. In a peculiar pattern all of the works chosen to be showcased have their veritable stakes in the room.

The selection is judicious and prefaced by what had come before including David Bomberg’s layered acts of attention, Stanley Spencer’s curiously estranging Cookham realism, the charnel house butcher’s windows of Chaim Soutine and the lovingly deconstructed brushwork of Walter Sickert’s shadowy nudes. And in the proximity of the lot it’s almost perceivable of Bacon’s reexamining of these models and determining what in 1945 was now honest and possible.

In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art: Graham Sutherland was going to be the leading painter. ‘Then downstage left, picking his nose, Francis Bacon sauntered on. And the whole scene was changed.’ But how did it alter? What happened to figurative painting in London in the decades after Bacon exploded on to the scene? This is a question with which All Too Human at Tate Britain grapples.

It is an old problem. When in 1976 R.B. Kitaj proposed that there was an important group of figurative artists at work here, a ‘School of London’, he defined them as ‘a herd of loners’. Some, but not all, drank together and socially — at least until they fell out, which often occurred spectacularly if Bacon was at one of the parties. But artistically, for the most part, they were sui generis.

Consequently, the exhibition is full of odd couples and incompatible pairings. One half of a gallery is hung with pictures by Michael Andrews and the other with works by Kitaj himself. These are two idiosyncratic figures, both of whom are, in hall-of-fame terms, pending.

Kitaj’s reputation plummeted after a misconceived retrospective in 1994, and the disproportionately violent critical response that followed. Michael Andrews, in contrast to the abrasive and articulate Kitaj, tended to fly beneath the radar when he was alive, and was accorded a fine posthumous exhibition at Tate to which unfortunately almost nobody came. Only now is the idea dawning that he might have been a truly important figure. And so might Kitaj, after all.

It must have been tempting to put Andrews and Kitaj together. A text on the wall points out, correctly, that they both owed something to Bacon. But in practice, Kitaj’s tendency to bright, slightly bilious colour and jangling compositions fights with Andrews’s elusiveness and subtlety.

Even when painters have a real affinity their works may not help each other. William Coldstream was a highly influential teacher of, among others, Euan Uglow, whose works are hung beside his. But this juxtaposition obscures the individuality of Uglow, who evolved into an extraordinary amalgam of Coldstream, Piero della Francesca and the White Knight from Alice (his models would pose, often very uncomfortably, amid plumb lines and contraptions of his own devising, designed to aid precise observation of their bodies).

Still, there is a strong connection between Coldstream and Uglow. But putting the young Lucian Freud in the same room with them is just misleading. It is true that Bacon, after he and Freud had quarrelled, delighted in describing the latter’s work as ‘the very epitome of the Euston Road School’ — that being the label given to Coldstream and his followers (Bacon meant this as an insult). But though Freud also worked from close observation of a model, he was interested in matters such as their mortality, the impact of their presence and what was ‘going on in their heads’, which didn’t concern Coldstream and Uglow at all.

Nor did Freud have much to do with Bacon aesthetically, close friends though they were for 25 years. Freud invariably worked ‘from life’ — in front of the subject; Bacon virtually never. Bacon habitually used photographs, Freud hardly at all. And neither is there much connection with Francis Newton Souza, an Indian painter who moved to London in 1949, who gets a room to himself (though some strained links are suggested). Souza’s work looks closer to Parisian art brut than anything else done in London.

The most convincing pairing is Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, but even then only in their earliest years. After a while quite distinct painterly personalities emerged. This is perhaps why the subtitle of the show — ‘a century of painting life’ — is so vague. ‘Painting life’ could mean anything.

Although the exhibition contains many magnificent pictures, and draws attention to some unjustly neglected figures, ill-assortment runs through it like a leitmotif. It begins, reasonably enough, with Bomberg and Sickert — who really did have an effect on what came later in London – but also unexpectedly throws in the Russian-French-Jewish Soutine. It is good to see a group of younger painters in the last room — Jenny Saville, Celia Paul, Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — as a sort of coda. But you can’t help noticing how different they are.

Of course, the arbiters of what is happening in art, including Tate curators, often get it wrong. The final verdict on many of the artists in All Too Human — Kitaj, Uglow and Andrews among them — is not yet in. Bacon liked to point out that time is the only great critic, which lets the rest of us off the hook — at least a bit.

The 20th century saw God lose his central role within the scheme of human belief and philosophy. Nietzsche’s assertion that God was dead was followed by two of the bloodiest wars in human history, which further cemented feelings of alienation, scepticism and doubt. Artists, writers and thinkers found themselves in a world that lacked transcendental meaning, where the divine no longer offered escape or respite. In his writings, the French philosopher Sartre’s nihilistic existentialism chimed with the experiences of war. The belief that ‘existence precedes essence’ meant individuals were now responsible for their all too human choices, whims and actions. What came to interest artists was the authenticity of individual experience, the solitude and angst experienced by those who understood that God had finally gone up in smoke in the chimneys of Auschwitz. “To me,” wrote W.H. Auden, “Art’s subject is the human clay”.

After the war, echoing, Beckett’s doom-laden remark that: “there is nothing to express…no power to express…together with the obligation to express,” Giacometti – who appears fleetingly in this show All Too Human at Tate Britain – was so eaten by doubt that he was only able to make the tinniest of sculptural figures. The title of the show is based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s book of aphorisms of 1878 and illustrates how an unsentimental approach to painting, free of romanticism or mythology, took hold. Human relationships, raw desires, drives and fears are the preferred subject matter of these artists. They painted their friends, lovers and family with real and urgent intimacy.

A number, such as Walter Sickert, David Bomberg and Stanley Spencer, reach back into the 19th century, with further sections ranging through the likes of Lucien Freud and Michael Andrews, towards a gathering of younger women who undermine what was, until recently, an essentially male view of the world. Sickert’s bleak and sensuous figures, which borrow from Degas, set the tone. These are naked women rather than academic nudes, where we, the viewer, are invited to become complicit voyeurs. Spectacle and desire are also expressed in Sickert’s dark music-halls with their working-class audiences. Elsewhere Stanley Spencer’s second wife Patricia Preece confronts the viewer with her piercing gaze in an abrasive image that’s free of all false sentiment.

Flesh is important. Soutine’s excitement with raw meat is taken up by Bacon and translated in Bomberg’s and Auerbach’s thick gloopy impasto and gestural brushwork, where the paint comes to form a sort of bodily skin. As Freud said: “I want the paint to work as flesh does.” The distillation of undiluted experience, what it feels like to inhabit rather than observe the world, is what matters. In contrast to Freud’s paintings from life, the exhibition explores Francis Bacon’s relationship with the photographer John Deakin, whose portraits of friends and lovers often provided him with the catalyst for his paintings.

The show will please the naysayers who have been claiming over the last couple of decades that painting is dead. For most of these artists, the sensual pleasure taken in their medium is clear to see. Central to the narrative is the role of the School of London that included Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj. A group loosely linked by friendship and a mutual sensibility to the modern world. They met regularly at Soho drinking venues such as the Colony Room, run by the notorious Muriel Belcher, and regularly painted each other. Both Kitaj and Michael Andrews, in their very different ways, explore an interest in group scenes and storytelling.

London is also important. There’s a room filled with crowded swimming pools and vertiginous city churches by Kossoff. These are juxtaposed with the psychologically complex and angst-ridden portraits of Frank Auerbach, which often feel like a difficult psychoanalytic session expressed through the medium of paint. While the focus of the show revolves around the London School, diversity is flagged by the inclusion of the mystical work of Indian painter FN Souza.

But it is Freud who dominates with his superbly neurotic, hyperreal paintings, through to those where the paint becomes looser and more visceral. There’s a stunning small head of Leigh Bowery which, with his closed eyes, dimples and fleshy rose-bud mouth, is full of surprising tenderness. Freud’s ability to mirror the soul of his sitters is also there in the poignant portraits of his mother and the astute depiction of Frank Auerbach, his friend and artistic rival.

Deference is paid to William Coldstream and the Slade School of Art. For Coldstream painting was above all a process of perception. To this end, he attempted to fix observed reality in a series of measurements. This practice was also adopted by a generation of Slade painters, particularly Euan Uglow though, in contrast to the sturm und drang of the Europeans such as Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff, there seems something tight, English and rather academic about these.

A generous display of Paula Regos turns the previously male-dominated view of the world on its head. Not only does she explore human relationships with her own cast of personal characters but she’s unafraid of using stories and commenting on social issues. We see the world not only through her vivid imagination but from a feminist perspective as she fearlessly takes on issues of sexual inequality, jealousy and emotional abuse.

The exhibition concludes – optimistically I would suggest for the future of painting – with a room full of powerful works by younger female painters. Jenny Saville’s visceral self-portrait, with its parted wet lips and dreamy gaze, has something post-coital and confessional about it. In contrast, Celia Paul paints herself as both model and painter, in poses that are introverted, dreamy and intimate, with the edgy intensity of Gwen John. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is represented by two of her distinctive fictional portraits, while Cecily Brown pays homage in her complex painterly canvases that merge abstraction and figuration, to her many art historical influences. This show creates numerous threads between artists across the generations. Painting, looking and trying to make sense of the human condition will, this show suggests, be with us for a long time yet.

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life – Tate Britain Until 27 August Adult £18.80

in this thrilling survey spanning 100 years of the human figure in British art

n 1945, as the war was ending, Francis Bacon, then 35, made a painting he called Figure in a Landscape. Details of a seated man in a flannel suit, thought to be Bacon’s then lover, Eric Hall, struggle to emerge from the centre of the picture, out of a tunnelled blackness, but they don’t resolve into a human form. There is, too, the spectre of a yawning mouth in the picture, a toothy vacancy that prefigures Bacon’s famous screaming popes – but the whole refuses to quite add up. Instead, it returns the viewer to an unsettling no man’s land of tangled pipework and indistinct hedging or bracken, mostly in an arid khaki but with traces of blood red. Bacon, who was only starting to paint in earnest, seems to be wrestling with the idea of whether it is still possible to depict a human figure with any confidence at all. The full extent of the Holocaust was just then filtering into British newspapers, after the liberation of the camps; London remained a bomb site; violent abstraction was more than a temptation. Bacon, as much as anyone at that moment, wanted to find how a postwar British art might connect to what had gone before.

In this thrilling and thoughtful exhibition, the way certain British painters maintained their fidelity to the human figure, while all about them were losing faith, is at the heart of everything. Curator Elena Crippa has placed Bacon’s 1945 painting like a starter’s pistol to what follows. It is in a room of the painter’s work which has as its centrepiece one of Giacometti’s spindly bronze figures, from 1956, both upright and insubstantial, the shape of things to come. The Swiss sculptor, with his insistence on the human form, however diminished, was Bacon’s great inspiration. His life mask of William Blake and his first contorted animal studies, a dog chasing its tail, a yowling fanged baboon, face that insistent human figure as if it is a totem, or circle it as if in a bacchanal.

In some ways all of the work chosen here has a stake in that room. It is prefaced by a judicious selection of what had come before: David Bomberg’s layered acts of attention, Stanley Spencer’s curiously estranging Cookham realism, the charnel house butcher’s windows of Chaim Soutine and the lovingly deconstructed brushwork of Walter Sickert’s shadowy nudes. In this proximity you can almost sense Bacon re-examining those models and determining what in 1945 was now honest and possible. And then, in turn, as the exhibition and the century develops, Bacon’s dissolving figures are challenged by other strategies – new hard-won approaches to the oldest artistic relationship of all, that between painter and model. Crippa takes the name for her show from Friedrich Nietzche’s book of aphorisms, a T-shirt slogan for existentialists: “Everywhere he looked… what he saw was not only far from divine but all-too-human.”

The exhibition uses that understanding to open up many startling paintings. Each of the rooms is conceived as a discrete, brilliant statement of intent. Lineages of influence and friendship are traced, like a list of biblical begats. Sickert taught Bomberg; Bomberg taught William Coldstream and Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff; Coldstream taught Euan Uglow and Michael Andrews and Paula Rego at the Slade, where Lucian Freud was also a tutor, and so on. The bloodlines are carefully calibrated. Coldstream may have insisted on the primacy of attention, of looking, but his relatively low-wattage nude here becomes something remarkable in the hands of his pupil Uglow. Bacon may have delineated the psychological fallout of war, but Auerbach, who arrived in London on a Kindertransport, sought to give you the thing itself; his paintings of the early 1960s have you look into the ongoing wounds in the capital, put you in the ruins of great clay-ey layers of paint in Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square and have you imagine the slow work of reconstruction.

If the close friendships and rivalries between these painters start to make it seem like another exclusive British club, the show also acknowledges the presence of one or two alternative histories. Francis Nelson Souza, born in Goa, arrived in London from Bombay in 1949 and his black-on-black saints and voodoo crucifixions ask different questions of Britishness, though they lack the foregrounded industry, the intensive overpainting, of the self-styled London school.

For all such intriguing diversions, the heart of the show remains the forcefield of a relationship between Bacon and Lucian Freud. In the immediate postwar years Freud seemed to want to cling to a kind of limpid sensuality, however disturbed. His pair of portraits of his wife, his Girl With a Kitten and Girl With a White Dog appear to inhabit the world his grandad Sigmund first analysed, that of the uncanny: his sitter and intimate seems at once alive and almost drained of animation, beyond a wild-eyed stare. Freud is somewhat desperately questioning what is vital and what is not.

That question is carried over to the wonderful room of his later portraits, in the settled hogbrush-and-impasto style of his mature career, in which he makes the human form a convincingly lived-in slab of meat. His sitters in the paintings chosen here – including the headline acts of performance artist Leigh Bowery and benefits supervisor Sue Tilley – are mostly asleep, accentuating their too, too solid flesh, and its myth of impermanence. Bacon’s portraits – including his study of Freud himself, a satyr-like figure with several rows of teeth – are far less substantial, forever threatening to thaw and melt into something less than human.

There are counterweights and balances to these primal forces. Something like joy emerges in some of the later work here, in Frank Auerbach’s Mornington Crescent mornings and twilit Primrose Hill evenings, in the fabulous cacophony of Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool and the wonderful furtive groping of Cecily Brown’s Teenage Wildlife. The refusal of narrative in Freud and Bacon, which reflected a distrust of any form of lasting domesticity, is interrogated in particular by Michael Andrews and Paula Rego. Their storytelling seems far more alive to the possibility of relationship; subjects are no longer isolated, or held captive, in the studio.

Michael Andrews’s painting Melanie and Me Swimming strikes a different note from anything else in the show, a rare celebration of what could be uncomplicated love and connection as the painter reimagines a moment in which he supported his daughter in the water – even if that connection is encased and spotlit in an enclosing blackness. Paula Rego’s triptych The Betrothal looks like a modern take on the satirical nuptials of Hogarth, until the last panel, that is, in which the artist depicts herself cradling her husband, Victor Willing, who suffered with multiple sclerosis for 15 years before his death – a personal pieta of unfathomable intimacy; all too human indeed.

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER | ARTS | LIFE & ARTS | FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND | 3 MARCH/4 MARCH 2018

Absorbing, affecting, discomforting, contradictory, intensely relevant, ultimately infuriating: All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life is both unmissable and Tate Britain’s most grievously squandered opportunity yet.

The prelude is Stanley Spencer’s grim, compelling frontal close-up nude of his unyielding lesbian second wife Patricia Preece (1935). The coda is Cecily Brown’s “Boy with a Cat” (2015), a smart abstracted painterly riff on Manet’s odalisque. Centre stage rages a debate about “the mystery of appearance” conducted between Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud through 30 paintings where the figure is magnificently trapped and enlivened by layers of paint. These range from Bacon's raw, urgent, silken screaming Pope (“Study after Velazquez”) and howling animal stand-ins for psychological agony “Dog” and “Study of a Baboon” in the early 1950s, to Freud’s 1990s extravaganzas of wobbly, bulging messy bodies in flesh colours streaked with earthy red, grey, yellow: “Leigh Bowery”, benefits supervisor Sue Tilley in “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet”.

Of outstanding interest are a handful of Bacon rarities, fresh, exciting, unseen for decades. “Study for a Portrait of P.L.” (1962), an unsparing depiction of the artist’s lover Peter Lacy scowling on a sofa, is the first Bacon picture where internal organs burst out though the surface of the skin, like an expressive X-ray grafted on the body. “Triptych” (1974-77), unusually set outdoors, on a beach, memorialises Lacy’s successor George Dyer, whose swollen distorted features are entangled with black umbrellas placed against a brilliant Mediterranean Sea, while two forbidding father figures look on and a pair of riders — borrowed from Degas — canter on the sand. In the central panel Dyer’s contrapposto pose recalls Michelangelo’s dynamic nudes; the entire composition is a response to Picasso’s 1930s beach pictures playing with variations on the human form — the subject of Tate Modem’s show opening next week.

The imposing scale of “Triptych”, the heroism/despair of the main figure, leaking a livid purple shadow, the balance of the brutal and aesthetic, the concentrated images distilled within the umbrella — a happier variation of Bacon’s caged portraits — plus the art historical references, all reveal Bacon’s ambition and inventiveness at a time, in the aftermath of the second world war, when human figuration had become the riskiest of projects. “Reworking the image,” Bacon saw, “will demand more and more profound, sensational and evocative ways” of painting: this show’s core story.

Bacon’s sources were photographic; he incorporated camera blur, made a virtue of deformation: “when I’m dead people will realise how natural my distortions are.” Freud painted from the model, with pristine clarity that stretched however to “involuntary magnification”. Tate’s supreme contrast is Bacon’s six-foot “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” (1964), the bare-chested figure curled into a dark comer under a lightbulb, a vision of existential anxiety not seen in public since it was exhibited in 1965, with Freud’s heavily textured, severe “Man’s Head (Self Portrait I)” (1963), the face at an ungainly angle interrupted by a skeletal arm thrusting violently into the composition.

Freud here turns on himself the “visually aggressive” mode — “I would sit very close and stare” — that makes so many works dramas of control and power: over the wrinkled, fierce, despairing features of “The Painter’s Mother IV”; the compressed body and vulnerable expression of daughter “Annabel”; or Freud’s first wife Kitty Carman terrified under his scrutiny in “Girl with a White Dog” (1950-51).

Her dressing-gown slips to expose a breast with a dark mole; tightly controlled details of eyes, lashes, fingernails, strands of hair, porcelain-smooth skin, are realised with precision; the sleepy indifference of a bull terrier lazing on her lap contrasts with Kitty’s own tense response to the painter. This work resonates marvellously with “David and Eli” (2003-04): in Freud’s late-style slathered impasto, connections between man and dog remain vivid in an unexpectedly tender depiction of man and whippet as a mass of quivering flesh.

Two Freud portraits — resilient, tough “Frank Auerbach” and a harrowing, cowed “Girl in a Striped Nightshirt” depicting Celia Paul — make subjects of artists whose work is also displayed here, and one wants a conversation. Disappointingly, only two Auerbach portraits are included, and just one by his friend Leon Kossoff. As existential as Bacon, Auerbach’s glowing “Head of EOW” and Kossoff’s wily, wiry “Self Portrait II” emerge out of deep furrows of paint, hard-won, architectonic yet fleeting, seeking, Auerbach says, “to pin down an experience in its essential aspect before it disappears”.

Thick, war-torn London cityscapes — Auerbach’s “Rebuilding the Empire Cinema”, Kossoff’s “Building Site, Victoria Street” — now tilt All Too Human towards social history. British painting links inextricably with London emerging from austerity to swing; Michael Andrews’ laconic fantasy party “The Deer Park”, RB Kitaj’s self-portrait reclining in a Le Corbusier chair among refugee booksellers “Cecil Court, London WC2”. But where are David Hockney’s iconic portraits charting changing attitudes to sex, class, fashion, such as Tate’s “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy”?

While Hockney is, arbitrarily, inexplicably, entirely absent, derivative Indian Modernist Francis Souza occupies a whole gallery: frozen, long-necked mythological saints and sinners “Negro,in Mourning”, “Jesus and Pilatus”. Curator Elena Crippa “positions the work of Souza as central to the development of British art in the postwar period”. This is laughable. So is likening Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s mediocre, composite, generic figures — “The Host over a Barrel”, “Coterie of Questions” — to Walter Sickert’s. Yiadom-Boakye’s black figures are here because “they investigate and stretch stereotypical views on femininity, masculinity, race... that define and constrain our identity”.

The show’s contemporary section is women-only, and highlights two emotionally shattering compositions about grief. Paula Rego’s “The Family” was painted as her husband was dying: a cruel/tender wife and daughter attempt to resurrect a sallow, ill man. Celia Paul’s “Family Group” depicts her mother and sisters, expressions distraught, each in their own way mourning her father.

Rego and Paul, distillers of domestic experience, are terrific artists. But as All Too Human’s declared theme of “reengagement with realism ... looking at and participating in the modem world” expands to embrace storytelling and abstraction, excluding important, more influential men feels perverse. Peter Doig’s theatrical reinvention of figuration, Chris Ofili’s ornamental figures such as “No Woman No Cry” about 1990s race relations, are missing pivots key to recent art history.

In figurative painting postwar and beyond, Britain, building on empirical traditions of attention to observation, individuality, resistance to theory, is distinctive and world class. On this subject, Tate Britain could have mounted a landmark exhibition to return this languishing museum to the global map; what a travesty that instead it narrowed into gender politics.

Why painter Francis Bacon was art’s greatest punk

Bacon’s art both repulsed and fascinated audiences equally, but revealed our most intimate,

GUNSELI YALCINKAYA | DAZED | FEATURE | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2018

In April 1945, then 35-year-old Irish-born painter Francis Bacon debuted what would become his first seminal piece of work, at the Lefevre Gallery Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the work was a triptych of paintings allegedly modelled on the Ancient Greek tragedies, The Oresteia. It presented distorted, humanoid creatures set against a fiery orange backdrop. It was shocking, and it gained Bacon the title of one of Britain’s most established painters.

“From the moment Francis Bacon started exhibiting regularly, in 1945, critics were fascinated and repelled by his work. The shouting mouths, distended eyes and distorted or swelling body parts of his figures were seen as markers of brutality or the result of uncontrolled urges and feelings of disquiet,” explains Elena Crippa, curator of the just-opened exhibition, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, which features several of Bacon’s works. “This was at a time when artists were expected to produce work that reflected a socially progressive role. Bacon was not painting idealised beings but revealing people’s most intimate, transgressive, and unruly nature.”

Whereas 70s punk subculture was a product of a disenfranchised generation of British youth and the rise of Thatcherism, unemployment and racial tensions, Bacon’s work was symbolic of post-war Britain – a feeling manifested in the shadowy aftermath of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. His works shone a light on the dark realities of a collective shattered innocence. But his art was also deeply personal. Growing up his family moved numerous times between Ireland and England, imbuing him with a sense of displacement that would linger through his lifetime. It is said that the elements of sado-masochism in his work can also be traced to this time when he was punished by his father for slipping into dresses and his mother’s underwear. His homosexuality only caused further upset and he was thrown out of home before heading to London with an allowance of £3 a week from his mother.

As a self-taught artist, Bacon’s paintings would often forgo brushes for rags, his fingers, or by applying paint straight from the tube, and creating a smeared, smudged, raw physicality. He also preferred to work from references such as the freakish figures captured by photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a book on anatomical diseases of the mouth that he purchased secondhand in Paris in 1935, and a specific scene of a screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, as opposed to the more acceptable practice of employing life models.

Paintings such as Bacon’s 1945 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion hold the same punk essence that the Sex Pistols’ 1977 God Save the Queen does – albeit predating the latter by three decades. Both expressed deep resentment and each seemingly came out of nowhere. They also present an Expressionist vision of the world, where art reflects the deep feelings and emotions of its artist. In an interview with art critic John Gruen, Bacon said, “I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse.” In the 70s, these feelings were presented sonically through angst. For Bacon, they were via the recurring motif of the silent, but screaming mouth.

The artist’s romance with former East End criminal George Dyer – who he met in London in late 1963 – was arguably central to the chaos of Bacon’s later paintings. Described by critics as turbulent and ultimately tragic, Bacon painted his lover obsessively, even as they became distanced. In 1971, two days before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer committed suicide. Bacon was consumed with grief but channelled it through his works such as Triptych May to June 1973, which depicts an overdosing Dyer. In it, Bacon’s obsession with life, sex and death combine against a vacuous black background: to the left, Dyer sits on the toilet shitting, and to the right, he vomits into it. In the central image, Dyer is barely there, engulfed by a dark shadow that resembles an angel. The Times wrote that Bacon had once described the painting as an exorcism, adding that it was one of his most brutal paintings, based solely on facts.

It is because of his own life experiences and otherworldly references that Bacon’s works could never have conformed to the ideals of a post-war world – which were emphasised in the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism (thanks to artists such as Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning) or Surrealism (namely via Spanish artists Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso). While these movements inspired Bacon – he once described Picasso as “the father figure” and “the reason I paint” – they focused on the potential of the unconscious mind. Instead, Bacon focused on the role of the body in real life human experience. Illustrating these in primitive, animal-esque forms, or “figures (in) moments of crisis”. He told David Sylvester, “When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself… the violence of suggestions within the image which can only be conveyed through paint.” Just like punk would – Bacon’s work cut straight through the bullshit. And – alongside his School of London contemporaries, such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff – peeled back the flesh to unleash raw emotion, desire, and darkness.

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life – by Elena Crippa, curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, and Laura Castagnini, assistant curator – runs at London’s Tate Britain 28 February – 27 August 2018

MART ENGELEN | PORTRAIT & INTERVIEW | #59 MAGAZINE | ISSUE NO. 19 | 2018

Majid Boustany, founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, talks to Mart Engelen about the artist’s life, work and vision and love of Monaco. The MB Art Foundation was inaugurated by Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2014 on 28 October the anniversary of the painter’s birth. This non-profit organisation is dedicated to promoting a deeper understanding of Francis Bacon’s work, life and creative process around the world, with a particular focus on the time the artist lived and worked in Monaco and France. Since it opened, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation has worked with local and international institutions, supporting a variety of projects, awarding scholarships to researchers and artists, publishing books on Bacon and taking part in various exhibitions and lectures dedicated to the British painter. The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation was involved with the extraordinary Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman – Face to Face Exhibition held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier from 1 July to 5 November 2017, lending two works by Bacon, Figure with monkey (1951) and Study for a Portrait (1979), and supplying several photographs from its archive for the exhibition catalogue and the museum website.

Mart Engelen: How and when did your interest in Francis Bacon and his work start?

Majid Boustany: My first encounter with Francis Bacon’s oeuvre goes back to my academic years in London in the early 1990s. While pursuing my academic studies in business and international relations, I enrolled in a short course in history of art. During a visit to the Tate Gallery, I was confronted with Bacon’s enigmatic triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), which challenged interpretation and triggered in me the need to explore his world. My immersion into the artist’s work, life and creative process started in those years and continues to this day.
ME: Can you describe Bacon’s relationship with Monaco throughout the years?

MB: We know that Bacon started visiting Monaco at the dawn of the 1940s. In 1946, Erica Brausen, who was to become his art dealer from 1948, purchased Painting 1946 from the artist for £200. With the proceeds from the sale, Bacon left London to settle in Monaco with his nanny Jessie Lightfoot and Eric Hall, his lover and patron. The Principality became his main residence from July 1946 to the early 1950s. From the 1950s to the early 1990s, the painter frequently visited Monaco and the French Riviera with his lovers, friends and family. It was in Monaco that the self-taught artist began to concentrate on the representation of the human form, a decisive step that would lead him to be recognised as one of the major figurative artists of the twentieth century. It was also there that Bacon embarked on his papal figures (mainly inspired by the Diego Velázquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X) and his ‘head’ series, and initiated new working practices. A seasoned gambler, he spent whole days gambling at the Monte Carlo Belle Époque Casino. During his various trips to Monaco in the 1970s and 1980s, he could often be seen with his circle of friends in the Casino gardens, on the terrace of the Café de Paris, at the Chatham Bar, and at Pulcinella or Le Pinocchio restaurants.

MB: Contemplating Bacon’s attachment to and fascination with Monaco, and after having studied the poignant, timeless work of the British painter for a number of years, I started to dream of a concrete project in his memory. The creation of a Foundation in Monaco, dedicated to this singular artist, seemed obvious to me. In 2010 I initiated the project thanks to the pivotal support of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Monegasque authorities. The Estate of Francis Bacon encouraged this unique initiative and Martin Harrison, editor of the artist’s catalogue raisonnés, is on the Foundation’s board. On 28 October 2014, the anniversary of the painter’s birth, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation was inaugurated by the Sovereign. Our foundation is dedicated to promoting a deeper understanding of the work, life and creative process of Francis Bacon worldwide, with a particular focus on the time the artist lived and worked in Monaco and France. It is open to researchers, and to the public throughout the year, by appointment only. It provides a singular way for visitors to immerse themselves in Bacon’s oeuvre, by offering them a free guided tour through which they can discover about one hundred pieces of my collection. Since its opening, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation has supported a variety of projects: it has awarded scholarships to researchers and artists, published books on Bacon and taken part in various exhibitions and lectures dedicated to the British painter, in conjunction with local and international institutions.

ME: What do you consider to be the most precious artwork in your collection?

MB: Over a number of years I have been building a comprehensive collection that now includes over 2500 items dedicated to Francis Bacon. It encompasses paintings by Bacon, a unique photographic archive on the artist, a comprehensive collection of his exhibition catalogues, a wide selection of the painter’s graphic works, various working documents from Bacon’s studios and rare items from his furniture and rug designer period. The foundation headquarters also houses an extensive library dedicated to the painter, offering an essential source for scholars. I cherish each and every item of my collection and I have acquired some rare pieces such as the earliest surviving painting by Francis Bacon, Watercolour (1929), a unique work once owned by Eric Alden, his companion and first collector, and by the Australian artist Roy de Maistre who was arguably Bacon’s most formative mentor. I have also purchased a rug designed by Bacon entitled Composition (1929), one of only seven rugs that have survived from his furniture and rug designer period. Figure Crouching (1949), the earliest crouching figure executed by the artist, is among my favourite paintings in the collection. The nude figure, perhaps a self-portrait of the artist, is isolated in a three-dimensional transparent cage. This work might have been painted in Monaco.

ME: Can you tell me more about your participation in the current exhibition at the Musée Fabre ‘Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to Face’?

MB: The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation took part in the ‘Francis Bacon/Bruce Nauman. Face to Face’ exhibition held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier from 1 July to 5 November 2017. This exhibition brought together two artists who worked using quite distinct, sometimes even opposing, means, in order to allow a renewed reading, a revivified understanding of these two major twentieth century figures. It was curated by Cécile Debray, curator at the Centre Pompidou, and organised around an important group of about ten works by Bacon from the collection of the Musée national d’Art moderne, lent within the framework of the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary. On this occasion our institution lent two works by Francis Bacon: Figure with Monkey (1951) and Study for a Portrait (1979). We have also supplied several photographs from our archive for the exhibition catalogue and the museum website.

ME: Quite a few important artists make their interpretation, inspiration of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Can you tell me more how you think Bacon’s feelings and approach to this important work was?

MB: Francis Bacon considered Diego Velázquez to be the greatest of all artists. When talking about Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), the British artist stated: “I’ve always thought this was one of the greatest paintings in the world and I’ve had a crush on it”. This papal figure obsessed and haunted Bacon for years. He perceived it as factual, powerfully formal and unlocking valves of sensations at various levels. He particularly loved its magnificent colours. Bacon’s first attempt at reinventing the Velázquez pope was initiated in Monaco in 1946. Between 1946 and 1971, he produced over 50 papal variations mainly inspired by the Spanish master’s painting. Though he was an atheist, Bacon was obsessed throughout his life by religious imagery and painted a series of works on the crucifixion and pope themes.

—Copyright 2018 Mart Engelen

A major exhibition on the work of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon opens at Tate Britain tomorrow.

A major exhibition celebrating the achievements of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon opens at Tate Britain next week. It holds a special interest for me, as it was my luck to work for Freud for several years from the late 1980s and we became intimate friends — despite our age difference — he was in his 60s and I was in my 20s.

The show, entitled All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, shows their work alongside art by contemporaries including Frank Auerbach (Freud’s best friend) and RB Kitaj. Despite differences in style, these London-based artists strove to represent human forms and their surroundings in a realistic way to capture the intense and sensuous experience of life through paint.

One of my tasks for Freud was to compile a list detailing everyone who rang throughout the day, as he did not wish to be disturbed whilst working. On the morning of 28 April 1992, my phone rang incessantly — dozens of journalists desperate to speak to him about his friend Francis Bacon who had died while on holiday in Madrid. I rang Freud, who had already heard the news. He sounded very sad.

“I don’t wish to talk to someone I don’t know about a friend who is dead,” he said.

I’d met Bacon a few times in the late 1980s, but can’t claim to have ever talked to him when he was sober. He could frequently be seen walking around South Kensington wearing his trademark black leather jacket, his face fixed in an impassive, glazed expression — rather like a living waxwork.

At the time of Bacon’s death, Freud and Bacon hadn’t spoken for years. They had once been intensely close friends. For 20 years, Bacon was the most important man in Freud’s life, influencing how he thought, lived and painted. In the early days of their relationship Freud, ten years the junior, was encouraged by Bacon and hero-worshipped him. He greatly admired Bacon’s wild imagination, caustic wit and powerfully expressive way of painting large oils. It encouraged him to be more artistically adventurous and move away from meticulous, minute detail and to paint with a freer style, on a more ambitious scale — standing up, rather than sitting in a chair.

They had much in common: including a love of champagne, gambling and danger. They frequently dined together in Soho and drank the night away in rackety watering holes carousing with friends. Freud was impressed by Bacon’s carefree approach to life, and by the fact that he didn’t care what anyone else thought.

Although their styles are quite different, both clung firmly to figurative painting in the post-war years when it was distinctly unfashionable. Freud painted directly from the flesh but Bacon painted only from photographs.

They sat for each other, with Bacon’s enigmatic, powerful portraits of Freud and Freud’s intense, minutely-detailed painting of Bacon considered key works. In 1951, Freud was the first subject who was named as a sitter by Bacon, who went on to paint 19 portraits of him and some are likely to feature in the Tate’s show. Freud returned the favour, and his 1952 powerful portrait of Bacon was to become one of his best-known paintings. In 1988, it was stolen from a gallery in Berlin while on loan from The Tate and has not been seen since.

Freud’s naturalism captures the essence of the friends he painted, including their wrinkles, sagging skin and muscles, moles, pasty complexions and lumpy noses, often reclining in a state of passivity.

Bacon and Freud shared a concern with universal themes of human frailty and existence. Now, 25 years after Bacon’s death, and nearly seven since Freud’s, this exhibition of their work will heighten what is best in each.

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life is at Tate Britain from February 28 to August 27.

This exhibition showcases around 100 works by some of the most celebrated modern artists in Britain, including

some rarely seen paintings by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, all who captured the intensity of life in paint

This is an exhibition that will please the Tate Britain constituency in this Brexit world. It is proof that in the end all the doomsayers claiming the death of painting got it wrong and in particular British painting has emerged and remained a force to be reckoned with. The prices of the works by artists like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff is testimony to this, and in a world where increasingly it feels as if it is all about the money, everyone can feel a winner.

The title (I might have called it Warts and All) alludes to the fleshy enjoyment of the likes of Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff whose sheer pleasure of the medium is palpable to see. Freud said, “I want the paint to work as flesh does.” Observation surrounds the viewer, the gaze of the painter and the painted is paramount. There is a wonderful room filled with the glinting light of swimming pools and churches of Kossoff played against the landscape and murkier portraiture of Frank Auerbach.

While there are the historical likes of British artists Stanley Spencer, with a very small nod to Chaim Soutine and Indian transplant FN Souza, the focus of the show is the core London School. There is a mini-retrospective of Lucian Freud. For those who do not know the work of Bacon there is a room of greatest hits with a noteworthy early portrait that Bacon did of his friend and artistic rival, Freud.

Paula Rego overwhelms with a joyous and powerful room alive with her mixture of imaginary and real characters grounded with a painting completed while her husband, painter Victor Willing, was dying of multiple sclerosis. Rego is the voice of female authority – here writ clear and large fearlessly telling the stories that need to be told.

The exhibition ends with a room full of powerful paintings by younger female painters all at the top of their game. Jenny Saville’s self-portrait feels painful to look at while Celia Paul chooses to paint herself as model and painter (she is on the cover of the catalogue in a more flattering painting, painted by her then lover Lucian Freud). Lynette Viadom-Boakye is represented by two of her distinctive lyric fictive portraits, Cecily Brown with the powerful Boy with Cat. There is much to applaud here but why do I leave feeling it is all seems a bit too dutiful and sombre? Where are the quirky distinctive voices of painters like Rose Wylie and Chantal Joffe, the wonderful portraitists like Catherine Goodman and if you make the strange choice to include one Giacometti, why not open the doors fully to other figurative sculptors?

LONDON, Feb 19 ― February 28 to August 27, 2018, London’s Tate Britain is showing works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, two artists who captured the sensuous, immediate and intense experience of life in their paintings.

“I want the paint to work as flesh does,” said artist Lucian Freud, grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis. Exploring this theme, Freud’s work is set to go on display alongside that of Francis Bacon. The two artists both strove to illustrate the experience of life through their work.

Pieces by other artists will also feature in this exhibition of around 100 works, making connections between generations of artists and telling an expanded story of figurative painting in the 20th century.

The show promises major and rarely seen works by both Freud and Bacon, giving visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the sensuality and intimacy of the two artists.

Freud works featured in the show will explore his studio as a context and a subject of his work, and how his bluntly honest depiction of models became more sculptural and visceral over time. Examples include “Frank Auerbach” and “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet.”

As for Bacon, the exhibition will look at his relationship with photographer John Deakin. Earlier works by the artist, including “Study after Velazquez,” will be shown alongside works by other artists, such as Giacometti.These works will be complemented by pieces from other artists, including painters from previous generations, such as Walter Sickert and Chaim Soutine.

The exhibition will also highlight the role of female artists in the very male-dominated world of figurative painting. Paula Rego, for example, explored the condition of women in society while referring to autobiographical events.

After showing in London, the exhibition will head to the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

All Too Human, Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life February 28 to August 27, 2108, at Tate Britain, London.

Strikingly different paintings of Bacon’s lover George Dyer hung side by side for first time

Two portraits by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud of the same man, one intense, twisted and distorted; the other serene, relaxed and unguarded, have gone on display side by side for the first time.

The portraits of George Dyer were produced around the same time, but are strikingly different and shine light on one of the most fascinating artistic friendships of the last century.

“Lucian painting George was a way of giving him some space and some distance and a bit of a rest from Francis Bacon,” said gallerist Pilar Ordovas, who knew Freud. “You can see a George Dyer that is pensive, into his thoughts and with his guard down. There is something very fragile about him.

“The Francis Bacon is completely different. There is this violence, and it is fascinating to see how different they are.”

Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies of George Dyer 1966, which sold at auction for £29m last year, and Freud’s Man in a Blue Shirt, painted in 1965, have gone on public display at the Ordovas gallery in London, part of a small display of works by artists who were part of the “School of London”.

It is often said that Bacon met his lover when Dyer, a petty East End crook, burgled his house. The truth, however, is that they met in a Soho pub when, according to Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppiatt, Dyer approached him and cheerily said: “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?’’

They fell in love and Bacon painted Dyer many times. Their relationship was a dysfunctional one, however, fuelled by alcohol and sadomasochistic sex, and it ended in the most tragic of circumstances when Dyer killed himself two days before the opening of Bacon’s hugely important retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. It was an event that haunted Bacon and had a profound effect on his work.

Ordovas said the relationship between Bacon and Dyer was tumultuous, but that it is sometimes misunderstood. “People think of George Dyer as the violent one, but talking to Lucian it was the other way round.”

Bacon and Freud were almost inseparable in the mid-1960s. They would work in the morning, have lunch at Wheeler’s and then go drinking in the Colony Room.

Freud saw that Bacon’s intensity was taking a toll on Dyer and took him to stay with his friend Jane, Lady Willoughby de Eresby, on her estate in Scotland. It was here that Dyer sat for the portrait.

Also on display at the gallery for the first time in the UK is an unfinished Freud self-portrait from 2002 along with works by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, David Hockney and RB Kitaj. Ordovas said “the story of the supposed School of London” was a story of friendships and that is what the exhibition explores.

London Painters is at Ordovas, Savile Row in London from 22 February to 28 April

Marlborough Graphics is hosting a solo exhibition of prints by Francis Bacon at its New York space.

“Francis Bacon: Prints” will feature lithographs, etchings and aquatints by the artist. Some of the artworks presented were published by Marlborough. Showcased are the graphic works including self-portraits, portraits of old lovers, as well as depictions of the human figure that reflect the very grotesque and expressive natures seen in Bacon’s paintings. With the featured presentation, we could identify Bacon’s inclination to printmaking and connect with his close association with his printmakers. Bacon’s ideology is especially evident with the usage of bright oranges and deep blacks.

Marlborough Graphics’ presentation is on view from February 7 through through March 10, 2018, Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.

Lucian Freud was so jealous of Francis Bacon that he bought one of his most celebrated paintings for just £80 and refused to let it be seen in public, just to infuriate his rival, it has been claimed.

Bacon’s 1953 masterpiece Two Figures depicts two nude men on a bed. Freud bought it at a reduced price after the painting failed to sell at auction and then refused to let it be borrowed by any museums, even when the Tate hosted a retrospective of Bacon’s work in 1985.

Barry Joule, a close friend of Bacon’s from 1978 until the painter’s death in 1992, recorded a conversation they had about the picture. Bacon can be heard recalling how the art critic David Sylvester had sold Two Figures to Freud for £80.

Bacon says: “I had to give £20 of it to Sylvester as a commission and I got £60 for it, I think . . . You see how things are.” Mr Joule said that Bacon then gave a “sad triple shrug of his shoulders”.

He told The Observer: “Freud stashed it away in his house. He later was to put his jealousy knife into Francis as he never, ever allowed this important picture to be borrowed, which mightily [upset] Francis, especially as he wanted it for his 1985 Tate retrospective.”

The painting was inspired by a photograph taken by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s of two men wrestling.

They were titans of 20th-century art, painters whose friendship and rivalry helped create some of the most expensive artworks ever sold. Yet Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud had a falling out, for reasons that neither man fully explained.

Now, recordings of Bacon have emerged that shed light on the estrangement. Talking with a close friend, Bacon poured scorn on Freud, ridiculing one of his paintings in the Charles Saatchi collection and lamenting in 1982 that Freud “doesn’t want to see me”.

The recordings came to light weeks before a joint exhibition of their work in London. Tate Britain’s All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life will reflect the complex friendship between the two men when it opens on 28 February.

Bacon confided: “Certainly the ones [Saatchi] bought of Lucian’s are the worst ones I have ever seen. I saw one ghastly thing of a man standing on a bed and two little heads peeping out from under the bed. It looked ridiculous.”

The recordings were shared with The Observer by Barry Joule, who lived near Bacon’s studio in South Kensington. In 1978, Bacon saw Joule repairing a neighbour’s television aerial and invited him in for champagne. They remained friends until the artist’s death in 1992.

Joule believes Freud’s friendship with Bacon was tainted by Freud’s jealousy: “He cut Francis off completely, much to Francis’s surprise, and never, ever relented.”

There seems to be another element of contention, however. Bacon’s Two Figures(1953), a masterpiece showing two nude men on a bed, was exhibited for the first time in decades last October, when it was loaned to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It had ended up in Freud’s possession and he never allowed it to be borrowed, much to Bacon’s fury.

On one tape, Bacon recalled his German-born London dealer, Erica Brausen, freaking out over Two Figures. He imitated Brausen’s high-pitched Germanic tones: “When I took in that painting … she did say, ‘Darling, don’t bring that sheeet in here!’” He tried to explain that it was inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s 1880s photographs of wrestlers. “She said: ‘I don’t care where it comes from. I don’t vaant de police in ’ere!’”

Bacon then related how the late art critic David Sylvester sold Two Figures to Freud for £80. When Joule expressed astonishment at the low price, Bacon replied: “I had to give 20 of it to … Sylvester as a commission, and I got 60 for it, I think … You see how things are.”

Joule will never forget Bacon’s “sad triple shrug of his shoulders, eyes downcast”.

Joule said: “Freud stashed it away in his house. He later was to put his jealousy knife into Francis as he never, ever allowed this important picture to be borrowed, which mightily [upset] Francis, especially as he wanted it for his 1985 Tate retrospective.”

Bacon once confided to another friend: “When I die, my paintings won’t be worth anything, I’ll be forgotten.” He could not have been more wrong.

Freud is admired for portraying the human body with brutal realism. His life-sized nude depiction of his muse Sue Tilley, who was known as “Fat Sue”, sold in 2015 for £35.6m.

Bacon met Freud in the mid-1940s. Although each admired the other’s art in the early days, they eventually stopped speaking.

Joule said that Two Figures was painted in an old garage near Henley-on-Thames rented by Bacon’s then lover, Peter Lacy, just before Christmas 1952. “The exact spot was poignantly pointed out to me by Francis … No doubt he considered it to be a … groundbreaking picture, one that would make a powerful ‘homosexual point’.”

In 1988 Joule was sipping whisky with Bacon, who had just finished a painting, when the phone rang. It was Freud, wanting Bacon to attend a supper for a forthcoming exhibition.

Joule said: “The conversation was short and curt. Only a few words were spoken, with a red-faced Francis slamming the receiver down so hard the wall shook. He angrily returned to his drink, swearing with the foulest language, which was unusual for him. ‘Never lends me his Two Figures painting and now he wants this!’”

In 1991 Joule was with Bacon in a Marylebone cafe when Freud walked in: “I saw Francis stiffen … Lucian did a double-take, but marched right past him. Later I quizzed Francis about what just happened, as I was sure Francis was up for a Freud rapprochement. He just sighed.”

Joule said that Bacon was happy to be recorded, insisting only that Joule wait 12 years after his death before making the conversations public.

The artist also gave Joule works of art, including 1,200 sketches from his studio, whose worth was estimated at £20m in 2004 when Joule donated them to the Tate, one of its most generous gifts. He kept about 120 drawings, which he is exhibiting in Italy at the Villa Fiorentino museum in Sorrento from May to October. The recording of Bacon discussing Freud will be featured.

From Van Gogh to Richter–what happens when bidders fail to pay up at auction?

GEORGINA ADAM | ART MARKET | THE ART NEWSPAPER | TUESDAY 23 JANUARY, 2018

Shortly before Christie’s sale of post-war and contemporary art in New York on 15 November 2017, the auction house learnt of a potential new bidder: a little-known Saudi prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud. According to the New York Times, a scramble ensued to establish his identity and financial means, and, in order to bid, he had to pay a $100m deposit for a red paddle.

The work he bid for, Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (around 1500), went on to make a record-shattering $450.3m and was bought by Abu Dhabi with the prince acting as a middleman, but why did all the bidders on the high-value work need a special paddle? Quite simply because Christie’s wanted to be sure the final buyer would pay up.

Such high-profile prices rightly make auction houses wary when it comes to payment. One of the first public cases was of Van Gogh’s Irises sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1987 for $53.9m—the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting at the time—to the Australian businessman Alan Bond. But he could not pay, and Sotheby’s had to lend him around half the purchase price, later brokering its sale to the Getty Museum.

As for Phillips, the complex saga involves a second Chinese collector, Lin San. As well as taking Zhang to court, Phillips is attempting to claim Francis Bacon’s Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), which was bought by Zhang at Phillips on 30 June 2015 for £12.1m. Lin says that he lent Zhang the money for his art purchases–and that Zhang had given him the Bacon instead of repaying the loan.

The various parties are thought to be moving towards a settlement – although the outcome of which will likely remain confidential.

BY TOM MCGLYN | ART SEEN | THE BROOKLYN RAIL | TUESDAY 09 JANUARY, 2018

What comprised the “social real” of London between 1945 and 1960? In general accounts it was defined by privation and austerity brought on by the personal and economic sacrifices of six years of world war but with a hopeful accompaniment of starting from scratch, of fabricating one’s individualized expression out of the rubble. For painters of this generation the war allowed for a break from the gravitational influences of Picasso and the School of Paris, the same break that would lend lift to the Abstract Expressionist ascendancy in New York. Artists from both cities would assimilate the codified (and for the most part exhausted) styles of Cubism and Surrealism toward their own ends, yet is was figurative painting that took primary hold in London.

In truth there was no coherent “social real” in London art circles at the time, considering the diverse backgrounds of artists such as Francis Bacon who came from an aristocratic family in Ireland, and Frank Auerbach, who as a child was evacuated to London from Hitler’s Germany. And in fact, the only native Londoner in the group was Leon Kossoff, but then, communities of artists tend to invent their own cultural histories, sourced from their own pasts, while in the process of transforming their futures. Lucian Freud, certainly, would wind up faithfully translating his grandfather’s (Sigmund) psychological analysis by transforming its complex plumbing of psychic association into sinuous skeins of paint defining both his sitters mental state and their skin and bone structure. A good example is seen here in his penetrating, yet opaque, portrait of Lady Willougby de Eresby, simply entitled, Woman With Fair Hair, Portrait II, (1962-63). Similarly, Bacon would deconstruct such symbols of aristocratic privilege as the papal throne in his study of Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X represented here by a gripping Study After Velazquez (1950).

The Freud and Bacon paintings are viscerally realized examples of the painterly poles that would charge this version of a “School of London,” namely the abstract disassembling of the human form and its tactile, sensuous reassembly. While painters such as Kossoff and Auerbach were not as singularly focused on the figure, they too often used it as an armature for the luscious application of oil paint. They both studied with David Bomberg, who in this instance functioned (in an American analogy) as the Robert Henri to their Glackens and Bellows, or to use a term applied to post-war social realist theater in Britain by the London-based critic David Sylvester, their “kitchen sink” to the Americans’ gritty “ashcan.” Bomberg, like Henri, encouraged his students to take up the heavily-loaded brush stroke as an index of “real” expression. Kossoff often takes this injunction to extremes as seen in such a topographically canyoned and crenellated accretion of paint in the landscape represented here, Stormy Summer Day, Dalston Lane (1975), while Auerbach tends to create a somewhat lighter, more slashingly calligraphic stroke in Head of J.I Y.M. I(1984-85). Kossoff can evoke Van Gogh’s structural brushwork at times, while Auerbach’s technique assimilates both the labile focal depth of Manet’s paint application and the appropriation of the atomized Cubist faceting of painterly space as was practiced so remarkably by Bacon. Relevant to the last point, what made each of these artists’ contributions to their creative community significant is their sophisticated awareness of previous historical styles of painterly figuration. And, as the show infers, their attendant ability to let themselves be influenced by each other’s development out of these precedents is what really formed their bond.

Any “school” would quickly become moribund (and eventually historically irrelevant) without a constant flow between its assumption of a historical tradition and the nurturance of evolving personal styles. It is this open-ended esprit de corps that helps to invigorate the retrospective, time capsule, aspect of the show. Of the relatively younger generation of artists associated with this group, one of its main promoters, paradoxically, was the transplanted American R.B.Kitaj, who befriended a young David Hockney while they both took classes at The Royal Academy of Art. Kitaj favored a more graphic, illustrative figurative approach that would influence Hockney at a time when they both professionally “arrived” on the cusp of Swinging London and British Pop. A decade later Kitaj would organize a comprehensive show of British contemporary art entitled The Human Clay, which was held at The Hayward Gallery under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1976. While including himself and a younger generation of artists such as fellow Royal College alumni David Hockney, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, Kitaj featured Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, and Michael Andrews prominently in the exhibition. Andrews is represented here by the quiescent Portrait of Jane (1989-91) while Hockney is shown by the small but lively oil sketch Montcalm Pool, Los Angeles, (1980). Kitaj’s large painting entitled The Neo-Cubist (1976-1987), a full length portrait of Hockney superimposed by the ghostly profile of the playwright Christopher Isherwood, pays alluring homage to both Kitaj’s longtime friend and sitter as well as one of Hockney’s most significant portrait subjects. It’s a fitting compendium to a show that emphasizes how a microcosmic form of social realism can be derived from a circle of intimates as well as from the larger, less knowable circle of the historical real.

RICHARD BROOKS | ARTS EDITOR | THE SUNDAY TIMES | JANUARY 07, 2018

A painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, unseen in public for more than half a century, is to go on show at Tate Britain next month.

The two artists were close friends from the 1940s until they fell out in the early 1970s after each criticised the other’s work. They would go to the same demi-monde drinking clubs and dine at Freud’s west London home.

Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964, has previously gone on show only once, in the mid-1960s. It has Bacon’s visceral style, with an angst-ridden face.

"Freud did not sit for it but it was inspired by photos of him by their friend John Deakin," aid Elena Crippa curator of the Tate’s All Too Human exhibition.

Freud is depicted as muscular. “Bacon was always fascinated by strong, physical presence. He was also attracted to Freud.”

VISUAL ARTS | MUSEUMS | BLOUIN ARTINFO | THURSDAY, JANUARY 04, 2018

The ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum is currently hosting an exhibition of works titled Bacon, Freud, and the London Painters.

The show features works by post-war painters including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The works on display showcases work by the group of British artists who have come to be known as the ‘School of London.’ They were active in the two decades following World War II. Their artistic starting point was the bomb-scarred post-war Europe. These artists explored themes and subjects such as angst and hopelessness. The depiction of friends, lovers, and immediate surroundings in deeply personal and insistent paintings was coupled with psychological portraits of distorted and deformed bodies contributed to the creation of an entirely different view of a man in the post-war era. Erlend G. Høyersten, museum director, ARoS, points out that “This exhibition marks the beginning of a collaboration between ARoS and one of the world’s most renowned museums. It is an exceedingly ambitious art exhibition boasting a uniquely high standard, and it showcases extraordinary paintings, only a few of which have been previously shown in Denmark.”

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum is one of the largest museums in Northern Europe with a total of 20,700 square meters distributed on 10 floors. It features four galleries and a floor featuring installation art.

Bacon, Freud, and the London Painters runs through February 4, 2018 at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark.

Artist who sketched some of the greatest cultural figures of the 20th century

Milein Cosman, who has died aged 96, drew many of the greatest artistic names of the 20th century. Working on commission for publishers, magazines and newspapers, she sketched Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Sir Thomas Beecham, Otto Klemperer, TS Eliot, Francis Bacon, Barbra Hepworth and Henry Moore, among others.

She drew primarily from life, and her subjects were mostly artists of various kinds, and above all musicians. Into this she was led by a love of music, but also by her almost 40-year-long collaboration with her Viennese husband, the musician, musicologist and broadcaster Hans Keller. Their book Stravinsky at Rehearsal (1962), which combined his words with her drawings, is a classic of a genre they largely devised themselves; he analysed the music, while she captured the musicians in the midst of its creation.

Cosman worked in ink, pencil and conté, and was never inhibited by the fame of her subjects: she drew Thomas Mann while he was lecturing; Sir Arthur Bliss conducting and John Ogdon at the piano. She worked extraordinarily swiftly, saying: “I can only draw fast. If I draw slowly, I almost always get it wrong. I think all the Stravinsky sketches were done in one day.” She also did many paintings, subjects including Stravinsky and Mstislav Rostropovich, the artist Fred Uhlman, and, most often, Keller.

In his appreciation of Milein’s work, published in the catalogue of her show of drawings and prints at the Belgrave Gallery in 1996, Sir Ernst Gombrich commented: “Posterity will be grateful to Milein Cosman above all for the sureness of her eye, with which she has succeeded in capturing the unique quality of so many of our distinguished contemporaries.” She claimed, however, that: “What I really like to draw best are people who work: fishermen and road menders. Yes, it must be said, that really a lot of people have quite wonderful faces.”

Emilie Cosmann (her brother nicknamed her “Milein” and she dropped the last letter of her surname when she came to Britain) was born into a comfortable German-Jewish family in the small town of Gotha, in Germany. She was educated largely in Düsseldorf, where she organised a pupils’ anti-fascist group and for her last two school years attended the Ecole d’Humanité and the International School in Geneva.

In 1939 she followed her brother, who was already installed in Scotland, to Britain. Thereafter, Milein always referred to herself as an émigrée rather than a refugee. Refugee was not the only label she refused to accept. “I’m not religious, I was brought up without religion, my religion is the arts,” she said, and: “I am not a ‘Jewish’ artist.”

After she gained entry to the Slade School of Fine Art – by turning up in person with her portfolio – she lived in a leaky garret behind the Ashmolean museum, Oxford, where the Slade was evacuated for the duration of the war. She studied drawing under Randolph Schwabe and lithography with Harold Jones, and in 1943 she alternated evening classes with Bernard Meninsky at Oxford Polytecnic with giving art classes for the Workers’ Educational Association. She supported herself by delivering milk with a pony and trap and teaching French at a convent school.

It was at Oxford, too, that she met Iris Murdoch, then a student, and was invited back for “cocoa at Somerville” after an evening lecture given by Graham Sutherland. Milein drew Murdoch’s portrait, commenting on the sharp features in the baby face, and the acute intelligence they revealed. This was the first lithograph Milein made, and demonstrated her ability to get under the skin of her subjects, to perceive more than perhaps they were aware of exposing.

While at Oxford, she met a constellation of musicians, artists and writers. The poet Sidney Keyes fell in love with her and dedicated some of his work to her. He was not the last poet to be struck by the tiny, lively-minded woman with birdlike movements and sharp intelligence. Years later, Dannie Abse was so impressed by a chance encounter in Zwemmer’s bookshop that he followed her all the way up the Charing Cross Road to pursue their conversation.

Milein moved to London at the end of the war, where she worked as an illustrator and began to submit sketches to magazines and newspapers. She became a regular contributor to the Radio Times, supplying portraits of the next week’s interviewees. Of Imogen Holst she said: “She looked quite funny, you know, in her sandals and ankle socks. She had the face of a Flemish Madonna.” Sometimes she generalised: “I find on the whole women quite difficult to do. They often have softer features – and very few of them are conductors”; of the cellist Rostropovich, she said: “He was marvellous to draw, as I believe cellists almost always are, crawling all over their instruments like beetles.”

In 1947, while working on a commission, she met Keller, who became her most frequent subject; his keenly angular, impish face adorned the small spaces of wall between the vast living-room windows of the Hampstead house which they bought in the 1960s, and where Milein stayed on alone after his death in 1985. With its unfolding rooms – French windows and a kitchen verandah giving on to a long front garden scattered with fruit trees – it had a German ambience often enhanced by the aroma of fresh poppyseed cake wafting through the open-plan modernist interior.

In 1958 Milein worked on a schools’ television series about drawing for ITV and in the 60s she joined Camden Printmakers, participating in numerous group shows. Her work was acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Jewish Museum in London, and internationally by the universities of Texas, Pennsylvania, McMaster, Canada and Kanagawa, Tokyo.

Her cousin Leo Goldschmidt established the permanent exhibition of her work in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, where he was the director, and there is another at Milein’s beloved Wigmore Hall, where she was a regular attender.

In 1986 Milein’s illustrations appeared in Klemperer on Music, and in 1998, in the John Heath-Stubbs 80th birthday issue of Aquarius.

As a sideline she devised a series of animals to which she added ludic descriptions: a Bird Flautist, Dancing Kangaroos, Dream Camels. She drew Britten’s parrot, for which she had to obtain not only Britten’s permission, but also that of his ill-tempered housekeeper, Miss Hudson, for access to “her” kitchen.

In 2006 she established the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust to support education in these fields, and to preserve her work and that of her husband. It has recently bequeathed her drawings and prints of musicians to the Royal College of Music in London, drawings and prints of dancers to Salzburg University and a selection of drawings and prints to the arts academy in Berlin.

Despite encroaching blindness from the 90s onwards and a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 2011, Milein carried on working for as long as she could. In 2014 she attended the opening of a major retrospective of her work in Gotha, and a documentary on her life, directed by Christoph Böll, was funded by the city. An exhibition of her work is due to be held at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2019

As she said, swiftly sketching a young child who came to her annual apple-picking party in 2003: “There’s always the thrill of the ink and the pen on the page.” Then, cocking her head to peer at what she’d just done: “It is a good drawing, isn’t it?”

When one thinks of Modernism, it is not just Modernist literature that comes to mind but Modernism in all its artistic expressions. This movement – unlike those that preceded it – starts from the idea that there is no fixed basis, with an emphasis on experimentation which is carried out in all kinds of artistic expressions. Several names come to mind when looking at Modernist prose, some figures that had a determinant role in the development of Modernist literature and whose influence continues to be of a vivid significance. In the field of literature in the English language names such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or John Dos Passos stand out as being the main developers of this type of literature. In the following pages, we will focus on one of the milestones in Modernist Literature and Modernism in general: Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Even though his influence is higher in the field of theatre, we will be analysing one of his works in prose, which, though at a different level, left a great heritage as well.

All the arts were intermingled in Modernism – as it has the objective of imbuing life – and every artistic creation was an influence over another. That is to say, the paintings, sculptures and literary works that were produced were not separate creations; quite the contrary, each one constituted an inspiration for others. In this context of continuous creative feedback Beckett has his own place. His relation with art was very intense since he was very young. His correspondence leaves great proof of it. As he would define the effect art had on him in one of his letters to Thomas MacGreevy, he experienced an “Own feeling of helplessness, finally, and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art” (Beckett 2011: 105). Art has a strong impact on the Irish writer, who was left helpless before it many times. All those visits to museums and art galleries during his entire life and specially during his youth constitute not just a mere influence for some of his writings but an essential part of his way of looking at reality and at himself as well as his way of posing questions about it.

It is difficult to say whether all that modern art he saw in the most important galleries of Dublin, Paris, London, or Berlin2 was an inspiration for Beckett’s writing process or, on the contrary, it was Beckett’s work that inspired some of those artists. Most likely, in some cases it was a mutual inspiration. Be that as it may, I contend that some of Beckett’s contemporary artists’ work has a complementary relation with his own. They help to understand and shed new light upon each other’s work. Undoubtedly, the art that struck Beckett the most was one that rose determining questions about aspects such as life, the subject, and reality issues that will be developed, if not given an attempt to be answered, throughout the Irish writer’s texts. For instance, the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, Francis Bacon, or Lucian Freud and their different gazes of a damaged or somehow broken self can add other sensibilities and new angles to Beckett’s statements and view. In the same way, those paintings exploring the self will be enriched and made more intricate after the reading of some of the Irish writer’s literary production, in particular his novella Company (1980), the text that is central in this study.

A new approach to Beckett’s Company is offered here thanks to a starting point which is different from that of other critics of the novella: a comparison with Francis Bacon’s work. We will be looking at one of them whose approach to Beckett’s vision of the world can be considered as equally terrible, that of the ‘I’ facing its own presence in an atemporal fight against its shadow. Bacon, like Beckett, presents existence as a tragedy with no limits. “Es como si ahora llegara a ser posible un combate. La lucha con la sombra es la única lucha real” (Deleuze 2005: 68). Thus, the purpose of this essay is to analyse the relation between Beckett’s prose work Company and the artistic production of Francis Bacon.

This article will adopt a double perspective. The aspects covered in the first part will be mainly the perception of the ‘I’ and the voices of consciousness. Bacon’s selfportraits will be central in establishing this relation to Beckett’s ideas on self-perception.

This will be the most psychological part of the essay, which will approach the text and the paintings from a Cubist viewpoint. Thus, I attempt to illustrate the way the issue of self- perception in both Beckett and Bacon shares some basic characteristics with a Cubist or fragmented notion of reality.

The second part of this paper will consist on a more aesthetical3 approach to both the novella and the paintings, aiming at identifying the correlated aesthetics of both Company and Bacon’s compositions. The lying figures, the eyes, an aestheticized life and a final and paradoxically half-illuminated void, will be the points leading our analysis. Special attention will be paid in this second part to Bacon’s blackest paintings, since darkness and light will become central elements of the argument.

The comparative analysis seeks to provide us with a renewed reading of the novella. A concrete perspective will be given in order to look at Company in the same way in which we observe a Modernist painting: we will take an impression from the text, we will forget about a possible story, and we will take not only an intellectual but also a purely aesthetical insight.

La absurdidad primera pone de manifiesto ante todo un divorcio: el divorcio entre las aspiraciones del hombre hacia la unidad y el dualismo insuperable del espíritu y de la naturaleza.4

Company is a novella written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and published for the first time in 1980. It was later included in the trilogy Nohow On together with Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho in 1989. The novella is one of the short prose texts the Irish writer produced in his late period and can be labelled as one of his ‘closed space’ writings, a very appropriate label for our comparative study with Bacon’s paintings. Beckett’s reader could argue that there is a lot of openness in the space of Company, but we will see that the author creates a contradictory space as well as many other contradictory elements in his text. In fact, ‘company’ is a very contradictory title for a novella like this one. We do not seem to have anything like company, as it is revealed at the end, when we are left with a bleak picture that has been building up throughout the pages, a picture of isolation. What we observe is a “devised deviser devising it all for company” (Beckett 2009: 30) that never finds it. Company is the negation of company:

Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always where. Alone. (Beckett 2009: 42)

Company begins by giving us a subject. The subject is within a body, which is within a space that seems a lack of space. If Modernist literature seeks the representation of the inner and therefore ‘more real’ reality, Beckett, as one of the foremost Modernists, explores this inner self. If the Modernist Virginia Woolf makes use of the special voice of interior monologue that is helped by Free Indirect Discourse and stream of consciousness, Beckett carries his exploration out through a more complex voice, but equally personal. Beckett’s exploration always takes into account that the subject is framed. As we were saying, it is framed in a body and in time and space. We cannot forget that the exploration and own understanding of time and space are also key themes for Modernist art. Proust had already experimented with time and memory in his À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) when Beckett started writing, and artists such as Dalí with his La persistencia de la memoria (1931) were doing the same exploration with painting at the Irish writer’s times. Time seemed to be subjective, linked to the subject’s memory and perception. It was not that one is framed in an objective time but that time is one’s inner time.

In Company, the voice’s continuous movements to the past in the shape of autobiographical memories blurred by fantasies make us think that Beckett had an interest in the Proustian concern with time5 : “To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future” (Beckett 2009: 3). Real and fictional in time can be confused as all depends on a subject and we as readers do not know what to consider real. Again, Beckett’s subject is not within an ‘exact’ timing but it is the voice which frames time:

To confess, Yes I remember. Perhaps even to have a voice. To murmur, Yes I remember. What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Murmuring now and then, Yes I remember. An old beggar woman is fumbling at a big garden. Half blind. You know the place well. […] On the way home from kindergarten on your tiny cycle you see the poor old beggar woman trying to get in. You dismount and open the gate for her. She blesses you. (Beckett 2009: 10)

The subject imagines and recalls memories that make him or her who he or she is. ‘I’ am my past, what I remember and what my memories have of real and imagined. Beckett’s ‘I’ of the past, the present and the future are different ‘I’s. Nevertheless, with a lack of objective temporality, we have three simultaneous ‘I’s or a dissolved or combined ‘I’. Time is confused in a deviser that “speaks of himself as of another” (Beckett 2009: 16):

On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. […] So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. […] You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light. (Beckett 2009: 15-16)

Might not the voice be improved? Made more companiable. Say changing now for some time past though no tense in the dark in that dim mind. All at once and in train and to come. But for the other say for some time past some improvement. Some flat tone as initially imagined and same repetitiousness, No improving those. But less mobility. Less variety of faintness. (Beckett 2009: 21)

It seems clear that the collage of voices Company consists on builds a broken self. However, by having several voices, the depiction is wider and more real. Something similar can be observed in Francis Bacon’s work. What was introduced by Cézanne and developed by Braque or Picasso is ultimately fostered and brought to maturity by Bacon in a very particular way. After all, both Bacon and Beckett are working with something quite similar to Cubism6 , maybe a deformed and degenerated one. The self is not just broken or fragmented but also degenerated. At the same time, Beckett’s Cubist voice reveals not just that the reality being represented is fragmented, but also that its perception as a whole is not possible. Peter Fifield is the first to have established a connection between the writer and the painter in this respect:

For Bacon the broken body is a striking, multi-textured body, the artist stating, ‘I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance’ (Sylvester, 146). The shiver one has at the sight of a vivid mutilation is surely an extension of that ‘shorthand of sensation’ sought by Bacon in his paintings. Without the blood and gore so characteristic of the artworks, Beckett’s figures are, of course, notably distorted by injury and bodily malfunction as well as the sort of strange embodiment. (Fifield 2009: 60)

If one pays attention to the Irish painter’s self-portraits (see appendix, fig. 1-7) one realises the multi-textural composition that produces the deformation of the face, and therefore of the self, in the paintings. Bacon rejects the established way of portraying and tries to apprehend the essence by emphasising flesh. As Fifield puts it, “The repetition of these mutual acts of mutilation and distortion stresses (and distresses) the physical at the expense of conventional bodies and settings, forging a meaty mimesis of the atypical subject” (Fifield 2009: 69). Funnily enough, Bacon gets the essence of the self by means of distortion. That self is similar to Beckett’s, which is broken through a distorting narrative voice. And what we get is that unique sensation in Bacon, that ‘shorthand of sensation’ recalled by Fifield in his essay.

The multi-texture is clear in Beckett’s ‘I’ as well. The embodiment in Company is strange because it is estranged. The reader places him or herself within the body but keeping at a distance from it, partly because ‘I’ and ‘body’ are not fully identified. This estrangement is constructed continuously in Beckett’s text and perceived at once when we look at one of Bacon’s portraits. His self-portraits are particularly close to Beckett’s ‘I’, given the amount of autobiographical content in Company’s voice of memory. Regarding this narrative voice, the reader should not worry about what to take as real or not as all fragments, all voices –all the brushstrokes in the artist’s self-portraits– are equally valid in a context that leaves no place for objectivity. What is more, it could be said that the damaged, the deformed, is preferable as it is more human and also more ‘real’. An approach to the Beckettian deforming narrative voice can be helpful for the reader to better comprehend the final warping of the self, which has a lot of Beckett himself.

Bacon’s isolated faces and bodies are tangled and messy, warped and sick. So there is tension or distress in the body with itself, its presence in an obscure world because it lacks the harmony of unity:

El cuerpo – en la obra de Bacon – se hace carne, se desacraliza, se presenta como espasmo, rompe con la armonía de la superficie y de la forma en un ser amenazado por su propia indefinición, esto es, por la dispersión de su identidad. Un cuerpo que se descompone, que escapa por una boca que grita, que se vacía, se prolonga en los torrentes de semen, se dilata, se mezcla con otros cuerpos, se metamorfosea en su reflejo. (Vásquez 2012: 3)

Funnily enough, the coarser his bodies are given to us, the weaker and more human they result. As Peter Fifield puts it, “In Bacon and Beckett the human form is given through emphasis and exaggeration of the curved, the swollen and the bulbous” (Fifield 2009: 58). However, that ‘human form’ is human presence that has to be liberated from the common human form we are used to see. The liberation is reached through emphasis of the bended and the bloated. The reader can say it is a human being, life, what is being painted –with words or with brushstrokes.

Both artists are talking about what they are not sure it can be talked about as it is even difficult to comprehend. This first chapter opened saying that Company’s title was contradictory because the novella is, after all, the lack of company, isolation of the self, who has no company. The subject does not have company even from his own voice, from his own self, as its perception is not clear. There is a lack of content. A subject is being portrayed but that subject is not there. Nevertheless, for us the question to be considered here is nicely put by Milan Kundera in his essay “Une rencontre” (2009), which I quote in its Spanish translation: “¿hasta qué grado de distorsión un individuo sigue siendo él mismo?” (Kundera 2009: 20). The face is distorted and one beholds the most intimate ‘I’: Bacon’s raw self. But it is difficult to say what one’s identity is when the self has been broken, fragmented into several ‘I’s and memory and imagination are equally valid, as happens in Company. There, the subject ends being unnamable: “Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You” (Beckett 2009: 20)

Kundera’s question is somehow answered by means of an element that is repeated in all the self-portraits by Bacon: there is always certain tension that presents the tension of life itself. The tension of a depiction that deforms (almost dissolving) the individuality means that identity is brought to its limit and results in a vibrant and arresting portrait.

Por mucho que legue a la deformación, los personajes de Bacon resultan reconocibles e identificables. El proceso de representación se debate siempre en esa tensión, que busca aquel momento conflictivo en que la presencia parece a punto de disolverse, pero aún no ha perdido del todo los rasgos que la distinguen. (Hunter 2009: 60)

That extreme presence that is about to be dissolved, that pursuit of sensation is not so pictorially represented in Beckett. Nonetheless, in his work, as in Bacon’s, identity is not totally destroyed. There is an attempt to grasp the core element of raw identity, naked existence once liberated from its own skin. Identity suffers a process of abstraction in both Beckett and Bacon. Bacon’s bodies and faces and Beckett’s metafiction are maintained in that tension that allows the individual to keep his or her own identity. Tension is an essential element for both artists to represent individuals –‘I’s– the way they perceive them.

The incapability to communicate as a result of the fragmented self and the consequent alienation of the individual is a chief theme in Modernism in general. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895) portrays the angst that one can feel as a consequence of this alienation. As for American Modernist Fiction, a considerable number of Faulkner’s characters embody this inability to communicate, with the clear example of Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929): “I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying arid the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out” (Faulkner 2010: 33). Benjy struggles to communicate but he fails. As a result, his perception of the world is also damaged, blurred. The lack of communication, the distorted language, limits his perception of reality. Company presents the same panorama. Furthermore, just as no one seems to care about whether Benjy speaks or not, Beckett’s individual is alienated and inactive, lacking all human contact. His presence does not seem to be relevant for anyone else, at least from the voice’s perspective, from what we know through the narrative voice. Beckett and Bacon share that consciousness of triviality of one’s existence. However, that is not where the most distressing part of it lies. Company brings the panorama to its limits denying the possibility of communicating with oneself. Both physical and psychical interactions are problematic. Thus, in Beckett, the lack of communication isolates the person even from himself or herself. At the same level, something similar can be observed in Bacon’s individuals. The painter does not have narrative voice(s) to express the condition of alienation of the subject and yet his portraits inspire the deepest feeling of isolation and remoteness, which is stressed by the fact that most of the people depicted in his paintings are completely alone and framed.

Additionally, chaos is a shared element in the ‘broken’ world Faulkner, Beckett and Bacon –among other many Modernist artists– depict, which is the chaotic view of reality of man in the 20th century, coming with the end of Modernity. Another indispensable example is another foremost modernist, James Joyce, who will be considered again later. In the novel that is considered to be his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), his representation of chaos as an essential part of the broken man is very clear. This chaos is brought by the polyphonic, stream-of-consciousness voices of Joyce’s individuals resounding in the city, which are, like Beckett’s voices, “anonymous, obscure in their attachment to the ‘I’” (Oppenheim 2000: 103-4). In Joyce, and especially in Beckett, the reader never knows at which point one voice ends and another starts. “By fragmenting or fizzling voices, by rendering them anonymous yet also attached to the self […] [w]e cannot individuate them” (Oppenheim 2000: 103). This reflects the chaotic dimension of existence, of bare life, which impedes communication with others and with oneself.

Is there a voice in Company? Are there several voices? If so, where is the line separating them? Are they talking only to the body? When looking at this body, this ‘I’ in the dark, the reader cannot help thinking of possible others, those others that appear in Ulysses. In Company, the lack of presence of others, or the incapability of meeting other selves, makes us think of those others and the probability of their presence. What is more, the Beckettian subject’s own alienation leads him or her to ask about possible others, other ‘I’s: Beckett leads us to a paradoxical ethics of non-relation that appears very close to the ethics of distance that Emmanuel Levinas was elaborating at the same time, paradoxical because the relation with the other is founded on a non-relation, since the face of the other person always reveals an infinite distance. The term of ‘nonrelation’ destroys from the outset the humanistic illusion that we are all alike, or that reciprocity is a given. On the contrary, it is because we are all infinitely different that a new rapport can be thought. (Rabaté 2014: 142)

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.7 Modernism is a lot about perception, in all its faces. Beckett’s Company shares this Modernist interest but narrows it down to the perception of the self. When we read the novella we picture a man —or better a body and voices, no clear attachments implied— in the darkness, which means that we do not really picture anything in particular as there is only blackness. Therefore visual perception, sight, which has traditionally been considered as the superior sense in epistemology, is rendered useless and therefore primary sensorial perception is hindered.

The reader starts reading Company and all he or she sees is a bulk in the middle of blackness and as part of that blackness. Company is dark. There is a body, there is an ‘I’, and there is darkness, shadow: “Basalt is tempting. Black basalt. […] If with none then no light from the voice on the place where our old hearer lies. In immensurable dark. Contourless.” (Beckett 2009: 21). The author comes back once and again to the black so that the reader can plunge into that dimness in order to feel the same way the body does. The reader has trouble trying to picture a figure lying in the dark, but (s)he soon embodies that same figure. Apparently a specific body accompanied by a voice or group of voices talking to it, but also a body which every human being can ‘occupy’. In other words, every person can be within that skin. The same happens with Francis Bacon’s representation of people, even in his self-portraits, already discussed in the previous section; they represent specific people but one can see him or herself among the diverse shots building a face or a body as they depict the purest and rawest humanity after all.

Perception of the subject in Company is determined by an essential condition apart from this darkness and obscurity: the body is lying, necessarily lying “on his back in the dark” (Beckett 2009: 3). This position leaves the figure in a cognitive relation with the space different from that he would have if he were standing up or sitting down. This condition can recall other cases in Modernist narrative like the one in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). In this book, when Gregor Samsa wakes up in a body that is his but estranged and metamorphosed, he is lying down. He goes through a process of perception of his new physical self from his lying position. And Kafka presents, again, a broken self in his novella. Right before Gregor starts moving, there is a long moment of silence, while lying down, when time is blurred. Gregor’s body seems to be detached from time.

It is in his lying position that Gregor starts to fragmentally perceive his body and, later, his new voice with terror. Even if The Metamorphosis has a metaphorical or even socio-political connotation and Company has a more abstract look, both introduce a lying figure whose voice is apart or estranged, Gregor’s being the ‘exterior’ one. He is shocked when he hears his own metamorphosed voice:

[T]he clock struck quarter to seven. There was a cautious knock at the door near his head. “Gregor”, somebody called – it was his mother – “it’s quarter to seven. Didn’t you want to go somewhere?” That gentle voice! Gregor was shocked when he heard his own voice answering, it could hardly be recognised as the voice he had had before. As if from deep inside him, there was a painful and uncontrollable squeaking mixed in with it, the words could be made out at first but then there was a sort of echo which made them unclear, leaving the hearer unsure whether he had heard properly or not. (Kafka 2005: I)

We do not know how long Gregor Samsa is lying down, but it is a fact that he has something in common with Beckett’s lying figure: both their bodies are passive. Their only activity, especially in Company, is perception; the rest is therefore passivity or lack of movement, lack of life. Your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. This is the type of assertion he does not question. You saw the light on such and such a day and your mind never active at any time is now less active than ever so. (Beckett 2009: 4)

Your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. This is the type of assertion he does not question. You saw the light on such and such a day and your mind never active at any time is now less active than ever so. (Beckett 2009: 4)

However, “certain activity” (Beckett 2009: 4) is registered in Company, a slight one that is perception, hearing the voice, scrutinising darkness. That perception is the so-called ‘company’, “mental activity of a low order” (Beckett 2009: 29). The voice as only and necessary – although never sufficient– company can be observed in the context of isolation of the subject, which is another condition of the body in the dark. As far as the subject is concerned, he or she is isolated, with the only company of voice. The two texts, though quite different, make use of the lying position so that the subject can face himself, both physically and in terms of existence. Or an estranged self, that is.

Something similar can be said about Francis Bacon’s lying bodies. They are passive and isolated in the dark. However, even though they are sometimes sleeping (fig. 11), which could be conceived as a peaceful state, there is no harmonic relation to the figure’s surroundings. The figure is physically confronting himself or herself and his or her own existence. Because of the tension of the body and the inherent violence of the representation, the figure is a misfit in the space, in the world, and it is therefore in agony.

In Company sensual perception focuses on hearing and, later, as light appears, sight. The reader’s sources are an inner ear that hears voices and an eye that ‘sees’ a dark space. The eye is as important element in Beckett as it is in Bacon. In the Irish painter’s Self- Portrait with Injured Eye (1972) (fig. 3) his obsession with the eye is patent. He uses a closed swollen eye as the axis that unchains the deformation of the entire face. Thus, from the eye, the whole face is distorted. Beckett leaves a special place for the eye in his text too:

There is of course the eye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again. (Beckett 2009: 12)

The damaged state of the sense of sight has already been mentioned in the introduction to this second chapter. The eye cannot work properly due to the lack of light. This can be explained by its connection to traditional symbolism of light and darkness. Traditionally, light means truth and that truth cannot happen in the darkness we find in Beckett and Bacon. Is the eye not the only element that is not completely blurred, that gives a hint of profound and abysmal presence? “Only eyelids move” (Beckett 2009: 29). Is it not its moisturising necessity what shows us life? These questions are here posed with reference to Beckett’s novella but in universal terms as well, being as they are about human beings in general. It is interesting to confirm that the eye in Company has the same intensity as the eye in some of Bacon’s portraits. The two artists are communicating the same, life, even if the eyes are closed.

Every word said by the voice in Beckett’s novella conveys certain lyricism. The way it talks about the eye, the light, the memories… every aspect of movement and life becomes art in Company. Life has an intrinsic beauty in it, even if it is in the middle of chaos. Life should be art. Here we find something similar to the Nietzschean affirmation of life:

Nietzsche estetiza la vida, no en el sentido burgués, sino en el sentido de que la vida misma sea una obra de arte. Sólo así el arte podrá generar novedades y no morir. El arte así pensado no es un fin, sino un instrumento que hay que llevar más allá, puesto que debe estar al servicio de la vida. Una vida que se concibe no ya como una infinitud a alcanzar sino como un finito ilimitado (o sobrepliegue), visible tras la fractura de la visión del mundo unitario. (Álvarez 2012: 11)

What really interests Beckett in Company is that life, and the isolated condition of the living body. Sometimes that perception of oneself does not go further towards the consideration of presence and existence as it happens with Existentialist authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, or the abovementioned Franz Kafka. Even though questions about existence are sown, Beckett sticks to the question of perception. And this perception, although complex, is direct and penetrating as a portrait by Bacon can be. Violently and heartrendingly Bacon’s work gives an insight that utterly moves us. Bacon’s brushstrokes have the power of Beckett’s second person singular voice in Company –“use of the second person marks the voice” (Beckett 2009: 3) –; they are rough and unrefined as the voice is sharp and undressed. Both artists leave us facing a lying figure in an undefined space. Consequently, they leave us lying on our own, scrutinising darkness. In the case of some of Bacon’s paintings, the isolated figure is there, in a space where it does not fit at all. The tension grows between the ‘I’ and the place the ‘I’ is, in spite of himself, framed in. As a consequence of that tension, the figure cannot be fully framed. This is very clear in one of Bacon’s lying figures, Sleeping Figure (fig. 11): “El pintor explota la relación figura/espacio. […] [E]l personaje aparece atrapado por su actitud, aplastado contra […] la cama como si fuese un resto de sí mismo, su sola presencia inanimada y moldeada por la presión del espacio circundante sobre ella” (Hunter 2009: 33). There is an obvious tension produced by the relation between the body and the space, and yet the space is unavoidable. Even if the space is undefined, it is needed if a portrait has to be made. Bacon’s spaces are essential to frame his portraits.

The same happens with space in Beckett’s Company. And, I dare say, was this not the same portraying activity carried out by James Joyce, the fellow countryman of both artists? As another Irish Modernist novelist, Joyce made an attempt at grasping just life through “unadorned portraits of the human presence” (Hale 1993: 97) in his writing, especially in his Ulysses. Nevertheless, the portrait of humans, of life, is given to us within a different frame since space changes. The city —Dublin as a microcosm—, acts as a constant movement of gyres, were lives are intermingled in an ordered chaos. That clashes with Beckett’s darkness and absence of space. And yet it is not that obvious that the contrast is so radical. While Joyce explored the impossibility of communication, the individual within the continuous urban movement, the musicality of the variety of Dubliners living parallel and juxtaposed lives, Beckett writes about the impossibility of communication of the self, blurred multiple voices and so on. All in all, he writes about the complexity of the ‘I’.

That ‘I’ can be whoever, but, at the same time, it is a definite and somehow unique self. As it has already been said, presence in Beckett is extreme and powerful. Aesthetics throughout the text is hence quite strong and unique. A blurred but at the same time determined self embodies that presence, the text itself. It is blurred due to the lack of light, the multiplicity of voices that appears to be coming from that light, the undefined space or lack of space. The reader pictures a sort of dim room that can be compared to the rooms where some of Bacon’s naked figures are drawn. This can be easily observed in works such as Study from the Human Body or Untitled (Crouching Nude) (fig.8-10). All of those whitish bodies are found in a placeless room. Some straight lines form a geometrical, linear but also undefined container for a violently and distressingly curved body that could be said to be fighting against itself. The lack of definition of the space is stressed by the colours black, grey and ochre at the background. In addition, sometimes the angst is reinforced by means of the use of red. It can be stated that conflict is a key point in Bacon’s bodies and colour and form work together to produce that conflictive nature.

Surprisingly, it is a determined self in a specific body, with specific experiences in the past that can be brought to mind in this undetermined space, even if everything is blurred. This can be thought if we take that there is just one self, one subject. In Beckett’s text, there is a huge part of the discourse, or attempt of discourse, that is memories, Beckett’s memories as he left them. The autobiographic elements are clear. Again, the reader feels lost trying to draw a line separating the defined and undefined when reading Company and looking at Bacon’s work.

Aesthetically, Company is all about that presence, human presence in the dark, what has already been referred to as ‘raw humanity’. This humanity conveys a violence and extreme way of being, presence. That violence of being stands out in Bacon’s portraits. Each line seems to be fighting against another; the rough brushstrokes were spontaneously made, sometimes with rags, by the artist. The violence can be unjustified or unavoidable. Does the beauty lie in that confrontation? A terrible beauty is born in Bacon’s works. The face is full of life and, paradoxically, it is rotting. The same happens with the Beckettian subject: being full of life, being all existence on its mind, being absolute presence for one’s own, its death would not mean any significant change in the dark, even if that presence could be perceived as the most important element in that undefined space.

The white nothingness perceived by Wallace Stevens’s snowman is the black nothingness perceived by the Beckettian hearer. However, there is a presence that is maintained in the novella thanks to the voice, which keeps talking to the ‘I’. Total absence is not allowed. The light in the text brightens the void, ‘enclosed’ within the undefined space, which we know about because there is an eye looking at what is being lit: “Whence the shadowy light? What company in the dark! To close the eyes and try to imagine that. Whence once the shadowy light. No source. As if faintly luminous all his little void” (Beckett 2009: 11). Light is masterly used by Beckett. The voices draw the ‘I’ and create light. As much as the body is eager for light, he will not get it but for the voice, and for the eye that gives access to the produced light that grows with the voice.

Just as Beckett’s ‘black nothingness’ is briefly broken by this shadowy light, Francis Bacon’s monochromatic paintings – see most of the bodies in the Appendix to this article – are also faintly lit by some sort of shadowy light and in some cases by a lamp or a dangling light bulb (fig. 11). In Untitled (Crouching Nude) (fig. 10), for instance, this is patent. The combination of blue, grey, black, and ochre – all dark lines – tends to a monochromatic blackness, a “bourneless dark”, as Beckett would say (Beckett 2009: 33). However, in that blurred colour that tends to black in Bacon’s work there is a curved line, a violent white that acts as Beckett’s light, defining the undefinable and at the same time highlighting that lack of definition. The body in distress is emphasised as it conveys powerful presence. The sensation of the contrasted white that forms a body is made through great tension, as happens with the curvature of all the white lines that seems to be pushing against the straight lines that create darkness. The other contrasting colour is red, which just adds fierceness and chaos.

Some mention should be made to the lack of adaptation of the body to the space, somewhere in the void. Even in Study from the Human Body (fig. 9), in which the figure is slender like a harmonic white sculpture, the body does not fit. The figure is clearly leaving, evaporating after a shaded curtain. As an exception, that body is straight and standing up, whereas the rest are lying down as Beckett’s nameless figure, or bending with angst. However, all of them are the same, misfits, inappropriate.

Physical darkness on the body’s surroundings somehow mirrors the obscurity of perception of oneself going on in Beckett’s novella. Indeed, in both Company’s body and Bacon’s bodies the inner obscurity is extended to the space the body is lying in. “La figura parece surgir de la penumbra del fondo como un espectro” (Hunter 2009: 65). The white wraith is in reality full of life. Actually, it is life itself in a placeless darkness, an “equal remoteness at its most remote” (Beckett 2009: 20). The movement that the figure transmits is a result of the tension, the intrinsic tension of existence. “You were once. You were never. Were you ever?” (Beckett 2009: 12). The nostalgic memories in the novella are counteracted by the inquisitive second person voice asking disturbing questions which do not have an answer.

There is tension in both artists; tension between a white light and blackness, between the body and the space, between real memories and fiction in Beckett’s novella, between straight and curved brushstrokes in Bacon’s paintings. In Beckett’s short novel, there is even tension between the title word, ‘company’, and the ending word, ‘alone’. I think that we can state that the aesthetics of both artists is one of disturbing tension within an abysmal void.

All in all, Beckett shows in Company his own understanding of the self by means of a man lying down, “on his back in the dark” (Beckett 2009: 3) and a voice or a collage of voices supposedly addressing him. The limited perception of the subject allows the author to express his ideas on the individual and his/her distressing way of existing in the world. The Beckettian self is broken and fails to communicate. The voice that the individual and the reader hear throughout the novella draws a broken and alienated self, deficient in communication. That voice is unreliable. Actually, everything is unreliable. If the self, identity, cannot be trusted and everything goes around the ‘I’, nothing can really be trusted, not even the knowledge about oneself.

On the other hand, Francis Bacon’s self follows the Beckettian path but his perception is soaked with violence and his fragmentation is brought further to deformation. Bacon’s selves transmit that raw dimension of the bulging body in a permanent fight against itself. If Bacon’s painting adds his own fierceness to Company’s perception of an individual, Beckett has enhanced the fragmentation of the ‘I’ by means of highlighting the impossibility of communication.

Both an intellectual and an aesthetical look on perception are needed in order to get the point of the written and painted material of the present study. There are many points where the two artists meet: the isolated ‘I’, the distorted perception, the all surrounding void, etc. It is the two artists’ terrible tension that generates that unique sensation of extreme, raw life that is as universal as is talking about human condition. If the tension of contrast is very visual and clear in Bacon, it is differently perceived in Beckett’s Company as it is built up via word relations instead of brushstrokes of colour. Nevertheless, both artists leave us with the same intense sensation every human can feel identified with, sensation of experiencing life itself. This could be put as the most important conclusion here: by means of two different languages, Beckett and Bacon make use of extreme existence, the heartrending tension that is necessary to express life. Human existence is suffering, isolation and anguish but still it is an art expression, full of beauty. Like Bacon’s paintings, Beckett’s Company is the expression of that man of the 20th century, living in the degeneration of an era of developments, in the death of Modernity. Because of the clash between the ideas and reality, the concept of the latter oscillates and turns into fragments. There is not unity, or light, or truth any more as it is reflected with the subject’s self-conscience, as this Cubist piece by Beckett proves. Both the writer and the painter expose their different faces with the intention of covering the real, which includes now that which is left in the shadow because of the existence of raw life in the darkness. Even if we are condemned by that darkness to void.

Álvarez, Marta. 2012. El cuerpo sin órganos en Francis Bacon. Trabajo de iniciación a la investigación no publicado. Universidad de Valladolid - Santander

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Beckett, Samuel. 2011. “Letter to MacGreevy, 26 September [1948]”, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, volume II: 1941-1956. Ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press. 104-106

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Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Francis Bacon: Lógica de la sensación. Trad. Isidro Herrera. 2nd ed. Madrid: Arena Libros

Faulkner, William. 2010. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1984

Fifield, Peter. 2009. “Gaping Mouths and Bulging Bodies: Beckett and Francis Bacon”. Journal of Beckett Studies. Vol. 18, Sept 2009. 57-71

Gontarski, Stan (ed.). 2014. The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Hale, Jane. 1993. “Framing the Unframable: Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon”. Pp. 95-102, in Marius Buning y Lois Oppenheim (eds.): Beckett in the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi

Joyce, James. 2000. Ulysses. Intro. Declan Kiberd. London: Penguin Classics

Kafka, Franz. 2005. The Metamorphosis. Trans. David Wyllie. The Project Gutenberg; August 16, 2005.

Katz, Daniel. 1999. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Conciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

Oppenheim, Lois. 2000. The Painted Word. Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 2014. “Beckett’s Masson: From Abstraction to Non-relation”. Pp. 131-145, in Stan Gontarski (ed): The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett: Edinburgh University Press

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1967. El hombre y las cosas. Trad. Luis Echávarri, 3rd edition. Buenos Aires: Losada

Stevens, Wallace. 2001. “The Snow Man”, Harmonium. London: Faber and Faber

Vásquez Rocca, Dr. Adolfo. 2012. “Francis Bacon; la deriva del yo y el desgarro de la carne”. Revista Observaciones Filosóficas, 13 Jan. 2012. Accessed 30 June 2016

BY HILARY WEBB | VISUAL ARTS | GALLERIES | BLOUIN ARTINFO | SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2017

Extraordinary paintings by the notorious Francis Bacon, many of which have not been displayed in almost half a century, are going on show at Tate Britain. “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and Century of Painting Life” celebrates some of Bacon’s most revered and hidden pieces. This landmark exhibition of paintings opens in London at the end of February 2018.

This exhibition will showcase “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud,” a large scale painting by Francis Bacon of his friend Lucian Freud, which was only seen in public shortly after it was completed – first in London in 1964 and then in Hamburg and Stockholm in 1965. It has since remained in private hands and has not been exhibited for over half a century. The portrait shows an anxious looking, bare-chested image of a human figure, curled up in the corner of a darkened room, partly illuminated by a single light bulb. The portrait was over six feet high and was originally part of a three-piece panel, which the artist later made into three separate paintings. It was first showcased in the group exhibition “Aspects of XX Century Art” in 1964 at Marlborough Fine Art. The current exhibition will also showcase portrait of Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy in 1962, the year Peter died. The portrait, last exhibited in 1964, shows a scowling face of Peter, seated nude with all his internal organs bursting through his skin. “All Too Human,” another triptych created in 1975-77 will be showcased after 30 years, which is on loan from a private collection.

This is a final homage to Bacon’s lover George Dyer, which shows a twisted body under a black umbrella on a cold stretch of beach. Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain said, “This will be an unmissable opportunity to see some truly extraordinary paintings, many of which have not been seen for decades. With this exhibition we want to show how British figurative painters found new and powerful ways to capture life on canvas throughout the 20th century, and Bacon’s portraits are some of the greatest examples of that endeavour.”

“All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and Century of Painting Life” will be presented from February 28, 2018 through August 27 at 2018 at Tate Britain, London, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG, UK.

The New York evening auctions wrapped tonight with a solid if imperfect postwar and contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s, the house’s $310.2 million haul falling squarely between its low estimate of $250.4 million and its high estimate of $343.4 million. The sell-through rate was an impressive 95.8 percent, with only three works failing to sell throughout the long sale of 72 lots.

The night’s biggest lot was Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of George Dyer (1966), one of his coveted triptychs, which sold for $36.8 million, over its low estimate of $35 million. That was followed by another eight-figure juggernaut, Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972), which went for $32.4 million, over a low estimate of $30 million. (All sales prices include buyer’s premium, unless otherwise noted.)

While neither work had ever before been offered at auction, they both failed to capture the interest of the salesroom. Each earned just one bid—in both instances, the bidder was on the phone with the house’s contemporary art head for Europe, Alex Branczik. Both were subject to third-party guarantees.

Nothing here could match the era-defining events of Wednesday night’s sale at Christie’s, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500) sold for a record 4450 million—considerably more than tonight’s entire sale. But during the press conference at Sotheby’s after the action, auctioneer Oliver Barker noted that, setting aside the Leonardo, the two sales were fairly comparable. If you compare contemporary to contemporary and remove the $450 million from the total, Christie’s totaled $338.6 million, just a bit higher than the total at arch-rival Sotheby’s tonight.

“Taking aside a certain Old Master that sold last night, in terms of the actual contemporary market, it was really quite level,” Barker said.

Gregoire Billault, the house’s contemporary art head, also obliquely mentioned the Salvator Mundi as he recapped tonight’s auction, saying, “This has been an historic week in the art market and this is one more step in the right direction.”

What’s more, the total was up from the same auction a year ago, which generated sales of just $276.6 million, and it nearly bested the $319.2 million sale of last May—a sale that was boosted by a bidding war that catapulted an untitled work by Basquiat past the $100 million threshold, making it the most expensive artwork by an American ever sold.

Here tonight, there was nothing that came close to that Basquiat in terms of price or excitement. But after a throat-clearing stretch of 24 works from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection—nearly all low-priced work on paper—the sale began in earnest with an untitled 2012 work by Laura Owens, who has a wildly acclaimed show that just opened at the Whitney Museum in New York. (There’s a blank space in the museum’s exhibition space where the newly-auctioned Owens will go on loan right after the sale.)

A great deal of talk leading up to the sale had focused on the Owens, considered to be one of her finest, and the fact that it was priced so low, with an estimate of just $200,000 to $300,000. Sure enough, as soon as Barker started the bidding, an avalanche of bids surged forward, in the room and on the phones, bringing the price up to $800,000 before Sotheby’s chairman Lisa Dennison came in with a bid at $950,000, where it slowed. After going back and forth with bidders on the phone, Dennison secured the bid for her client for a $1.45 million hammer, or $1.75 million with fees. That shattered Owens’s previous auction record, which had been just $336,500.

But then a Jean Dubuffet estimated to sell for between $12 million and $18 million was a pass, and when Barker started the bidding on the Bacon, he chandelier bid up to $35 million, found a single bid from Branczik, and then could not find another interested party. The same happened with the Warhol Mao two lots later—one bid, and then nothing.

“So there’s always lots that have one bid, and yes, the Bacon sold on one bid, but if you look at things, we saw there were 73 lots and that was a long list,” said Billault after the sale.

A large-scale painting by Francis Bacon of his friend Lucian Freud is to be shown in Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition, All Too Human in February 2018. The work was only seen in public shortly after it was completed – firstly in London in 1964 and then in Hamburg and Stockholm in 1965. It has since remained in private hands and has not been exhibited for over half a century.

Bacon and Freud had a deep and complex friendship and were often viewed as artistic rivals. Having first met in the mid-1940s they were inseparable for years, seeing each other almost daily in Soho’s bars and clubs as well as visiting each other’s studios and occasionally sitting for portraits. The portrait that will be shown at Tate Britain next year is an angst-ridden image of the human figure, bare-chested and curled into the corner of a dark room beneath a single lightbulb. The painting stands over six feet high and was originally part of a triptych which Bacon then split into separate works. It was first unveiled in 1964 at the group exhibition Aspects of XX Century Art held at Bacon’s gallery Marlborough Fine Art. It then travelled from the Kunstverein Hamburg to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the following year as part of a solo show of Bacon’s work, but has not been seen in public since.

The work will be one of several key Bacon paintings on loan to Tate Britain for the exhibition All Too Human. These will include an important portrait of Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy made in 1962, the year of Lacy’s death, and not seen in the UK since. It shows him seated with a scowling expression and is the first time Bacon portrayed the nude body with its internal organs on display, seemingly bursting through the surface of its skin. An extraordinary Bacon triptych from 1974-77, on loan from a private collection, will also be exhibited for the first time in a UK public gallery in over 30 years. A final homage to George Dyer, the great love of Bacon’s life, it shows a contorted body beneath a black umbrella on a cold stretch of beach.

‘This will be an unmissable opportunity to see some truly extraordinary paintings, many of which have not been seen for decades. With this exhibition we want to show how British figurative painters found new and powerful ways to capture life on canvas throughout the 20th century, and Bacon’s portraits are some of the greatest examples of that endeavour.’ Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and Century of Painting Life will be at Tate Britain, running from 28 February to 27 August 2018. This major exhibition will celebrate how artists have captured the intense experience of life in paint, portraying personal and immediate experiences. Much loved and rarely seen works will be included, from Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer to Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, through to Paula Rego and Jenny Saville. It will be curated at Tate Britain by Elena Crippa, Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art and Laura Castagnini, Assistant Curator.

A portrait of Lucian Freud by the painter’s friend Francis Bacon is going on display for the first time in half a century. The 6ft-high work shows Freud “angst-ridden”, bare-chested and curled into the corner of a dark room beneath a lightbulb.

It will be shown at Tate Britain’s All Too Human exhibition next year, as the show examines how artists capture the “intense experiences of life” in paint. Bacon’s painting has only been seen in public twice before, shortly after it was completed in London in 1964 and then in Hamburg and Stockholm the following year.

The painters had a deep and complex friendship, and were often seen as rivals. They were inseparable for years after first meeting in the mid-1940s, seeing each other almost daily in Soho’s bars and clubs as well as visiting each other’s studios.

The painting, now in private hands, was originally part of a triptych which Bacon then split into separate works. Tate’s exhibition will also feature works by Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Frank Auerbach, RB Kitaj and Paula Rego among others.

It will also examine the role of women artists in the traditionally male-dominated field of figurative painting. Other paintings on loan to the show include a nude portrait of Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy, a Bacon triptych from 1974-77 and his final homage to George Dyer, the great love of his life.

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson said: “This will be an unmissable opportunity to see some truly extraordinary paintings, many of which have not been seen for decades.

“With this exhibition we want to show how British figurative painters found new and powerful ways to capture life on canvas throughout the 20th Century, and Bacon’s portraits are some of the greatest examples of that endeavour.”

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud And A Century Of Painting Life will be at Tate Britain from February 28 to August 27 next year.

After encouraging results in London in October, the auction houses are approaching their key November sales of Impressionist and Modern and contemporary art with optimism. More stable economic conditions have contributed to discretionary sellers’ willingness to part with choice material, and in the Impressionist category, the overall pre-sale estimates at Sotheby’s and Christie’s are at a two-year high. “We’ve had a very busy gathering season”, says Jessie Fertig, the head of the Impressionist and Modern evening sale for Christie’s.

After the failure of a £60m Francis Bacon at Christie’s London last month, Friedlander says she aimed for "a really layered, textured sale" composed not only of heavy hitters but also more modestly priced but attractive material. The $100m Da Vinci alongside Mark Rothko’s radiant yellow Saffron (1957, est $25m-$35m) and a 1980s Julian Schnabel painting on velvet (Ethnic Type #14, 1984, $500,000-$700,000), she says, "tells a story about what the marketplace is after right now."

On the contemporary side, Sotheby’s is offering a Francis Bacon triptych of George Dyer, one of five extant and one of three in private hands, bought by the consignor in 1967, the year after it was painted. Another triptych sold at Christie’s New York in May for $46m hammer; this one is tagged at $35m to $45m (and guaranteed by the house). “It’s absolutely magnificent”, says the head of contemporary art Grégoire Billaut. “He is at his best when painting the very close circle around him.” Other discoveries include a large Warhol Mao portrait, unseen in public since 1973 (est $30m-$40m) and Cabra (1981-82), a Jean-Michel Basquiat skull painting owned by Yoko Ono (est $9m-$12m).

At the end of World War II, Francis Bacon, the British painter, painted figures that were seemingly transformed by the imagery of the unconscious. Bacon’s direct revelation of the unconscious evokes the chaotic forces that civilization has repressed in humanity and also captures a loss of control, a sense of helplessness and horror. This notion is most directly represented in his papal series, which includes the renowned Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. In these works the vertical lines, which form a caged in claustrophobic space close in uncomfortably, while the figure blurs into anonymity. Bacon’s signature papal themed work has generated extensive interpretation since arriving to the art world in the 1950’s. In this paper, the published material focused on Bacon’s this body of work will be discussed chronologically, characterized from a methodological and critical perspective. [1]

In “Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror,” (1952) Sam Hunter attempts to identify the source of the scream expressed by the Pope figures. Using Head VI, 1949 as one example, the author finds that there is nothing to provoke such a frightening reaction. Rather, the Pope is experiencing an existential crisis — the anguish is one of mental entrapment and not a response to some horrific scene occurring outside the canvas. Furthermore, Hunter claims that Bacon had repeatedly defended himself against being a painter of literal, physical violence. Although admitting his images are violent, Bacon sought to portray a psychological violence and self-destruction incurred through the social and cultural structures imposed and created by humanity, like the Catholic Church. The papal series is a visual manifestation of, in Bacon’s mind, the most confining system with the most destructive results. Hunter has employed both a psychoanalytic methodology and a biographical methodology in his assessment of Bacon’s work, as he explains Bacon’s obsession with the papal system, and specifically his portraits of Pius as a fascination with the dictators and perpetrators of Nazi Germany. [1]

Hunter’s interpretation of Bacon’s paintings as psychologically violent and existentialist, and his referencing of the artist’s obsession with the papal system would be challenged by Laurence Alloway, who in 1960 wrote a stinging attack on critical approaches to Bacon’s papal paintings that interpreted them as images of horror and terror. In the author’s “Dr. No’s Bacon,” he specifically dismisses Robert Melville’s approach to the artist’s work, a classic 1950’s read, which maintains that Bacon’s papal imagery stems from the psychological anguish associated with the current Pope as well as the one painted by Velázquez in 1650. [2] Alloway claims that Bacon did not gain inspiration from Innocent X as depicted by Velázquez, nor did he gain inspiration from the position of the Pope during WWII. Instead, Alloway asserts that Bacon’s references to popular culture and fine art can be related to his reliance on the format and tonality of Grand Manner painting, as Bacon’s technique is, in some respects, an abbreviated version of “Venetian” painterliness. Alloway asserts that to look at the papal portraits, as images of terror and pain are to make them something they are not. However, the methodological approach issued by the author omits any analytical read, reducing it to a purely formal art historical investigation. [3]

As Alloway avows that the works have no narrative or social historical content, so too does the artist. In 1975 David Sylvester interviewed Bacon and discovered that the artist wanted to minimize the role of narrative in his work because, to the artist, narrative involves implicit explanation or structured meaning, which causes the destruction of self-identity. According to Sylvester, Bacon claimed that his Pope imagery did not come from anything associated with religion; rather, it was inspired only by the aesthetic quality of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, 1650, which the artist felt was the greatest portrait ever created due to the magnificent color. However, the artist admitted that that his interest in the Pope lies in the uniqueness and “silliness” of the position. Bacon allegedly said, “like in certain great tragedies, the Pope is as though raised on to a Dias on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world.” Sylvester also inquired about Bacon’s paintings of Pope Pius XII. Bacon denied any reference to the specific position of the Popes during World War II; he also denied gaining inspiration from the Eichmann trial. According to Bacon, the cages or spatial frames depicted in the works were simply a means of focusing the attention on the image, not as a historical reference. [4] Although Sylvester’s interview was direct and candid, Bacon’s purely formal understanding of his depicted cages, his apparent evasiveness, and his misunderstanding of the strength of his own imagery led to further contemplation and interpretation

In 1986, Donald Kuspit author of “Hysterical Painting” aims to demonstrate Bacon’s misunderstanding of his own work. Kuspit argues that Bacon appropriated such authoritative historical figures as Pope Innocent X and reduced them to globs of paint, so that the Popes “sink as if in quicksand.” Kuspit claims that Bacon repeatedly “misinterprets” the strength of the character he seems to find in Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X as sheer monstrousness, brutality. The author argues that Bacon destroys what he creates in the very act of recreating. In that, this destruction has “world-historical import”: as the sadistic character of the Pope is only realized by the sadistic application of paint. Consequently, paint triumphs over human reality and becomes the dominant expression of being. Kuspit claims that Bacon’s papal portraits are not expressive illusions of a figure, but the illusion of being in the presence of a certain self. According to Kuspit, the Pope is locked in a hypoid state as he intensely responds to being cut-off from communication. Bacon utilizes this painterliness to strip the Pope naked bodily and emotionally. Kuspit believes the only element rooting the body of work in reality is the miter that appears in every papal image. [5]

Whereas Kuspit’s argument is rooted in an investigation that aims to expose some hidden truth within the works, Linda Nochlin’s argument rejects any psychoanalytic read. In her article “Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou,” written in 1996, she abandons the “grandiose” over-readings and philosophical generalizations that Bacon’s papal series had attracted in past interpretations, including Sartre’s existentialism and references to Nazism. She writes, “Despite the usual reading of the pope’s open mouth as a sign of existential nausea – a universal scream on the order of Edvard Munch’s famous image – I always read it as a sneeze, which reduced the papal being, or rather, Velázquez’s famous image of Innocent X, to a modern photo-op, the pope’s partially covered mouth agape in a vigorous and non-existential kerchoo.” According to Nochlin, in Bacon’s series of papal portraits, “temporal immediacy and mere physical reflex” undermine the pictorial effects of hierarchy and permanence. She claims that this does not solely occur in the apparent captured gesture, but in the “very transparency of the physical substance of the image itself,” which is enhanced by the lines of gold that encase the papal form. Nochlin has thus determined that through this series, Bacon is both belittling human condition and ironizing references to High Art. This is a direct counter to Alloway’s argument that Bacon’s work should only be viewed as referencing and aspiring to the Grand Manner of traditional High Art. [6]

It is evident that these historians and critics are constantly in debate over Bacon’s papal series. John Hatch, author of “Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon,” (1998) adds to the breadth of interpretation. Hatch believes the source of the violence Bacon portrays through the scream is mental, although can ultimately manifest in physical violence. Relying on Bacon’s alleged atheism, Hatch constructs his argument based on the artist’s nihilistic views on the system of the Church. Apparently, it was known that Bacon believed that the tragedy of the situation of the Pope is that he has relinquished himself to a stifling system of beliefs that is an illusion veiled as an ultimate truth. Hatch, consequently, understands Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953, as a literal portrayal of “the veil of illusions that mentally traps the Pope and elicits his cry of horror.” Here, the author employs a biographical methodology, which is semi-reductive. However, this methodology is replaced by a formal and semi-psychoanalytical methodology with Hatch’s discussion of Bacon’s use of spatial frames as a metaphor for mental entrapment. He writes, “On a formal level, these frames act to isolate the image and minimize any potential narrative. However, this formal device does equally serve as a metaphor for psychological entrapment, highlighted by the fact that the skeletal outline of the frame could never function as a physical barrier.” To Hatch, the papal figures are only psychologically trapped; he wonders why they don’t simply walk out of their prison. [7] The author’s conclusion is aligned with Hunter’s interpretation of Bacon’s papal series. In that, both authors rely on Bacon’s own feelings toward the Catholic Church, to find that the source of the scream is internal.

Thus far, the relationship between Bacon’s papal series and Velázquez’s portrait has been minimally discussed, and when discussed it has only been in terms of either the artist’s distain for the church or his love for Velázquez’s painting. Rina Arya, however, author of "Painting the Pope: an Analysis of Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X," (2009) focuses her argument entirely on the relationship between Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X and Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X to unravel Bacon’s true obsession with the Pope. In claiming that Bacon’s depiction of the Pope in camera (in chamber) contradicts Velázquez’s depiction of the Pope ex cathedra, Arya assesses that Bacon’s painting functions as a photographic negative or mirror image of Velázquez’s. Bacon’s decisive Study After in the title means that Bacon aimed to deconstruct the Velázquez painting and reappropriate it for his own ends. Here, a correlation between Arya and Kuspit’s argument is evident, as both discuss Bacon’s recreation through destruction of an already existing image. Unlike Velázquez whose portrayal of the Pope is a representation of all popes, Bacon portrays the Pope as a single man in a state of mental collapse as his public persona crumbles. Clearly Bacon is critiquing the institution of the Church, however, Arya states that he is dependent upon theological sources for his imagery regardless of his denial of it. [8]

Although many historians aim to uncover the reasons behind Bacon’s use of the papal figures, there are others who have interpreted the series only in terms of Bacon’s own explanation. In 1952, Bacon said, “Real imagination is technical imagination. It is the ways you think up to bring an event to life again. It is in the search for the technique to trap the object at a given moment. Then the technique and the object become inseparable. The object is the technique and the technique is the object. Art lies in the continual struggle to come near the sensory side of the objects.” The authors of “Francis Bacon,” published in 2009, implement this statement to explain how distorted photographic images inspired Bacon’s papal series. The authors assert that Bacon valued distorted photographic images – like those of Ozenfant and Moholy-Nagy – to develop a technique for animating the perception of the papal figure. The authors claim that this is demonstrated by the range of papal images that Bacon produced in the early 1950s, which depicted various forms of distortion such as the extended and stretched seated figure of Head VI, 1949, the striated form of Study After Velázquez, 1950, and Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. [9] Bacon’s figures are then realized through a specific technique, making the subject and the paint inseparable. Here, a direct correlation to Kuspit’s argument exists; Kuspit believes that the sadistic character of the Pope is only realized by the sadistic application of paint. Although, there is a twenty-year gap between arguments, it is evident that a formalist read is always significant throughout the extensive interpretation of these works.

In surveying the published material on Bacon’s papal themed body of work, it is clear that the majority of the scholars share a similar perspective, although each slightly nuanced. Initially, during the 1950s and early 60s Bacon’s work received an existentialist, philosophical read, which also viewed the works as referencing the Pope’s particular situation and the general horror during World War II. However, with Laurence Alloway and his stinging attack on this type of interpretation, a new generation of scholarly interpretation was spawned, running the gamut from the formal to the iconographical to the biographical. Bacon denied any specific source material for his works, always valuing the formal and material aspects over the socio-historical or political references. Despite the artist’s rejection of any religious references specifically to the cage, his feelings toward the stifling tragic position of the Pope have inspired scholars to continually see the cages as a metaphor for psychological imprisonment. Although the arguments discussed are slightly nuanced, there is a common thread in all of the literature: a continued reliance on the artist’s biography. With this papal series, it is impossible not to reference Bacon’s feelings toward the Church. Therefore, biography is important when understanding this body of work; however, it necessitates other methodologies to formulate an interpretation that goes beyond the artist’s personal statement. Thus, the most successful arguments are those that contain a range of methodological approaches and do not necessarily rest upon the notion that Bacon was merely obsessed with Velázquez’s painting for its beauty alone or for his interest in Grand Manner painting.

Alloway, Lawrence. "Dr. No’s Bacon." Art News and Review 12.6 (April 1960).

Arya, Rina. "Painting the Pope: an Analysis of Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X." Literature & Theology 23.1 (2009): 33-50

Matthew Gale, Chris Stephens, and Martin Harrison. Francis Bacon. (New York, NY: Skira Rizzoli, 2009)

Hatch, John G. “Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon.” Artibus et Historiae, 19. 37 (1998): 163-175

Hunter, Sam. “Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror,” Magazine of Art 95.1 (January 1952).

Kuspit, Donald. “Hysterical Painting.” Artforum XXL (5/January 1986): 55-60.

Nochlin, Linda. “Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou.” Artforum 35 (October 1996): 108-110

Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993)

[1] Sam Hunter. “Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror,” Magazine of Art 95.1 (January 1952)

[2] Robert Melville. “Francis Bacon,” Horizon 20.120-1 (Dec. 1949 – Jan. 1950)

[3] Lawrence Alloway. “Dr. No’s Bacon,” Art News and Review 12. 6 (April 1960)

[4] David Sylvester. Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson: 1993)

[5] Donald Kuspit. “Hysterical Painting.” Artforum XXL (January 1986): 55-60

[6]Linda Nochlin. “Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou.” Artforum 35 (October 1996): 108-110

[7] John G. Hatch. “Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon.” Artibus et Historiae 19.37 (1998): 163-175

[8] Rina Arya. "Painting the Pope: an Analysis of Francis Bacon’s Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X." Literature & Theology 23.1 (2009): 33-50

[9] Matthew Gale, Chris Stephens, and Martin Harrison. Francis Bacon. (New York, NY: Skira Rizzoli, 2009)

MELANIE GERLIS | COLLECTING | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2017

November’s auction season in New York is often the stuff of headlines. Last year, when the sales of hundreds of pieces of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art were squished into one week to avoid clashing with the uncertain US general election, a total $900m of art was sold across four evenings ($1bn with fees). Telephone-number sums for individual works included Edvard Munch’s “Girls on the Bridge” (1902) for $50m ($54.5m with fees), Willem de Kooning’s “Untitled XXV” (1977) for $59m ($66.3m with fees) and, top lot of the week, Claude Monet’s grainstack “Meule” (1891) for $72.5m ($81.4m).

There are several juicy offerings this year, again squeezed into one week (November 13-17), so the formula must have worked. Headlines have already been dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” (c1500), which famously once sold for £45 and is now estimated at $100m, and to its accompanying, huge “Sixty Last Suppers” (1986) by Andy Warhol, estimated at $50m, both at Christie’s. Star lot at Sotheby’s is Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of George Dyer” (1966, est $35m-$45m) and Phillips has Peter Doig’s 1995-96 “Red House”, sold in 2008 for $3.2m and now offered at between $18m and $22m. In all, up to $1.7bn of art is estimated to sell across five evening auctions, some $500m more than expected last year.

Auction houses control some of this outcome through guarantees and this series is no exception (though the Bass collection is being offered “naked”). So far, half of the 74 lots in Sotheby’s contemporary auction are effectively pre-sold, while the Leonardo and Warhol at Christie’s, Bacon at Sotheby’s and Doig at Phillips have also been backed.

So a dramatic failure — as witnessed with the Francis Bacon that went unsold at Christie’s in London last month — is not expected. And with the economic winds in favour, “there’s no reason why this season shouldn’t be record-breaking,” Nathan says.

Beautifully and meticulously produced, these five volumes are a magnificent work. Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels have laboured for many years to produce them: the result is surely a model of what a dedicated team can do if given sufficient time and resources. High quality catalogues of this type underpin the ability of scholars to study the work of a given artist seriously and in detail. The volumes are overwhelmingly scholarly and informative. Rather than seeking to contribute directly to the long-running debate about the meaning of Bacon’s work, they contribute indirectly by displaying the material which can enable objective analysis.

Martin Harrison has written extensively about Francis Bacon; he is one of the leading writers about the great artist of 20th century Britain, (who should be treated as wholly English and not Irish, despite the place of his birth; just as England does not claim Jack Yeats, born in London but thoroughly Irish in all ways). His writing on Bacon bears certain characteristics. Always thorough, he likes to base his opinions on facts and one can imagine the pleasure which the accumulation of the facts in these books must have given him. He and his associate editor must now be the most knowledgeable people in the world about Bacon’s work.

It is particularly important in the case of Bacon to establish facts about his career as an artist, as many things which are not facts intrude in his case. Over his long life in the public eye – from 1945 to his death in 1992 – Bacon spoke a great deal of nonsense. Fortunately, one does not have to wrestle with his writing because he was unable to – or chose not to – write anything much except chatty and harmless short letters to his friends. But a decision to write about him forces the writer to consider what Bacon is said to have said. Some of what we are told he said comes down to us in fabricated form. The gospel according to David Sylvester, in the published interviews, is not a transcript of what Bacon said; it is a paraphrase, tidied up for publication by the artist himself after extensive interventions by Sylvester to suit his agenda. Here is what Sylvester wrote about the structure of the published interviews:

“What is preserved here amounts to no more than about a fifth of the material in the transcripts – out of choice, not because of any arbitrary limitation on length. Furthermore, since the editing has been designed to present Bacon’s thought clearly and economically – not to provide some sort of abbreviated record of how the taped sessions happened to develop – the sequence in which things were said has been drastically rearranged. Each of the interviews, apart from the first, has been constructed from transcripts of two or more sessions, and paragraphs in these montages sometimes combine things said on two or three different days quite widely separated in time. In order to prevent the montage from looking like a montage, many of the questions have been recast or simply fabricated. The aim has been to seam together a more concise and coherent argument than ever came about when we were talking, without making it so coherent as to lose the fluid, spontaneous flavour of talk.”

The other person whose contribution to the Bacon canon needs close attention is Michel Leiris. When he “translated” Sylvester’s work into French, even Bacon was a bit surprised about the results, finding the translation “possibly better than the original”. Leiris had somehow “managed to give it a much more profound meaning than I had been able to express. It’s extraordinary: I felt myself to be much more intelligent when I read it. I didn’t think I had said such things”.

That does not mean that, in searching for facts about the artist and his thoughts, one has to ignore the record of what Bacon allegedly said, but it does mean that anyone writing from the point of view of a historian rather than, say, that of a polemicist, has to be wary of it. One also has to be extremely wary of David Sylvester’s role in Bacon studies. His motivation in promoting Francis Bacon and his work, for a very considerable period, seems to have been a mixture of admiration bordering on worship of the artist, together with an impression of wishing to promote his own career as the keeper, and to some extent creator, of Bacon’s growing reputation. My feeling is that, as artist and disciple interacted in the early days of their relationship, it dawned on the highly intelligent and loquacious artist, who could talk but not write, and whose intellectual rigour was limited by his autodidacticism, that he could use the highly intelligent, but obsequious Sylvester, who could write, to help to create for him a reputation as a serious artistic thinker which would help Bacon’s pictures sell. Bacon was no doubt aware of how other serious contemporary artists were burnishing their reputations as participants in the wider intellectual world around them by using the work of others. The catalogue for Giacometti’s first solo exhibition in New York, in 1948, had, for example, a piece by Sartre.

Bacon had all sorts of ideas about art, some of them mildly interesting and original when first aired; but he was inconsistent in his views, easily bored and, like most of us, ignorant about art which he was not particularly interested in. Moreover, he drank a lot, mixed with some rather strange people in a milieu which did not, shall we say, encourage studious reflection, and liked to show off verbally and to dominate and if necessary subjugate those listening to him. Sylvester was his route to consistency and to being taken seriously intellectually. Between them they developed some catch phrases, which I cannot bring myself to reproduce here, so tiresome has their repetition made them. Even if they ever had any deep philosophical meaning, they have become nonsensical through their repetition. Bacon was a very great artist, but not a great thinker or artistic philosopher.

Martin Harrison cannot go too far in the direction of agreeing with my analysis, but he does nod towards it. On page 44 he says “But he was a painter, not an art historian. Evidently he felt under no obligation to be consistent in his opinions, as contradictions and infelicities in his recorded remarks testify”. This lets the artist off the hook completely: he could say anything he liked, however ridiculous or inconsistent with what he had said previously, and be forgiven on that basis. Jeffrey Bernard, the sage and soak of Soho, was acute enough in his sober moments to skewer Bacon in a few words describing his conversation: “One minute Monet is a giant and four drinks later he’s absolutely ghastly”. I think that says it all about Bacon the philosopher of art.

The other thing which Martin Harrison has to cope with, and he copes with it quite brilliantly, is somehow keeping a cool head when writing about Bacon in a relatively short essay in Volume I, when the bibliography enveloping the subject is so large and so full of its own pretentious dead-ends. Harrison stays very largely factual: he is cool under fire; one would want him on one’s side in any Bacon-scholar contest. The essay has calm, logical sections on aspects of Bacon’s productions: how he painted his pictures, in what format, requiring what types of frame, how some pictures were amended and so on. I liked this approach very much. One feels that the writer knows what he is talking about and is using his heavy knowledge to make simple, powerful points. These are not the last words on Bacon the artist: they are probably (hopefully) not even Harrison’s last words; but they are careful, thoughtful words. Those interested in Bacon would do well to read them.

Now to the catalogue which fills Volumes II, III and IV. There are some choices to be made about the way such catalogues are prepared. I have had to use a number of them in my own research and one does sometimes find oneself groaning with frustration as they impinge negatively on one’s nervous system (but via the brain). They can be infuriating, especially if they skimp on, or omit, detailed provenance information. Here the work is a triumph. I hope I am allocating praise fairly if I say that I think much of this work has been done by Rebecca Daniels. I know she has slaved to verify the details supporting each entry, not taking for granted the information easily available to her in the previous catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work, published in 1964 by Ronald Alley of the Tate, under the encouragement of the great director of the Tate, Sir John Rothenstein. That work was done relatively early in Bacon’s career and yet the current editors have been able to locate approximately 40 new works from the period it covered, which gives a hint of the extent of their original research. These have come to light, in the years following Bacon’s death, from private collections and stores where their existence had been unknown or forgotten; some of them are pictures which Alley thought had been destroyed, but which in fact survived, probably unbeknownst to the artist. New discoveries include Bacon’s first Pope (“Landscape with Pope/Dictator” of c.1946. Catalogue number 46-05).

The catalogue is significantly more professional than the 1964 work, to an extent reflecting the greater ability now to obtain and cross-check information via the internet and to obtain obscure exhibition catalogues for the more esoteric shows. Many owners and former owners have been spoken to. As a result, exhibition history and provenance information is fulsome, although the editors have not always been able to circumvent the infamous “Private Collection” entry, which so infuriates provenance researchers seeking to piece together the history of a particular collection, for example, by breaking their ability to trace the chain of descent of a picture from the artist’s studio. Each entry has a short narrative passage to give the picture’s context and background. Of course, even in a work of this stature the impression of finality in the information provided is an illusion, as more provenance information will inevitably emerge. There may have to be a second edition in the years to come. One small item which I would have preferred to see, as a practical help to hard-pressed scholars struggling to research something, is an index of names. If the user wants to look up which pictures were owned by Peter Watson or the little-known early collector Jimmy Bomford, he has no choice but to dredge his way through the provenance sections against each painting, jotting down notes as he goes. This is possible but painful.

Special mention should be made of the photographs. It is difficult to photograph and reproduce photographs of works of art in a way which ensures consistency of tone and colour and accuracy to the original marks on the canvas. There are many variables which can intervene to complicate the overall picture. To state only the most obvious, non-technical, issues, different photographers, at different times in varying light and using different film and so on will inevitably produce different images. When one knows a picture it can be astonishing to observe how different it can appear in reproductions. The nature of the paper used for the printing in the book is another source of unwelcome intervention. In this work, the illustrations are a triumph. In an attitude typifying the rigorous approach of the editors, up to date digital photographic techniques have been used to ensure that the illustrations are of the highest quality which could reasonably be achieved. Prudence Cuming Associates were used for the photography because they had photographed works for the artist during his life. The person who undertook a lot of the new photography which had to be commissioned for the catalogue was the same person who had often photographed the pictures when Bacon had originally completed them and released them from his studio. The result of all this care in seeking to achieve accuracy is, for example, that the beautiful fluid brushstrokes that sometimes characterise Bacon’s work are clear and strong in the image. Simply to take an example at random would be “Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, 1959″ (catalogue 59-10), where the clothes are gorgeously painted. The photographs also enable a study of the many different surface treatments which Bacon deployed.

Apart from various essays, Volume I contains an extremely useful chronology of Bacon’s long life. It is detailed and provides the best available starting point for those seeking to base their comments on the artist on a factual armature, although the methodology used is not apparent. Have the editors transported into the chronology every single date they are aware of, regardless of significance? Entries like “FB and the Sutherlands have dinner in Monte Carlo” (24 December 1949) or “FB in Wivenhoe” (14 February 1966) suggest by their banality an attempt at a comprehensive coverage of known dates. If that has been the approach, it shows the astonishing shortage of facts known about even an artist of Bacon’s stature, as the vast majority of days of each year are blanks. If, in fact, selections have been made, that is understandable but unclear. There will be many more dates available from research and some of them will be about people who were important to Bacon’s career.

An example of a person whose interaction with Bacon was highly significant for the artist was Peter Watson. He procured the first serious piece of art criticism on Bacon, in the final issue of Horizon, and he facilitated the first retrospective of his work at the ICA in 1955. Although there is an entry of a meeting between Bacon and Watson on 16 February 1956, there is no entry for the dinner which took place in London a few days before Watson’s death in May of the same year, when Bacon met up with Richard Chopping, Cecil Beaton and Rosamond Lehmann, but no Watson, who was prevented by illness from joining them. Similarly, Watson and Waldemar Hansen had dinner with Bacon in Monte Carlo on 9 July 1947.

Another example of a piece of information which the editors might have included if they had been aware of it relates to the house called Horsemoor Studio, which Bacon bought in 1964, from the artist Jim Page-Roberts, who had built the house for himself a few years earlier. Bacon responded to an advert in the Daily Telegraph offering the house for sale, saw it and, according to Page-Roberts, agreed to buy it immediately. It probably appealed to him because, whilst small and manageable, it had been purpose-built for an artist, with one very large picture window. Page-Roberts went down for lunch on one occasion, with Bacon and George Dyer, and was later told that the house was given to Dyer by Bacon after a heavy drinking session. The chronology picks up, presumably from the Marlborough Gallery records, that the house was acquired in 1964 and was given to Dyer on 15 October 1965, but it does not record that Bacon wrote to Page-Roberts as late as 31 March 1966 saying that he was hoping to sell the house. The fact that he was involved in decisions about the sale may suggest that the gift to Dyer was more gestural than legal.

The glory of Volume V is the bibliography. This, like the chronology, is a great thing for those who want to tackle Bacon, or more likely some aspect of him. It seeks to list all the possible sources of published information about him. The aspirant new writer on Bacon would do well to look mournfully at the length of this bibliography, and the extraordinary range of topics which have already been covered, before jumping into the same shark-infested pond. I picked up an odd omission when checking a cross-reference. On page 58 of Volume I, Martin Harrison refers to the scratchy little pieces of writing that were probably written by David Sylvester, but which were published during Bacon’s lifetime under his name. The famous piece for Matthew Smith’s 1953 retrospective is picked up in Part 1 of the bibliography, but not things like the short piece which appeared under Bacon’s name in a catalogue for a Louis le Brocquy retrospective exhibition which appeared in Dublin and then in Belfast in 1966/7, even though it is referred to on page 58. The contribution to the catalogue consists of one long sentence. It is far too ordered and crafted to have been written by Bacon, but it says things which he may have believed or said he believed (or was prepared to have said in his name). It should certainly be in any bibliography. But what carping! The bibliography alone is a major art historical achievement.

Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels are professional art historians in the best sense of the term. They are scholars who are keen to achieve the worthy aims of factual completeness and accuracy. They have produced a work which reflects their skills and their approach. It is a monument to a great artist’s work: he has secured the editors he deserves.

Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné. 5 Volumes. The Estate of Francis Bacon 2016. pp 1537. Martin Harrison, ed. Rebecca Daniels, associate ed ISBN 9780 95692731 6 £1,000

titled and dated 1966 on the reverse of the left panel
oil on canvas, in three parts
each: 14 by 12 in. 35.6 by 30.5 cm

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Basil and Elise Goulandris, Athens (acquired from the above in 1968)
Private Collection
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Paris, Galerie Maeght; Rome, Marlborough Galleria d’Arte; Milan, Galleria Toninelli; and London, Marlborough Fine Art. Ltd., Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, November 1966 – April 1967, n.p., no. 16 (Paris), p. 20, illustrated (detail of left panel) and p. 21, no. 12, illustrated in color (London)

Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, New York, 1983, p. 100, no. 41, illustrated in color
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, New York, 1987, p. 48, no. 42, illustrated in color
Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London, 1996, p. 32, illustrated in color and p. 33, illustrated in color (detail of center panel)
Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III, 1958-71, London, 2016, pp. 816-817, no. 66-11, illustrated in color

The impact of Francis Bacon’s most powerful portraits is in direct proportion to the intensity and conviction of his brushstrokes. The energy and dynamism of the paint projects the meaning of the paintings directly outwards onto the viewer’s psyche, as demonstrated in a serial portrait of a man under extreme pressure, Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966. Indubitably one of the most impressive of Bacon’s small triptychs, it is a passionate and incisive representation of a close (and emotionally troubled) companion.

n 1962 Bacon had arrived at a format for painting portrait heads which subsequently remained constant, and which formed a distinct and significant category of his work. Invariably painted on relatively small, 14 x 12 inch canvasses, he produced these subjects as single panels and diptychs, as well as triptychs. In contrast to the large canvasses, in which the spatial settings and more complex pictorial schemas of full-length figures afforded greater scope for variation, the portraits are remarkably consistent in their formal conception. Consequently, it is particularly impressive when, working within ostensibly limited parameters, Bacon was nonetheless able to create several of his masterpieces, including Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966.

With the catalogue raisonné published last year, I no longer have to search for ‘lost’ paintings, or their historiographies. Neither is there a requirement to maintain objectivity or detachment in assessing Bacon’s oeuvre. Hence I sometimes find myself thinking about whether there is a common factor, among the nearly six hundred extant paintings, linking those which ‘came off’, as Bacon used to put it. The answer would appear to be as unfashionable, in art-historical terms, as the notion of a qualitative hierarchy: that is, after 1952 the most potent paintings tend to be those of, or inspired by, Bacon’s lovers. This is manifestly true of the paintings of Peter Lacy, made between 1953 and 1963, and those of George Dyer painted from 1963 to 1976. Of course Bacon was projecting himself into, and out through, other subjects, the Popes for example, but the trajectory of his art was definitely in the direction of the intrapersonal.

Recently I have been writing in what was Bacon’s studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington, albeit in its later guise as a neutral, white space, stripped of all the legendary clutter and aura. I wonder at Bacon’s valiant drive to rise at daybreak and engage in a tussle with the canvas, a performance that would leave him, as his friend the photographer Peter Beard observed, literally breathless with nervous excitement as he emerged from an experience that was simultaneously physical and trance-like.

With virtually no conventional training, Bacon was forced to invent a technical repertory attuned to his expression. This is often characterised as painting in a thick impasto, but he developed a much more elaborate range than that. When appropriate he painted with subtlety and even delicacy; he also applied paint quite thinly – in what Georges Bataille memorably described as ‘brusque’ treatments. In the right panel of Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966, leaving Dyer’s jacket as background wash and under-drawing is a marvellous example of his wilfulness in this respect, his defiance, as well as his layered approach to representation. Bacon sought immediacy – he was keenly aware that boredom of execution would translate as apathy in the mind of the beholder: in this sense the shorthand techniques he developed are analogous to his determination to convey sensation in his paintings and avoid overt narratives.

Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966, exemplifies succinctly Bacon’s mid-career mastery of his craft. The grounds of each panel are rich in linseed oil, dense black voids that, contradictorily, also oscillate with light reflected from their textured surfaces. The palette of the three heads is reminiscent of two of Bacon’s early inspirations, late Monet and Degas’s pastels, but he pushes these stimuli into another dimension. The paint is applied in rapid, enervated sweeps, in arcing strokes of slippery, mixed colors, flicked from the wrist, that partly obliterate the hot skin tone. Arbitrary patches of coagulated black paint have been impressed with a variety of fabrics – to form a textured substance that is a classic Bacon anti-illustrational shorthand device. The outer panels, which vibrate with the restless motion of the paint, flank a pitiless frontal view of Dyer. In the center Dyer’s features are collapsing, the lubricious flesh and facial features are twisted, distorted: we may be sure that Bacon equally identified with these ‘wounds.'

Thus Three Studies of George Dyer, 1966, explodes from the picture plane: across a gap of more than fifty years Dyer appears to us as a living, pulsating presence. Transformed through paint applied with vigour and élan, it is a revelatory image of his friend and muse. Bacon was motivated to paint by love (however elusive or transitory) and sex, which were underpinned by a personal philosophy that can be partly defined as anti-religious, nihilistic, Nietzschean. And he was resolute about being a great artist: disingenuous about the importance of his reputation, when he excelled without compromise, as in the present triptych, he fulfilled with force and audacity his stated aim ‘to get on to the nervous system.’

Within the grand theater of Francis Bacon’s prolific career, George Dyer inhabits a position of tremendous importance. Appearing in over forty paintings, with as many created following his death as executed during his lifetime, Dyer possesses a commanding presence unlike any other. Charged with desire and framed within a seductive dark ground, Three Studies of George Dyer wields the full force of Bacon’s painterly bravura and pictorial authority with arresting intensity and consummate psychological depth. His portrayal encompasses the full range of human drama: at once vulnerable, brooding, romantic, heroic and tortured, Bacon’s stunning incarnations of Dyer reveal a multifaceted, tempestuous and passionate love affair. Between 1963 and 1969, an intensely busy moment in his career, Bacon would paint only five triptychs of Dyer in this intimate scale, two of which are in museums: the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk. Of this jewel like size, John Russell has said, “The single head, fourteen inches by twelve, was from 1961 onwards the scene of some of Bacon’s most ferocious investigations. Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them.” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 99) Also unique to these rare triptychs, Bacon treated the characteristic profile from John Deakin’s famous source images of George Dyer (found ripped, torn and paint splattered among the debris in Bacon’s studio) in his unique visual vocabulary, abstracting them in dramatic gestural swaths of luminous color. Although Bacon would continue to render Dyer’s countenance after his death, he never again returned to a portrayal of Dyer in this highly charged and intimate format after 1969. Three Studies of George Dyer remains an incredibly rare gemlike triptych that exudes passion, vitality and a fervor that has immortalized both Bacon’s deep infatuation with his lover as well as his inimitable style.

The story of Bacon’s first meeting with Dyer has gained a legendary status: Dyer, aged twenty nine, attempted to break into and burgle Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews. Through the studio’s famous skylight, Dyer tumbled into Bacon’s life, truly falling from above and forever altering the course of the artist’s work. Their relationship was marked by a polarity of extremes: ardent infatuation, enchanted desire, the artist’s intellectualism, Dyer’s rough innocence, passion and love. This full range of emotional and psychological heat seethes beneath the richly textured surface of the present work. Beautifully sublime and framed within a dramatic background of a dense lustrous black, these three portraits masterfully illustrate Bacon’s twisted, torqued and scraped handling of paint. Exquisite tones of navy and violet sweep in graceful swaths and bold brushstrokes against a rich palette of brick red, apricot and lilac. Elegant impressions of corduroy and torn cloth imprint vigorous patterns onto the surface of the face, lending texture to and asserting the flatness of these indelible works. With sumptuous inflections of pigment, both delicately applied and heavily worked up, Bacon’s distortions of Dyer’s visage interrogate the limits of the self, presenting an ethereal and unearthly form of his muse that, while undoubtedly grounded in a photograph of Dyer, is manifestly surreal. Like a sequence of film stills, Dyer’s likeness eloquently unfolds from left to right, moving from asymmetrical three-quarter turn into full profile and back to three-quarter. Dyer’s suit collar provides a formal anchor to each canvas, an almost Matisse-like cut-out clarity that echoes Bacon’s physical manipulation and cutting up of Deakin’s photographs. Each of Dyer’s three portraits reverberates with violent smudges and a psychological profundity; however, these smears, swipes and blows to Dyer’s visage are not marks of brutality, but rather the artist’s insistence on chance, play, and radiant prismatic color. Bacon seems to make the case against any singular perspective on the individual, instead privileging a layered understanding of the human psyche. John Russell described: “Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image. The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting,” (John Russell, Francis Bacon, New York, 1971, p. 168)

Divorced from the natural world, the distorted and vivid tonal spectrum coalesces into an almost dreamlike picture. With obscured eyes, curved noses, hollowed jawlines and torqued lips, Bacon has portrayed a deep introspection in an arresting and raw color palette. An intensely amorous response to Dyer’s looks overwhelms this work; these three portraits relay unbridled enthusiasm and delight for the contours and landscape of his physiognomy. Bacon’s tremendous ardor for Dyer and his masculine good looks outweighed Dyer’s downward spiraling propensity for alcoholism and violent self-pity. Towards the end of the 1960s, this already unsteady and tumultuous relationship became destructively marred by Dyer’s waning sense of purpose in Bacon’s shadow. Indeed, Bacon reached the culmination of his career at the beginning of the 1970s, honored with a one man show at the prestigious Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon had inadvertently fueled Dyer’s paranoia of inadequacy by providing his ‘kept’ existence, and on the eve of the artist’s opening in Paris, Dyer died from an overdose. The degree to which Bacon was consumed by grief, loss and guilt would find equal measure only in the posthumous paintings of Dyer. Dyer’s presence is at once the most pervasive, libidinal and inventive of Bacon’s entire oeuvre. The creative fecundity of these seminal years, both the decade prior to and following 1971, is predominantly owing to the abiding and all-consuming impact of George Dyer. Painted obsessively, Dyer’s likeness utterly dominates Bacon’s production: as strongly present in this extremely rare triptych, George Dyer fueled the tortured and extraordinary talents of a master of modern art at the apex of his imaginative and technical powers.

Memorial unveiled at London coach house on 108th anniversary of Irish artist’s birth

VISUAL ART | ART & DESIGN | THE IRISH TIMES | SATURDAY 28 OCTOBER 2017

Painter Francis Bacon has been commemorated with a blue plaque at the “insanely eccentric” mews home where he produced some of his greatest works. The Irish artist, who was known for his bold and shocking figurative style, lived at the studio in South Kensington, west London, from 1961 until his death in 1992.

English Heritage unveiled the permanent plaque at the converted Victorian coach house, 7 Reece Mews, on the 108th anniversary of his birth. The tiny studio, situated on the first floor, was a scene of chaos – but where Bacon felt he worked best. He used the walls to mix paints, while paint tubes, brushes and rags were strewn across the floor and covering every surface.

Author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, who knew Bacon well, said: “It’s a great idea to put up a blue plaque for Francis Bacon at the idiosyncratic, almost insanely eccentric, tiny upstairs flatlet in which he did some of his finest work. I’m sure he would have loved it.”

During an interview with Bragg on The South Bank Show in 1985, Bacon said the studio was the “kind of dump that nobody else would want but I can work here”. He added: “I work much better in chaos. I couldn’t work if it was a beautifully tidy studio, it would be absolutely impossible for me... Chaos breeds images.”

Bacon completed Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) shortly after moving into the mews house and went on to produce some of his most celebrated works there, including Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966). Six years after his death, the studio and its contents were moved and recreated at The Huge Lane gallery in Dublin, the city where Bacon was born in 1909.

The blue plaques scheme, taken on by English Heritage in 1986, has been running since 1866 to commemorate the notable people who lived and worked in buildings in London.

Painter Francis Bacon has been commemorated with a blue plaque at the "insanely eccentric" mews home where he produced some of his greatest works. The artist, who was known for his bold and shocking figurative style, lived at the studio in South Kensington, west London, from 1961 to his death in 1992.

English Heritage unveiled the blue plaque at the converted Victorian coach house, 7 Reece Mews, on the 108th anniversary of his birth. The tiny studio, situated on the first floor, was a scene of chaos but where Bacon felt he worked best. He used the walls to mix paints and used paint tubes, brushes and rags were strewn across the floor and covering every surface.

Author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, who knew Bacon well, said: "It’s a great idea to put up a blue plaque for Francis Bacon at the idiosyncratic, almost insanely eccentric, tiny upstairs flatlet in which he did some of his finest work. I’m sure he would have loved it."

During an interview with Bragg on The South Bank Show in 1985, Bacon said the studio was the "kind of dump that nobody else would want but I can work here".

He added: "I work much better in chaos. I couldn’t work if it was a beautifully tidy studio, it would be absolutely impossible for me... Chaos breeds images."

Bacon completed Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) shortly after moving into the mews house and went on to produce some of his most celebrated works there, including Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966). Six years after his death the studio and its contents were moved and recreated in The Huge Lane gallery in Dublin, the city where Bacon was born in 1909.

The blue plaques scheme, taken on by English Heritage in 1986, has been running since 1866 to commemorate the notable people who lived and worked in buildings in London.

Painting of artist’s lover and muse expected to fetch at least $35m at Sotheby’s

JAMES PICKFORD | UK ARTS | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2017

A painting by Francis Bacon of his lover and muse George Dyer will be shown in public for the first time in 50 years this week, ahead of its debut auction sale.

Painted in 1966, “Three Studies of George Dyer” is one of five triptychs Bacon created of his troubled lover. Two of the works are held by museums.

Carrying an estimate of between $35m and $45m, the painting will be unveiled at Sotheby’s London showrooms on Wednesday, before appearing as the top lot in the auction house’s contemporary art sale in New York next month.

The painting has appeared in public just once, at a Marlborough Gallery show in 1967. The work is now being sold by an anonymous private collector, who bought it in a private sale from its original buyer, a European collector.

Bacon met Dyer met in 1963, before embarking on a passionate but tempestuous relationship. An alcoholic and convicted petty crook, Dyer was attracted to Bacon’s self-confidence and intellect, while Bacon was drawn by the younger man’s aura of criminal risk.

Tragedy followed in 1971, when Dyer was found dead in the couple’s Paris hotel room, having overdosed on sleeping pills just two days before the opening of Bacon’s first mid-career retrospective at the Grand Palais.

Traumatised by grief, Bacon repeatedly returned to Dyer’s image, producing a series of “Black Triptych” portraits in the early 1970s.

Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art said: “This is Bacon at his most spontaneous and intense ... His stated aim was always to bring his observers closer to the nervous system of his sitters.”

Bacon’s reputation in the international art market has soared in recent years, and his work has achieved record prices at auction. A triptych depicting Dyer was sold by Christie’s in May for $51.8m. Another Bacon triptych of the artist’s friend and rival Lucian Freud smashed auction records in 2013 when it sold for $142m in New York.

But Bacon’s works are not always guaranteed to sell at auction. A 1971 study including both an image of George Dyer and a pope — another recurring Bacon theme — which was estimated at around £60m, failed to find a buyer at Christie’s earlier this month.

MELANIE GERLIS | THE ART MARKET | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2017

Art collectors are not buying anything at any price any more. October’s auction season in London will be remembered as the time that Francis Bacon’s “Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971” (1971) didn’t sell. Since it includes both the artist’s lover, George Dyer, and a trademark Pope, and shown at a landmark Paris exhibition just days after Dyer had committed suicide in the French capital, the work was powerful — but not to the extent of its £60m to £80m price tag, according to many in the trade. “Ambitious” was the euphemism used by Christie’s specialists after its auction on October 6.

Despite palpable disappointment in the auction room, Christie’s executives are confident the painting will sell, but one question is whether or not it has been “burned”, an art market term for the loss of reputation suffered when a work fails in a public arena. This has historically meant a lengthy grace period before offering again, in order to avoid a dramatic fall in value. Seemingly, however, the market is shorter-term these days. Sotheby’s also had a disappointment at its evening auction on October 5, when Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Bronze” (1982), estimated between £5m and £7m and guaranteed with Sotheby’s own money, attracted no bidders. The auction house swiftly added the work to its day sale the following afternoon, with the same estimate and, according to Sotheby’s, the same reserve, when it subsequently sold for £4.4m (£5.1m with fees).

Another question is whether we will experience again the drama of a work offered publicly for more than £50m without a guarantee to sell. I suspect not in the near future.

Two works from Francis Bacon’s (1909 - 1992) 'Popes' series met with contrasting fates

The highest expectations at tonight’s sale were on Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971 which was described in the catalogue as "the grand finale to his celebrated body of Papal portraits".

Dating from 1971, the picture was a reworking of his 1962 canvas Study from Innocent X but with the added inclusion of the artist’s lover George Dyer in the background appearing as the Pope’s reflection.

The 6ft 6in x 4ft 10in (1.98 x 1.48cm) oil on canvas had been acquired from Marlborough Fine Art in Zurich in February 1973 and had descended to the vendor. It had an 'estimate on request' which was reportedly in the region £60m-80m but, on the night, the bidding failed to reach the low end of this range and the work was left unsold.

Six lots later, Bacon’s earlier and smaller painting Head with Raised Arm was offered with a £7m-10m estimate.

The 2ft x 20in (61 x 50.5cm) oil on canvas from 1955 had been in the vendor’s collection over 50 years in which time it had never been exhibited publicly. Indeed, its location was listed as ‘unknown’ in the most recent version of Bacon’s catalogue raisonne published last year by Martin Harrison.

The painting belonged to a group of nine surviving paintings depicting the then-Pope, Pius XII, of which four are now in museum collections.

With market freshness in its favour and the pitch not deemed unreasonable for an artist whose single-format portraits have sold for over £35m at auction before, the bidding was taken up by a number of parties before it was knocked down at £10m.

With Christie’s having dropped its June sale of Contemporary art in London (its two main series in this category now take place in March and October only), these two works by Bacon were part of a higher number of big-ticket lots than would usually appear at these Frieze week auctions.

Bacon’s Pope, Estimated at $78 Million, Fails in $172 Million Christie’s Sale

MARK BEECH | VISUAL ARTS | AUCTIONS | BLOUIN ARTINFO | FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2017

A Francis Bacon Pope did not sell in the most high-profile of failures at Christie’s Frieze-Week auction tonight. The sale’s star lot had an unpublished estimate put at £60 million (about $78 million) to £80 million.

Later, it was a tale of two Popes with a little good news to counteract the blow. Christie’s managed to sell another Bacon pontiff for £11.48 million, the third-best price of the evening. But dealers were still reeling from the earlier mishap, which some said was a serious miscalculation.

The unsold Pope, a late addition to the sale, was larger and more important than the one that did get away. The bought-in Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version, from 1971, had been in a private collection since 1973. Bidding went from £50 million to £58 million before its withdrawal. Perhaps it would have made it for just £2 million more, dealers whispered. The dealers also were speculating about the reasons for such a highly-valued failure, saying there are a limited number of buyers for a work of this level. Some said the level of bought-in would take some explaining, depending on agreed figures.

The work shows the Pope sitting, while in the background the burglar George Dyer, the artist’s lover and muse, is poised by a switch ready to turn off the light that illuminates the scene. Dyer died just months after the work was completed.

The last time such a major work by Bacon appeared in a London sale was at Christie’s last year when Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringes from 1968, also said to be highly significant, fetched a less ambitious £20.2 million.

The Pope that sold is one of nine surviving Bacon paintings depicting Pope Pius XII. "Head with Raised Arm" from 1955 was last exhibited in Turin in 1962. After it was included in a 1964 catalogue raisonne of Bacon’s oeuvre, its whereabouts have been unknown for more than 50 years. The recent Bacon catalogue raisonne update stated that "despite every effort to locate this painting, we have been unable to trace it." Christie’s Francis Outred had described the £7 million to £10 million estimate as "a come and get me" price. Perhaps a more tempting estimate would have helped the other work.

The Christie’s news release that eventually followed made little mention of the Popes. It talked up the sale’s total — including the "Thinking Italian" event before it — of £131,719,000 ($172,156,735), the second-highest figure for an evening of postwar and contemporary art in London.

**Christie’s Fails to Sell Bacon Painting**

**NATE FREEMAN | MARKET | ART NEWS | FRIDAY 06 OCTOBER 2017**

Christie’s netted £99.5 million ($130 million) during its postwar and contemporary art evening auction at its King Street salesroom in London Friday night, securing a sell-through rate of 83 percent. But the sale was defined by a single lot that, once it failed to sell, made for one of the most notable pricing miscalculations in recent auction memory. That work, Francis Bacon’s Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971, was marketed with an on-request estimate of £60 million to £80 million ($78.4 million to $104.5 million), which, if achieved, would have made it the priciest artwork ever sold at auction in Europe. But Christie’s could not find a buyer in that range, and the lot flopped.

The auction house had been spinning Bacon hagiography for a month, highlighting the fact that the painting hadn’t been seen publicly in 45 years. It was displayed in a cupola room at the house’s headquarters in London for all the people in town for the Frieze Art Fair to gawk over, and beside it wall text explained that the figure in the painting with the Pope, George Dyer, killed himself in a drug overdose two days before the work was first exhibited in Paris. In press releases, Francis Outred, Christie’s chairman and head of postwar and contemporary art, said things like “this painting is quite simply art history.”

Tonight, the culmination of all the frenetic Frieze week activity, auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen started the bidding on the Bacon, the week’s biggest and most-discussed lot. But after opening at £50 million and taking that figure up to £58 million only to find no takers in the salesroom or on the phone, he realized he was below the threshold of £60 million that the seller had agreed upon, and he resigned himself to fate, declaring it a pass.

However, another Bacon, the 24-by-20-inch Head with Raised Arm (1955), which looks like a close-up of one of the artist’s popes during a moment of contemplation (rather than torture), had no trouble finding a buyer. It went for £11.5 million (about $15 million), a bit above its high estimate of £10 million. (All sales prices include the buyer’s premium, unless otherwise noted.)

The sale at least got off to an energetic start, with Pylkkänen announcing that the room was “extremely full. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a good way to end the week and start the weekend.” He added, “It’s been an incredible week for the London art market.” And then he quickly set a world auction record for Grayson Perry, for a glazed earthenware amphora going for £200,000, naturally hammering for around its high estimate (£120,000, without premium) as is customary for opening lots in high-profile sale.

**Francis Bacon Painting Offered**

**for $78 Million Fails to Sell**

**BY KATYA KAZAKINA | ART | BLOOMBERG | FRIDAY 6 OCTOBER 2017**

**A trophy painting by Francis Bacon failed to draw any bids at Christie’s in London after being offered at auction for 60 million pounds**
($78 million).

The unexpected outcome for the star lot of Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art on Friday drew a collective gasp in the sale room. The auctioneer began soliciting bids at 50 million pounds and continued up to 58 million pounds. None came.

Titled “Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971,” the 6.5-foot-tall canvas depicts Bacon’s two most famous subjects: his lover George Dyer and Pope Innocent X. It’s the only work that has both muses in the same composition, Christie’s said. Dyer committed suicide six months after the work was made.

**A Christie’s spokesperson said Friday that the piece attracted global attention and the auction house expects strong after-sale interest in it.**

A smaller Bacon painting, “Head with Raised Arm" (1955), depicting Pope Pius XII, sold for 11.5 million pounds on Friday, above the high estimate, after the commission was added. Prices include a fee Christie’s charges buyers; estimates don’t

Bacon’s auction record of $142.4 million belongs to the triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” sold in 2013. “Portrait of George Dyer Talking” brought more than $70 million in 2014, the highest price for a single canvas by the artist.

**Christie’s sale is continuing through Friday evening in London. Sotheby’s completed its series of contemporary auctions in London tallying $114.1 million.**

**Will Francis Bacon’s ‘Red Pope’ break the €100m mark?**

**‘This painting gives me a shiver down my spine,’ says Christie’s chairman**

**MICHAEL PARSONS   |   FINE ART & ANTIQUES   |   THE IRISH TIMES   |   SATURDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER, 2017**

**Take a close look at this little-known painting by Francis Bacon. It hasn**’t been seen in public for 45 years, but by this time next week it could have become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in Europe.

**What is it?**

The painting’s title is Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971. It is a framed oil-on-canvas measuring 6.5ft by 5ft and was made, as the title suggests, in 1971. It depicts two male figures with whom the artist was obsessed – the Pope and a man named George Dyer. It was exhibited in Paris for the first time on October 26th, 1971, in a major retrospective show of Francis Bacon's work at the “Grand Palais”. It was acquired by the family of the present – unnamed – owner in 1973.

According to the catalogue notes, “against a background of naked canvas, an extraordinary outburst of controlled expression produces a maelstrom of activity, drawing the eye first to the sumptuous symphony of rounded red forms and then to the Pope at the centre of the composition whose own reflection appears in the back of the mirror and George Dyer’s in the front. Dyer’s hand is poised ready to turn off the light.”

**How much is it worth?**

It could, eventually, cost over €100 million. Christie’s said the painting would go under the hammer in London on Friday, October 6th, with an estimate of £60 million to £80 million. That is between €70 million and €90 million at current exchange rates. Even if it sells at the low estimate it would become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in Europe.

If bidding reaches the top estimate – and with Bacon this is quite possible – the buyer will probably need in excess of €100 million when auction fees and exchange rates are factored in. This isn’t pre-auction hype. Bacon has form here. Over the past decade his paintings have regularly sold at auctions in London and New York for tens of millions of pounds/dollars each.

The highest price ever paid for his work was in New York in 2013 when – also at Christie’s – his life-size triptych (three-panel) painting of his friend and fellow-artist *Three Studies of Lucian Freud* sold for $142.4 million. In the 1950s Bacon's paintings were being sold in London for, on average, £200.

**Who was Francis Bacon, and wasn’t he Irish?**

Up to a point. Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 – the son of a British army officer turned racehorse trainer – and raised in Co Kildare. He ran away to England in his teens and never came back. He became a prominent artist in London in the mid-20th century, and died in 1992. After his death his estate donated his studio to the people of Ireland, and it was shipped to Dublin and reconstructed in the Hugh Lane Gallery where it is on public display. In the international art market he’s generally classified as a British artist.

Love or loath him, Bacon is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and prices for his paintings have rocketed in the past decade. The late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once famously referred to him as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”.

**Who’s who in the painting?**

Bacon was obsessed with the two figures depicted in *Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971* and, although he painted both on several occasions, this painting represents the first and only time that both are united in a single image. Bacon often painted images of the Pope – sometimes very contorted and agonised – which have become known as his “Screaming Pope” paintings. His inspiration was the famous 17th century Portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Spanish artist Velazquez.

**The other figure in the painting is George Dyer, an East End criminal and alcoholic who Bacon met in a pub in 1963. The two became lovers and Bacon depicted Dyer in an estimated 40 paintings.**

*Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971* was made in spring 1971. Six months later, in October 1971, Dyer went to Paris with Bacon for the exhibition where the painting was to be shown for the first time. However, Dyer died from a drink and drugs overdose in his hotel bathroom 36 hours before the exhibition opened. His death was reputedly kept quiet for two days to allow Bacon to attend the opening.

**So, the art world regards this as an important painting?**

Is the Pope a Catholic? According to Francis Outred, chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, “this painting is quite simply art history” and, ahead of the auction, “gives me a shiver down my spine”. Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppiat said the artist’s Pope paintings are “a centrepiece of the whole of twentieth-century art”.

**What’s the reason for the painting’s confusing title?**

Bacon made at least 50 paintings featuring images of the Pope. One, dated 1962, is titled *Study from Innocent X* and depicted a “red pope”. Bacon wanted to show this in his Paris exhibition in 1971 but had already sold it and the owner refused to lend it. So he embarked on this new version titled *Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971.*

*Study from Innocent X*, incidentally, sold at Sotheby’s, New York, in May 2007 for $52.6 million. **Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction takes place at King Street, London, on Friday, October 6th.**

       **Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971.** **Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction takes place at King Street, London, on Friday, October 6th.**

**A portrait of the artists as a pair of young wastrels**

**Outsiders, gamblers, brawlers: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon**

**had a volatile friendship which flourished wildly but ended badly**

**JEFFREY MEYERS |   FEATURES |   STANDPOINT MAGAZINE |   MONDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER, 2017**

In 1945 Lucian Freud asked Graham Sutherland to name the greatest living English painter and to Freud’s surprise he named Francis Bacon. Sutherland then introduced them and initiated a close but volatile friendship — based on similar temperaments, social life and art — that lasted for 30 years.

Both artists had a distinguished lineage, but different attitudes toward their background. Bacon was descended from his namesake, the eminent philosopher and statesman who, as Lord Chancellor under James I, was charged with corruption, dismissed from office and imprisoned. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man described the fall of great figures from high office: “If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin’d / The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” Alluding to Pope’s poem but leaving out the devastating “meanest”, Freud called his friend, who was certainly not wise, “the wildest and wisest man he had ever met”. Bacon, descended from the intellectual nobility, did not value his ancestry. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, was extremely proud of his heritage.

Both men were outsiders in London: Bacon was born in Dublin, Freud in Berlin. They came to England in boyhood and kept noticeable accents. Both had been threatened by an early death: Bacon had near-fatal asthma and continued to wheeze; Freud had escaped from the Holocaust. Both were mad about horses — Bacon’s father bred them — and as boys they had hero-worshipped the grooms. At Dartington Hall school Freud — like Gulliver after escaping from the Yahoos — slept in the stables with the horses, and also rode the most dangerous ones. Freud’s teenaged sculpture of a thick-limbed, three-legged horse, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, won him a place in a London art school, and he later painted several horses.

Both artists were compulsive gamblers. Freud explained this mad attraction in an equine metaphor: “The excitement is like nothing else: galloping home on the straight . . . I’m stimulated by debt . . . The only point of gambling is to have the fear of losing and when I say losing I mean losing everything. It has to hurt.” When completely cleaned out, he was free to return to his other obsession: his art: “When I lost everything — which was quite often, since I’m so impatient (except with working, where patience isn’t quite the point) — I always thought, Hooray! I can go back to work.” After William Acquavella became his art dealer in 1992, he agreed to settle Freud’s staggering gambling debts, which amounted to £2.7 million.

Both Bacon and Freud were extravagant spenders who, when flush, carried and dispersed thick wads of cash. For a long time Freud was financially dependent on Bacon’s generous subsidies. He would pull out a thick pack of £50 notes and casually declare, “I’ve got rather a lot of these, I thought you might like some of them.” After Freud had married the wealthy heiress Caroline Blackwood, he reciprocated by using her money to finance Bacon’s trip to the fleshpots of Tangier.

To the young and impressionable Freud, Bacon (13 years older) was a tempestuous, flamboyant and charismatic model. He embodied Nietzsche’s dynamic amoralism and defied all the rules of conventional behaviour. Both artists were charming, shameless and cruel, and revelled in what Bacon called an “atmosphere of threat”. Often on the run or hiding out, they led priapic private lives: Bacon was homosexual, Freud hetero. Mixing in high and low society, consorting with royalty and criminals, they patronised louche Soho drinking clubs, the Gargoyle and the Colony, where Bacon wittily toasted: “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.”

Both were violent and belligerent battlers. At the slightest provocation, Freud would punch people who annoyed him. Bacon, who liked to be beaten up, once seduced a Cockney burglar who broke into his studio in the middle of the night. George Dyer remained his most important lover until he committed suicide in 1971. Though Bacon encouraged punch-ups all his life, he ironically gave Freud lessons in polite deportment. He asked his friend why he always got into fights, suggested he adopt a less abrasive manner, and urged him to “use your charm.”

The artists were inseparable in the 1950s and 1960s. They exhibited together at the Venice Biennale in 1954, which included Freud’s great portrait of Bacon, and travelled to Paris to see the Ingres centennial exhibition in 1967. Caroline Blackwood declared, in a misleading statement frequently quoted in books on Freud, “I had dinner with Bacon nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian” from 1953 to 1957. This was a considerable exaggeration, since she and Freud spent a year in Paris during their marriage, but suggests Bacon’s omnipresence in their lives. Michael Peppiatt reports that Freud and Bacon attended a notorious postwar London ball “at which Princess Margaret seized the microphone to sing Cole Porter songs to a captive audience until a fearlessly derisive Bacon booed so loudly she was forced to flee” from an audience both appalled and relieved.

On one occasion, writes Andrew Sinclair, during a dinner at Wheeler’s in Soho, Bacon “came into the restaurant declaring that he had heard from his doctor that his heart was in tatters and was hardly functioning. Rarely had such a diseased organ ever been examined. If he touched another drink, his useless heart would fail. He then ordered a bottle of champagne, and then another bottle and another . . . [Freud and Blackwood] took the diagnosis seriously and believed that Bacon would soon be dead, but he went on drinking prodigiously until his eighties.” After Freud’s marriage broke up, mainly destroyed by his ruinous gambling, Bacon worried that his severely depressed friend might commit suicide and urged his pals to keep a close watch on him.

Bacon and Freud also had important artistic similarities. Both worked in filthy and chaotic studios. At a time when abstract art was dominant, they opposed the prevailing fashion by creating figurative paintings that convey emotional intensity. Their portraits did not attempt to reproduce the actual appearance of the models, but revealed their essential characters. But their methods of work and styles of painting were very different. Distracted by models in his studio, Bacon preferred to paint alone and used photographs of his subjects. Freud observed, “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me.” Wyndham Lewis called Bacon “a Grand Guignol artist: the mouths in his heads are unpleasant places, evil passions make a glittering white mess of the lips”. Employing intuitive spontaneity and whirling brushwork, Bacon declared, “If anything ever does work in my case, it works from that moment when consciously I don’t know what I’m doing.”

reud was impressed by Bacon’s reckless use of newspapers and rags, the wooden end of his brush and even his hands to smear the details and express the passion in his work. Astonished by and unable to compete with Bacon’s productivity, Freud recalled, “Sometimes I’d go round in the afternoon and he’d say, ‘I’ve done something really extraordinary today.’ And he’d done it all in that day. Amazing.” Comparing his early work to Bacon’s, Freud noted that his friend’s art “related immediately to how he felt about life. Mine on the other hand seemed very laboured.

Bacon, whose blurred faces were both a caress and an assault, painted the brutality of fact. Freud, who created anguished but exquisitely delineated figures, was the Ingres of Existentialism. Influenced by his Germanic heritage and the precise linear tradition of Holbein and Dürer, the young Freud established his ambience and mood with slow and patient scrutiny, with meticulous detail and riveting attention. His masterpieces, the high point of his career before he changed his style, were his 1952 portraits of Caroline Blackwood, which are as sensuous and stunning as Botticelli’s Venus.

Bacon had achieved fame decades before Freud and impressed the younger artist by his work and the force of his personality. Freud later remembered Bacon “as the man who amused and excited [him] by talking about paint carrying the form and packing a lot of things into a single brush-stroke”. In order to paint as fluently as Bacon, Freud stopped drawing and changed to a thicker and more painterly style of clashing brush strokes. Sebastian Smee notes that the influence occasionally went both ways. Bacon, “insecure about his own lack of facility as a draftsman, was also eager to learn what he could from his younger friend.”

Bacon painted 19 portraits of Freud, 14 of them between 1964 and 1971 modelled on photographs by his friend John Deakin. Bacon’s earlier Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951) was based on a photograph of the young Franz Kafka in Max Brod’s biography. Bacon portrays Freud with tiny eyes, thick chin and bangs of hair hanging down the forehead of his long narrow face. Wearing a dark suit and tie, standing in front of a doorway and casting a dark shadow on the white foreground, Freud looks like a criminal lurking on a dark street in a Hollywood film noir.

The painting doesn’t look like either Kafka or Freud. Smee asserts, “What Kafka had to do with Freud is impossible to say.” But it is possible to see, as Bacon did, Freud’s significant resemblance to Kafka, who died two years after the artist was born. Both the Kafka and Freud families came from cities — Prague and Vienna — in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both men were thin, handsome, Jewish, German-speaking, avant-garde artists, who felt (in Freud’s words) that “the task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.” Like Kafka, Freud assaults and disturbs the sensibilities of his audience. Freud dismissively recalled this portrait: “I sat for one picture, and I thought it was pretty good a bit before the end, then he spoilt it.”

In 1964 Bacon painted a divided two-panel Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, pairing Freud with his Berlin-born fellow émigré and close friend. Both, in white T-shirts and no trousers, have grotesquely deformed features and monstrously misshapen legs. They recline on huge red divans, enclosed by strangely tilting and threatening walls. Three years later, in his Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud, Bacon’s suicidal lover wears a dark suit and tie and crosses one leg on his thigh. His swivelling double face, bruised and swollen like a boxer who has just lost a fight, looks toward and away from Freud. The artist is seated next to Dyer, in front of a heavy green curtain and behind a shiny, reflecting table that supports a small cat. Dressed in an open-collar white shirt and grey trousers, Freud clasps his hands on his knee. In both portraits Freud and his companion are distorted and detached from each other. Bacon does not portray Freud’s appearance, but conveys the powerful perception of his tormented genius.

Bacon painted three full-length triptychs of Freud in 1964, 1966 and 1969. Andrew Sinclair writes that in the first one “Freud sprawls with one shoe pulled up, on a kitchen chair placed upon a crimson rostrum with an armchair back. The extreme mobility of his features in conversation and of his arms emphasising his points appear in the smudged outlines of skin and blurs of flesh and repetition of features that was becoming Bacon’s signature.

In the mid-1950s Bacon had sold Freud Two Figures for only £100, and Freud kept this portrayal of Bacon having sex with a lover until his own death. By contrast, the third triptych, sold in 2013 for $142.4 million, set a world record for a painting at auction. Freud fondly recalled, “I used to have a lot of Francis’s paintings that he gave me or I bought . . . He gave me one of the popes with the tassel swinging across — you could almost see it move — and also a picture he did of two figures silhouetted against a blind in the South of France — which was very odd and witty.”

To reciprocate for Bacon’s art, Freud created three portraits of his friend. Sarah Howgate observes that he depicted “a man often hid behind his own blur, and whom the art world has often portrayed as almost beast-like”. Freud noted that Bacon grumbled a bit, as he always did, but “sat well and consistently”. In the pencil sketch Study of Francis Bacon (1952) the eyes in the heavy head gaze downward. Bacon’s open shirt and hands hidden behind his back reveal his naked torso. His trousers seductively folded open at the fly and his vulnerable belly suggest the sexual availability of a rent boy.

Freud’s most powerful portrait of Bacon, about 6 ½ by 4 ½ inches, was painted in 1952 with oil on copper plate while he was sitting knee to knee with his subject. In this detailed, sharply focused close-up, Bacon’s massive, pear-shaped, pillowy asymmetrical head is tilted slightly to the left. His lips are slanted, his heavy-lidded eyes are downcast and look inwards. A strand of hair hangs down his expansive forehead like a scar, and a heavy crease between his eyes and on the side of his nose accentuate his features. His bulging ovoid face — with its alarming pallor, twisted lips and swollen eyes — fills the whole frame and threatens to burst out of it. As Freud captures his alcoholic, masochistic and half-ruined character, Bacon seems trapped and trying to escape from the intense scrutiny in a confined space. This brilliant portrait, on loan from the Tate Gallery, was stolen from a Berlin exhibition in 1988. Freud designed a Wanted poster, modelled on those offering rewards for outlaws in old Western movies. The thieves demanded a ransom of £1 million, which was not paid, and the portrait has never been recovered.

In 1957 Freud painted a third, unfinished, portrait of Bacon in a looser, heavier style that reveals most of his face emerging from a cloudy white background. Bacon has a high forehead, thick eyebrows, heavy-lidded eyes, strong nose and full lips, and a sad fleshy face blotched with red. The picture, interrupted when Bacon left for Tangier, was never completed.

The artists had opposing attitudes to honours as well as to lineage. Bacon scorned and rejected official recognition while Freud sought and accepted it. The older artist, who had insulted Princess Margaret, turned down a knighthood and a Companion of Honour. He strongly disapproved when his younger friend accepted the latter and would have been even angrier in 1993 when Freud welcomed the UK’s highest civilian honour, the Order of Merit. Freud also aroused Bacon’s anger by perversely refusing to loan the coupling men in Two Figures for his second retrospective at the Tate. And Freud aroused Bacon’s wrath when he borrowed but never repaid large sums of money to support his obsessive gambling.

Greig notes that at the Marlborough Gallery in 1968 Freud “felt ignored and sidelined compared to Bacon, who in 1962 had a show at the Tate Gallery and was rapidly gaining a global reputation”. David Hockney thought “Lucian couldn’t countenance the success that Francis was enjoying, particularly in France . . . While he admired Bacon’s ambition, he envied his [international] success.”

But rivalry and jealousy erupted when Freud’s reputation began to match Bacon’s and he could no longer play a subservient role. “When my work started being successful,” Freud declared, “Francis became bitter and bitchy. What he really minded was that I started getting higher prices.” He felt that Bacon’s character “had changed quite a lot, which I think was to do with alcohol. It was impossible to disagree with him about anything. He wanted admiration and he didn’t mind where it came from.

As a child, Bacon had dressed up in women’s clothes and been severely beaten on his father’s orders by his grooms. As an adult, he seemed to feel guilty of a terrible but unspecified crime and developed a masochistic taste for punishment. Freud, who cared deeply about his friend’s wellbeing, became unwillingly involved in Bacon’s sordid spectacles and was shocked by his self-destructive impulses. He was terribly disturbed when Bacon was beaten up by his lover Peter Lacy, who had been a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain and drank himself to death in Tangier. “I was so upset seeing him like this,” Freud exclaimed, “that I got hold of Lacy’s collar and twisted it around.” Ignoring Bacon’s advice, Freud chose violence rather than charm, but Lacy refused to accept the challenge and would not defend himself. Freud admitted he didn’t understand that “the violence between them was a sexual thing”, that Bacon wanted to be beaten up and was furious when Freud interfered with his punishment. After seeing him brutalised by Lacy, Freud stopped talking to Bacon for a long time.

Over the years, as anger and resentment built up, each artist, well aware of his friend’s weaknesses, would zero in on the most vulnerable aspects of his character — vanity and ambition, egoism and jealousy — and they would attack each other’s lack of imagination and debased style. When Freud caustically criticised Bacon in their familiar hangouts, malicious gossips repeated his remarks and Bacon felt wounded and betrayed. He retaliated with sharp-witted retorts that destroyed their old affection: “The trouble with Lucian’s work is that it’s realistic without being real.” Referring to Freud in camp style and using a feminine pronoun, Bacon hit a sensitive spot by declaring, “She doesn’t put herself through the same third degree as her other sitters.” Freud certainly had to dominate and control. He was cruel to his models — friends, wives, lovers and children — who had to sit frozen in uncomfortable positions for many hours at a time and for pictures that went on for months and even years. He became furious if the models were even five minutes late.

At Freud’s 1974 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, Bacon deprecated the German origins of his art: “Well, Lucian’s extremely gifted, but I’ve never been interested in Expressionism.” When Freud said he would not see him again because “his conversation is so repetitious”, Bacon retorted that he would not see Freud again because “his work is so repetitious”. Freud didn’t mind tipping Bacon’s omnipresent former nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who earned pocket-money by guarding the toilet during her master’s illegal roulette parties. But as anger intensified after a stimulating and inspiring friendship, the combustible artists quarrelled frequently and bitterly until they finally severed all relations. After Bacon’s death in 1992, Freud had the last word with a characteristic equine metaphor that suggested his talent was exhausted: “Here’s the poor old accident standing in his stable with his head down waiting to be harnessed yet again. I wish Francis would go back to being a gentleman, which he was when we first knew him, and leave painting alone.



                                                                                             **Francis Bacon Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach 1964**

**Focus on Francis Bacon at the Magnani-Rocca**

**BY REDAZIONE** **| EXHIBITIONS | FINESTRE SULL ARTE | MONDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2017**

**At the** **Magnani-Rocca** **Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma) an exhibition (or rather: a **focus**) celebrates the legend of AFrancis Bacon (Dublin, 1909** – Madrid, 1992). **Francis Bacon: Two Americans** brings the 1954 painting Two Americans to the halls of the Villa di Mamiano: the work, which belongs to the Barilla Collection of Modern Art, was purchased by Pietro Barilla in 1968 from the Mario Tazzoli Gallery in Turin and joined a collection made up of works by great contemporary artists such as Max Ernst, James Ensor, Henry Moore, Chaim Soutine, Nicholas de Staël, as well as Italians Giorgio De Chirico, Umberto Boccioni, Marino Marini, Alberto Savinio, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and many others.

Bacon executed his *Two American* most likely in Ostia during his stay in Italy in the fall of 1954. In the painting, Bacon portrays two American travelers he had seen looking out of the window of his hotel in Rome. They are two figures in dark blue suits, probably two businessmen, inserted within a rectangle traced with a faint white marker that marks the space of the composition: a sort of frame inserted to capture the viewer’s attention and at the same time to prevent a story from distracting the viewer’s concentration from the two characters. Bacon’s figures in fact are isolated, disintegrating figures (Bacon used to dissolve his characters with brush strokes and spatulas or by hurling colors directly onto the canvas). Declared the artist himself, “in those moments I am ready for anything: I wipe away with a rag or take my brush and rub away what I have just painted, I run turpentine over it, I paint something else over it ... anything to break the rational organization of the image, as long as it grows spontaneously, that is, according to its own structure and not the one I impose on it. [...] I want to deform things beyond the appearance, but at the same time I want the deformation to register the appearance.”

The exhibition, running from Sept. 9 to Dec. 10, 2017, is open during the Foundation’s opening hours: Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (closed Monday, ticket office closes one hour before closing time). On Saturdays at 4 p.m. and Sundays and holidays at 11:30 a.m., 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. there are tours of the exhibitions with specialized guides. The exhibition is entered with the ticket also valid for the permanent collection and the Advertising exhibition. 10 euros full price, 5 euros reduced for schools. From Sept. 30 to Oct. 8, the ticket entitles the visitor to a discount on admission to Mercanteinfiera at Fiere di Parma. Information and reservations: 0521 848327, www.magnanirocca.it. Exhibition produced with the collaboration of XL Catlin and AON s.p.a.

**Francis Bacon painting** **– Study of Red Pope**

– **to sell for record £60 million**

**A LANDMARK painting by Francis Bacon hidden from the public for almost half-a-century**

**is set to sell for £60 million – a record for any art at auction in Europe.**

**NEWS | THE DAILY EXPRESS   |   FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2017**

Study of Red Pope, from 1971 is the grand finale to Bacon’s celebrated body of Papal portrait. It is also the only painting which unites the Pope with the artist’s great love, George Dyer, who is depicted in the shadow.

Dyer and the Pope were the British artist’s two biggest obsessions and it the painting became a tragic premonition of Dyer’s fateful end when, less than 36 hours before the opening of the career-defining Paris exhibition in 1971, he was found dead. The painting was acquired by the family of the present owner in 1973 and has appeared in all the major publications dedicated to Bacon’s work – but it has never been shown public.

Christie’s today announced it will be selling Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971 on October 6 during London’s Frieze Week. They have given it a guide price of £60 million – which will set a record for any artwork sold at auction in Europe.

The auction house has put the large painting, which is almost two-metres high and 1.5-metres wide, on display in London. Francis Outred, chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art, Christie’s EMERI described the painting as “quite simply art history”. He said: “If Bacon’s oeuvre was shaped by his devotion to George Dyer and the aftermath of his death provided his darkest and most celebrated triptychs, then this painting represents the ultimate landmark.

“Painted six months before George Dyer would commit suicide on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais, it is a tragic premonition which unites Bacon’s two greatest muses, the Pope and George Dyer for the first and only time

“Against a background of naked canvas, an extraordinary outburst of controlled expression produces a maelstrom of activity, drawing the eye first to the sumptuous symphony of rounded red forms and then to the Pope at the centre of the composition whose own reflection appears in the back of the mirror and George Dyer’s in the front. Dyer’s hand is poised ready to turn off the light.

“Rarely have I seen a single panel carry so much power and profundity, the swipes of colour and scumbling which realise the heads are a sight to behold. This painting gives me a shiver down my spine and I am extremely excited to be sharing it with the public this October.

If the painting sells for a £60 million hammer price, the final cost including premiums will exceed the £65 million paid for Giacometti’s life-sized sculpture L’homme qui marche I in 2010. Legend has it that Bacon and petty thief Dyer first met when the former caught the latter breaking his mews home in Kensington in 1963 – but the reality was they met in a pub.

**Over the next eight years, Bacon created at least 40 paintings of Dyer only for his lover to die from a drink and drugs overdose in 1971** – just 36 hours before a major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. In March, a painting of George Dyer by Francis Bacon was sold by Christie’s in New York for £40 million. The record for a work by Bacon is currently £89 million, set in New York in 2013 for a painting of his friend, Lucian Freud.

**The Art Market | Bacon bonanza**

**The cost of Bacon**

**MELANIE GERLIS | COLLECTING | FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND | SEPTEMBER 16/SEPTEMBER 17 2017**

One of the most heart-wrenching paintings by Francis Bacon comes to Christie’s next month (October 6). Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version was unveiled at the artist’s 1971-72 retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris. Just 36 hours before, George Dyer — Bacon’s lover and inspiration, who features spectre-like in the painting — had committed suicide in their hotel room.

The painting has not been on public view since. “It’s truly and simply art history,” enthuses Francis Outred, Christie’s chairman of postwar and contemporary art.

Christie’s will offer the work with a £60m-£80m estimate, which would make it the priciest work to sell in Europe this year. It could become the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in London. Accounting for inflation, this record is currently held by Rubens’ The Massacre of the Innocents, which sold for £45m (hammer price) in 2002, the equivalent of £67m in today’s money.

**The European seller of the Bacon has turned down Christie’s offer to guarantee the work, according to the auction house.**

**Francis Bacon Pope portrait could**

**set record at auction**

**DAVID SANDERSON | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | THE TIMES | FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 15 2017**

The only Francis Bacon painting combining his two great muses could set a British record at auction after being hidden from the public for 45 years. The artist’s *Study of Red Pope 1962, 2nd Version 1971* was his only work combining his two obsessions, the Pope and his lover George Dyer.

It was first exhibited in 1971 in Paris, only 36 hours after Mr Dyer had died from an alcohol and drug overdose in one of the city’s hotels. Two years later it was bought by the family of the present owner and has never again been seen publicly.

Christie’s announced today that it would be on view at its London offices from the end of the month and would be put up for auction on October 6. The estimate is £60 million, which if met and coupled with a 12.5% buyer’s premium would be the highest price for an artwork sold at auction in Britain. The record for a Bacon at auction is £89 million for his triptych of Lucian Freud, which was sold in the US in 2013.

“This painting is quite simply art history,” Francis Outred, head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, said of the work. “Painted six months before George Dyer would commit suicide on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Grand Palais, it is a tragic premonition which unites Bacon’s two muses, the Pope and George Dyer, for the first and only time.”

**Bacon and Dyer had a volatile, alcohol-soaked relationship after meeting in a Soho pub in 1963. His death and the subsequent anguish prompted some of the darkest works in Bacon’s output.**

Bacon painted him frequently. He also executed numerous papal portraits, once saying: “He’s put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world.”

Mr Outred said the 1971 work — which was a revisiting of his 1962 canvas *Study from Innocent X*, itself inspired by Diego Velázquez’s *Portrait of Pope Innocent X* — represented the “ultimate landmark” of Bacon’s career.

“If Bacon’s oeuvre was shaped by his devotion to George Dyer and the aftermath of his death provided his darkest and most celebrated triptychs, then this painting represents the ultimate landmark.”

**He said he had rarely seen a “a single panel carry so much power and profundity”, adding it gave him a “shiver down my spine”.**

“Against a background of naked canvas, an extraordinary outburst of controlled expression produces a maelstrom of activity, drawing the eye first to the sumptuous symphony of rounded red forms and then to the Pope at the centre of the composition whose own reflection appears in the back of the mirror and George Dyer’s in the front. Dyer’s hand is poised ready to turn off the light,” he said.

**Study of Red Pope 1962, 2nd Version 1971 by Francis Bacon will be on view at Christie’s in London before the auction in October**

**‘Lost’ Francis Bacon** painting of the Pope and

George Dyer could set new auction record

ANITA SINGH |   ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | FRIDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

**A ‘lost’ painting by Francis Bacon could become the most expensive art work ever sold in Europe when it goes under the hammer next month.**

Carrying an estimate in the region of £60 million, *Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971* unites two subjects that obsessed Bacon during his career: his lover and muse, George Dyer, and the figure of Pope Innocent X.

The canvas has been in a private collection for the past 45 years and never loaned. It was exhibited at the Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, then in Dusseldorf the following year, before disappearing from public view. The painting foretells a tragedy. Bacon met Dyer, a young, East End crook, in a Soho pub in 1963 and their relationship was tempestuous.

He completed the work in April 1971, to be unveiled at the retrospective in October. Dyer accompanied him to Paris, but the artist had little time to spend with him in the run-up to the show. Two days before the opening, Dyer took an overdose and was found dead in his hotel bathroom. A grief-stricken Bacon carried on with the show.

He said later: “If I’d have stayed with him rather than going to see about the exhibition, he would be here now. But I didn’t and he’s dead.”

The painting will be sold at Christie’s, London, on October 6. Christie’s believes it could surpass the European record for a work of art sold at auction: £65 million for Giacometti’s Walking Man bronze in 2010. The hammer price for that work was £58 million, with the final figure including buyer’s premium.

If the Bacon painting achieves its £60 million estimate, it will fetch around £67 million with premium added. Francis Outred, Christie’s head of post-war and contemporary art, hailed the painting as “quite simply art history”. He said: “It is a tragic premonition which unites Bacon’s two greatest muses, the Pope and George Dyer, for the first and only time.”

Dyer is depicted as the Pope’s reflection. The Papal figure is based on the Velazquez portrait of Innocent X that inspired many Bacon works, including a 1962 painting that Bacon had hoped to exhibit at the Grand Palais. However, the owner of that work turned him down, and Bacon embarked on this second version in 1971.

Katharine Arnold, senior specialist at Christie’s, said: “Bacon described himself as almost having a boyhood crush on the painting by Velazquez. And he definitely had a crush, or something more powerful, on George Dyer. “The painting is very intense. There must have been friction in their relationship at this point, and I’m sure the pressure in the lead-up to the exhibition must have had an impact on Dyer as well.

“There are two sash cords in the picture, as if to turn off a light – it’s almost prophetic. It has this sense of the dramatic. The wall on the right looks blue on first glance, but then you see the reflection of the red.”

The painting was acquired by the family of the present owner in 1973. Arnold said: “London in October feels like the right time to show a masterpiece.” It will not be the most expensive Bacon painting ever sold. That record is held by *Three Studies of Lucian Freud*, a triptych that went for £89 million in New York in 2014.

                   **Francis Bacon and George Dyer on the Orient Express in 1964**

Pope painting by Francis Bacon to go

on sale after 45 years hidden away

Estimated to be worth £60m, the painting depicts a slumping pope

whose formless body is capped by a drunk’s red nose

JONATHAN JONES |   CULTURE |   THE GUARDIAN   | FRIDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

The pope’s body is a spiralling heap of sausages wrapped in white and pink robes. Go closer, and even stranger physical images arise: brown smears over his fleshy hands look disturbingly faecal. You could almost believe it, if this were not a £60m – or more – masterpiece soon to go on sale in the opulent setting of Christie’s London auction house.

Francis Bacon’s Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971 is as close to a new painting by the great bohemian painter who died in 1972 as we are ever likely to see.

The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1971, six months after Bacon finished it, and was shown in Düsseldorf the following year. Since then it has been locked away by a private collector, who never lent it or showed it.

The gold-framed explosion of velvety red and rose on raw beige canvas has been hidden away for 45 years, said Jussi Pylkkänen, the president of Christie’s.

Pylkkänen will be auctioning this choice cut of raw artistic beef in person early next month, when the world’s art collectors converge on London for the Frieze art fair.

Bacon painted Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971 – probably not his best title – at the most intense moment of his life. It was the best of times and the worst of times for the Irish-born artist. He was about to put on a massive one-man exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. As a francophile who was friends with Paris intellectuals including the surrealist Michel Leiris, he cared deeply about how he would be received there.

Yet, Pylkkänen said, Bacon faced a problem. He wanted to include his renowned 1962 painting Study for Innocent X but its owner refused to lend it. With just six months to go before the most important exhibition of his life, Bacon shut himself in his cramped studio at 7 Reece Mews, Kensington to create a new version of a masterpiece.

He was facing a personal as well as artistic crisis. As Bacon painted, his relationship with George Dyer, the small-time East End criminal who was the love of his life, was getting ever more futile. Dyer had descended into an alcoholic malaise, unable to live as Bacon did in a giddily creative permanent champagne high. He was vanishing from Bacon’s life, but invades this painting.

As the pope squirms like a giant silk-clad turd, sitting not on a papal throne but a 1970s swivel chair, the glass booth that encloses him morphs into a mirror in which he sees the figure of George Dyer. This is not the decaying man Dyer had become by 1971. It looks more like the handsome, well-dressed young thug he was when Bacon first met him in a pub in 1963. Wearing a smart suit and tie, his hand elegantly clenched in a proud fist, Dyer is upright, strong and a bit cocky.

Is the slumping pope whose formless body is capped by a drunk’s red nose in fact a portrait of Dyer drunk, looking at a last vision of his former self?

Pylkkänen thinks Bacon was working at an artistic and emotional peak when he painted this furious bloody mary cocktail of artistic ambition and private sorrow.

“There’s something about it that tells me – ‘I’m going to paint a great picture for this show, the last of my popes, with my muse George Dyer in it,’’’ he says.

Bacon succeeded, at least artistically. The exhibition at the Grand Palais would be the greatest triumph of Bacon’s career, raising his reputation to the sublime level it has held ever since. Yet as Bacon got ready for the opening, Dyer killed himself with a drug overdose in their hotel room. Notoriously, there was a conspiracy of silence for two days so the death wouldn’t spoil Bacon’s vernissage.

“We’re talking about £60m,” says Pylkkänen. That’s actually quite a bit less than Bacon’s record of £89.3m for Three Studies of Lucian Freud, so the estimate may be exceeded if bidders get excited enough by the painting’s intense combination of aesthetic and human drama.

“It’s got all the elements that collectors are looking for,” says Pylkkänen.

The president of Christie’s is by definition a good salesman – but his excitement is justified. This modern Baroque marvel proves Bacon was the Caravaggio of the 20th century.

Francis Bacon Pope Portrait Resurfaces After 50 Years at Christie’s London

The rediscovered painting measures just 26 by 20 inches, is estimated to sell for £10 million

CHRISTIE’S  | ART MARKET | ARTLYST | WEDNESDAY 6 SEPTEMBER 2017

A portrait by the British artist Francis Bacon which has not been seen in public for over 55 years is to be sold at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, a highlight of London’s Frieze Week auctions. Head with Raised Arm (1955, estimate: £7,000,000 – £10,000,000) will be unveiled for the first time in over half a century as part of the sale.

One of only two known Papal paintings of that size, while most of Bacon’s 50 Pope paintings are inspired by Velasquez, only nine relate to the incumbent Pope, Pius X11. Bacon had a photograph of Pius being carried on his throne through St Peter’s pinned to his studio wall next to images of wartime dictators.

Last exhibited in 1962 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, the work was acquired by the present owners the following year. It has remained hidden from public view ever since. The work’s location was listed as ‘unknown’ in the most recent version of the catalogue raisonné published last year by Martin Harrison. Riddled with quiet introspection and human tension, it belongs to a group of nine surviving paintings depicting the then incumbent, Pope Pius XII. With four held in museum collections, and a further on permanent loan, Bacon’s portraits of the living Pope are among his most profound. The work will be on view from 8 September, Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York; 18 September, Christie’s Hong Kong; and 30 September 2017 at Christie’s King Street as part of the Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction that will take place on the 6 October 2017.

Francis Outred, Chairman and Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art EMERI: “Bacon’s Head with Raised Arm poses the question that would haunt Bacon for the duration of his career: how to paint the human figure in the age of photography. The camera’s ability to cast fiction as truth resonated with the fundamental tension that Bacon identified in religious and political figureheads: a conflict between public image and innate animal instinct. Evoking the works of Eadwaerd Muybridge, as well as anticipating Gerhard Richter’s blurred photo-paintings of the following decade, Head with Raised Arm speaks directly to this theme. Pius was the only living Pope that Bacon would ever look to capture and by hinting at the transience of a figure immortalized through the camera lens, Bacon lifts the veil on his humanity. Illustrated in the first catalogue raisonne created by Ronald Alley with Francis Bacon in 1964 and listed as ‘whereabouts unknown’ in the most recent version by Martin Harrison in (2016), this is a landmark moment, marking the reappearance of a major Bacon portrait after more than 50 years.”

The Pope’s face and arm flicker like moving images caught on camera, animated by a veil of rapid hairline striations. Combed vertically with a fine brush over layers of colour, the work demonstrates Bacon’s dialogue with photography in his bid to capture what he termed ‘the trail of the human presence’. Rare for its closely-cropped depiction of the pontiff’s head and shoulders, the present work confronts its subject on a piercing, intimate scale. It is one of only two Popes executed in Bacon’s jewellike 24-by-20-inch format, aligning it with his first small portrait triptych of 1953. Elected to the papacy in 1939, Pius’s reign had spanned the Second World War, famously inciting accusations of silence in the face of atrocity. As the Church and media sought to uphold his infallibility, the artist cast him as a fragile, flawed being, tortured by the weight of his grand station.

Pursued over nearly two decades, and numbering more than fifty canvases, Bacon’s Papal portraits are widely regarded as his finest achievements. These works were his first and most significant existential enquiries, and stand today among the foremost images of the twentieth century. ‘It’s true, of course, the Pope is unique’, he explained. ‘He’s put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he’s as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world’ (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, *The Brutality of Fact*, London 1990, p. 26).

A “centrepiece of the of the whole of 20th-century art”

Rediscovered Francis Bacon piece to be auctioned at Christie’s

BY COLIN GLEADELL | LUXURY | ART | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | MONDAY 4 SEPTEMBER 2017

A rediscovered painting by Francis Bacon is to be shown for the first time in over 50 years at next month’s contemporary art sales in London. The 1955 painting of Pope Pius X11 seated on a golden throne, his hand raised in some enigmatic gesture, was last exhibited in 1962 and sold the following year in Turin. Since then it has been locked away in a very private collection.

Even the extensive, 10-year research conducted by art historian, Martin Harrison for the catalogue raisonne of all the artist’s works, published last year, could not uncover its whereabouts and lists the painting, Head with Raised Arm, as ‘location unknown.’ It is the only one of Bacon’s 584 paintings which Harrison could not locate. Christie’s is withholding the identity of the seller, but speculation will be centred around the descendants of Italian collectors, such as film producer, Carlo Ponti, or car manufacturer, Gianni Agnelli, who bought examples of Bacon’s work in Turin at that time.

Bacon’s Papal portraits are considered his finest achievements. They are, writes his biographer, Michael Peppiatt, "not only the centrepiece of all his paintings of the 1950s, but a centrepiece of the whole of 20th-century art."

They began after he saw a reproduction of Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X in 1946 and became obsessed with it, attracted by the idea that an all-powerful religious leader could also be a tragic figure, terrified by the human situation.

Amazingly, he never saw the original, but bought a photograph of it to work from. One of the series, a 76-inch tall Study for Innocent X, sold in 2007 for a then record £26.6 million. The buyer was thought to be shipping heir, Philip Niarchos.

The rediscovered painting measures just 26 by 20 inches, which accounts for the lower £10 million estimate, but is rare - one of only two known Papal paintings of that size. And, while most of Bacon’s 50 Pope paintings are inspired by Velasquez, only nine relate to the incumbent Pope, Pius X11. Bacon had a photograph of Pius being carried on his throne through St Peter’s pinned to his studio wall next to images of wartime dictators.

While his Velazquez inspired paintings are rent with the anguish of a scream, his Pius paintings express a more repressed anxiety. When this was painted, Pius was extremely ill, suffering terrible nightmares and hallucinations. Hardly surprising for a pontiff who had to negotiate Nazism, speak out against persecution and protect the Vatican at the same time.

The Post War & Contemporary Art auction will be held at Christie’s London (8 King Street, St. James’s , SW1Y 6QT) on October 6th at 7pm.

Francis Bacon: Two Americans at the Magnani Rocca Foundation

MARIKA LION   |   ART EDITORIAL   |   CULTURE |   FIRST ONLINE    | SATURDAY 2 SEPTEMBER 2017

The characters portrayed and on display in Parma are two Americans whom Bacon had sometimes seen looking out of the window of his hotel in Rome. In an arcane space he places two busts of men in dark suits, white shirts and ties, perhaps as a symbol of contemporary masculinity with the typical outfit of a businessman, which seem to materialize from the profound darkness of the background. The exhibition on the portraits of Francis Bacon is held from 9 September 2017 to 10 December 2017 in Mamiano di Traversetolo – Parma, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca.

An exceptional auction at Sotheby’s in London, in July 2015, decreed the “Bacon Myth”: in the catalogue, in addition to two self-portraits from 1975 and 1980, the 1961 work Study for a Pope I, born from Francis Bacon’s obsession for the Portrait of Innocent X by Velázquez and belonged to Gunter Sachs, well-known playboy in the 50s and 60s and third husband of Brigitte Bardot. The myth of Bacon (Dublin 1909 – Madrid 1992) now reaches the Magnani-Rocca Foundation: the famous painting by Bacon *Two Americans* of 1954, belonging to the Barilla Collection of Modern Art, will in fact be exhibited from 9 September to 10 December 2017 alongside the masterpieces of all times collected by Luigi Magnani in the Villa of Mamiano di Traversetolo near Parma.

The legend of the artist had perhaps reached its peak in November 2013 when his triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud from 1969, sold at an auction at Christie’s in New York, became the highest paid painting in history, surpassing the previous record which it belonged to Munch’s The Scream.

**“I too considered that work difficult, I suffered it a bit, but then as time went by, I understood it mo**re and more deeply, I fell in love with it…” confesses Pietro Barilla in the pages of an interview only chronologically impossible drawn up by Francesco Alberoni one hundred years after the birth of the great industrialist. The work that initially disturbs the patron of Barilla, but which he later falls under the spell of is Two Americans by Francis Bacon, purchased from the Mario Tazzoli gallery in Turin in 1968 to further enrich his private collection designed to share and make art usable as an experience that improves life, starting from the workplace itself which it will disseminate with paintings and sculptures: from Picasso to Max Ernst, to Ensor, de Staël, Soutine, Moore, to the Italians Morandi, Boccioni, de Chirico , Savinio, Marini, Cascella, Manzù, Messina, Pomodoro, Soldati, Morlotti, Burri, Fontana, Guttuso, Maccari, Ceroli.

The artist presumably painted in Ostia, the last stage of a brief stay in Italy in the autumn of 1954. However, he was not a frequent visitor to the Bel Paese; despite his declared love for Michelangelo’s sculpture, he has never been to see the Medici chapel, he does not even consider it necessary to go to the Venice Biennale where some of his works are exhibited at that time, nor does he consider it advisable to visit the Doria Gallery Pamphilj in Rome to see Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, the source of inspiration for a series of eight studies carried out between 50 and 53.

Two Americans: A simple quadrangular space originating from thin white filaments that trace the perimeter of the back wall and that of the side walls of a compact black cube creates a glass box, a frame that serves no other purpose than to isolate and concentrate attention to the image it contains, allowing you to see it better. A constant concern for the artist has been, since the very beginning, that a story inexorably tends to insinuate itself between two figures. Only the action of roundels or parallelepipeds which isolate the figure in the painting will prevent a story from creeping into the whole represented, thus exorcising its illustrative and narrative character.

Isolating is for Bacon the simplest way to break up the narration, prevent the illustration, thus freeing the figure by sticking to the fact. Neither the landscape nor any informal element will fill the rest of the picture; rather, it will be occupied by large backgrounds of dark and gloomy colour with the sole intention of attracting form. From this unfathomable space emerge two faces in the process of dissolving, subjected to an evident distortion under the strokes of brushes and palette knives, or due to the colours that the artist himself squeezes on his hand and then hurls directly against the canvas. Bacon explains that: “in those moments I’m ready for anything: I erase with a rag or take a brush and scrub away what I’ve just painted, I run white spirit over it, I paint something else over it ... anything to break the rational organization of the image, as long as it grows spontaneously, that is, according to its own structure and not the one I impose on it” **[...]** “**I want to deform things beyond appearance, but at the same time I want the deformation to register the appearance**”.

The man on the left is characterized by a slightly enlarged mouth in a mocking grin that bares all the teeth and deforms the features of the face as in an X-ray image. Bacon would later admit that he referred to some radiographs published in the book Positioning in radiography purchased during a trip to Berlin. His is a disquieting smile because it is precisely because of this smile that his face is unravelling, as if under the action of a corrosive acid, becoming unbearable, intolerable. Only the insistent smile that Bacon suggests calling a hysterical smile will be able to survive the dissipation of the face and the next and inevitable erasure of the body. Even the man on the right, however, is subjected to the same forces of deformation that take possession of the head of the Figure, becoming visible as if his head were trying to shake off his own face.

Bacon, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote in 1981, hopes “always to deform people to the point of obtaining the appearance; he cannot literally paint them”. His intention is to bring out, make visible, invisible forces. The whole body is stretched out to escape from the mouth which here does not scream, as often happens in the characters represented by the artist. In addition to the cry, there is in fact the smile which performs the function of dissolving the body. Difficult not to make use of the words of Lewis Carroll intent on describing the disappearance of the cat in Alice in Wonderland: "and this time it vanished very slowly (...) ending with the grin, which remained for a while when everything was already gone”.



                                                     **Francis Bacon, *Two Americans*, 1954, oil on canvas**

‘Playboy’ Duke of Beaufort dies at 89

KATIE GIBBONS | NEWS | THE TIMES | THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2017

David Somerset, the 11th Duke of Beaufort, has died aged 89 at his home in Badminton.

A statement from Badminton House said that he died peacefully yesterday morning. It added: “He leaves his widow Miranda and four children Harry, Anne, Edward and John, and issucceeded by his eldest son Harry, the Marquess of Worcester.”

The former art dealer, who had a reputation as an international playboy before he assumed the title in 1984, was president of the Badminton Horse Trials, which is held on the family estate every May.

He was also chairman of Marlborough Fine Art gallery, which he joined in 1948 when he was 20 and helped to make into a leading name in contemporary art. The gallery showed Francis Bacon to huge acclaim and went on to exhibit works by Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Egon Schiele.

The duke, educated at Eton College, carried out his national service in the Coldstream Guards. He succeeded his distant cousin as 11th Duke of Beaufort in 1984.

James Lees-Milne, the English diarist who lived for some years on the Badminton estate, described the duke as having “being born with a handful of silver spoons sticking out of every corner of his mouth” and “the kindest man alive (perhaps also the cruellest)”.

The duke was criticised in January 2009 when it was disclosed that he had been paid £281,431 for a 70ft bridge to be built Over the River Tawe near Swansea as the dukedom had been granted ownership of the riverbed 400 years ago.

loan Richard, a Swansea councillor who discovered the payment under freedom of information laws, said that he was “furious that public money had to be used to pay one of Britain’s richest estates”. He added: “For centuries Swansea folk have paid rents to the Duke of Beaufort and we don’t owe this powerful and wealthy family anything.”

The duke married Lady Caroline Thynne in 1950 and had they four children. She diedof cancer in 1995. In June 2000 he married Miranda Elizabeth Morley, who was said to have been his longstanding mistress.

OBITUARY

The Duke of Beaufort

Landowner and chairman of Marlborough Fine Art, known for his

raffish reputation and frequent conflicts with hunt saboteurs

OBITUARY | THE TIMES | THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2017

Compared with some of his ancestors, the life of David Somerset, 11th Duke of Beaufort, may sound rather ordinary: the 3rd Duke of Beaufort had to prove his sexual potency in front of a crowded court room; the 5th duke’s son served with distinction at Waterloo and is commemorated by a monument on the Cotswold Way; and the 10th duke’s grave was attacked by anti-hunt protesters who tried to exhume his body with the intention of presenting his head to the Princess Royal.

The diarist James Lees-Milne thought otherwise. “David is a moody man, and very restless,” observed Lees-Milne, who for some years lived on the Beaufort family’s 52,000-acre Badminton estate in Gloucestershire. “One would suppose he was born with a handful of silver spoons sticking out of every corner of his mouth. Heir to a dukedom, rich, handsome, successful, courted, blessed with a heavenly and beautiful wife, and four children. What more could a man want, a stranger might ask? He has good health, strength, guts, and above all — charm, that often fatal gift of the gods.”

Somerset found his niche as an art dealer. In 1947 he joined Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer at Marlborough Fine Art. They had founded the gallery in 1946 and chose to deal in top-tier modern art, much of it acquired discreetly from highborn British families brought low by the war. For entrée they relied on Somerset, whose friendships with many rich and titled people went a long way to making Marlborough a successful enterprise.

By 1952 the gallery was selling late 19th-century works by Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir and others. In 1960 they showed Francis Bacon to huge acclaim, and went on to exhibit work by Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Egon Schiele. In time, they were showing Frank Auerbach, Lynn Chadwick, Lucian Freud and Barbara Hepworth. Somerset became chairman in 1977, overseeing the expansion of the gallery in the 1990s into the Chinese art market. He claimed to know nothing about contemporary art, but he learnt from long experience what his clients wanted.

Yet there was no escaping his inheritance. After the Olympic Games of 1948 the 10th duke had founded the Badminton Horse Trials, believing that there was a need to improve the standard of equestrian training in Britain. In the early days the Queen and other members of the royal family were frequent visitors, and in 1959 Somerset rode Countryman III to second place, although later his riding was limited to hunting.

After Somerset inherited the dukedom the royals no longer came to stay, possibly because of his raffish reputation, but he was still involved with those who hunted, including the Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and Princess Michael of Kent. As joint master, with Captain Ian Farquhar, of the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt he was frequently in conflict with hunt saboteurs, who once tried to pull him out of his vehicle and, he believed, would have kicked him to death.

There were other hunt-related skirmishes, including in 1991 when the duke and Farquhar were in court after their hounds ran riot on a wildlife sanctuary. A decade later there were allegations that he allowed deer carcasses to be dumped on his estate to encourage foxes to feed and breed for the hunt.

Although the duke featured on The Sunday Times Rich List (he was No 748 this year, with assets valued at £150 million), it emerged in 2009 that he had charged council-tax payers in Swansea £281,431 for permission to build a bridge over the River Tawe, historically in his ownership, to link a shopping centre to the city’s Liberty Stadium.

It was perhaps no surprise that Lees-Milne would conclude his assessment of the duke by writing: “He is ruthless yet charming [and] the kindest man alive (perhaps also the cruellest).” The duke’s first wife, Lady Caroline, did not demur. On one occasion, over dinner with Lees-Milne and Patrick Trevor-Roper, the conversation turned to the difference between a cad, a bounder and a shit. Caroline looked at her husband and said: “I know what a shit is. David’s one.”

David Robert Somerset was born in 1928, the son of Captain Henry Somerset, DSO, and his wife, Betty (née Malcolm). David’s elder brother, John, was killed in action in Germany in April 1945, at the age of 20. He had a younger sister, Anne, who died in 1995.

The Somersets are descended from John of Gaunt, the father of Henry IV. The dukedom of Beaufort was created by Charles II in 1682. Since the 17th century the dukes of Beaufort have lived at Badminton House, where the game of badminton was invented in 1863. In 1742 Henry Somerset, the 3rd duke, had tried to divorce his wife for adultery. To the astonishment of 18th-century society the duchess countersued, accusing the duke of impotence. His grace was required by the court to retire behind a screen and perform. The result was a triumphant climax to the trial.

David was educated at Eton and did his National Service as an officer in the Coldstream Guards. In his youth, and indeed into his middle and later years, he was known as the “dashing duke” for his slender good looks. He flew a private aircraft from a landing strip he had built on the estate and in 1988 was included on the International Best-Dressed List. Woodrow Wyatt described him as “the great woman slayer”, while Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek gossip columnist, recalled heavy partying with Somerset and Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrialist, who would wake the next morning and ask: “Tell me what happened last night. Were the tarts pretty?”

In 1950 Somerset married Lady Caroline Thynne, daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bath and sister of the current marquess. Their wedding, at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, was attended by George VI. They had four children, who all survive him: Henry, known as Bunter, a singer-songwriter who becomes the 12th Duke of Beaufort; Anne, a historian known for her biography of William IV; Edward, a former drug addict who was jailed in 2014 for domestic violence; and John, a freelance record producer and former reggae band manager.

Caroline died of cancer in 1995 and in June 2000 the duke married his mistress, Miranda Morley, a gardener and former debutante about 19 years his junior, who also survives him. She had lived for many years on the estate, although the duke is said to have “whacked” a Daily Express reporter with his walking stick in 1994 after a “scurrilous report that he could count on companionship” from her when the duchess was away.

He did not expect to inherit the dukedom at the age he did. Tragedy struck in 1965 when his father, Bobby Somerset, who had been heir presumptive to the dukedom, and two female passengers drowned when Bobby’s yacht, Trenchemer was hurled against rocks in rough weather off the coast of the Greek island of Rhodes. David now became heir to his cousin, the 10th Duke of Beaufort.

“Master”, as the 10th duke was known, even by his wife, had lived at Badminton all his life and served as Master of the Horse, the third great officer of the royal household. He had married a niece of Queen Mary, but they had no children, although at one time they tried to acquire an heir by adopting a young boy from a branch of the family living in Queensland, Australia. The child’s parents had refused. The 10th duke’s funeral, in 1984, was attended by the Queen, the Queen Mother and other members of the royal family, and his widow lived with the new duke and duchess at Badminton in a twilight world of her own until her death in 1987.

Upon inheriting the title the 11th duke set about doing up Badminton House with considerable imagination and flair, the previous ducal couple having been devoid of aesthetic taste. Without sentiment he disposed of treasures that did not interest him. Most controversially he sent to the sale room the fabulous marble-inlaid Italian Badminton Cabinet, commissioned by the 3rd duke in 1726, where it ended up in the hands of Barbara Johnson, the heiress to the Johnson & Johnson baby powder fortune and was later sold to Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein for £19 million in 2004.

The duke was unrepentant. “I have to find money to pay [inheritance] taxes,” he told The Sunday Times. “At the end of the day, it’s really just a cupboard of which I was never very fond.”

The 11th Duke of Beaufort, landowner and art dealer, was born on February 23, 1928. He died in his sleep on August 16, 2017, aged 89



Spanish police recover three stolen

Francis Bacon paintings

JENNIFER O’BRIEN | IRELAND REPORTER | THE TIMES | JULY 21 2017

Three paintings by Francis Bacon that were stolen from a Madrid apartment have been recovered by Spanish police. The works were three of five that were taken in a robbery in 2015. The five are estimated to be worth more than €25 million.

Spanish police confirmed that ten people were arrested during the investigation into the robbery at the home of José Capelo, a friend of Bacon’s, who had inherited the paintings after the artist’s death in 1992.

The burglars also made off with a safe containing jewels from the house. A Spanish police statement said that the three works were recovered after a tip-off from a London team specialising in tracking down missing art. Police offered no further details about which paintings had been recovered, or where they were discovered.

In May 2016, police arrested and bailed seven suspects over the stolen works. Three more suspects were arrested in January after police raided homes in Madrid and seized arms, safe-cracking manuals and oxy-fuel cylinders used for cutting metal.

Bacon, who was born in Dublin in 1909, famously had no formal training as a painter, but became one of the best-known surrealist artists of his era.

He drew inspiration from the old masters for his work, in particular Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X which Bacon used as the basis for his own series of screaming popes. His expressionist-surrealist works, many of which centred around imagery of wounded and traumatised humanity in the postwar era, remain hugely sought after.

In November 2013, his painting, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, sold for €122 million at auction, breaking the record for the highest price paid for an artwork. It was succeeded 18 months later with the sale of Les Femmes d’Algers, by Pablo Picasso, which sold for €153 million.

FRANCIS BACON MB ART FOUNDATION:

AN INTERVIEW WITH MR. BOUSTANY

FOUNDER-DIRECTOR OF THE FRANCIS BACON MB ART FOUNDATION

INTERVIEWS | WORLD ART FOUNDATIONS  | TUESDAY 15 AUGUST 2017

The trigger that led to the creation of your Foundation seems remarkable to us; it was the encounter with a work by Bacon and the emotion that followed that put you on this long but passionate path of creating a Foundation. Could you elaborate on that?

My first encounter with Francis Bacon’s oeuvre goes back to my academic years in London in the early 1990s. During a visit to the Tate Gallery, I was confronted with Bacon’s enigmatic triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), which challenged interpretation and triggered in me the need to explore his world. My immersion into the artist’s work, life and creative process began in those years. I discovered early on in my reading that Bacon started visiting Monaco at the dawn of the 1940s. The Principality became his main residence from July 1946 to the early 1950s. Throughout his life he frequently returned to Monaco and the French Riviera with his family, lovers and circle of friends.

Contemplating Bacon’s attachment to and fascination with Monaco, and after having studied the poignant, timeless work of the British painter for a number of years, I started to dream of a concrete project in his memory. Subsequently the creation of a Foundation in Monaco, dedicated to this singular artist, seemed obvious to me. In 2010 I initiated the project thanks to the pivotal support of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and the Monegasque authorities. The Estate of Francis Bacon encouraged this unique initiative and Martin Harrison, editor of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, is on the Foundation’s board. On 28 October 2014, the anniversary of the painter’s birth, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation was inaugurated by the Sovereign.

Monaco was a central point in the life and work of Bacon. Is your Foundation more particularly connected to this?

Bacon had resided in the Principality for four years and continued to visit Monaco until the end of his life. It was there that in the late 1940s he began to concentrate on the representation of the human form, a decisive step that would lead him to be recognised as one of the major figurative artists of the post-war period. It was also in Monaco that Bacon embarked on his papal figures (mainly inspired by the Velázquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X), his series of heads, and initiated new working practices.

Our Foundation is dedicated to promoting a deeper understanding of the work, life and creative process of Francis Bacon worldwide. It endeavours to show, through its archives, the very close links connecting the British artist with Monaco and France.

Are you looking to expand your collection or do you think you are more specifically a research centre and initiator of exhibitions?

I have set up an acquisitions policy to regularly enhance my collection (the MB Art Collection) with new items, in order to offer an essential tool for researchers.

Among our various missions, we support research on the artist, publish books on Bacon and take part in the organisation of exhibitions.

On this subject, you initiated the remarkable exhibition “Bacon” in Monaco in 2016, which allowed us to discover a certain number of Bacon’s works rarely or never unveiled, staged in subdued lighting emphasising the light of the paintings.

How did you achieve this feat?

The creation of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in October 2014 undoubtedly steered the choice of the Grimaldi Forum towards Francis Bacon for that summer exhibition of 2016 which they organised under the auspices of our Foundation. We naturally participated in the preparation of this exhibition, both through giving advice and by lending paintings and photographs from my collection. The success of this show is also due to Martin Harrison, the exhibition’s curator, as well as to the entire team of the Grimaldi Forum.

What are the Foundation’s links with the Estate of Francis Bacon in London, the trustees of the painter’s heritage?

We regularly work with The Estate of Francis Bacon and collaborate on certain research or editorial projects.

In general, how do you relate to other foundations, museums, universities?

Since our opening in 2014, we have established many links with local and international institutions, such as the Grimaldi Forum, the Fabre museum in Montpellier, the Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Liverpool, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Condé museum in Chantilly….

As part of its various scholarship programmes, in 2016 the Foundation entered into a partnership with the École du Louvre, with which it undertook to allocate a research scholarship every four years to a postgraduate who is undertaking a PhD thesis on Francis Bacon, or whose PhD thesis has a direct link with the British artist.

We have also established a partnership with the Villa Arson, with whom the Foundation is committed, from this year, to awarding a scholarship every two years to an artist who has graduated from Villa Arson with the national diploma of advanced artistic expression. This financial support will provide crucial help for the young artists at the beginning of their professional life and artistic career.

The visit to your Foundation can only be done a drop at a time, the privileged visitor being entitled to a guided tour. Do you plan, in the course of your success, to open your Foundation more or remain with this exclusive formula?

When I initiated the project of a Bacon foundation in Monaco, I wanted to create a study and research centre, but also an institution open to the public. The Foundation is open to researchers, and to the public throughout the year, by appointment only. It provides a singular way for visitors to immerse themselves in Bacon’s oeuvre, by offering them a free guided tour lasting an hour and half through which they can discover about one hundred pieces of my collection.

I do not think I will abandon this principle because I wish to maintain this harmonious balance between the opening of our institution to art historians and its opening to the public.

What are the projects which you would like to let us know about?

**Among our recent projects, we have just completed the re-edition of the Foundation’s book, which has been expanded with additional texts, testimonies and photographs.** We have also conducted a series of filmed interviews about Bacon with artists, photographers and friends of the painter, which will be accessible by the end of the year on the Foundation’s website. **Finally, we are considering changing the Foundation’s scenography for the beginning of 2018.**

Modern Master Paintings Cause Legal Pile-Up in NY

**ADAM KLASFELD | COURTHOUSE NEWS SERVICE | MANHATTAN (CN)  | MONDAY 14 AUGUST 2017**

**Auctioned two years ago for $16 million, British painter Francis Bacon’s *Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer* lies at the heart of a legal battle in Manhattan.**

Christie’s described the painting as one of only 10 diptychs that the Dublin-born Bacon painted before he died at 82 in 1992. The auction house said the piece "commemorates two of the artist’s most profound relationships: with his lover and muse, George Dyer, and his lifelong friend and confidante, the artist Isabel Rawsthorne."

At the center of the new lawsuit is a wealthy Chinese businessman who bought two famous artists’ paintings he could not afford. Zhang Chang bid more than 12.1 million British pounds for Bacon’s work at the June 30, 2015, auction in London.

Then on Nov. 16, 2016, Zhang agreed to shell out another $24 million for German artist Gerhard Richter’s Düsenjäger (Jet Fighter) at Phillips’ auction house in New York. Both purchases inspired lawsuits in New York County Supreme Court.

On June 9 this year, Judge Peter Sherwood ordered that Phillips Auctioneers could attach the Bacon painting — now in the possession of New York’s storied Gagosian Gallery — to compensate it for Zhang’s nonpayment for the Richter work. This order inspired another lawsuit by Lin San, another Chinese citizen, who claims he loaned Zhang the money for the Bacon art.

Mr. Zhang paid Christie’s for the purchase over time, using funds loaned by Mr. Lin for this purpose in accordance with a loan agreement between them executed in June 2015," the 9-page complaint states. "Those loans from Mr. Lin first began in June 2015, and continued through 2017.

Lin says Zhang agreed to transfer the painting to him because he was not able to repay the loans. Lin on Thursday filed a petition to intervene in Phillips Auctioneers v. Chang, saying the painting is rightfully his. "At the time of this supplemental agreement in February 2017, Mr. Lin was unaware of any dispute between Mr. Zhang and Phillips, or that Mr. Zhang allegedly owed Phillips any money," his complaint states.

**Christie’s and Gagosian are not named in the petition, which lists Phillips as the sole respondent. Phillips declined to comment. Lin is represented by New York-based attorney Gerald Novack.**

**Stolen paintings by legendary Irish artist Francis Bacon**

**worth more than £20m recovered by Spanish police**

**BY AIDAN LONERGAN | NEWS | THE IRISH POST | ESTABLISHED 1970 | TUESDAY, JULY 25, 2017**

THREE paintings by renowned Irish artist Francis Bacon have been recovered by Spanish police after they were stolen two years ago. The paintings were seized near Barcelona after a tip-off was received by art database firm Art Loss Register (ALR). The three artworks – part of a total of five stolen in June 2015 – are estimated to be worth more than €25m (£22m; $29m).

They were stolen alongside jewellery and other objects belonging to Spanish banker José Capelo, who was a friend of the Dublin-born artist. In a statement, Spanish police said an email from an unnamed individual to ALR contained unpublished photographs of the artworks taken after the theft.

Thanks to those pictures, it was possible to identify the specific model of camera that the photographs were taken with. Police traced it to a camera rental company and then tracked down the renter of the photographic equipment.

This information led the police to the suspected thieves and eventually to the stolen artworks. Ten arrests have now been made relating to the case. The ALR’s director of recoveries and general counsel, James Ratcliffe, said: “The return of the pictures is testament to the value of collaboration between the public and private secto

“We gave the police this lead to help them track down these individuals. The Spanish police have done a fantastic job.” During the raid which recovered the artworks, police found suspected robbery equipment including firearms, oxy-fuel cutting equipment, frequency inhibitors, uniforms from telecommunications companies and fake key. It also uncovered laser measurement sensors, insignia from security companies and a guide to unlocking safes.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon had no formal training as a painter but became one of the most prominent artists of his era. He lived most of his life in London before dying of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992, aged 82. In 2015, two Bacon self-portraits sold for a combined £30m at a Sotheby’s auction in London, having been kept hidden in a private collection for decades.

**A Bacon painting depicting the Irish artist’s friend Lucian Freud set a world record in 2013, becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction when it fetched $142m (£89m) in New York.**

Spanish police recover stolen Francis Bacon paintings after tip-off from the Art Loss Register

Three Francis Bacon artworks stolen in Madrid in 2015 have been recovered by Spanish police near Barcelona.

LAURA CHESTERS | ANTIQUES TRADE GAZETTE  | THE ART MARKET WEEKLY  | MONDAY 24 JULY 2017

The paintings were seized following a tip-off from art database firm Art Loss Register (ALR). The three artworks were among five Bacon pictures taken in June 2015 alongside jewellery and other objects from the belongings of Spanish banker José Capelo, who was a friend of the Dublin-born artist.

Last year the ALR was contacted by an individual in Sitges, a resort to the southwest of Barcelona, who requested a check against its database of one of the paintings.

Interpol alert

The artwork was discovered to have been stolen, having been recorded as so at the ALR after Interpol issued the alert in 2015.

ALR then contacted the Spanish police to alert them.

In a statement, the Spanish national police said the email from the individual to ALR contained unpublished photographs of the artworks taken after the theft. With these, it was possible to find the specific model of camera that the photographs were taken with. The police traced it to a camera rental company and then the lessee of the photographic equipment. This information led the police to the suspected thieves and eventually to the stolen artworks.

Ten arrests have now been made related to the case.

The ALR’s director of recoveries and general counsel, James Ratcliffe, said: "The return of the pictures is testament to the value of collaboration between the public and private sector. We gave the police this lead to help them track down these individuals. The Spanish police have done a fantastic job."

**Francis Bacon Studio**

**THIS YEAR MARKS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH**

**OF FRANCIS BACON WHOSE STAR CONTINUES TO SHINE FOR**

**BOTH LIFELONG FANS AND NEWCOMERS ALIKE**

**JOSEPH R. MURPHY  |  IRISH INTERIORS  | SUMMER 2017**

In 2013, the sale of Francis Bacon’s *Three Studies of Lucian Freud*, 1969, shook the world with its winning bid on the block of just over $142 million. At the time, it was the most expensive artwork sold at auction. Bacon’s work is highly sought after and will, no doubt, continue to break new research ground and auction records into the future. So it was a remarkable coup for the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane when it became home to the relocated South Kensington studio of this Irish-born contemporary figurative painter. Today visitors come from all around the globe to view Bacon’s studio and to pay homage to this master painter.

Born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents, Bacon first lived in Kildare near the Curragh at Cannycourt House. The family made the move to Ireland so that the artist’s father, a retired army major, could set up stables for training racehorses. During World War I, the family went to London temporarily where the artist’s father worked as a war official. On their return to Ireland they lived at Straffan Lodge in Naas. The young Francis often came to odds with his father, mostly on account of his homosexuality but also partly due to his asthma, which limited his outdoor pursuits and further diminished Francis in the eyes of his father. At the age of 16, after being caught trying on his mother’s clothes he was expelled from the house. He never returned to Ireland.

With this in mind, the studio project takes on an added significance. It is the artist’s homecoming. Francis Bacon’s studio – 7 Reece Mews – as we see it today is just as it was found following the death of the artist in 1992. It is a unique project because unlike similar projects preserving artists’ studios, this was not simply a reconstruction but rather a complete relocation. Gallery director, Barbara Dawson, secured the acquisition in 1998 working with Bacon’s heir and executor, John Edwards Brain Clarke. Dawson oversaw the move, which was supervised by conservator Mary McGrath conducted by teams of archaeologists, conservators and curators. Every item in the artist’s studio – there are over 7,000 in total – was accounted or, catalogued, collected and indexed, before being moved, digitally recorded on a specially designed database and replaced in the exact same spot in Dublin. The studio is reconstituted exactly including the actual studio walls, floorboards, ceiling, stairs, hallway and doors. The project was so extensive that the teams even preserved the original dust and reapplied it to the items once the move was completed.

The unaltered studio gives the viewer an insight into the artist’s state of mind, his mode of practice and also gives us another lens through which to view his work, one which we might never have been privy to were it not for the valiant efforts of John Edwards, Brian Clarke and the gallery staff of the Hugh Lane. Their efforts were comparable in spirit to Hugh Lane’s original mission of a freely available educational platform for the people of Ireland to come and learn about modern and contemporary art.

Alongside the Francis Bacon studio the gallery also possesses a large archival collection of materials, and two finished and six unfinished works by the artist. Jessica O’Donnell, acting head of collections abroad says much of the gallery’s acquired material is highly sought after by researchers and exhibition makers worldwide. “The Hugh Lane is a facilitator and has loaned materials including some of the unfinished works to international museums before. It’s important for the artist to be continually recognized abroad,” she adds. The treasure trove of the studio gives a platform to discuss the works, which draw on the sub-conscious for a great deal of their imagery. Bacon very rarely spoke about the specific meanings behind his painting, but did say that he didn’t want to paint “an illustration of reality but a concentration of reality.”

The finished works are framed in elaborate gilded frames, quite unusual for a contemporary artist. It shows how highly his works were sought after whilst he was alive and also gives us a sense of his extravagant sense of style. His expensive taste is further showcased through the small black boxes scattered on the studio floor– KRUG Champagne, the artist’s favourite drink.

Bacon was self-taught and had no interest in attending art school. It was after seeing an exhibition of works by Picasso in Paris during the 1920s that he set himself the task of becoming an artist. Upon moving away from Ireland and setting up in London his first job was in interior design. Bacon taught himself about art and art history extensively through visiting exhibitions, reading catalogues and books. On the floor of the studio, close to the radiator, there is a book on the Spanish painter Velázquez. His portrait, Pope Innocent X, c.1650 inspired Bacon to paint what became known as his “screaming pope” series, the most readily recognisable work from the series being *Study After Velázquez*, 1953.

According to Michael Dempsey, head of exhibitions, Bacon’s studio provides an insight into a bygone era for artists working in the post-Internet era. “The idea of what the studio means is changing, some artists don’t even have a dedicated studio space anymore. Some can work from a laptop from anywhere around the world. Bacon’s studio not only gives the viewer an insight into his own artistic practice but a broader sense of artistic and painterly production that embodies the romantic image of the artist and the studio that the 20th century has come to represent,” he says.

The Hugh Lane first opened its doors on Parnell Square to the public in 1933. It holds numerous masterpieces of modern and contemporary art, including stain-glass works by Harry Clarke, Seán Scully’s Wall of Light series, and works by Monet and Renoir to name a few.

**For more on the Hugh Lane and on Francis Bacon’s studio, see Hugh Lane Gallery.**

**Spanish police recover 3 Francis Bacon paintings stolen in 2015**

**Five paintings by the British artist were stolen from the home of a friend of Bacon in July 2015**

**AFP | THE JOURNAL IE | IRELAND  | THURSDAY, JULY 20, 2017**

**SPANISH POLICE HAVE recovered three of five paintings by British artist Francis Bacon that were stolen from a Madrid apartment in 2015, they said today.**

**“I can confirm that three paintings have been recovered,” a police spokeswoman said.**

She said she could not give more details because of the ongoing investigation to find the remaining two artworks. The five paintings are estimated to be worth more than €25 million. They were stolen from the home of a friend of Bacon in central Madrid in July 2015 while he was away in London.

The thieves also made off with a safe that contained a collection of coins and jewels. Spanish police have so far arrested 10 suspects linked to the theft. In May 2016, with the help of a British firm that searches for stolen art, they arrested one of the suspected perpetrators, as well as five accomplices that allegedly helped hide the paintings.

A Barcelona resident had sent the firm pictures of a Bacon painting to see if it appeared on the company’s list of stolen artworks. Police analysed the photos and found clues that led them to another suspect who they believed carried out the robbery. This suspect then led police to an art dealer and his son who are suspected of hiding the stolen paintings.

Police did not provide details on the stolen paintings but daily newspaper El Pais said they depicted the owner of the artworks, Bacon’s friend. The thieves tried to sell the paintings on two occasions, the newspaper added. Police recovered one painting several months ago and the other two just a few days ago, according to the newspaper.

**Bacon often visited Madrid, where he spent time studying old masters paintings in the Prado Museum, and died in the city in 1992, aged 82.**

**Three Francis Bacon works stolen in Madrid recovered by Spanish police**

**Paintings were seized following a tip-off from the Art Loss Register**

**BY GARETH HARRIS   |   THE ART NEWSPAPER   |   FRIDAY, 21 JULY, 2017**

Spanish police say that they have recovered three works by Francis Bacon that were stolen from a private residence in Madrid in June 2015. Five works by the Dublin-born artist were removed during the raid.

According to the BBC, the three unidentified works, which belong to Bacon’s acquaintance José Capelo, were recovered following a tip-off from the Art Loss Register, the London-based stolen art database. The UK organisation was contacted by an individual in Sitges who wanted to verify one of the works. Spanish police did not respond to further enquiries.

"The return of the pictures is testament to the benefits of international cooperation between the private sector and law enforcement agencies. That these pictures have now been recovered through the skill of the Spanish police, after the Art Loss Register had identified them, and following the circulation of details of the loss via Interpol, is a perfect example of the value of such collaboration," says James Ratcliffe, director of Recoveries & General Counsel at the Art Loss Register.

Ten people have so far been detained in connection with the robbery; seven arrests were made in Madrid last year and three more people were arrested in January. Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963), the first portrait of the artist’s longtime lover, fetched $51.8m at Christie’s New York in May.

The Animal Surfaces:

The Gaping Mouth in Francis Bacon’s Work

RINA ARYA | VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY | VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 4 | FRIDAY 7 JULY 2017

THE GAPING MOUTH

One of the most popular motifs in Francis Bacon’s art is the gaping mouth, which seems to take the form of expressing a scream, as seen on the faces of popes, most notably his Study after Velázquez’s *Portrait of Pope Innocent X* (1953).1 While in some paintings the expression appears to be a scream, in others the mouth is open, baring its glistening inside, replete with upper and lower teeth, but beyond that it cannot be determined whether we are looking at a mouth that is screaming or making some other expression. Emotion is conveyed through vocalization, facial expression and behavior but, in Bacon, all but facial expression are withheld from the viewer. These open mouths have been the subject of a number of commentaries, with scholars trying to determine their cause, especially in relation to the papal figures where the imagery becomes most alarming in its incongruity. This article conveys the importance of the mouth as a “lever” for prising apart the human. In depicting the open mouth Bacon exposes the human-animal, while reducing the mouth as an organ of speech, reason and humanity to its primal and pre-linguistic function. In showing this it will be argued that rather than focusing exclusively on the scream, more attention needs to be paid to the gaping mouth and its significance in Bacon’s œuvre.

THE SCREAM IN PAINTING

One of the most well-known depictions of the scream in painting is Edvard Munch’s *The Scream* (1895), which conveys a moment of existentialist crisis. Wieland Schmied draws a parallel between *The Scream* and Bacon’s *Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X*, and concludes that while in the former there is some continuity of feeling between the scream and its surroundings, where the scream is absorbed by the metaphoric ear of nature, in the latter there is no containment, and the scream rebounds in a hollow ecclesiastical space [Schmied 2006: 21]. Arthur Danto argues [1995] that the problem with Bacon’s screaming figures is that, unlike other examples depicting a scream in painting, there is no apparent source or cause of horror here. If one examines sources that are cited as influences for the scream in Bacon’s art, which Danto does—for instance Nicolas Poussin’s *The Massacre of the Innocents* (ca. 1625–1629) or the still of the Odessa steps from Sergei Eisenstein’s *Battleship Potemkin* (1925), which was the subject of Bacon’s *Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin* (1957)—then one can account for the scream by appealing to the narrative. *The Massacre of the Innocents* refers to the biblical narrative of infanticide ordered by Herod the Great. The woman screams in protest at the sight of an innocent baby that is about to be slaughtered. In the second example, the nurse screams in horror as she is shot by czarist troops, resulting in the shattering of her pince-nez and her eye dripping blood. There is a discernible narrative in both cases that explains the cause of the horror that prompts the scream. This in turn inspires pathos. What is lacking and unsettling in Bacon is that not only is there no explanation for the scream—in Danto’s words, “[t]here is no available narrative” [1995: 98]—but that it feels seriously out of place, especially on the face of such eminent figures as popes.

INTERPRETING THE SCREAM: AN INDEX OF HORROR

There are several key interpretations of the scream in Bacon’s paintings that go beyond biographical—such as his asthmatic condition—and often simplistic readings, and that examine his themes and interests. One of the most widely used interpretations presents the view that the scream is a symbol of postwar horror and the collapse in the West of the metanarrative of God. One of Bacon’s first studies of open mouths, after *Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion* (1944), came in the form of his Head series, which were closeup studies of enclosed heads that Bacon painted in 1948–49. In these studies, in particular *Head I* (1948) and *Head II* (1949), one sees the detailed studies of an open mouth that has been twisted from its natural placement in the center of the face to the point where the face is falling apart. *Head VI* (1949) is one of the first depictions of the screaming pope, and is a precursor to Bacon’s papal images of subsequent decades. What is striking about the Heads is the concentration and confinement of the scream. The figure is submerged in a glass box that muffles, smothers or even silences any noise uttered. Another noteworthy observation of Bacon’s Heads is that his studies focus on the mouth: there is a noticeable absence of other facial features. It would seem that Bacon’s studies of Heads are really studies of mouths. In their development in the papal series in the 1950s, we see the transfer of the glass containers into similarly confining spatial containers, such as interlocking frames.

The popes react to the death of God with screams and other expressions of despair. What is significant about the scream is how reductive it is: “[a] scream implies an absolute reduction of its emitter to whatever state it is that the scream outwardly expresses” [Danto 1995: 99]. In some sense it is irrelevant as to whether a pope or any other person is emitting a scream because it is “in any case not really an expression of someone’s character” [idem]. It is depersonalizing and reduces the emitter to a raw emotion, a base sentiment. What is significant is that it becomes a recurring motif for a range of figures, which in itself communicates something about the pervasive malaise. In the absence of order or system, and following the atrocities of the Second World War, humanity screams at the void in unsparing despair. In the 1950s Bacon introduced other figures who were plunged into existential despair, such as the businessman in *Study for a Portrait* (1953) and in his *Man in Blue I–VI* series, in 1954, where the business suit stands for the public and patriarchal order, and the anonymity of the figure trapped in a confined space casts him in the role of Everyman experiencing the Sartrean horror of *Huis Clos*.

In *Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X*, Bacon imitated many iconographic and stylistic features of the original but transformed the tenor of the painting by planting a scream on the face of the pope. This feature alone puts the two paintings in stark opposition to each other. Painted at the height of the Baroque period in 1650, as well as in the Papal Jubilee year, Velázquez sought to flatter Giovanni Battista Pamphilj by portraying his religious authority, evident in his regalia, majestic pose and stern gaze, and to mask his unscrupulous and corrupt nature, which was anything but innocent. Bacon’s study strips the pope of any religious authority, dignity or self-control by desecrating his stature. Aside from the schematic and garish rendering of his robes and throne, which Hugh M. Davies viewed as “some form of ludicrous fancy dress in a Genet play” [1978: 100], the appearance of the screaming mouth and “balled fists” [Davies and Yard 1986: 26] transforms the reserve of Innocent X into a desperation that is iconoclastic and not in keeping with aesthetic conventions or public understanding of a pope’s status. The scream, like the “shuttering” [Sylvester 1993: 176]2 effect of the vertical striations, shatters the surface of the painting and is the overriding sensation, principally because, as Danto argues, “the scream leaves no space for other expressions” [1995: 99]. For centuries portraiture was about the unique relationship between artist and sitter, where the former was committed to certain obligations to flatter and/or enhance the positive attributes of the sitter, whether in appearance, wealth, stature or nobility, etc. By absenting himself from these conventions and by working from photographs or copies of artworks, Bacon created physical distance between himself and the sitter, which licensed him to capture the brutal reality of the sitter rather than the social façade of the persona [Sylvester 1993: 41].3 This reality involves breaking up the symbol to expose the man behind it. The scream destroys the symbolic safeguard of the pope, leading the viewer to see him as a fallible wretch rather than in his elected representation as the Vicar of Christ. This becomes a broader comment about Godlessness in the postwar West, following Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead. Bacon is not content to convey the untenability of God just once though, but in pitiless fashion reinforces the pope’s fall over and over again in a number of different papal portraits. In the summer of 1953 Bacon painted a series of eight papal portraits, and one sees the growing frustration of the pope as, from frame to frame, he becomes increasingly agitated and desperate to escape the scrutiny of the viewer. After four shots his resolve breaks and, like a caged animal being provoked by an intruder, he resorts to grimacing and breaking into a scream before finally turning violent.4

BECOMING ANIMAL

In a Godless world the plight of the pope exposes the fact that the human is level with the beast: “[i]n a world without God, humans are no different to any other animal, subject to the same innate urges; transient and alone, they are victims and perpetrators of meaningless acts” [Gale and Stephens 2008: 27]. In the absence of a transcendent redeeming reality, humans are consigned to the same fate as the animal, a fact that was hitherto rejected by humanity’s oft-proclaimed imago dei status. The relationship between humans and animals is conveyed as a continuum where the human is at various stages of “becoming animal,” as seen in Bacon’s humanoid figures from the 1940s onwards.

In his expansion of the vocabulary of human forms, Bacon turned to many different visual sources, including Picasso’s biomorphic figures on beaches of the late 1920s, figures which were highly distorted in various ways; sometimes anatomical forms were grossly exaggerated and at other times body parts were assembled randomly [Berggruen 2003: 76]. Thus Picasso showed Bacon how the human body could be represented in ways that transgressed the conventional anatomical order. By distorting and reordering the body, one could generate a multitude of effects. Among Bacon’s sources for the open mouth was the magazine Picture Post, where images of wide-opened mouths of people—whether anonymous subjects in the November 5 issue of 1938, for example, or prominent Nazis in the July 13 issue of 1940—were not uncommon [Hammer 2012: 61, 47].5 Bacon wanted to depict in visual terms the versatility of the mouth in showing a range of emotion, and in particular how in situations of extremis (limit experiences) the human resorts to animality, thereby expressing its “indwelling animality” [Pawlett 2015: 2].

One of the most credible accounts of the open mouth in Bacon’s work is Gilles Deleuze’s reading of the “becoming-animal” of Bacon’s figures. First introduced in his collaborative work with Félix Guattari, “becoming-animal” was developed in *A Thousand Plateaus* [(1980) 2008], and then applied to Bacon in Deleuze’s 1981 *Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation* [English trans., 2003]. The central tenet of “becoming-animal” is that the relationship between human and animal goes beyond resemblance: “it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man” [Deleuze 2003: 50]. Bacon’s figures are “becominganimal” in their bodily structure. In a Bacon figure the flesh is not supported by the bones but rather hangs off them like meat hanging in a slaughterhouse, and it is this that creates the equivalence between man and animal, and is a reminder that at any moment the human can become meat. The dissolution of bodily structure extends beyond the body to the facial structure which prompts Deleuze’s assertion that “Bacon is a painter of heads not faces” [ibid.: 20]. The face is an integral part of human identity. Gerald Bruns [2007: 712] describes it as “a regime of socialization to be escaped” in favor of the head. Bacon dismantles the spatial structure of the face to allow for the emergence of the head. This dehumanizes (or “animalizes”) the figure—for, “without the face, the body becomes-animal, that is, becomes flesh or meat—something that loses definition as it is removed from its bones” [ibid.: 711]. Other structural motifs and devices are employed that further increase the degree of affinity between the human and the animal, including the cage motif,6 which traps the human in isolation as if an animal, the white splotches of bodily matter,7 and the crouching figure, which often has its face hidden, a feature that increases its anonymity. The most pronounced animal expression of the human in Bacon, however, is the gaping mouth. The mouth is the aperture by which the unstable body escapes from itself. And so rather than viewing the pope’s open mouth gesture as a scream, as the source of horror wherein he is screaming at something—at the realization of his fate—we are actually looking at the open mouth as an exit point. This contrasting reading, popularized by Deleuze, denies that the pope is actually screaming at anything (“he screams before the invisible” [Deleuze 2003: 38]), and asserts that the scream is instead explained in relation to bodily forces. This is how Deleuze explains the violence in Bacon: he argues that what interests Bacon directly is not actual violence but the violence of sensation, which is “a violence that is involved only with line and colour… a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression” [ibid.: x]. The violence is caused through the movement and sensation of the body, which causes it to overflow. The stimuli are not external but come from within, such as the spasm of a sneeze or the “violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit” [idem]. Deleuze argues that, contrary to expectation, “the maximum violence will be found in the seated or crouching Figures, which are subjected to neither torture nor brutality, to which nothing visible happens, and yet which manifest the power of the paint all the more” [ibid.: 38–39].

An alternative but equally suggestive reading of the open mouth expression in Bacon can be drawn from the work of Georges Bataille. He viewed animality as a condition that humans repress in order to be, and “attempts nothing less than a general anthropology, charting the emergence of human beings from the condition of animality to the apparently, or superficially, civilized life of modern society” [Pawlett 2015: 1], stating how certain situations betray our natural origins. In *Theory of Religion* [(1973) 1992] Bataille discusses how animals live in a state of continuity with nature; they are immanent—at one—with it [ibid.]. Humans, by contrast, are separate (“discontinuous”) from nature and reside in the profane world of things and objects [Bataille (1957) 1987: 12–14]. Various operations, such as sacrifice and eroticism, restore a sense of the sacred through continuity where we can move beyond our isolated states and embrace the other in a “moment of communal unity” [Richman 2002: 162], but this is only momentary and conveys that in being human we are compelled to a destiny of separation from our natural environment. Civil society dictates the repression of the animal nature of the human through ritualistic action, for to show it is regarded as both obscene and regressive. Our relationship with our animal origins is paradoxical, for to be a part of civilized society entails the repression of animal instincts, yet the most humanizing of experiences are actually the most animal ones.

In his anthropology Bataille mines the animal aspects of humanity, which include the material body and animal drives, for the richness and despair they can contribute to life. Within his “base materialism” he examines various bodily parts to reveal their base origins. His commentary on “The Mouth” (“La Bouche”) is featured in the “Critical Dictionary” section of the art journal Documents [5, 1930], a publication that was known to Bacon. Bataille discusses the mouth as the point “where the animal begins” [Pawlett 2015: 9]; it is the locus of eros and thanatos, where life and death meet, and is the outlet of animal emotions such as fear and fury. Accompanying the text is Jacques-André Boiffard’s detailed black-and-white full-page photograph of a mouth which takes on an unfamiliar and menacing aspect by closing in on the glistening mouth to capture the viewer’s attention. The image offers an appropriate counterpart to the text, which equally involves defamiliarizing something commonplace. Bataille argues for the two outlets of the mouth—the intellectual, via speech, and the physical, via the release of instincts or appetites. In extreme moments the mouth becomes shaped for this release, thereby returning to its pre-linguistic roots. This entails a reversion of the pre-adaptive role intended for the mouth. The psychologist Paul Rozin discusses the evolutionary development of the human mouth in preadaptation [Rozin 1999; Rozin et al. 2008: 757–776] which is a Darwinian notion that concerns cases where features that evolved serving one role come to be co-opted for another. A cognate notion, exaptation, is often used in place of pre-adaptation, where the former dispenses with the teleologically loaded associations of the latter. Pre-adaptation is where

[a]n anatomical structure, physiological process, or behaviour pattern in an organism that is by chance highly suited to a new habitat to which the organism migrates or that improves the chance in environmental conditions. For example, the lungs that developed in a certain fish were probably originally a buoyancy aid before these fish began to adapt to a new environment on dry land. [Martin and Hine 2008: 524]

The original function of the human mouth was no doubt for breathing and eating. The creation of language was a later function that departed from the mouth’s original use. By rendering it defunct as an organ of speech, Bacon shows “evolution in reverse” as his figures are locked in a state of pre-symbolic regression, where they can only utter sounds and cries conveying the breakdown of language. This develops an idea advanced by Ernst van Alphen that Bacon’s figures have an incomplete sense of self; they are trapped in an inner sense of self, and are therefore unable to be conceived as whole [van Alphen 1992: 15, 166]. Indeed if we are to view them as humans-as-animal then not only have they relinquished a higher understanding of self or self-awareness (being-for-itself, to use a Sartrean phrase) but also the fundamentals of human and linguistic communication, which is one of the distinguishing traits of the human. Armin Zweite discusses how “[t]hrough language, humans can divest themselves of bare life, effectively placing themselves in opposition to it” [2006: 101]. The function of the mouth as an organ of speech is reversed and becomes an outlet of overflow—the overflow of emotions, and even the body, in Deleuze’s interpretation. In “our most concentrated experiences of agony or ecstasy” [Ades 1985: 13], humans are compelled to express themselves through the mouth: “fury makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of rending screams” and bypasses the “constipa[ted]”…“magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth” [Bataille 1995: 62–64]. These extreme states result in a primal frenzy where even the physical physiognomy of the face is distorted. The “overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column, in other words, it assumes the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals” [Ades 1985: 62]. This configuration of the contorted mouth is apposite in Bacon’s depictions. Take, for instance, his outstanding contribution to the Lefevre group show in April 1945, *Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion* (ca. 1944), also known as the Tate triptych. Painted near the end of the war, Bacon presents a vision of fury. Each of these three humanoid, hybrid forms has an elongated animal neck ending in a head bearing a human mouth. In the central panel the figure reveals a grimacing mouth. In the right-hand panel the figure breaks out into a cry. By veiling the eyes of the creatures, the auditory aspect of the scream becomes more pronounced, as it is channeled through overwrought lungs. John Russell and others have commented on the ghastliness of these unidentifiable and anomalous figures that presented a sight so awful that the postwar viewing public did not know how to receive them. The figures’ wild open mouths present a palpable sense of hatred: “Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity of hatred” [Russell 1993: 11].

Since this early work Bacon continued reworking the open mouth in his series Heads, which reveal the process of deforming the face through the techniques of rubbing and brushing. Bacon “dismantle[s] the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face” [Deleuze 2003: 20–21]. In Head I four years later the human mouth was transformed into an animal mouth as it twists the face, breaking up the structure, and reveals fang-like canines. This transformation was more acute in *Head II*, where the head dissolves into the neck and one of the only points of identification are the teeth, the arrow, safety pin and curtain, in which the latter three components give some sense of context. Head V (1949) shows further dissolution, with a few suggestive marks including the ear in the bottom right (and a safety pin). If we take the face as the index of the human—where it personalizes and individualizes the entity—then the head reduces and restores the human to its natural condition. The dissolution of the face makes the starkness of the open mouth, the “faceless mouth” [Hammer 2012: 118, quoting a phrase of John Russell’s] even more alarming.

The most severe and incongruous manifestation of the open-mouthed expression is the pope’s “scream,” and this is because of the disparity between the pope in his divine representation and the lowly beast. Bacon wanted to bring the exalted figure down to the level of abject humanity. Ades argues that “[p]erhaps his idea was to test one of the greatest portraits ever painted, of a man set highest above his fellow men (the archetypal father, verging on the divine) in the grip of a feeling so intense that the only expression of it brought him close to the beasts” [Ades 1985: 15]. Bacon wanted to bring the pope to the point of paroxysm [Borel 1996: 190; Leiris 1988: 6], at “breaking point” where “[f]act exceeds appearances [and there is an] increased presence” [Borel idem].

While the open mouth seeks to “animalize” the human, to transform it into a beast, Bacon’s depictions of animals need consideration in their own right. As well as the numerous human-animal hybrid forms, as seen in works such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon singled out individual animal species for depiction and was influenced by photographic sources, including Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of human and animal motion and Marius Maxwell’s pictures of animals in the wild. Study of a Baboon (1953) is of a single baboon screaming in a tree, uncannily aware of its isolation and unfamiliar with its natural habitat, and *Elephant Fording a River* (1952) shows a solitary elephant crossing a river. *Study of a Dog* (1952) in both stance and pathos bears similarities to *Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge)* (1961) and *Study for Nude* (1951). Owls (1956) presents vulture-like forms huddled together. Steve Baker observes how Bacon’s “animal” works “hold-to-form,” in that “[a]nimal form is allowed to be and to stay what it is,” which is not the case with human form that is undone by “the painterly violence done to most of the human figures” [Baker 2000: 142–143]. Baker’s analysis is based on a “generalization,” by his own admission, “on an impression left in the mind after looking at them, rather than on detailed formal scrutiny” [ibid.: 142], but his impression is quite correct and raises the question as to why animals are not subject to the same painterly scrutiny as human figures. One possible explanation is that Bacon was commenting on humanity’s futile tendency to attempt to transcend its nature, a rebuke not directed at animals. He reverses conventional roles—he debases the human figure by placing it on the horizontal axis, and by foregrounding its animality. In contrast, his animal portraits exude an existential (and anthropocentric) solitude; the sole cry of the animal in the wild. Some of the figures are eerily human, such as the dog in Study of a Dog (1952), or the hooded forlorn figures in *Owl*. His animal “portraits” adopt the format designed for his portrait studies, typically of single figures in rooms that contain cage-like structures.8

Bacon spoke in interviews to David Sylvester of the crossover he perceived between human and animal movement [Sylvester 1993: 116], which undoubtedly was fueled by his interest in Muybridge’s photographs. The similarity, however, extended beyond movement to nature, something that Deleuze aptly summarized as the overlap between “the common face of man and animal” [2003: 21]. There are select works that impart the coincidence of human and animal, which is central to Deleuzian becoming-animal. *Chimpanzee* (1955), for example, represents an amalgamation of the human and animal in both movement and spirit. Ritual communion is explored further in Head IV (Man with Monkey) (1949), where the boundaries that separate form are undone, and the human merges with the animal.

THE UNTERMENSCH

Bacon concurred with Nietzsche about the cultural centrality of the death of God. Where they parted company was about what happens in the aftermath of this crisis. According to Nietzsche, a type of creature is needed who can surpass humanity in its strength and vision, while for Bacon, in the absence of transcendence and its mythological imperatives, reality should be about embracing our mortal condition—which he bleakly stated as “man is meat.” Bacon also shows a regression of humanity; the subhuman—what John Russell describes as Untermensch [1993: 38]9—which indicates what happens when our goals and aspirations are thwarted, especially since the human condition is about transcending nature. Wyndham Lewis described the grotesqueness of this vision: Bacon depicts “the shouting creatures in glass cases, those dissolving ganglia the size of a small fist in which one can always discern the shouting mouth, the wild distended eye” [Tinterow and Alteveer 2008: 31]. Russell views the figures less in terms of the grotesque and more as an authentic statement of humanity, which effectively happens in the absence of the social front. He describes what happens during “the disintegration of the social being which takes place when one is alone in a room which has no looking-glass. We may well feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose” [Russell 1993: 38]. Keith Tester argues that, rather than viewing Bacon’s figures as degraded and subhuman, as one would view an untermensch, Bacon actually facilitates a “rehumanization” [1994: 142]. This is because he shows the human being in its authentic natural status of animality, thereby transgressing cultural norms. The “inhuman,” according to Tester, is “everything which forces the individual to ‘subscribe to a determined being’” [ibid.: xi]. By becoming animal Bacon’s figures are indeterminate and in the process of change, which is a rehumanizing experience. Tester argues that not only is the figural depiction itself rehumanizing but so is the response that viewers have to the work. Through distortion Bacon configures the human in its raw state, and by eschewing narrative in his painting he forces the viewer to respond to the sensuous surface that instinctively chimes with our experiences of embodiment and other cognate sensations of humanity. The continuity between humans and the animal in Bacon’s œuvre reveals his commitment to uncovering the inherent animality of the human, which is captured in the ideological shift conveyed by the phrase “human animal” [Wilkie and Inglis 2007: 9].

PRE-LINGUISTIC GAPE FACE

At the beginning of this article it was indicated that there was a need for a change in direction from thinking about the scream to thinking about the implications of the gaping mouth. When seen in artworks the open mouth is usually explained in terms of horror, sorrow, ecstasy or some other extreme emotional state. In Bacon’s œuvre the open mouth is featured in a great many works, usually in relation to nonspecific or rather unnamed people, who might be called “types” rather than “individuals,” such as pope I, pope II, etc. Although one can argue that his studies of popes were inspired by representations of particular papal figures, his objective was about deconstructing the symbol rather than capturing a particular likeness. This is unlike the situation of portrait studies of his friends, which was about capturing a deeper understanding of the individual in question. In Bacon the open mouth was the raison d’être of the human being, as it conveyed the “zone of indiscernibility” between “man and beast” [Deleuze 2003: 23], the fact that at any moment we can be turned into meat. The open mouth indicated a departure from the linguistic world of “civilization” to a realization of the purposeless (but not necessarily meaningless) position of humans in the world. It was a way of prizing open the social persona and looking at the flesh-and-blood reality of humanity.10 Erasing the face and its individual features, especially the eyes, which he veils or distorts, is a way of de-individualizing the figure and of underscoring an inherent animality. This is evident in *Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion* and is present in other works, such as *Painting* (1946). The latter example, which bears similarities to *Figure Study II* (1945–1946), features a hieratic figure in the center of an abattoir or butcher’s shop. Various pieces of meat are featured above and around him. All but the teeth-baring lipless grimace is shrouded by a black umbrella. Perhaps this is a harbinger of Bacon’s philosophy that humans are potential cadavers and the fate of this sinister figure lies all around him

Like Bataille, Bacon wanted to restore the real presence of reality that modern society had sanitized and made banal. In Documents and the “Critical Dictionary” Bataille did this through a process of de-sublimation; by uncovering the “ritual violence” of the temple, the abattoir and various body parts including the mouth and the big toe [Ades 2006: 55]. In his own practice Bacon strips away the conventions of social propriety by representing grotesque behavior that is normally hidden from viewing under the spotlight, such as figures crouching, copulating and defecating. It is not acceptable to show the gaping mouth in public and actions that bring this about are hidden because of the impropriety associated with the inside of orifices. Bacon is drawn to the surfaces between the inner and outer, which is where we experience corporeal turmoil. He echoes Michel Leiris’s view that “we can never examine life closely enough […] without coming […] to the horror lying hidden beneath the most sumptuous coverings” [Zweite 2006: 87]. Bacon was interested in showing the organic unbounded body—what happens when the boundaries between outer and inner are taken away and we experience the flowing, leaking body that is in a state of untamed dissolution. This phenomenon is known as abjection. Abjection, as expounded in Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1982],11 is a cultural code that addresses boundary crossings between the subject and the source that threatens the subject with abjection. Within the context of the body the abject refers to bodily fluids and other parts of matter that threaten the clean and proper (in the sense of intact) body with contamination and formlessness. The abject “does not respect borders, positions, rules” [ibid.: 4], and for this reason “[t]hat which threatens identity must be jettisoned from the borders and placed outside” [Oliver 2003: 47]. But even outside the boundary the abject hovers, threatening the boundary with collapse.

Like Bataille, who exposed the base materialism of the body, Bacon practised a form of de-sublimation by reacting against the conventions of figurative representation. He did this chiefly by blurring the boundaries between traditionally opposed states in various ways—the outer and inner—which resulted in various states of fragmentation and distortion where the body is featured as unstable and anarchic. The boundaries between outer and inner are in tension, as conveyed by the relationship between the structure of the body and the matter, where they are often pulled in opposing directions, which contributes to the effect of torsion (or twisting). Visually this is conveyed by smears and smudges that are wiped across the body. Michel Leiris uses the term “liquefaction” [1988: 13] to refer to this process of turbulence, which many of Bacon’s figures are subject to and which results in overspill, where the inner contents flow into the foreground, causing confusion as to whether the viewer is looking at the external or internal, something compounded by the fact that the overspilled material is more opaque than the boundaries of the body.

Leiris describes how the “indefinable form of [Bacon’s] figures … in some cases, seem to lose their bone structure to become strange fluxes or whorls of matter in fusion,” which can be described in terms of the process of becoming-animal [ibid.: 11]. As his career progressed, Bacon started to break up the body more into “lumps and gobbets and tubes of flesh” of viscera, and the mouth “as dentated wounds,” and they often served as “some point[s] of orientation” [Danto 1995: 101]. The viscerality of the open mouth was captured by the synaesthetic phrase that Bacon came across in William Bedell Stanford’s Aeschylus and his Style. A Study in Language and Personality: “[t]he reek of human blood smiles out at me,” which had inspired Bacon since he came across it in the 1940s [Stanford 1942: 109]. The open mouth, like an open wound, has numerous possibilities including a portal for disgust, an erogenous zone and a site of aggression.

In his account of the cultural development of the mouth, Rozin discusses how the human mouth, which originally evolved for the intake of fluids and food and the inhalation and exhalation of air, was “co-opted in later human evolution as a vocal output. The tongue and teeth [and lips], critical for speech production, evolved for purposes of handling food” [1999: 2]. In this expanded sense the original use of the mouth was retained but there was a further function. In many cultural traditions the linguistic function of the mouth is prized above eating. In fact on occasions when the two functions work alongside one another, such as when dining with another, the linguistic is regarded as being of primary importance and part of social identity while activities involving eating including breaking up the food, mastication and swallowing are done as discreetly and noiselessly as possible (in some cultural contexts). Here cultural etiquette overrides biological evolution.

Eating also activates the disgust reflex that was originally a response to certain foods that were spoiled or unpalatable, and hence was a mechanism that deterred the ingesting of food of this kind. The sight of a maggot-infested piece of meat, for example, would bring about the phenomenological response of disgust that includes the gape (the “disgust face”) [Rozin 2008: 759] and that more precisely involves the lowering of the jaw, the nose wrinkle and (less often) the upper lip rise. The facial expression may be accompanied by nausea, prompting the gag reflex (through retching) and other behavioral changes, including the urge to move away from the source of disgust (recoil). Daniel Kelly argues that “there is something very reliable about the gape face” [2011], because it betrays the truth about how someone is really feeling. He gives examples that show how people can verbally lie about how they are feeling, for the sake of not being perceived as rude and to avoid hurting people’s feelings. In the case of genuine disgust the situation is different, as we cannot hide it. It is automatically emoted in what is described as “facial leakage,“12 which marks the difficulty of maintaining a façade of politeness. The open mouths of Bacon’s figures can be described as gaping faces (rather than screaming faces) and this aligns with Bacon’s objective to look behind the veneer of social niceties to expose brutal realism. Sitting on high-backed chairs we expect Bacon’s figures to be orators, ready to speak to their public, but instead they gape, revealing the animal that lies beneath. The gape face signals a reversion to a pre-linguistic state, signaling a breakup of the symbolic order of law and patriarchy, and crucially of language. The biological core of humans is legitimated when it brings about great cultural activity, and so the mouth is praised as noteworthy if it produces great words or song. In cases where it draws attention to itself as a fleshy orifice, however, repulsion occurs unless we are able to transform it into desire, but in either case it results in having to respond to an animal reflex. The collapse of language is seen par excellence in the fate of the defenseless pope who has the trappings of holiness but is distinct in his position of inarticulacy, which undermines his credibility and status. Unable to move away from its placement the papal throne doubles up as an electric chair [Davies 2001: 12] that becomes the instrument of torture.

The open mouth in artworks has been both an indicator and index of horror, as in the Poussin and Eisenstein examples discussed earlier, where both figures are responding to atrocities they have witnessed or experienced. It is disquieting precisely because it “is not still nor silent” [Tester 1994: 144]. Harmut Böhme discusses other signs of the open mouth in pictorial depiction as conveying “irrationality,” as providing “an appropriate sign to convey oral pleasure, boundless greed or mindless aggression” [quoted in 2006: 99]. Mikhail Bakhtin talks in similar terms about the mouth in his depiction of the carnivalesque, which involves the exchange between different realities in a confusion and subversion of states. He describes how the gaping mouth is “related to the lower stratum; it is the open gate leading downward into the bodily underworld” [(1965) 1984: 325].

By expanding the meaning of the open mouth in Bacon to look at other explanations that take the viewer beyond the scream creates new possibilities for thinking about the expressive potential of his art as well as developing the plausible evolutionary hypothesis of the human’s proximity to the animal. For Deleuze the mouth is key to his conception of becoming-human, as it is through the mouth that the flesh is able to be released from the hold of the body. For Bataille the mouth is pivoted on an axis between civilization and the primal, and the size and articulation of the aperture determines its location. Bacon distorts the mouth in his figures, which reveals the “indwelling animality” [Pawlett 2015: 2] or in Deleuzian terms the “zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal” [Deleuze 2003: 21]. One unique aspect of Bacon’s work is that, as Tester puts it, “humanity is placed in the social and the cultural and the natural environments at one and the same time” [1994: 141]. And so the figures of the pope and the businessmen, so exalted in their social stature, are grounded by their animality and cannot transcend their nature. Arguing for a reading of preadaptation of the mouth is to look at what in Bacon is tantamount to a pictorial “evolution in reverse.” What we are seeing then are studies of figures that take on the guise of traditional portraits in some aspects—such as through the isolation of a formally dressed figure on a podium—though in other respects the figures exist on the same ontological plane as the animal. The starkness of contrast between the human in the guise of grandiosity and literal uprightness and the reality of his lowly position conveys the human-animal amalgam that Bacon sought to achieve. By creating the fluidity, the indeterminacy between the human and animal, in terms of its forms and behavior, Bacon creates moral ambivalence: the viewer feels intrigued by (yet afraid of) humanoid figures such as those in the Tate triptych or in the figures (particularly the lower one) in *Fragment of a Crucifixion* (1950) because they offer partial resemblance to the human. Conversely, the presence of animal traits in the human causes a sense of repulsion, as the viewer becomes aware of the inherent vulnerability and cruelty of a human who is capable of lashing out like a beast.

NOTES

1. Bacon’s images are available for viewing online via Artimage.

2. Bacon uses the term “shuttering” to refer to the way Degas striated the form of the body in his pastel work. Bacon’s vertical striations serve to confound foreground and background.

3. Interestingly, in his portraits Bacon insisted on working from photographs even though most of his sitters were friends or lovers, and so were known to him personally. His reason for this was that he claimed he did not feel comfortable enacting violence on the image if the sitter was directly in front of him. Perhaps he applied the same logic to the Velázquez original, which he did not see firsthand when in Rome but kept multiple reproductions of, at least one of which was pinned on his studio wall. Barbara Dawson [2009: 54] notes that nine books on Velázquez were found in his studio (at Reece Mews), and out of these nine all but one had the illustration of Innocent X torn out, and one had been used by Bacon as evidenced by the creases on the image and deposits of paint on the surface.

4. This development anticipates an earlier series, *Three Studies of the Human Head* (1953).

5. Martin Hammer’s book-length treatment [2012] of the subject unearthed the impact that Nazi propaganda had on Bacon.

6. Other similar structures include a glass box, a pedestal or rostrum, all designed to isolate.

7. As seen in *Study for Bullfight No.1, 2nd Version* (1969), for example.

8. *Chimpanzee* (1955) resembles the Man in Blue Series (1954).

9. John Russell uses the term to refer to *Head II*, but I am expanding the reference here.

10. The sexual aspects of the mouth and its links to the bestial were also explored by Sigmund Freud and can be used to discuss the imagery in some of Bacon’s works, such as *Two Figures* (1953). In *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality* [1905; reprinted in Freud’s Complete Works 7] Freud discusses the tension that exists between sexual desire and repulsion: “A man who will kiss a pretty girl’s lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her teeth-brush [*sic*], though there are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he feels no disgust, is cleaner than the girl’s. Here, then, our attention is drawn to the factor of disgust, which interferes with the libidinal overvaluation of the sexual object but can in turn be overridden by libido.” See Menninghaus [2003: 232].

11. The French original Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection was published in 1980 (Paris: Éditions de Seuil).

12. Darwin “hypothesized that some facial muscle actions associated with strong emotion are beyond voluntary control and cannot be completely inhibited” [Porter et al. 2012: 23–37]

                                                            ***Head II*** **(1949)**

Requiem for Soho — Irish photographer John Minihan

laments the heyday of London’s pleasure ground

**JOHN MINIHAN   |   LIFE & STYLE   |   THE IRISH POST   |   TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 2017**

IN his great 1862 novel *Les Miserable* Victor Hugo wrote “old Paris is no more and new Paris does not yet exist”. Every city needs its pleasure ground and Soho enlivens London, like the Left Bank in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York. The death-knell has been ringing for years, but Soho has always welcomed change.

I have been photographing Soho since 1964, its strip clubs particularly Paul Raymond of Raymond’s Revue Bar. The girls were pretty and talented but public taste has moved on, now the nearest thing to a sex shop is the Ann Summers on Wardour Street.

In 1964 I was invited to photograph a band from Shepherds Bush called The Who. They were starting a residency at the Marquee Club, Wardour Street. The Marquee Club would be a venue for some of the biggest names of the 1960s and 1970s, The Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie to name but a few.

The first time I heard of a cappuccino coffee was in the popular Bar Italia in Frith Street. In 1962 I was working as an apprentice in the Daily Mail darkroom. Much of my time was photographing musicians, Nina Simone and Van Morrison, Jazz and Blues at Ronnie Scott’s, The Flamingo Club and Marquee Club, all located five minutes from each other.

The inhabitants of Soho have ranged from aristocrats to barrow boys, from artists, writers, musicians, pimps and prostitutes, always prevalent the underbelly of criminality. Soho is still London’s most colourful and cosmopolitan district, renowned for its street life and night life. But now owing to the redevelopment of the area its long established residential community is all but gone.

Many of my friends, writers Stan Gebler Davies and Richard West, enjoyed drinking in Soho, from the French House to the Coach and Horses, the area was well-equipped and what fun we had walking from the York Minster in Dean Street, now renamed The French House, with its affable landlord Gaston Berlemont, with his handlebar moustache, who was born upstairs in the pub in 1914. He took over the running of the pub in 1951 and played host to artists Frances Bacon, Lucian Freud, Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan.

Around the corner from The French House is Romilly Street and you see the Coach and Horses, it’s cantankerous but good hearted boss Norman Balon celebrated his 90th birthday in January this year, was made immortal in a series humorous columns in The Spectator by the journalist Jeffrey Bernard, who also liked a drink.

I remember photographing Dick West, Stan Gebler and Jeffrey Bernard outside Bow Street Magistrates Court back in the late 1980s for what reason now I can’t remember, but it would have something to do with gambling or alcohol. Soho is all things to all people, it is the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue, the supermarkets and restaurants of Chinatown, the once bookshops on Charing Cross Road, the fresh fruit smell off a barrow in Berwick Street Market.

Soho is infinitely varied, little of what I remember from the 1960s is still there. The Colony Room, a private members club on Dean Street, closed its doors in 2008. During the 1970s I spent much time in the Colony Room drinking with Stan Gebler Davies. I was the only one with a cheque book but did not have a cheque card depending on friendly publicans like Gaston in The French House to change a cheque.

Most of it was spent in the bar. In those days Soho was full of drinking clubs, they existed partly to quench the thirst of afternoon drinkers, journalists, petty criminals, doctors, artists and writers at a time when pubs were obliged to shut from 3 to 5.30pm.

Francis Bacon I first saw in the Colony Room in 1970 with Stan Gebler Davies. Bacon was a man whom I both knew and did not know. Born in Dublin in 1909, certainly Irish by birth, if not by blood. He had the Irish love of gambling, drinking and the perpetual desire to be somewhere else. Over the next 20 years I would photograph him on numerous occasions in London and at his invitation in Paris in 1977.

Recently in London I passed the now closed door that was the Colony Room, where once I heard the cry “Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends”, Bacon’s frequent toast which he displayed with an icy ceremonious politeness.

Although I never got to photograph Muriel Belcher who founded the club in 1948, she was the greatest of Soho hostesses much loved by Bacon who immortalised her in a series of paintings. Muriel was famous for the foul mouthed greeting she gave to visitors to her afternoon drinking club.

The successor to Muriel was her barman Ian Board who would greet member’s with, ‘Hello Cuntie’, taking over the Colony Room when Muriel died in 1979. Board treasured the patronage of famous artists like Frances Bacon and Lucian Freud.

When Ian Board died in 1994 he bequeathed the club to Michael Wojas who had worked behind the bar since 1981. For all his crude talk Board always was kind to me while I sat and smoked his Dunhill cigarettes one after another in that small dark upstairs room.

It was painted racing green, the wall heavily hung with photographs, newspaper clippings, cartoons and some very bad paintings, but we loved the place. Board was a bombastic bohemian with extraordinary warmth and natural wit. One cannot always know the consequences of our passage through the world, when you’re young you really only live for the now.

In 1980 I first met John Calder, Samuel Beckett’s British publisher; I had photographed the writer some months earlier in London and John wanted to publish my photograph on the back of his new Beckett publication.

Calder’s offices were in Brewer Street and he lived above his office. Many times he would invite me to dinner at Kettner’s in Romilly Street, once a favourite haunt of Oscar Wilde. I would often stay the night, leaving early in the morning to sounds of the barrow boys wheeling fruit-filled carts into Berwick Street. Very little is left now of the street traders who were so a part of Soho.

John Calder gave many parties for his authors and on rare occasions Samuel Beckett came from his home in Paris and stayed overnight, playing Calder’s Bechstein grand piano into the early hours.

Michael Wojas died aged 53 in 2010. The Colony Room closed its doors in 2008. Images have become for me a source of knowledge as well as pleasure every bit as powerful as the written word.





                                                                                  **The Colony Room in 1990**

**Beyeler to reunite Giacometti and Bacon**

**Swiss museum to stage show on the artists, who first met in the early 1960s, in time for Art Basel in 2018**

**MARTIN BAILEY | SWITZERLAND | SPECIAL REPORTS | THE ART NEWSPAPER  | TUESDAY 13 JUNE 2017**

Giacometti and Bacon will be the stars of the Fondation Beyeler’s main exhibition next year, which is due to coincide with Art Basel 2018. The show is being organised by the Fondation Beyeler’s curator, Ulf Küster, Catherine Grenier, the director of the Fondation Giacometti, and Michael Peppiatt, an expert on Bacon and Giacometti.

Peppiatt promises that “the sheer visual excitement of two great 20th-century masters” will make this a major show. Discussions are taking place about a second venue for the Bacon-Giacometti exhibition after Basel (29 April-2 September 2018), possibly in the US.

Peppiatt sees strong parallels between the art and lives of the two artists. Both were strongly influenced by Surrealism and worked in a figurative style at a time when abstraction was “becoming louder”. They were existentialists, avid readers, deeply affected by the Second World War and lived in chaos. With huge drive, both proved to be survivors.

Peppiatt says that the two men first met in Paris in the early 1960s: “Bacon told me that he had gone up to Giacometti in a café in St Germain, probably Les Deux Magots or Flore, to say he admired his work.”

Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) was eight years older than the UK artist Francis Bacon (1909-92). They met again a few years later, probably through their mutual friend Isabel Rawsthorne, who was Giacometti’s lover and also modelled for both artists. Peppiatt says that on one occasion the two artists stayed up all night talking. They remained friends until Giacometti’s death in 1966.

The artists had two motifs in common: the scream and the cage. Both used a cage-like device in their compositions to create space and perspective and to concentrate attention on the central figure. Giacometti led the way, influencing his younger contemporary. Bacon once introduced his friend Daniel Farson to Giacometti, saying: “This is the man who has influenced me more than anyone.” There are, of course, also considerable differences in their work. “They were both X-raying their figures, but whereas Giacometti was stick-like in his depictions, Bacon was decidedly fleshy,” Peppiatt says.

Works by the two artists will be intermingled at the Fondation Beyeler. The majority of the Giacometti loans are to come from the Fondation Giacometti, with works by Bacon coming from a wide range of lenders, including a number of Swiss owners.

       Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1965.

Francis Bacon Painting Hits $51.8 Bid

OLIVIA O’MAHONY, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT | IRISH AMERICA | SUNDAY 28 MAY 2017

A triptych painting of George Dyer, the lover and muse of Irish-born figurative artist Francis Bacon, sold for $51.8 million at a Christie’s auction for contemporary works in May. The painting, once owned by children’s author Roahl Dahl, a close friend of Bacon’s, spent the last 25 years in the private collection of French actor Francis Lombrail and was originally slated to reach up to $70 million with bidders. However, a substantial fall on Wall Street at the time of the auction resulted in a notably cooled demand.

The piece, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, was painted in 1963, one year after the two men met, and is the first of almost 40 works inspired by their relationship. One of only five triptychs painted of Dyer, it is representative of the explosive vitality of new romance and was completed during the period of Bacon’s greatest satisfaction in his personal and professional lives. A petty thief with a yearning to learn his true place in the world, Dyer was 33 years Bacon’s junior and sought meaning through his role as muse. When their dynamic as creatives and lovers alike began to crumble, Dyer fell into an intense depression. After some time apart, Bacon invited him to Paris for a retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971, but ignored him in favour of other guests upon arrival. The young man finally snapped, and after a hurricane of drinking and drug use, he was found dead the following morning. In his guilt-ridden grief, Bacon would paint several more portraits of Dyer in the years that followed.

“George Dyer is Bacon’s number one muse, like Dora Maar was for Picasso,” said Loic Gouzer, deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. “He was the subject who allowed Bacon to push his limits and become the artist he became.”

Bacon’s triptychs are incredibly sought after among art collectors; one piece that depicted his joint friend and rival, Lucian Freud, previously held the world record for highest bid fetched by a painting at an auction, with an offer of $142.4 million in 2013.

Behind the veil: the secret art collection in Iran

An Iranian museum guard protected a hidden $3bn collection of modern masters for 40 years.

Now they are out on the walls

CHRISTINA LAMB | ART | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY 28 MAY 2017

**On one wall is Jackson Pollock’s vast drip-painted Mural on Indian Red Ground — thought to be his most valuable painting. Opposite are two Mark Rothkos and a Picasso.** **In the next room, two Andy Warhols and** a Robert Rauschenberg. Along the corridor, which spirals downwards like a reverse Guggenheim, there is a Henry Moore bronze, followed by works by Gilbert and George, Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein. A glass case contains a wrapped Christo. Outside are sculptures by Giacometti and Magritte.

On one wall is Jackson Pollock’s vast drip-painted Mural on Indian Red Ground — thought to be his most valuable painting. Opposite are two Mark Rothkos and a Picasso. In the next room, two Andy Warhols and a Robert Rauschenberg. Along the corridor, which spirals downwards like a reverse Guggenheim, there is a Henry Moore bronze, followed by works by Gilbert and George, Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein. A glass case contains a wrapped Christo. Outside are sculptures by Giacometti and Magritte.

It’s one of the most exciting western art collections in the world, yet for most of the past four decades, it has lain forgotten and gathering dust in a vault. It is perhaps the last thing one expects to find in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The museum housing it has a photograph of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini over the entrance — his contempt for western culture is well known — and just along the road is a “Death to USA” mural.

Amassed by the Shah’s wife, Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, in the 1970s, using Iran’s oil wealth (it has the world’s fourth largest reserve), the collection opened in the specially built Museum of Contemporary Art in autumn 1977, with a lavish ceremony featuring horses, Japanese dancers and caviar from the Caspian Sea, attended by guests from around the world, including Nelson Rockefeller. But within a few months the Islamic Revolution had started; by January 1979 the royal family were on a plane and the Ayatollahs had taken over, banning western movies, music and many books. The art was quickly hidden.

Until now. In Iran to report on the elections last week, it was my birthday, and I decided to give myself a day off. I had met an artist who told me to go to the museum. I set off for Laleh (Tulip) Park, which at this time of year is lush and green. I entered a concrete building shaped like a periwinkle, bought a ticket and followed the walkway down.

It was the best pound I ever spent. First, an arresting black and white Picasso, The Painter and His Model. Then a wonderful vibrant Gauguin, Still Life with a Head-shaped Vase. Then the Pollock, a vast terracotta canvas with streaks of white, yellow, grey and black, valued by Christie’s seven years ago at $250m, and Rothko’s bold Sienna Orange and Black on Dark Brown. The next room has Warhol’s Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), which, though painted in 1963, makes one think of 9/11 and the “falling man” from the Twin Towers.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. One after another, fabulous works of art. And the only spectators me and a few young Iranians taking selfies, setting off the alarm by crossing the sensor. Altogether, 32 of the museum’s greatest masterpieces are on show, along with 30 leading (and also spectacular) Iranian works. The exhibition is titled The Travelers, because these works were supposed to be going to Berlin and Rome, the first time the collection has been shown overseas.

Afterwards I met the genial head of communications, Hassan Noferesti, who has worked here for 20 years. He gave me tea and explained that the museum has 3,400 pieces, of which half are western, all acquired in the 1970s, when auction houses and gallery owners from Paris to New York sent agents with slides for the buying frenzy. The empress even commissioned Warhol to fly to Iran and paint her portrait. For the past 38 years, they have remained locked in a basement vault behind a velvet rope, vast steel doors and a combination lock. Very few of the paintings have ever gone on loan in that time.

Noferesti introduced me to Firdouz Shahbazi Moghadam, 65, who he said was the real hero of the collection. He recently retired after 40 years, but still comes to the gallery every day.

Shahbazi told me he had been working as a driver for a flooring company and delivered something to the not yet completed museum in 1977. He ended up getting a job there as a guard. “There was huge excitement, we were working 24 hours a day to get it ready,” he said. “The empress was coming back and forth.”

Finally the big day came, but within months the revolution began. The museum is close to Tehran university, one of its centres. “There was unrest, fires and demonstrations, so we decided to collect all the works and put them in the treasury vault,” Shahbazi recalled.

They were just in time. Shortly after that, 20 armed Revolutionary Guards came to the museum. “They sent all the staff home, but asked me to stay,” he said. “I was afraid.” The museum director fled the country; Shahbazi ended up as keeper of the vault, responsible for a collection now valued at $3bn, even though he had never finished high school and knew nothing about art.

“I felt responsible for them, like a father taking care of his babies,” he said. “I was worried that conditions in the treasury are not like the museum and just wanted to keep them in the best way until they could be shown again.”

Royal palaces were thrown open to the public as examples of the degenerate lifestyle of the shahs, but the art collection was forgotten. Meanwhile, Shahbazi worked seven days a week. “I put everything else to one side and dedicated my life to the museum,” he said. “I was terrified of a flood if it rained.” He read art books to learn more. Occasionally, Revolutionary Guards would come. “They knew nothing about art,” he said. “They would laugh at the Picassos and say, ‘My children could draw that.’”

The museum reopened in the 1980s to exhibit patriotic propaganda during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq. Occasionally people turned up at the vault with official letters demanding to borrow paintings. Shahbazi refused, suspecting loans would never be returned.

Astonishingly, the collection remained intact. The only painting to be removed was a Willem de Kooning, exchanged in 1990 for 118 pages of the Shahnameh, a book of 16th-century Persian miniatures owned by the American art collector Arthur Houghton and swapped on the tarmac at Vienna airport. “I took the piece to the airport, then received back the book,” Shahbazi said.

The collection briefly resurfaced in 2005 under the more liberal President Khatami, when a progressive director managed to get some of the paintings exhibited. He also tried to get permission to buy some Brit Art, but that was vetoed, and the exhibition closed after five months when the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected. That was the last anyone has officially seen of the modern masterpieces.

After the historic nuclear deal of 2015, which reopened Iran’s relations with the West, the museum received lots of requests to lend its works. Agreements were signed with Germany and Italy, and 30 works were set to go to Berlin last December to show in the Gemäldegalerie, then on to Rome for an exhibition in the Maxxi museum.

“This was the first time we wanted to send so many pieces from our own vault to another country,” Noferesti said. “Everything was arranged, transportation, insurance with Lloyds...”

First, the Germans were upset when Iran hosted a cartoon contest about the Holocaust, and the director of the Contemporary Art Museum was one of the officials awarding prizes. Then the Iranian Painters Association wrote a letter protesting at the proposed loan, arguing that if the paintings went to Europe, they might not come back.

“We don’t have any problem having cultural relations with those two countries, or museums borrowing works — that’s useful,” Mohammed Reza Firouzehei, an artist on the board of the association, told me. “But all of a sudden they decide to send 30 masterpieces from the biggest artists in the world all at once! The paintings were bought by Empress Farah, and their ownership is not clear, so we’re worried they could be seized. Anyone might make a claim, and there’s no assurance the original will come back, rather than a copy.”

The initial December date came and went. A later date was set. Then the minister of culture was changed. In the end, the museum decided to take advantage of the distraction of the elections to show the paintings in Tehran. The re-election of President Hassan Rouhani, who re-established relations with the West, is more likely to enable the paintings to travel, and Noferesti believes they will go eventually.

“It seems unlikely they would be seized,” he said. “Farah Diba was only responsible for buying them. These paintings were bought from the oil budget, they weren’t personal belongings.”

Meanwhile, some paintings in the collection are unlikely to make the museum walls. “I think Renoir’s Gabrielle with the Open Blouse will be staying in the vault,” Noferesti said.

                 **Two parts of the Francis Bacon triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants Photograph: Zohreh Soleimani**

Tate Britain to show Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon

works side by side in major new exhibition

The Tate will have to borrow work from some of the world’s greatest private collections for the show

ROBERT DEX | ARTS | EVENING STANDARD | THURSDAY 25 MAY 2017

**Two giants of modern British art — Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon — will share wallspace in a major new exhibition next year.**

The Tate will have to borrow work from some of the world’s greatest private collectors for the show which is part of a new season of exhibitions across the various galleries announced today.

Among the works likely to feature in the show, called All Too Human, is Freud’s Sleeping By The Lion Carpet which shows one of his regular models Sue Tilley asleep in his studio. A similar work showing the same model, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, was bought at auction for £17.2 million almost a decade ago, setting a then record for a work by a living artist.

Both artist’s work is highly collectable with Bacon’s work attracting even higher sums — three portraits he did of Freud in 1969 sold for a staggering £89 million at auction four years ago.

Both men were members of the 1970’s-era School of London which was associated with more traditional work rather than the abstract approach fashionable at the time and the show will also include work by less-well known artists who were also members of the School such as Frank Auerbach and R.B. Kitaj.

Other shows announced today include an exhibition of work at Tate Britain by Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones. Around 150 of his works, including painting, stained glass and tapestry, will appear in the show which is the first major retrospective of his work in four decades.

As well as a previously announced Picasso show, Tate Modern will feature shows dedicated to two pioneering women artists — Joan Jonas, an early exponent of video art, and Anni Albers who transformed the use of textiles in art as part of Germany’s Bauhaus movement and then later in exile in the United States.

Other planned shows include an exhibition of photography with work by names including Man Ray and another examining how the First World War influenced the art of different countries including France, Germany and the UK.

**ATHENAEUM ART HISTORY LECTURES: FRANCIS BACON**

**ART | LECTURES | LA JOLLA   | SAN DIEGO READER   | SATURDAY 20 MAY 2017**

The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library is pleased to announce An Introduction to Francis Bacon, a series of art history lectures presented by Hugh Davies, director emeritus of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. On May 25 the subject will be *Francis Bacon: Paintings from 1945-1973* and on June 29, *Francis Bacon: the Late Work*.

Hugh Davies did his doctoral dissertation on Francis Bacon at Princeton University, largely based on a series of interviews with the artist in London from February through July 1973. The dissertation was subsequently published by Garland Press as Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts. Davies co-published another book on Francis Bacon with Sally Yard through Abbeville Press in 1986, contributed chapters and articles on Bacon for several other publications and exhibition catalogues, and curated Francis Bacon: Papal Portraits in 1999 for MCASD. He currently serves as one of the five members of the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee, which published his catalogue raisonné in 2016.

Note: If you previously attended the April 13 lecture introducing the art of Francis Bacon and had purchased tickets for the series (originally planned for just two lectures), contact the library to find out how to incorporate the third lecture.

When: Thursday, May 25, 2017, 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

**Contemporary Art Buyers Cautious After Wall Street Dips**

    **BY SCOTT REYBURN   |   ARTS   |   THE NEW YORK TIMES |**   **WEDNESDAY, MAY 17, 2017**

A substantial fall on Wall Street cooled demand Wednesday night at a Christie’s auction of contemporary works that was regarded by many as the first serious test of the art market in the Trump economy.

The 71-lot sale raised $448.1 million with fees against a low estimate of $339 million. Ninety-six percent of the works found buyers — helped by the auction house’s guaranteeing the minimum price of no fewer than 39 works — but bidders were conspicuously cautious, and few lots sold significantly above their estimates. Fifty-five percent of the lots were bought by American bidders, Christie’s said.

“If Wall Street hadn’t taken a dive, there would have been fireworks,” said David Benrimon, a New York dealer. “While the sale was strong over all, it did change the mood among American bidders, and these contemporary sales are about Americans.”

The core of Christie’s sale was a group of 25 works formerly owned by the eminent Kings Point, N.Y., collectors Emily and Jerry Spiegel, who both died in 2009. In September, their collection was divided between their daughters, Pamela Sanders and Lise Spiegel Wilks, who were reported to be feuding. Ms. Sanders is selling a total of 107 pieces with a value of more than $100 million at Christie’s while Ms. Wilks will be offering a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting valued at $60 million at Sotheby’s on Thursday night. Both sisters have been guaranteed minimum prices by the auction houses.

Ms. Sanders’ most highly valued Spiegel collection works at Christie’s were Sigmar Polke’s 1964 Ben-Day dot canvas, Frau mit Butterbrot, and Untitled, a 1988 Christopher Wool word painting emblazoned with “PLEASE” six times. Both works sold toward the low end of their estimates to telephone bidders, for $17 million and $17.2 million.

The Spiegel pieces, all of which were guaranteed — which can in itself sometimes dampen demand — raised $116 million against an estimate of $79 million.

Tellingly, the two highest-bid lots in Christie’s sale were both offered without guarantees. Cy Twombly’s six-foot-tall abstract, Leda and the Swan, was fresh to the auction market and was valued at $35 million to $55 million. It attracted at least five bidders before going to the dealer Larry Gagosian, who was in the room to bid the night’s top price of $52.9 million

Francis Bacon’s brooding Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer from 1963 was also fresh to the market without a guarantee. Entered from a private collection in Paris, having previously been owned by the author Roald Dahl, this triptych of expressive head studies of the artist’s lover was estimated to sell for at least $50 million — an auction high for Bacon canvases of smaller format. It attracted two telephone bidders and a winning bid of $51.8 million, including fees.

“The Bacon could have done a bit better,” said Ivor Braka, a private dealer based in London. “Because it wasn’t glazed, it lacked luster.” Mr. Braka added that the bidding was “measured and stable — unlike the politics in this country.”

Mr. Braka said that demand was all the more measured because of some ambitious estimates. Eyebrows were raised before the sale by Christie’s $13 million valuation on a monumental and thickly textured abstract by Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14), dating from 2011. The painting had been acquired by Patrick Seguin, a collector and dealer in 20th-century design based in Paris, directly from the artist for an undisclosed price.

Paintings by Mr. Grotjahn, who is based in California, are on the shopping lists of many wealthy collectors, but this work was valued — and guaranteed by a third party — at a level that was exactly double the artist’s previous auction high. Nonetheless, two telephone bidders pushed the price up to $16.8 million.

It was a strong estimate, but we went for it,” said Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art in the Americas. He added: “It’s a competitive environment, and that leads to certain price expectations. I was worried when I looked at the stock market today, but if a lot sells for a couple of ticks above estimate, that’s a success.”

Francis Bacon’s childhood home in Co Kildare guides €2.75m

Once lived in by the famous artist, Straffan Lodge has also been home to the Guinnesses

MADELEINE LYONS |  RESIDENTIAL | THE IRISH TIMES  | THURSDAY, MAY 11, 2017



When Marcus and Edel Beresford took up residence at Straffan Lodge in 1989, the primary appeal was its location. Dublin based for the preceding decade, the couple, who originally hailed from stately homes, wanted to return to country life. Just 18 miles from Dublin, Straffan Lodge on the outskirts of the Kildare village of Straffan, provided the ideal base for Marcus, a solicitor (and former chairman of A&L Goodbody) and historian, and his wife Edel, a keen sportswoman who fly-fishes for Ireland.

The couple are also equine enthusiasts, and trained racehorses locally with Arthur Moore for many years, including Marcus du Berlais which placed second and third in the 2004 and 2005 Grand Nationals. The 34 acres of land at Straffan Lodge was mainly kept for the children’s ponies as they pursued eventing and showjumping interests.

Marcus Beresford almost apologetically admits that Straffan Lodge’s most prominent claim to fame had practically eluded him until they had already taken up ownership. For it was here that the internationally acclaimed Irish artist Francis Bacon spent his early years.

From 1909 the artist lived here until 1926 when he famously fell out with his father, a former British army captain, who had retired to Kildare to train and breed racehorses, with little success, his son always said. Marcus defends Bacon junior’s harsh analysis, having reviewed Bacon senior’s training records, and he regrets never having contacted Bacon before his death in 1992 to ask about his time at Straffan Lodge.

Instead, and for many years, Bacon’s sister, Ianthe, was a frequent visitor to the property where she recalled an idyllic childhood. Unsurprising really, given the lovely matured sylvan setting and the 5,000 sq ft Georgian country manor at its heart.

Straffan Lodge was most likely built on the land of the original Straffan House Demesne – where the K Club is now located – originally owned by the Barton family, of Barton & Guestier wine.

The house itself, like many Irish country homes, appears to have evolved over two eras. The front section dates from the 1820s, and was likely to have been added to the more modest rear as the owner’s fortunes improved. The main hall, approached via a flight of granite steps, retains its Georgian features including simple cornices, fanlight above the front door and original timber floors.

In keeping with the symmetry of the era, the two main receptions are accessed to the right and left of the hall, and with their original floor to ceiling shuttered sash windows, they make the very most of their sunny southerly aspect on a glorious May day.

The formal receptions are covered with oil portraits of notable figures from the Beresford family tree. Marcus is the 7th Baron Decies in the de la Poer Beresford line, and ancestors of note include Marshall Williams Carr Beresford who, as Captain General of Spain, was Wellington’s right-hand man in the Napoleonic war, and Archbishop of Tuam, William Beresford, whose unfeasibly large and flamboyant portrait quite dominates the upper stairway.

Both receptions feature fine marble fireplaces – the one in the diningroom came from Edel’s family home, Belleville, beside the Ashtown gates of the Phoenix Park.  Off the dining room is a cosy duck egg blue country kitchen added in the 1920s and updated by the Beresfords, with a lovely bay window overlooking the lawn, and French windows lead out to a very nicely contained patio and large enclosed garden.

One side of the enclosure – where the barbecue is located – comprises an ornate folly wall hand-built by previous owner, Robert Guinness of the Guinness banking family, who lived here for 20 years. To the rear of the ground floor are probably the original more modest rooms of Straffan Lodge, and include a study with woodburning stove, an office, a cloakroom and a second scullery kitchen/utility.

Upstairs are five bedrooms laid out over two levels. The grander two – added with the main receptions below – face to the front, providing lovely uninterrupted views across the lawn, beyond the Ha-Ha to the paddocks running to the boundary. Two smaller doubles, a single, two en suites and an updated bathroom complete the upstairs accommodation.

The basement, as with all these country homes, has long since retired its original function as a downstairs kitchen, although a sprawling old range stands as testimony. Now it’s used as a snooker room, there’s a tack room off it with access to the yard, a wine cellar and gun room. Just outside the back door of the house is a strip of loose boxes and garages, and somewhat surprisingly, three further bedrooms of guest accommodation in a fully refurbished and heated two-storey house adjacent to the main house.

Behind this, in an area replanted where the original orchard once stood, is an astro turf tennis court and, Marcus’s pride and joy, a fruit garden which promises a huge bounty of raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, blueberries, loganberries and gooseberries any day now.

With their four children reared the Beresfords are moving on – albeit with a heavy heart after many happy years here – and Straffan Lodge is for sale by tender, with Paddy Jordan guiding €2.75 million. The tender process is a little different to the usual private treaty and auction methods, and is more often applied to commercial land sales.

Unconditional sealed bids are invited before July 3rd, which means all due diligence must be completed and the deposit prepared in advance. Paddy Jordan is banking on concentrating minds over a finite selling period – not a bad strategy given that country home sales can often be protracted affairs over a minimum of 12 months. Whether it pays off is anyone’s guess.

Straffan Lodge will doubtless need another injection of cash to bring it up to modern day living requirements, but the basic ingredients for a lovely rambling family home are all there. The land itself may also have appeal for local stud farms looking to extend their footprint in the heart of bloodstock country.



                                                                                       **Artist Francis Bacon lived in Straffan Lodge from 1909 to 1926.**

Looking Back at Bacon: Reviewing the Oeuvre

Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, edited by Martin Harrison, with Rebecca Daniels,

London: HENI Publishing, 2016, 5 vols, 1,538 pp., 800 col. illus., hardback, £1,000

**RINA ARYA   |   REVIEW   |   ART HISTORY   |   ISSUE 3   |   VOLUME 40   |   THURSDAY 11 MAY 2017**

The exquisitely presented five-volume catalogue raisonné of Francis Bacon was published in June 2016 by the Estate of Francis Bacon. Compiled by Martin Harrison, with Rebecca Daniels as research assistant, the new publication has been keenly anticipated, promising to reveal numerous works that had not been seen before. In press coverage Harrison remarked on how Bacon scholarship had hitherto concentrated on a core of Bacon’s works, leaving others overlooked or undiscovered. At the outset, then, the ‘unveiling’ of Bacon’s entire oeuvre in the catalogue raisonné was bound to be substantial.

A word about the catalogue raisonné as a category of art-historical writing: it is premised on a certain idea about personhood and implies the coherence of a body of work. This is problematic, something revealed both in the images and commentary in this particular catalogue. Although we can speak of particular leitmotifs in Bacon’s oeuvre, as will become apparent below there are a number of issues resisting the idea of his work as a coherent whole. The appeal of such a project – how digital technology brings about the communications necessary for the gathering of Bacon’s complete works and the digitization of the work itself – should not lead us to take for granted the value of the catalogue raisonné as such. These caveats need to be considered whenever approaching such a publication. Although it is desirable to chronicle the works of a signifi cant artist, and access to the complete works enables cross-comparison, the endeavour is fraught with problems pertaining to the very category of selfhood. There is also the question about acclaim; why is it that some artists are deemed worthy of the monumental effort of a catalogue raisonné, whilst others are recognized more disparately? The status granted to Francis Bacon, as arguably one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century and as prophet of a sensibility that seems to symbolize the modern condition, may go some way to explaining his enduring appeal in the art world.

The first catalogue raisonné was published in 1964 by Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein, covering work up to 1963.1 Bacon had a long career and painted up to his death in 1992. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the entirety of his life’s work is therefore long overdue. Since the publication of the fi rst catalogue a few works had been destroyed or lost. Some had gone into private ownership without public record, thereby increasing the challenge to track them down. In addition, works were left behind when Bacon left his Cromwell Place studio in April 1951, and the other studios he occupied including in Tangier and St Ives. Work was also found in Chelsea Art Stores in 1997 (418). Some works such as Head with Raised Arm (1955) (55–14) could not be traced.2 In isolated cases – ‘Figure’ (c. 1959) (59–16) for example – there were doubts as to whether the work was actually by Bacon, consequently requiring authentication.3 The logistics of locating, investigating, analysing, validating and documenting the entire body of work was a mammoth task, taking over a decade to complete and requiring the cooperation of many individuals across the world, including private collectors and gallery archivists. In particular, Harrison acknowledges the debt owed to Valerie Beston, the gallery administrator at Marlborough Fine Art, who represented him from 1958. Unlike Bacon, Beston was meticulous at recordkeeping and her documentation (including her diary) proved invaluable for the research.

The Francis Bacon Authentication Committee – comprising Hugh M. Davies, Norma Johnson, Richard Calvocoressi, Sarah Whitfield, and Ludovic de Walden, a legal representative – was set up in 2006, tasked with examining the veracity of work and with recovering as much as possible, eliminating forgeries in the process. A call was released for artworks to be submitted to the committee within a decade, from 2006 to 2016. Incomplete documentation meant that each work had to be examined in terms of iconography, style, and provenance, amongst other aspects. The committee further sought the expertise of a group of conservationists and scientists. It was headed by Brian Singer, based at the University of Northumbria, who studied Bacon’s materials and techniques; findings were recorded on a database. They used a variety of observational equipment and chemical analyses to determine characteristic production methods, that is, whether a particular paint or material was typical or atypical for Bacon at a stated time.

The compilation of the new catalogue raisonné involved two distinct approaches, accounting for unknown works and also making revisions to the earlier catalogue. Revisions were made to certain titles, dates and even the very existence of a work – Alley had believed that The End of the Line (c. 1953) (53–28) was destroyed but this was not in fact the case. Fundamentally, this means that this new catalogue raisonné is much more than an updated version of the previous catalogue, serving as a corrective, and perhaps even the definitive record. A total of 584 paintings are contained in volumes II, III and IV, respectively covering the periods 1929– 57, 1958–71 and 1971–92. In addition, there is a range of supporting material including sketches by Bacon (contained mainly in volume V) and photographs of early stages of paintings, X-ray photographs of the works, and photographs of people in his life. Volume I is a contextualizing preface containing a detailed chronology, with further and previously unpublished photographs, and an extended critical essay by Harrison providing a thorough overview of Bacon’s work. Elke Cwiertnia, a doctoral student at the University of Northumbria, wrote the second essay, about the materials and techniques used by Bacon. This includes his use of cloths in the 1950s as a tool both for the application of paint, and to modulate the surface (69). Cwiertnia’s research is part of a relatively new strand in Bacon studies: technical or scientific analysis. Volume V contains a range of drawings, bibliographic details, and an index consisting only of a list of works.

Each catalogue entry is accompanied by a wealth of factual material: the provenance and exhibition history, with details of solo and group shows, the catalogues of which are listed in section six in volume V. The visual list of exhibitions is useful to consult, as it conveys which works have been seen more widely in the public domain. Moreover, Harrison cross-references Alley’s catalogue entries, and discusses points of difference, including instances of re-dating and retitling. On the matter of assigning dates, there are a number of ways that this has been done. One is by adhering to textual evidence, whether written notes on the backs of canvases, gallery records, archival information or photographic evidence. In addition, the testimony of authoritative figures, such as David Sylvester, was often taken as decisive. When work was undocumented it was compared with contemporaneous paintings to assess the most plausible sequence of paintings.

Although it is inadvisable to fix Bacon’s preoccupations, a cluster of attributes including technique, theme, approach, materials, and state of finish (which I reservedly call degree of resolution) was often taken together to give a better overall judgement.

While in many instances retitling is a minor issue that does not alter the overall meaning, in other variants the recovery of the original or intended title transforms, or at least has the potential to transform, the interpretation. For instance, After Picasso, ‘La Danse’ (1933) (33–02) was formerly known as Crucifixion and hence could be grouped with two other Crucifixions from 1933. The annotations on a photograph of this work in the Marlborough Fine Art archive state that the artist ‘was inspired by Picasso “La Danse” and is not a crucifixion’ (122). This is not an explicit admission of a change of title but it transpires that the acquisition of Picasso’s The Three Dancers (1925) by the Tate Gallery in 1965 ostensibly prompted the change. Harrison argues that Bacon’s spectral interpretation is not incompatible with the subject of the Crucifixion (122). Nevertheless, this opens up a series of related questions about how to read Bacon’s works. Some with ‘Crucifixion’ in the title seem to be of that subject whilst others are not and the title is more like a hermeneutical key. We know that Bacon had a fertile imagination and was inspired by ‘high’ and mass culture. He often combined sources of interest, making it is apposite to pursue more than one iconographical line of enquiry. Another consideration is Bacon’s motivations, which plausibly were multiple yet still fundamentally visual. These three aspects – the titles, his sources and his motivations – allow for multiple interpretations.

The number of works that have come to light posthumously means that there were some that Alley and Rothenstein were unaware of, like ‘Study after Velázquez’(1950) (50–05), and some that were only made available after the publication of their catalogue raisonné, for example, ‘Pope’ (c. 1953) (53–32). The revelation of new and undiscovered work transforms the meanings of extant works. One example is ‘Fury’ (c.1944) (44–02) which, as David Sylvester noted, is a variant of the right panel of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and shows red roses either ‘vomited from’ or ‘sucked into’ the open mouth which ‘allowed a painterly passage to intrude’ (148).4 This suggestive addition mobilizes the activity of this fury-figure; it is either violently engulfing or expelling matter. The materialization of rage, not altogether absent in this same right panel figure in the triptych, makes manifest latent energy, creating a sensation of catharsis. In other words, this painting, which cannot conclusively be dated as preceding or post-dating the triptych, nonetheless adds certain associations to the disposition of this fi gure, increasing its suggestive power.5 It stands to reason that the uncovering of new works not only adds to the collective body of knowledge about Bacon but also generates new readings and assessments of well-documented works, as is the case here.

Another problem encountered was the issue of personal testimony. Ronald Alley contacted Valerie Beston about ‘Head’ (c. 1948) (48–04), which he came across in 1968, and she told him that Bacon categorically denied having painted it, saying it might be the work of a student (186). Perhaps Bacon did not want to be associated with the portrait, deeming it a failure, but his denial of authorship was further problematized by the fact that the painting was damaged. In another example, Harrison recalls how Bacon was asked to sign his painting, ‘Pope’ (c.1953) (53–32) but declined and he also refused to acknowledge it and to let it be reproduced in any publication (376). Another pope painting made five years later (58–07) was treated similarly; Bacon left this painting in Tangier with an artist, with the intention that the primed side would be used for a new painting. It was eventually donated to Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it was subsequently exhibited (550).

Descriptive comments are given for each painting, attempts to interpret Bacon’s iconography using potential sources, inspirations and biographical information. Harrison turns to X-ray analysis on occasion to discuss the various ‘layers’ of the paint, referring to preliminary elements in the compositional structure. This technical approach reveals marks which may have been subsequently obliterated and even traces of now-obliterated paintings. ‘Head’ (c.1948) (48–03) is unusual in that the hand of Bacon’s early ‘mentor’, Roy de Maistre, is visible and his signature can also be seen at the bottom of the board. The assiduously compiled chronology of the complete oeuvre – including destroyed and abandoned works – shows the transformation of styles and contents across a long and varied career.6

As with most artists, Bacon had a repertory of subjects, devices and stylistic flourishes. But there are also variations in his work, incongruities, and phases where motifs and influences were less perceptible. Picasso was a significant influence in his early work, stylistic and thematic concerns pinpointed. While categorization should be approached cautiously, Bacon’s attention was captured by certain clusters of pictorial problems. It is informative to see the first instances of pictorial devices and technical decisions, such as the first use of a space-frame, triptych, letraset and so on, which Harrison assiduously points out. He also comments on how certain aspects foreshadow others, such as the floorboarding effect that Bacon used in five of his drawings from the early 1930s. It was first developed in After Picasso, ‘La Danse’ (1933), anticipating the ‘curtaining’ device adopted in 1945 (122) in works like Man Standing (c. 1945) (45–03) and Study for a Figure (c. 1945) (45–06).

The full-sized colour reproductions, some closeups, with the triptychs as fold-cut pages, are a visual treat. This is especially so given the relatively paltry number of colour reproductions in the 1964 catalogue raisonné. Thus one may appreciate the physicality of Bacon’s processes of painting, with the expressive malerisch surfaces replete with smudges, smears, and splodges. He also incorporated other materials to create interesting surface textures, like sand and cotton wool, which in Study for a Figure (1950) (50–03) gives a leathery effect to the skin. The pressing of fabric on the paint surface, visible for example in Head of Man (1960) (60–15) and Head II (1961) (61–20), was another way of creating texture and drawing attention to the facial features, for example in Study for Portrait (1975) (75–10).

Bacon notoriously destroyed many canvases, and photographic evidence of the paintings from previous exhibitions is sometimes the only record of their appearance. Like many artists, Bacon was able to talk intelligently about his inspirations and approaches but the act of creating he would cloak in quasi-mystical terms, as something often beyond conscious control. He described his ideal in the painting process as a coherence or coming together of idea and technique. One should not lag behind the other, he maintained; they should come together. When this failed he would usually destroy the canvas or get others to do so. This was not necessarily perfectionism but he did have exacting standards, albeit not necessarily in the sense of finish. This point also suggests how he conceived of painting as a process or event. In a few isolated cases he either regretted destroying them – something he mentioned with respect to Wound for a Crucifixion, for example – or reconsidered their merits, which he did in A Performing Dog (c. 1954) (54–19). He was known also to abandon works, which he sometimes gave to art students or painters so that they could paint on the primed side.7 After Bacon died a number of works that had been abandoned at different stages of their inception were found in storage in Chelsea.

The 1964 catalogue raisonné lists ‘destroyed’ (D) and ‘abandoned’ (A) paintings separately, a decision which has its own merits, while the 2016 incorporates these works into the linear chronology. This may well have been antithetical to Bacon’s wishes, as his decision to not progress a painting further was decisive but it gives a better general impression of his working processes. It also ensures that due care is given to works which might otherwise be overlooked or judged as inferior, if they had been relegated to discrete sections, which Harrison indicates was Bacon’s preferred option. It is important to take these images on a case-by-case basis; just because Bacon regarded them as below par does not mean they are not important from a painterly perspective. The historical significance also should be noted. These works provide information about the very early stages of production, including how Bacon ‘worked out’ his paintings. This is especially important given his figure/ground relationship; more specifically how he situated the figure in space. Technically Harrison does not include all destroyed works – there is a category named ‘slashed canvasses’, consisting of fragments. These were found in Bacon’s studio stacked against surfaces or piled up, and many of these are exhibited in Dublin City Gallery (The Hugh Lane). An example is included in the catalogue (745) presumably to illustrate the category but it remains unclear why they were excluded.

The catalogue raisonné gives a comprehensive account of the ongoing interests of Bacon and various shifts in his techniques and processes including colour palette and format. It also casts a different light on the overall body of work because it places the relatively smaller number of paintings that have been in circulation, in the popular imagination, in criticism, and in exhibitions, in the broader context of the whole of his career. This results in a dilution of the significance of certain subjects, or at least a qualified reappraisal. The cliché of the screaming pope misrepresents the actual range of pontiff paintings, which were varied in their depictions. In fact, Harrison comments, only six fit this description (308) and adds that ‘[a] further six paintings with shrieking mouths could be described as “Screaming Businessmen”’ (308).

This revaluation of prevailing views is complemented by a development of unexplored themes and areas, of which there are many, too many to cover in this review. For example, Bacon’s numerous self-portraits, from the 1970s onwards, merit closer attention as do his studies from human bodies made in the 1980s (see 82–08, 82–01, 82–09, 82–10, 82–11, 84–02, 85–01, 86–01, and extending to studies such as 91–03) and his portraits of Lucian Freud. Another area that has been overlooked is his representation of landscape. This needs qualification: Bacon was uninterested in nature in itself, in situ, but did extrapolate elements and materials to explore in isolation, for instance sand dunes (1981) (81–04), (1983) (83–05), water (in two paintings titled Jet of Water (1979) (79–03), (1988) (88–04), and Water from a Running Tap (1982) (82–04), and landscape, A Piece of Waste Land (1982) (82–05). As far as themes go, while the male nude has been widely written about in Bacon scholarship, little has attention has been paid to the female form. There is a Bacon series of female nudes from the 1960s based on Henrietta Moraes, and aided by John Deakin’s photographs, which definitely warrant closer analysis.8 Bacon depicts the fluidity of gender and gendered identity in works exploring androgyny, a subject hitherto little explored.9 Besides all this, within the catalogue there are standout works, in terms of their imagery, style, or both, that deserve to be seen and discussed more widely. ‘Figure in Sea’ (c. 1957) (57–24) fits the bill. Only exhibited four times, it deserves further study. Study of a Bull (1991)(91–04) (plate 1), painted shortly before his death, echoes other works. In it, he returns to a subject of great fascination, his preoccupation with violence and death that dogged his whole life. There are also works that have hitherto never been reproduced. While many of these were painted in the last decade of Bacon’s life, there are much earlier examples; ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’ (c. 1946) (46–05) (plate 2). There are also anomalies that are not necessarily of the same critical merit but show a different side to Bacon’s working practices. Poster for the 1988 Van Gogh Exhibition in Arles (1985) (85–02) (plate 3) and Triptych (1977) (77–01) fall into this category, the latter is illustrative (and so atypical) of his surroundings at 7 Reece Mews.

The question of whether or not Bacon produced drawings has gained momentum since the release of forty-two works on paper to the Tate in 1997–98 and is addressed in volume V. Bacon cultivated the myth of being a self-taught genius and denied suggestions that he drew. The evidence amassed to the contrary shows that there are works that are not paintings and a sample of these are presented. There is no consensus on how these works should be categorized – are they paintings in the rudimentary stages or drawings in their own right, or a combination of both? This dispute ought to be reframed to consider these works holistically, as preparatory. Bacon was known to note down ideas for paintings, including adjacent sketches, very often on the flyleaves of his books.

Since the publication of the landmark 1964 catalogue raisonné, scholarship on Bacon has widened to include approaches beyond the art historical. These include the art theoretical and philosophical, aided greatly by the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (English edition 2003; originally published in 1981). The bibliography in volume five, compiled by Krzysztof Ciezkowski, reflects the growing diversity of writings about Bacon. Starting with published and unpublished texts by Bacon himself, the bibliography continues with subsections on relevant monographs, books, articles and reviews. Curiously most of these sections end in 2014, which is unfortunate given the publication date of mid-2016 for the catalogue. Harrison comments on this, stating that the bibliography will be revised and updated on the official website of the Estate of Francis Bacon. Less helpful is the omission of a number of studies in different disciplinary fields, and the somewhat idiosyncratic ordering. It would have been more useful if done alphabetically, not chronologically, as per academic convention. In this way, it would be far easier to consult; at present one has to sift through pages and pages to find any particular title of interest. Alphabetical ordering would also have helped foreground research specialisms by particular authors working on Bacon.

As important as the accompanying documentation on Bacon is, the pivotal aspect of the catalogue remains the images, something Harrison readily admits: ‘for the first time, Bacon’s entire output can be seen – and assessed’. That said, there is a practical constraint. Priced at an astronomical £1,000, the catalogue will be acquired mainly by copyright libraries, and some select university libraries, yet will remain inaccessible to many others. Although scholars will pursue the avenues for new research opened up by the catalogue, thereby increasing dissemination, strenuous attempts must be made to make it available. It seems that future Bacon exhibitions will represent the newly discovered works, and better still, that the Bacon Estate will make pictures of the paintings available online.10

Notes

1 It was published by Thames & Hudson (London) and Viking Press (New York). The last painting included is *Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes* (1963).

2 This number refers to the catalogue number used in the 2016 catalogue raisonné.

3 The use of inverted commas around the title is a convention adopted by Harrison to denote that the title was not given by Bacon or his gallerists, and hence is only descriptive (102).

4 Sylvester, *Looking back at Francis Bacon*, London, 2000, 21.

5 *Study for a Figure* (c. 1945) (45–06) is a painting of the figure in the left panel of the same triptych that adopts the same motif of roses but I would argue that this rather benign offering does not have the same impact on the overall reading of the triptych.

6 That being said, very little is known about Bacon’s working practices during the years 1937–43.

7 Bacon painted on the unprimed ‘reverse’ side of the canvas.

8 Harrison mentioned this series of eleven nudes painted between 1963 and 1969 (see 63–01, 31–13, 64–02, 64–04, 65–08, 66–03, 66–07, 67–11, 68–04, 69–03, 69–12).

9 See for example *Lying Figure* (1959) (59–06), *Lying Figure* (1959) (59–08) and Two Figures (1961) (61–06).

10 Special thanks to Annabel Robinson at FMcM Associates.



                        **Francis Bacon, *Landscape with Pope Dictator*, c. 1946.**

A world premier at the gallery

MARIA GREGORIOU | CYPRUS MAIL | MONDAY, MAY 1st, 2017

Theatre and great painters come together in a new play entitled Bacon/Freud by Anthie Zachariadou, which is to have its premiere on Saturday in Nicosia.

The new play, based on the true friendship between two art legends Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud is presented as part of a third theatre collaboration between Alpha Square and Leventis Gallery.

Bacon/ Freud is set in 1988 in a Berlin gallery where a small painting was stolen – a portrait of the great artist Francis Bacon. Since then, it is nowhere to be found. This disappearance isn’t just a loss of a great work, for the creator, famous painter Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund), that painting possibly represented the most significant relationship he ever had. Just like, the painting the relationship was also lost and the work of art was all he had to remind him of it.

The play is co-directed by Andreas Araouzos and Varnavas Kyriazis, who also take on the parts of Bacon and Freud while Elena Katsouri is responsible for the design, set and costumes.

The play, which will run for ten performances, will be staged every Wednesday and Saturday at 8.30pm and Sunday at 6.30pm. There will be no show on May 10.

**Bacon/Freud** Performance of the play based on the relationship between the two artists. May 6-28. Leventis Gallery, Nicosia. 8.30pm. €15. In Greek. Tel: 22-668838

**Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London**

**GREGORY SALTER | VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN | VOLUME 18 | ISSUE 1 | MONDAY, 10 APRIL, 2017**

Francis Bacon’s paintings of the immediate post-war period in Britain include several works that take as their subject the spaces and experiences of queer intimacy, prior to the partial-decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. These works inevitably stray across the spheres that queer men occupied at this time, from the domestic interior to public spaces such as bars and hotels. Through an analysis of **Two Figures**, 1953, and the ‘Man in Blue’ series, 1954, in their wider social and cultural contexts, this article argues that Bacon’s works present visions of a broad, fluid, anxious sense of queer home in post-war London.

In Francis Bacon’s 1953 painting **Two Figures** (Figure 1), two men are having sex on a bed in a darkened room. The bed stretches horizontally across the canvas like a platform or a stage. There is a headboard on the left side of the bed with a mangled, misshapen pillow alongside it. The crumpled pillow and the folds, ripples and creases of the bed sheets are formed out of thick smears of white paint, and the two men lie together on its edge. Their bodies are broadly modelled in fluid strokes of white, pink, blue and lilac, although there are areas where paint has been applied more carefully to begin to pick out their faces. These bodies are in motion in a moment of intimacy, with their faces bearing ambiguous expressions of exertion and submission, lust and tenderness. This ambiguity is heightened by the thin streaks of watery paint that descend from the top of the canvas, passing over the bodies of the two men, distorting and smearing their faces slightly, before curving gently at the base of the canvas, like a translucent curtain hitting the floor.

This is a room, although it is a very basic one – windowless and featureless, apart from the bed at its centre. It is delineated with very thin lines of white paint, and we seem to stand just within it or on its threshold, intruding or about to intrude on this moment between the two men. That thin curtain attests to this feeling of being simultaneously within but also just outside this space and moment. The bodies of the two men occupy a threshold too: they are seen and exposed – a private moment made public – but they are caught up in this moment of sexual intimacy, seemingly unknowing or uncaring of the audience that watches. This sense of an invasion of privacy is all the more palpable with the knowledge that in 1953 the witnessing of a sexual act like this between two men could have resulted in their being arrested. Male homosexuality had been criminalized in the UK since 1885, and the post-war period saw a sharp surge in the number of arrests for male vice, particularly in London. This brought with it increasingly alarmist national news coverage of a perceived epidemic as well as, in late 1953 and early 1954, sensational public trials for well-known figures, such as the actor John Gielgud, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and journalist Peter Wildeblood.1

Two Figures was first exhibited in a show of Bacon’s works at the Hanover Gallery in the early 1950s, where his dealer and gallery owner Erica Brausen hung the work in the upper part of the gallery, half hidden from visitors who would have had to actively seek out the work in order to see it. With homosexuality illegal – the decriminalization of homosexual acts between men aged 21 and over did not occur in England until 1967 – Brausen was concerned that, at this moment of heightened anxiety, the graphic nature of Bacon’s painting would provoke a police raid.2 The transgression that Two Figures represented – the way it made an illicit, private act public – was risky and potentially controversial, and Brausen’s decision restored a little of the boundaries that Bacon had wilfully ignored. Since this first exhibition, **Two Figures** has continued to live a semi-public, semi-private existence. It has not been exhibited publicly for several decades although it remains widely reproduced in Bacon literature.3

Critics have also closely tied the painting to Eadweard Muybridge as the pose and positions of the two men in the painting clearly derive from his photographs of wrestlers taken in 1887. Bacon’s interest in Muybridge’s photography and his intensely personal use of these images as sources for his work has not gone without comment. Critic David Sylvester viewed **Two Figures** as ‘a conflation of autobiography and photography’ and saw Bacon’s and his then partner Peter Lacy’s features in the faces of the two men on the bed. Years after the work was produced, Bacon himself admitted, ‘I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the forms of bodies I have known’.4 There has, however, been a tendency to follow the lead of Bacon and his interviewer Sylvester and focus on Muybridge at the expense of other elements of **Two Figures**. The constant reference to Bacon’s use of his sources when discussing works like this, in effect gives it a more palatable public face, something Bacon and Sylvester may well have been inclined to do (understandably, given their age and the period in which Bacon was working). But continuing to invoke Muybridge in front of Two Figures is akin to Erica Brausen’s moving the painting half out of sight in 1953.

It is this tension between public and private – the sense that there existed strict boundaries around what could and could not be expressed about queer sexuality in post-war Britain, alongside the sense that queer experience meant that these boundaries were inevitably going to be transgressed – that is a key element of Francis Bacon’s art in the 1940s and 1950s. It is also a balancing act that Bacon himself performed. In his interviews with Sylvester and other public statements on his art, Bacon avoided explicit references to his sexuality beyond a few biographical details, although he never sought to hide or disguise his homosexuality from friends and sections of the art world. This reticence helped to shape the scholarship and discussion around his art and continues to hold some influence, even today.5 It is easy to see how this was the case as the majority of Bacon’s experiences occurred prior to partial-decriminalization (he would have been approaching 60 in 1967): he was banished by his father from his family home after being caught wearing his mother’s underwear, lived and explored in interwar Paris and Berlin, and produced Two Figures at a time when to be found to be homosexual, even to exhibit what were interpreted as signs of homosexuality (such as wearing make-up, as Bacon did) was to risk arrest. Bacon’s forays into homosexual subject matter or references in the early part of his career toe this saying/not-saying line. They are occasionally explicit, as in Two Figures, but are couched in other, queer-but-less-explicitly-queer terms (e.g. Muybridge, whose male wrestlers have a potential homoerotic charge, although perhaps only to those willing to identify it); elsewhere, they are more discreet or coded, as in his ‘Man in Blue’ series from 1954.

The uneasy relationship between public and private seems to have been a distinct aspect of queer male experience in Britain in the post-war period prior to the partial-decriminalization of homosexuality. This is linked to the way in which queerness was conceived by queer men themselves, as well as by the popular press, the government, and the public at large. Vital, influential studies by historians Matt Houlbrook and Richard Hornsey have highlighted the intense unease surrounding homosexuality by the British establishment after the Second World War, with queer men becoming symbols of the decline of the British Empire, the feminizing effects of consumerism, and the wartime breakdown of the family unit. The figure that confirmed these fears was usually the effeminate, predatory, and heavily made-up West End quean. Police surveillance and arrests, particularly for people who appeared to conform to this stereotype, were common.6 This unease also extended to the planning and reconstruction of London in more general terms. According to Hornsey, Patrick Abercrombie’s London plans aimed towards a ‘total organisation of everyday time’ – spanning work, domesticity and leisure – so that dissenting activities (such as contact between queer men) might be prevented from taking place. In this context, the queer man was an anti-social figure, occupying ‘crowded sites of ephemeral flow and transient encounter’, corrupting others with money and sex.7

Alongside this unease around the queer man in public, however, a counter view emerged that drew on contemporary sexology to argue for homosexuality as an unfortunate medical condition that couldn’t be helped.8 This discourse led to the formation of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1954 and the publication of its findings in the Wolfenden Report in September 1957.9 The committee drew on testimonials from police officers, psychiatrists, religious leaders and discreet, respected gay men, including Peter Wildeblood, who had served time in prison after his arrest for homosexual offences in 1954 and written a book called Against The Law about his experiences.10 The report recommended that homosexual behaviour in private between consenting adults should no longer be considered a criminal offence. Although it was clearly a first step towards a wider social acceptance of homosexuality, the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report contained some restrictions: it confined homosexuality to the private sphere – the home – and excluded it from public life, and continued to criminalize the queer men who did not have consistent access to private spaces in the same way as wealthier members of society did.11

While the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report sought to keep queerness in the private, domestic sphere, to conceive of the post-war queer experience as operating solely in that sphere would be inaccurate, as the presence of queer men in public spaces – and the fears and anxieties they provoked – attest. Bacon’s experience of home, both in this period and across his life, is indicative of the broad realms in which queer men could operate and find intimacy. Within this context, home, for him, was frequently in flux. He was born to wealthy English parents in Ireland and, after his eviction from his family home there, he initially moved with a certain amount of social and sexual freedom around Europe in the late 1920s (financed, in part, by a trust fund as well as casual work, petty theft, and the attentions of rich, older men). He soon settled in London, but continued to seek experience abroad. By late 1943, Bacon moved into a flat at 7 Cromwell Place in Kensington along with his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. Lightfoot had been Bacon’s nanny since birth and seems to have taken on the role of surrogate mother; Bacon retained a close bond with her and seems to have supported her even after she was dismissed from employment by the family once all the children were grown up. She is listed on the electoral register as living with Bacon in London in 1931, for instance, and seems to have vetted his casual lovers, assisted him in organizing illegal roulette parties, and shoplifted when money was tight.12 In Cromwell Place, the couple were joined a few years later by Eric Hall, who was then Bacon’s lover. Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppiatt frames this arrangement as unusual, makeshift, bohemian, but distinctly happy and stable, with Lightfoot as a mother figure to the artist and Hall as lover but also replacement father.13 It came to an end by 1950, when Bacon’s relationship with Hall ended.

A year later, Lightfoot died of heart failure. This appears to have crushed Bacon: he had known her since his birth, and she had lived with him, in one setting or another, for the previous twelve years. In the aftermath of her death, Bacon quickly gave up the lease on his home. He spent periods abroad in South Africa, visiting family, as well as Tangier and Monte Carlo, while taking numerous temporary residences within and just outside London over the next ten years, from briefly sharing a home with his violent lover, Peter Lacy, in Henley-on-Thames to finding more stable but still temporary accommodation in Battersea from 1955 with two friends, Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah. At the centre of this upheaval at the end of 1954, Bacon wrote to his dealer Erica Brausen from a hotel room in Rome that he was ‘going to try and find a place in London where I can really settle for a change and perhaps let when I go away. I am so sick of never having a permanent place’.14 There is a sense here that for Bacon, like other contemporary queer figures, the queer experience can certainly take in the domestic interior, but a sense of ‘home’ – of belonging, of community, of security – may be far from easy to find within domesticity alone and may in fact filter into other spaces: temporary accommodation in London and abroad, and even public spaces such as the bar, the street and the park.

To begin to think about home in relation to homosexuality in the 1940s and 1950s, then, is to find a space where the overlapping of private and public spheres is heightened, not only in the sense that queer men typically moved between these realms in search of intimacy, but also in the sense that these very private experiences and conceptions came under scrutiny and occupied a prominent position in public consciousness. You can find echoes of this experience in Bacon’s Two Figures. It gives a sense of this moment of male intimacy being wrenched into public view while retaining the basic elements of a private space in a way that does not jar or even, for contemporary viewers prior to the partial-decriminalization of homosexuality, shock. It also makes visible the very experience of being queer in post-war Britain, of seeking intimacy but also living with the gaze of a reconstructive society, of finding a space outside but also within the boundaries of home. Bacon appears to have registered the difficulties of home – in art and in life – in ways that speak to this kind of reading. In a 1974 interview with Sylvester, he discussed his transition from what he and Sylvester termed the malerisch paintings – painterly bodies and forms in dark settings, such as Two Figures – to the use of similar forms against increasingly stark backgrounds, made up of pinks and oranges. For Bacon, this shift, which occurred initially in the late 1950s and then came to dominate his painting from the 1960s, was connected to a desire to distance his art from the home:

I hate a homely atmosphere, and I always feel that malerisch painting has too homely a background. I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background. I want to isolate the image and take it away from the interior and the home.15

This short statement is, as is usual for Bacon, seemingly riddled with contradictions: he dismisses a ‘homely atmosphere’ while wishing to retain a sense of intimacy in his art, and he claims he wishes to take his images away from the home and the domestic interior while continuing to include those elements – blinds, couches, doors, toilets, and so on – in his more vivid canvases in the 1960s and beyond. It is the slippery relationship between Bacon’s words and his images here – the ambivalent nature of Bacon’s relationship to home – that interests me, and speaks to the wider question of how home is addressed in his art. It is present but denied, a clear concern but also something to be subverted.

A similar sense of instability permeates a series of paintings completed by Bacon shortly after Two Figures. The ‘Man in Blue’ series of 1954 is made up of seven paintings of lone men in suits, seated in dark, barely delineated spaces, tinged with blue tones. He based these figures on a man he had met and picked up that year, at the Imperial Hotel at Henley-onThames.16 Much about these works hints at anonymity: the generic title of the series and the numbered variations within it (I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII), the barely sketched-out settings that suggest, minimally, the interior of a hotel bar, and the familiar appearance of the man in each painting, always in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. There is a sense of repetition here – that each man in blue could be the same man, painted in different positions or poses, but also that each man could be a different man, encountered in a similar setting and potentially picked up, perhaps with similar conversation or actions each time. This man is always positioned at the bar or in a booth: leaning in towards us, clenching his hands as if in conversation as in **Man in Blue IV** (Figure 2), folding his arms nonchalantly and leaning over a table or bar as in Man in Blue I, or occupying the space without gesture, isolated and still, as in Man in Blue III.

There is a sense, then, that the ‘Man in Blue’ series is concerned with the experience of the homosexual pick-up, in its anonymity, repetition and public intimacy – the very kinds of experience that post-war planning and surveillance sought to limit. Its subject is not necessarily a visibly queer man: he adopts the suited uniform of a heterosexual man – free of signs of effeminacy – in a way that echoes the normative, limited nature of clothing for the majority of men outside of the counter-culture in the post-war period and that casts some doubt on his status and availability.17 There is little to suggest the man’s deviation from these norms, at least in terms of his dress. There are, however, other, less easily readable aspects of these paintings too. The subjects’ faces are blurred, pushed by Bacon’s familiar, soft handling of paint into uncertainty, a lack of recognition. They shift too, between carefully stylized distance, turned from us, arms folded (**Man in Blue I**) to adopting more direct eye contact and open body language (Man in Blue V). In Man in Blue IV, the figure shifts again, leaning in to us, caught up in conversation or appearing to be about to make a proposition. Our relationship to these figures is unstable, moving from distance to closeness and even the possibility of intimacy and back again, from image to image.

The uniform of the suit, in this context, could be read as taking on the quality of a public mask or costume, something that was worn to conceal queerness (at least from those from whom queerness needed to be concealed), a veneer of respectability that was distant from the make-up and drag of more effeminate queer men. It is known that these were often the type of men Bacon liked to pick up – seemingly heterosexual men who ‘could be seduced by money, or by the novelty, or by their own desire for defiance’.18 These are men who operate under the social gaze of a society that policed and prohibited homosexuality, while managing, momentarily, to escape that prohibition.

These paintings are not just possible reflections on the public masks worn by queer men in public in the post-war period, but they also speak to the direct experience of the pick-up and its wider implications for the conception of queer intimacy and the spaces of home at this historical moment. In order to begin to unpack this, I want to address a particular literary example that it is known that Bacon linked to his conception of his own sexuality. It is named in Lord Gowrie’s obituary for Bacon, published in The Guardian shortly after the artist’s death.

He told me that he [Bacon] had come to the view that homosexuality was an affliction, that it had turned him, at one point in his life, into a crook. The crookishness, not the sex, was a source of shame and if he talked at all, it was his nature to tell everything. We both liked Proust and agreed that the beginning of Cities Of The Plain said all that needed to be said about being homosexual.19

Here, Gowrie records that Bacon aligned his experience of homosexuality with ‘crookishness’ and coming up against the law (unsurprising, given the context in which Bacon lived, but still poignant), as well as with Proust’s introductory section to the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time. Copies of volumes of Proust’s novel were found in Bacon’s Reece Mews studio after his death, and the short section that Gowrie cites is useful for placing the ‘Man in Blue’ series within the context of Bacon’s apparent conception of queer experience.20

This section of In Search of Lost Time focuses on the unnamed narrator’s observations of a chance meeting in public, and sexual encounter in private, between the Baron de Charlus, one of the novel’s main characters, and Jupien, a tailor. While watching them, the narrator adopts a position of initial ignorance about the nature of their encounter; once they disappear into Jupien’s shop together, he creeps over to the other side of the courtyard and listens to the two men having intercourse through a partition, finally, apparently, understanding what has occurred.21 This leads the narrator to reflect more generally on the nature of male ‘inverts’. Here, queer men are characterized as an effeminate, afflicted race, forced to find comfort in fleeting sexual encounters with other ‘inverts’ because the ‘real men’ they truly need would not return their desires. They operate, in part, like a second society, recognizing each other, mixing across classes, and relying on chance meetings – such as that which the narrator had just witnessed – in order to form bonds. They are also, by necessity, part of normative society, but hidden and duplicitous within it, looking, as the narrator puts it, ‘no more like the common run of men than those apes with melancholy ringed eyes and prehensile feet who dress up in dinner jackets and black ties’.22 This short text is wide-ranging in its scope, and particularly illuminating for Bacon: it takes in queer experience, the nature of a public pick-up, and conceptions of homosexuality that are rooted in values and assumptions that we would consider outdated and stereotypical, but which were clearly key to the thinking of Bacon – and more than likely other queer men – on identity at this time. There is a particular sense, as in the ‘Man in Blue’ series, that queer men were attempting to adopt a costume in order to pass in everyday life, with Proust’s narrator comparing them to apes dressed unconvincingly in a uniform of respectability. In general, queer men are framed in a way that positions them as being outside society while operating within it, largely hidden from view (unless you can see through their disguise) and finding intimacy almost randomly, when they meet another queer man.

This is crucial for Bacon and for my reading of his ‘Man in Blue’ works. The images in this series appear to be concerned with the encounter with a suited and potentially queer man in public. They register that experience but they also register the layers of concealment and revelation that were a fundamental aspect of homosexuality in the post-war period. That Bacon would think of his sexuality in these terms is perhaps alien to twenty-first-century viewers of his works, but an acknowledgement of this does not necessarily turn these paintings into images of self-loathing. I want to suggest, however, that recognizing these elements in these paintings is an act of recognizing a more enduring element of queer experience, namely the sense of being aware of signs or gestures of queerness, and the moments at which these might be made visible or not. Reading the ‘Man in Blue’ series through Proust’s text casts one kind of contextual light onto these otherwise (and necessarily) quiet, unassuming images of suited men at bars. These men are unsettled, tense, isolated at times, but also potentially available for intimacy; they gesture to an existence that rests on glimpses of mutual recognition and moments of connection within long stretches of necessary invisibility. Proust’s text – invoked by Bacon via Gowrie years later – speaks where the paintings did not.23 There is a sense, then, that the ‘Man in Blue’ series is about intimacy and connection, but also looking – seeing and identifying others for this intimacy and connection, or at least others who share the same queer desires for them. Looking is also, of course, inherent in cruising – a moment of visual exchange and mutual recognition between anonymous individuals in the public spaces of the city. Cruising might originate in sustained mutual glances – in the street, in front of a shop window, at a urinal, at a bar – and could lead to conversation and sex, although not necessarily. It requires a certain amount of free time and freedom of movement too – to linger, to move, to look in public space.24 The shifting glances across the seven ‘Man in Blue’ paintings certainly appear to echo the look of cruising. Bacon appears to have posited looking as being central to the post-war queer experience more generally: Whenever I really want to know what someone looks like I always ask a queer – because homosexuals are always more ruthless and more precise about appearance. After all, they spend their whole lives watching themselves and others, then pulling the way they look to pieces.25

Looking, in Bacon’s words here, is partly a symptom of being under surveillance, from other queer men and, I would suggest, wider society too, and partly a result of needing to turn that same gaze on others. That this is framed in terms of cruelty – the ruthlessness of the look, and the way it pulls others apart – is typical of Bacon but also indicative of a sense of being within and a part of these types of look.

Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick found this sense of surveillance – through looks and the knowledge they produce – in Bacon’s chosen extract from Proust. In her terms, the description of the meeting between Charlus and Jupien and the revelation of their relationship reveals the narrator’s complicity in the queer world in which the two men operate. He is able to describe what she calls ‘the spectacle of the closet’ (the closet observed) from ‘the viewpoint of the closet’ (the closet inhabited), gaining, through the advantage of expertise on the subject of another’s sexuality, momentary insulation from the suspicions of others about his own sexuality.26 Knowledge, here, offers the power to cast the heterosexual gaze of society onto other queer figures. Sedgwick acknowledges the possibilities that this offers to queer figures and queer audiences, while highlighting the homophobic undertones of this – the ‘outing’ of others can reveal queerness in a way that allows for identity and the possibility of connection, while also exposing these figures to the gaze of the heterosexual society that they had sought to avoid.27

Bacon, I think, is aware of this bind, in a less theoretical, more visceral way. The ‘Man in Blue’ – in his many, very similar guises – is painted into the appearances, the settings, the possibilities, and the anxieties of the closet. He wears the costume of heteromasculinity; he sits alone in public at the hotel bar, available – maybe – for conversation, a drink, sex. But Bacon never makes the big reveal. There is an element of doubt or ambiguity about these men: there is nothing, beyond the knowledge that Bacon based this image on a man he picked up or the wider context of anxiety around the ‘respectable homosexual’ hidden amongst the masses that I have provided, that hints explicitly at homosexuality.

A reading of this nature, perhaps relies on the viewpoint of the closet – a viewpoint Bacon would know well – or at least a knowledge of that viewpoint, most easily achieved by queer viewers, in the 1950s and beyond. In this way, the ‘Man in Blue’ series is made up of paintings of men that can be looked at in a variety of ways. There is a sense in which the ‘Man in Blue’ paintings can be read as being subjected to the queer look that Bacon knew well – the look that wonders what the suited costume hides, that pulls the figure to pieces, or that seeks connection. At the same time, he can be subject to the non-queer look – the look that reads these images as concerned with moments of intense isolation, perhaps rooted in the anxiety, despair, and tension of post-war existentialism.28 This is a historically appropriate way of dealing with these images, since I think it allows for the look of queer viewers to recognize the way in which they engage with the circumstances of the pick-up, while acknowledging that the look of non-queer viewers may bypass these connotations.29

In this way, these paintings also enact the very experience of being queer in Britain in this period – the uncertainty and possibilities of the pick-up, the sense of looking but also being watched, and the necessity of operating, to some degree, undercover while being aware of the possibility of, both intentionally and unintentionally, revealing oneself. They also reflect the ways in which boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality could blur, as Bacon also knew very well: the way homosexual contact or intimacy did not necessarily equate to homosexual subjectivity as we know it today, and the way experiences of queer intimacy could rise suddenly out of the appearances and spaces of heterosexual life before seemingly disappearing again, out of view. This kind of reading seeks to avoid falling into the trap that Sedgwick warned against: reading Bacon’s series as concerning itself with the spectacle and experience of the closet is not intended to expose his own sexuality by association (even though this is, in part, what it does). Instead, my intention is to illuminate the way in which these images very tentatively reflect on revelation and exposure, building into their careful, minimal composition the very circumstances, anxieties and possibilities of being queer at this historical moment.

In a broader sense, The ‘Man in Blue’ series also encapsulates the fluid sense of spaces of intimacy for queer men at the time. The paintings are based on the inherently public space of a hotel bar, although they incorporate aspects of private, personal connection that begin to undermine the separation between public and private spheres. This is an intermingling of the homely and unhomely, and it is indicative of Bacon’s experience of queer intimacy and a sense of home more generally. It is necessary to locate Bacon within the wider context of the postwar queer home here. As Wolfenden confined queer intimacy to the private, domestic space, there emerged a respectable norm for queer relationships that was middle class and domestic based. But this was not necessarily something to which queer men could or wished to adhere. Matt Cook has shown how, for many, a comfortable sense of ‘being at home’ was not necessarily found in the interior, and was just as likely to be related to public spaces. He draws on experiences of home in this period that are marked by their fluidity: in the mobile, functional, though often dangerous spaces of the urban bedsitter, or the symbolic power of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s ‘excessive and unbounded’ collage mural in their home in Islington.30 The queer home in this period was likely to explicitly blur the boundaries between public and private spheres, and Bacon’s art engages with this tendency in his own way.

Looking back on the period of his life after he was banished from his father’s home at the age of 16 – during which he spent time in interwar London, Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s, before settling back in London in the 1930s – Bacon characterized his ambition at this point as ‘simply to drift and follow my instinct – to drift and see’.31 This sense of drifting – not settling, moving around, meeting and embracing the people, events, and opportunities that come your way – appears to have been how Bacon framed his whole experience of life. In Peppiatt’s biography, Bacon continually returns to this idea of drifting as a way of conceptualizing his experience: ‘life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant’.32 ‘Drifting’ is a useful term here since it is attentive to his experience of and reflections on home and queer intimacy in this period – taking in a distrust of home-as-interior, unsettling public and private boundaries, and echoing the processes of cruising – and it can assist in conceptualizing a particular kind of queer experience in post-war Britain to which Bacon’s work is attentive.

Drifting, exile and the search for home within a lack of home are key themes elsewhere in post-war queer culture, particularly in James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. Bacon and Baldwin have seemingly little in common in many respects, but I want to suggest that Baldwin’s novel (like the work of Proust) can give voice to some of the unspoken yet present queer themes in Bacon’s art, particularly surrounding the experience of queer intimacy and home. **Giovanni’s Room** focuses on David, a young American man in Paris and his reflections on his relationships with an Italian man called Giovanni and with his American girlfriend, Hella. David is drifting in Paris: Hella has taken a trip to Spain to contemplate marrying him, and, in the meantime, David has fallen into a relationship with Giovanni and moved into his dark, claustrophobic room. For David, life in Giovanni’s room ‘seemed to be occurring underwater’ at a remove from the outside world, not least because Giovanni has smeared white cleaning polish on the single window to ensure privacy. Scattered around the room is the two men’s dirty laundry, Giovanni’s tools and paintbrushes, and other detritus, which Giovanni calls ‘the garbage of this city’ and which David sees as ‘Giovanni’s regurgitated life’.33 Removed and dark, while also infiltrated by the dirt and detritus of the outside world, Giovanni’s room is an other space, marked with the experience of homosexuality.

It is not much of a jump from the windowless, dirty space of Giovanni’s room to Bacon’s equally airless though less cluttered interior of Two Figures – the two spaces share a conflation of queer intimacy with a claustrophobic, separate space, removed from society at large. At the same time, these are spaces where boundaries have been breached. Two Figures focuses on a moment of passionate, frantic (even ambiguously violent) sex between two men, and positions the viewer on the threshold as both witness and intruder. In Giovanni’s room, the ‘garbage’ of the city has found its way into the space – boxes of cardboard and leather, empty bottles and spilled wine, old newspapers, a rotting potato – in a manner that explicitly disturbs our sense (and David’s) of what should constitute a domestic space: it is not clean, organized, delineated (and it even recalls the chaos of Bacon’s own studio). The boundaries that fall away in Giovanni’s room – the divisions between public and private, between cleanliness and dirt, the slipped mask of respectable masculinity – seem about to shift, tantalizingly and terrifyingly. The ‘Man in Blue’ series similarly demonstrates a disregard for boundaries, in its focus on images of men at bars or in booths who shift quietly between isolation, apparent indifference, and eye contact in a way that also gestures towards the processes of cruising.

As the novel continues, David finds himself struggling to extricate himself from Giovanni’s room, at least in emotional terms, and he finds himself increasingly unable to occupy it comfortably. He is constantly called home to the normative space of heterosexuality – by Hella, who returns and seeks, disastrously, to continue their relationship, and his father, who writes to him from the United States. In a key passage, David watches a sailor walk across a Parisian boulevard, confident and carefree in his heterosexual masculinity, and this confidence, this ease, makes him think of home again and reflect: ‘perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Home, here is final, determined, and, once left, impossible to recover. The sailor, in David’s eyes, represents someone who has not strayed, who has clung to the expectations of a heteronormative life. David left, he drifted, and now can see no way back. Crucially, it is in an imagined look that David finds confirmation of his lack of home. As the sailor approaches, the two men make eye contact and David receives a look ‘contemptuously lewd and knowing’ which he feels certain would, if voiced, be one of ‘look, baby. I know you’.34 David’s recognizable queerness cuts him adrift.

If Baldwin’s descriptions of Giovanni’s room speak to Bacon’s own unstable, increasingly boundary-less representations of a kind of queer domestic world in **Two Figures** and the ‘Man in Blue’ series, then his broader reflections on home for queer figures in the post-war period can speak to Bacon’s personally important sense of drift. In Baldwin, queer experience is explicitly linked to a sense of straying from the heterosexual family and its gender roles, which creates a seemingly irreversible state of exile or homelessness. His queer figures are marked by the spaces they occupy – the claustrophobic, dirty room, the street, or the dingy queer bar – but also by the looks of others, which register the difference of queerness, a separateness and apparent lack of place. For Baldwin, these reflections on the difficulties of home are of course shaped not only by his own homosexuality but also his position as a black American who left his birthplace of New York and made a home in France in an attempt to escape the oppressive racial prejudice of post-war America.35 Bacon was an exile of sorts too, though for different reasons, instigated by his banishment from his father’s home. Here, I want to avoid conflating the very different experiences of Baldwin as a person of colour in America and Bacon as a white queer man in Britain: I make this comparison not to erase difference, but to place Bacon’s reflections on ‘drifting’ in the context of an exploration of homelessness and marginalization by another contemporary and internationally mobile queer figure. Both men would have known the uncertainty of home that Baldwin expresses through David, an uncertainty that seems to represent a melancholic and seemingly doomed sense of queer experience in the post-war urban metropolis.

There is a clear sense of how Bacon’s works, such as **Two Figures** and the ‘Man in Blue’ series, can speak to these broader ideas of drift, homelessness, and perpetual emergence. These paintings retain recognizable elements of home – the barely delineated interior, the bed, sensations of intimacy and connection – while also extending them into public space (implicitly in Two Figures, explicitly for the ‘Man in Blue’ series). At the same time, they incorporate elements of the unhomely in their sense of anxiety, tension, undertones of violence, anonymity, and so on. In their emergence from the spaces, intimacies, and relationships available to queer men at this moment in history and their rearrangement of them, Bacon’s works can be considered as expressions of being ‘not at home’ within an overwhelmingly heterosexual culture, while also seeking a sense of home, some kind of intimacy, that does not necessarily cohere to expectations. To find home in paintings like these is not to tie Bacon to a concept of normative domesticity in which he clearly had no interest, nor is it to postulate them as expressions of the possibility of queer community. Rather, it is to allow his work to register the possibilities of intimacy that are not built around home in the conventional sense of the term, and that bleed into the public sphere covertly or shockingly.

This can consistently feel like an overwhelmingly dark portrait of postwar queer experience, as I have noted, although it is worth emphasizing, in tandem with this, the potential of being not at home, of allowing yourself to ‘drift and see’, as Bacon would have it. These works speak of connections – bonds, intimacies, even relationships – that are formed in the face of the restrictions and hindrances of criminality and marginalization. They attest to the queer experience of being unmoored from the solid boundaries of home that is by no means specific to the post-war period. But a sense of ‘drift’ perhaps responds appropriately to this moment of social flux in Britain, where queer men became a focus for anxiety (in public) and, tentatively for certain men, respectability (in private). In response, Bacon’s paintings address moments of queer intimacy, while also speaking of the ambiguity and difficulty of defining and living a sense of queer home at this historical moment. His response is to paint the expansive, seemingly unbounded sense of queer experience – to represent the experience of the drift and of apparent homelessness – while also registering the inherent and irreconcilable difficulties of knowing and establishing home within it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organizers of the ‘Masculinity in The Metropolis’ conference at the University of Kent, UK, in April 2016 for the opportunity to present this research, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful and incisive comments.

Notes

1 See Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 82–3.

2 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 31.

3 Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 124.

4 See Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, 72. Bacon is quoted in Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 116.

5 Some more explicitly queer readings of Bacon have come from Ofield, ‘Comparative Strangers’, 64–73 and Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint.

6 On sexual difference, categories of queer men, and anxiety about Britishness, see Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957, 221–41.

7 See Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 44–52 (on town planning) and 81–116 (on the homosexual in urban space).

8 Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, 1.

9 Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.

10 Houlbrook, Queer London, 254–61.

11 Houlbrook concludes with similar reflections on the implications of the Wolfenden Report, 256–61.

12 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 67–70.

13 On Bacon, Lightfoot and Hall, see Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 123–5.

14 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 146. 15 Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 120.

16 Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 122. 17 See O’Neill, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, 271–91.

18 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 97.

19 Lord Gowrie, ‘Obituary: Francis Bacon’, The Guardian, 29 April 1992.

20 The database of Bacon’s personal library at the time of his death is accessible at Bacon’s Books: Francis Bacon’s Library and its Role in his Art.

21 Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Part IV, Cities of The Plain, 1–16.

22 Proust, 23, and 17–38 in general on ‘inverts’.

23 Bacon’s use of past queer literary references in order to situate his contemporary homosexuality has parallels with David Hockney’s engagement with Walt Whitman – see Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London, 138–59.

24 See Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London, 43–67.

25 Bacon is quoted in Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 181.

26 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 213–30.

27 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 240–46.

28 A broader reading like this is gestured to in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 122.

29 On this, see Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, 68–96.

30 See Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth Century London, 143–90.

31 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews, 31.

32 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in your Blood, 10–11.

33 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 76–9.

34 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 80–2.

35 Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 17–23.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James, **Giovanni’s Room**, London: Penguin, 2007.

Baldwin, James, **Nobody Knows My Name**, London: Penguin, 1991.

Chare, Nicholas, **After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint**, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957.

Cook, Matt, **Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth Century London**, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Gale, Matthew and Chris Stephens, eds., Francis Bacon, London: Tate, 2008.

Hornsey, Richard, **The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Post-War London**, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Houlbrook, Matt, **Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropoli**s, 1918–1957, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

O’Neill, Alistair, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, **Visual Culture in Britain**, 10 (2009): 271–91.

Ofield, Simon, ‘Comparative Strangers’, in **Francis Bacon**, eds. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, pp. 64–73. London: Tate, 2008.

Peppiatt, Michael, **Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma**, London: Constable, 2008.

Peppiatt, Michael, **Francis Bacon in the 1950s**, London: Yale University Press and the Sainsbury Centre, UEA, 2006.

Peppiatt, Michael, **Francis Bacon in Your Blood**, London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2015.

Peppiatt, Michael, **Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews**, London: Yale University Press: London, 2008.

Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time: Part IV, Cities of the Plain, trans. S.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1990.

Sinfield, Alan, **Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain**, London: Continuum, 2004.

Sylvester, David, **Interviews with Francis Bacon**, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Sylvester, David, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Mark W. Turner, **Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London**, London: Reaktion, 2003.

Gregory Salter is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Birmingham. His research specialism is post-war British art and its intersections with home, gender, sexuality, and identity.

He is currently developing a monograph entitled Reconstructing Home: Painting and Male Identity in Post-War Britain, based on his PhD, completed at the University of East Anglia in 2013.

                                Francis Bacon, *Man in Blue IV*, **1954**



**The Mystery of Lucian Freud’s Missing** ‘**Bacon’**

**In the middle of a crowded 1988 show, someone absconded with Lucian Freud’s relatively**

**small painting of his one-time friend Francis Bacon.**

**ALLISON MCNEARNEY   |   LOST MASTERPIECES   |   THE DAILY BEAST   |   SUNDAY 2 APRIL 2017**

In 1988, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin debuted an exhibition of Lucian Freud paintings. By all accounts, the show was a success, with the Germans warmly embracing the work of the famed British painter…maybe a little too warmly. On May 27, the gallery filled with students on a trip to see the exhibit. It was just another day at the show with visitors milling around examining Freud’s paintings under the watchful eye of art guards when someone noticed something alarming—one of the works was missing.

In broad daylight, in the middle of a crowded show, someone had absconded with Lucian Freud’s relatively small painting of his one-time friend Francis Bacon. While Freud had started a second painting of his fellow artist, the missing copper canvas was the only portrait of Bacon that he ever completed.

In a 2008 piece in The Guardian, art critic Robert Hughes called the painting an “unequivocal masterpiece,” continuing on to write “that smooth, pallid pear of a face like a hand-grenade on the point of detonation, those evasive-looking eyes under their blade-like lids, had long struck me as one of the key images of modernity.”

But twenty years earlier, that important “image of modernity” had disappeared with not so much as a peep heard or a glimpse caught in the time since. Zero substantial leads have turned up in the case of the missing Francis Bacon. The seeds of Freud’s small masterpiece were sown in 1945, when Lucian Freud and Francis bacon were introduced by their mutual friend, artist Graham Sutherland.

The 23-year-old Freud and 36-year-old Bacon hit it off almost immediately. In his book, *The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art*, Sebastian Smee described their friendship as “the most interesting, fertile—and volatile—relationship in British art of the twentieth century.”

The two painters were opposites in many ways. At the beginning of their friendship, Bacon was a rising star on the British art scene while Freud was still toiling over his canvases in relative obscurity. And toil he did—Freud was painstaking in his work, spending up to several months working on one piece, while Bacon painted much more quickly and instinctually. But despite their different working styles, they developed a deep friendship and respect that would lead to each artist’s work being influenced—and criticized—by the other.

At the height of their relationship, the two painters would meet daily at the Gargoyle Club, and then the Colony Club once it opened, where they would drink, gamble, and argue the evening away with a coterie of other friends who came and went. While art was the most important thing in their lives, they also lived on the edge with days filled with drink and debauchery.

During that time, the two were spending so much time together that Lady Caroline Blackwood, Freud’s second wife, said, “I had dinner with [Bacon] nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian. We also had lunch.”

Naturally, given the amount of time spent in each other’s company talking about art, the artists also decided to paint one other. Bacon completed16 works of Freud, the most influential of which was a triptych of his friend sitting in a chair that became the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction when it was snapped up for a cool $142 million in 2013. (This record was shattered in 2015 when a Picasso sold for $179.4 million.)

But the much more methodical Freud only reciprocated with two paintings. Bacon sat first for three months in 1952 resulting in the Francis Bacon on copper. Freud worked on the second painting of his friend between 1956 and 1957, but it was eventually left unfinished after Bacon stopped sitting for him. (The unfinished work still fetched a respectable $9.4 million at auction in 2008). For a quarter of a century, the friendship burned bright. But, as was most likely inevitable given the two very opinionated and passionate artists, their friendship blazed to an end by the 1970s and it would never recover.

While all missing or destroyed art delivers a deep blow to an artist’s oeuvre, the loss of Francis Bacon was a particularly upsetting one. Not only was it a seminal portrait in the development of Freud’s style, but, some have suggested, it also was an emotional reminder of his former friend.

After discovering that Freud kept a “Wanted” poster of the portrait (more on that later) hanging next to his studio door, Smee told Artsy, “I knew that he wanted that painting back very much because of its quality, but I also thought it must have been partly to do with the fact that the subject of the painting was this person who had played such a crucial role in his life and in his artistic career.”

With no suspects in the theft, all that was left to do was speculate who could have taken the painting. A camera crew visiting the exhibit filmed the portrait at 11am; by 3pm, it had been reported missing. Sometime in those four hours, someone had simply unscrewed the piece from the wall and walked off with it, aided by the fact that there were no alarms or cameras in the vicinity.

Rather than an organized crime ring or an experienced art thief, Freud always thought the culprit was someone a little more naive, a little closer to home. “I wonder whether it was taken by a student because it was stolen when the gallery was full of students. Also, for a student to take a small picture is not that odd, is it?” Freud told The Telegraph. He also suspected that the student nabbed it not out of admiration for Freud’s talent, but out of an admiration for Bacon.

Germany has a 12-year statute of limitations on prosecuting crimes like these. Once the statute on the Francis Bacon theft had expired, Freud decided to make one last attempt to recover the painting. In 2001, ahead of a retrospective planned the following year at the Tate, Freud sketched out a black and white reproduction of the missing painting on a poster that proclaimed “Wanted” in bright red type. “Would the person who holds the painting kindly consider allowing me to show it in my exhibition next June?” the text read above the offer of a reward of over $100,000 for its return and the promise that no questions would be asked.

Around 2,500 copies of the poster were printed and plastered across Berlin but, alas, no one stepped forward to heed Freud’s polite plea. The only thing that came out of the campaign was the aforementioned art on Freud’s wall—one of these posters received a place of honor hung next to the door of the artist’s studio.

The loss continued to sting Freud up to his death in 2011. From the day it was taken in 1988, the artist only allowed black and white photos of the painting to be shown or printed. It was a decision he made “partly because there was no decent colour reproduction, partly as a kind of mourning,” the painter told *The Telegraph*.  It was an artistic—and a symbolic—gesture of loss. “In fact, the painting is quite near monochrome—so it comes out quite well, and I thought it was a rather jokey equivalent to a black arm band. You know—there it isn’t!”

Martin Harrison, ed *Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné*



  **Alexander Adams**

**ALEXANDER ADAMS** **| BOOK REVIEWS | THE BRITISH ART JOURNAL | NUMBER THREE | VOLUME SEVENTEEN | SPRING 2017**

On 30 June 2016, Martin Harrison launched the long-anticipated Francis Bacon: catalogue raisonné. He commented that a full reappraisal of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), British art’s most influential Modernist painter, could begin in earnest. And yet, important as the publication of such scholarship is, in a way Bacon’s art, ideas and life have been in a state of continual reappraisal since his death. It seems that, every year, previously lost and disavowed works are exhibited and new biographical information emerges. Adrian Clark’s in-depth review (The British Art Journal, XVII, 2, 2016) is a fair and thorough assessment of the majestic catalogue raisonné. My review of the catalogue was published in The Art Newspaper in July. I concur with Clark that the cataloguing is rigorously thorough, despite a small number of omissions in the bibliography. The illustrations are excellent and the most truthful reproductions of the paintings to date. The binding and printing are of the highest quality. A number of copies have been distributed to important libraries and universities and may be consulted there.

The Visitors’ Book is a new biographical study that describes the lives of commercial illustrator and teacher Richard Chopping (1917-2008) and his partner, landscape painter Denis Wirth-Miller (1915-2010). The two artists were part of the bohemian Soho scene of the 1940s and 1950s but lived in Wivenhoe on the Essex coast. The book describes their lives through anecdotes about their interaction with an array of mid-century luminaries, the most prominent of which was Bacon. Bacon owned a cottage nearby and sometimes painted with Wirth-Miller who assisted Bacon with a handful of paintings. The Visitors’ Book is an excellent insight into Bacon’s character and social milieu.

Bacon, Wirth-Miller and Chopping visited Monte Carlo together. As a young hedonist, Bacon came for the roulette tables and found he could make a living gambling. From 1946 to 1949 Bacon’s main place of residence was Monaco and he frequently visited the principality over the years that followed. Thus it was fitting that the Forum Grimaldi hosted ‘Francis Bacon: France et Monaco’, the first ever Monégasque display of Bacon’s art (2 July-4 September). The exhibition explored Bacon’s many personal, cultural and artistic links with France and Monaco, including work by French-based artists who influenced him. Unpromising as the giant conference hall seemed as avenue for a fine-art exhibition, the display turned out to be superb. Since the designers had completely free rein over the size, layout and decoration of spaces, they were able to be ambitious. The early work was presented in dark spaces, spot-lit, with black and dark-grey drapes and carpet, which meant figures were like butterflies pinned on black velvet. The décor and lighting design varied in the spaces: later brighter paintings were shown in lightly coloured spaces with more ambient light.

Presenting Bacon’s canvases alongside the art he admired is illuminating. In the Monaco exhibition, the series Study for Portrait of Van Gogh looked at home next to paintings by Soutine. Pre-war Bacons hung near pictures by Jean Lurçat and Fernand Léger. Pieces by Giacometti and Picasso reinforced the case for the influence of École de Paris on Bacon’s outlook. Rare paintings – **including an unfinished male nude (c. 1953), a seascape and an architectural scene (c. 1945)** – complemented well-known works, and made the display a full retrospective. The exhibition included Bacon’s earliest surviving painting and the last completed one (of a standing bull). One of the most accomplished paintings of the figure in all of Bacon’s oeuvre is the late Man at a Washbasin (1989-90). The compact form is tightly defined but richly expansive in tone and hue, with sprays of maroon, lilac and black suggesting shade. The Monaco exhibition is the best selected solo exhibition of Bacon I have seen and it was the best visually conceived of Bacon solo exhibitions.

The Monaco exhibition was the first exhibition to be organised and partly funded by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, which was founded on 28 October 2014 as a non-profit organisation. The moving spirit behind the foundation is Dr Majid Boustany, who became fascinated by Bacon’s paintings while he was a student in London in the 1990s. The foundation’s mission is to research, collect and preserve art, documents, personal items and material associated with Bacon, especially in connection with France and Monaco, in order to promote knowledge of Bacon’s art and life. As well as sponsoring Baconian publications and exhibitions, the foundation assists original research and plans to provide grants to artists in need of financial support.

Situated in a dramatically positioned 1908 townhouse in Monaco, the foundation is home to a collection of more than 2,500 items, 90 of which are art works, some by Bacon. There are a number of small paintings by Bacon from all periods. The collection includes Bacon’s first surviving painting and an early painting of a figure with a caged ape, both loaned to the Monaco exhibition. Other works include *House in Barbados* (1952), painted for Peter Lacy, which Wirth-Miller assisted Bacon with. A comprehensive body of Baconian literature is supplemented by a replica of Bacon’s library, comprising books he owned, accurate down to the exact edition – a useful resource for scholars. Objects in the foundation collection include Bacon’s Paris easel, plates used as palettes and his brushes. There are forms for resident-identity cards, made out for Bacon, his nanny Lightfoot and Eric Hall, the London alderman who was Bacon’s lover in the 1940s.

The décor and lighting of the foundation are a combination of midcentury luxury and Art Deco, with contemporary lighting and air-conditioning technology. The bespoke furnishings replicate some of Bacon’s own designs and the foundation owns a rug (1929) and a stool (1930) by Bacon. Guided tours (in English or French) are restricted by group size and must be booked in advance. For both experts and fans, a visit to the foundation offers a fascinating insight into Bacon’s art and life. Much of the work in the Monaco exhibition was included in the subsequent exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: de Picasso a Velázquez’ held at Guggenheim Bilbao (30 September-8 January 2017), which is reviewed here from the Spanish-language catalogue. Spanish art was intermittently important to Bacon. He acknowledged the accomplishment of Picasso and Velázquez above all other painters but he did not comment much beyond that on Spanish art.

The Spanish exhibition included work from all periods of Bacon’s career, as well as pieces by Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Giacometti, Soutine and Spaniards Picasso, Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Zurbarán, Zuloaga, Ribera. The 1962 *Crucifixion* travelled from New York, which helped those wishing to understand Bacon as a painter who used religious themes and imagery while not subscribing to the theology. The *Tauromaquia* prints (1816) were included and are the works of Goya which most closely resemble Bacon’s, even if Bacon may not have been familiar with them. Bulls appear in a handful of Bacon paintings. Bacon owned a number of illustrated books on bullfighting. The exhibition made a cogent case for the influence of Spanish art on Bacon.

A third solo exhibition took a different approach. Ina Conzen notes in the catalogue for ‘Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms’ (Tate Liverpool, 18 May-18 September; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 7 October-8 January 2017) that ‘Bacon’s figures are frequently confined in closed rooms and glass-like cages, or they are pressurised by scaffold-like beams that disappear into nothingness; curved steel railings, circular and elliptical arenas and pedestals exhibit their bodies mercilessly, just as if they were displays in a museum or animals in a zoo’. The aim of the exhibition was to consider Bacon’s approach to space, specifically centring on the use of spatial dividers in his paintings.

The curators of the Liverpool exhibition did what was not done in the other exhibitions: inclusion of Bacon’s sketches and altered photographic sources, lent by the Tate and the Hugh Lane Gallery. The upper floors of Tate Liverpool are sympathetic spaces for moderately sized work and this added to the intimacy of the display. Although the selection included a number of Bacon’s weakest paintings (discussed below), the hang, lighting and layout were good. Triptychs were given enough space to be seen in totality.

While Bacon was very sensitive to space and rooms, he retreated from landscape as a genre after some forays into landscape painting in the 1950s. Often Bacon made exterior views fragmentary (over time, increasingly so). This practice was partly a demonstration of the law of contrasts, namely that the property of an element is emphasised by proximate contrast with its opposite. Thus the human figure – **which possesses no straight lines and no hard exterior** – is rendered more itself when seen against its opposite: elements that are inflexible, geometric and unyielding. Bacon considered landscape in anthropomorphic terms. Grass is akin to human hair or the pelt of an animal, the swell of a sand dune is akin to muscle, spume of a breaking wave is akin to the spurt of seminal fluid. Despite the rocky, bare terrain of Monaco’s Mont Agel and the coastal cliffs of Tangiers, Bacon generally chose to portray landscapes that were less dramatic: Essex marsh, African velde and the lush greenery of French and British gardens. Bacon treats flat horizontal military parade grounds, veldes, sandy arenas and lawns as akin to the flat floors of domestic interiors, thereby turning the exterior into a surrogate interior.

The range of work was wide even though the Monaco-Bilbao exhibition made certain pieces unavailable for inclusion. The Tate’s collection was drawn from as were many North European museum collections. The issue of space is a part of comprehending the way Bacon’s famous triptychs work, wherein a single tripartite space is established while at the same time one figure is presented multiple times. This presents a paradox. How can the same figure exist in one space at one time in multiple forms? The artist went even further by apparently doubling single figures within the same painting. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Bacon worked on the theme of the double, with identical figures in identical or similar poses placed so close that their bodies overlap and merge. The very similarity of the figures implies that these pairs are not truly separate individuals but figures becoming single entities briefly during shared states (copulating, sleeping, working or marching). The sensation of losing one’s identity in shared activity is something that has been analysed at length by so ciologists and psychologists but – **aside from heroic collective activity depicted in Socialist Realism and political propaganda** – **it has not been addressed by many artists. This is one of Bacon’s most fascinating philosophical propositions.**

*Triptych, 1967* (Hirshhorn, Washington DC) is a good example of doubling. The left panel has a lesbian couple resting passively; the right panel has a (probably male) couple engaging in sexual activity. This is Bacon’s only scene with a lesbian couple; it is telling that the only time it appeared was to contrast it with male homosexuality. At the time it was painted (autumn 1967), homosexual acts had been legal for only a few months (commencing 27 July) and it was significant that Bacon chose to locate the homosexual acts in close pictorial proхimity to the site of a crime: the bloody garments and bedding in the central panel. Biographers noted that Bacon (who was homosexual) apparently lamented that legalisation removed the frisson of illicitness from the sex act and so the association in this triptych between homosexuality and violent crime was possibly some way of commemorating the psycho-sexual charge of danger at the beginning of a new social era.

One of the more striking paintings is *Study from the Human Body and Portrait* (1988). It presents the truncated male nude and the painted photographic self-portrait. It retains an air of mystery despite its bold design and intense palette. This combination is characteristic of Bacon and can be found in works of all periods. Again, observation of the best of late Bacon disproves the common criticism that his late work was stale and repetitive.

A number of canvases that feature space-frames are substandard as art (cats. 16, 17, 20, 21, 24), though their inclusion for the sake of example in worthwhile. They demonstrate the problems Bacon had during the transitional 1957-62 period. Bacon took a risk in moving from a tenebrous dark-ground, cautious style to a more dramatic, highly coloured, high-risk style. These weak paintings play an essential part in the story of Bacon’s transformation in his painting approach while also demonstrating how constant the use of internal spatial dividers was in his output. Contributions to the catalogue raise more questions than they answer, but they are intelligent questions. All of these exhibitions and publications present us with more Bacon – the man and his art. Perhaps the questions and intriguing blank areas that remain only seem worth addressing because of the one immutable truth that underpins the art of Bacon: Francis Bacon was supremely gifted at conceiving and painting powerful works of art that have an enduring power to haunt us.

Martin Harrison, ed *Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné* The Estate of Francis Bacon (distr. by HENI), 2016 5 hb vols in slipcase, 1,538pp, 800 col ISBN 978 0 956 92731, £1,000/$1,500/€ 1,400 Jon Lys Turner *The Visitors’ Book: In Francis Bacon*’*s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller* Constable, 2016, hb, 392pp, some illus, ISBN 978 1 472 121660, £20 Martin Harrison. ed *Francis Bacon: France and Monaco* HENI/Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation/Albin Michel, 2016 (French-English bilingual), hb, 240pp, fully illus, ISBN 978 0 956 873880, £35/$50/€ 40 Martin Harrison, Sarah Whitfield, Manuela B Mena Marqués, *Francis Bacon: de Picasso a Velázquez* Guggenheim Bilbao/Turner 2016 (Spanish only), hb, 207pp, 110 col ISBN 978 8 416 714360 €45 Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Ina Cozen, eds Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms/Unsichtbare Räume Prestel/Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/Tate Liverpool, 2016 (German-English bilingual), bb, 256pp, 150 col ISBN 978 3 791 355764 £29.99/$45



      **Francis Bacon painted in the studio of Denis Wirth-Miller in 1966**

**AHMED YACOUBI:**

**The Occidental Tourist**

**VERBATIM   |   THE BROOKLYN RAIL   |   APRIL 2017**

In Paul Bowles’s acclaimed 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, the primary characters, Port and Kit Moresby, journey through Saharan Africa as if navigating a dissociative dreamscape: the familiar is slightly askew; contemporary and ancient become indistinguishable; Occidental logic slowly slips into hallucinatory detachment.

In 1947 the New York City-born Bowles had taken up residence in Tangier, a city whose exotic allure similarly captivated Francis Bacon, Tennessee Williams, and William S. Burroughs. A polymath composer, writer, and expert translator, Bowles consumed the cultural and psychic landscape of Morocco, delving deep into the country’s hidden recesses. Methodically, he made audio recordings of native tales preserved through the oral tradition, translating them into English from Maghrebi.

Bowles first encountered Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi in Fez in 1947. The young Moroccan, born in 1928, was descended from a family that practiced the healing profession of *f’qih*. Although forbidden by religion from depicting idols, Yacoubi secretly drew figurative images in ink and, in 1948, was introduced to paint by Jane Bowles, Paul’s wife. Yacoubi’s ensuing canvases were colorful, densely abstract compositions packed with energy; heavily layered surfaces were smoothed through a process that Yacoubi likened to alchemical transformation.

With the young Yacoubi under his wing, Paul Bowles wrote to Betty Parsons in 1951 to advocate for “a young Arab painter from Fez, a natural abstractionist, as is to be expected when there has been no tradition in the culture save that of absolute abstraction.” The following year the Betty Parsons Gallery staged an exhibition of Yacoubi’s work, and soon after he made the acquaintance of Peggy Guggenheim, who purchased several of his paintings. Concurrently, Paul Bowles translated several of Yacoubi’s stories into English, including the play The Night Before Thinking, which was eventually published in the Evergreen Review in 1961.

In 1966, Yacoubi departed his native Morocco for New York City, where he painted in a downtown loft. Yacoubi was illiterate; his frequent and enduring correspondence with Bowles was read and transcribed by friends, including a 1979 letter in which Bowles cautiously offers an introduction to Yacoubi’s painting from the perspective of a writer, rather than art critic.

Like Bowles, who had largely escaped his roots to become a permanent expatriate in Tangier, Yacoubi embraced the United States as an artistic catalyst and place of exotic fascination, dying in New York City in 1985 at the age of fifty-seven. Bowles lived until 1999 as both a tremendous presence in the literary landscape and an elusive voice embedded within the ancient rhythms of the human condition.

                                           **Francis Bacon** **with Ahmed Yacoubi**

‘**Maria Lassnig’ and ‘Francis Bacon’:**

**Invisible Rooms at Tate Liverpool**

**RINA ARYA   | REVIEWS |   VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN   |   ISSUE 1   |   VOLUME 18 |   20 MARCH 2017**

Among the highlights of Tate Liverpool 2016’s calendar were the Francis Bacon and Maria Lassnig shows. They were designed to be contiguous. What struck me by walking from the Lassnig to the Bacon show was the change of ambience. In the Lassnig exhibition, viewers were greeted with light, brightness and an overall feeling of expanse. Work was arranged approximately thematically – abstraction, American realism, cyborg transmutations, and the film work that she made in America. Moving into the Bacon rooms, the mood became more sombre and dark (quite literally).

Spectral popes and blue-suited businessmen loomed in disquieting dark corners. Bacon’s penchant for his work to be displayed behind glass and also framed created a vastly different impression, dissuading the viewer from getting too close. The grandeur was distancing. In spite of the diametrically different visual experiences, Bacon and Lassnig have a number of shared concerns, mainly to do with their mutual preoccupation with embodiment and representation, the experience of what it feels like to be enfleshed, which deflects the focus away from the external representation of the body to the insides.

We experience the sense of the inner in Bacon through the open mouths of the orator figures, organic (biomorphic) forms, and suggestive surfaces. Both artists share an intimate connection with the canvas and the act of painting, but this is more apparent in Lassnig, who has a more overt connection with the canvas, which doubles up as skin. In works such as *Tragic Duet/Dramatic Duet* (1987), *Inside and Outside the Canvas V* (1985) and Inside and Outside the Canvas IV (1984–1985) the representation spills over from the depicted canvas into the real world. Unlike Bacon, who used photographs to uncover the veracity of his sitter, Lassnig required the real fleshy body in front of her, which was usually her own, and little else.

**Lassnig** admired Bacon’s work, believing him to be a genius, which she discussed in a 2006 interview in Frieze magazine. She was not, however, taken with his treatment of backgrounds and his use of space-frames, which is ironic, given the subject of this particular Bacon exhibition. Lassnig preferred to concentrate on the figure and was unconcerned with its relationship with the ground. Bacon’s focus was also on the figure but pictorial space was integral. Since the 1950s he employed the device of the space-frame with the intention of scene-setting and drawing attention to what is contained within it.

The range of examples used in the exhibition show the extent of Bacon’s use of this frame within-a-frame as well as the multipurpose use to which he put it, which included the conveyance of the exuberance of sentient motion. One of the enduring characteristics of living beings, whether human or animal, is the perpetual sense of motion that accompanies and determines life. The space-frame, even those more crudely conceived, conveys the impulse to contain form, which is continually slipping away and evading the boundaries of containment. The contrast between the angularity of the planes and sides of the space-frame and the organic form of the body is striking. One of the most powerful manifestations of this is *Sand Dune* **(1984), which conveys the force of nature. The exhibition includes well known Bacon works such as the** Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) with less-seen works, including Two Owls, No. 2 (c. 1957–1961). The exhibits drew attention to Bacon’s ability to set a scene or create an environment often using very abstract means while simultaneously evoking room-space. One of the most interesting additions was the inclusion of numerous sketches and photographs of Bacon’s inimitable studio, 7 Reece Mews.

The space-frames create a sense of pictorial depth and focus. The eye is drawn in to the mise-en-scene, but any attempts to narrativize are thwarted. In contrast, there is little sense of depth in Lassnig and the marks of the body are laid on the surface. As well as the shift in ambience then there is also a contrast in finish – Lassnig’s experimentalism gives way to the self-contained grandeur of Bacon. Overall, the contrast between these two artists worked well, and the synergy between these two hugely expressive painters in their economy of execution and technical range is apparent.

It stands to reason that interest in Lassnig was piqued by her place[1]ment alongside Bacon but her exhibition on its own was outstanding and reflected the breadth of her phases and the power of her imagery which, similarly to that of Bacon, combines aspects of figuration and abstraction to interesting effect. Her work can be couched in a narrative about the status of a woman’s body in a changing society that embraces the digital age and, with it, changing attitudes to the life processes of ageing and death. The array of work is deeply personal in that it is about her feelings, the sensorial effects of her body, and the emotional relationship she has to her identity. Her emphasis on body sensations is about her experience of being in a body (which she describes as body-awareness), where she emphasizes the body part that draws her in and highlights this visually by prioritizing that particular part or process over any other. This gives much of her work a fragmentary appearance, a feature that coheres with Bacon’s own sense of distortion.

In addition to the abstract recordings of her sensations, Lassnig, through the vehicle of the self-portrait, lays out various aspects of her emotional psyche, which at times is humorous in merging with household objects, such as in *Self Portrait with Saucepan* (1995), replete with an undercurrent of rebellion against the expectations placed on women. These sentiments are expressed more starkly in her images of the body featured under plastic. Elements from her biography creep into her work in the poignant elegies *Child with Dead Mothers/The Killers (Murderers) Cry a Lot/Grieving Child* (1965). Her strong personal stamp is apparent even in her early *Expressive Self-Portrait* of 1945, which was created in the same year as her graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It represents a point of departure from the prevailing style of academic realism, and gives a foretaste of not only her preoccupations but also her spirit of independence.

Bacon’s work has a timeless quality and resonates with a post-war Godless age. It evokes sensibilities that are core to the human condition and that instil a sense of solemnity and even of foreboding. Lassnig’s work cannot be interpreted in the same way but operates as a commentary on the contemporary digital age, which problematizes the place of the human. Lassnig explores the morphology of self as it is transmuted into everyday objects and machines. The greenish hues of her self-portraits and luminescence of her science fiction canvases communicate something of the decay and dystopia of the current age where image is equivalent to identity. Little is known of Lassnig’s work outside the German-speaking world but this exhibition succeeds in showcasing the importance of her contribution to contemporary painting alongside her near-contemporary Bacon. Recent Bacon exhibitions have explored his affiliation with Henry Moore (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2014) and the great masters (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2015) but there are greater points of affinity and identification here, and in that respect the exhibitions are mutually illuminating.

**Stunning collection of modern art goes on display in Tehran**

**Exhibits include works by Francis Bacon and gay Iranian painter**

**Bahman Mohasses – bought before Islamic revolution of 1979**

**SAEED KAMALI DEHGHAN |  IRAN CORRESPONDENT  |  THE GUARDIAN  | FRIDAY 10 MARCH 2017**

A remarkable collection of modern western and Iranian art that had been gathering dust in the cellar of a Tehran museum and blocked from being shown in Europe has gone on display in Iran’s capital.

The collection features works by two prominent gay artists, Francis Bacon and Bahman Mohasses. Some of the hidden treasures of Tehran’s museum of contemporary art had been due to travel to Berlin and Rome this year for their first show outside Iran since they were bought by the museum before the 1979 revolution.

But those exhibitions were cancelled, bringing embarrassment to German and Iranian officials, after Iranian artists protested about the secrecy surrounding their transfer, concerns about their fate, and the fact that some had never been shown before in Iran.

Now the works that were due to arrive in Europe have gone on display in Tehran, much to the delight of art lovers in Iran. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Majid Molanorouzi, a former head of the museum, said there was still hope that the works would get to the German and Italian capitals “in the summer this year”.

Tehran’s museum of contemporary art is believed to have the finest collection of modern western art anywhere outside Europe and the US, including works by Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. The works are thought to be worth more than $2.5bn (£2bn) in total.

A total of 30 western artists and 30 works by Iranian figures are on show at the exhibition, entitled Berlin-Rome Travellers. But two artists stand out: Bacon and Mohasses, both of whom were openly gay. Bacon’s painting Reclining Man with Sculpture and his triptych, Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendant, are displayed.

Mohasses, who died in Rome in 2010, is seen as Iran’s most prominent artist of the past century and is certainly the country’s best-known artistic figure to have been openly gay, although he lived in post-revolutionary times in Italy.

Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran and carries a huge social stigma. Mohasses’ sexuality is not discussed officially in his home country. In a recent poll conducted by an Iranian art journal, he came first in the list of the country’s popular contemporary artists. But his prominence was overlooked for many years – some of his works were destroyed by the authorities and some by the artist himself.

Iranian painter Nicky Nodjoumi, whose work has been acquired by the British Museum, said the elites and those close to the artist knew he was gay. “To me, his artistic significance in Iranian contemporary art is enormous,” he told the Guardian.

“He followed his instinct to portray the suffering of humanity according to what he was feeling, rather than depicting the benign decorative Islamic motives. No doubt his being gay influenced his art – most of his paintings are figurative, the majority of [his] paintings are nude men in a orgy situation.

“Even though he was trying to conceal it with different tactics to hide them, he was living in Islamic society. In many respects we can compare him with Frances Bacon and I would say [he was] influenced by him.”

In 2012, Iranian film-maker Mitra Farahani made a documentary about the life and works of Bahman Mohasses, Fifi Howls from Happiness, which is named after a painting by the artist himself. The film provided a unique insight into Mohasses’ life in exile.

“Being homosexual did not have anything to do with him being reclusive, it was the opposite – he was proud of his sexuality and lived it fully,” she said. Farahani complained about the lack of efforts by the Iranian government to retrieve, restore and list Mohasses’ work. “The people who chose Mohasses as their most popular artist should know how many works have remained from him and where they are,” she said.

“The six-metre long sculpture of Les Amants that was made for a Shah villa in the Kish island, and was influenced by a poem by [Persian poet] Nima [Yooshij], where is it?” She added: “Even if they can’t put them on display, they should keep them safe and let people know about them, because [his works] belong to the people.”

Iran’s LGBT community thrives despite restrictions. Works by internationally-known gay writers have been translated into Persian and published in Iran. These include works by by Marcel Proust and André Gide. Officials appear to tolerate such works so long as their subjects are not explicitly gay or cannot be easily detected.

**Sohrab Sepehri, Mohsen Vaziri, Monir Farmanfarmaian and Paarviz Tanavoli are among other Iranian artists featured in Berlin-Rome Travellers.**



          **CENSORED: Francis Bacon’s Attendants displayed without the central panel Two Figures Lying on a Bed**

Bacon triptych, once owned by Roald Dahl, to lead Christie’s New York sale in May

The auction house is also selling works by Picasso, Ernst and Lichtenstein to benefit Cleveland Clinic

GABRIELLA ANGELETI | HELEN STOILAS |  THE ART NEWSPAPER  | FRIDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2017

Christie’s has offered an early peek at the works consigned for its 20th-century art auctions in New York in May, which will be led by Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963), and include pieces by Picasso, Ernst, Giacometti, and Lichtenstein.

The triple portrait is the first Bacon ever made of his longtime muse and lover George Dyer—he would go on to use him as a subject in some 40 paintings—and was created at the very start of their relationship. “George Dyer is to Bacon what Dora Maar was to Picasso,” says Loic Gouzer, Christie’s deputy chairman for post-war and contemporary art. “He is arguably the most important model of the second half of the 20th century, because Dyer’s persona as well and physical traits acted as a catalyst for Bacon’s pictorial breakthroughs.”

The work, estimated to make between $50m to $70m, was once owned by the British author Roald Dahl, a close friend of Bacon’s. Bloomberg has identified the current owner as the French actor Francis Lombrail, who has held it for 25 years and loaned it to a number of exhibitions dedicated to the artist, including the travelling retrospective in 2008-09 that was shown at London’s Tate Britain, Madrid’s Prado, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Christie’s sold another triptych by Bacon, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) in 2013, which broke the record at the time for the most expensive work sold at auction when it made $142.4m against an estimate of $85m.

The auction house will also offer eight works from the collection of Sydell Miller with all proceeds to be donated to the Cleveland Clinic Heart & Vascular Institute, a non-profit medical centre located in Ohio. Miller, an American philanthropist, is a member of the centre’s board of trustees.

Slated for the 17 May post-war and contemporary art evening sale is a cast, made during the artist’s lifetime, of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture of his wife, Buste d’Annette VI (conceived 1962, cast 1964, est $1.5m-$2.5m), as well as works by Jean Dubuffet and Louise Bourgeois.



                                                                                                        **George Dyer was to Bacon what Dora Maar was to Picasso – Loic Gouzer Christie’s**

**Francis Bacon Painting May Reach $70 Million at Christie’s Sale**

**The 1963 triptych previously belonged to author Roald Dahl**

**The seller is the French actor and collector Francis Lombrail**

**BY KATYA KAZAKINA   |   BLOOMBERG |   FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2017**

**A portrait of Francis Bacon’s lover may fetch as much as $70 million at Christie’s in May, when bellwether auctions test the health of the high-end art market.**

The triptych Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer was painted in 1963, soon after the two men met. It depicts three versions of Dyer’s twisted face, each on a separate, small, black canvas. In 2014, a similar triptych, done in 1964 on a light background, sold for 26.7 million pounds (about $45.6 million at the time) at Sotheby’s.

The work for sale at Christie’s is the first major consignment for the next auction season in New York. Sales of works by Bacon, who became the most expensive artist at auction in November 2013, have fallen 74 percent since 2014, according to Artprice.com. Last year, his sales tallied $69.6 million as the industry’s supply of top-tier works dried up amid economic and political volatility.

The work previously belonged to Roald Dahl, the British author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. The piece, which isn’t guaranteed, will be offered during the evening sale of postwar and contemporary art on May 17, Christie’s said Friday in a statement.

“It’s a real trophy work,” said Loic Gouzer, Christie’s deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art. “George Dyer is Bacon’s No. 1 muse like Dora Maar was for Picasso. He was the subject who allowed Bacon to push his limits and become the artist he became.”

**Savvy Investment**

The seller is Francis Lombrail, a French actor who’s owned it for 25 years. Lombrail said he first spotted the work when it was turned against the wall at a Paris art fair; all he could see was back of the canvas.

“**I saw the title. I saw the date. And before I even saw the work, I knew it’s my painting,” Lombrail, 70, said in a telephone interview. “I knew I had an incredible chance.”**

Although he declined to disclose his purchase price, Lombrail said he had to sell much of the art he owned at the time to pay for the Bacon. It may turn out to be a savvy investment, as Christie’s is estimating the work at $50 million to $70 million.

Over the years, he lent the piece to major exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Tate and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. He said he will use the proceeds to pay for an historic Paris theatre he recently bought. “All the biggest actors in France played there,” said Lombrail. “It’s like the Bacon of theaters.”

**Francis Bacon’s first portrait of lover George Dyer goes on sale**

**1963 triptych of muse was painted three months into relationship and was once owned by Roald Dahl**

**MARK BROWN   |   ARTS CORRESPONDENT |   THE GUARDIAN |   FRIDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2017**

**Francis Bacon’s first portrait of George Dyer, the East End petty criminal who became the artist’s lover and muse, is to appear at auction for the first time.**

The 1963 triptych, once owned by Roald Dahl, was painted three months into a relationship which, a much repeated story goes, began after bacon caught Dyer attempting to burgle his home in South Kensington, south-west London. Instead of calling the police the artist invited him to bed. The truth is far more pedestrian in that they met in a Soho pub, Dyer offering to buy Bacon a drink.

**So began a tempestuous and largely drunken relationship which ended in tragedy a decade later when Dyer killed himself days before Bacon’s important retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris.**

**Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer has gone on display at Christie’s in London before its sale in New York in May. The work has an estimated price tag of between $50m (£40m) and $70m.**

The auction house’s head of postwar and contemporary art in London said the passion of the relationship was plain to see. “It is like they are making love together, it is a sensual portrait of George Dyer but you can almost find some hints of Bacon … the two bodies are merging, it is very dramatic,” said Edmond Francey.

**Dyer appeared in more than 40 of Bacon’s paintings. That this this triptych was the first, makes it a historically important work.**

**Loic Gouzer, Christie’s deputy chairman of postwar and contemporary art, said the portrait exemplified “the dynamism and complex psychology” that Bacon was most revered for.**

He added: “George Dyer is to Bacon what Dora Maar was to Picasso. He is arguably the most important model of the second half of the 20th century, because Dyer’s persona as well and physical traits acted as a catalyst for Bacon’s pictorial breakthroughs. “The Francis Bacon that we know today would not exist without the transformative encounter that he had with George Dyer.”

**The former ownership of the work adds an extra layer of interest. Dahl was a passionate Bacon fan and keen to collect, but the artist’s works were not cheap.**

The success of his books, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as money from writing the screenplay for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, allowed Dahl to indulge his passion, buying the Dyer triptych along with three other works by Bacon between 1964 and 1967.

The triptych has been given a room of its own at Christie’s in London. On public display in other galleries are works that will be sold in the capital in the coming fortnight as part of Christie’s and other auction houses' impressionist and modern art, surreal art and postwar and contemporary sales.

Among the highlights are one of Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes, Te Fare (La maison), which has estimate of £12m-18m, and a Magritte surreal landscape of a cloud on a drinking glass, La corde sensible, which has an estimate of £14m-£18m and is expected to set an auction record for the artist.

**Book Review: Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon In Your Blood is a fascinating**

**exploration of the artist, the author, and a decades long friendship**

**JODIE SLOAN |   THE AU REVIEW   | EST. 2008 |   THURSDAY FEBRUARY 23 2017**

As a young student in Swingin’ Sixties London, Michael Peppiatt met the star of British contemporary art, Francis Bacon. Initially just hoping to secure an interview for a university magazine, what followed was thirty years of friendship, late nights, copious amounts of champagne, and an interview that never really ended.

The author of an acclaimed biography of Francis Bacon, Michael Peppiatt here presents more of his own story, albeit one told through the lens of a decades long friendship with one of recent art history’s most controversial and talked about figures. Following Peppiatt as he moves around Europe establishing his career as an art writer and critic, *Francis Bacon in Your Blood* **shows how his relationship with the famous artist influenced and inspired him, and gave him access to exclusive social and professional circles.**

Throughout Peppiatt’s life, Bacon appears and disappears, often with an eclectic selection of hangers on and true friends in tow, picking up the tab every time. This makes for a slightly repetitive nature to the book, and the cycle of nights of heavy drinking, interactions with wild characters, and Peppiatt and Bacon musing on life, love, the universe, and, of course, art can start to jar after a while.

But thanks to Peppiatt’s beautiful writing and insightful commentary, the memoir successfully steers clear of monotony. Peppiatt explores all sides of Bacon’s character, including those that lead Bacon to seemingly constantly toe the line of self destruction; and muses on how the friendship reflects upon Peppiatt himself. It’s neither an indictment nor a celebration of Bacon’s lavish lifestyle, rather it’s an interesting insight into how a friend sees the actions of another, with Peppiatt taking a step back and looking at Bacon from a distance.

Given the background of the author, and the fact that the front cover of the book hones in on Bacon, readers might be forgiven for expecting another biography focusing on the artist. Peppiatt himself seems to fall into the same trap from time to time, almost as if his own story isn’t as interesting, and while it’s true that Bacon’s life is a rich tapestry, his ‘gilded gutter life’ only takes on real poignancy when it’s explored by an outsider like Peppiatt. Peppiatt is a way to ground the artist’s heavy handed and excessive ideas and behaviours, making Bacon that much more accessible. It’s a side of the artist that is so well hidden by his work, but Peppiatt, someone who visited his studio, was there at gallery openings to see him speaking so gregariously and openly, and sat with him during his some of his darkest times, is able to draw that out. By analysing Bacon’s words and by presenting his own story side by side, Peppiatt’s rise from starstruck student to someone who understands and reads his older friend with such clarity is central to the book.

*Francis Bacon in Your Blood* mixes art, ambition, and friendship, with a heavy dose of alcohol, to craft a potent dual portrait of Peppiatt and Bacon. Filled with moments of intense emotion and deep conversation, the story is as beautiful and grotesque as any of the enfant terrible’s paintings, shattering myths and exploring an unlikely, but lasting friendship.

**Francis Bacon in Your Blood is available now through Bloomsbury.**

**Freud and Bacon to visit Málaga’s Picasso Museum**

**CULT British artists will be the focus of a huge new Picasso Museum exhibition.**

CHLOE GLOVER | THE OLIVE PRESS | MONDAY 20 FEBRUARY 2017

**Works by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud will be flown over from Tate London for the five month showcase, open from April 26 to September 17.**

**Titled Bacon, Freud and the School of London, the exhibition focuses on post-war and late 20th century art which discuss the symbolism and fragility of the human figure.**

Among the famed works going on display will be Freud’s Girl with a White Dog, which features of painting of his first wife Kitty while she was pregnant. Other renowned artists on show include Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, William Coldstream, B Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego and Euan Uglow.

Talking about the exhibition, a spokesperson for the museum said: “By painting the human figure and their own everyday landscapes, these artists conveyed the fragility and vitality of the human condition.

“**Simultaneously, they developed new approaches and styles, translating life into art and reinventing the way it is depicted.”**

Kirklees Council scraps proposed Francis Bacon sale

Kirklees Council backs down on proposed Bacon sale

APOLLO   | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | THURSDAY 5 JANUARY 2017

Kirklees council leader David Sheard has backed down on his suggestion that the local authority sell a Francis Bacon painting described as the ‘most significant exhibit’ in its collection. Late last year, Sheard asked local residents for their thoughts on sealing the work in order to plug significant gaps in the council budget.

Sheard’s proposal was met with both negative and positive responses, but following an intervention by the Contemporary Art Society, which donated the work to the council in 1952, the authority has confirmed that it is not entitled to sell the painting. ‘Kirklees Council cannot sell the work. If we tried, it would be taken away from us and given to another institution’, the council said in a statement.

The Influence of Roy de Maistre on Francis Bacon

RINA ARYA |   RELIGION AND THE ARTS   |   VOLUME 21   |   ISSUE 5 | 1 JANUARY 2017

Very little is said about the Australian artist Roy de Maistre in scholarship on Francis Bacon, apart from the fact that he provided guidance about painting technique. Being self-taught, Bacon did not have any art school training,1 and when he met de Maistre in 1930 he was working as an interior decorator and furniture designer. De Maistre helped him make the transition to painting and, according to Michael Peppiatt (60, 72), answered elementary questions about technique. Bacon also picked up various skills and practices from de Maistre, including using pastel and oil on sundeala board, a practice observed in Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), for example.2

In spite of this, the contribution that he made to Bacon’s art and career has been downplayed. Andrew Brighton states that the covering up of de Maistre’s influence was deliberate and that both parties had reasons for marginalizing the role of the other (22). Recent studies on the archival material in Bacon’s studio have shown that, contrary to Bacon’s admission that he painted straight onto the canvas without the need for preparatory work, he actually did studies, in the sense of working out ideas before he committed to canvas.3 These involved different processes such as painting over photographs, drawing on them, folding parts of the image, etc. His desire to preserve the mystique of a painterly genius that was guided only by intuition was his motivation for distancing himself from the fact that he needed guidance about how to paint. The cultivation of a particular public persona required extricating himself from the actual circumstances of having a mentor; what Brighton describes as “the myth of his untaught genius” (22).

Equally, de Maistre’s religious calling made him want to create some distance from Bacon, the militant atheist who poured scorn on believers. Moreover, Bacon’s dissolute lifestyle was at odds with de Maistre’s own courting of respectability; he was “a homosexual of extreme discretion” (Brighton 22). Indeed, in later years de Maistre befriended artists and others who shared his religious faith, and would not have wanted to be closely associated with Bacon. The two artists overlapped for a short while and then went on to experience very different fates.

Criticism has tended to downplay de Maistre’s abstraction, considering it decorative or stylized. This is in great contrast with the grandeur, power, and sense of tragedy that characterizes Bacon’s output, not to mention its international acclaim.4 Scholarship on Bacon has appraised the significance that various artists including Picasso, Velázquez, and Rembrandt had on Bacon in different periods of his work, but de Maistre is treated cursorily and without due attention to the significance that the Australian artist had on the junior artist. This article attempts to assess the contribution he made, not overstating de Maistre’s influence on Bacon but merely detailing the connections between the two painters and the influence de Maistre had at the beginning of Bacon’s career as a painter.

Roy de Maistre arrived in London in April 1930, where he would stay for the rest of his life.5 His experience is carefully documented by Heather Johnson, author of the two biographies on the artist, respectively entitled “the Australian Years” and “the English Years.” This division into two parts follows the conventional reading of his work. It was after his arrival that he also changed his name. Roy de Maistre was christened as LeRoi Leviston de Mestre, but a number of different records of his name exist, with Leviston often replaced by Livingstone. Soon after he arrived in London he changed parts of the spelling of his name; LeRoi became Roy and de Mestre became de Maistre. He also added the name Laurent (from a family relative) and Joseph from the late eighteenth century philosopher Joseph de Maistre,6 making his full name LeRoy Leveson Laurent Joseph de Maistre (but he became known as “Roy de Maistre”). His name change is also revealing of a need for a new identity for the next phase in his life, and its French sound may have worked in his favor in the British art world, which was open to European influence.

In 1919, while in Australia, he developed his experiments in color and music together with Roland Wakelin and established his abstract style. His move to England enabled him to continue his experimentation with abstraction and to move away from the conservatism of Australian post-war landscape painting, which did not appeal to de Maistre not least because it did not embrace the pictorial language of modernism.7 It was not simply the perception of what art should be about that lacked appeal for de Maistre, but also social attitudes about homosexuality that he would have wanted to escape from. The relative openness and bohemian spirit of London suited him more, or at least would have provided him with greater opportunities for artistic development and selfexpression. Johnson also cited religion as another point of contention with Australian culture: “De Maistre’s religious art served to almost totally alienate him from his Australian family (bigoted anti Roman Catholics), Australian culture in general and the Australian art world—which in spite of awards like the Blake Prize, has shown a marked disinterest, even antipathy to religious art—in particular.”8

1    Marking the Transition from Designer to Painter

Bacon was working as a designer when he met de Maistre. Some of Bacon’s items of furniture and rugs were depicted in de Maistre’s paintings of the 1930s, such as Interior, Francis Bacon’s studio (1930) (see Shone) and New Atlantis (c. 1933) which features Bacon’s trademark circular mirror. De Maistre organized a joint exhibition in November 1930 with Jean Shepeard in Bacon’s studio, at 17 Queensberry Mews, which featured four rugs designed by Bacon and also four of his paintings. The decision to curate a joint exhibition meant that de Maistre believed in Bacon’s potential and that he was happy to show his work alongside the lesser known artist. Indeed, he encouraged Bacon to work on paintings and had artistic connections with particular artists, dealers, and patrons and their venues. Soon after his arrival he was involved with the newly established Mayor Gallery in London, the London Artists’ Association and the Unit One group. Being neither formally trained nor having contacts in the art world, de Maistre mentored Bacon, and his gentle depiction of the youthful Bacon represented in his portrait of c. 1935 conveys something of the nurturing role that de Maistre provided. Michael Peppiatt (60) spoke about Bacon’s need for an older father figure, given his relationship with his own family and de Maistre fitted this role.9 Patrick White has discussed how de Maistre’s studio on Eccleston Street became a meeting place for fellow artists and would have widened Bacon’s artistic circle (62). Johnson also discusses the school of contemporary painting that de Maistre started with Martin Bloch in 1936 (81–82).

Although short-lived, lasting about a year, such a venture conveyed his interest in mentoring artists and reflected his own extensive art training from 1913 to 1923, where he studied painting under Norman Carter and Dattilo Rubbo at the Royal Art Society school of New South Wales, and at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton.

After the 1930 exhibition de Maistre and Bacon would exhibit together again on different occasions including at Thomas Agnew & Sons in 1937, after which there was a hiatus in Bacon’s productivity. This has been attributed to his new relationship with Eric Hall in which he undertook the role of housekeeper (Johnson 100, 102). But it is entirely plausible that de Maistre’s guidance and encouragement for the young painter was a motivational spur in the early 1930s. After the show at Agnew the next exhibition in which Bacon was included was a group show in 1945 at the Lefevre gallery in London, which proved to be life-changing as Bacon launched his vision on the art world.

11     Religious Works

Throughout his career de Maistre painted a series of different subjects including portraits, landscapes, and still life. The subjects which engaged him the most and for which he is best known are religious, and these included commissions for church organizations as well as his own work. Even before de Maistre started exploring religious themes, he was interested in the spiritual potential of color, which he explored in its affinity with music, where musical notation was mapped with color tones to produce visual harmony in his painting. His theory, which he expounded in a talk entitled “Colour in Art” at the Australian Arts Club, Sydney, was about the analogy between “the colours of the spectrum and the notes of the musical scale.”10 His interest in the emotional impact of color was initiated by personal circumstances. After being discharged from the Australian Army in 1916 after contracting tuberculosis, de Maistre became interested in the therapeutic use of color to shell-shocked patients released from the military.

De Maistre was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1949 and confirmed in 1951, but he began exploring his Christian faith in imagery soon after his arrival in London in the early 1930s. Catalogue entries for an exhibition in 1934 at the Mayor Gallery included the Dead Christ and The Annunciation, painted in the same year. While London was more receptive to modernist abstraction, de Maistre, along with many other religious artists of his time, had to bridge the gap between modernism and religious work. “Church art” was not an aesthetic that welcomed abstraction. The church leader and patron of the arts, Walter Hussey, and other figures including Dr. John Morel Gibbs and Revd. Douglas Wollen, founders of the Methodist Modern Art Collection, supported the importance of engaging with good quality art, whether old or modern, which had the power to depict faith.11 De Maistre sought to revitalize the relationship between the contemporary art of his day and the Church. Religious commissions included: Crucifixion (1945) for Westminster Cathedral; Resurrection for the Chaplaincy Centre, Oxford; paintings for the Immaculate Heart of Mary (1961), Hayes, London and for St Aidan’s Church, East Acton (1964) London; and Crucifixion (1944) for the Abbey on Iona. In 1954, de Maistre accepted his most esteemed commission, which was to paint a series of the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral. He executed this to dramatic effect over a period of eighteen months. This series, displayed in the Great Corridor (which connects the cathedral with the Clergy House), showcases the power and intensity of his religious vision. Figures are brought up to the picture plane to emphasize pathos, extraneous details are eliminated, including the surrounding crowds, to avoid diminishing the contemplative focus. Perhaps de Maistre was using the series as a meditation on his faith and so by omitting other figures he was increasing the intimacy between him and the objects of his faith. In a Neo-Romantic vein, de Maistre draws on landscape (although not necessarily English landscape) to add to the drama of the scene.12 In spite of his religious intensity, the Stations, however, are markedly inconsistent in treatment. The finest examples, such as Christ Falls Under the Cross (Station of the Cross ix) and Pietà (Station of the Cross xiii) (1953), are revered as the finest examples of devotional art, whilst other works such as Christ is Nailed to the Cross (Station of the Cross xi) (1958) are lacking in expression and are schematic and flat.

In many of his religious works de Maistre employed his archetypal quasicubist aesthetic and combined strong figuration with a background of geometrical forms, as seen in works such as The Supper at Emmaus (1958) (fig. 1). In some of his religious works such as Noli me Tangere (1952–1958) he applied abstraction to the figurative form in order to heighten the emotional intensity of the scene (fig. 2). In The Crucifixion (1945) Christ’s body is comprised of wrought triangular facets, which emphasize the torsion that the body underwent by hanging on the Cross. In contrast, the stillness of the grassy plain and the blue sky background starkly define the movement of the body. In depictions of the Crucifixion many painters use distortion to convey the suffering of Christ. Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel for the Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512–1515) emphasizes the grotesque to convey horror. Wounds and piercings are shown on Christ’s contorted body. De Maistre uses the fragmentation of form, where the surface is broken up into planes to emphasize pain, in a literal sense and also metaphorically. In Stations of the Cross the cumulative sense of suffering is articulated by the progressive sense of abstraction. In Christ Falls under the Crucifixion, Christ is barely visible under the weight of the Cross, which blends into a landscape reminiscent of Australia’s plains.

De Maistre’s interest in pivotal moments in the Christian narrative may have influenced Bacon, who painted two crucifixions in 1933.13 Given that Bacon was clearly open to de Maistre’s suggestions about technique, it seems entirely apposite that Bacon would have been receptive to the content of his mentor’s work. De Maistre’s early interest in religious images may have influenced Bacon to think about the aesthetic possibilities of the Crucifixion as a subject.14 The younger painter was, after all, new to painting, and even though he developed a strong interest in a number of different subjects and themes from Greek mythology, literature, and popular culture magazines in his early years, it is plausible that his decision to depict the Crucifixion partially came from de Maistre’s preoccupations. He singled out particular Crucifixions from the history of Western art including Cimabue’s Crucifix (c. 1287–1288) and Grünewald’s Crucifixion, which he described as being a work that extolled “grand horror” and brought about catharsis (Interview with Peter Beard in Geldzahler 14–15). Bacon’s two crucifixions of 1933 consisted of the basic linear shapes consistent with the cruciform shape with arms outstretched. His inclusion of a skull in one of these examples suggests his conflation of crucifixion with death and the finality of death. This cohered with his unabated atheism; for Bacon, the crucifixion was not a symbol of religious truth or sacrifice but was rather a way of representing the brutality of humankind, and his crucifixion paintings, including the triptychs, explore related themes. In the post-death of God context in which Bacon situates his work, the human becomes level with the animal (see Gale and Stephens 27) and the animal death is presented in his crucifixion triptychs (of 1962 and 1965) as the gamy worm slides down a waste chute. De Maistre’s approach towards crucifixion imagery was far more conventional and entrenched within a Christian framework. De Maistre emphasizes the sacrifice of Christ and the accompanying emotions— anguish, sorrow, despair—that conveyed the pain of sacrifice and love of God. He uses Cubist-style abstraction to accentuate the grotesqueness of the Christ figure, to show how pain lines his body and fragments it. In The Crucifixion, which was begun in 1932 and completed in 1945, the body of Christ is fractured into triangle-like shapes and his downcast head takes a circular form.

In speaking of de Maistre’s motivations for choosing religious subjects, John Rothenstein recalls de Maistre saying “[t]he painter is always in search of a peg on which to hang his creative urge” which for de Maistre concerned religious, particularly Catholic subjects, mainly the Crucifixion and the suffering Christ, interpreted in his abstract style (Rothenstein, Modern English Painters 181). Bacon’s fascination with the power and drama of religious images may have been awakened and facilitated by his contact with de Maistre, and he tapped into the potential that these potent and dramatic images provided. Yet unlike de Maistre, who was “moved by the images of the Crucifixion, and of Mary mourning over the dead Christ not because there [sic] were dramatic ‘subjects,’ or dramatic symbols, still less just shapes, but because he believed in what they represented” (Rothenstein, Modern English Painters 181), Bacon was more interested in the power of the fiction or symbol that it held. When questioned about his use of religious images, in particular crucifixions and popes, Bacon always had a multitude of reasons that ranged from an interest in the formal qualities of the symbol to deeper reasons about its symbolic potential (Arya 59–60). He was drawn to the mythological grandeur of the symbol of the Crucifixion, which held sway in the history of Western art and culture, and transformed the specific sense of this particular event into a more general statement about humanity.

Although their interpretations of the subject vary, Bacon inherited de Maistre’s Catholic sensibility of focusing on the sentience of the flesh and the role of pain and suffering, and arguably his entire oeuvre is about the vulnerability of the flesh. Bacon’s central subject matter, which emerged in the 1940s, was the body, and the crucifixion was a vehicle through which he was able to show the body taken apart. In Postmodern Heretics (2004) Eleanor Heartney offers an alternative reading of “transgressive” “religious” art that depicts the body in grotesque and abject ways. In offering a defense of (Catholic) artists whose work was condemned for its treatment of religious subject matter, she argues that artists such as Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili do not detract from religious meaning, as their antagonists would have it, but rather return the viewer to Catholic thinking. She elaborates how “the entire drama of Christian history hinges on the moment when ‘the Word was made Flesh’” and situates these works within that context where the central events in the Christian faith: Christ’s Incarnation, his physical death and his bodily Resurrection and the Transubstantiation emphasize the physicality of action, ritual and liturgy (Heartney 6). It is too simplistic to describe Bacon as a Catholic artist in this regard but his work can certainly be couched in this vein as exploring related issues, such as carnality, the struggle between life and death, and flesh and bone, where flesh is aligned to the spirit. He also shows the imperceptibility between the human and the animal in works like Crucifixion (1965) where the form sliding down the waste chute is neither simply human nor animal, both and beyond. And in his crucifixion triptychs and other “non-religious” works he explores the moment of death, the point at which flesh becomes meat; in biblical terms, the cry at the ninth hour. The paradox is that in fleshing out the brutality of the crucifixion he ends up reinforcing the religiosity of the symbol of Christ on the Cross.

111   Stylistic Affinities

De Maistre should not simply be credited as the painter who taught Bacon the fundamentals of oil painting or as the person who introduced Bacon to the power of Christian imagery, but should also be recognized for exposing him to points of style that go beyond the mere technical, most notably in his abstraction of the figure. De Maistre’s style is sometimes erroneously described as Cubist or post-Cubist. Johnson argues that his style lacks the philosophy or systematization of Cubism. He is not attempting to “fragment and rebuild form” in the manner employed by the analytic and synthetic phases of Cubism, as characterized in the work of Picasso and Braque (19). Nor is he emulating other Cubists such as Albert Gleizes who sought “the underlying principles of form and colour rather than representation” (21). He is, however, interested in the Cubist tendency to fragment form and to present multiple perspectives, in the vein of Cèzanne, which reflected his training under Rubbo. Lesley Harding and Sue Cramer make a distinction between “a cubist appearance,” which they argue de Maistre adopted, “rather than a sensibility” (Harding and Cramer 61). His work involves flattening picture space and geometrizing form through the interplay of planes that create form and explores space and light. When applied to figures, such as Pietà, this dramatizes the emotions between the figures thereby underscoring the sorrow of the Mother. Rosemary Crumlin describes how he “was absorbed in the formal intricacies of painting, in the rhythmic organization of shapes on the flat surface of the canvas, and in the way colour, if carefully orchestrated, can create a kind of visual music” (24).

Bacon adopted certain features and motifs which are seen in de Maistre’s works but distorts them to idiosyncratic ends. While de Maistre adhered to representational conventions in painting, Bacon grossly subverts conventions. All the ontological certainties that we have about objects are displaced. In writing about depiction in Bacon’s art, Ernst van Alphen (13) outlines the implications of Bacon’s subversions of object functionality by how it adds to the difficulty of interpretation. Mirrors do not reflect accurately, lights do not project accurate shadows, doors do not help anchor the spatial co-ordinates in the room but instead contribute to the sense of spatial ambiguity; furthermore, bodies do not operate as they should in that the skin or skeleton fails to hold the form together. In Annunciation, de Maistre depicts the shadows cast by the two figures. De Maistre’s shadows are optically accurate in the way they fall, whereas in numerous works by Bacon the shadows become extensions of the body or are metaphoric attempts of the flesh exiting the body envelope.15 Bacon not only used the strong sense of shadow from de Maistre but also its palpability, where it exerts a strong presence. Since Bacon’s shadows are cast erratically, the substantiality of their form creates a visual sense of confusion as we are unable to trace the outline of the figure.

Another characteristic of de Maistre’s paintings seen in Bacon is the strong sense of place, which (in Bacon’s work) does not ground the forms but instead compounds the sense of dislocation. De Maistre creates an interesting sense of interiority by situating his figures in interiors that are comprised of a number of intersecting planes that fragment the space and create multiple perspectives. In most cases it is apparent whether the ground is an interior or landscape, but in Annunciation we have features of both, which is disorienting. De Maistre often places the focal point in the corner of the room, which gives a strong sense of enclosure and interiority, as seen in the still life Hyacinths (1955), for example. New Atlantis, similarly, hones in on the corner of a room with an open door and paintings resting against the walls. Bacon’s rooms are often anonymous and characterless spaces, but in spite of this, the sense of the interior, and concomitantly the figure/ground relationship, is very significant in his work. But, unlike de Maistre’s work, architectural features are not wedded to their function, instead they subvert it, so doors or windows do not function as openings, space curves around itself, objects do not have gravity, and so on. His use of curved walls occlude space further as do his flat backgrounds.

Color is one point of difference between the two artists. De Maistre uses color illustratively. The numerous abstract forms and geometrical planes are defined through coloration, which is not the case in Bacon. It is plausible that Bacon was influenced by de Maistre’s experimental and evocative sense of color and, while the saturation is different in Bacon’s own work, he was clearly influenced by the strong use of tonality. But another point of difference is the significance of painterliness in Bacon’s work, or malerisch, as it is often described, which is at odds with de Maistre’s highly stylized approach, with its emphasis on line, flatness, and stylization.

As well as the adoption of particular stylistic features, there are also certain motifs that Bacon apparently adopts from de Maistre. Brighton suggests that Bacon’s coupling male figures as seen in Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (1967) are prefigured in de Maistre’s Studio Interior (c. 1931) (23). The most explicit example is the bird-like form in de Maistre’s Figure by Bath (1937), which takes on a sinister edge when adopted in Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) (Johnson 22). In the 1920s and 1930s Picasso started to experiment with the human form through distortion. Bacon’s debt to Picasso, seen in his work from 1933 to the mid-1940s, has been acknowledged by commentators (Sylvester 8,126; Baldassari). Equally, de Maistre’s time in France in the 1920s and 1930s, would have acquainted him with Picasso’s contemporary work of biomorphic forms. Annunciation and Studio Interior (1931) reveal de Maistre’s tendency to encase a biomorphic figurative subject by abstract and fragmented surrounding forms. While Picasso’s influence on Bacon is indisputable, de Maistre’s biomorphic forms would have been vivid to Bacon, and reminders of the influence of Picasso’s tendency to fragment form. It is very likely that Bacon’s interest in Picasso was enlivened by de Maistre’s interest in biomorphic forms and abstraction. Furthermore, the similarity between de Maistre’s form in Figure by Bath and Bacon’s third figure in his1944 triptych strongly suggests a direct influence.16 The transformation of de Maistre’s benign and quirky form into a symbol of prophetic despair marking postwar desperation encapsulates the radically different outlooks and visions of these artists. This biomorphic form, derived from de Maistre, retained its power in Bacon’s mindset and would be unleashed some forty years later in his Second Version of Triptych of 1944 (1988). This example raises an important issue regarding how de Maistre’s influence has been downplayed and marginalized in scholarship on Bacon. It is significant that Johnson, whose expertise is on de Maistre and not Bacon, cites the influence of the biomorphic form of Figure by Bath. Commentators on Bacon have instead preferred more grandiose interpretations of Bacon’s three forms of his 1944 triptych including the Eumenides or variants on the figures of sorrow at the base of a Cross (Arya 68). This raises the question as to whether it would be seen to compromise Bacon’s cultural caché if he were acknowledged to be influenced by a relatively lesser-known artist, especially within the context of this particular attribution. However, it is very likely that this banal form (in de Maistre) marked the inception of the three studies.

There are also instances where influence works the other way. De Maistre’s Annunciation features a white biomorphic form that imitates Bacon’s Crucifixion, completed a year earlier, of a skeletal white form on a black background. The white looming form in Annunciation communicates with a shrouded figure in an ambiguous interior that could be outdoors or in the corner of a room. Surrounding, on all sides, are house-like facades. The scene is unremarkable in many ways and conveys the biblical event in bathetic rather than triumphant tones. The transformation of the form from Bacon to de Maistre is characteristically deflationary. Grandeur and spectrality give way to understated representation. Other correspondences include the allusion between de Maistre’s Crucifixion (c. 1945) and the figure in the left panel of Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, where the head is bowed and turned at the same angle.

IV   Reassessment: The Place of de Maistre in Bacon’s Oeuvre

Although their period of overlap was short lived, lasting less than a decade, de Maistre was an important figure in Bacon’s early career, and significant in his transition from design to painting. Bacon’s relationship with Eric Hall in 1934 represented a new phase in his life, and he found in Hall a mentor who would support him both personally and professionally for the next fourteen years. Similarly, de Maistre’s religious calling led him in a different direction. Commentaries vary in the relative importance they place on the mentoring role de Maistre had, with Peppiatt singling him out as Bacon’s first mentor, although he does qualify the impact he had adding that “de Maistre’s forcefully expressed but fundamentally derivative imagery had no real awakening effect on Bacon’s imagination” (72).Johnson qualifies the nature of the relationship in the following way, arguing that de Maistre claimed that he had “shown Bacon a few things” but that does not equate to him being “the man who taught Francis Bacon to paint” (21). Having established that de Maistre aided Bacon both in his development as a painter and also in his career by introducing him to useful contacts and involving him in exhibitions, perhaps the focus should now be placed on points of stylistic and thematic influence.

Their standing in the art world can be symbolized in the approaches they expressed to the bird-like form in the paintings discussed earlier. In de Maistre it was decorative and frivolous. In Bacon’s reworking it became portentous. De Maistre is credited with being one of Australia’s first abstract artists, and for his pioneering color and music system. His religious artworks were also important in the relationship they forged between traditional Christian imagery and abstraction. He is included in studies on Australian art including the Bernard Smith’s seminal study Australian Painting (1962) and Rosemary Crumlin’s Images of Religion in Australian Art (1988) but is often overlooked in monographs on British art. Johnson’s division between his Australian and English year reflects a life of two halves, both in his life experiences but also in the subsequent reception of his artwork. More work needs to be done to reappraise his work within the context of British art and culture. His religious works are homed in church institutions across Britain, including Westminster Cathedral—one of the most well-known Catholic churches in the country. His influence on Bacon’s oeuvre, which went beyond mere technical instruction to matters of style and even subject matter, also underscores his significance in British art.

Notes

1 And in fact had very little formal schooling (see Brighton 3 and Davies 4).

2 x-ray analysis shows that Bacon’s ‘Head’ c.1948 had previously been used by de Maistre, whose painting is visible underneath Bacon’s brushstrokes. De Maistre’s signature is also visible (Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, 184).

3 See Harrison, In Camera—Francis Bacon; Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné.

4 John Rothenstein cites many reasons for de Maistre’s lack of success, attributing it to his reticent and non-showy personality and his non-fashionable art which did not fit into any “convenient category” (Roy de Maistre 6). Rothenstein is more frank and less sparing about de Maistre’s lack of success in his chapter on de Maistre in his Modern English Painters than he was in his tribute to him in his retrospective (172, 182).

5 Rothenstein, and other accounts taking their lead from him, state that while he exhibited in London in the early 1930s, he did not live there until later on in the decade, and that in those years he lived in France, or at least divided his time between England and France (Roy de Maistre 8; Modern English Painters 178). Heather Johnson argues that de Maistre actually settled in London in 1930 and remained there whilst taking short trips to France (St. Jean de Luz and Paris) (Johnson 18).

6 Andrew Brighton, drawing on Patrick White’s account, who was de Maistre’s lover, seizes on the significance of the addition of ‘Joseph,’ from Joseph de Maistre, the eighteenth-century philosopher. Brighton claims that there are similarities in their world views and that the artist’s adoption of the forename confirms the connection (25). I think that such a reading is tenuous.

7 Ironically the visual aesthetic of modernism became more acceptable in Australia when de Maistre had moved to London.

8 The Blake Prize for Religious Art was founded in 1950 and was the idea of a Jesuit priest, Michael Scott, and a Jewish businessman, Richard Morley, who saw it as a way of enabling the Church to become a patron of the arts and to forge a relationship thereby encouraging the dialogue between the two domains (see Crumlin 14, 16).

9 Bacon had a negative and destructive relationship with his own father, as biographical sources attest (see Sylvester 71; see also Brighton 13).

10 Rothenstein, Modern English Painters 175. He also had an exhibition of the same title.

11 Roger Wollen discusses the history of the Methodist art collection and the objectives of both Dr. John M. Gibbs and his father Rev. Douglas Wollen, a Methodist minister, in the two catalogues for the Methodist art collection (The Methodist Church Collection; Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection).

12 In one of the Stations Pietà and other works including Deposition (1946) de Maistre uses certain configurations such as a crown of thorns which asserts a strong symbolic presence and prefigures Graham Sutherland’s use of thorns in his own paintings of thorn trees in the 1940s.

13 Prior to the publication of the 2016 catalogue raisonné it was widely held that Bacon painted three crucifixions in 1933. One of these works in fact has been revealed as not being of a crucifixion (although the imagery could suggest otherwise) and was inspired by Picasso’s La Danse hence the retitling, After Picasso, ‘La Danse’ (1933). (Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné 122).

14 Whether they did or not, what is indisputable is that de Maistre saw Bacon’s paintings and they are depicted in his paintings of Bacon’s studio, as seen in Atlantis, for example.

15 For example, Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1986), Portrait of John Edwards (1988) and the third panels from Triptych, Studies from the Human Body (1970) and Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981).

16 The figure in the right panel most explicitly resembles de Maistre’s figure but to some extent all three forms seem like animated versions of it, albeit with the exaggerated buccal cavities.

Works Cited

Arya, Rina. *Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World*. Farnham, England: Lund Humphries.

Baldassari, Anne. *Bacon—Picasso: The Life of Images.* Trans. David Radzinowicz. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.

Brighton, Andrew. *Francis Bacon*. London: Tate, 2001.

Crumlin, Rosemary. *Images of Religion in Australian Art*. Kensington, Australia: Bay Books, 1988.

Davies, Hugh M. *Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928–1958*. New York: Garland, 1978.

Gale, Matthew, and Chris Stephens, eds. *Francis Bacon*. London: Tate, 2008.

Geldzahler, Henry, ed. “Francis Bacon: remarks from an interview with Peter Beard.” *Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968–1974*. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.

Harding, Lesley, and Sue Cramer. *Cubism & Australian Art.* Carlton, Australia: The Miegunyah Press, 2009.

Harrison, Martin. In Camera—Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Harrison, Martin, ed., and Rebecca Daniels. *Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné*. London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016

Heartney, Eleanor. *Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art*. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004.

Johnson, Heather. Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930–1968. Sydney, Australia: Craftsman House, 1995.

Peppiatt, Michael. *Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma*. London: Constable, 2008.

Rothenstein, John. *Modern English Painters: Volume ii*, Nash to Bawden. London: Macdonald & Co., 1976.

Rothenstein, John. Roy de Maistre: A retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings from 1917–1960. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1960.

Shone, Richard. “Francis Bacon in 1930: An Early Exhibition Rediscovered.” *The Burlington Magazine* 138. 1117 (Apr. 1996): 253–255.

Sylvester, David. *Interviews with Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact.* London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

Van Alphen, Ernst. *Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self.* London: Reaktion Books, 1992.

White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

Wollen, Roger. Catalogue of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art: with an account of the Collection’s history. Oxford: The Trustees of the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art, 2003.

Wollen, Roger. The Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art: An Introduction. Oxford: The Trustees of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art, 2000.

Fakon: Fake Bacon

The most ridiculous—and expensive—fake art scandals and spats of the year

AMAH-ROSE ABRAMS | ART & LAW | ARTNET NEWS | TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2016

Fakes and forgeries in the art world are the stuff of legend, the subject of books, films, and television series the world over. In real life, they land people behind bars. 2016 brought us many unwanted things, but it also appears to have been a year when a huge amount of authenticity disputes took place. The spats took shape from contested provenance, to painters faking their own work, to a multimillion dollar Old Masters scandal. From farce to tragedy, we’ve compiled the highlights of this year’s biggest art forgery scandals below.

Francis Bacon made it notoriously difficult to authenticate his work, by refusing to take part in the compilation of his catalogue raisonné or speak to those entrusted with the task. That being said, when these gems (see below) came onto the market via an ex-boyfriend of Bacon, they were rejected from the catalogue raisonné before going up for sale at a London gallery. Just looking at these loose sketches, one is forced to consider—even if Bacon himself did make them—whether he would ever want them to see the light of day.

Francis Bacon in Your Blood **by Michael Peppiatt**

   — the artist’s life

In contrast to the bleakness of his art, this starry-eyed chronicle shows

the painter could be genial, generous and waspishly funny

ANTHONY QUINN  | REVIEW  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  THURSDAY 24 DECEMBER 2016

In the summer of 1963, exactly 200 years after James Boswell first met Dr Johnson, an impressionable young man named Michael Peppiatt was introduced to Francis Bacon in a Soho pub, the French House. It was a momentous occasion, for one of them at least. Peppiatt, a 21-year-old art history student at Cambridge, revered the painter, then (at 53) in the full flush of his talent, and was tickled to be taken under his capacious wing. He found himself not merely part of Bacon’s court on his noon-to-night jaunts around the fancy restaurants and louche drinking-dens of London but his chief confidant and protégé.

The photographer John Deakin, who had introduced them at “the French” that day, later remarked to Peppiatt: “It’s incredible, but you’ve become a sort of Boswell to Francis...He talks to you about everything”. His advice is to “get it all down”, to be the painter’s amanuensis and thus ensure his own place in the mythology of Bacon’s “gilded gutter life”.

Peppiatt didn’t need telling twice. In the years since Bacon’s death in 1992 he has published five books about his hero, including a full-length biography, Anatomy of an Enigma, in 1996. One might have considered that a sufficiency, but here comes another, this one a memoir of their friendship over 30 years and a reckoning of Peppiatt’s own development in his mentor’s shadow.

The Boswell-Johnson analogy, however, now looks rather presumptuous. For one thing, Boswell – despite his buffoonery – was a superb writer even before he began the biography that was his life’s work (see his London Journal). For another, his subject was a brilliant talker whose wit and bons mots still crackle through the language

On neither count can Peppiatt or Bacon remotely compare. Francis Bacon in Your Blood is partly a record of its subject’s table talk, which Peppiatt sets down as though recalling it verbatim. The strategy is a risky one. While Bacon was indisputably a great painter, his was not a great mind, and the deeper one reads into the book the more threadbare and repetitious its contents appear. His philosophy, if such it can be called, was one of devil-may-care nihilism, expressed in a few gnomic phrases: Life is ridiculous and futile. We come from nothing and return to nothing. Existence is a kind of charade. His “nervous system” is a “compost” from which his paintings emerge.

These same pronouncements keep coming around, until they take on an incantatory air. But they are hardly profound. At one point he admits, “half the time I don’t know what my painting’s about”.

It’s a telling moment: surely the greatness of Bacon’s work lies locked in his subconscious, of which there can be no telling. Or as Henry James put it, “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Why should we expect a painter to be able to explain its mystery?

And yet the bleakness of Bacon’s paintings – the screaming heads, the flayed and distorted flesh – is strikingly at odds with his social exuberance. As a host, fortified by drink and company, he could be genial and generous and waspishly funny. Over oysters and Krug at Wheeler’s, or caviar and grouse at Claridge’s, Bacon carpes the diem and most of the noctem, with Peppiatt in grateful attendance.

If the painter is vague about his own art, he is magisterial about others’. He admires Velázquez, Giacometti, Picasso; he is respectful of Lucian Freud (though he later declares that he has “the smallest cock in England”); the rest – Jackson Pollock (“the old lace-maker”), Matisse (“squalid little forms”), Hockney (“there’s nothing really there”) – he disdains. Abstract art he dismisses as “a free fancy about nothing”. He says that he can’t read novels – “I find them so boring” – yet goes on to profess his “deep” admiration of Proust and Joyce, apparently unaware that they were both novelists. If Peppiatt saw the contradiction he failed (or didn’t dare) to point it out. Peppiatt makes a starry-eyed chronicler, as besotted with his patron’s fine wine and grub as he is with his closeness to the throne.

Yet one does wonder what he could have offered in return to Bacon. The thought occurs to Peppiatt, too, worried that he might just be a “person from Porlock”, forever getting in the way of genius. Beyond an ability to speak French and supply company at a moment’s notice, the young man has very little to recommend him – as Sonia Orwell, another Bacon intimate, would gloweringly point out. But “Francis” seems content to have made him his pet, and besides, he’s convinced that “all men are really homosexual”, even if they don’t realise it.

Peppiatt proceeds on his girlfriends coming and going, though one is never in doubt that Bacon remains the most important figure in his life – a substitute, moreover, for his own unsatisfactory father, a manic-depressive who bullied the family for years

The underlying tension between master and protégé keeps the pages turning, though Peppiatt’s prose seldom quickens the pace. He shows no great resistance to a cliche (“over the moon” and “rose-tinted spectacles” are waved through) and his dipping in and out of the present tense doesn’t lend his narrative the freshness he intends

His social nervousness, which might otherwise have been touching, makes his writing plod the more: “When I’m doing one of my large parties I serve a spicy chicken curry with exotic condiments, much appreciated by my French friends, or for a sit-down dinner I often make a slowly braised boeuf bourguignon, to which in a slight departure from the classic recipe I add mushrooms and top with diced bacon, croutons and crisp-fried parsley – the latter being something I know Francis likes especially, since we had it once in a restaurant on some grilled fish and he pronounced it ‘one of the most delicious things you can possibly eat’.” Monsieur Pooter lives – and cooks too!

Oddly, Peppiatt is at his most readable on Bacon’s painting, the hardest trick of all, and the one area in which he allows his critical discernment the upper hand. Elsewhere his pride and his gratitude smudge the portrait – he never really pays Bacon the tribute of suspecting him

Their relationship did not have a happy ending. The first cracks opened when Bacon vetoed Peppiatt’s projected biography of him, despite his long service as bag-carrier and Boswelliser. The rift became wider when Peppiatt announced he was about to become a father for the first time. Bacon, pale with fury, reacts to the news as a personal “affront”.

Was this a heterosexual step too far? Did Bacon, now old and ill, fear the prospect of “losing” his one-time disciple? Perhaps he had become too attached to the idea of the tragic exit, like that of his troubled lover George Dyer, who killed himself in a Paris hotel bathroom on the eve of Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais. (Peppiatt’s reminiscence of Dyer, spouting broad cockney-sparrowisms, is pitifully inadequate).

Long goodbyes didn’t suit Francis Bacon, and one wonders if his shade would be any better pleased by his friend’s ongoing parade of memorials.

**Francis Bacon painting may be sold**

by **Yorkshire council to boost funds**

BY MAL ROGERS |  NEWS  |  THE IRISH POST  | ESTABLISHED 1970 | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2016

A PAINTING by Dublin-born Francis Bacon may be sold at auction to help the finances of Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire. The council has already been forced to close two museums, with one more scheduled to close its doors next year. The sale of the Bacon painting could raise up to £60million and help shore up council funds.

The painting, entitled *Figure Study II*, is kept in storage in Huddersfield Art Gallery’s vaults as nowhere locally is secure enough to exhibit such a valuable painting.

Figure Study II is described as “a screaming mouth and the eyeless face of a sub-human creature” Because of the great value of the painting, it is expensive to insure, and several councillors believe it is pointless to keep such a valuable work of art in storage while the council is so cash-strapped.

The 1940s Bacon painting came to be in the possession of the council through a gift from the Contemporary Art Society, which presented it to Batley’s Bagshaw Museum more than 60 years ago. But selling the work of art may not be straightforward.

Andrew Cooper, leader of the Green Party in Huddersfield confirmed to The Irish Post that the legal position is unclear. “There may well be a restrictive covenant preventing us from selling the painting — attached to its gift status from the Contemporary Art Society. We currently have experts looking into the situation.”

Mr Cooper said he was sorry that the situation had arisen, but that it was unavoidable. “We’re being starved locally of funds by the UK Government, so desperation is driving us to this point.

“We would love to keep a Francis Bacon painting, but we badly need funds right across the board — from adult care services to keeping our libraries going.” The Kirklees Council is made up of a broad range of political outlook, but it seems there is some agreement over selling the painting.

“There is a broad consensus that we should at least find out what the position is. "Nobody is running around calling us Philistines for suggesting this move; I think all councillors realise the dire situation we’re in, and are happy to clarify the situation,” Mr Cooper told The Irish Post.

Francis Bacon was born in the heart of Dublin. The family moved variously between Dublin, London, Co. Kildare and Co. Laois. Since Bacon’s death in 1992 in Spain, his reputation and value of his paintings have grown steadily.

In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set a world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction: $142.4million. This was subsequently topped in 2015 by a Picasso painting.

**Francis Bacon in your Blood — A Memoir**

When Michael Peppiatt stepped inside the French House, a dark, dank Soho pub, one busy

lunchtime in June 1963, he could hardly have anticipated how life-changing an impact the

next few hours would afford him.

BILLY O’CALLAGHAN   |   BOOK REVIEW   |   IRISH EXAMINER   |   SATURDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2017

A 21 year-old Cambridge student who’d just become editor of the university’s arts journal, he was hunting a few words of wisdom from one of the lions of the painting world, Francis Bacon, and maybe, too, dreaming of enlightenment. Gaining access seemed largely wishful thinking, but through the photographer, John Deakin, he soon found himself sitting at the great man’s side. It was a position he would maintain for the next three decades, in the process becoming Bacon’s sidekick, servile recorder, put-upon apprentice, confidante and, in a myriad of ways, his confessor.

This is not a biography, Peppiatt has already written that, *Francis Bacon — Anatomy of an Enigma*, 20 years ago, in fact, along with three more books that offer glimpses and reflections of the one of the 20th century’s most compelling artists. Rather, this is an analysis of a long and often lopsided friendship, a reflection by Peppiatt on his own life, and a contemplation on the cost and worth of living in the often generous, frequently demanding shadow of a genius.

In the book’s preface he tells us “Bacon comes across here in ways that no formal biography could convey: close up and unguarded, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the legend that has grown up around him”. The opening pages, which depict in vivid fashion that historic first meeting, set the tone for what is to come, and if there is an inevitable imbalance between the two main personalities involved then that in no way lessens the worth of book, or the story being told.

Bacon is larger than reality in almost every conceivable way, a walking, bloviating sackful of contradictions, a goading presence on every page, living loose and wild from within his cadre of cartoonish celebrity hangers-on, pushing all the boundaries of excess and masochism, trawling the most sordid corners of the gutteral nightlife in search of the next thrill, the next kick, the next cerebral high.

However, he is also gentle, in moments, and soulful, and fascinated at the kinds of normality that exist beyond what he might have regarded as his Pale. And always, there is the sanctuary, salvation and protective shield of his art, his true reason for breathing. Measured against such a full-blown creation, the author is a spare part, yet it is this very position that provides the optimal view of an existence so hard-spent.

Peppiatt, for his part, is a witness but also a student, absorbing lessons not only about the work but about all that feeds it and makes it whole. He paddles perhaps in the shallows, careful of lines that can’t be easily uncrossed, but finds it impossible to resist falling under the spell of the bacchanal and its rampant conductor.

Even after escaping to Paris, even after finding love, a wife, starting a family, forging a separate life for himself, the artist remains a dominating presence, colouring every detail of the world.

“Having lived to tell the tale, I recount it here as indiscreetly as Bacon once recommended I should, sketching in the parallel evens of my own life as the story unfolds.” The result is “a double portrait, a diptych of the kind Bacon sometimes painted, showing two profiles, two personalities, two lives closely intertwined.” Depicting as much, in a readable manner, is a considerable achievement.

Francis Bacon painting goes on show at Barber Institute

Gallery at the University of Birmingham is showcasing a Bacon work for the first time

By TAMLYN JONES  |  **WHAT’S ON** |  **ARTS & CULTURE** |  BIRMINGHAM MAIL | TUESDAY 14 FEBRUARY 2017

**A painting by renowned artist Francis Bacon has gone on display in Birmingham.** The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is showing *Two Figures in a Room*, 1959 for the next six weeks at its gallery on the University of Birmingham campus in Edgbaston.

The Barber does not own a work by him and no example has ever been exhibited there previously. *Two Figures in a Room* has been lent to the Barber by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia — only the second time it has been shown publicly in the UK outside the centre since 1962.

The painting is a disquieting image from Bacon’s middle years, one of a series of similar composition. The Barber said the faceless figures may be read as two lovers, apparently both men, a daring and provocative image to paint at a time when homosexual acts between men in private were still illegal in the UK.

Works by Matisse and Degas featuring bathers, and even the Michelangelo sculpture *Crouching Boy*, have been suggested as sources for the two figures, the institute says. *Two Figures* in a Room joins Frank Auerbach’s *Primrose Hill — Winter* (1981/2) — the only painting in the Barber collection by a living artist — also on display in the Red Gallery.

Deputy director Robert Wenley said: "Both juxtapositions emphasise the continuity of the European painting tradition and the continuing relevance of historic art to modern and contemporary artists."

The painting is on display until March 26

          ***Two Figures in a Room*, 1959, by Francis Bacon **at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts****

**The Art of Rivalry**

**when Bacon met Freud and other creative friendships**

How Picasso became pals with Matisse and why Manet slashed a Degas …

all in Sebastian Smee’s study of painter friends

ANTHONY QUINN   |   THE GUARDIAN   | FRIDAY 3 FEBRUARY 2017

In the end, the true artist goes it alone, no matter what the promptings of advisers, critics, friends. Especially those friends who are artists themselves, for without even knowing it they may also be your rivals. It’s not that the competitive impulse hardwired into so much artistic enterprise is necessarily a harmful one. It might be the thing that drives you on, that piques what this new book describes as “the yearning to be unique, original, inimitable”. But it is just as well to assume the brace position when the ambition of the artist collides with the duty of friendship.

The Art of Rivalry selects four pairs of artists who were also pals and investigates the streams of influence that flowed between each pair. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and   and Willem de Kooning are led into the ring like prizefighters, each eyeballing the other in a posthumous contest of achievement. Art being an unpredictable and often indecipherable commodity, it isn’t clear what conclusions the book is leading us towards. What Sebastian Smee does essentially is to reformulate familiar material – biography, art history, gossip – by viewing it through the prism of a close friendship. Perhaps the most enjoyable of the pairings is Bacon and Freud, because the ambivalence between them feels so awkward and profound. The earliest battleground of their friendship was Freud’s exquisite 1952 portrait of Bacon, painted on copper plate in a series of sittings close enough for artist and subject to be touching knees. Mesmerising, memorable, utterly modern, the picture pierced to the very core of Bacon’s volatile nature, somehow giving his face, in Robert Hughes’s great phrase, “the silent intensity of a grenade in the millisecond before it goes off”. Sadly it was stolen from the wall of a German museum in 1988 and has never been recovered.

What attracts one artist to another in this account is more than a matter of professional admiration. It is the magnetic force of personality, of daring to be one’s own man. Freud once said of Bacon, “His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.” He envied the older man’s social charm and gregariousness as well as his ruthless attitude to his work (Bacon would destroy whatever he considered unsatisfactory). A century earlier, in Paris, Manet’s sense of passionate conviction would inspire Degas to cultivate a similar boldness of outlook. In the early days of their friendship Picasso, the uncertain expatriate, was struck by the self-possession and ease of Matisse. De Kooning, who called his friend Pollock “the painting cowboy”, was beguiled by the younger man’s outlandishness, his sense of freedom, and his “desperate joy”. Temperament was as much a subject of emulation as technique.

Smee is good on the sense of these friendships as a two-horse race. When one of them enjoys a coup or some kind of breakthrough, you feel the other man brood and take stock: how did he do that? It is not about admiration expressed through gritted teeth – there seems a genuine urge to absorb the other’s example, and then adapt it. Under Bacon’s influence, Freud quit drawing for years to explore the possibilities of paint. In time, it would enable his “mature” style and catapult him into the firmament of international masters. But it’s when the glaze of amity begins to crack that the reader’s interest quickens.

Matisse regarded Picasso “almost as a younger brother”, encouraging him, introducing him to family and friends. When offered a gift from Matisse’s studio, Picasso asked for the portrait of his daughter Marguerite, an unusual choice given Picasso’s own struggle with fatherhood: he had recently returned his 13-year-old adopted daughter to the orphanage. He kept the picture all of his life, yet it didn’t prevent him one night – in a stew of resentment towards Matisse – firing toy arrows at it.

Influence, as we know, can create anxiety. While there is pleasure in falling under another’s spell, there comes the countervailing impulse to protect your own identity – “to push back”, in Smee’s phrase. It provokes strange behaviour. One of the famous stories here is of Degas’s 1868-69 portrait of Manet and his wife, Suzanne. As a portrait of a marriage it revealed rather more than Manet liked – the wife absorbed at her piano, the husband sprawled in a pose of bored distraction, perhaps dreaming of another woman. When Degas later visited Manet’s studio, he noticed that the painting he had given the couple had suffered an assault: the canvas had been slashed with a knife through Suzanne’s face. The culprit turned out to be Manet himself, for reasons unknown. They stayed friends, but it marked a break. Degas, one-time protege, had ambushed the master and asserted his independence. “A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime,” he once said – and he should know.

In the last months of his life, Jackson Pollock fell in with a younger woman, an artist named Ruth Kligman. She was the only survivor of the car crash that killed Pollock and another friend. Within a year De Kooning, the dead man’s friend and rival, himself began a relationship with Kligman, which lasted seven years – yet when Kligman later wrote a memoir, it was about her time with Pollock. The connection endured: in 1963, De Kooning moved to a house opposite the cemetery where Pollock was buried. It is a tale twisted enough for a Hitchcock movie.

Smee doesn’t have any new material, but he shuffles the pack of familiar stories with dexterity and enthusiasm. His prose, spruce and well-mannered for the most part, suffers minor lapses here and there. He writes “impunity” when he means “impudence”, “a burr in the side” is surely meant to be “a thorn” and so on. He gets the year of Freud’s death wrong, and is perhaps the only man in the world who thinks the Titanic went down in 1913 – a few small blemishes to be painted out when the paperback comes round. As a study of the dynamics of friendship between artists it offers some useful lessons, not the least of them in the tension that may inform every friendship: the longing to be close against the need to stand apart.

The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art is published by Profile.



                                                                                   **Admiration and anxiety … Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in 1974.**

Francis Bacon: a Brush With Violence

RACHEL COOKE   |   CULTURE   |   NEW STATESMAN | THURSDAY 2 FEBRUARY 2017

Beauty is the thing right now, isn’t it? All I want to do is to sink down into music, novels, art. On which note, the documentary Francis Bacon: a Brush With Violence (28 January, 9pm) seemed to me to be mistitled – and not only because of the woeful pun. Beauty, I say, not violence. The biographer John Richardson, a friend of the artist, said it best at the end of the film, when he suggested that these days people think of Bacon almost as a religious painter, the disgust that trailed his earliest big shows in the 1940s having long since dissipated. Gazing at the paintings, you feel as someone might have done in the 16th century on catching sight of a pietà. What I get from Bacon’s work is an other-worldliness: a transporting, almost paralysing sense of awe. The filth and brutality are almost beside the point.

This is not to criticise Richard Curson Smith’s gossipy but never prurient film. It was incredibly good, elegantly combining footage of Bacon – whose voice always startles me by sounding of the drawing room rather than the gutter – with some transfixing talking heads. Listening to Richardson was thrilling. (“Everything was torn, everything was dirty, everything was . . . wonderful,” he said of Bacon’s studio.)

The same was true of another friend, Nadine Haim. She had never been his subject, she noted, an unfiltered cigarette in her hand. But were he alive now, perhaps her wrinkles would – at this she laughed, darkly – encourage him to take up his brush. Rather less compelling were the Bacon-fryer-in-chief, his biographer Michael Peppiatt, who fell back on all the old Jekyll and Hyde clichés; and Damien Hirst, still stupidly insistent in the matter of his kinship with the master.

Only one thing spoiled the drama for me. Why are film-makers so afraid of silence and so determined to avoid it by using music? Quiet was badly needed here: moments in which, some terrible biographical truth or infelicity having been uttered, we might have paused to take it all in.

THREE MORE SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN CONNECTION

WITH THEFT OF FIVE FRANCIS BACON PAINTINGS

NEWS   |   MADRID   |   ARTFORUM   |   WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2017

After seven suspects were arrested last in connection with the 2015 theft of five Francis Bacon paintings, together valued at over $27 million, El Pais reports that Spanish authorities have arrested three more people they believe to be involved in the case.

**The three new detainees are allegedly the criminals who actually broke into a private home containing the works. The seven previously arrested are considered the masterminds of the robbery.**

According to the general director of police in Spain, the three are members of an organized group dedicated to robbing homes and establishments throughout the country.

Three held for theft of £21m Bacons

   GRAHAM KEELEY | MADRID | THE TIMES | WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 01 2017

Spanish police have arrested three men in connection with the theft of five paintings by Francis Bacon worth £21 million.

Police raided six homes in the Madrid region and seized a gun, ammunition, manuals for cracking safes, laser devices and oxy-fuel cylinders used to cut metal. Officers said that the suspects were “directly linked” to the robbery and were part of a gang which burgled homes across Spain.

In July 2015 portraits and landscapes by Bacon were stolen from a house in an affluent neighbourhood of the Spanish capital in a break-in police described as “worthy of a Hollywood movie”.

The thieves observed the movements of the home owner and waited until he was away before they struck, disabling the alarm system at the house. They were not seen by security staff or neighbours. The thieves, who also took a safe containing coins and jewels, left no trace inside.

The stolen paintings were bequeathed by Bacon to his close friend José Capelo Blanco, a Spanish financier. Among the stolen works of art is a portrait of Mr Capelo.

Seven men were arrested last May after a tip-off from a British company that tracks stolen art. The London-based company had received an email from a man living in Sitges, near Barcelona, with images of one of the stolen paintings. The man inquired if the painting was on a list of stolen works of art.

The British company passed the information to a specialised unit of the Spanish police which deals in art thefts.

Detectives tracked down the company that had leased the camera used to take the photographs of the stolen painting and details of the customer who hired the equipment.

The man who allegedly took the photographs was arrested at his home with another man. None of the paintings has been recovered. The theft is one of the biggest art heists in Spain in recent years.

Mr Capelo Blanco, 61, inherited the works when Bacon died in Madrid in 1992. He was in London when the theft at his home occurred. Mr Capelo met Bacon at a party in honour of the choreographer Frederick Ashton, when the artist was 78 years old.

Mr Capelo went on to pose for Bacon for a 1987 portrait and a 1991 triptych, which is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

                             **One of the portraits stolen from the home of a Spanish financier**

                              **in a raid described by police as “worthy of a Hollywood movie”**

Remembering John Hurt and the Colony Room

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world.

RAKEWELL | APOLLO  | WEDNESDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2017



It was with great sadness that Rakewell learned of the passing of actor John Hurt, star of Alien, The Elephant Man and much more. Hurt, whom the Rake encountered propping up the bar of the French House with a glass of tonic on more than one occasion, came to London in the ’50s to study as an art student. Aside from the fateful afternoon on which Hurt first encountered Quentin Crisp, whom he would twice portray on screen, and who was the model in one of his life drawing classes, St Martin’s did not contribute greatly to his future thespian success. But this is not to suggest it was the limit to his ties with the art world.

As art students were supposed to do in those days, Hurt fell under the spell of the boho set of Soho’s Colony Room club. Quickly becoming a regular at the infamous dive bar, which from 1948 fostered three generations of artists. According to some testimony, Hurt was ‘most often seen at The Colony falling down its staircase’.

But reminiscing about the bar when it finally closed in 2008, Quietus editor John Doran remembered quite differently: ‘The first time I ascended those stairs I nearly got knocked back down again by John Hurt who was being helped on his way by alcohol, gravity and a gentle push from some burly chaps, who shouted after him: “Fuck off!”’

Nevertheless, Hurt made many friends among the Colony’s clientele, not least founding member Francis Bacon. Indeed, according to artist Mark Clark, when the great painter had fleeting ambitions to direct a film in the 1980s, he was adamant that Hurt should star in it. Alas, the picture was never realised, but speaking to the Telegraph in 2015, Hurt reminisced about another encounter with Bacon.

Walking into the Colony one afternoon, Hurt found Bacon sitting alone, reading the newspaper. ‘“Mmmm,” said Bacon. “When Pablo [Picasso] dies, I’ll be Number One.”’

Spanish police arrest three in £19m Bacon art heist

GRAHAM KEELEY | MADRID | THE TIMES | TUESDAY, JANUARY 31 2017

Spanish police have arrested three men in connection with the theft of five paintings by Francis Bacon worth £21 million.

Police raided six homes in the Madrid region and seized a gun, ammunition, manuals for cracking safes, laser devices and oxy-fuel cylinders used to cut metal. Officers said that the suspects were “directly linked” to the robbery and were part of a gang which burgled homes across Spain. They were detained last Thursday but officials only released the information today.

In July 2015 portraits and landscapes by Bacon were stolen from a house in an affluent neighbourhood of the Spanish capital in a break-in police described as “worthy of a Hollywood movie”.

The thieves observed the movements of the home owner and waited until he was away before they struck, disabling the alarm system at the house, which is near the Spanish parliament. Security staff at the building and neighbours did not notice anyone entering or leaving with the stolen works of art.

The thieves, who also took a safe containing coins and jewels, left no trace inside. The stolen paintings were bequeathed by Bacon to his close friend José Capelo Blanco, a Spanish financier. Among the stolen works of art is a portrait of Mr Capelo.

Seven men were arrested last May after a tip-off from a British company that tracks stolen art. The London-based company had received an email from a man living in Sitges, near Barcelona, with images of one of the stolen paintings. The man inquired if the painting was on a list of stolen works of art.

The British company passed the information to a specialised unit of the Spanish police which deals in art thefts. Detectives tracked down the company that had leased the camera used to take the photographs of the stolen painting and details of the customer who hired the equipment. The man who allegedly took the photographs was arrested at his home with another man. None of the paintings has been recovered. The theft is one of the biggest art heists in Spain in recent years.

Mr Capelo Blanco, 61, inherited the works when Bacon died in Madrid in 1992. He was in London when the theft at his home occurred. Mr Capelo met Bacon at a party in honour of the choreographer Frederick Ashton, when the artist was 78 years old. Mr Capelo went on to pose for Bacon for a 1987 portrait and a 1991 triptych, which is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

         **One of the portraits stolen from the home of a Spanish financier**

          **in a raid described by police as “worthy of a Hollywood movie”**

*Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence*

SAM WOLLASTON | LAST NIGHT’S TV | THE GUARDIAN | MONDAY 30 JANUARY 2017

This is more BBC2, more Reithian – Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence (BBC2, Saturday). But also a ton of fun because of the fabulousness of the contributors – not just biographers and critics but drinking mates, neighbours, gallery workers, lovers, wannabe lovers, didnawannabe lovers, doctors, disciples, pop stars, actors, hangers on – and their stories. Insiders from that world with a brilliant way of talking about the extraordinary as if it was quite normal.

John Richardson remembers Bacon’s blind nanny, who slept on the kitchen table, and organised the drugs and the gambling parties, until she died. Bacon’s partner, Peter Lacy, regularly used to beat Francis up, something he actively encouraged and enjoyed, says Michael Peppiatt. Lord Gowrie had a very nice girlfriend at the time, who was vegetarian, but she converted under Gowrie’s tutelage, to meat, though never to Bacon, hahaha. Francis used to pick Marianne Faithfull up from the wall on which she lived and took heroin after splitting up from Mick, and he’d take her to Wheelers, which was wonderful because she could warm up and eat and they’d have a good natter … etc. Everyone drank, gambled, hit each other and tied each other up. And killed themselves, which had to be covered up until after the exhibition.

It is – and they are – ghastly and terrifying, as well as brilliant. And it makes sense that a world of some light and a lot of darkness – and both tenderness and brutality – should be the one from which Bacon’s paintings came.

Bacon painted the heady horror of his sex life

Andrew Billen

TV review

ANDREW BILLEN | TELEVISION & RADIO | THE TIMES | MONDAY JANUARY 30 2017

In a brief career detour as this paper’s arts correspondent, I crossed paths regularly with Margaret Thatcher’s gentlemanly arts minister Richard Luce. An experienced Foreign Office hand, he found himself on a tough learning curve when it came to the arts. One day he told me he would like to meet Francis Bacon, just to ask him why his paintings were so unpleasant.

I hope he saw Saturday’s Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence. All was revealed. This was a barnstorming arts documentary that paid no lip service to the notion that we need to know about an artist’s technique to understand his work. Impeccably sourced from interviews with Bacon’s friends and colleagues and from interviews with the man himself, Richard Curson Smith assembled a savagely intimate biography of a tormented and tormenting man.

The cruelty of his work was no pose, no intellectual reaction to the war. It painted instead the heady horror of his sex life, starting in the stables of his childhood home in Ireland, where the grooms, on his father’s orders, beat him and then, presumably on their own initiative, buggered him. Lord Gowrie, Luce’s predecessor as arts minister, traced his weirdness to those days. The biographer John Richardson thought he was born a “through-and-through masochist”. Who knows? The die was cast.

As an adult, Bacon’s first great love was a soberly dressed but sadistic former Spitfire pilot who threw the artist through a plate-glass window, causing him only to love him more. After they parted, the pilot took revenge by killing himself, or so the artist believed, on the day Bacon’s first big retrospective opened.

His last lover was an East End thug called George Dyer, who turned out to be disappointingly gentle, a crime for which he was excoriated in portraits that cut off parts of his face. Yet it was Bacon who committed the literal crime. When Dyer died on the lavatory in the Paris hotel they were staying in, the artist connived in keeping the body hidden for two days lest it spoil the opening of his exhibition.

Yet Bacon remained capable of great and non-sexual friendships, and of acts of kindness, such as lunching Marianne Faithfull when, post Jagger, she was living rough. I spoke to him only once, when the newsdesk asked me to check out a rumour he had died. Somehow, I got his number. He was very polite, and sorry he could not help me “on this occasion”.

**Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence   BBC Two**  *****

          **The artist Francis Bacon was a tormented and tormenting man. Photo: Peter Stark/BBC**

Francis Bacon: A Brush With Violence, BBC Two

Portrait of the artist as disaster area

ADAM SWEETING   |   REVIEWS   |   THE ARTS DESK   |   SUNDAY, 29 JANUARY 2017

Francis Bacon died in April 1992, aged 82, but heaven knows how he managed to live that long. The tortuous story of his life is now fairly well known, but Richard Curson Smith’s documentary marshalled a formidable array of critics, biographers and celebs including Marianne Faithfull, Damien Hirst and Terence Stamp to create a portrait of a man capable of effervescent wit and charm, yet fuelled from within by a monstrous darkness.

The film lit the blue touch paper by looking at Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which, when exhibited in London in 1945, did little to enhance any sense of euphoria at the prospect of a Nazi-free world. Critics and public were shaken by Bacon’s ghastly, misshapen figures, which may look to us now like antecedents of HR Giger’s appalling Alien. Nonetheless, it was clear that a major talent was on the loose, and horror and pain would become familiar traits in his work (below, Bacon’s Study for a Self-Portrait – Triptych, 1985-86).

In this telling, Bacon’s progress resembled a mashed-up narrative concocted by the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe and Joe Orton. His life could almost be seen as a kind of diabolical experiment, designed to explore ways in which psychological damage can be used as the raw material of artistic genius. His father, Captain Eddy Bacon, was a Boer War veteran and racehorse trainer, who apparently used to order his stable boys to whip his son. Young Francis, meanwhile, admitted to feeling a sexual attraction to his father and enjoyed homosexual romps with the aforesaid grooms (“buggaring in the barn” as Lord Gowrie, one of the talking heads, put it).

He ended up for a time in Weimar Berlin, chaperoned by an exploitative bisexual friend of his father, then moved to Paris, where a Picasso exhibition made a deep impression on him. Back in London, he moved into John Everett Millais’s old house in South Kensington (partially bombed), where he held riotous gambling parties and was attended by his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. Although blind and forced to sleep on the kitchen table, Nanny Lightfoot diligently supplied visitors with cannabis.

Though we saw scenes of the convivial, bon viveur Bacon (bearing an odd resemblance to Dudley Moore), sometimes babbling enthusiastically in fluent though thoroughly Anglified French, his emotional life was driven by his masochistic urges. He fell into an arduous love affair with ex-Spitfire pilot and sadist Peter Lacy, who beat him mercilessly and (as one contributor recalled) once hurled the artist through a second-floor window. In later years he became infatuated with George Dyer, an East End criminal and acquaintance of the Krays, but instead of the brutal, dominant lover Bacon wanted, the disappointing Dyer was a borderline alcoholic who suffered from erectile dysfunction.

Yet Dyer’s suicide in Paris in 1971, as Bacon launched a major exhibition at the Grand Palais, shocked the artist deeply, and prompted some of his most powerful work including the “Black Triptychs”, which fixated on the Dyer suicide in agonising close-up. Artist and friend Maggi Hambling, in one of several astute comments, noted how it was almost considered “a dirty habit” to go and look at Bacon’s paintings, and also pointed out how he defied the prevailing tides of abstract expressionism and “American stuff” to concentrate on depictions of the human body. Bacon’s instinct proved unerring, as his legacy of screaming popes and crucifixion scenes, Figure with Meat, the Study for a Self-Portrait – Triptych, 1985-86 and his sequence of late landscapes attests.

In the end, could some sort of salvation be dragged from the wreckage? Hambling suggested that “his work can be seen as a search for God,” while art critic John Richardson reckoned that Bacon is now seen “almost as a religious painter”. He certainly wouldn’t have been deterred by the prospect of flagellation and crucifixion.

                              **Francis Bacon: 'His work can be seen as a search for God'**

**Critic’s choice**

**Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence**

BBC TWO, 9pm

CHRIS BENNION   |   VIEWING GUIDE | SATURDAY REVIEW |   THE TIMES |   SATURDAY 28 JANUARY 2017

If you have ever popped by the Tate Gallery, stood in front of Francis Bacon’s most famous triptych — Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion — and wondered at the agony, pain and sheer violence behind the work, then this spellbinding documentary is for you.

It is also proof that the simple, talking heads format can work a treat, provided that your subject is fascinating enough and your interviewees are as erudite and compelling as they are in Richard Curson Smith’s film. That painting, with its three, distorted, howling figures, shocked in 1945 and continues to do so today.

“It was as if art had become feral,” as one contributor puts it Here, quite explicitly, we see the man behind the art. It is well known that Bacon, right, was a famed carouser, a powerful drinker and, to put it mildly, a troubled soul, but the glimpse further beyond the surface, as supplied by close friends and contemporaries, is nearly as jolting as Bacon’s brushstrokes.

From his desperately damaging childhood, during which his father had the stable boys attempt to whip the homosexuality out of him (it backfired) and sent him, aged 17, to a family friend to try to straighten him out (it backfired), to his adventures in Berlin, Paris and Soho, and his intense love affairs, what is revealed is a life lived in the raw, all nerve endings and impulse, a life that was a wild mix of pleasure and pain.

“l believe in deeply ordered chaos in my work,” Bacon once said. Here is the deeply ordered chaos in the artist’s life.

**Chris Bennion**

**Bacon’s nanny knew best how to source drugs and gay lovers**

RICHARD BROOKS | ARTS EDITOR | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY JANUARY 22 2017

By any standards, Jessie Lightfoot was no ordinary nanny. She cared for the artist Francis Bacon during his childhood in Ireland and then in later years became his drug dealer, the organiser of his gambling parties and even his pimp.

The extraordinary influence of Lightfoot on Bacon — regarded as the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century — is revealed in a documentary to be broadcast next Saturday on BBC2.

Sir John Richardson, the art historian, got to know Bacon immediately after the Second World War while living with his mother in Kensington, opposite the artist’s home. “He lived like no one else in the world,” says Richardson in the documentary, Francis Bacon — A Brush with Violence.

“I would go there often. There were a lot of incredibly strong cocktails, so you got plastered pretty quick. Then Nanny would appear and say, ‘Would anybody like something to smoke?’ And this didn’t mean Player’s cigarettes.

“She was totally blind. How on earth she cooked, and how she knew what she was doing, I don’t know. She organised the gambling parties he gave.” Lightfoot also placed adverts in local shops asking for “a gentleman’s gentleman” — a euphemism for young lovers for the gay Bacon.

Nanny Lightfoot then went with Bacon to live in the south of France but died in 1951. “Francis was heartbroken,” according to Richardson. “She was his adviser. She ran his life, and so after her death he had to depend on himself.”

Later, when Bacon was living in Reece Mews in South Kensington, the actor Terence Stamp, who was famed for roles in Billy Budd and Far from the Madding Crowd, got to know him through a mutual friend, the musicals composer Lionel Bart.

“Lionel, who lived very close to Bacon, told me that in his kitchen were loads of pictures of me,” Stamp recalls.

“He then told Lionel that the two handsomest men in the world were Terence Stamp and Colonel Gadaffi. And I thought Gadaffi would give him a good hiding.”

Stamp, decidedly heterosexual, got to know Bacon well and would often visit him at his home. The singer Marianne Faithfull, who had a relationship with Mick Jagger in the 1960s, also recalls her gratitude to Bacon for taking her out when she was in a bad way on drugs after her split from the singer

“Francis would take me to Wheeler’s [a restaurant in Soho] and feed me,” she says.



                                                                **Francis Bacon was heartbroken when Jessie Lightfoot died**

A spoonful of brown sugar

TELEVISION PREVIEW | THE SUNDAY TIMES | SUNDAY JANUARY 22 2017

The idea that Mary Poppins was the perfect nanny must infuriate childcare professionals. As we know from the film, she not only takes her children to dance with chimney sweeps on the rooftops of London — contravening all the latest thinking about the safety and welfare of young people — but she also offers unregulated financial advice that causes a run on the banks.

Yet it seems there was a nanny who was even more mischievous and irresponsible. A BBC documentary will reveal this week that Jessie Lightfoot, nanny to the artist Francis Bacon, looked after him into adulthood, supplying him with drugs, arranging gambling parties and organising his love life.

A nanny is for life. Winston Churchill never forgot Elizabeth Everest, who cared for him as a child. He was by her side when she died. The nanny of the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg now looks after his own children and canvassed for him at election time. The BBC’s revelations explain much about Bacon’s rackety life. When nanny orders you to drink, gamble and take lovers, who would be brave enough to refuse?

Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon: Fraught friendship and art

ROSAMMA THOMAS   |   THE TIMES OF INDIA |   SUNDAY JANUARY 22 2017

JAIPUR: Of all reasons to turn down an invitation to a wedding, this must take the cake – artist Lucian Freud, once invited to a wedding, was forced to decline because he had slept not just with the bride, but also the groom and the mother-in-law! This was one juicy nugget that emerged during a discussion at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday on the book 'Art of Rivalry' by Pulitzer-winning art critic Sebastian Smee.

Smee’s book is about the relationship between four pairs of artists. On Sunday, he chose to dwell on the fraught ties between Lucien Freud, grandson of the famous psychoanalyst, and Irish-born painter Francis Bacon.

Bacon was older than Freud by a decade or so. It was clear that the older artist was held somewhat in awe by Freud. Through a series of carefully chosen slides, Smee commented on how the artistic styles of Bacon and Freud were so different – yet their lives were woven together through strange bonds of deep friendship that later soured.

Smee said Freud, who died in 2011, had admitted to him that he had once got so riled by a violent lover of Bacon’s, who had thrown him out of the window and left him with an eye that almost dangled out of his face. Angry at the violence, Freud had held the lover by the collar – but he later realized that even the violence was some form of sexual expression that he did not quite understand. The relationship between the two artists was marred irrevocably by this "intrusion".

At the end of the session, some members of the audience wanted to know if it was indeed helpful to assess an artist on the basis of his life. Smee said in response that it was not as if, standing in front of a work of art, one can infer anything about the artist’s life. Even so, he said, contemplating the life afterwards, one might glean some important insights. He spoke with great appreciation for Matisse, who he said was doing such amazing things with colour at a time when he was also troubled in his personal life.

Rajalaxmi Kamat, who was at JLF from Bangalore, said, "This is one session that I will remember for long. This is what I shall take away with me from this festival."

Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes now on

display at Ferens Art Gallery

By HANNAH ROBINSON | HULL DAILY MAIL | JANUARY 20, 2017

Five iconic paintings from a leading British painter are officially on display from today – showing how far Ferens Art Gallery has come with its ability to fund and hold major exhibitions.

The Francis Bacon: Nervous System will be displayed alongside the permanent collection at Ferens in Gallery 9 after the venue secured a £70,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Bacon’s widely acknowledged masterpiece, Head VI, 1949, will act as the centrepiece of the display on a year-long loan from the Arts Council Collection. It will be accompanied, until 1 May, by four others from his "Screaming Pope" series.

Kirsten Simister, curator of art at the Ferens Art Gallery, said: "We are extremely grateful to our lenders and the Heritage Lottery Fund who have made it possible to bring these exceptional works to Hull audiences this year. "It is amazing to show Bacon’s extraordinary 20th century secular paintings at the same time as the equally extraordinary 14th-century sacred paintings by Lorenzetti and his Sienese contemporaries."

The additional 'Screaming Pope' loans come from the collections of Aberdeen Art Gallery, The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich and a private collection.

"This has always been a painting in high demand and we never managed to get it to Hull until it was announced we were going to be UK City of Culture 2017," she said.

"I immediately thought it would be a good idea to contact them again and they said yes. It is a juxtaposition between the religious work of the Lorenzetti and the atheism of Bacon. It is wonderful to have and has massively exceeded my expectations."

Bacon is known for his darkly visceral, yet striking portraits. The five powerful canvases convey the darker side of the human condition suggesting what lies beneath everyday life. Bacon himself expressed his working processes in very direct terms stating: "Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system projected onto canvas."

Drawing from varied sources including photography, film and Surrealism, Bacon was also inspired by the Old Masters and in this case Diego Velazquez’s 17th century portrait of Pope Innocent X. The artworks will be shown alongside highlights from the Ferens’ strong modern and contemporary portrait collection from the last 100 years including Wyndham Lewis’ iconic and deliberately repellent Self-Portrait As a Tyro of 1920-21.

Councillor Terry Geraghty, portfolio holder for culture and leisure and chairman of Hull Culture and Leisure Limited, said: "The display of these spectacular art works underscores the very reason for undertaking the major investment in the Gallery that has just been completed.

"With the new environmentally controlled galleries, the Ferens is able to display the work of internationally acclaimed artists amongst its very own permanent collection displays.

"These Francis Bacon loans make a powerful dramatic statement to open our UK City of Culture year."

Entry is free to all Hull City Council’s museums and art gallery, and are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm and Sunday from 11am to 4.30pm. The Maritime Museum and Ferens Art Gallery is also open until 7.30pm every Thursday.


Why Kirklees Council can’t sell £20m Francis Bacon painting

Kirklees Council answer our questions over one of Britain’s most important artworks

By TONY EARNSHAW | NEWS | WEST YORKSHIRE NEWS | EXAMINER LIVE | JANUARY 14, 2017

Kirklees Council has come under pressure to sell a painting described as one of Britain’s most important artworks.

Experts said the painting, Francis Bacon’s Figure Study II, could be worth up to £60 million on the open market. Rarely seen on show in Huddersfield, the artwork could solve some of the council’s financial woes. But now the council has revealed that the painting can’t be sold after all.

Here they answer a series of questions from the Examiner.

1: Can you provide details of the covenant relating to this piece of art?

There is no covenant but there are conditions attached to the gift. Francis Bacon’s Figure Study II was a gift from the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) to Batley Art Gallery in 1952. When Kirklees Council was created, the painting was transferred to Huddersfield Art Gallery. The conditions attached to the gift include: “Should the museum attempt to dispose of the artwork it will automatically forfeit title of the artwork, which will revert to the ownership of Contemporary Art Society.”

Therefore the council cannot sell the work. If we tried, it would be taken away from us and given to another institution. These conditions apply to other gifts from the CAS in our collections.

2: When was it last exhibited in Huddersfield Art Gallery, and for how long?

The artwork was put back on display following the redisplay of the permanent collection in the new ‘Perspectives’ gallery in 2013. It was only removed in May 2016 to lend it to Tate Liverpool for a Francis Bacon ‘Invisible Rooms’ exhibition, which then toured to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Following this, it will travel to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh where it will be reunited with Figure Study I for a new exhibition opening in February 2017. As one of the most important works of art in Britain, it is much in demand for exhibitions around the world and enables us to promote Kirklees in a positive way.

3: How long has it spent in storage over the last two years?

0 years – it has either been on display at Huddersfield Art Gallery or loaned to another gallery for an exhibition.

4: How much time has it spent on tour, or as a guest exhibit in UK or foreign exhibitions?

Since 2013, the work has been on display for 30 months at Huddersfield Art Gallery and by the end of the Tate Gallery and Staatsgalerie exhibitions, it will have been on tour for 10 months.

5: Does the authority receive any revenue from these tours or exhibitions?

No. It is standard practice that galleries have a reciprocal arrangement: they lend each other works of art to increase audience access to collections. The borrowing institution pays for insurance, packing, transport and installation etc, so the lending institution incurs no costs. For example, as well as loaning to the Tate, in recent years we have borrowed significant artworks from their collections including Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (one of the most famous sculptures in modern art, the notorious bricks). We recently had loans from the Hepworth, Wakefield to Huddersfield Art Gallery for the David Tindle exhibition – we have met those costs; when the Francis Bacon was on loan to Stuttgart they met the costs.

For the Francis Bacon, lending the work to others is also a stipulation of the Contemporary Art Society agreement Section 2.6: which also relates to the security question below:

The museum will agree to consider all requests to loan the Artwork to any interested party. The caveat to this agreement is that the museum will have the right to refuse the loan if the requesting organisation does not indicate satisfactory and appropriate conditions for the loan.’

6: How much is the piece worth? Who made the current valuation of £19.5 million, and when? Has it been re-valued since in line with other Bacon works sold at international auction?

We received a valuation from the Head of Contemporary Paintings at Bonham’s on 15th February 2016. He valued it at £20 million, which was less than we expected having seen the recent auctions of Bacon’s work. However, Bacon’s earlier work, of which Figure Study II is an example, is not as valuable as his later work.

7: What are the insurance costs associated with this piece of art? What is it insured against, i.e. fire, flood, vandalism, etc.?

The insurance premium is £10,000 per year. We only pay this when the work is not on tour. The insurance policy is an industry standard fine art policy.

8: Are there any attendant security costs when it is on display in Kirklees, or anywhere else?

There are no additional costs. We do not wish to discuss security publicly for obvious reasons. Kirklees Museums and Galleries is an Arts Council England Accredited Museums service, which means that its standards of collections management and security meet nationally agreed standards appropriate to its collections.

9: How much Arts Council England (ACE) funding does Kirklees receive each year? How is this spent?

Kirklees Museums and Galleries is not a regularly funded Arts Council organisation. The museums service applies for grant funding for specific projects. These have to be for additional priority work which will help ACE to achieve its goals and the museums service to focus on its priorities – ACE does not fund shortfalls in local authority funding.

Over the last three years, Kirklees Museums has received £257,000 from the Arts Council’s Museums Resilience Fund. This funded improvements to interpretation at the Grade I Listed Elizabethan Oakwell Hall; created a new Shop; upgraded facilities in the Barn, which is used for room hire and weddings; and installed new gates to the Visitor Centre which were created by an artist working with the local community.

The Museums service is also part way through a two-year Arts Council funded Sustainable Collections project, which is enabling us to explore new ways to ensure that the collections are sustainable, accessible and cared for in the future. It involves working with volunteers, partners and other institutions to pilot innovative long-term solutions to the challenges faced in a climate of reduced core funding.

**How long can our great civic museums hold out?**

   **Kirklees Council’s proposal to sell off Francis Bacon’s ‘Figure Study II’ is just a taste of things to come.**

ALISTAIR BROWN | COMMENT | APOLLO | THE INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE | FRIDAY 6 JANUARY 2017

While most of us were enjoying the Christmas break, David Sheard, leader of Kirklees Council, was busy canvassing Twitter users’ opinion on whether the council should sell its extremely valuable Francis Bacon *Figure Study II.* ‘If I were a philistine,’ he tweeted, ‘I might compare the costs of caring for a piece of coloured canvass [sic] to an aging resident with dementia… I have been asked “Should we sell our Bacon”. Any thoughts?’

Members of the twitter sphere vociferously told him that he definitely was a philistine, and the council rowed back from the idea of selling the painting when it became clear that the original donor, the Contemporary Arts Society, has a claim to the painting should it ever be sold. Nevertheless, this incident has caused alarm in museums across the country. It once again raises the spectre of local authorities using their cultural collections as a cash cow.

The 2014 sale of Northampton Museum’s early Egyptian Sekhemka statue by Northampton Borough Council for £16 million is still fresh in the minds of many museum professionals, and there is a real desire to prevent more widespread selling off of the ‘family silver’.

But how long can our great civic museums hold out? The government’s austerity agenda has been particularly cruel to local government, and – as all the easy savings have long since been made – museums and galleries are extremely vulnerable. Last year saw Kirklees Council close two museums, with the great Tolson Museum to follow this year. Next door in Lancashire, the council closed five museums in September, two of which held collections of national importance. Across the UK, councils are announcing swingeing cuts to their budgets which put museums and their collections at risk.

In this context, David Sheard’s tweets are a warning of things to come. Without the cash to deliver statutory duties like social care provision, or even facing bankruptcy, the fear is that councils will not only close down museum services, but will also look to the assets they own to get themselves out of a hole. Once they’ve alighted on the municipal art collection, the trick for local politicians is easy: denigrate the art work, say it’s just a canvas, say it’s elitist, say it’s too expensive to display properly, and finally: sell it.

Some of these techniques were employed by David Mackintosh, leader of Northampton Borough Council, during the sale of the Sekhemka statue. That incident also revealed another problem. When Northampton sold the statue in 2014, the Culture Minister slapped an export bar on the statue and announced an effort to save it for the nation. But no other museum wanted to be associated with the statue’s unethical sale (and few could have matched the price in any case), and so, sadly, it disappeared to a private buyer on the international antiquities market. Future sales by councils would doubtless result in a similar outcome.

So are we actually powerless to prevent sales from local authority collections? Things are perhaps not as bleak as they seem. As David Sheard found over Christmas, the strength of public opinion about public collections is strong, as is the power of negative media coverage. In this case there was a separate legal claim on the painting. And, had things gone any further, Mr Sheard would have found that the Museums Association Ethics Committee, Arts Council England, and the Heritage Lottery Fund would also have been resolutely opposed to the sale.

None of this solves the long-term funding problems faced by our great civic museums – but these measures can help preserve the integrity of their cultural, historic and scientific collections so that they continue to benefit the public long into the future.

***Alistair Brown is Policy Officer at the*** **Museums Association**.

Kirklees council considers selling

Francis Bacon painting

Cash-strapped council could raise up to £60m as value of artist’s works

has soared but any auction likely to be controversial

NAZIA PARVEEN  | NORTH OF ENGLAND CORRESPONDENT  | THE GUARDIAN  | WEDNESDAY 28 DECEMBER, 2016

A prized painting by Francis Bacon could be sold at auction – to help a cash-strapped West Yorkshire council raise a potential £60m. Sales from public collections are heavily frowned upon in the arts world, with some critics saying it betrays those who originally donated the items and deters others who might donate in the future.

But Kirklees council is considering selling the 1940s painting by the artist after it was recently forced to close two museums, with another closure on the way.

David Sheard, leader of the council, said the painting, Figure Study II, had languished in storage for years as it was too valuable to be exhibited locally. He said: “I can’t see any value of owning a painting which is stuck in a cellar most of the time. I know recently it has been on tour, but there have been times where it has been in storage for a very long time.

“It is an issue that we need to have an open debate about as it is a problem if it is costing us so much to insure yet we’re not able to display it.”

The painting, which depicts a “screaming mouth and the eyeless face of a sub-human creature”, is the multimillion pound “superstar” of the borough’s art collection. Its companion piece, Figure Study I, hangs in the Scottish National Gallery.

However, senior council figures say that because it is expensive to insure it can only be exhibited within the secure environment of Huddersfield Art Gallery. Currently it is in the gallery’s vaults.

The Labour council leader’s comments come after London art experts said current auction prices meant the painting could be worth up to three times its estimated value of £19.5m. Prices of Bacon paintings have rocketed since his death in 1992. In November 2013, a Bacon triptych depicting artist Lucian Freud fetched £90m, then the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Some say auctioning the piece could fund Kirklees’ museums and galleries for decades to come.

Andrew Cooper, Green councillor for Newsome, said: “In the dire circumstances the council finances are in, we have to consider selling artworks that the council has. We have got to look at using any money that we realise from it to protect essential council services.” However, Sheard said he would prefer to loan the painting to other museums and art galleries within the UK.

“That would be my preferred outcome because then we get the best of both worlds – we get to keep the painting and raise revenue. However, I need to know all the facts before any decision is made and will have to discuss options with the whole council,” he added.

The notion of selling the Bacon painting caused outrage among art lovers when it was first mooted by the Conservative group, in charge of the West Yorkshire council four years ago. It was argued then that the millions of pounds raised could potentially fund the reopening of Dewsbury Museum and Red House Museum, safeguard jobs, and repair and revive Tolson Museum in Huddersfield.

But any potential sale could be blocked by the Contemporary Art Society, which gifted the painting to Batley’s Bagshaw Museum more than six decades ago.

The society said the artwork is secured by a restrictive covenant that allegedly prevents it from being sold. A spokesman said: “The painting was a conditional gift from the Contemporary Art Society and the conditions of the gift means that it cannot be sold. This is in line with the Arts Council’s museum accreditation policy.”

London art dealer David Messum said the painting could be worth double or triple its £19.5m valuation. “There is big money around for Francis Bacon at the moment because a Francis Bacon is a prized possession,” he said. “There are one or two opportunities a year for these. It’s going to fetch a steep price and above estimate.”

In 2014, Northampton borough council was accused of a “moral crime against world heritage” after it sold an ancient Egyptian statue. The council’s decision to put the 4,500-year-old statue up for auction saw Northampton Museum stripped of its Arts Council England accreditation until 2019, rendering it ineligible for a range of arts and grants funding.

The statue was considered the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection but was sold at Christie’s in July 2014 to an anonymous buyer for £15.8m. After its sale, the government put a temporary export ban on it in the hope a domestic buyer would match the sum to keep it in the UK. But after campaigners failed to raise the funds to prevent its departure it reportedly went into a private collection in the US.

The statue, taken from the tomb of Sekhemka, the pharaoh’s inspector of scribes in Saqqara, had been donated to the museum in 1880 by the son of the second Marquess of Northampton who had brought it from Egypt. The council put the statue up for sale to fund an extension to the museum, and the proceeds were split with Lord Northampton.

It has previously been claimed that Britain’s councils own artworks worth £2.3bn – but less than 2% are on public display. Manchester city council was top with an art hoard worth £374m, followed by Birmingham and Southampton with £200m each, Leeds with £150m and Newcastle with £104.



                **Francis Bacon. Prices of his paintings have rocketed since his death in 1992.**

**Perception and the ‘I’ in Samuel Beckett’s**

**Company and Francis Bacon’s Paintings**

**ANA ÁLVAREZ GUILLÉN  | LAOCOONTE |  REVISTA ESTÉTICA Y TEORÍA DE LAS ARTES  | VOL. 3 | N0. 3 |  DECEMBER 2016**

When one thinks of Modernism, it is not just Modernist literature that comes to mind but Modernism in all its artistic expressions. This movement – unlike those that preceded it – starts from the idea that there is no fixed basis, with an emphasis on experimentation which is carried out in all kinds of artistic expressions. Several names come to mind when looking at Modernist prose, some figures that had a determinant role in the development of Modernist literature and whose influence continues to be of a vivid significance. In the field of literature in the English language names such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or John Dos Passos stand out as being the main developers of this type of literature. In the following pages, we will focus on one of the milestones in Modernist Literature and Modernism in general: Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Even though his influence is higher in the field of theatre, we will be analysing one of his works in prose, which, though at a different level, left a great heritage as well.

All the arts were intermingled in Modernism – as it has the objective of imbuing life – and every artistic creation was an influence over another. That is to say, the paintings, sculptures and literary works that were produced were not separate creations; quite the contrary, each one constituted an inspiration for others. In this context of continuous creative feedback Beckett has his own place. His relation with art was very intense since he was very young. His correspondence leaves great proof of it. As he would define the effect art had on him in one of his letters to Thomas MacGreevy, he experienced an “Own feeling of helplessness, finally, and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art” (Beckett 2011: 105). Art has a strong impact on the Irish writer, who was left helpless before it many times. All those visits to museums and art galleries during his entire life and specially during his youth constitute not just a mere influence for some of his writings but an essential part of his way of looking at reality and at himself as well as his way of posing questions about it.

It is difficult to say whether all that modern art he saw in the most important galleries of Dublin, Paris, London, or Berlin2 was an inspiration for Beckett’s writing process or, on the contrary, it was Beckett’s work that inspired some of those artists. Most likely, in some cases it was a mutual inspiration. Be that as it may, I contend that some of Beckett’s contemporary artists’ work has a complementary relation with his own. They help to understand and shed new light upon each other’s work. Undoubtedly, the art that struck Beckett the most was one that rose determining questions about aspects such as life, the subject, and reality issues that will be developed, if not given an attempt to be answered, throughout the Irish writer’s texts. For instance, the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, Francis Bacon, or Lucian Freud and their different gazes of a damaged or somehow broken self can add other sensibilities and new angles to Beckett’s statements and view. In the same way, those paintings exploring the self will be enriched and made more intricate after the reading of some of the Irish writer’s literary production, in particular his novella Company (1980), the text that is central in this study.

A new approach to Beckett’s Company is offered here thanks to a starting point which is different from that of other critics of the novella: a comparison with Francis Bacon’s work. We will be looking at one of them whose approach to Beckett’s vision of the world can be considered as equally terrible, that of the ‘I’ facing its own presence in an atemporal fight against its shadow. Bacon, like Beckett, presents existence as a tragedy with no limits. “Es como si ahora llegara a ser posible un combate. La lucha con la sombra es la única lucha real” (Deleuze 2005: 68). Thus, the purpose of this essay is to analyse the relation between Beckett’s prose work Company and the artistic production of Francis Bacon.

This article will adopt a double perspective. The aspects covered in the first part will be mainly the perception of the ‘I’ and the voices of consciousness. Bacon’s self-portraits will be central in establishing this relation to Beckett’s ideas on self-perception.

This will be the most psychological part of the essay, which will approach the text and the paintings from a Cubist viewpoint. Thus, I attempt to illustrate the way the issue of self- perception in both Beckett and Bacon shares some basic characteristics with a Cubist or fragmented notion of reality.

The second part of this paper will consist on a more aesthetical3 approach to both the novella and the paintings, aiming at identifying the correlated aesthetics of both Company and Bacon’s compositions. The lying figures, the eyes, an aestheticized life and a final and paradoxically half-illuminated void, will be the points leading our analysis. Special attention will be paid in this second part to Bacon’s blackest paintings, since darkness and light will become central elements of the argument.

The comparative analysis seeks to provide us with a renewed reading of the novella. A concrete perspective will be given in order to look at Company in the same way in which we observe a Modernist painting: we will take an impression from the text, we will forget about a possible story, and we will take not only an intellectual but also a purely aesthetical insight.

1. Self-perception of the Fragmented and Dismembered Self

La absurdidad primera pone de manifiesto ante todo un divorcio: el divorcio entre las aspiraciones del hombre hacia la unidad y el dualismo insuperable del espíritu y de la naturaleza.4

Company is a novella written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and published for the first time in 1980. It was later included in the trilogy Nohow On together with Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho in 1989. The novella is one of the short prose texts the Irish writer produced in his late period and can be labelled as one of his ‘closed space’ writings, a very appropriate label for our comparative study with Bacon’s paintings. Beckett’s reader could argue that there is a lot of openness in the space of Company, but we will see that the author creates a contradictory space as well as many other contradictory elements in his text. In fact, ‘company’ is a very contradictory title for a novella like this one. We do not seem to have anything like company, as it is revealed at the end, when we are left with a bleak picture that has been building up throughout the pages, a picture of isolation. What we observe is a “devised deviser devising it all for company” (Beckett 2009: 30) that never finds it. Company is the negation of company:

Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always where.

**Alone. (Beckett 2009: 42)**

Company begins by giving us a subject. The subject is within a body, which is within a space that seems a lack of space. If Modernist literature seeks the representation of the inner and therefore ‘more real’ reality, Beckett, as one of the foremost Modernists, explores this inner self. If the Modernist Virginia Woolf makes use of the special voice of interior monologue that is helped by Free Indirect Discourse and stream of consciousness, Beckett carries his exploration out through a more complex voice, but equally personal. Beckett’s exploration always takes into account that the subject is framed. As we were saying, it is framed in a body and in time and space. We cannot forget that the exploration and own understanding of time and space are also key themes for Modernist art. Proust had already experimented with time and memory in his À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) when Beckett started writing, and artists such as Dalí with his La persistencia de la memoria (1931) were doing the same exploration with painting at the Irish writer’s times. Time seemed to be subjective, linked to the subject’s memory and perception. It was not that one is framed in an objective time but that time is one’s inner time.

In Company, the voice’s continuous movements to the past in the shape of autobiographical memories blurred by fantasies make us think that Beckett had an interest in the Proustian concern with time5 : “To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future” (Beckett 2009: 3). Real and fictional in time can be confused as all depends on a subject and we as readers do not know what to consider real. Again, Beckett’s subject is not within an ‘exact’ timing but it is the voice which frames time:

To confess, Yes I remember. Perhaps even to have a voice. To murmur, Yes I remember. What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular. Murmuring now and then, Yes I remember.

An old beggar woman is fumbling at a big garden. Half blind. You know the place well. […] On the way home from kindergarten on your tiny cycle you see the poor old beggar woman trying to get in. You dismount and open the gate for her. She blesses you. (Beckett 2009: 10)

The subject imagines and recalls memories that make him or her who he or she is. ‘I’ am my past, what I remember and what my memories have of real and imagined. Beckett’s ‘I’ of the past, the present and the future are different ‘I’s. Nevertheless, with a lack of objective temporality, we have three simultaneous ‘I’s or a dissolved or combined ‘I’. Time is confused in a deviser that “speaks of himself as of another” (Beckett 2009: 16):

On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. […] So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. […] You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light. (Beckett 2009: 15-16)

A Cubist, Broken Self

Might not the voice be improved? Made more companiable. Say changing now for some time past though no tense in the dark in that dim mind. All at once and in train and to come. But for the other say for some time past some improvement. Some flat tone as initially imagined and same repetitiousness, No improving those. But less mobility. Less variety of faintness. (Beckett 2009: 21)

It seems clear that the collage of voices Company consists on builds a broken self. However, by having several voices, the depiction is wider and more real. Something similar can be observed in Francis Bacon’s work. What was introduced by Cézanne and developed by Braque or Picasso is ultimately fostered and brought to maturity by Bacon in a very particular way. After all, both Bacon and Beckett are working with something quite similar to Cubism6 , maybe a deformed and degenerated one. The self is not just broken or fragmented but also degenerated. At the same time, Beckett’s Cubist voice reveals not just that the reality being represented is fragmented, but also that its perception as a whole is not possible. Peter Fifield is the first to have established a connection between the writer and the painter in this respect:

For Bacon the broken body is a striking, multi-textured body, the artist stating, ‘I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance’ (Sylvester, 146). The shiver one has at the sight of a vivid mutilation is surely an extension of that ‘shorthand of sensation’ sought by Bacon in his paintings. Without the blood and gore so characteristic of the artworks, Beckett’s figures are, of course, notably distorted by injury and bodily malfunction as well as the sort of strange embodiment. (Fifield 2009: 60)

If one pays attention to the Irish painter’s self-portraits (see appendix, fig. 1-7) one realises the multi-textural composition that produces the deformation of the face, and therefore of the self, in the paintings. Bacon rejects the established way of portraying and tries to apprehend the essence by emphasising flesh. As Fifield puts it, “The repetition of these mutual acts of mutilation and distortion stresses (and distresses) the physical at the expense of conventional bodies and settings, forging a meaty mimesis of the atypical subject” (Fifield 2009: 69). Funnily enough, Bacon gets the essence of the self by means of distortion. That self is similar to Beckett’s, which is broken through a distorting narrative voice. And what we get is that unique sensation in Bacon, that ‘shorthand of sensation’ recalled by Fifield in his essay.

The multi-texture is clear in Beckett’s ‘I’ as well. The embodiment in Company is strange because it is estranged. The reader places him or herself within the body but keeping at a distance from it, partly because ‘I’ and ‘body’ are not fully identified. This estrangement is constructed continuously in Beckett’s text and perceived at once when we look at one of Bacon’s portraits. His self-portraits are particularly close to Beckett’s ‘I’, given the amount of autobiographical content in Company’s voice of memory. Regarding this narrative voice, the reader should not worry about what to take as real or not as all fragments, all voices –all the brushstrokes in the artist’s self-portraits– are equally valid in a context that leaves no place for objectivity. What is more, it could be said that the damaged, the deformed, is preferable as it is more human and also more ‘real’. An approach to the Beckettian deforming narrative voice can be helpful for the reader to better comprehend the final warping of the self, which has a lot of Beckett himself.

Bacon’s isolated faces and bodies are tangled and messy, warped and sick. So there is tension or distress in the body with itself, its presence in an obscure world because it lacks the harmony of unity:

El cuerpo – en la obra de Bacon – se hace carne, se desacraliza, se presenta como espasmo, rompe con la armonía de la superficie y de la forma en un ser amenazado por su propia indefinición, esto es, por la dispersión de su identidad. Un cuerpo que se descompone, que escapa por una boca que grita, que se vacía, se prolonga en los torrentes de semen, se dilata, se mezcla con otros cuerpos, se metamorfosea en su reflejo. (Vásquez 2012: 3)

Funnily enough, the coarser his bodies are given to us, the weaker and more human they result. As Peter Fifield puts it, “In Bacon and Beckett the human form is given through emphasis and exaggeration of the curved, the swollen and the bulbous” (Fifield 2009: 58). However, that ‘human form’ is human presence that has to be liberated from the common human form we are used to see. The liberation is reached through emphasis of the bended and the bloated. The reader can say it is a human being, life, what is being painted –with words or with brushstrokes.

Both artists are talking about what they are not sure it can be talked about as it is even difficult to comprehend. This first chapter opened saying that Company’s title was contradictory because the novella is, after all, the lack of company, isolation of the self, who has no company. The subject does not have company even from his own voice, from his own self, as its perception is not clear. There is a lack of content. A subject is being portrayed but that subject is not there. Nevertheless, for us the question to be considered here is nicely put by Milan Kundera in his essay “Une rencontre” (2009), which I quote in its Spanish translation: “¿hasta qué grado de distorsión un individuo sigue siendo él mismo?” (Kundera 2009: 20). The face is distorted and one beholds the most intimate ‘I’: Bacon’s raw self. But it is difficult to say what one’s identity is when the self has been broken, fragmented into several ‘I’s and memory and imagination are equally valid, as happens in Company. There, the subject ends being unnamable: “Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You” (Beckett 2009: 20)

Kundera’s question is somehow answered by means of an element that is repeated in all the self-portraits by Bacon: there is always certain tension that presents the tension of life itself. The tension of a depiction that deforms (almost dissolving) the individuality means that identity is brought to its limit and results in a vibrant and arresting portrait.

Por mucho que legue a la deformación, los personajes de Bacon resultan reconocibles e identificables. El proceso de representación se debate siempre en esa tensión, que busca aquel momento conflictivo en que la presencia parece a punto de disolverse, pero aún no ha perdido del todo los rasgos que la distinguen. (Hunter 2009: 60)

That extreme presence that is about to be dissolved, that pursuit of sensation is not so pictorially represented in Beckett. Nonetheless, in his work, as in Bacon’s, identity is not totally destroyed. There is an attempt to grasp the core element of raw identity, naked existence once liberated from its own skin. Identity suffers a process of abstraction in both Beckett and Bacon. Bacon’s bodies and faces and Beckett’s metafiction are maintained in that tension that allows the individual to keep his or her own identity. Tension is an essential element for both artists to represent individuals –‘I’s– the way they perceive them.

Alienating, Broken Voices

The incapability to communicate as a result of the fragmented self and the consequent alienation of the individual is a chief theme in Modernism in general. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895) portrays the angst that one can feel as a consequence of this alienation. As for American Modernist Fiction, a considerable number of Faulkner’s characters embody this inability to communicate, with the clear example of Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929): “I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying arid the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out” (Faulkner 2010: 33). Benjy struggles to communicate but he fails. As a result, his perception of the world is also damaged, blurred. The lack of communication, the distorted language, limits his perception of reality. Company presents the same panorama. Furthermore, just as no one seems to care about whether Benjy speaks or not, Beckett’s individual is alienated and inactive, lacking all human contact. His presence does not seem to be relevant for anyone else, at least from the voice’s perspective, from what we know through the narrative voice. Beckett and Bacon share that consciousness of triviality of one’s existence. However, that is not where the most distressing part of it lies. Company brings the panorama to its limits denying the possibility of communicating with oneself. Both physical and psychical interactions are problematic. Thus, in Beckett, the lack of communication isolates the person even from himself or herself. At the same level, something similar can be observed in Bacon’s individuals. The painter does not have narrative voice(s) to express the condition of alienation of the subject and yet his portraits inspire the deepest feeling of isolation and remoteness, which is stressed by the fact that most of the people depicted in his paintings are completely alone and framed.

Additionally, chaos is a shared element in the ‘broken’ world Faulkner, Beckett and Bacon –among other many Modernist artists– depict, which is the chaotic view of reality of man in the 20th century, coming with the end of Modernity. Another indispensable example is another foremost modernist, James Joyce, who will be considered again later. In the novel that is considered to be his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), his representation of chaos as an essential part of the broken man is very clear. This chaos is brought by the polyphonic, stream-of-consciousness voices of Joyce’s individuals resounding in the city, which are, like Beckett’s voices, “anonymous, obscure in their attachment to the ‘I’” (Oppenheim 2000: 103-4). In Joyce, and especially in Beckett, the reader never knows at which point one voice ends and another starts. “By fragmenting or fizzling voices, by rendering them anonymous yet also attached to the self […] [w]e cannot individuate them” (Oppenheim 2000: 103). This reflects the chaotic dimension of existence, of bare life, which impedes communication with others and with oneself.

Is there a voice in Company? Are there several voices? If so, where is the line separating them? Are they talking only to the body? When looking at this body, this ‘I’ in the dark, the reader cannot help thinking of possible others, those others that appear in Ulysses. In Company, the lack of presence of others, or the incapability of meeting other selves, makes us think of those others and the probability of their presence. What is more, the Beckettian subject’s own alienation leads him or her to ask about possible others, other ‘I’s: Beckett leads us to a paradoxical ethics of non-relation that appears very close to the ethics of distance that Emmanuel Levinas was elaborating at the same time, paradoxical because the relation with the other is founded on a non-relation, since the face of the other person always reveals an infinite distance. The term of ‘nonrelation’ destroys from the outset the humanistic illusion that we are all alike, or that reciprocity is a given. On the contrary, it is because we are all infinitely different that a new rapport can be thought. (Rabaté 2014: 142)

Aesthetics of the Figure and the Space

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.7 Modernism is a lot about perception, in all its faces. Beckett’s Company shares this Modernist interest but narrows it down to the perception of the self. When we read the novella we picture a man —or better a body and voices, no clear attachments implied— in the darkness, which means that we do not really picture anything in particular as there is only blackness. Therefore visual perception, sight, which has traditionally been considered as the superior sense in epistemology, is rendered useless and therefore primary sensorial perception is hindered.

Figures Lying in the Dark

The reader starts reading Company and all he or she sees is a bulk in the middle of blackness and as part of that blackness. Company is dark. There is a body, there is an ‘I’, and there is darkness, shadow: “Basalt is tempting. Black basalt. […] If with none then no light from the voice on the place where our old hearer lies. In immensurable dark. Contourless.” (Beckett 2009: 21). The author comes back once and again to the black so that the reader can plunge into that dimness in order to feel the same way the body does. The reader has trouble trying to picture a figure lying in the dark, but (s)he soon embodies that same figure. Apparently a specific body accompanied by a voice or group of voices talking to it, but also a body which every human being can ‘occupy’. In other words, every person can be within that skin. The same happens with Francis Bacon’s representation of people, even in his self-portraits, already discussed in the previous section; they represent specific people but one can see him or herself among the diverse shots building a face or a body as they depict the purest and rawest humanity after all.

Perception of the subject in Company is determined by an essential condition apart from this darkness and obscurity: the body is lying, necessarily lying “on his back in the dark” (Beckett 2009: 3). This position leaves the figure in a cognitive relation with the space different from that he would have if he were standing up or sitting down. This condition can recall other cases in Modernist narrative like the one in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). In this book, when Gregor Samsa wakes up in a body that is his but estranged and metamorphosed, he is lying down. He goes through a process of perception of his new physical self from his lying position. And Kafka presents, again, a broken self in his novella. Right before Gregor starts moving, there is a long moment of silence, while lying down, when time is blurred. Gregor’s body seems to be detached from time.

It is in his lying position that Gregor starts to fragmentally perceive his body and, later, his new voice with terror. Even if The Metamorphosis has a metaphorical or even socio-political connotation and Company has a more abstract look, both introduce a lying figure whose voice is apart or estranged, Gregor’s being the ‘exterior’ one. He is shocked when he hears his own metamorphosed voice:

[T]he clock struck quarter to seven. There was a cautious knock at the door near his head. “Gregor”, somebody called – it was his mother – “it’s quarter to seven. Didn’t you want to go somewhere?” That gentle voice! Gregor was shocked when he heard his own voice answering, it could hardly be recognised as the voice he had had before. As if from deep inside him, there was a painful and uncontrollable squeaking mixed in with it, the words could be made out at first but then there was a sort of echo which made them unclear, leaving the hearer unsure whether he had heard properly or not. (Kafka 2005: I)

We do not know how long Gregor Samsa is lying down, but it is a fact that he has something in common with Beckett’s lying figure: both their bodies are passive. Their only activity, especially in Company, is perception; the rest is therefore passivity or lack of movement, lack of life. Your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. This is the type of assertion he does not question. You saw the light on such and such a day and your mind never active at any time is now less active than ever so. (Beckett 2009: 4)

Your mind never active at any time is now even less than ever so. This is the type of assertion he does not question. You saw the light on such and such a day and your mind never active at any time is now less active than ever so. (Beckett 2009: 4)

However, “certain activity” (Beckett 2009: 4) is registered in Company, a slight one that is perception, hearing the voice, scrutinising darkness. That perception is the so-called ‘company’, “mental activity of a low order” (Beckett 2009: 29). The voice as only and necessary – although never sufficient– company can be observed in the context of isolation of the subject, which is another condition of the body in the dark. As far as the subject is concerned, he or she is isolated, with the only company of voice. The two texts, though quite different, make use of the lying position so that the subject can face himself, both physically and in terms of existence. Or an estranged self, that is.

Something similar can be said about Francis Bacon’s lying bodies. They are passive and isolated in the dark. However, even though they are sometimes sleeping (fig. 11), which could be conceived as a peaceful state, there is no harmonic relation to the figure’s surroundings. The figure is physically confronting himself or herself and his or her own existence. Because of the tension of the body and the inherent violence of the representation, the figure is a misfit in the space, in the world, and it is therefore in agony.

The Eye Straining for Life in the Dark

In Company sensual perception focuses on hearing and, later, as light appears, sight. The reader’s sources are an inner ear that hears voices and an eye that ‘sees’ a dark space. The eye is as important element in Beckett as it is in Bacon. In the Irish painter’s Self- Portrait with Injured Eye (1972) (fig. 3) his obsession with the eye is patent. He uses a closed swollen eye as the axis that unchains the deformation of the entire face. Thus, from the eye, the whole face is distorted. Beckett leaves a special place for the eye in his text too:

There is of course the eye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again. (Beckett 2009: 12)

The damaged state of the sense of sight has already been mentioned in the introduction to this second chapter. The eye cannot work properly due to the lack of light. This can be explained by its connection to traditional symbolism of light and darkness. Traditionally, light means truth and that truth cannot happen in the darkness we find in Beckett and Bacon. Is the eye not the only element that is not completely blurred, that gives a hint of profound and abysmal presence? “Only eyelids move” (Beckett 2009: 29). Is it not its moisturising necessity what shows us life? These questions are here posed with reference to Beckett’s novella but in universal terms as well, being as they are about human beings in general. It is interesting to confirm that the eye in Company has the same intensity as the eye in some of Bacon’s portraits. The two artists are communicating the same, life, even if the eyes are closed.

Raw Life in an Undefined Space

Every word said by the voice in Beckett’s novella conveys certain lyricism. The way it talks about the eye, the light, the memories… every aspect of movement and life becomes art in Company. Life has an intrinsic beauty in it, even if it is in the middle of chaos. Life should be art. Here we find something similar to the Nietzschean affirmation of life:

Nietzsche estetiza la vida, no en el sentido burgués, sino en el sentido de que la vida misma sea una obra de arte. Sólo así el arte podrá generar novedades y no morir. El arte así pensado no es un fin, sino un instrumento que hay que llevar más allá, puesto que debe estar al servicio de la vida. Una vida que se concibe no ya como una infinitud a alcanzar sino como un finito ilimitado (o sobrepliegue), visible tras la fractura de la visión del mundo unitario. (Álvarez 2012: 11)

What really interests Beckett in Company is that life, and the isolated condition of the living body. Sometimes that perception of oneself does not go further towards the consideration of presence and existence as it happens with Existentialist authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, or the abovementioned Franz Kafka. Even though questions about existence are sown, Beckett sticks to the question of perception. And this perception, although complex, is direct and penetrating as a portrait by Bacon can be. Violently and heartrendingly Bacon’s work gives an insight that utterly moves us. Bacon’s brushstrokes have the power of Beckett’s second person singular voice in Company –“use of the second person marks the voice” (Beckett 2009: 3) –; they are rough and unrefined as the voice is sharp and undressed. Both artists leave us facing a lying figure in an undefined space. Consequently, they leave us lying on our own, scrutinising darkness. In the case of some of Bacon’s paintings, the isolated figure is there, in a space where it does not fit at all. The tension grows between the ‘I’ and the place the ‘I’ is, in spite of himself, framed in. As a consequence of that tension, the figure cannot be fully framed. This is very clear in one of Bacon’s lying figures, Sleeping Figure (fig. 11): “El pintor explota la relación figura/espacio. […] [E]l personaje aparece atrapado por su actitud, aplastado contra […] la cama como si fuese un resto de sí mismo, su sola presencia inanimada y moldeada por la presión del espacio circundante sobre ella” (Hunter 2009: 33). There is an obvious tension produced by the relation between the body and the space, and yet the space is unavoidable. Even if the space is undefined, it is needed if a portrait has to be made. Bacon’s spaces are essential to frame his portraits.

The same happens with space in Beckett’s Company. And, I dare say, was this not the same portraying activity carried out by James Joyce, the fellow countryman of both artists? As another Irish Modernist novelist, Joyce made an attempt at grasping just life through “unadorned portraits of the human presence” (Hale 1993: 97) in his writing, especially in his Ulysses. Nevertheless, the portrait of humans, of life, is given to us within a different frame since space changes. The city —Dublin as a microcosm—, acts as a constant movement of gyres, were lives are intermingled in an ordered chaos. That clashes with Beckett’s darkness and absence of space. And yet it is not that obvious that the contrast is so radical. While Joyce explored the impossibility of communication, the individual within the continuous urban movement, the musicality of the variety of Dubliners living parallel and juxtaposed lives, Beckett writes about the impossibility of communication of the self, blurred multiple voices and so on. All in all, he writes about the complexity of the ‘I’.

That ‘I’ can be whoever, but, at the same time, it is a definite and somehow unique self. As it has already been said, presence in Beckett is extreme and powerful. Aesthetics throughout the text is hence quite strong and unique. A blurred but at the same time determined self embodies that presence, the text itself. It is blurred due to the lack of light, the multiplicity of voices that appears to be coming from that light, the undefined space or lack of space. The reader pictures a sort of dim room that can be compared to the rooms where some of Bacon’s naked figures are drawn. This can be easily observed in works such as Study from the Human Body or Untitled (Crouching Nude) (fig.8-10). All of those whitish bodies are found in a placeless room. Some straight lines form a geometrical, linear but also undefined container for a violently and distressingly curved body that could be said to be fighting against itself. The lack of definition of the space is stressed by the colours black, grey and ochre at the background. In addition, sometimes the angst is reinforced by means of the use of red. It can be stated that conflict is a key point in Bacon’s bodies and colour and form work together to produce that conflictive nature.

Surprisingly, it is a determined self in a specific body, with specific experiences in the past that can be brought to mind in this undetermined space, even if everything is blurred. This can be thought if we take that there is just one self, one subject. In Beckett’s text, there is a huge part of the discourse, or attempt of discourse, that is memories, Beckett’s memories as he left them. The autobiographic elements are clear. Again, the reader feels lost trying to draw a line separating the defined and undefined when reading Company and looking at Bacon’s work.

Aesthetically, Company is all about that presence, human presence in the dark, what has already been referred to as ‘raw humanity’. This humanity conveys a violence and extreme way of being, presence. That violence of being stands out in Bacon’s portraits. Each line seems to be fighting against another; the rough brushstrokes were spontaneously made, sometimes with rags, by the artist. The violence can be unjustified or unavoidable. Does the beauty lie in that confrontation? A terrible beauty is born in Bacon’s works. The face is full of life and, paradoxically, it is rotting. The same happens with the Beckettian subject: being full of life, being all existence on its mind, being absolute presence for one’s own, its death would not mean any significant change in the dark, even if that presence could be perceived as the most important element in that undefined space.

A Faintly Luminous Void

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (Stevens 2001: lines 13-15)

The white nothingness perceived by Wallace Stevens’s snowman is the black nothingness perceived by the Beckettian hearer. However, there is a presence that is maintained in the novella thanks to the voice, which keeps talking to the ‘I’. Total absence is not allowed. The light in the text brightens the void, ‘enclosed’ within the undefined space, which we know about because there is an eye looking at what is being lit: “Whence the shadowy light? What company in the dark! To close the eyes and try to imagine that. Whence once the shadowy light. No source. As if faintly luminous all his little void” (Beckett 2009: 11). Light is masterly used by Beckett. The voices draw the ‘I’ and create light. As much as the body is eager for light, he will not get it but for the voice, and for the eye that gives access to the produced light that grows with the voice.

Just as Beckett’s ‘black nothingness’ is briefly broken by this shadowy light, Francis Bacon’s monochromatic paintings – see most of the bodies in the Appendix to this article – are also faintly lit by some sort of shadowy light and in some cases by a lamp or a dangling light bulb (fig. 11). In Untitled (Crouching Nude) (fig. 10), for instance, this is patent. The combination of blue, grey, black, and ochre – all dark lines – tends to a monochromatic blackness, a “bourneless dark”, as Beckett would say (Beckett 2009: 33). However, in that blurred colour that tends to black in Bacon’s work there is a curved line, a violent white that acts as Beckett’s light, defining the undefinable and at the same time highlighting that lack of definition. The body in distress is emphasised as it conveys powerful presence. The sensation of the contrasted white that forms a body is made through great tension, as happens with the curvature of all the white lines that seems to be pushing against the straight lines that create darkness. The other contrasting colour is red, which just adds fierceness and chaos.

Some mention should be made to the lack of adaptation of the body to the space, somewhere in the void. Even in Study from the Human Body (fig. 9), in which the figure is slender like a harmonic white sculpture, the body does not fit. The figure is clearly leaving, evaporating after a shaded curtain. As an exception, that body is straight and standing up, whereas the rest are lying down as Beckett’s nameless figure, or bending with angst. However, all of them are the same, misfits, inappropriate.

Physical darkness on the body’s surroundings somehow mirrors the obscurity of perception of oneself going on in Beckett’s novella. Indeed, in both Company’s body and Bacon’s bodies the inner obscurity is extended to the space the body is lying in. “La figura parece surgir de la penumbra del fondo como un espectro” (Hunter 2009: 65). The white wraith is in reality full of life. Actually, it is life itself in a placeless darkness, an “equal remoteness at its most remote” (Beckett 2009: 20). The movement that the figure transmits is a result of the tension, the intrinsic tension of existence. “You were once. You were never. Were you ever?” (Beckett 2009: 12). The nostalgic memories in the novella are counteracted by the inquisitive second person voice asking disturbing questions which do not have an answer.

There is tension in both artists; tension between a white light and blackness, between the body and the space, between real memories and fiction in Beckett’s novella, between straight and curved brushstrokes in Bacon’s paintings. In Beckett’s short novel, there is even tension between the title word, ‘company’, and the ending word, ‘alone’. I think that we can state that the aesthetics of both artists is one of disturbing tension within an abysmal void.

All in all, Beckett shows in Company his own understanding of the self by means of a man lying down, “on his back in the dark” (Beckett 2009: 3) and a voice or a collage of voices supposedly addressing him. The limited perception of the subject allows the author to express his ideas on the individual and his/her distressing way of existing in the world. The Beckettian self is broken and fails to communicate. The voice that the individual and the reader hear throughout the novella draws a broken and alienated self, deficient in communication. That voice is unreliable. Actually, everything is unreliable. If the self, identity, cannot be trusted and everything goes around the ‘I’, nothing can really be trusted, not even the knowledge about oneself.

On the other hand, Francis Bacon’s self follows the Beckettian path but his perception is soaked with violence and his fragmentation is brought further to deformation. Bacon’s selves transmit that raw dimension of the bulging body in a permanent fight against itself. If Bacon’s painting adds his own fierceness to Company’s perception of an individual, Beckett has enhanced the fragmentation of the ‘I’ by means of highlighting the impossibility of communication.

Both an intellectual and an aesthetical look on perception are needed in order to get the point of the written and painted material of the present study. There are many points where the two artists meet: the isolated ‘I’, the distorted perception, the all surrounding void, etc. It is the two artists’ terrible tension that generates that unique sensation of extreme, raw life that is as universal as is talking about human condition. If the tension of contrast is very visual and clear in Bacon, it is differently perceived in Beckett’s Company as it is built up via word relations instead of brushstrokes of colour. Nevertheless, both artists leave us with the same intense sensation every human can feel identified with, sensation of experiencing life itself. This could be put as the most important conclusion here: by means of two different languages, Beckett and Bacon make use of extreme existence, the heartrending tension that is necessary to express life. Human existence is suffering, isolation and anguish but still it is an art expression, full of beauty. Like Bacon’s paintings, Beckett’s Company is the expression of that man of the 20th century, living in the degeneration of an era of developments, in the death of Modernity. Because of the clash between the ideas and reality, the concept of the latter oscillates and turns into fragments. There is not unity, or light, or truth any more as it is reflected with the subject’s self-conscience, as this Cubist piece by Beckett proves. Both the writer and the painter expose their different faces with the intention of covering the real, which includes now that which is left in the shadow because of the existence of raw life in the darkness. Even if we are condemned by that darkness to void.

Bibliografía

**Álvarez, Marta. 2012. El cuerpo sin órganos en Francis Bacon. Trabajo de iniciación a la investigación no publicado. Universidad de Valladolid - Santander**

**Beckett, Samuel. 2009. Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle. London: Faber and Faber**

Beckett, Samuel. 2011. “Letter to MacGreevy, 26 September [1948]”, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, volume II: 1941-1956. Ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press. 104-106

**Croke, Fionnuala (ed.). 2006. Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland**

**Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. *Francis Bacon: Lógica de la sensación.* Trad. Isidro Herrera. 2nd ed. Madrid: Arena Libros**

**Faulkner, William. 2010. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1984**

**Ficacci, Luigi, Francis Bacon. Trad. Carme Franch Ribes. Köln: Taschen**

**Fifield, Peter. 2009. “Gaping Mouths and Bulging Bodies: Beckett and Francis Bacon”. Journal of Beckett Studies. Vol. 18, Sept 2009. 57-71**

**Gontarski, Stan (ed.). 2014. *The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts.* Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press**

**Hale, Jane. 1993. “Framing the Unframable: Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon”. Pp. 95-102, in Marius Buning y Lois Oppenheim (eds.): Beckett in the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi**

**Hunter, Sam. 2009. *Francis Bacon.* Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa**

**Joyce, James. 2000. *Ulysses*. Intro. Declan Kiberd. London: Penguin Classics**

**Kafka, Franz. 2005. *The Metamorphosis.* Trans. David Wyllie. The Project Gutenberg; August 16, 2005.**

**Katz, Daniel. 1999. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Conciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press**

**Kundera, Milan. 2009. Un encuentro. Barcelona: Tusquets**

**Oppenheim, Lois. 2000. The Painted Word. Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press**

**Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 2014. “Beckett’s Masson: From Abstraction to Non-relation”. Pp. 131-145, in Stan Gontarski (ed): *The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett*: Edinburgh University Press**

**Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1967. El hombre y las cosas. Trad. Luis Echávarri, 3rd edition. Buenos Aires: Losada**

**Stevens, Wallace. 2001. “The Snow Man”, Harmonium. London: Faber and Faber**

**Vásquez Rocca, Dr. Adolfo. 2012. “Francis Bacon; la deriva del yo y el desgarro de la carne”. Revista Observaciones Filosóficas, 13 Jan. 2012. Accessed 30 June 2016**

                    **Figure 1: Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1973**

                           Figure 4: Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1971

Francis Bacon, Enigmatic Painter of Howling

Popes, Lived a Life on the Edge

BY ALEXXA GOTTHARDT | ART  |  ARTSY | WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2016

From a small London studio littered ankle-deep with source material, bottles of fine champagne, and a cacophony of paint splatters, Francis Bacon conjured some of the most innovative and, as art critic Robert Melville once put it, “satanically influential” paintings of the 20th century. His canvases writhe with fleshy, screaming, contorted figures, from popes and famed art-historical subjects to friends and ill-fated lovers. His searing work embodies a host of post-war cultural anxieties, as well as Bacon’s personal demons and obsessions.

But what was this mighty, enigmatic painter’s secret to creating such spellbinding imagery—and, all the while, upholding his status as king of the bon vivants? Below, we pull back the curtain on who Bacon was, what motivated his deeply affecting paintings, and why their sulphurous power won’t be fading anytime soon.

Who Was Francis Bacon?

Bacon was a complex man whose work was informed by a tangled web of intense relationships, art-historical fixations, and a fair number of vices. Born in Dublin in 1909 to a domineering father, Capt. Anthony Edward Mortimer, and his much younger wife, Christina Winifred Firth, Bacon was derided as a “weakling” and, as legend has it, horse-whipped by his father during his youth due to issues with chronic asthma. At 17, he was kicked out of the family home for good when he was discovered trying on his mother’s underwear.

But despite (or perhaps because of) his asthmatic bouts and the abuse he endured, Bacon was strong-willed and resilient, with the constitution of a bull. He drank, ate, gambled, loved, and painted with such voraciousness that he rarely had time for sleep; two to three hours a night was typical. Through this haze of debauchery and hard living, and bolstered by deep friendships and aesthetic obsessions, Bacon produced a cascade of paintings that were not only disturbingly beautiful, but also boldly original. His shocking work galvanized the group of painters surrounding him in mid-century London (the “School of London”) and eventually influenced several generations of artists to come, including Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, to name just a few.

What Inspired Him?

After Bacon was jettisoned from his family home, he embarked on a series of European escapades that opened his eyes to art and design, not to mention other earthly pleasures, like sex and wine. Several works he encountered during his travels made a lasting impact on his work and wouldn’t leave his mind until his death in 1992.

While studying French near Chantilly in 1927, he happened upon Poussin's great Massacre of the Innocents (1628–29) and was struck by the emotional agony of the scene, embodied forcefully in the screaming maw of a mother whose child is about to be killed. Later that year, he picked up a book detailing diseases of the mouth, and not long after that, he watched Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, which features a scene of a howling, bloodied nurse—an image permanently tattooed on his mind. Around that time, on a trip to Paris, he was also introduced to Picasso’s early figurative drawings. All these run-ins provided Bacon with his initial art education (he was never formally trained) and went on to influence his unique approach to rendering the human body as a malleable—and, at times, grotesque—vessel of raw human feeling.

The wide-open mouth would later materialize in some of the painter’s greatest canvases: his series of wailing popes, which he toiled over from 1949 until 1971. They show blurred, bethroned men caught in the act of an intense and seemingly eternal scream that, as Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt has said, might have referred simultaneously to the militaristic orders of Bacon’s father, the raging rows between Bacon and his tortured lover Peter Lacy, or more simply, to a cry of fear or the climax of a body-quaking orgasm. This was the rare power of Bacon’s work: fusing a range of references into a Frankenstein’s monster of a whole, a beast shuddering with frustration, tension, and countless other, subtler emotions.

Bacon’s “Popes” also reveal another influence: Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), a painting Bacon became so infatuated with that he admitted to having a “crush” on it. Time and time again, Bacon would rework his own version of the masterpiece, although, interestingly, he refused to see the painting in person when he finally made a trip to Rome. He was embarrassed, he told Peppiatt, of his many “stupid” manipulations of the piece.

Alongside the many other great artists (Giacometti, van Gogh, and Matisse among them) who influenced Bacon, the painter also looked for creative guidance in the work of writers and poets—namely Racine, Baudelaire, and Proust. He was attracted to their ability to pare down the complexities of human existence into succinct lines and phrases; he sought to do the same with the arresting figures rooted at the core of his canvases.

How Did He Work?

Reproductions of Bacon’s inspirations—like the Massacre of the Innocents, along with tattered photos of wild animals, Egyptian talismans, and more—ended up in a soupy jumble on the floors of the many studios he occupied over the course of his career. The exuberant mess was accented with paint and the occasional vestiges of parties he hosted after a long night of carousing through London’s drinking clubs and gambling houses. One of Bacon’s friends, the painter Graham Sutherland, once described Bacon’s early Cromwell Place studio as “a large chaotic place, where the salad bowl was likely to have paint on it and the painting to have salad dressing on it.”

But for all his decadence, Bacon was also extremely dedicated, with his own brand of regimentation. “You have to be disciplined in everything, even in frivolity,” he was known to have said. “Above all in frivolity.” Indeed, his passion for enthusiastic and prolonged socialization seemed to fuel his work. Without fail, after a late night of partying, he would wake up at 6 a.m. to paint for several hours in the morning light. Then he’d begin dining and boozing about town, liaising with his many friends and acquaintances, from fellow painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach to renowned London collectors, such as the Sainsbury’s, to one of his many lovers, like Lacy or Eric Hall. He even went so far as to say that he worked better after a night of drinking: “My mind simply crackles with electricity after one of those evenings,” he once boasted to his friends. “I think the drink actually makes me freer.”

There were some risks to this routine, however. On several occasions, he’d come home late at night, wildly drunk, and decide to “perfect” a painting he’d finished the day before, only to wake up the next morning and discover that he’d ruined it. After one of these episodes, his gallery began collecting his paintings from his studio the moment he finished them.

Bacon’s childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who lived with the painter until her death in 1951, and his two primary dealers—first Erica Brausen at Hanover Gallery, then Valerie Beston at Marlborough Gallery—also played major roles in helping organize his life and career. When Bacon was struggling financially during his youth, Lightfoot helped him find lovers who would also provide financial support. Brausen became a close friend and confidante; they bonded over their shared homosexuality and appetites for risk-taking (Bacon’s on the canvas; Brausen’s on the walls of her gallery). And starting in 1958, Miss Beston, as she was affectionately called, arranged almost all of Bacon’s day-to-day logistics during his most successful years. She paid his bills, arranged his calendar, made sure his apartment stayed clean, and kept him to his painting schedule. She also kept his canvases out of the trash bin, as he was known to destroy them.

Why Does His Work Matter?

Bacon brought new emotional intensity to the painted figure by representing his subjects—be they friends or mythological figures—as contorted, fleshy, emotionally open masses. He sought to reveal, in all its complexity, what was behind the human facade. “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence...as a snail leaves its slime,” he once said. Indeed, Bacon’s paintings pulsate with the dual energy of human suffering and ecstasy. They seem to unearth, in their blurred limbs and wide-open mouths, our most primal urges. (Scholars have noted that in his canvases from the 1950s, monkeys and men often closely resemble one another.)

In his life and work, Bacon embodied and fed off extremes. “The core of Bacon’s genius,” Peppiatt has said, “lay in his ability to straddle these extreme contradictions and translate (or sublimate) them into instantly recognizable images whose characteristic tension derives from a life lived on the edge.” As Bacon once put it: “You have to go too far to go far enough—only then can you hope to break the mould and make something new.”

Alexxa Gotthardt is a Staff Writer at Artsy.

                                  **Henri Cartier-Bresson, Francis Bacon, London, 1971**

**Life through a lens**

**Celebrated photographer John Minihan on some of his most famous photos**

**DES O’DRISCOLL** **| LIFESTYLE | ARTS  |  IRISH EXAMINER  |** **THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2016**

Celebrated photographer John Minihan tells Des O’Driscoll about some of his most famous pictures.

THERE is nobody in Ireland who has photographed — or possibly even met — such an array of famous figures as John Minihan. A teenage Diana Spencer, a wizened Samuel Beckett, an edgy young band named The Who, and countless others have ended up in iconic photographs as a result of posing for Minihan’s trusty Rolleiflex camera.

As a photographer with the Daily Mail and Evening Standard in London, Minihan had access to many of the world’s news-makers. And, through friendships he forged, often in the drinking dens of Soho or via his own interest in the arts, he regularly managed to breach the divide between news snapper and subject. And yet, despite the world of royals and super celebs Minihan mixed in, it’s the photographs he took through the years in his home town of Athy that are still the most important to him.

Now 70 and resident in West Cork, he is as passionate as ever about his craft and is still taking pictures. Minihan’s collection has also been acquired by UCC. Here, we select just a few examples from that hugely important archive. “As an apprentice on the Daily Mail I was getting very little money and as a means to earn a little extra I’d go to the clubs in Soho — Flamingo Club, Ronnie Scotts, The Marquee — and I’d photograph the bands.

**FRANCIS BACON AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS**

“Myself and [Irish journalist] Stan Gebler Davies used to love drinking together in the clubs and bars around Soho. I first saw Francis Bacon in the Colony Room; he was loud, very brash and everybody wanted to be around him. I was introduced to him through Stan, who knew him quite well, and I started photographing him in 1971. I spotted a story one morning in the **Daily Telegraph** that said: ‘Irish painter on drugs charge’. In London, if you win the Nobel Prize for Literature, you’re British, if you’re up on drugs charges, you’re Irish!

I went straight down to the Marlborough Street magistrates court where I met Francis getting out of a taxi. His then boyfriend had got very jealous and had planted a substance and called the police. He was acquitted and I went back to Soho with him to celebrate. I got this picture of him with Burroughs when Burroughs came to London in 1989 for an exhibition of his paintings.”

    **Francis Bacon and William S. Burroughs outside The October Gallery on Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, WC1 in 1989. Photograph by John Minihan**

**Is Elaine Wynn’s $142 Million Francis Bacon Painting on Way to LA?**

**She reveals some details about the purchase in a new interview**

**BRIAN BOUCHER**  **| NEWS  | ARTNET |**  **TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2016**

Billionaire art collector Elaine Wynn has hinted, in an interview with Forbes, that the crown jewel of her blue-chip art collection, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), may go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wynn is the co-chair of the institution, along with investor and Apollo Global Management cofounder Tony Ressler.

She didn’t rule out the donation, instead saying “We’ll see!”

With a net worth estimated at $1.71 billion, Wynn took a number of valuable works away in her 2010 divorce from Las Vegas casino honcho Stephen A. Wynn, also a noted art collector. Forbes values her collection, also featuring other works and examples by Picasso and Manet, at $375 million.

Wynn was so determined to be low-profile about her acquisition of the Bacon, she tells Forbes, that she slinked into the preview exhibition of the work, at Christie’s New York, in sweats and a baseball cap. Her secrecy about the purchase, then the highest ever price paid at auction for any work of art, continued for two months, until the New York Times outed her as the buyer.

The $142 million paid for the three-panel painting remains the record price for a Bacon at auction, far outstripping the next-highest, the $86.3 million paid for another triptych, at Sotheby’s New York in 2008, according to the artnet Price Database.

Wynn experienced a considerable amount of anxiety related to the purchase, she tells Forbes: “First I was worried I’d want to buy it,” she says. “Then I was worried I might not get it.”

**Elaine Wynn, Buyer Of $142 Million Painting, On Her Love Of Art**

**CHASE PETERSON-WITHORN**   **|   FORBES   |** **MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2016**

When Elaine Wynn first laid eyes on Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud triptych, she says she was “gobsmacked.” Wynn had quietly slipped into the Christie’s building in New York in November 2013 – just two days before the set of paintings was to be auctioned off – cloaked in sweats and a baseball cap to discreetly inspect the masterpiece.

“First I was worried I’d want to buy it,” says Wynn. “Then I was worried I might not get it.”

Much to her delight, she won the auction with a bid of $142.4 million after commission. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction – a sum so staggering it could even bust a billionaire’s budget. “I had buyer’s remorse,” Wynn admits. “But only for 30 minutes.”

The purchase was the culmination of a lifelong love of art and aesthetics for Wynn, who spent four decades revitalizing the Las Vegas Strip as co-founder of both Wynn Resorts and, first, Mirage Resorts, where she helped put together the Bellagio’s unprecedented fine art gallery. Now she’s applying the same passion to her own private collection and to her role as co-chair of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she is spearheading a $600 million campaign to build a striking new home for the museum’s permanent collection.

“The things I do, I do because they’re deep passions of mine,” says Wynn. “If I’m invested I’m all the way in.”

For that she can thank her mother, a self-taught pianist who instilled in Wynn a deep appreciation for the arts. Though she grew up admiring beautiful paintings, her middle-class family couldn’t afford to buy many of their own, Wynn says. But by the 1990s she and then-husband Steve Wynn had built a billion-dollar Vegas empire that included the Mirage and Treasure Island. The couple’s next crown jewel, the Bellagio, was designed to resemble an elegant European resort; Wynn found herself purchasing art worth millions of dollars – sums she never thought possible – to be displayed in its world-renowned gallery.

Primarily driven by Steve’s “more scholarly” approach, as Elaine describes it, the collection the couple amassed reads like a who’s who of the art world: Picasso, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Warhol. Much of it was either sold to MGM Grand, along with the rest of Mirage Resorts, in 2000 or divvied up between the couple when they split (for the second time) in 2010.

These days she’s focused on building her own personal collection. Wynn calls her approach “visceral” and “instinctive,” making decisions based more on what makes her fall head over heels than what might turn a nice profit one day or what she can flip for a number of lesser works.

“My tastes are very eclectic,” Wynn says. “I’m not really worried about what’s the hot thing on the market right now.”

The result is a varied collection that Forbes estimates to be worth some $375 million, full of big names – besides the Bacon triptych, there’s Manet’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Suzette Lemaire and Freud’s The Painter Surprised By A Naked Admirer, for example – and lesser-known works like a set of paintings Wynn recently picked up in Cuba for less than $10,000.

She gushes about the “absolutely gorgeous” Cuban works the same way she fawns over the priceless Bacon triptych, which might explain why she has never really sold anything that she has purchased. And why, when asked about regrets, she can only recall pieces that she and Steve got rid of years ago that she now wishes they had kept, including van Gogh’s Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat and Turner’s Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio.

Wynn tends to take an active role in whatever she pursues (she’s the president of the Nevada State Board of Education and a board member of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), so it’s no surprise that when a top museum came calling she took it up on the offer. At a friend’s insistence, she joined the board of LACMA in 2011, impressed by its director, Michael Govan, and his work with contemporary artist Michael Heizer (whose Levitating Mass exhibit adorns the rear of LACMA and who has spent decades developing the massive earth art sculpture, City, in the Nevada desert near Wynn’s home base of Las Vegas).

Then, last year, she was asked to take over the board as co-chair alongside Apollo Management cofounder Tony Ressler. “Since it involved building the new addition to our museum, I was very flattered and excited to say yes,” says Wynn.

She quickly got to work on the project, which calls for replacing a number of aging structures on the museum’s campus by 2023 with a sleek, charcoal building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. After helping to secure a $125 million commitment from Los Angeles County in 2014, Wynn kicked off a $475 million private fundraising drive with a $50 million personal pledge of her own last April. She says the new building is much needed, but also that the decision was “a little self-serving” because she hopes to one day donate some of her most cherished art to a museum.

“I was preferring to do that in a West Coast place to be consistent with where I have spent all my adult life,” Wynn says. “The prospect of having a beautiful addition to LACMA that could house this important work of art was in the back of my mind.”

Asked whether she’s referring to the headline-grabbing Bacon triptych – which currently graces the walls of her living room (“When I invite people over I lose them for the first ten minutes”) – she pauses and offers just the words you’d expect from a skilled fundraiser (or maybe a passionate collector who hates the thought of letting go of a masterpiece): “We’ll see!”

**Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez**

**Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez**

**Guggenheim Bilbao**

**30 September 2016 - 8 January 2017**

REVIEW BY DR RINA ARYA  | THIS IS TOMORROW  |  CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE | 14 NOVEMBER 2016

Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, curated by Martin Harrison, is conceivably one of the most significant Bacon exhibitions to date. It features a number of paintings on which little is known and some that have never been exhibited. The exhibition is timely, occurring after the publication of the masterly five-volume catalogue raisonné (edited by Harrison), which unveiled these new or later works. Many Bacon exhibitions to date have focused on a core of well known works and so it is refreshing to see relatively unknown works, especially ‘Sea’ (c. 1953) and ‘Landscape near Malabata, Tangier’ (1963), and indeed forecasts exciting times ahead.

The exhibition is outstanding in the sheer range of work shown, surveying more than six decades of Bacon’s painting. While most are from Bacon’s later career, his earliest works from 1929 to 1933 are also exhibited. One of his erstwhile ‘crucifixions’ from 1933 is displayed, retitled as ‘After Picasso, ‘La Danse’ (1933), which we learn from the catalogue raisonné was never intended to be conceived of as a crucifixion. The relative technical simplicity of these early works makes the contrast with those from the mid-1940s stark. The rooms focus on different themes – ‘Human Cages’, ‘Isolated Figures’ and ‘Exposed Bodies’. One of the galleries showcases the power of his portraits, including self-portraits, all painted with ferocious intensity and stark simplicity. This is complemented by additions by Alberto Giacometti and Chaïm Soutine.

The focus of this exhibition is on the continental European, mainly Spanish, connection. Bacon’s Francophilia is noted here and, not least through the recent Monaco exhibition, ‘Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture’. However, acknowledgement of the influence of Spanish culture has been overdue. The influence of Pablo Picasso, especially his biomorphic bather forms of the late 1920s, which has been well documented, lasted for about a decade from 1933. The exhibition also features Picasso’s cubist works as well as those of his contemporaries, such as Juan Gris. The fragmentation of form, characteristic of these works, provides an interesting parallel with Bacon’s own aesthetic of distortion.

Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Innocent X’ (1650), itself not present in the exhibition, was a landmark painting for Bacon, evident in his amassing of multiple copies of the painting in his studio. These were the basis of his inspiration for multiple works. Whilst declaring it to be one of the greatest paintings, he did not actually see it first-hand when visiting Rome, preferring instead to consult reproductions. The papal theme is explored in conventional portrayals by other artists, which collectively underscore the aberrance of Bacon’s pontiffs. Other religious works by a host of Spanish artists exhibited include José de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. While their depictions contrast with Bacon apropos the religious tenor of ‘Saint Paul the Hermit’, ‘The Crucified Christ with a Donor’ and ‘Saint Peter in Tears’, they share with Bacon raw intensity brought about by the use of the pared down image of a spectral figure emerging out of darkness.

A separate room features Francisco de Goya’s ‘Tauromachy’ series of 1816, which served as a counterpart to and summary of Bacon’s overarching preoccupations with the shadow of death on life. Bacon spoke of his interest in bullfighting and painted a couple of bullfighting scenes in the 1960s. The final painting he worked on before his death is ‘Study of a Bull’ (1991).

One of the highlights of the show, and quite a thrill it is, is the virtual reality headset which reveals a three-dimensional view of Bacon’s studio (7 Reece Mews) and literally brings Bacon into the digital age. The opportunity for immersion into Bacon’s private space is an unexpected but welcome treat. This is part of a continuing trend to acknowledge the working practices of Bacon – his sketches, ‘drawings’, sources and other integral material aspects of his practice. The leather cases containing ‘detritus’ found in Reece Mews capture the vitality of his working environment and pinpoint his sources of creativity.

**LONDON CALLING: RAW BACON**

**LAURENCE FULLER** **|  SQUARE SPACE |** **TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2016**

Why do we find sexuality a taboo subject in our culture? It is what creates life and yet can be a destructive force for many, a primordial unity for others and for all there is an element of sacrifice. The French call it La Petite Mort (The Little Death), Marcelle Hanselaar’s series of etchings by this name have been were an early influence on me. I feel much of life comes down to this tiny demise, figurative painting by the London School in particular Bacon and Freud capture this so well.

Each relationship is structured differently and for conventional morality to get in the way of others happiness is ludicrous. For instance, it’s hard to believe not so long ago Homosexuality was not allowed, in fact it was illegal, as Francis Bacon’s work vividly demonstrates, during the creation of Reclining Woman 1961 (on display in this exhibition) the figure was suppose to be male, presumably his lover at the time, and in order to not be found out for his crimes he painted over the penis to make the figure appear female. This was the case with a number of his portraits up until the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 allowed homosexual relationships in private. These works offer some exposure, revealing some things that are strange and difficult in our nature, yet I believe

Bacon is so present in all his paintings, the canvas and the subject are reflections of himself, there is no distance between himself and the painting. The same could be said of his lovers, his willingness to express a violent space even in the most casual ways is not an intimidation, but an invitation. He wanted to instigate the other, his way of seduction.

Though since Sigmund Freud the revelation that a person’s sexuality informs so much about their behaviour, the sexuality of Freud and Bacon standing in parallel opposition to each other, respectively extreme cases of both, Freud having potentially fathered 54 children (though only 14 of them confirmed publicly). Says something very fundamental about the way they see their subjects. For Freud he is like the observer, with a penetrating eye wishing to see his subject at their most vulnerable, to deeply understand them for the individuals they are. For Bacon he wishes to inspire his subjects for them to fight back at him, Freud wishing to subdue his subject.

**"It’s true to say when you paint anything you are also painting not only the subject but you are also painting yourself as well as the object that your trying to record" - Francis Bacon**

There is, I feel, in my father Peter Fuller’s perception of Bacon a fear of the humiliation of his gaze, and to meet Bacon would in itself be a violent act without any physical manifestations taking place. The mutilation that would occur in the mind alone would be enough to warrant a skepticism of his work. My father saw a threat in Bacon’s pictures, that he thought only a concern with the grotesque could entertain. And he walked with this weight, the underlying value that their cannot be dignity in roughness. I don’t believe roughness should be shied away from, but wholly embraced in order to fully live.

Here is where me and my father differ, on painters like Bacon, roughness, adrenaline, immediacy are all vital parts to an actors craft. An actor has only their humanity to bear, it’s all they have to offer, even in the flesh, skin deep, blood flowing moment the actor finds their true self and that is what they bring to the world. Immediacy and sponteity are key aspects to Bacon’s work. In acting there is a necessary ugliness, not in order to shock but in order to reveal, the best actors are emotionally naked, they’ve put themselves bare faced onto the world’s stage, their ideas, their feelings and their unique individual song and if they’ve stayed the course they’ve been subject to all the ridicule the Western world has to offer in its competitive nature and still they stand in front of the camera lens, brave and naked. Daniel Day-Lewis said that it is "very hard to have any dignity as an actor" though he has tried for both, and in contradiction has revealed his soul through the life of another. There’s this idea that actors are like meat puppets or narcissists, and all that they say is in order to sell themselves, and yes indeed the profession does attract many people like this, but the truly great actors know that there is not enough of their own humanity to bear to fill the void of the swelling mob as they seek love in another, and humility in the face of this is their only option, a constant, unending sacrifice of dignity, all the while struggling to pick it back up. I feel this same dichotomy is present in Bacon’s pictures and in our relationship to sexuality.

Bacon said that he would to have liked to make some films towards the end of his life, painting solely from photographs and raw emotions, his subjects are reimagined first through a lens and then with the brush. American films are far more accepting of portrayals of violence, than they are depictions of sexuality, the naked human form is judged far more harshly by the censors than that same form being blown to bits by a machine gun. I believe that this is a mistake in our culture.

In the famous interview between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon, Sylvester suggests that Hockney is the antithesis of Bacon. And if as I have suggested in the past London based expressionist artist Marcelle Hanselaar is in line with Bacon, certainly one that that they share is this sense of theatricality in their work. I remember talking to Marcelle Hanselaar in this interview about the comparisons between theatre and painting. When I asked Marcelle 'Do you think shocking images will captivate people more?' she responded "I think because an image is artificial what you do on a canvas, you try to grab a whole life or a whole situation really on a square or rectangular piece. So of course it’s like theatre you have to dramatize it, it has to be intensified, because otherwise people for the same money will just look at the wall and think 'nice wallpaper'". We discussed how in the mise-en-scène, the situation which we find her characters there is quite often a social dynamic whether its a lone figure caught in the act of something or multiple figures and they are caught, Marcelle told me that this sense of theatricality comes from a need to create an immediacy in her work, something Bacon was continually concerned with.

Yet there is a decided difference between what Bacon and Hanselaar call immediacy and theatricality, and the kind that Hockney puts to use in his work. It’s much the same subjective approached from completely different corners.

An actor friend told me recently that I maintain a kind of stoic position to life in spite of it all, I feel in full consideration of the moment of death it becomes very difficult not to value the preciousness of life. "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live” - Marcus Aurelius. Bacon had much the same outlook when he suggested to David Sylvester that life life is so much sweeter to this who walk in the shadow of death because it can be taken away at any moment.

My father, who defended the preciousness of life, would constantly tell his friends that he was going to die young and would go about his work leaving the legacy that he did by the age of 42, with a kind of franticness, which is now recited back to me by those same friends as an ironic part of his story. I believe this stoic awareness of death was a vital aspect to his point of view on art. Though in the case of Bacon he defended the dignity of the image by bearing his own demons on paper and allowing the images to speak to the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, therefore he had a difficult relationship to Bacon’s paintings:

**RAW BACON**

by Peter Fuller

Their heads are eyeless and tiny. Their mouths, huge. Two of them are baring their teeth. All have long, stalk-like necks. The one on the left, hunched on a table, has the sacked torso of a mutilated woman; the body of the centre creature is more like an inflated abdomen propped up on flamingo legs behind an empty pedestal; the third could be a cross between a lion and an ox: its single front leg disappears into a patch of scrawny grass.

They exude a sense of nature’s errors; errors caused by some unspeakable genetic pollution, embroidered with physical wounding. One has a white bandage where its eyes might have been. All are an ominous grey, tinted with fleshly pinks: they are set off against backgrounds of garish orange containing suggestions of unspecified architectural spaces.

Francis Bacon painted this triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base o f a Crucifixion, now in the Tate Gallery, in 1944. It was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery the following April, where it hung alongside works by Moore, Sutherland and others who had sought to redeem the horrors of war through the consolations of art. Although Bacon referred to traditional religious iconography, he did not wish to console anyone about anything. Indeed, he seemed to want to rub the nose of the dog of history in its own excrement.

When the Three Studies was first shown, the war was ending and it was spring. Bacon was out of tune with the mood of his times. Certainly, as far as the fashionable movements in art were concerned, he was to remain so. And yet his star steadily ascended. By the late 1950s he was one of an elite handful of ‘distinguished British artists’. Today his stature among contemporary painters seems unassailable. And yet Bacon — **who recently held an exhibition of new work at Marlborough Fine Art to mark the publication by Phaidon of a major monograph, Francis Bacon, by Michel Leiris** — **must be the most difficult of all living painters to evaluate justly. His work is so extreme it seems to demand an equally extreme response.**

Bacon has always denied that he set out to emphasise horror or violence. In a chilling series of interviews conducted by David Sylvester, he qualified this by saying, ‘I’ve always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly, people feel that that is horrific.’ He explained that people ‘tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called truth.’ He has repeatedly said that his work has no message, meaning or statement to make beyond the revelation of that naked truth.

Bacon’s serious critics have largely gone along with his own view of his painting. Michel Leiris, a personal friend of the painter’s, is no exception; Leiris argues that Bacon presents us with a radically demystified art, ‘cleansed both of its religious halo and its moral dimension’. Again and again, Leiris calls Bacon a ‘realist’, who strips down the thing he is looking at in a way which retains ‘only its naked reality’. He echoes Bacon himself in arguing that his pictures have no hidden depths and call for no interpretation ‘other than the apprehension of what is immediately visible’.

No doubt the ‘horror’ has been overdone in popular and journalistic responses to Bacon. But it is just as naive to think Bacon is simply recording visual facts, let alone transcribing ‘truth’. Creatures like those depicted in Three Studies can no more be observed slouching around London streets than haloes can be seen above the heads of good men, or angels in our skies. Of course Bacon’s violent imagination distorts what he sees.

But the clash between Bacon’s supporters and the populists cannot be dismissed as easily as that. The point remains whether Bacon’s distortions are indeed revelatory of a significant truth about men and women beyond the facts of their appearances; or whether they are simply a horrible assault upon our image of ourselves and each other, pursued for sensationalist effects. And this, whether Bacon and his friends like it or not, involves us in questions of interpretation, value and meaning.

The stature of Bacon’s achievement from the most unpropitious beginnings is not to be denied. Although his father named his only son after their ancestor, the Elizabethan philosopher of sweet reason, he was himself an unreasonable and tyrannical man, a racehorse trainer by profession. Nonetheless, Francis, a sickly and asthmatic child, felt sexually attracted to him. Francis received no conventional schooling and left home at sixteen, following an incident in which he was discovered trying on his mother’s clothes.

He worked in menial jobs before briefly visiting Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s; soon after, he began painting and drawing, at first without real commitment, direction or success. In the early 1930s, he was better known as a derivative designer of modern rugs and furniture, although an early Crucifixion, in oils, was reproduced by Herbert Read in Art Now. Bacon subsequently destroyed almost all his early work; his public career thus effectively began only with the exhibition of Three Studies in 1944.

Bacon then began to produce the paintings for which he has become famous: at first there were some figures in a landscape; but soon he moved definitively indoors. He displayed splayed bodies, surrounded by tubular furniture of the kind he had once designed, in silent interiors. A fascination with the crucifix and triptych format continued; but he painted the naked, human body — **usually male** — in all sorts of situations of struggle, suffering and embuggerment. A picture of two naked figures wrestling on a bed of 1953 is surely among his best. But a series of variations on Velazquez’s Portrait o f Pope Innocent X — **which he now regrets** — became among his most celebrated. By the 1960s, the echoes of religious iconography and the Grand Tradition of painting had become more muted. Bacon could never be accused of ‘intimism’ : ‘homeliness’ is one of the qualities he hates most. The large, bloody, set-piece interiors continued; but the forms of their figures became less energetic, more statuesque. Bacon seemed increasingly preoccupied with portraits, usually in a triptych format, of his friends and associates: Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, George Dyer (his lover), Muriel Belcher, the owner of a drinking club in Soho he frequented, and himself.

Bacon has repeatedly said that he is not an ‘expressionist’; it is easy to show what he means by this by contrasting his work with that of the currently fashionable, but lesser, painter George Baselitz (at the Whitechapel Gallery) - who is. Baselitz deals with a similar subject matter; but he invariably handles paint in an ‘abstract expressionist’ manner; i.e. in a way which refers not so much to his subjects as to his own activity and sentiments as an artist. Anatomy, physiognomy, gesture and the composition of an architectural illusion of space mean nothing to him: to Bacon, they are everything. Or rather almost everything.

For if he has sought to work in continuity with the High Art of the past, Bacon recognises that the painter, today, is in fact in a very different position. He has regretted the absence of a ‘valid myth’ within which to work: ‘When you’re outside tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s nervous system as one possibly can.’

He stresses that the echoes of religion in his pictures are intended to evoke no residue of spiritual values; Bacon is a man for whom Cimabue’s great Crucifixion is no more than an image of ‘a worm crawling down the cross’. He is interested in the crucifix for the same reason he is fascinated by meat and slaughterhouses; and also for its compositional possibilities: ‘The central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level. The alteration of level is, from my point of view, very important.’ But, for Bacon, the myths of vicarious sacrifice, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, salvation and victory over death mean nothing - even as consoling illusions.

The appeal to a meaningful religious iconography is, in effect, replaced in his work by an appeal to photography; similarly, in his pictures, as in his life, the myth of a jealous and omnipotent god has been replaced by the arbitrary operations of chance.

Bacon’s fascination with Muybridge’s sequential photographs of men, women and animals in motion is well-known. References to specific Muybridge images are often discernible in his pictures; even his triptych format seems to relate more to them than to traditional altarpieces. He seems to believe that Muybridge exposed the illusions of art, and freed it from the need to construct such illusions in the future. Unlike many who reached similar conclusions, they did not, of course, lead Bacon to narrow aestheticism or abstraction. Rather, he sometimes insists that the artist should become even more ‘realist’ than the photographer, by getting yet closer to the object; and, at others, that as a result of photography’s annexation of appearance, good art today has become just a game.

But this insistence on ‘realism’, and reduction of art to its ludic and aleatory aspects, are not, in Bacon’s philosophy, necessarily opposed. Accident and chance play a central role in his pursuit of ‘realistic’ images of men; they enter into his painting technique through his reliance on throwing and splattering. In fact, of course, Bacon exercises a consummate control over the effects chance gives him; but, as he once said, ‘I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.’ He fantasizes about the creation of a masterpiece by means of accident. The religious artists of the High Tradition attributed their ‘inspiration’ to impersonal agencies, like the muses or gods; and Bacon, too, is possessed of an overwhelming need to locate the origins of his own imaginative activity outside of himself.

The role of photography and chance in his creative process relate immediately to the view of man he is seeking to realise. ‘Man,’ he has said, ‘now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.’ Thus, in reducing itself to ‘a game by which man distracts himself’ (rather than a purveyor of moral or spiritual values) art more accurately reflects the human situation even than photography . . . The human situation, that is, as seen by Bacon.

Bacon then has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has used the shell of the High Tradition of European painting to express, in form as much as in content, a view of man which is utterly at odds with everything that tradition proclaims and affirms. Moreover, it must be admitted that he has done so to compelling effect. It is perfectly possible to fault Bacon, technically and formally: he has a tendency to ‘fill-in’ his backgrounds with bland expanses of colour; recently, he has not always proved able to escape the trap of self-parody, leading to mannerism and stereotyping of some of his forms. But these are quibbles. Bacon, in interviews, has good reason constantly to refer back to the formal aspects of his work; he is indeed the master of them.

But this cannot be the end of the matter in our evaluation of him. Leiris maintains his ‘realism’ lies in his image of ‘man dispossessed of any durable paradise . . . able to contemplate himself clear-sightedly’. But is it ‘realistic’ to have a Baconian vision of man closer to that of a side of streaky pig’s meat, skewered at random, than to anything envisaged by his rational ancestor?

Nor can we evade the fact that Bacon’s view of man is consonant with the way he lives his life. He emerges from his many interviews as a man with no religious beliefs, no secular ethical values, no faith in human relationships, and no meaningful social or political values either. ‘All life,’ he says, ‘is completely artificial, but I think that what is called social justice makes it more pointlessly artificial . . . Who remembers or cares about a happy society?’ One may sympathise with Bacon because death wiped out so many of his significant relationships; but his life seems to have been dedicated to futility and chance. It has been said that, for him, the inner city is a ‘sexual gymnasium’. He is obsessed with roulette, and the milieu of Soho drinking clubs. He wants to live in ‘gilded squalor’ in a state of ‘exhilarated despair’. He is not so much honest as appallingly frank about his overwhelming ‘greed’.

And it is, of course, just such a view of man which Bacon made so powerfully real through his painterly skills. Because he refuses the ‘expressionist’ option, he also relinquishes that ‘redemption through form’ which characterises Soutine’s carcasses of beef, or Rouault’s prostitutes. But it may, nonetheless, be that there is something more to life than the spasmodic activities of perverse hunks of meat in closed rooms. And perhaps, even if the gods are dead, there are secular values more profound and worthwhile than the random decisions of the roulette wheel.

I believe there are; and so I cannot accept Bacon as the great realist of our time. He is a good painter: he is arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the last war. (Though I believe Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff are better.) Nonetheless, in the end, I find the vision of man he uses his undeniable painterly talents to express quite odious. We are not mere victims of chance; we possess imagination - or the capacity to conceive of the world other than the way it is. We also have powers of moral choice, and relatively effective action, whether or not we believe in God. And so I turn away from Bacon’s work with a sense of disgust, and relief: relief that it gives us neither the ‘facts’ nor the necessary ‘truth’ about our condition.

**1983**



**The Art of Rivalry by  Sebastian Smee**

**from shared vision to slashed canvas**

**Picasso and Matisse, Bacon and Freud… this study of great**

**painters’ rivalries buzzes with gossip but little real insight**

**RACHEL COOKE | REVIEW**  **| THE OBSERVER**  **| SUNDAY 16 OCTOBER 2016**

Sebastian Smee’s collection of long essays about artistic friendships springs from his interesting – surely not entirely original – contention that when it comes to inspiration, finding oneself in competition with a brilliant rival may be every bit as important as being, say, in possession of a beautiful muse. But while his principal characters are all male – “culture in this period was overwhelmingly patriarchal”, he writes, casually and unapologetically – his narrative is not quite so macho as it may first appear. The Art of Rivalry is, he suggests, a book about “yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence… about susceptibility”. In other words, though he doesn’t put it quite like this himself, his subject is a series of tender, and then not-so-tender, love stories: between Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, and Pollock and de Kooning.

Each essay begins with a ripely significant moment in the history of these complex relationships, after which Smee retraces his steps, returning to the beginning to unwrap the full story, from early shy sweetness to full-blown falling out. For Matisse and Picasso, this moment is their first meeting in 1906, when the collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein took Matisse and his daughter, Marguerite, to visit Picasso’s ramshackle studio in the dilapidated former piano factory known as the Bateau-Lavoir, while for Pollock and de Kooning it’s one night in the early 1950s, when the two painters were seen sharing a drink outside the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. If Matisse and Picasso’s rivalry was mostly unspoken, a quietly crackling atmosphere in which each of them, almost slyly, checked the other out, Pollock and de Kooning had an altogether bolder strategy. As they passed the bottle between them, each man took it in turns to insist loudly to the other that he (the other) was “the greatest painter in America” – greatness, you understand, was then all the rage, even among the sober – until Pollock finally passed out.

The tale of Manet and Degas begins with the story of Degas’s 1868-69 portrait of Manet and his wife, a canvas Manet famously slashed, his friend having apparently failed to flatter Suzanne. Smee’s belief is that Degas’s painting in fact reminded Manet painfully of the hypocrisy and shame that had once attended his relationship (their son, born illegitimately when Manet was just 19, had been brought up as his wife’s brother). But this is a well known drama. More intriguing by far is Smee’s starting point for the story of Freud and Bacon: the theft from a Berlin museum in 1988 of Freud’s 1952 pocket-sized portrait of his former friend.

“Somebody out there really loves Francis,” Freud said after its disappearance, a feeling with which he could identify, for all that the two of them had definitively broken with each other back in the early 1970s. Thirteen years after its loss, as the Tate was preparing to mount a retrospective of his work, Freud designed a WANTED poster for this portrait in a desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, bid to get the picture back. The poster in question, he insisted, was the “jokey equivalent of a black armband”. But that word, “wanted”, emblazoned in red letters above a black-and-white image of his former friend’s face, his eyes cast down and his lips forming a kind of plangent sneer, was powerfully significant, whether Freud allowed it or not. If he did not long for Bacon, exactly, he carried with him a hollow in the form of shared history and, perhaps, a debt owed. It was a gap that seemingly wouldn’t go away. Just as Degas frantically collected Manet’s work after his death, so Freud kept Bacon’s Two Figures  (1953), in which male lovers lie wrestling in the middle of an unmade bed, their teeth bared, in his house in London until the end of his life.

What did all these men do for one another? Mere days after his visit to Picasso’s studio, Matisse exhibited Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) at the Salon des Indépendants, a painting that caused Picasso to abandon his own work on a similarly Arcadian theme, The Watering Place, on the grounds that it now seemed unexceptional (even the devoted Leo Stein at first balked at Matisse’s extraordinary painting, a vividly coloured vision of paradise that was also uncomfortably odd). But in the main, influence is not specific like this; it’s subtle and twisting and complicated. Can we ever be certain that it was Bacon who caused Freud to replace his early delicacy with a new, more brutish amplitude? Or that it was Pollock’s wild drip paintings that enabled de Kooning finally to see what was missing in his own work? (According to Smee, he wanted a “share” of Pollock’s abandon, his sense that he was almost “inside” the canvases he laid on the floor and danced around.)

I’m not sure creativity works like this. Jealousy is often a spur. So, too, is admiration: the desire to earn it, as well as to ape the source of it. Friends may encourage and learn from each other. In the end, though, a true artist competes only with himself.

The Art of Rivalry has two great virtues. The first is that it is plainly written, almost entirely free of the clotted art-speak that makes a lot of books on similar themes so difficult to read. (Though it is also rather lazy and flip, sometimes: “He had caught the art bug,” its author notes of the young Degas, before going on to inform us that Manet’s drawings were “often a bit iffy”). The second is that it bulges with gossip, even if you will have heard a lot of it before. In context, the wedding from which Freud absents himself on the grounds that he has been sexually involved not only with the bride but also with the groom and the groom’s mother, barely causes the reader to raise an eyebrow. It’s also almost certain to make you want to chase down (or reread) the big biographies that are some of its major sources. But these things don’t entirely compensate for the sense that Smee, the winner of a Pulitzer prize for his art criticism, is sometimes only going through the motions – particularly so in the case of the rather breathless essay on Matisse and Picasso, which never seems to do much more than skim the surface. All in all, it feels rather forced, bolted together: a book that didn’t need to be written, and thus doesn’t always demand to be read.

The Art of Rivalry is published by Profile Books (£16.99).

**Art as a mirror of this dark moment**

**By SEBASTIAN SMEE | CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK | THE BOSTON GLOBE | NOVEMBER 24, 2016**

Francis Bacon’s portraits capture the human psyche at the very moment when composure breaks down and the animal — adrenalized, alert, ready to snarl — is revealed.

We are, evidently, in an angry moment. The repressed, factored-out, and thwarted sides of our psyches are spilling out, and it isn’t pretty. The terrible strain of pretending that that other person over there is just as important as I am, that we are equal, that love trumps hate, and all those other platitudes, those feeble fictions, is proving too much to bear.

Taunting is in. A female student in a hijab is surrounded and heckled by fellow students who call her a terrorist. Black students get on a bus only to be told by other students to sit in the back. Swastikas appear in the boys’ bathroom at a school with a high number of Jewish students.

We have columnists and comedians on hand to make sense of this moment. We have edifying teachers and lecturers. We still have a political opposition. But do we have artists? Of course. And they’ve been speaking to this moment for a very long time.

The artists who feel most in tune with what is going on right now are not, by and large, overtly political artists. Political speech has a strange way of not really applying to anyone. (That, in a nutshell, was Hillary Clinton’s problem.) The same, unfortunately, is true of most well-intentioned political art.

Great art is different. It applies to me, to you. The artists who speak most cogently to the present are interested in something deeper than truisms. They’re not trying to check identity boxes. They’re not trying to preach to the converted. They are interested in conveying what Francis Bacon called “the brutality of fact.”

Bacon is in some ways exemplary. His portraits come out of a dark European tradition that includes Hieronymous Bosch, James Ensor, Pablo Picasso, and Max Beckmann. They dramatize the tension between the psyche’s darker compulsions and the pressure felt in civilized society to conform, to repress emotions, not to lash out.

Bacon invented a whole new visual language for this tension. He drew on those forerunners in art, but also on photographs in medical textbooks, in the films of Luis Bunuel and Sergei Eisenstein, the stop-motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, and news images of 20th-century violence.

Think of the pinched and slightly blurred look in the president-elect’s eyes when he is not getting his way or feels hard done by. His micro-expressions — the fleeting twitches, the flash of fury — hint at a mind incapable of composure.They find gorgeous equivalents in the smeared, distended expressions of Bacon’s portraits, which capture the human psyche at the very moment when composure breaks down and the animal — adrenalized, alert, ready to snarl — is revealed.

We are in a divided society. People are on a short fuse. They are looking for — and finding — like-mindedness. In some cases, for the reassurance of platitudes. In others, for permission to make those ugly faces, to express the contempt that burns beneath the scuffed veneer of civility.

In crowds, at protests, at rallies, these people feel an expanded license to say and do things they wouldn’t dare elsewhere. Sometimes they hide behind a political placard or put on a mask. Given the right setting, they might even throw up a Nazi salute.

But it’s good to remember that not all art is there to console us. More than any piece of investigative journalism, art can express fundamental truths about our circumstances and our natures. Very often, we would hesitate to put those truths into words — assuming we even could.

**The Rule of Three for Prizes in Science and the Bold Triptychs of Francis Bacon**

**Lasker Jury Chair Joseph Goldstein makes the case that the triptych — a classic storytelling form for painters**

**— is also an effective mode for enlightening the general public on how scientific discoveries arise.**

**Opening remarks from 2016 Lasker Awards ceremony.**

**JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN**  **| AWARDS | JURY CHAIR ESSAYS  |  LASKER FOUNDATION  |** **TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2016**

**The Rule of Three**

For many scientific awards, such as Nobels and Laskers, the maximum number of recipients is limited to three. This Rule-of-Three forces selection committees to make difficult decisions that increase the likelihood of singling out those individuals who open a new field and continue to lead it. The Rule-of-Three is reminiscent of art’s three-panel triptych. The master of the modern triptych is the British artist Francis Bacon, who used the triptych format to distill a complex story so that it could be painted and told in a bold way.

**What’s Magic About the Number 3?**

There’s something magical and magisterial about the number 3. Religion has its Holy Trinity; literature has its Three Musketeers; comedy has its Three Stooges; folk music has its Peter, Paul and Mary; thoroughbred racing has its Triple Crown; the universe has its First Three Minutes. In baseball, it’s Three Strikes and You’re Out; In science, it’s the Nobel Rule of Three. And in art, it’s the Three-Panel Triptych.

**Origin of the Nobel Rule-of-Three**

The original will of Alfred Nobel made no mention of the number of recipients who could share a Nobel Prize. For the first 50 years of Nobel Prizes (1901-1950), the prizes in every category were given primarily to one or two individuals with very few exceptions (Levinovitz and Ringertz, 2001). In 1902, one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Henri Becquerel for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity, and the other half was shared between the husband and wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie for developing methods for measuring radioactivity and identifying new radioactive elements such as radium. A physics prize to three was not given again for 54 years at which time William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain were honored in 1956 for the discovery of the transistor.

The first time three individuals received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was in 1934 when the prize went to George Whipple, George Minot, and William Murphy for discovery of liver therapy for pernicious anemia. The second time that the Karolinska Institute recognized a threesome was in 1945 when Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain were honored for the discovery of penicillin. It was not 1946 that the first Chemistry Prize was given to three individuals. This award recognized the discovery that enzymes could be crystallized (James Sumner) and that viruses could be prepared in a pure form (John Northrop and Wendell Stanley). No further chemistry prizes to three occurred until 1967 when the Nobel was awarded to Manfred Eigen, Ronald Norrish, and George Porter for studies of fast chemical reactions.

In 1968 the Nobel Foundation formally decided that the maximum number of recipients to receive any of their prizes would be three (Levinovitz and Ringertz, 2001). In the last 50 years, about one-third of the prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine have each been shared by three people. Following in Nobel footsteps, the Lasker Foundation adopted the Rule of Three in 1997. Since then, about one-third of Lasker Basic and Clinical Awards have been shared by three individuals.

**Origin of Triptychs**

The first triptychs go back to the Middle Ages when Byzantine churches were decorated with biblical altar paintings. One of the most famous of all triptychs is the altarpiece in the Antwerp Cathedral by Peter Paul Rubens, completed in 1612 (Fig. 1). Rubens’ triptych, entitled Descent from the Cross, depicts the Visitation (left panel), the Descent (middle panel), and the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple (right panel). The central panel shows four men lowering the body of Christ with the aid of a shroud. At the top of one ladder, the grey-haired man holds one end of the shroud in his teeth, while at the top of a second ladder, the brown-haired man holds the other end of the shroud with his left hand. One of Christ’s feet comes to rest on Mary Magdalene’s shoulder, right next to her beautiful golden hair (Bialostocki, 1964).

In 1794 after winning the battle of Fleurus in the Netherlands, Napoleon visited the Antwerp Cathedral where he became awe-struck by Rubens’ triptych. As part of the victory spoils, Napoleon removed the painting and sent the three panels to the Louvre. After his death, all three panels were returned to the cathedral in 1815.

**Francis Bacon: Master of the Bold Triptych**

Fast forward to 1944, when the Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon entered the art world. Bacon is one of the most important painters of the last half of the 20th century. His mastery of bold, raw, and emotionally charged human images are exceptionally powerful in much the same way that the human figures of Picasso and Willem de Kooning shock and haunt the spectator (Sylvester, 2000; Harrison, 2016).

In adopting the triptych format, Bacon was greatly influenced by Rubens, especially his Descent triptych and the related triptych Elevation of the Cross, also in the Antwerp Cathedral. From 1944 to 1986, Bacon painted 31 large triptychs (~78 x 58 in) and 45 smaller ones. His favorite subjects were crucifixions, screaming Popes, drinking companions, famous artists, and wealthy businessmen. Figure 2 shows a 1965 triptych by Bacon entitled Crucifixion, in which he depicts three forms of violent death. In the central panel, a half human-half animal hybrid figure hangs upside down from a scaffold hook – a modernist rendition of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross.

During the 15-17th centuries, Popes were celebrated and immortalized in portraits by renowned artists, such as Raphael, Titian, and Velasquez. Although Bacon was fascinated by Popes as bearers of power, he was angered by their authority. Inspired by a photograph of Pope Pius XII, in 1951 he painted three Pope portraits, entitled Pope I, Pope II, and Pope III (Fig. 3). This series of paintings was his first to show the same figure in three different poses (see legend for more details on the history of how this triptych was assembled and disassembled). Bacon depicted his three Popes, not as sanctified figures, but as anti-Pope creatures in which “the papal throne becomes the electric chair, the papal attire becomes gaudy dress, and the organ of speech becomes the aperture of a scream” (Arya, 2009). Moreover, the scream becomes a clever double entendre, mimicking the shrieks of many viewers who are shocked at what they are seeing.

1951. Oil on canvas. Each canvas, 6.5 x 4.6 ft. The three portraits were originally done as three separate pieces and not combined as a triptych until 1962 when they were exhibited together in a retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Tate Gallery in London (Sylvester, 2000). At the close of the exhibition, the three portraits were separated. Pope I is now exhibited at the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum Collection (Aberdeen, Scotland). Pope II is now exhibited at the Stadtische Kunsthalle (Mannheim, Germany). Pope III was damaged beyond repair when it fell into Tokyo Harbor in 1966; it was subsequently destroyed on Bacon’s instructions (Harrison, 2016).

Bacon’s most famous screaming Pope is his 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, which is shown in Fig. 4 adjacent to Velazquez’s 1650 version. Bacon considered Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X to be the finest portrait ever painted (Sylvester, 2000; Harrison, 2016).

One of Bacon’s contemporaries in the London art world during the last half of the 20th century was another of England’s highly original artists, Lucian Freud. Bacon and Freud had a complicated relationship; they were confidants and rivals at the same time. One of Bacon’s most acclaimed triptychs, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, depicts Freud in a hellish Holy Trinity – tangled and trapped in a series of cages, sitting like a coiled spring about to erupt and shoot out of the flat picture frame (Fig. 5). Freud is shown in his trademark navy blue socks and rolled-up white shirt. In 2014, this triptych was sold at auction for $142 million – the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction - until last year when a Picasso painting sold for $165 million.

Why the Triptych Format? Why the Rule-of-Three?

What attracted Francis Bacon to the triptych format? In addition to the influence of Rubens, Bacon believed that having three images next to each other allowed him to tell a better story than did a single image. Moreover, limiting his painting to three panels forced him to distill and simplify a complex story so that it could be presented in a chronological way much like a series of successive photographs captures a key event.

How does the triptych approach for telling a good story relate to the Rule-of-Three? Why should a Nobel Prize and a Lasker Award be limited to a maximum of three individuals if the scientific story being recognized is based on the work of four, five, six people, etc. or a team of many? Bypassed scientists may legitimately feel that their contributions have been left out in the cold, and without their inclusion the story would be incomplete.

Scientific awards afford a special opportunity to enlighten the general public on how scientific discoveries arise. Like a Francis Bacon triptych, a prizeworthy scientific discovery has its greatest impact in capturing the public’s imagination when the story of its origin can be traced to its fundamental roots and told in an engaging way.

2016 LASKER AWARDS: TWO TRIPTYCHS AND ONE SPECIAL MONOTYPE

This year’s Lasker awardees made discoveries that reflect the type of boldness and adventurousness exemplified in the triptychs of Francis Bacon.

Basic Award

The Lasker Basic Research Award honors three scientists: William G. Kaelin, Jr. (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School), Peter J. Ratcliffe (University of Oxford/Francis Crick Institute), and Gregg L. Semenza (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine). The combined triptych-like discoveries of these three scientists revealed the pathway by which human and most animal cells sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability - an essential process for their survival. The unique features of this signaling pathway involve an oxygen-stimulated proline hydroxylation of a protein called HIF-1α (Hypoxia-Induced Factor), followed by ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation. Under hypoxic conditions, HIF-1α is no longer modified and becomes available to dimerize with a partner protein. The resulting dimeric complex activates transcription of many genes that aid cells in adapting to the hypoxic state, including those encoding erythropoietin, VEGF, PGDFβ, and glycolytic enzymes. Discovery of the oxygen-sensing pathway not only provides major insights into a fundamental physiological process but also plays a central role in a wide range of human pathologies.

Clinical Award

The Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Research Award honors three scientists for discoveries concerning the hepatitis C virus (HCV), which causes a chronic, often lethal disease. Two of the awardees - Ralf F.M. Bartenschlager (University of Heidelberg) and Charles M. Rice (Rockefeller University) - developed a system for studying the replication of HCV in cultured human liver cells. The third awardee is Michael J. Sofia (formerly at Pharmasset, Inc.; now at Arbutus Biopharma, Inc.) who used the replicon system to invent the first effective and nontoxic inhibitor of the HCV polymerase (NS5B). This drug, called sofosbuvir (Sovaldi) was FDA-approved in December 2013. It is now the cornerstone component of three FDA-approved combinations for HCV disease that provide effective and curative therapies that do not require the toxic co-administration of interferon and ribavirin. The first of these curative therapies to be approved contains sofosbuvir in combination with lepidasvir, which inhibits the HCV nonstructural protein 5A (NS5A). This drug combination, called Harvoni (developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc. and approved in October 2014), set the stage for revolutionizing the treatment for HCV disease. The lives of many thousands of HCV-infected individuals have now been improved and saved as a result of this pioneering work

Special Achievement Award

The Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award honors only one scientist, but one with three bold strokes. The awardee is Bruce M. Alberts (University of California, San Francisco) who during a 55-year career, is highly regarded by the scientific community for his triptych of accomplishments, which include: 1) fundamental discoveries in DNA replication and protein biochemistry; 2) visionary leadership in directing national and international scientific organizations to better people’s lives, including a 12-year term as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; and 3) passionate dedication to improving education in science and mathematics. A notable example of this latter accomplishment was his leadership role in teaming up with five other scientists to write the most influential textbook of its kind Molecular Biology of the Cell. The first edition, which was published in 1984, is now in its 6th edition (appearing in 2015). This classic textbook has been translated into 11 languages (including Chinese) and has been devoured by tens of millions of students as well as established researchers, all of whom praise it for its clarity, the logic of its explanations, and its splendid illustrations. Even though the 2015 edition was assembled by seven authors, the material is integrated in such a way that it reads like the work of a single hand - undoubtedly the deft hand of Bruce Alberts.

References

Arya, R. (2009). Painting the Pope: an analysis of Francis Bacon’s Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X. Literature and Theology. 23, 33-50

Bialostocki, J. (1964). The descent from the cross in works by Peter Paul Rubens and his studio. The Art Bulletin 46, 511-524

Harrison, M. (2016). Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon).

ylvester, D. (2000). Looking Back at Francis Bacon (New York: Thames & Hudson, Inc.).

Levinovitz, A.W., and Ringertz, N. (2001). The Nobel Prize: The First 100 Years. (London: Imperial College Press).

**DOUBTFUL WORKS SURFACED**

**Francis Bacon: The crazy million dollar**

**business with his Estate**

**BY SILKE MÜLLER | NEWS | STERN | SUNDAY 06 NOVEMBER 2016**

2016 is the year of Francis Bacon: five major exhibitions around the world celebrate the artist, and a catalogue raisonné boasts around 100 previously unknown paintings. A million dollar business is growing in the art market. The artist’s estate administrators pull the strings.

"And now we come to lot 8A, on the left, you on the right, ladies and gentlemen, the great triptych 'Lucien Freud' by Francis Bacon from 1969. Wonderful thing, here we have it."

New York, November 12, 2013. In the sales room of Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Center, the evening auction for post-war and contemporary art is approaching its climax. The bidding war is on. Money is in the air. And silence. Auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen lets out a laugh, encourages the first bid: "Hush, we’re starting now!" Then a redeemed "$ 80 million!", Followed by an "$ 85 million!" Then "90, I have 90."

The price rises in five million steps to 120. Then 121, 122, two bidders on the phone are now fighting for the picture, there is tense silence in the hall. At $ 126 million, Pylkkanen leans over his desk as if he wanted to rake the millions out of thin air and states: "A historic moment."

In the end, at the standard auction house premium, the three-part painting ends up at Elaine Wynn, the ex-wife of Las Vegas casino mogul Stephen Wynn, for $ 142,405,000. Hammer blow, "Sold!", World record.

**The most expensive artist in the world**

The painter Francis Bacon, born in 1909 as the son of an English horse trainer in Dublin, an autodidact without any significant schooling, was already considered the most expensive contemporary artist during his lifetime. His pictures of people who seem to dissolve into masses of flesh, of screaming popes and writhing bodies are puzzling and disturbing to this day.

Since his death in 1992, a relentless battle has broken out over the painter’s legacy, estimated at around 100 million British pounds, and the sovereignty over his work. And the few big works that even hit the market have become trophies from hedge fund billionaires like J. Tomilson Hill of Blackstone and Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovic. Those who cannot get a Bacon original by conventional means are resorting to more brutal methods: In March it became known that five paintings worth over 30 million euros had been stolen from the apartment of Bacon’s last lover in Madrid.

**Suddenly new Bacon works everywhere**

This year, the Bacon Mania has reached a new high with exhibitions in Liverpool, Monaco, Stuttgart, Bilbao and Los Angeles as well as a major journalistic project: "The Estate of Francis Bacon" wants around 100 previously unknown paintings Artist, discovered and verified.

In a five-volume magnum opus in a black slipcase, weighing 15 kilos and costing 1,000 British pounds, the estate published all of the works it classified as authentic in June this year. And according to current art trade practice, the following applies from now on: What is inside is real.

Quite a few owners of a painting that hitherto hung undocumented on the wall and could only be described as "attributed to Bacon" can now look forward to an increase in value that can hardly be named in numbers. And the auction houses, greedy for big names and works that have never been traded, i.e. works fresh from the market, have long been in the starting blocks.

**£400,000 for a waste product**

At the moment almost everything that can be associated with Bacon can be sold: A clumsy and probably justly discarded study of Bacon, which an English artist cut in two parts, turned over and painted landscapes, brought in 434,500 pounds in March, 15 Times as much as the auction house expected. And two left gloves, which Bacon is said to have worn while painting, were bought by a buyer for almost £7,000.

Bacon pictures often generate sales between 10 and 30 million euros at auctions. The prices fluctuate considerably – depending on the size, importance and public appreciation of the work. And according to his impression: The gloomy works usually bring less. With around 100 newly published pictures, the art market has a potential of hundreds of millions of euros.

A host of art consultants, gallery owners, auction houses and, last but not least, those who establish contact between prospective buyers and owners who are willing to sell who are listed in the catalogue raisonné as anonymous private collectors will benefit from this: only the Francis Bacon Estate can do that.

**The painter’s reputation is at stake**

The downside of the great friction: the painter’s reputation is at stake. Because the authors, Martin Harrison and his assistant Rebecca Daniels, according to their own statements, completely include everything in the directory that, according to their findings, can be ascribed to the hand of Francis Bacon: Even those works that the painter tore up, cut up and in a well-known fury thrown in the garbage. And who miraculously survived.

With all the rediscoveries and failed attempts swept together, as well as everything that Bacon still recognized during his lifetime, the painter’s oeuvre has increased from 221 works documented in the first catalogue raisonné in 1964 to 584 now.

Someone who knew Bacon very well and is considered to be the artist’s authoritative biographer put a long-held work by Bacon up for auction in February. Because he knew that a flood of new, partly inferior works would force their way onto the market? Michael Peppiatt shakes his head. "The picture was my pension fund. Due to the huge increase in value over the past few years, I couldn’t even afford the insurance for it, so I always loaned it out to museums and exhibitions. At least that’s how it was safe."

The friend’s gift brought in just under five million pounds. This year Peppiatt will be 75 years old, and he is still freeing himself from his mentor’s spell with every book, exhibition and sale. He now exchanges the memory for a house on the Cote d’Azur.

**A meeting with the biographer**

Peppiatt sits on the first floor of the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris. He chose this place because it stands for the good old days – when Paris was the place of longing for artists and intellectuals from all over the world. When paintings still provoked existential debates. And when the young London art historian Peppiatt sought and found his happiness here in 1966.

How closely his own story is connected to the life and work of Bacon, and how much he owes the painter, the renowned author recently told in the double biography "Francis Bacon in your blood", published in London in 2015: "Mad, bad and dangerous to know, as he was, Francis Bacon became a father figure for me and the central influence on my life."

Peppiatt was 21 and a student at Cambridge when he founded his first magazine in 1963 and wanted to do an interview with Francis Bacon, then 53. He met the notorious drunkard, gambler and lover of young small-door children in a bar in London and began a conversation that would not end until Bacon’s death.

**Incredible fame and personal dramas**

Bacon was at the beginning of his most successful and best decade: in 1958 he signed with the leading London gallery Marlborough, in 1962 the Tate Gallery anchored him in art history with a retrospective, in 1963 the Guggenheim Museum in New York followed, in 1964 his catalog of works, which was valid until then, was published . The triumph went hand in hand with Bacon’s personal drama: Shortly before the opening of the Tate show in 1962, Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy drank himself to death. And in 1971, on the eve of the acclaimed exhibition at the Paris Grand Palais, Bacon’s lover George Dyer killed himself.

Bacon owed the ingenious art dealer Frank Lloyd, a Viennese Jew who had emigrated to London and, with Marlborough, probably the most influential gallery of the post-war period, to the fact that his career rose so quickly and consistently. Lloyd worked as efficiently as an investment bank. Artists received advances, monthly fixed payments, and all of their financial affairs were managed by the gallery. And they produced exchange values that Lloyd knew how to multiply.

Bacon enjoyed the money, but didn’t count it. In the afternoon he set out, pulling a tail of friends behind him, who he invited to the finest food, champagne and Bordeaux, and then drifted on to the bars of Soho, "The French House", the legendary "Colony Room", the "Coronation Club". And Peppiatt, fascinated by this strange world, followed him.

"When you’re out with bacon, you have to be able to keep up," says Peppiatt. "No matter how much you drank with him the night before, drinking less the next day is out of the question. Francis seemed to think the only solution was persistent, relentless excess."

**Drink in the evening, paint in the morning**

But just as consistently as Bacon devoted himself to the night feasts, he stood in his studio the next morning and worked on his canvases. He discovered painting for himself later, and it was not until he was 35 that he began to work seriously on his career. His approach was unacademic in every respect: Without classical training, he gave himself up to eruptive work and produced at an inconsistent level. Trial and error principle. "The fine distinction he makes between failure and success springs from a deep conviction and is implemented mercilessly," wrote John Rothenstein in 1962, who, as director of the Tate Gallery in London at the time, organized the painter’s first major retrospective and in 1964 co-edited the catalogue raisonné.

Painting remained the only constant in his life. Since his father caught him in his mother’s clothes and sent him to Berlin for discipline with an uncle, Bacon roamed Europe and North Africa, looked for companionship, lost two lovers and sunk his pain in art. Peppiatt says he was immersed in the revelation of nothing. That gave him freedom. But it also robbed him of all hope.

Bacon’s paintings document this epic struggle between the search for truth and destruction: "You have to deform appearance into an image," he describes his way of working. "I’m just trying to twist something into the truth."

In his search for the absolute, Bacon was not squeamish – neither in life nor in art. He almost completely erased his early work from the twenties and thirties. By 1949 alone he is said to have destroyed more than 700 pictures. But not every canvas has fallen victim to Bacon’s self-hatred and doubts. "There was a pile of discarded pictures in his studio," reports Peppiatt. And he says that rejected works kept turning up somewhere, in studios that were left behind, with old companions or people who had access to the studio.

Now, with the publication of the new catalogue raisonné, some of these works, which the author considered invalid, have probably been rewritten as real Bacons. "We have to look at this catalogue very carefully," says Peppiatt. Peppiatt has refused to work with the Estate.

Art historians generate millions

The rapid development of the art market since the turn of the millennium has given art historians a power that at times borders on magic: "When art is sold for millions of dollars, trust in the attribution of the work opens the door to a fortune," writes economics professor and art market expert Don Thompson in his book "The Supermodel and the Brillo Box." The boards and committees become key institutions. In this scene, "money goes from hand to hand," says a London curator. "You can reinvent the world of Bacon and generate hundreds of millions in the process."

But who or what exactly is the Bacon Estate? The Estate rejects inquiries from the Stern regarding the organizational form and function. There is also no information on the Estate’s website. Only in the category of "Friends" is there a photo of a young man who does not play a role in any of the artist’s biography: Brian Clarke, among all the illustrious artists, writers, models and partners of the artist.

Bacon’s sole heir, John Edwards, a handsome illiterate who had worked in his brothers’ Soho bars and had been close to Bacon for the last ten years of his life, had ceded responsibility for the estate to stained glass architectural designer Brian Clarke in 1998.

"Bunch of Cowboys"

"They’re a bunch of cowboys," says art critic Brian Sewell of Edwards and Clarke. Edwards had no idea about the art market and Clarke had realized that there was treasure to be found. Clarke withdrew the right to represent Bacon’s estate from the Marlborough Gallery and sued the gallery for the surrender of 33 allegedly embezzled pictures and documents with an amount in dispute of around £100 million. In 2002 he had to withdraw the lawsuit. But he was now the doorkeeper of the painter’s work

In 2006, the world’s most powerful art dealer, Larry Gagosian, triumphed in London with the first Bacon exhibition after the separation from Marlborough. The presentation of an installation by Brian Clarke in 2005 should not have stood in the way of the coup. Clarke now calls himself the "world leader" in the category of leaded glass windows. Bacon’s studio in the former coach house 7 Reece Mews transformed Clarke and Edwards into a luxury apartment for the heir’s stays in London, who after Bacon’s death lived in the Keys in Florida and later in Thailand, where he also died. Today it is the seat of the Bacon Estate. Brian Clarke rarely appears in connection with Francis Bacon. He’s found a front man for his affairs who is only too happy to be in the spotlight.

After more than ten years of research for the catalogue raisonné, his specialist knowledge can hardly be doubted. The fact that he retroactively made himself co-organizer of the big Bacon exhibition in Düsseldorf in 2006 is only one of many questionable aspects regarding Harrison. Armin Zweite, then director of the NRW art collections and curator of the show, says: "I met him once or twice, he came relatively late and wrote a good article about Bacon and photography."

The fact that Harrison is now presenting around 100 newly discovered Bacons amazes Second: "After all the experiences of recent times, that puzzles you." The renowned art historian considers it questionable to write discarded pictures back into his oeuvre: "If an artist says that I have discarded that, then one would have to accept it." Harrison and the Estate sell the finds as a sensation. At the end of May, they invited visitors to preview the catalogue in a Bacon show set up especially for this day in the Soho district. On the walls: six major Bacon works. Harrison whispers about the origin of the pictures, they came from "very private private collections". Others were discovered in a locked warehouse in Chelsea, along with several other paintings that Bacon discarded.

The paintings had to be hoisted to the first floor with a crane, and an employee of the publishing house slept in the exhibition for fear that the work would be stolen. Harrison, in a green velvet vest and a blue jacket, goes to the microphone. "This is the beginning of something," he says. Later in the conversation he cannot answer who inherited the estate after John Edwards’ death, nor who is on the board of the Bacon Estate: "Brian Clarke is the director of the Bacon Estate, I have no idea ofthe legal situation. It there are trustees, or whatever their name is. I don’t even know who they are. " He would just have to ask his son: Ben Harrison works at the Bacon Estate.

The paintings had to be hoisted to the first floor with a crane, and an employee of the publishing house slept in the exhibition for fear that the work would be stolen. Harrison, in a green velvet vest and a blue jacket, goes to the microphone. "This is the beginning of something," he says. Later in the conversation he cannot answer who inherited the Estate after John Edwards’ death, nor who is on the board of the Bacon Estate: "Brian Clarke is the director of the Bacon Estate, I have no idea ofthe legal situation. It there are trustees, or whatever their name is. I don’t even know who they are. " He would just have to ask his son: Ben Harrison works at the Bacon Estate.

Harrison presented his findings to a committee that ultimately decided on inclusion in the catalogue. Art historian and current director of Gagosian’s London office, Richard Calvocoressi, confirms this: "I was a member of the committee from its inception in 2006 until last year, 2015, when I moved to the Gagosian Gallery. We usually met twice a year."

**"A catalogue of works is not a hit parade"**

The task of the committee was to decide whether it was real or not. "Sometimes I had great effort to convince them: No, this really is Bacon! There are about 20 works in the catalogue that should actually be destroyed. But they came into the world one way or another, mostly because someone stole them But I am not God, if it exists I have to record it. A catalogue of works is not a hit parade.

Harrison gets going. He just guarantees that there is not a single fake Bacons among the 584 paintings in the catalogue, when he turns to Rome, to the painter Caravaggio: "I know exactly what I’m talking about. I know absolutely. The Narcissus of Caravaggio in Rome is not from Caravaggio. Because I say it!"

Regarding the return of the pictures listed as destroyed in the catalogue of works in 1964, Harrison says: "Bacon didn’t really care. He wasn’t an accountant. I saw most of the destroyed pictures. And how could I have seen them when they were destroyed in 1964? End the discussion!"

The man is controversial. And whoever meets him has an idea why. Edward Lucie-Smith, poet, author, art expert, photographer and intimate connoisseur of the London art scene, describes Harrison as "extremely ruthless. He lists himself as the" king of Bacon attributions. "Bacon would be extremely unhappy with all the work that is now being done appeared in the catalogue, says Lucie-Smith. The enormous attention that the market is currently paying to Bacon and that the Estate is fueling with its activities is Harrison’s great opportunity to advance his career. In Monaco he has curated a major Bacon show, modified, she moved on to the Guggenheim Bilbao, trying to turn the marginalized figure Francis Bacon into a socially acceptable artist. He often plays down violent sexuality. Harrison insists there are only eleven pictures of men having sex. In contrast, there are 18 depictions of naked women.

Thirteen works from the period up to 1964 alone, which did not appear in the first catalogue raisonné, were exhibited in the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco – and many more from the period after that. Harrison presented them between dark curtains, each on their own walls, partly staged on stair landings and spectacularly illuminated with spotlights out of the darkness. Finds that are now powerfully inscribed in the canon of Bacon’s great works

The aim of the exhibition was to stylize Bacon’s stays in Monaco between 1946 and 1949 as key moments in his career. Rothenstein stated as early as 1964: "Although Bacon tried to paint when he lived in Monte Carlo, he realized that he could hardly achieve anything there and had to come back to London to work for his exhibition."

Harrison is now spreading the opposite. No wonder: an important partner of Harrison and sponsor of exhibitions, catalogues and research projects is the Lebanese philanthropist and luxury hotel owner Majid Boustany, who lives in Monaco. A Bacon madman, wealthy, enthusiastic and his passion for collecting can hardly be stopped. In the meantime he has established a foundation, opened his own museum in the small monarchy and, according to Harrison, owns the largest private Bacon collection in the world. Harrison also advises Boustany on acquisitions and the direction of its collection. "I should stop taking money for it," he adds.

It can only be speculated whether Bacon, the great destroyer, would approve of even one of these entire actions. His companions and also those who have studied him intensely doubt that. And here even Harrison agrees with his critics: "Thank God Bacon is not here. A horrible man, pain in the ass. He would never have let this happen."

                         **Photo of Francis Bacon in his studio in 1972**

**Paintbrushes at the ready**

**Sebastian Smee’s subjects include Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon**

**— whose rivalry was, surprisingly, complicated by a sexual element**

ALASTAIR SMART | ARTS | THE SPECTATOR | SATURDAY 15 OCTOBER 2016

When the old curmudgeon Edgar Degas died in 1917, a stunning trove of works by Edouard Manet — eight paintings, 14 drawings and 60 prints — was discovered in his studio. There, too, was a portrait of Manet and his wife Suzanne, painted by Degas 50 years earlier. But its right-hand third was missing — which included half of Suzanne’s body and all of the piano she was playing. For some reason, Manet had put a knife through the canvas and sent Degas packing with what remained.

The duo’s relationship is one of four ‘friendly rivalries’ considered by the Boston Globe art critic, Sebastian Smee, in his new book (Matisse vs Picasso, Pollock vs de Kooning and Bacon vs Freud being the others). In each case, Smee reckons, competition between the pair changed the course of modern art. And this wasn’t a matter of sworn enemies slugging it out for art-world supremacy, but of ‘yielding, intimacy and openness to influence’ inspiring the respective parties to greater heights.

Smee avoids chronological order, which is a pity, because with that we might have followed the influence of each pair on the succeeding one. He begins with Bacon and Freud, perhaps because theirs is the relationship he knows most about (his previous five books have all been on Freud). Or perhaps it’s because their relationship was the juiciest, with a hint of the sexual about it. Bacon’s one-time neighbour, the art critic David Sylvester, insisted that, for all Freud’s reputation as a ladies’ man, ‘Lucian clearly had a crush on Francis’.

The pair were 22 and 35 respectively when they met in 1945, and Smee steers us engagingly through the ensuing years, as Bacon — going from strength to strength — snapped British art out of its neo-romantic comfort zone into a new world scarred by the horrors of the second world war. The pair saw each other on an almost daily basis, and gradually a Bacon-inspired Freud — dispensing with his old sentimentality and revelling in the viscosity of oil paint — achieved a greatness of his own.

Smee is a gifted storyteller. This is clearest in the Picasso-Matisse chapter, as he ratchets up the tension before the pair’s fraught first meeting at the Spaniard’s studio in Montmartre in 1906; and also, later, as he jump-cuts headily between them, as Henri and Pablo create masterpiece after masterpiece across Paris from each other.

With so many paintings under consideration, it’s regrettable that just 14 are reproduced. A bigger problem, though, is that Smee’s wish for a compelling narrative comes, at times, at the expense of fact. I lost track of how often he makes claims he has no means of standing up. To give two examples: Matisse’s inner insecurity, in contrast to his outward urbanity, ‘was something that Picasso, preternaturally alert to weakness in others, must have grasped’. Meanwhile, leaving his native Holland for the US, inflated ‘within de Kooning a yearning for fellowship, for the camaraderie of… a pilgrim on the same hard path’. The would-be novelist in Smee regularly trumps the historian.

In each of the four relationships, there seems to have been a period of a few years of peak intensity — and in the case of Pollock and de Kooning, the end was hastened by the former’s death at the wheel of his car. (Pollock’s lover Ruth Kligman survived the crash and, within a year, became de Kooning’s girlfriend.)

I must admit I wasn’t aware that Pollock, the macho drunk from Wyoming, was Tennessee Williams’s inspiration for Stanley Kowalski in **A Streetcar Named Desire**. But, in the main, there’s not much in this book that’s new, which is perhaps unsurprising, at a mere 85 pages per face-off. Might Smee have been wiser to have focused on just one of his four duos and writing a joint biography? Possibly — but, to be fair, his whole point is to stress the similarity between the different rivalries.

One artist always seems to have been methodical and technically gifted, the other impulsive and instinctive; one artist tends to have been socially adept, the other rather reticent; one artist seems to have been senior while the other played catch-up… before the rubbing off on (and up against) each other began in earnest.

Parallels between the four relationships are striking, but you can’t help but feel Smee’s blanket approach is reductive. Artistic inspiration is notoriously tricky to pinpoint. What’s more, in this case we’re dealing with eight of the most brilliantly outlandish individuals in art history. They’re surely the last people whose behaviour and feats we should be trying to explain by way of a pattern.

Heaven only knows what prompted Manet to slash that picture of him by Degas — or, for that matter, why Degas decided to keep it.

**Francis Bacon: from Picasso to Velázquez at Guggenheim Bilbao**

EMILY GOSLING |   CREATIVE BOOM   |   THURSDAY 6 OCTOBER 2016

Francis Bacon’s work is something that only seems to reveal itself as time goes on, and through ever renewed lenses.

When I was younger the anguish and fervent, incomprehensible levels of emotion made me turn away from it, as though it was too much to bear. It didn’t seem overwhelming at first; I just thought it wasn’t for me, until new ways of understanding gradually began to reveal themselves. One such moment was embarrassingly recently, with the Tate’s text-based campaign that revealed Bacon’s Triptych - August 1972. “You describe obsessive love as something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,” it reads.

It continues: “The day before your first Tate Retrospective your partner is found dead…History mockingly repeats itself. Nearly a decade later, just before your Retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, your next partner is found dead from an overdose in your hotel room.”

The triptych is this horrific torture realised in brutal brushstrokes; one, two, three canvases of utter trauma. While I recalled snippets of the work’s story, to have it spelled out so plainly was enough to shed a silent tear at the unimaginable horrors behind the work.

It would be easy to believe that all contexts through which to view Bacon’s work have already been explored; he’s surely one of the most exhibited, written about and discussed artists of the 20th Century, such is the vastness of his output and the narratives that surround him and his work. But a new exhibition, Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velazquez, at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, hones in on yet another avenue: Bacon’s relationship to Spanish artists.

Curiously, it takes a long look at the impact on Bacon of a work he never in fact saw “in the flesh”, and one that it was impossible for the Guggenheim to acquire – Velazquez’s 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The image is said to have obsessed Bacon throughout his career, so much so that given the chance to see it in real life in Rome, he refused, instead choosing to savour it as he remembered so vividly from reproductions.

The exhibition intersperses a huge and impressive series of works by Bacon alongside works that impacted him and his career, beginning with Picasso. In Bacon’s words, he was the artist who “opened the door to all these systems. I have tried to stick my foot in the door so that it does not close.”

And it remained open, welcoming in a breeze of other influences, which as From Picasso to Velazquez demonstrates includes Toulouse-Lautrec for his haunting figures; Braque and Gris’ Cubist compositions and muted tones; El Greco’s trapped and darkened protagonists; Rodin’s exposed human corporealities, and the bleak, powerful sketches of Alberto Giacometti.

Presented almost like the most prized and choicest galleried scrapbook, Bacon’s visions take on new fronds of meaning. The pieces of his curious and powerful puzzle gradually move into clearer focus, though never so much as to lose their intrinsic mystery. It’s harrowing to be in a room filled with the cage paintings, men howling and entrapped in oil painted shackles. Yet it’s joyful and life affirming to see the vibrant hues of late works, as shown in the final room, “Life Essence”; where bright swathes of colour backdrop disfigured objects and bodies.

It makes for a show that gives layers and layers of meaning and inference; one that you could easily visit again and again and always come away with something new. It’s exhaustive, and exhausting. From Picasso to Velazquez is accompanied by detailed wall text narrating Bacon’s life and sources, and a revealing snippet tells of the influence of T S Eliot’s poems and plays on Bacon. For the confusing flotsam and jetsam of life, beauty, sex, figures, death, meaning, confusion and of course artistic genius that make up Bacon and his legacy, the words of Eliot’s Waste Land seem utterly apt. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

As this exhibition proves, there are so many fragments, and so many ruins, and it’s only in the hands of artistic greatness that we can start to fathom them, if we ever fathom them at all.

**“Shall we ever meet again?**
**And who will meet again?**
**Meeting is for strangers.**
**Meeting is for those who do not know each other.”**
**― T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion**

Francis Bacon: from Picasso to Velazquez runs from 30 September 2016 to 8 January 2017 at Guggenheim Bilbao

**Francis Bacon Guggenheim Exhibition**

**Reveals Influences Of The Great Masters**

ARTLYST | ART REVIEW   |   MONDAY 3 OCTOBER 2016

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is currently featuring a retrospective of the 20th century British/Irish artist Francis Bacon. Considered one of the most important artists of his time, Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez surveys more than six decades of the artist’s painting, displaying an impressive selection of his paintings alongside those of some of the Spanish and French masters who influenced him the most. This is one of the most daring exhibitions of Bacon’s work ever to be mounted and showcases many works never before displayed in public and offers an interesting insight into his work, especially later works which are in private collections.

This show reveals the importance that Bacon attached to tradition and allows visitors to grasp one of the keys to his creative impetus. Even though Bacon’s work embodies modernity and expresses the angst common to men of his time, he also boldly and ambitiously revisits and carries on the legacy of the great masters while providing referents to the culture of his day and age. The human figure is at the core of most of his compositions, which reflect a stark existentialist view of the individual. Bacon painted extraordinarily expressive portraits with a large dose of authenticity, which means being alive in all senses and with all its consequences. He sought to capture the mystery of life and reduce reality to its essence, synthesizing it in the guise of paint. Iberdrola’s support of this show on the British artist with Irish roots is part of our close partnership with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, as well as our commitment to disseminating art and culture wherever we operate. I would like to congratulate everyone who has worked to put together this wonderfully broad and representative selection of paintings from Francis Bacon’s career. It is very gratifying for Iberdrola, in its role as a patron of the arts, to have contributed to materializing a project which allows us to further explore the oeuvre of an exceptional artist.

The exhibition seamlessly displays 80 works many large scale, including some of the most important and yet least exhibited paintings by this artist, alongside the works of the classic masters from French and Spanish culture who played a huge role in his career. Transgressive in both is life and his art, Bacon broke down many barriers that were deeply entrenched at the time, placing human beings in front of a mirror in which we could see ourselves in a raw, violent way. Francis Bacon was a fervent Francophile. He was an avid consumer of French literature by authors like Racine, Balzac, Baudelaire and Proust and passionate about the art of Picasso and Van Gogh, both of whom lived in France, and the painters who preceded them like Degas, Manet, Gauguin, Seurat and Matisse. Bacon lived in and frequently visited France and the Principality of Monaco. As an adolescent, he discovered Nicolas Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (1628–1629) near Chantilly, and in 1927 he had a revelatory encounter with Picasso’s work when he visited the exhibition Cent dessins par Picasso in the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris, which, in fact, spurred him to decide to embark on his career as a painter. In 1946, he left London for Monaco, where he lived for three crucial years in his career, and where he would regularly return until 1990.

Bacon always regarded his retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971 as the peak of his career, even though it came at one of the most tragic times of his life, just after the death of his partner, and despite the fact that he had held major retrospectives in London and elsewhere. Throughout his career, Francis Bacon continued to develop ever closer ties with Paris, as attested to by the portraits of his Parisian friends and that fact that he kept a studio in Le Marais until 1985. After his initial contact with Picasso’s oeuvre in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Bacon’s influence from Spanish culture is the most obvious in his obsession with the portrait of Pope Innocent X that Velázquez painted in 1650, which would serve as Bacon’s inspiration for more than 50 works. Curiously, Francis Bacon never saw this Velázquez painting, which hangs at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome, in person; when he had the chance to lay eyes on it during his visit to the Italian capital in 1954, he preferred instead to retain the reproductions in his memory instead of seeing the original painting. In addition to Velázquez, he was also fascinated by other classic Spanish painters such as Zurbarán, El Greco and Goya, whose paintings he fervently admired at Madrid’s Museo del Prado, a museum he asked to visit alone just a few years before his death after seeing the Velázquez retrospective held there in 1990. Francis Bacon died on a brief visit to Madrid in 1992, and even though he never had a permanent home in Spain, he was known to have made extended sojourns in Málaga and visits to Seville, Utrera and Madrid.

Born into a wealthy British family living in rural Ireland, a place of upheaval in the early 20th century, Francis Bacon was confronted with Pablo Picasso’s work in Paris’s Paul Rosenberg Gallery at the tender age of 17. Bacon himself revealed that this signaled his shift towards a career in art; this is attested to in some of his earliest works, such as Composition (Figure) (1933), which clearly references Picasso’s works from the 1920’s, especially Las casetas, the series depicting deformed bathers holding a key, an object that fascinated Picasso and seduced Bacon as well. Starting with absolutely no technical training, Bacon gradually entered the world of art and quickly assimilated what other creators near him, such as Roy de Maistre, were able to teach him. The mere handful of paintings that have survived from this time—Bacon was dissatisfied with most of them and destroyed them—attest to his early influence from Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, and from Picasso’s biomorphic Cubism, which would lead Bacon to develop a language of his own. This vocabulary garnered recognition for the first time in 1933, when the critic Herbert Read reproduced Bacon’s Crucifixion (1933) in a privileged spot, opposite Picasso’s Bather (1929) in his publication Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture. Even though Bacon received this recognition at the start of his career and at a After World War II, in which Francis Bacon worked in a civil capacity because of his chronic asthma, the artist’s work was once again recognized by critics and the public. He also drew the attention of gallery owner Erica Brausen, who soon exhibited his paintings in different European countries. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art of New York purchased its first Bacon work from Brausen. During this period, the artist created a new universe of images conceived via literature, film, art, and his own life. Bacon approached this iconography using a unique language, reflecting human vulnerability with utter rawness. Somewhere between human and animal—as in some of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs—the figures begin to appear enclosed and entrapped in cages or cubes. Bacon used this device to focus the viewer’s attention on the figures, which were smudged or disfigured, reduced to strokes of greyish and bluish colours reminiscent of El Greco and the drawings of Alberto Giacometti, which Bacon preferred over his sculptures. Later in this period, Bacon also paid homage to Vincent van Gogh, whom he evoked through his loose brushwork and bright palette, which contrast with the dark figures in other paintings. Bacon was fascinated by the way Van Gogh veered away from the rules and literal reality in favour of expressiveness.

**Until 08/ 01/2017 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao**

**Francis Bacon: Picasso to Velázquez at Guggenheim Bilbao**

**BY NICHOLAS FORREST** **|   BLOUIN ARTINFO |   MONDAY, OCTOBER 03, 2016**

Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao highlights the influence of Spanish and French culture on the work of Francis Bacon, offering a new perspective on the Irish-born British artist’s fascinating oeuvre. Over a 60-year career, Bacon became known for reinventing the portrait with the contorted bodies of his isolated nude figures, placing human beings in front of a mirror in which they are faced with their own vulnerabilities and challenged with seeing themselves in a raw and violent way.

“I think art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves. Then possibly with Animals, and then with Landscapes,” Bacon said in an interview with David Sylvester in 1966. “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance, he said. “…who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?”

The exhibition of almost 80 works presents 50 of the most important and yet least exhibited of Bacon’s paintings alongside around 30 works by the French and Spanish masters whose work had such profound impact on Bacon’s work. Bacon was a keen Francophile who was passionate about the work of Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas, Manet, Gauguin, Seurat, and Matisse, and was also an avid reader of French literature by the likes of Racine, Balzac, Baudelaire and Proust. His decision to take up paintings was influenced by an encounter with the work of Picasso at Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris in 1927 – the same year he discovered Nicolas Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents 1628-29, which also left an indelible impression on the young artist.

“Picasso opened the door to all these systems. I have tried to stick my foot in the door so that it does not close. Picasso was one of that genius caste which includes Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and above all Velázquez,” Bacon once said. The influence on Spanish culture on Bacon’s work is epitomized by his obsession with Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X, but he was also fascinated by the work of other classical masters such as Zurbarán, El Greco, and Goya.

Bacon called Velázquez’s portrait one of the greatest portraits ever made. “I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velázquez Pope, because it just haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of […] imagination,” he explained. Organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in collaboration with Grimaldi Forum Monaco, and curated by Martin Harrison, author of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez exemplifies Bacon’s pioneering and visionary practice.

Exhibition highlights include Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion 1962, Composition (Figure) 1933, Study for Portrait of Van Gogh I 1956, Study after Velazquez 1950, Study for Self-Portrait 1976, Three Studies of Figures on Beds 1972, and Portrait of Michel Leiris 1976. Other notable works include Alberto Giacometti’s Buste of a Man in a Frame (Buste d’homme dans un cadre) ca. 1946, Francisco de Goya’s Tauromachy (Tauromaquia) 1816, John Phillip’s La Bomba 1863, and Diego Velázquez’s The Buffoon el Primo 1644.

**Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez is at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until 8/1/2017**

**BACON, PICASSO & VELÁZQUEZ; TOGETHER AT LAST**

BY HANNAH HAYES–WESTALL   |   EXHIBITIONS   |   FAD MAGAZINE |   SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum opened a new show to the public last week presenting 80 works by Francis Bacon alongside works by Picasso, Velázquez and other Spanish and French masters who are believed to have influenced the Anglo Irish painter.

In a bold move, art historian and Bacon expert Martin Harrison has drawn explicit links between specific works the Bacon may have seen, and specific works by the painter, whether evidence exists to correlate the works or not. Admitting that the artist’s own tendency to make dramatic, contradictory statements about the art of others makes it difficult to be certain of his true feelings, Harrison said.

It’s certain that Bacon’s early work was heavily influenced by Picasso, but whether directly or indirectly, via the work of other Picasso devotees, is harder to establish as Bacon himself destroyed so many works from the early and mid-30s, and didn’t write about his influences at this time anywhere. Harrison posits that some of Bacon’s genius lay in understanding that to be truly great meant not being derivative, and by destroying his early works ensured no trace of derivation could be attached to him. Yet as the images below show, it seems unlikely that there is no direct reference at play.

A similar process appears to have taken place with Velázquez, who Bacon revered, and who’s Pope Innocent X informed his many Pope works. Having worked from reproductions of the Velázquez, Bacon famously refused to see the original when in Rome, and a wonderful 1846 copy by the French artist Amédée Ternant-Lemaire has been loaned from the Versailles collection to hang alongside Bacon’s Pope I.

Also on show are works by French, British and Italian masters, ranging from Georges Braque and Rodin, to Sargent, Whistler and Giacometti, whose drawing Bacon greatly admired, referring to him as “The greatest draughtsman of the twentieth century”.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, and is an interesting way into the artist’s work. Of the 80 or so Bacons on display, around 10% are in private hands and rarely if ever exhibited. With Bacon prices now ranging from £3million to just under £200million, it represents a rare, and possibly final opportunity to see such a range of works by the artist in one location.

**Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez is at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from September 30th 2016 – January 8th 2017**

**Some of the best modern art grew out of the**

**egotistical clashes of its leading lights**

**The volatile relationships of eight rivalrous painters**

**Lynn Barber**

**LYNN BARBER**  **| ART | BOOKS | THE SUNDAY TIMES | OCTOBER 2, 2016**

This intriguing book is about four pairs of artists (Freud and Bacon, Manet and Degas, Matisse and Picasso, Pollock and de Kooning) and their influence on each other. But as Sebastian Smee admits, the title is a bit of a fudge because these artists were not rivals exactly. Freud, for instance, acknowledged that Bacon was the better painter (he hung Bacon’s Two Figures in his living room till he died), whereas Bacon had little interest in Freud’s work, though he enjoyed his company. What Smee is really dealing with is periods of intense friendship, when one artist energised another.

In each case, Smee starts by examining a particular work that has some bearing on the friendship. The most haunting by far is Degas’s 1868 portrait of Manet and his wife, which now hangs, badly damaged, in an obscure Japanese museum. The painting shows Manet lounging on a sofa looking bored while his wife, Suzanne, plays the piano. We see the whole of Manet but only his wife’s back, because a third of the painting has been sliced off, taking her face (and piano) with it. Apparently, Degas found the painting in this state some time after he gave it to the Manets and was so upset he walked out without ever, it seems, getting an explanation.

By the time Degas painted the portrait, he had been close friends with the Manets for seven years and had often attended musical evenings in their apartment. He liked painting people listening to music because they tended to sit still but without the self-consciousness of portrait sitters. And Suzanne often did play the piano to Manet at home, so it was a perfectly realistic scene. In fact, she had been piano teacher to Manet’s younger siblings when they met and he got her pregnant. She was then 22, he 19, and they raised their son Leon as his godson and Suzanne’s brother. Manet married Suzanne only when his father, a judge, died in 1863 by which time Leon was 11.,Perhaps Degas had somehow' guessed their secret? Perhaps that’s why Manet slashed the portrait? Years later, when Degas had forgiven Manet, he offered to repaint the missing third, but he never did.

The Freud-Bacon section focuses on the theft of Freud’s 1952 portrait of Bacon from a Berlin museum in 1988. It was a tiny work, no bigger than a postcard, painted on copper, and entailed Bacon sitting for Freud for three months knee to knee. Freud intended to give it to Wheeler’s restaurant where they often dined together, but the Tate bought it immediately, and years later lent it to the British Council for a Freud retrospective to be shown in Washington, Paris, London and Berlin.

This was a big breakthrough for Freud, because it was the first time his work had been seen abroad and marked the start of his international fame (and vastly increased prices). He insisted on showing in Berlin rather than, £2 say, Munich, because it was his birthplace. But one Friday afternoon, a visitor noticed a blank space on the wall — the Bacon I portrait had gone. Security was lax and there were many students in the gallery at the time. It was almost certainly an amateur job, all it needed was a screws driver, and no ransom was ever demanded. Years later, Freud put posters all over Berlin offering a reward of DM300,000, but the painting never resurfaced. The art critic Robert Hughes tried to console him by saying that whoever stole it must be a great fan, but Freud demurred: “I’m not sure I agree. I think somebody out there really loves Francis.”

The Matisse-Picasso section concentrates on the early years of their long and wary relationship when both were being wooed by Gertrude and Leo Stein, but the story is better told in Hilary Spurling’s and John Richardson’s biographies. The Pollock-de Kooning relationship is more interesting. Both hugely admired by fellow artists, they were unknown outside the small New York art world (de Kooning had only sold one painting) until 1949 when Life featured Pollock under the headline: “Is he the greatest living painter in the US?” Asked which painters he admired, Pollock nominated de Kooning, and both artists were sent to represent America at the 1950 Venice Biennale. Now dubbed “action painters”, they enjoyed a few years of success before Pollock died in a car crash in 1956 and de Kooning took over his girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, and announced: “I’m number one.” lie lived until 1997, long enough for his reputation to fade while Pollock’s continued to soar.

Smee writes beautifully, but his book has an odd structure. He starts from a particular moment and then proceeds outwards in widening circles, following various digressions that might or might not prove relevant, and never quite reaching any conclusion. It made me feel that my interest had been whetted rather than sated, and I immediately wanted to read full biographies of some of the artists whose lives I knew less about. No harm in that, in fact all to the good, but it makes me hesitate to recommend the book. It is tantalising, but ultimately unsatisfying.

THE ART OF RIVALRY Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art by SEBASTIAN SMEE **Profile £16.99 pp390**

**Francis Bacon**

**Monaco and Bilbao; Liverpool and Stuttgart**

**MARGARITA CAPPOCK**  **| EXHIBITIONS | THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE | OCTOBER 2016**

FRANCIS BACON’S LIFELONG passion for France and French art and culture is well documented. Many of Bacon’s paintings are inspired by French artists such as Ingres, Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, or indeed artists who lived there, such as Van Gogh, Giacometti and Picasso. Apartfrom Paris, Bacon spent significant periods of time in Monaco, with his longest stay there spanning the years 1946–49, when gambling at the Casino was a key attraction. It was in Monaco that he painted his first papal portrait, Landscape with Pope/Dictator (c.1946; not exhibited), and where he started to paint on the unprimed reverse of the canvas, a hugely significant change in his modus operandi. Bacon travelled extensively in the south of France from the 1950s onwards. From 1975 to 1987 he kept an apartment in Paris at 14 rue de Birague in the Marais district. Close French friends included Michel Leiris, Jacques Dupin, Claude Bernard, Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert.

Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco (closed 4th September), was the first Bacon exhibition to focus specifically on this French connection.¹ Its significance was demonstrated through sixty-six paintings by Bacon accompanied by judiciously chosen works by artists who had inspired him. It was unique in that it featured both Bacon’s first and last works, Watercolour (1929; cat. no.24) and Study of a Bull (1991; no.61). The exhibition had nine thematic sections: ‘Influences’, ‘The Cry’, ‘The Human Body’, ‘The “Caverne Noire”’, ‘France and Monaco’, ‘The Triumph of the Grand Palais’, ‘Portraits’, ‘The Reece Mews Studio’ and ‘Final Works’. In response to the cavernous space of the Grimaldi Forum, a multi-purpose conference centre, the curator, Martin Harrison, and the in-house designers opted for a theatrical presentation in keeping with Bacon’s own aesthetic. A debt to the influential stage designers Adolphe Appia (1862– 1928) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) was evident in the use of verticals, horizontals and diagonals throughout and the bold, dramatic use of light. Metal structures were suspended from the ceiling or used to divide rooms in reference to the cage motif in Bacon’s art.

In the first room, Watercolour (no.24) and Painting (c.1930; no.26) were displayed alongside works by Léger, Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean Lurçat, demonstrating how early on Bacon’s art was informed by French painting. One’s eye was drawn inexorably to the next room, through a series of four vertical pillars, to a nineteenth-century copy of Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (no.47), the departure point for Bacon’s most famous series of paintings. The verticality of the pillars echoed the striated or shuttered effect in many of Bacon’s paintings from the 1950s. The ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was shown on a loop, appropriately merging the painting and film in the visitor’s mind. Placed in front of the Velázquez was a series of steps, suggesting that one should kneel in veneration. This device was employed again later in the exhibition, in front of *Triptych – Studies of the Human Body* (1970; no.51), to reference the steps and columns of the Grand Palais, where the triptych was first shown in Bacon’s exhibition in 1971. However, the steps infer quasi-religious associations even though Bacon, a self-professed atheist, used the triptych format for purely secular purposes.

The ‘Caverne Noire’ featured works for which Bacon employed a very restricted palette. Enormous, rich velvet drapes in papal purple lined the walls and, coupled with exceptionally dim lighting, lent a majestic yet oppressive, claustrophobic air to the room. This reviewer felt that this room was over contrived and dark. More sympathetic lighting might have allowed the viewer to appreciate fully the subtleties of Bacon’s colours and techniques, especially with works such as Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963; n0.11) and Sea (c.1953; no.43). Study for Portrait of Van Gogh I (1956; no.31) showed Bacon’s emergence from these dark tones, which came to fruition in Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957; no.32), exhibited in the next room. Its intense, vivid colours and gestural brushwork reflect Bacon’s admiration for Chaim Soutine’s Céret landscapes, of which a superb example, Le Gros Arbre bleu (c.1920–21; no.34), was included.

Several exceptional paintings devoted to the human body were featured, ranging from Seated Figure (1962; no.70) and Figure in Movement (1972; no.1) to Man at Washbasin (1989– 90; no.63). Seated Woman (1961; no.36), one of the ten female nudes Bacon painted between 1959 and 1962, looked magnificent. Rodin’s monumental Muse Whistler, grand modèle (1908; no.17) was apposite given the presence of Rodin’s influence in most of Bacon’s lying, reclining and sleeping figures from 1959 to 1961.² One notable omission was Ingres, whom Bacon certainly admired. A number of Bacon’s paintings are variations on works by Ingres, although Bacon did not put him in the first rank, which may explain his exclusion.

Two sections were devoted specifically to French themes. Paradoxically, Bacon would destroy much of what he had painted in Monaco between 1946 and 1949, but its landscape features in works such as Dog (1952; no.10), in which the coast road with palm trees is based on postcards of Monaco. A further link was made concerning Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950; no.9; Fig.82), when the outline in black paint in the top-left corner was identified during the installation as being the shape of La Tête de Chien, a high rocky promontory above Monaco. The exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1971 was a triumph for Bacon. He painted five major triptychs for itand other paintings such as Lying Figure in a Mirror (1971; no.52), which hung in close proximity to Picasso’s Femme couchée à la mèche blonde (1932; no.50) in the present exhibition, a placement that works exceptionally well. The Grand Palais exhibition was marred by personal tragedy for Bacon when George Dyer died from an overdose at the Hôtel des Saints Pères in Paris on 24th October 1971, two days before the opening. Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps (1972; no.13) is a deeply affecting painting and depicts Dyer on the steps of the hotel. The brighter lighting in the final room is in keeping with the subject of these late works, both of which highlight the artist’s interest in bullfighting, which was partially inspired by Leiris’s text Miroir de la Tauromachie (1938). In Triptych (1987; no.60), the violence of the bullfight is evoked through the gored limbs and the brooding presence of the bull.

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (7th October to 8th January), seen by this reviewer at its previous venue, Tate Liverpool, also marks a first in terms of Bacon exhibitions by focusing on the linear framework known as the ‘spaceframe’ in Bacon’s œuvre from the 1930s onwards.³ Featuring thirty paintings alongside drawings and items from Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, it traces the development of this spatial motif throughout his career. The genesis of the exhibition lies with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose book Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (1981) analysed and classified these ‘spaceframes’. Bacon employed versions of these devices from 1929 until 1988 and, according to Harrison in his new catalogue raisonné, they are present in approximately twenty-two per cent of his paintings. ⁴

The purpose of this device is the delineation and isolation of the space in which the body is placed. Bacon rejected any suggestion that the structures had a psychological dimension or were intended to convey isolation or claustrophobia, but explained them in formal terms as a device for concentrating the image and seeing it more clearly, referring to them as ‘a box’. Many viewers of Bacon paintings focus on the contorted figures and the painterly quality of his work and overlook how skilled and, indeed, mathematically minded Bacon was in creating these complex structures, often using rulers and T-squares. This exhibition deftly draws attention back to this facet of Bacon’s art.

The exhibition runs chronologically but works are arranged thematically over five rooms, starting with ‘Crucifixion’, followed by ‘Cage’, ‘Subject’ and ‘Space, Arena’, and ending with ‘Mirror/Image’. It includes crucial works such as Crucifixion (1933), Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), Figure Study II (1945–46), Man in Blue IV (1954), Chimpanzee (1955) and, through to the 1980s, Untitled (Kneeling Figure) (c.1982). The groupings of paintings worked particularly well. After Muybridge – Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (1965) and Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967) look particularly strong together and demonstrate greater complexity in terms of Bacon’s spatial arrangements.

Triptych (1967; Fig.83),⁵ one of Bacon’s most complex works, is placed on a freestanding false wall alone and commands the visitor’s attention. This is the pictorial embodiment of what Bacon meant when he spoke about using the device to intensify the figure. Through the geometrical structures one’s attention is focused on the exquisite painterly quality of the sensuous nude figures and the heavily blood-stained pile of clothes. The drawings and original studio items on display serve to emphasise both how the theme of enclosure was a persistent one, and the principal formal devices Bacon used in his paintings, the rectilinear frame, circles, ellipses and arcs, are omnipresent. These exhibitions demonstrate two unique approaches to Bacon, and aficionados and newcomers to Bacon’s art alike could not fail to be impressed by what they offer.

1 Catalogue: Francis Bacon: France and Monaco. Edited by Martin Harrison, with contributions by Majid Boutany, Carol Jacobi, Rebecca Daniels et al. 240 pp. incl. 100 col. + b. & w. ills. (Heni Publishing, London, 2016), £35. ISBN 978–0–9568738–8–0. The exhibition is now on view in altered form at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, where Bacon’s connection to Spanish culture is emphasised; to 8th January.

2 M. Harrison: exh. cat. Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in Dialogue, London (Ordovas) 2013, p.11.

3 The exhibition’s catalogue is to be published upon the opening of its second leg in Stuttgart.

4 M. Harrison: Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. London 2016, 1, p.14; to be reviewed.

5 This work was previously known as Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, but was recently retitled in the catalogue raisonné as Bacon had always complained about its long title.

                                                **Fragment of a Crucifixion, by Francis Bacon. 1950. Canvas, 140 by 108.5 cm.**

***Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné***

*Martin Harrison, ed; Rebecca Daniels, associate ed*

**ADRIAN CLARK**

ADRIAN CLARK  |  BOOK REVIEWS  | THE BRITISH ART JOURNAL | VOL.  17 | N0 2  |  **AUTUMN** 2016

Beautifully and meticulously produced, these five volumes are a magnificent work. Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels have laboured for many years to produce them: the result is surely a model of what a dedicated team can do if given sufficient time and resources. High quality catalogues of this type underpin the ability of scholars to study the work of a given artist seriously and in detail. The volumes are overwhelmingly scholarly and informative. Rather than seeking to contribute directly to the long-running debate about the meaning of Bacon’s work, they contribute indirectly by displaying the material which can enable objective analysis.

Martin Harrison has written extensively about Francis Bacon; he is one of the leading writers about the great artist of 20th century Britain, (who should be treated as wholly English and not Irish, despite the place of his birth; just as England does not claim Jack Yeats, born in London but thoroughly Irish in all ways). His writing on Bacon bears certain characteristics. Always thorough, he likes to base his opinions on facts and one can imagine the pleasure which the accumulation of the facts in these books must have given him. He and his associate editor must now be the most knowledgeable people in the world about Bacon’s work.

It is particularly important in the case of Bacon to establish facts about his career as an artist, as many things which are not facts intrude in his case. Over his long life in the public eye – from 1945 to his death in 1992 – Bacon spoke a great deal of nonsense. Fortunately, one does not have to wrestle with his writing because he was unable to – or chose not to – write anything much except chatty and harmless short letters to his friends. But a decision to write about him forces the writer to consider what Bacon is said to have said. Some of what we are told he said comes down to us in fabricated form. The gospel according to David Sylvester, in the published interviews, is not a transcript of what Bacon said; it is a paraphrase, tidied up for publication by the artist himself after extensive interventions by Sylvester to suit his agenda. Here is what Sylvester wrote about the structure of the published interviews:

“What is preserved here amounts to no more than about a fifth of the material in the transcripts – out of choice, not because of any arbitrary limitation on length. Furthermore, since the editing has been designed to present Bacon’s thought clearly and economically – not to provide some sort of abbreviated record of how the taped sessions happened to develop – the sequence in which things were said has been drastically rearranged. Each of the interviews, apart from the first, has been constructed from transcripts of two or more sessions, and paragraphs in these montages sometimes combine things said on two or three different days quite widely separated in time. In order to prevent the montage from looking like a montage, many of the questions have been recast or simply fabricated. The aim has been to seam together a more concise and coherent argument than ever came about when we were talking, without making it so coherent as to lose the fluid, spontaneous flavour of talk.”

The other person whose contribution to the Bacon canon needs close attention is Michel Leiris. When he “translated” Sylvester’s work into French, even Bacon was a bit surprised about the results, finding the translation “possibly better than the original”. Leiris had somehow “managed to give it a much more profound meaning than I had been able to express. It’s extraordinary: I felt myself to be much more intelligent when I read it. I didn’t think I had said such things”.

That does not mean that, in searching for facts about the artist and his thoughts, one has to ignore the record of what Bacon allegedly said, but it does mean that anyone writing from the point of view of a historian rather than, say, that of a polemicist, has to be wary of it. One also has to be extremely wary of David Sylvester’s role in Bacon studies. His motivation in promoting Francis Bacon and his work, for a very considerable period, seems to have been a mixture of admiration bordering on worship of the artist, together with an impression of wishing to promote his own career as the keeper, and to some extent creator, of Bacon’s growing reputation. My feeling is that, as artist and disciple interacted in the early days of their relationship, it dawned on the highly intelligent and loquacious artist, who could talk but not write, and whose intellectual rigour was limited by his autodidacticism, that he could use the highly intelligent, but obsequious Sylvester, who could write, to help to create for him a reputation as a serious artistic thinker which would help Bacon’s pictures sell. Bacon was no doubt aware of how other serious contemporary artists were burnishing their reputations as participants in the wider intellectual world around them by using the work of others. The catalogue for Giacometti’s first solo exhibition in New York, in 1948, had, for example, a piece by Sartre.

Bacon had all sorts of ideas about art, some of them mildly interesting and original when first aired; but he was inconsistent in his views, easily bored and, like most of us, ignorant about art which he was not particularly interested in. Moreover, he drank a lot, mixed with some rather strange people in a milieu which did not, shall we say, encourage studious reflection, and liked to show off verbally and to dominate and if necessary subjugate those listening to him. Sylvester was his route to consistency and to being taken seriously intellectually. Between them they developed some catch phrases, which I cannot bring myself to reproduce here, so tiresome has their repetition made them. Even if they ever had any deep philosophical meaning, they have become nonsensical through their repetition. Bacon was a very great artist, but not a great thinker or artistic philosopher.

Martin Harrison cannot go too far in the direction of agreeing with my analysis, but he does nod towards it. On page 44 he says “But he was a painter, not an art historian. Evidently he felt under no obligation to be consistent in his opinions, as contradictions and infelicities in his recorded remarks testify”. This lets the artist off the hook completely: he could say anything he liked, however ridiculous or inconsistent with what he had said previously, and be forgiven on that basis. Jeffrey Bernard, the sage and soak of Soho, was acute enough in his sober moments to skewer Bacon in a few words describing his conversation: “One minute Monet is a giant and four drinks later he’s absolutely ghastly”. I think that says it all about Bacon the philosopher of art.

The other thing which Martin Harrison has to cope with, and he copes with it quite brilliantly, is somehow keeping a cool head when writing about Bacon in a relatively short essay in Volume I, when the bibliography enveloping the subject is so large and so full of its own pretentious dead-ends. Harrison stays very largely factual: he is cool under fire; one would want him on one’s side in any Bacon-scholar contest. The essay has calm, logical sections on aspects of Bacon’s productions: how he painted his pictures, in what format, requiring what types of frame, how some pictures were amended and so on. I liked this approach very much. One feels that the writer knows what he is talking about and is using his heavy knowledge to make simple, powerful points. These are not the last words on Bacon the artist: they are probably (hopefully) not even Harrison’s last words; but they are careful, thoughtful words. Those interested in Bacon would do well to read them.

Now to the catalogue which fills Volumes II, III and IV. There are some choices to be made about the way such catalogues are prepared. I have had to use a number of them in my own research and one does sometimes find oneself groaning with frustration as they impinge negatively on one’s nervous system (but via the brain). They can be infuriating, especially if they skimp on, or omit, detailed provenance information. Here the work is a triumph. I hope I am allocating praise fairly if I say that I think much of this work has been done by Rebecca Daniels. I know she has slaved to verify the details supporting each entry, not taking for granted the information easily available to her in the previous catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work, published in 1964 by Ronald Alley of the Tate, under the encouragement of the great director of the Tate, Sir John Rothenstein. That work was done relatively early in Bacon’s career and yet the current editors have been able to locate approximately 40 new works from the period it covered, which gives a hint of the extent of their original research. These have come to light, in the years following Bacon’s death, from private collections and stores where their existence had been unknown or forgotten; some of them are pictures which Alley thought had been destroyed, but which in fact survived, probably unbeknownst to the artist. New discoveries include Bacon’s first Pope (“Landscape with Pope/Dictator” of c.1946. Catalogue number 46-05).

The catalogue is significantly more professional than the 1964 work, to an extent reflecting the greater ability now to obtain and cross-check information via the internet and to obtain obscure exhibition catalogues for the more esoteric shows. Many owners and former owners have been spoken to. As a result, exhibition history and provenance information is fulsome, although the editors have not always been able to circumvent the infamous “Private Collection” entry, which so infuriates provenance researchers seeking to piece together the history of a particular collection, for example, by breaking their ability to trace the chain of descent of a picture from the artist’s studio. Each entry has a short narrative passage to give the picture’s context and background. Of course, even in a work of this stature the impression of finality in the information provided is an illusion, as more provenance information will inevitably emerge. There may have to be a second edition in the years to come. One small item which I would have preferred to see, as a practical help to hard-pressed scholars struggling to research something, is an index of names. If the user wants to look up which pictures were owned by Peter Watson or the little-known early collector Jimmy Bomford, he has no choice but to dredge his way through the provenance sections against each painting, jotting down notes as he goes. This is possible but painful.

Special mention should be made of the photographs. It is difficult to photograph and reproduce photographs of works of art in a way which ensures consistency of tone and colour and accuracy to the original marks on the canvas. There are many variables which can intervene to complicate the overall picture. To state only the most obvious, non-technical, issues, different photographers, at different times in varying light and using different film and so on will inevitably produce different images. When one knows a picture it can be astonishing to observe how different it can appear in reproductions. The nature of the paper used for the printing in the book is another source of unwelcome intervention. In this work, the illustrations are a triumph. In an attitude typifying the rigorous approach of the editors, up to date digital photographic techniques have been used to ensure that the illustrations are of the highest quality which could reasonably be achieved. Prudence Cuming Associates were used for the photography because they had photographed works for the artist during his life. The person who undertook a lot of the new photography which had to be commissioned for the catalogue was the same person who had often photographed the pictures when Bacon had originally completed them and released them from his studio. The result of all this care in seeking to achieve accuracy is, for example, that the beautiful fluid brushstrokes that sometimes characterise Bacon’s work are clear and strong in the image. Simply to take an example at random would be “Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, 1959″ (catalogue 59-10), where the clothes are gorgeously painted. The photographs also enable a study of the many different surface treatments which Bacon deployed.

Apart from various essays, Volume I contains an extremely useful chronology of Bacon’s long life. It is detailed and provides the best available starting point for those seeking to base their comments on the artist on a factual armature, although the methodology used is not apparent. Have the editors transported into the chronology every single date they are aware of, regardless of significance? Entries like “FB and the Sutherlands have dinner in Monte Carlo” (24 December 1949) or “FB in Wivenhoe” (14 February 1966) suggest by their banality an attempt at a comprehensive coverage of known dates. If that has been the approach, it shows the astonishing shortage of facts known about even an artist of Bacon’s stature, as the vast majority of days of each year are blanks. If, in fact, selections have been made, that is understandable but unclear. There will be many more dates available from research and some of them will be about people who were important to Bacon’s career.

An example of a person whose interaction with Bacon was highly significant for the artist was Peter Watson. He procured the first serious piece of art criticism on Bacon, in the final issue of Horizon, and he facilitated the first retrospective of his work at the ICA in 1955. Although there is an entry of a meeting between Bacon and Watson on 16 February 1956, there is no entry for the dinner which took place in London a few days before Watson’s death in May of the same year, when Bacon met up with Richard Chopping, Cecil Beaton and Rosamond Lehmann, but no Watson, who was prevented by illness from joining them. Similarly, Watson and Waldemar Hansen had dinner with Bacon in Monte Carlo on 9 July 1947.

Another example of a piece of information which the editors might have included if they had been aware of it relates to the house called Horsemoor Studio, which Bacon bought in 1964, from the artist Jim Page-Roberts, who had built the house for himself a few years earlier. Bacon responded to an advert in the Daily Telegraph offering the house for sale, saw it and, according to Page-Roberts, agreed to buy it immediately. It probably appealed to him because, whilst small and manageable, it had been purpose-built for an artist, with one very large picture window. Page-Roberts went down for lunch on one occasion, with Bacon and George Dyer, and was later told that the house was given to Dyer by Bacon after a heavy drinking session. The chronology picks up, presumably from the Marlborough Gallery records, that the house was acquired in 1964 and was given to Dyer on 15 October 1965, but it does not record that Bacon wrote to Page-Roberts as late as 31 March 1966 saying that he was hoping to sell the house. The fact that he was involved in decisions about the sale may suggest that the gift to Dyer was more gestural than legal.

The glory of Volume V is the bibliography. This, like the chronology, is a great thing for those who want to tackle Bacon, or more likely some aspect of him. It seeks to list all the possible sources of published information about him. The aspirant new writer on Bacon would do well to look mournfully at the length of this bibliography, and the extraordinary range of topics which have already been covered, before jumping into the same shark-infested pond. I picked up an odd omission when checking a cross-reference. On page 58 of Volume I, Martin Harrison refers to the scratchy little pieces of writing that were probably written by David Sylvester, but which were published during Bacon’s lifetime under his name. The famous piece for Matthew Smith’s 1953 retrospective is picked up in Part 1 of the bibliography, but not things like the short piece which appeared under Bacon’s name in a catalogue for a Louis le Brocquy retrospective exhibition which appeared in Dublin and then in Belfast in 1966/7, even though it is referred to on page 58. The contribution to the catalogue consists of one long sentence. It is far too ordered and crafted to have been written by Bacon, but it says things which he may have believed or said he believed (or was prepared to have said in his name). It should certainly be in any bibliography. But what carping! The bibliography alone is a major art historical achievement.

Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels are professional art historians in the best sense of the term. They are scholars who are keen to achieve the worthy aims of factual completeness and accuracy. They have produced a work which reflects their skills and their approach. It is a monument to a great artist’s work: he has secured the editors he deserves.

Francis Bacon. Catalogue Raisonné. 5 Volumes. The Estate of Francis Bacon 2016. pp 1537. Martin Harrison, ed. Rebecca Daniels, associate ed ISBN 9780 95692731 6 £1,000

Así se intentaron vender los cuadros de Bacon robados en Madrid

Una red de peristas, joyeros e intermediarios intentó colocar las obras sin éxito

JOSÉ MARIA IRUJO  | LUIS MAGÁN | MADRID | EL PAÍS | TUESDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2016

Los cinco cuadros de Francis Bacon robados hace más de un año en Madrid a José Capelo, amigo y heredero del pintor, se intentaron vender en España en dos ocasiones. La última durante una reunión celebrada el pasado mes de febrero en el número cuatro de la calle Duque de Alba de Majadahonda, una casa moderna de tres alturas situada a escasos metros del paseo principal de esta localidad madrileña, según ha podido acreditar la investigación policial y describe el sumario judicial al que ha tenido acceso EL PAÍS.

El encuentro tuvo lugar en el piso en el que residía Ricardo Barbastro Heras, que mostró fotografías de uno de los cuadros robados a Antonio Losada de la Rosa, un perista de El Rastro de Madrid interesado en su compra. El vendedor pidió por el cuadro dos millones de euros y el comprador exigió hablar con el dueño de la obra y un contrato legal. La oferta no prosperó porque este último descubrió finalmente que la obra era robada.

Antonio Losada y su hijo José habían sido informados de la existencia de los cuadros de Bacon por Rafael Heredia González, un vendedor de joyas, que estuvo presente en la reunión de Majadahonda y que antes del encuentro había mostrado al padre y al hijo fotografías de uno de los retratos robados en junio de 2015 en una casa señrial situada en el número 2 de la Plaza de la Encarnación, muy cerca del Senado, en pleno centro de Madrid. El valor de los cuadros supera los 30 millones de euros y el golpe está considerado como el mayor robo de pintura contemporánea en España. Los cuatro protagonistas de este encuentro fueron detenidos por la Policía el pasado mes de marzo y están en libertad provisional en calidad de investigados (imputados) por los delitos de encubrimiento de robo con fuerza. El caso sigue envuelto en un halo de misterio porque pese a las numerosas pistas obtenidas y personas detenidas (siete) el botín continúa sin aparecer.

En septiembre de 2015, solo dos meses después del robo, se produjo el primer intento de colocar las obras. Y lo protagonizó la misma persona. Ricardo Barbastro, de 45 años, con cinco antecedentes por tráfico de drogas y lesiones, llamó a su primo Jorge de las Heras, empleado de una galería de arte, y le ofreció “unos cuadros muy buenos”. Le comentó “que las obras procedían de una pelea entre una pareja y que uno de ellos se había llevado los cuadros del otro como compensación porque le había echado de casa. El propietario de los cuadros vivía en Londres y venía muy poco a España”, según aseguró en su declaración policial. La llamada le extrañó. No habían hablado desde hacía 17 años, pero Ricardo insistió en que conociese a los vendedores y se negó a enviar fotos de los cuadros por WhatsApp.

El encuentro se celebró a principios de octubre, sobre las 14.15 horas en un bar del número 5 de la madrileña calle Doctor Fleming. Ricardo acudió con cuatro personas más, tres se sentaron en la mesa y uno permaneció sentado en la barra escuchando, pero sin intervenir. Según su relato, su primo le volvió a contar la historia de la falsa pelea y aseguró que el propietario no se había enterado porque vivía en Londres. “Les propuse sacar las obras a subasta que es donde más beneficio obtendrían, pero contestaron que no se podía porque hay un problema legal en relación con la herencia de Francis Bacon y una parte de los herederos pueden reclamar las obras. Querían saber si teníamos algún cliente interesado en la compra de cuadros de Bacon”, describió el empleado de la galería a la Policía. “Uno de ellos me dijo que podía ganar mucho dinero si buscaba un comprador”, añadió el galerista que rechazó el ofrecimiento y respondió que no conocía a nadie interesado porque “todo me pareció muy raro”.

Antes de despedirse la prometieron que le enviarían un lápiz de memoria con las fotografías de los cuadros, pero nunca se volvieron a poner en contacto. Él tampoco quiso saber nada de su primo.

Barbastro y sus acompañantes conocían detalles de las características de los cuadros robados y de su dueño, que también reside en Londres. Explicaron que las obras eran tres dibujos y dos óleos, que estaban dedicados al propietario de las obras y que uno de ellos era un retrato de este último. En realidad los cinco cuadros representan el rostro de su dueño y estaban colgados en su dormitorio donde los ladrones robaron también una caja fuerte que contenía joyas y una espléndida colección de monedas antiguas valorada en 400.000 euros. Cuando se produjo el hurto Capelo estaba pasando unos días en la capital británica.

El testigo de esta reunión ha identificado a Alfredo Cristian Ferriz, un chófer de empresa de 40 años años, como la persona que llevó “la voz cantante” durante toda la reunión en la que le ofrecieron los cuadros. Cristian, como le llaman sus amigos, un tipo alto, calvo, de brazos corpulentos y cinturón negro de kárate, tiene un largo rosario antecedentes policiales, ocho de ellos por robo con fuerza, tres por hurto de vehículos, uno por amenazas y otro por tráfico de drogas. Fue detenido junto al marchante de arte Cristóbal García, en el domicilio de este último en Madrid, porque Ricardo Barbastro afirma que Cristian es la persona que tiene en su poder los cuadros y que su amigo Cristóbal es el cerebro del golpe. Los tres se conocen. Barbastro ha declinado responder a este periódico.

Los ladrones utilizaron una cámara Canon EOS 5D Mark II alquilada en la productora madrileña Addict Studios para fotografiar el anverso y el reverso de los cinco cuadros robados y ofrecerlos a los peristas de El Rastro. Agustín González, uno de los dueños de la productora ha hecho negocios con este marchante y el albarán del alquiler está firmado por Cristóbal Caballero, nombre y segundo apellido de García. “Han utilizado mi nombre e imitado mi firma. No tengo nada que ver con estas personas aunque conozco a alguna de ellas. Soy inocente. Lo último que se me ocurriría es intentar colocar estas obras tan importantes entre peristas de El Rastro”, afirma Cristóbal García a este periódico, un marchante de arte que ha trabajado en Madrid, París y Londres. Un informe caligráfico encargado por el Juzgado que investiga el robo no ha podido acreditar que la letra sea del considerado por la Policía como presunto cerebro.

Antonio Losada, el perista del Rastro que acudió a la reunión en Majadahonda, ofreció uno de los Bacon a Juan Manuel Marce Gea, anticuario y marchante en Sitges, quien a su vez comprobó con la empresa londinense The Art Loss Register si eran o no robados. El correo que recibió este último no dejaba lugar a dudas. “Le informo que la pintura de Bacon es posiblemente una pintura robada y registrada en la base de Interpol. Mis mejores deseos”, escribió Will Korner el pasado 23 de febrero a Marce. “La pintura fue robada en Madrid el 22 de junio de 2015..”, escribió más tarde la empleada de la empresa Nina Neuhaus quien más tarde comunicó a la Brigada de patrimonio Histórico de la Policía la consulta del marchante catalán.

El anticuario catalán llevaba desde enero negociando la venta del cuadro a varios clientes con una fotografía enviada por el perista Losada y citaba abiertamente a Capelo como dueño de la obra. A dos de ellos les remitió un correo bajo el título de “peligro” en el que reproducía la información recibida desde Londres. La conversación intervenida por la Policía entre Marce y el perista Antonio Losada, el hombre que acudió a la reunión de Majadahonda y que le ofreció uno de los cuadros robados, demuestra la preocupación de ambos al descubrir que eran robados.

-Antonio Losada: “ni hablar con ellos, nada, nada.. fuera. Una ruina, una ruina..

-Juan Manuel Marce: “no tenemos edad para estas cosas… muy bonito negocio y todo lo que tu quieras, pero aquí hay gato encerrado ¿o no? Hay que chequearlo todo en esta vida, en estos momento, porque no podemos patinar. Si salen otros negocios que sean correctos y legales pues vamos, pero si no …no. No quiero líos ¿Vale?

Los Losada, padre e hijo, pese a conocer ya que los cuadros eran robados buscaron otras personas donde colocar los Bacon, según se desprende de otras conversaciones telefónicas intervenidas en marzo, semanas antes de ser detenidos.

**Furies at the Base of a Crucifixion:**

**Francis Bacon’s Readings of “Oresteia”**

**MONIKA KESKA | SESSION 3 | IMAGINATION AND PROJECTION**

**34TH WORLD CONGRESS OF ART HISTORY | PEKING UNIVERSITY | BEIJING | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2016**

Some of Bacon’s most powerful paintings were influenced by literature, his readings of the Greek tragedies, and poetry of Eliot, Yeats or Lorca. The books found in his studio were a powerful source of imagery, often more suggestive than the photographs and illustrations that littered the floor of his London studio. The contents of Bacon’s personal library are an important document of his intellectual interests and offer a wider insight on the role of literature in his art.

Bacon spent most of his life in London, except brief periods in Paris, Tangier and Monaco. In the early 1960s he settled in a small apartment in a converted stable in South Kensington where he stayed for the rest of his life. After the painter’s death the contents of the studio were transferred to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. In 2004 the gallery received a further donation of 670 books that belonged to the painter at the time of his death. The contents of Bacon’s personal library, catalogued in 2012 as part of a project carried out by the Hugh Lane Gallery in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin ¹ , reveal a wide range of visual and intellectual themes and subjects that fascinated Bacon: medicine and anatomy, forensics, sports, cookery, animal photography, theory of evolution, supernatural phenomena, poetry, philosophy, history and politics, art and photography. A substantial part of the library was related to Greek tragedy. Bacon owned at least 4 different translations of Oresteia and various editions of the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, theoretical studies by W. B. Stanford. Bacon’s collection also included James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, which amply discussed Greek rituals, Greek Myths by Robert Graves, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and a number of book of poetry and plays inspired by the Greek tragedies: poems of Eliot, Yeats, versioning of the tragedies by Racine and Spender, whose Oedipus Trilogy was dedicated to Bacon.

Bacon did not receive a formal education. As a young boy he had a private teacher at his home in Ireland and later attended public school for a few years. Although he never considered artistic education as necessary or even beneficial to an artist, he did regret not having had the opportunity to learn classical languages. It is not surprising then that at least 10 manuals of modern Greek, published between 1932 and 1981, were found in his book collection. This finding suggests that he tried to learn the language by himself and never abandoned the idea of reading Aeschylus in the original and being able to perceive his writings in all their vitality.

In May interviews Bacon mentioned one book in particular, Aeschylus in His Style, written by W. B. Stanford in 1942, which influenced him greatly in the 1940s. He was particularly taken by a sentence from the Oresteia “οσμή βροτείων αιμάτων με προσγελά,” translated by Stanford as “a reek of human blood smiles out at me.” Stanford analyzed this fragment as an example of synesthetic imagery, which, “when it is a sincere description of a genuine experience it is a sign of a lively and unrestrained imagination, and, occasionally, of a mystical sense of the unity of experience.” ² The same sentence differs greatly in the four editions of Oresteia owned by Bacon, and was translated as follows:

The smell of man’s blood laughs to meet me. 3

A reek of human blood: it’s laughter to my heart. 4

The welcome smell of human blood has told me so. 5

The scent of mortal murder laughs in my nostrils. 6

However it was Stanford’s translation that affected Bacon the most. He quoted the sentence from Aeschylus in His Style in numerous interviews, as an example of the evocative power of words. He wrongfully attributed the fragment to Cassandra’s soliloquy included in the first part of the trilogy Agamemnon. Cassandra’s vision, delivered in trance, narrates the atrocities committed in the past of the House of Atreus, including infanticide and cannibalism. Soon after she accepts her fate and enters the palace, although she knows she will be murdered there.

In fact, the fragment that Bacon found so suggestive belongs to the 3rd part of the Oresteia, Eumenides, and is pronounced by the leader of the Furies, who chase Orestes after he murders his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aghistos.

The voluntary sacrifice of Cassandra is not dissimilar to the sacrifice of Christ, as both accept their fate imposed by a God, and the Furies coexist in Bacon’s first triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). The three figures at the base of an invisible cross are not mourners, but the Eumenides, avenging the sacrifice of Christ. This idea of sacrifice was possibly influenced by Bacon’s reading of John Frazer’s The Golden Bough. He owned at least the two volumes of the abridged edition ⁷ , and John Rothenstein recalled seeing it in Bacon’s apartment in the 1960s. ⁸ In his book, James Frazer argued that the periodical killing of the divine king was a quality found in many archaic religions and was also present in Christianity through the crucifixion of God’s son. His reference to Christianity was present in the first edition of the book and caused uproar among the readers, so it was reduced to an annex in the third edition and eventually removed from a further abridged edition.

The figures in Bacon’s first triptych are fairly ambiguous; they simultaneously represent the passive suffering of the victims, screaming in pain and blindfolded, and the fury of the avengers. The Furies under the cross are represented as eyeless, semi-human, semi-animal hybrids. In later works he developed an iconographical model of Furies, based on photographs of birds, as winged creatures, just like the crucified figure in the 1950 painting, Fragment of a Crucifixion, his only work of this subject executed on a single canvas. The painting in question represents an owl-like screaming figure, probably inspired by the photographs of Eric Hosking, being attacked by an animal.

The two Crucifixions triptychs painted in the 1960s present a much more complex composition and metaphorical references. The panels of the 1962 Crucifixions depict a slaughtered semi-human figure displayed on a bed and observed by other figures. In the 1965 Crucifixion the sacrifice is set once again in a slaughterhouse. The crucified figure in the central panel is represented as an eviscerated carcass, surrounded by two panels, one representing a scene of sexual violence and the other a bent male figure with a swastika band on his arm. After 1965, Bacon abandoned the religious subjects, with the exception of the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988). In later works the motif of the crucifixion was replaced by triptychs depicting agonizing or wounded figures, often observed by other characters that can be interpreted as either spectators or executioners that inflict pain

In an essay published in 1977⁹ , Michel Leiris, art critic, poet and one of Bacon’s closest friends, compared the composition of the 1976 **Triptych** to Bacon’s **Crucifixions** of the 1960s, where the crucified body is depicted as a slaughtered animal hanging in a butcher’s shop. Leiris’ own writings, alongside with Oresteia, were a major source of inspiration for the Triptych.

In a letter dating from April 1976 Bacon discussed the role of his readings in his creative process:

Il y’a long temps j’ai voulu écrire pour vous remercier non seulement pour le cadeau de votre livre mais pour avoir écrit cet magnifique livre Frêle Bruit pour une raison que je ne peux pas analyser il me touche même plus profondément que les trois superbe volumes de la Règle du jeu. Maintenant je travaille sur un très grand tryptich sur laquelle les accidents était fondé sur L’Oresteia d’Aeschylus et le Heart of Darkness 10 de Conrad, et maintenant que je travaille je trouve que Frêle Bruit être aussi tout le temps alors que ne je sais pas quel accident va arriver. ¹¹

The book mentioned in the letter, Frêle Bruit, is the final part of Leiris’ autobiographic tetralogy Règle du Jeu, of which only the third part, Fibrilles, is now in the Hugh Lane collections. The book is composed by poems, personal musings on the act of autobiographical writing, the author’s views on language, culture and literature. In one of the chapters Leiris discusses the fate of Orestes, prey of the Furies in Racine’s Andromache ¹² :

En se tachant de sang, Oreste demeure innocent doublement: son geste est bévue, qui dresse contre lui celle qu’il pensait satisfaire par la mise à mort d’un roi, et- trop béjaune encore pour être en tueur sans remords — il devient la proie des Furies. ¹³

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the other literary source of the Triptych, is also partly autobiographic, whose plot is based on the author’s experience as captain of a steamer on the Congo River, and the protagonists are modelled after real characters that ruled the Belgian colony at the end of the 19th century. The two isolated figures from the lateral panels of the triptych could be read as Bacon’s impression of the protagonist Kurtz, an ivory trader turned into violent dictator, living as a demigod in the Congo jungle among the natives. The faces in the two panels were inspired by a photograph of Peter Beard, Bacon’s friend and model, after his release from the Kenyan prison ¹⁴ , merged with the distorted photograph of Austen Chamberlain.

The butchered body in the central panel, surrounded by three bird-like creatures, representing Eumenides, belongs to Agamemnon, murdered by Clytemnestra and Aghistos. Agamemnon was killed with three blows of an axe, the same way the animals were sacrificed to gods. His death avenged the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, and that of the brothers of Aghistos who were murdered by Agamemnon’s father Atreus, then cooked and served to their father Thyestes. A small, distorted figure in a pool of blood in the right panel may represent a sacrificed child. Bacon depicts the central headless body as a carcass; the bowl in which his blood was recollected suggests that his death was no different from that of an animal. Bacon’s literary references often contain an element of shock and extreme brutality; as he once admitted, Macbeth, Oresteia and Second Coming were more suggestive and violent than explicit photographs of war atrocities that littered the floor of his studio. ¹⁵

The central figure of the sacrificed king reappears in similar form in the 1981 Triptych. The winged figure in the left panel this time does not represent a Fury. According to a note found in Bacon’s studio this figure depicts Sybil at Cumae, hanging in a cage like a sloth. This note leads us to another literary source that marks Bacon’s painting: T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. It is nearly an ekphrastic transcription of the epigraph to the poem, extracted from Satyricon by Petronius:

I saw with my own eyes the Sybil at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boy said to her “Sybil, what do you want?”, she answers “ I want to die.” ¹⁶

Another text, which affected Bacon’s art substantially, was a short essay on bullfighting: Miroir de la Tauromachie, written by Leiris in 1937. According to the correspondence between Leiris and Bacon, the latter was presented with the book in 1966 ¹⁷, and received another copy in 1969. ¹⁸

Bacon shared Leiris’ interest in bullfights; he saw corridas during his visits to Spain and Southern France, and collected books and illustrations of bullfighting and toreros. Shorty after receiving the first copy of the essay, he started painting scenes inspired by the corrida. Many of these works display a similar compositional concept: a circular space, inspired by a bullfighting ring, and rectangular mirrors that extend the realm of the painting, reflecting actions and figures located outside the canvas.

The first of these paintings was **Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho** (1967). Bacon transformed the London street into a bullfighting ring. A large mirror reflects a wounded bull and Isabel is represented standing alone in the centre of the arena, like a matador. The two Studies for a Bullfight painted in 1969 reveal a similar composition. In the first of the Studies for a Bullfight the mirror casts back a scene that can be read as Bacon’s musing on the obscure and violent side of human psyche, and a dark moment in 20th-century history. The reflection shows a crowd holding an NSDAP pennant, crowned with a parteiadler—an eagle sitting on a swastika.

The presence of the audience suggests a ritual character of the slaughter, a “mise-en-scène of some sort in the presence of third parties acting as voyeurs and fulfilling the function of a public.” ¹⁹The swirling movement of the bull and the matador in the centre of the arena, suggested by black lines and splatters of white paint, were very likely prompted by his reading of Leiris’ text, where it’s described as the movement that allows the torero to escape death on the ring: “The distortion (the evil) is the bull, who puts the life of the man in material danger and is the immediate-palpable eruption of this threat.”

In this essay, Leiris establishes a parallelism between the corrida and Greek tragedy, since the bullfight is “not so much a sport as a tragic art, wherein harmonious Apollonian forms get twisted by the arousal of Dionysian forces.” It is not accidental that this dichotomy brings to mind Nietzsche’s ideas presented in the Birth of Tragedy. In fact, Leiris believed that everything Nietzsche had said about music could be applied to bullfighting. The torero, with his coded physique and technique, represents the harmony, while the bull is the evil force, which puts man’s life in danger. The torero represents Apollonian harmony and order, while the bull embodies chaos and animalistic Dionysian force. The final sacrifice of the bull, and sometimes of the horses and of the torero, reestablishes the order through a cathartic experience. ²⁰

The reference to Greek tragedy and bullfighting persists in the 1987 Triptych, where the allusions to Miroir de la Tauromachie coexist with ekphrastic quotes from the poetry of Federico García Lorca, in particular, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. The elegy is composed by four poems dedicated to Lorca’s bullfighter friend who died from gangrene after being gored by a bull. Bacon owned several anthologies of poems of Lorca, at least two of which were bilingual editions and he attempted to read in the original.

The composition of the 1987 Triptych contains elements that link it to Miroir de la Tauromachie, such as the circular space and mirrors, but the figures casted in the mirrors are clearly inspired by the first poem of Lorca’s elegy, La cogida y la muerte (Goring and Death). Two panels represent a Michelangelesque male nude with a dark wound on his thigh; the third panel shows an injured bull. The swooping bird in the right panel is a reference to Eumenides, avenging the death of the matador.

The left panel of the triptych represents a wounded nude reflected in a mirror, set in a circular space. The bloodstains on the ground are very likely another ekphrastic quote from Lorca, referring to the second poem of the elegy, La sangre derramada (Spilt Blood). However, the blood-stained ground may as well allude to a scene from the Eumenides, in which the Furies trail Orestes following the reek of blood of his victims. After seizing the murderer they discover that rivulets of blood had formed around him.

The succession of murders in Oresteia, the crucifixions and the bullfights respond to the same idea of ritual sacrifice and extreme violence present in Bacon’s painting since 1944 when he painted the Furies at the base of a cross. Nietzsche in The Birth of Greek Tragedy hypothesizes on how the ancient Greeks faced the problem of suffering and evil. Nietzsche found that life under the constant threat of war and the memory of its atrocities would have been impossible to endure. The Greek spectators of the Oresteia, while contemplating extreme human suffering, affirmed the meaning of their own existence. Bacon’s violent imagery of human and animal sacrifice, which often was interpreted as his reflexion on the horrors of war and the history of the 20th century, could be read as the contrary—as an affirmation of life and the sense of human existence.

NOTES

1 For more information on the Bacon’s Books Project, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

2 W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in His Style: A Study in Language and Personality (Dublin: University Press, 1942).

3 Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. Gilbert Murray (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946).

4 Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Books, 1979).

5 Aeschylus, Oresteia, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume I: Aeschylus, trans. David Lattimore and Richmond Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

6 Aeschylus, The Oresteia Trilogy: Agamemnon, the Choephori, the Eumenides, trans. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982).

7 Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged Edition, vol. I (1960-reference nº BB18.20) and II (1961-BB21.06) (London: Macmillan).

8 John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon 24 May-1 July 1962 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1962).

9 Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Peintures Récentes (Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 1977).

10 Bacon probably was reading the 1976 Penguin edition of the book, found in his library (BB18.12).

11 “For a long time I have wanted to write to thank you, not just for the gift of your book, but also for having written the magnificent book Frêle Bruit. For some reason, which I cannot define, it touches me even more profoundly than the three superb volumes of la Règle du jeu. I am currently working on quite large triptych in which the accidents were based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus and Heart of Darkness by Conrad, and now that I am at work I find that Frêle Bruit is with me all the time. So I don’t know what accident will occur.” (April 3, 1976) Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet: Ms 43099.

12 Bacon admired Racine and owned French and English editions of his adaptations of Greek tragedies: Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah (Penguin, 1981); Andromache and Other Plays (Penguin, 1982); Oeuvres Complètes de Racine (Gallimard, 1951).

13 Michel Leiris, Frêle Bruit (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 217.

14 Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Merrell, 2005), 59.

15 Franck Maubert, L’Odeur du sang humain ne me quitte pas des yeux: Conversations avec Francis Bacon, (Paris: Fayard/ Mille et Une Nuits, 2009).

16 “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.”

17 MS43080, January 25, 1966.

18 MS40387, October 7, 1969.

19 Michel Leiris, The Bullfight as Mirror, trans. Ann Smock, October 63 (Winter 1993), l60.

20 Leiris, The Bullfight, 28

**Artists of the Colony Room Club**

**The Dark Art of Soho**

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today, 16th September 2016

Hooray! No need to travel to Chichester if you never seem to make it, Bonhams is putting on a terrific show from the magnificent Pallant House Galleries in its Bond St galleries during Freize week. This is a very special collection from an important time of 20thCentury British art. Post War it was when so much about art was being revaluated, stretched and reinvented; most of this occurred through conversation and those conversations between this group of Artists happened at their adopted club, and hangout The Colony Room Club, in Dean Street Soho. Starting in 1948, it continued for 60years,

Post-war Soho was a very different place, it had the taste of danger and the smell of sex around every street corner. It was a howling screech away from the smart, clean and comfortable tourist centre it has evolved into, full of media members clubs. The Colony run by the out spoken, witty and barbed tongue owner Muriel Belcher and her barman Ian Board drew in first of all Francis Bacon, who was paid in 1949 £10 a week to bring in rich and influential customers (this just about covered his bar bill), but as a charismatic and leading artist of the day he also attracted his fellow artists amongst them Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, John Minton, John Craxton, The two Roberts Colquon and MacBryde, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, RB Kitaj shown in this show, reflects a certain time but the Colony went on until 2008 and became the breeding ground for so much more, including the YBA movement of the 1990’s.

The Colony Room wasn’t singularly an artists club otherwise how could it survive? Somebody has to buy the drinks! What made it so special was the rare mix of intellectual, lords, ladies, musicians and poets and somebody to conduct and orchestrate a room full of people against the moral conventions of the day; Muriel Belcher. Francis Bacon summed it up as,’ “an oasis where the inhibitions of sex and class are dissolved… and you can be yourself”   And who doesn’t want to be that?

Sophie Parkin is the author of The Colony Room Club 1948-2008 – A history of Bohemian Soho pub by Palmtree Publishers £35. 277pgs. ISBN 978-0-9574354-1-4.

The exhibition will be in the main saleroom of Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, London W1, from Sunday 2 October to Tuesday 11 October. Opening hours are 9.30am – 4.30pm. Closed on Saturdays and Sunday 9 October. Admission free.

**Life as meat**

**Post–World War II London artists dabbled with expiration date**

W.S. DI PIERO | ART REVIEW | LOS ANGELES | SAN DIEGO READER | SEPT. 14 2016

In the years following World War II, the biggest art conversation was about abstraction and what to do with it. The critical center was New York and the artists in question were Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Gorky, and Kline. At the same time, several painters in England (though not all British-born) were complicating the idiom of representational painting. Each side had things to say about the other. Francis Bacon, the most articulate of the British artists, called Abstract Expressionism “decoration.” Harold Rosenberg, one of Abstraction’s house critics, called Bacon’s work “too figurative, too narrative, too concerned with Christian imagery yet dangerously unpious in its view of religion.” Barnett Newman said (approvingly) that Abstract Expressionists were “freeing [themselves] of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.” Bacon and five other figurative artists working in and around the ruins of postwar London were cultivating those “impediments,” and a sampling of their work is on view in London Calling, currently at the Getty Center.

These artists ate and drank together; they argued about and observed one another’s work; Bacon and Freud gambled together in casinos. I first saw Francis Bacon’s pictures in 1972, during the opening credits of Last Tango in Paris. I was a 27-year-old poet with no thought of ever writing about painting, but seeing those illustrations stirred a desire to say something, sooner or later, about Bacon’s work. (I’m slow: I didn’t get around to it until the 1990s.) The Tango images — a woman slouched in a chair, a figure sagging on a divan — were expressions of emotional disfigurement, solitariness, and tense anticipation kneaded into mercurial shapes, appropriate icons for Tango’s drama of carnal appetite and existential strain.

Dublin-born (in 1909) of British parents, Bacon was the oldest of what one of the six, R.I. Kitaj, termed the “London School,” and his palette of incited yellows, billiard-table greens, flamingo pinks, indigos, and reds gave a posh, privileged look to his vision of human animalism, of life as meat with an expiration date. The gamble of accident was part of his process. Artists before him had invited randomness into their interaction with the canvas, but Bacon’s interventions were more purposeful. He required instability. As a picture came into a structure, he’d destabilize it, pull it out of an achieved form, sometimes by swiping a rag across the canvas. It was an aggressive kind of painting-against-itself. His portraits of acquaintances and lovers, usually photograph-based, featured smeared skulls, enfolded faces, and elastic bodies composed of glistening planes that shed a protoplasmic “skin,” a kind of shadow incarnate.

Bacon left home at 17, travelled, worked as a furniture and interior designer, and by the early 1930s, virtually self-taught, was making paintings on profane and messily sacred subjects. His work responded as much to the containments of space as to human mood and expressiveness. Within the pictures he created staging areas, boxy structures or display platforms that look like laboratory containers or jewelry displays. The settings expose more than they enclose. The figures’ mouths sometimes remodel the mouth of a screaming woman in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. In the 1954 Figure with Meat, her mouth appears on a figure derived from Velázquez’s 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent X: the blue-robed pontiff shares a caged space with split halves of a beef carcass, meat-and-blood wings that obliterate any sense of the transcendent.

Other of Bacon’s photographic models were the stop-action motion studies Eadweard Muybridge made of wrestlers, acrobats, and ordinary people walking, jumping, and climbing steps. Bacon subverted photography’s stillness by working colour to make it look a little runny and decomposing. In the central panel of Triptych August 1972 two males muscle around each other like wrestlers or lovers. On the left panel is a seated George Dyer, Bacon’s model and lover who had recently killed himself, and on the right, the artist. Seeping from the figures is that familiar flayed-skin human spoor, a puddling pinkish flesh tone that looks like a spill of selfhood.

Bacon met Lucian Freud in the 1940s. Freud’s ambition was the pursuit of fleshly countenance. In an early work like Girl with a Kitten from 1947, the girl’s skin has a bruised pearliness, a tone Freud would work many variations on in his career, and her lost gaze directs her consciousness way beyond the picture. (She’s holding the kitten by the neck, like a trophy.) Freud experimented with consistency of surface and the elasticity of interior space. The surface of Girl with a Kitten is smooth, chaste, indifferent. The placid flesh from the 1950s pictures gradually gets eroded and corrupted by time; the fineness of finish breaks down into flaky cellular bits and knobs as Freud inquires more and more into the contemplative weathered-ness of the human form. The later work has coarser, broken consistencies, and his nudes look as if they’ve just now dropped or been pushed awkwardly onto beds. The skin in Freud’s work is a blast of carnal presence. He painted the life of time in the body, the decrepitude, the fat, the little and great collapses, just as in the early work he showed a lovely, though tough, youthfulness of presence.

One of Freud’s students at the Slade School of Fine Art was Michael Andrews, born in 1928 and, dead at age 67, the shortest lived of the six artists in London Calling. Of them, he was the most social; his paintings observe human consciousness registering its awareness of others and its surroundings. One of his best known pictures, A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over, doesn’t illustrate the act of falling so much as it reveals two states of mind in that moment. A portly businessman, trying feebly to break the fall with his shoulder, is suspended in a state of worried amusement that there’s nowhere for him to go but down, while the woman observing the event registers a shocked queasiness. Andrews liked parties and liked making pictures based on them. In the busy drinking-club crowd in Colony Room I (not included in the exhibition), his friends Bacon and Freud mix it up with journalists, arts people, and hangers-on. In his landscapes, Andrews aspirates the surfaces and breaks them down into a beautifully expressive unevenness. In a swirling grayish 1994 painting of the Thames Estuary, globs and chunks of clotted ash and dirt are mixed with the paint to create a pensive, elegiac moment in the mind: the churned textures of land and water become a platform for fishermen revealed high in the scene like presiding spirits. The entire picture feels like a modernist dream of 19th-century representation.

**Der doppelte Bacon**

**Christoph Vitali, Direktor vom Haus der Kunst in München, schreibt über den englischen**

**Maler Francis Bacon und über ein Buch, das in eindringlicher Weise den Mythos vom**

**ausschließlich tragisch, ja apokalyptisch fixierten Bacon zerstört.**

**FRANCIS BACON  |  ART  |  DAS KUNSTMAGAZINE  |  WEDNESDAY 7 SEPTEMBER 2016**

Die nochmalige Lektüre von Michael Peppiatts großer Francis-Bacon-Biografie war für mich auch das Eintauchen in ein Stück Vergangenheit. Im Jahre 1996 hatten wir vom Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris die große Retrospektive des nur wenige Jahre zuvor gestorbenen Malers nach München geholt. Ich hatte sie zusammen mit David Sylvester, einem Freund und Weggefährten des Künstlers, im Haus der Kunst gehängt - eine Einrichtung, die mir unvergesslich bleibt: zentrierend um die sechs großen Triptychen im Hauptsaal, die Bacon zum Ende der sechziger und zu Beginn der siebziger Jahre malte und deren Gegenstand stets das Bild seines Freundes George Dyer war.

Dyer hatte sich am Vorabend der großen Ausstellung im Grand Palais in Paris im Herbst 1971, der Krönung des Werkes von Bacon überhaupt, umgebracht. Unsere Münchner Schau wurde zu einer Inszenierung, wie sie prachtvoller, aber auch furchterregend-abweisender kaum je gelungen war. Für Münchens bildverliebtes Publikum ein harter, schwer zu verdauender Brocken. Zur Eröffnung brachte Michael Peppiatt, auch er mit Bacon dreißig Jahre lang befreundet, die englische Originalausgabe seines eben erschienenen Buchs über den Maler mit.

**Bacon führte ein Doppelleben**

Was kann uns die kluge Biografie heute sagen? Sie zerstört in eindringlicher Weise den Mythos vom ausschließlich tragisch, ja apokalyptisch fixierten Künstler. Sie zeigt uns statt dessen über viele Seiten den in die Welt verliebten, sein Leben in vollen Zügen genießenden Francis Bacon, der, als ein brillanter Causeur von Kneipe zu Bar zu Nachtclub in Londons Soho ziehend, eine große Anzahl von Bewunderern an sich fesselte. Danach allerdings, wenn er spät nachts als eleganter Dandy in sein bescheidenes Atelier zurückkehrte und zum Pinsel griff, verwandelte sich der Lebemann und protokollierte Zwänge in großen einsamen Bildern. Diese Doppelexistenz des Künstlers macht Peppiatts Buch in unnachahmlicher Weise deutlich.

Es ist in der kunsthistorischen Analyse so nüchtern und präzise, als ginge es um das Werk eines völlig Fremden. Gleichzeitig, und darin liegt seine große Kraft, ist es das eindrückliche Zeugnis eines sympathisierenden Beobachters voller Zuneigung. So liest sich die Biografie über weite Strecken wie ein fesselnder Roman, und es ist ihr eine gute Aufnahme bei den vielen Bacon-Freunden in Deutschland von ganzem Herzen zu wünschen.

**Der Artikel erschien zuerst in art - das Kunstmagazin, Ausgabe 12, 2000**

**Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms**

**Brutal and Brilliant**

**BY CHRISTOPHER DOWRICK** **| EXHIBITION | OUT OF HOURS | BRITISH JOURNAL OF GENERAL PRACTICE | VOLUME 66 | SEPTEMBER** **2016**

Francis Bacon has come to Liverpool, in a major new retrospective focusing on the shape and structure of his art. As is my wont in galleries, I wander for a while and then choose one piece on which to focus my attention.

Study for a Portrait (1952) (right), which has also been known as Businessman or Man’s Head, is painted predominantly in dark blues and black. It shows the upper body of a man in a jacket and tie, mouth wide open, spectacles dislodged, and right eye smeared, with a curtain rail in the background. I am drawn first to the whites — of the shirt and the teeth. Then I notice the cage-like structure enclosing his head and neck. Is he screaming? Is he shouting for help? Is he gasping for breath, suffocating within an invisible, impermeable layer?

I find this profoundly unsettling. Ideas and images vibrate and multiply around my brain. The distorted screaming face is a recurring motif in Bacon’s middle period. In the exhibition it’s also in the neighbouring paintings of Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) and Study for the Nurse in the Film ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1957). Like Munch’s The Scream, it leads us towards big themes: of anguish beneath the veneer of success and civilisation, of isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas, **‘enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual’**.¹

But I can’t escape into the distancing realms of philosophy. The painting draws me back into the real world. Is this what it feels like to have an asthma attack? Bacon suffered severely from asthma as a child, so he would know. Or is the cage the claustrophobic closet of a gay man in England in the days before sexual liberalisation? And then, nearer to home, the curtain looks suspiciously like the one round the examination couch in my consulting room. Might this even be a portrait of me, overcome by the distress and suffering of my patients, to the point where boundaries between self and other start to disappear?

I look for relief elsewhere in the exhibition, but it’s hard to find. Gargoyles grimace under crucifixes, a distorted child crawls around a ring, enmeshed and blood-spattered bodies are observed through a window by a man with a phone, a sand dune (left) that might have human form oozes out of its enclosure.

Eventually I do find laughter, in Study of the Human Body (1982): a headless and chestless naked man is protected from the evils of the world — by a pair of cricket pads.

Bacon is brutal, bothersome, and bloody brilliant.

**REFERENCE**

1. Nietzsche F. The Birth of Tragedy: out of the Spirit of Music. London: Penguin Classics; 1993. [first published in 1872].

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms. Tate Liverpool 18 May 2016–18 September 2016

**Inside the Artistic Rivalry 0f Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud**

**A close look at the conflict and competition that drove these legendary British painters.**

SEBASTIAN SMEE   |   TOWN & COUNTRY   |   MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2016

When the artists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon first met in the 1950s, Freud was little known beyond a small circle of supporters while Bacon was a rising star in Britain’s art world. Their fraught friendship, which spurred major creative breakthroughs and coincided with upheavals in both men’s love lives, was a source of inspiration, exasperation, and later, regret. As Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee writes in his new book The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, it was "the most interesting, fertile—and volatile—relationship in British art of the twentieth century."

Here, an excerpt from the book details the dysfunctional—and legendary—friendship of these two great artists.

Influence is erotic. Lucian Freud was young, and he was surely susceptible—ready to be seduced. And yet, even as he admitted Francis Bacon’s example, he now found himself caught up in a struggle to hold true to his own course. He became increasingly aware of what distinguished them, of the differences between them—in temperament, talent, and sensibility that were most likely unbridgeable. You can hear the ambivalence—the wariness and nervous excitement—in his reactions, remembered many decades later: Bacon, he said, "talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me," he said, "and I knew it was a million miles from anything I could ever do."

There was, too, another complicating factor, which was that, for a long time, Freud very much depended on Bacon’s largesse. Bacon would regularly pull out a bundle of bank notes, saying, "I’ve got rather a lot of these, I thought you might like some of them.

"It would make a complete difference to me for three months," said Freud.

Bacon would regularly pull out a bundle of bank notes, saying, "I’ve got rather a lot of these, I thought you might like some of them."

Gambling, for Freud, was a visceral thrill, and perhaps, too, an expression of his disdain for conventional notions about what matters in life. It was not yet, however, a way of life—much less a philosophy—as it had become for Bacon, whose more extreme and theatrical proclivity for gambling beguiled Freud, as did the beautiful rhetoric Bacon used to explain his habit. It was all of a piece with Bacon’s attitude to painting: the emphasis on risk; the willingness to stake all on a spontaneous swipe of a rag or smear of the hand; the conjuring of nightmare and disaster; and the tendency to destroy as much as he created. It all exemplified how Bacon’s work, in Freud’s own phrase, "related immediately to how he felt about life."

Only by going too far can you go far enough. —Francis Bacon

All this had almost nothing in common with Freud’s own exacting methods. Bacon’s approach— "only by going too far can you go far enough," as he put it—was rooted in a gambler’s mentality. In reality, he exaggerated aspects of his approach to making art, and most of his paintings, especially in the 1940s and 50s, actually involved a lot of labour. But his method was still a world away from Freud’s patient and concentrated scrutiny, his slow accumulation of observed lines and stylized hatchings. Where Freud spent weeks and months on a portrait, Bacon talked during these years about images being handed to him ready-made, dropping into his mind, one after the other, like slides.

Freud himself was never a serious, self-destructive drinker; remaining in control mattered too much to him. It was Bacon who led this dance—Bacon with his epic benders, his charisma, his compulsive generosity, all of which [Freud’s wife] Caroline Blackwood found terribly seductive.

Neither husband nor wife had been faithful, although Freud’s straying was, as usual, more egregious than hers. The collapse of a marriage—especially a marriage between two volatile personalities—is never straightforward. And yet Freud later said, in a typically sly construction, that, "If there’s such a thing as fault, putting it mildly it was completely my fault." Blackwood herself claimed that the main reason for the collapse of the marriage was Freud’s gambling. It was an obsession that lasted decades. He was in thrall to it. Breaking even was the one thing he detested.

Even if Blackwood’s claim is only partially true, it’s certainly the case that Freud’s whole mentality through these years was infected by Bacon’s devotion to leading a life of chance. When Daniel Farson, who was part of the Soho circle, asked Blackwood why her marriage to Freud had ended, she asked, "Have you ever driven with him?"

When a friend asked Blackwood why her marriage to Freud had ended, she responded, 'Have you ever driven with him?'

"Yes," he replied, "I was so terrified that when he stopped at a red light, for once, I threw myself out."

Exactly," came Blackwood’s reply. "That’s what being married to him was like."

**The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (Random House) will be released August 16, 2016.**

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Record $1.5bn auction reveals Microsoft co-founder

Paul Allen as voracious collector

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The Brooklyn Museum Sold a Francis Bacon Pope in 2019 for $6.6 Million.

Helly Nahmad Is Selling It at Art Basel for More Than Twice That

Bacon in Moscow By James Birch

Francis Bacon at the Royal Academy: visceral visions of man and beast

Bacon was hardly a Soviet-friendly artist, yet his 1988 Moscow retrospective,

BBC led thieves to my £8 million Bacon painting,

claims friend

A FRIEND of Francis Bacon has blamed the BBC for inadvertently leading thieves to his multimillion-pound painting by the artist.

The deception surrounding Martin Bashir’s interview with Diana, Princess of Wales has prompted Barry Joules to claim he was deceived by the corporation in agreeing to be interviewed for a documentary.

He accuses programme-makers of filming both the distinctive exterior of his 15th-century Normandy home and a painting by Bacon inside — even though he says he says he specifically asked them not to do so for security reasons.

He believes it is no coincidence that shortly alter the documentary was aired he suffered a well-planned burglary in which that painting was stolen.

Mr. Joule, who was Bacon’s friend from 1978 until the artist’s death in 1992, said; “The BBC have ruined my life.”

Having lived next door to Bacon in London, he now resides in France. In allowing the filmmakers to visit his Normandy farmhouse, he claims that he told them that its exterior could not be filmed because its distinctive Normandy style and “very strange” chimney would make it easily identifiable.

He also says he insisted that they not film his Bacon painting, one of the artist’s Pope pictures from the early 1950s, only to discover that they did just that.

When the BBC agreed to show him the documentary before it was aired, he was horrified to see footage of both the house exterior and the Bacon painting.

“Months later, there’s a highly professional robbery in my house and only the painting is stolen, cut out of its frame. Bacon had given me the painting after I saved his life, pumping his chest, giving him oxygen, on Jan 18 1992, after a minor heart attack.”

He added: “The police did a huge investigation. They think that the painting’s in Moscow with a gangster collector, because people have seen it.

“That’s what the BBC did to me, leading burglars to my French home — though I must admit I have no proof.”

The robbery was so professional that the thieves had put a tap on Mr Joule’s telephone line and knew exactly when he would be out.

All the more painful is that the painting was not insured. It was worth about £8 million. He assumed it was safe as only close friends knew he owned it, and he had good security: “The insurance was extremely high, so I was going to sell it or put it in a safety deposit.”

He added: “The painful memories have come flooding back in reading about what happened to Diana and how the BBC treated her, and the paranoia that she suffered afterwards — exactly what happened to me.”

A BBC spokesman said: “When people raise concerns of this kind about programmes, we of course look into them. This is a programme made nearly two decades ago and it is clear that recollections differ. If Mr Joule has concerns about the film, we welcome the opportunity to speak to him directly.”

A BBC source denied denied there was sufficient information in the film to enable a viewer to work out where Mr Joule lived, describing the house exterior as “not a long lingering shot”. They added that Mr Joule had given the crew a tour of the house.

But Mr Joule argues that the house is a “distinctly” Normandy style and he was known to have a home there.

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book in the art world right now

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Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art Gill Hedley Bloomsbury Visual Arts, pp.384, 27

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Kicked out of the family

Double meanings

We look at why John Baldessari burnt his art and baked cookies with the ashes, Francis Bacon

slashed his best paintings, and Robert Rauschenberg erased a work by Willem de Kooning

A French exhibition of Francis Bacon turns him

into that pseudo intellectual dude from college

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

MARCEL PROUST’S IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

JACQUES LACAN’S ECRITS

GEORGE STEINER’S IN BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE

GILLES DELEUZE’S MASOCHISM

Looking at Lucian Freud: photographic portraits of the artist

Forty years on from the sci-fi classic, a new film examines the genesis

of its horrifying monster, Kevin Maher reports

How Francis Bacon made $5m gift

to the Tate to spite his dealer

A review of the School of London exhibition

‘One of life’s original characters has been lost’

– cousin Rory Guinness

Why painter Francis Bacon was art’s greatest punk

Savvy Investment

Is Elaine Wynn’s $142 Million Francis Bacon Painting on Way to LA?

She reveals some details about the purchase in a new interview

CHASE PETERSON-WITHORN | FORBES | MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2016

Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez

Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez

Guggenheim Bilbao

30 September 2016 - 8 January 2017

REVIEW BY DR RINA ARYA | THIS IS TOMORROW | CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE | 14 NOVEMBER 2016

Life as meat

**Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art Gill Hedley Bloomsbury Visual Arts, pp.384, 27**