Nick Clark and Adam Sherwin, "Disturbing, raw and graphic – so was Francis Bacon inspired by the Nazis? Evidence of fascist imagery in artist's most important paintings has been ignored," The Independent, U.K., 29 August 2012 (online).
Francis Bacon appropriated Nazi propaganda for some of his most important paintings to explore "man's capacity for savage violence", a leading art historian claims.
Critics have long ignored the depth of inspiration the painter drew from fascist imagery despite "compelling" visual evidence, Martin Hammer says. Several of Bacon's most violent works, which are generally interpreted as sexual and autobiographical, actually contain "submerged" attempts to deal with the horrors of Hitler's regime, he argues in his book, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda.
It aims to shed new light on one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. Hammer, professor of history and philosophy of art at the University of Kent, said: "The use of Nazi imagery in Bacon's work was an important aspect of his creativity; it is present in many works. It was something that hadn't been addressed."
Bacon was born in 1909. He experienced the Blitz in London, but unlike many of his contemporaries he did not participate in the Second World War or become a war artist. Professor Hammer said: "Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged. He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone's lives."
The influences came from photographs and posters, often by Heinrich Hoffmann, a photographer close to Hitler. Many of the German images were recycled in books and magazines in the UK, Professor Hammer said.
"There was a horrified fascination with the image of Hitler and the Nazi leadership." The book refers to a painting of a "screaming orator-like figure with a military helmet, it clearly sets up the Nazi leadership as these grotesque creatures. You get a sense of his horrified reaction to this culture."
The professor added: "His earliest pictures using Nazi imagery were pretty obvious, which is why he abandoned them. Increasingly these references were submerged."
In his book, published next month by the Tate, Professor Hammer addresses the question of how and why Bacon appropriated the Fascist imagery. The trigger for the book, was the major Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008.
"It started a purely visual observation. I noted the parallels between one or two of the paintings and certain Nazi images I was aware of," he said. That started a process of research that accumulated a whole series of other images. "It got to the point where I felt this was a consistent feature of Bacon's work from the 50s and 60s."
Bacon never referred to the Nazis, "largely because he wasn't asked about it. Interviewers either didn't recognise it or thought it shouldn't be talked about," Professor Hammer said.
Francis Bacon appropriated Nazi propaganda for some of his most important paintings to explore "man's capacity for savage violence", a leading art historian claims.
Critics have long ignored the depth of inspiration the painter drew from fascist imagery despite "compelling" visual evidence, Martin Hammer says. Several of Bacon's most violent works, which are generally interpreted as sexual and autobiographical, actually contain "submerged" attempts to deal with the horrors of Hitler's regime, he argues in his book, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda.
It aims to shed new light on one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. Hammer, professor of history and philosophy of art at the University of Kent, said: "The use of Nazi imagery in Bacon's work was an important aspect of his creativity; it is present in many works. It was something that hadn't been addressed."
Bacon was born in 1909. He experienced the Blitz in London, but unlike many of his contemporaries he did not participate in the Second World War or become a war artist. Professor Hammer said: "Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged. He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone's lives."
The influences came from photographs and posters, often by Heinrich Hoffmann, a photographer close to Hitler. Many of the German images were recycled in books and magazines in the UK, Professor Hammer said.
"There was a horrified fascination with the image of Hitler and the Nazi leadership." The book refers to a painting of a "screaming orator-like figure with a military helmet, it clearly sets up the Nazi leadership as these grotesque creatures. You get a sense of his horrified reaction to this culture."
The professor added: "His earliest pictures using Nazi imagery were pretty obvious, which is why he abandoned them. Increasingly these references were submerged."
In his book, published next month by the Tate, Professor Hammer addresses the question of how and why Bacon appropriated the Fascist imagery. The trigger for the book, was the major Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008.
"It started a purely visual observation. I noted the parallels between one or two of the paintings and certain Nazi images I was aware of," he said. That started a process of research that accumulated a whole series of other images. "It got to the point where I felt this was a consistent feature of Bacon's work from the 50s and 60s."
Bacon never referred to the Nazis, "largely because he wasn't asked about it. Interviewers either didn't recognise it or thought it shouldn't be talked about," Professor Hammer said.
Jennifer O'Mahony, "Francis Bacon inspired by Nazi propaganda," The Telegraph, 29 August 2012 (online).
Art historian Martin Hammer's new book argues that the creative potential of photographs and posters from Nazi Germany were "an important aspect" of painter Francis Bacon's work.
The artist Francis Bacon dealt with "man's capacity for savage violence" by using elements of Nazi propaganda in his work for more than two decades, a leading art historian has claimed.
Professor Martin Hammer, who studies history and philosophy of art at the University of Kent, told The Independent newspaper:
"The use of Nazi imagery in Bacon's work was an important aspect of his creativity; it is present in many works. It was something that hadn't been addressed."
Professor Hammer believes works including Bacon's Figure Study II were primarily inspired by the photographs of Adolf Hitler's close associate Heinrich Hoffmann, whose images were circulated in British magazines at the time of the second world war.
In Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, Professor Hammer analyses Bacon's paintings from the angle of his "horrified fascination" with the Nazi regime.
"Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged. He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone's lives," Hammer said.
"There was a horrified fascination with the image of Hitler and the Nazi leadership," he added, in particular a "screaming orator-like figure with a military helmet," an image from Figure Study II, which "clearly sets up the Nazi leadership as these grotesque creatures. You get a sense of his horrified reaction to this culture." Bacon's chronic asthma exempted him from military service during World War Two, and he spent the early war years in Hampshire, and later in London during the Blitz.
Hammer believes Bacon's work shows elements of fascist imagery until well into the 1960s, when he shifted his focus away from extreme imagery and onto portraits of close friends.
On the subject of why fascist elements have remained unnoticed for so long, and why the artist himself never spoke of his precoccupation with Nazi imagery, Hammer claims he "wasn't asked about it. Interviewers either didn't recognise it or thought it shouldn't be talked about."
Art historian Martin Hammer's new book argues that the creative potential of photographs and posters from Nazi Germany were "an important aspect" of painter Francis Bacon's work.
The artist Francis Bacon dealt with "man's capacity for savage violence" by using elements of Nazi propaganda in his work for more than two decades, a leading art historian has claimed.
Professor Martin Hammer, who studies history and philosophy of art at the University of Kent, told The Independent newspaper:
"The use of Nazi imagery in Bacon's work was an important aspect of his creativity; it is present in many works. It was something that hadn't been addressed."
Professor Hammer believes works including Bacon's Figure Study II were primarily inspired by the photographs of Adolf Hitler's close associate Heinrich Hoffmann, whose images were circulated in British magazines at the time of the second world war.
In Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, Professor Hammer analyses Bacon's paintings from the angle of his "horrified fascination" with the Nazi regime.
"Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged. He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone's lives," Hammer said.
"There was a horrified fascination with the image of Hitler and the Nazi leadership," he added, in particular a "screaming orator-like figure with a military helmet," an image from Figure Study II, which "clearly sets up the Nazi leadership as these grotesque creatures. You get a sense of his horrified reaction to this culture." Bacon's chronic asthma exempted him from military service during World War Two, and he spent the early war years in Hampshire, and later in London during the Blitz.
Hammer believes Bacon's work shows elements of fascist imagery until well into the 1960s, when he shifted his focus away from extreme imagery and onto portraits of close friends.
On the subject of why fascist elements have remained unnoticed for so long, and why the artist himself never spoke of his precoccupation with Nazi imagery, Hammer claims he "wasn't asked about it. Interviewers either didn't recognise it or thought it shouldn't be talked about."
Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, Tate, 2012. "Born in 1909, Francis Bacon's entire early adulthood was penetrated by the tragedy of the Second World War. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Britain, he did not participate in the war or become a war artist. Rather, he is unique amongst his generation of artists as independently choosing Hitler, Nazi Germany and Fascist propaganda to be one of the most influential sources for his practice. In this new scholarly study, Martin Hammer addresses the question of how and why Bacon appropriated the photographs and documentation of Fascist imagery to his own expressive ends, emphasising how it was used technically in his painting as a visual aid, and how, far from being an artist of private spaces and personal anguish, he in fact found inspiration from mass circulated media and the use of it for the promotion of global ideals. Featuring an extensive selection of colour and black-and-white reproductions of both paintings and source material from Bacon's own collected archive, Hammer uses focussed visual engagement with Bacon's work, illuminating the artist's aims to comment and reflect on the wider contemporary world."
TATE. "Francis Bacon is one of the most important and internationally renowned British artists of the twentieth century. what is little known, is that Bacon was heavily influenced, and made extensive use of, Nazi propaganda photography as a springboard for his paintings. In this original and compelling book Martin Hammer presents Bacon as a ‘painter of modern life’; a man who wanted to distil the feelings, sensations and memories associated with living through the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, the second world war, the revelations of the Holocaust and then the early Cold war and post-Colonial struggles. Bacon was able to show the ugly face of power and its corruptive nature, how it the gives to its possessors the capacity to inflict savage violence on others. He emerges from this account as a deeply serious artist, of international significance and stature.
In the first in-depth study of its kind, Hammer focuses on Bacon’s creative processes, looking at how he appropriated and transformed Nazi propaganda in his work from the early 1940s into the first half of the 1960s. His work is set against the evolving backdrop of an initial impulse to bury wartime memories and the gradual resurgence of interest, associated especially with a new focus on the Holocaust. Bacon’s pictorial project is also understood in the context of contemporary writers and thinkers, such as W.H. Auden, Berthold Brecht and Hannah Arendt, who likewise reflected on the deeper psychological significance of traumatic events."
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian Blog, 4 September 2012. "Francis Bacon was a shock merchant, not a Nazi. Reports that the artist was influenced by Third Reich imagery have missed the point: Bacon loved nothing more than to challenge and disgust the world with his work.
[...] A silly-season art story has it that Bacon made massive use of Third Reich imagery and that champions of his work deliberately ignored this. The story, inspired by a new book, is misleading in two ways. First, Bacon never concealed his interest in such imagery, and nor did critical admirers in his lifetime. Second, the "discovery" changes nothing about how Bacon's art ought to be interpreted. A man who painted his closest friends with vicious intimacy was never a sentimental liberal type full of good will. The malignity in Bacon is self-evident. What makes him a great artist is the visceral force of his sense of human life as a godless disaster area. The Nazis fit rather well into that vision.
Bacon's Nazi references are no mystery, and no surprise. It is false to pretend his admirers glossed over them. In [a] radio programme, his most famous champion, David Sylvester, discusses how Bacon used the swastika as an artistic image. And here is Sylvester again, on swastikas and cricket pads in Bacon's art.
The sensational speculations now being relished about Bacon hinge on the idea that, in seeing his second world war tropes as formal painterly effects, his fans have ignored the underlying issue – that Bacon was promoting Nazism, or sympathetic to it. This is a childish, glib, and leaden way of hitting a poetic artist on the head with the rolled-up newspaper of literalism. Bacon created a monstrous, surreal imaginative world of enclosed rooms and private hells. Nazi armbands fitted naturally into his vision too.
The impact of Bacon's art after the second world war had a lot to do with the fact that he was the first artist who captured what the war revealed about the terrible truths of human capabilities. The opening of concentration camps such as Belsen in 1945 and the images of industrial mass slaughter that were Hitler's ultimate legacy left most artists incapable of matching horror with horror. Picasso's painting The Charnel House barely hints at the real nightmare of the Holocaust. Yet when Bacon's wartime masterpiece Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion was first exhibited, it caused a familiar shudder: here was an art that rose, or rather sank, to the challenge of representing the worst crimes imaginable.
In his later paintings, Bacon shows people enacting brutalities on one another in a terror that never ends. It was not the Nazis who obsessed him. It was their crimes."
TATE. "Francis Bacon is one of the most important and internationally renowned British artists of the twentieth century. what is little known, is that Bacon was heavily influenced, and made extensive use of, Nazi propaganda photography as a springboard for his paintings. In this original and compelling book Martin Hammer presents Bacon as a ‘painter of modern life’; a man who wanted to distil the feelings, sensations and memories associated with living through the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, the second world war, the revelations of the Holocaust and then the early Cold war and post-Colonial struggles. Bacon was able to show the ugly face of power and its corruptive nature, how it the gives to its possessors the capacity to inflict savage violence on others. He emerges from this account as a deeply serious artist, of international significance and stature.
In the first in-depth study of its kind, Hammer focuses on Bacon’s creative processes, looking at how he appropriated and transformed Nazi propaganda in his work from the early 1940s into the first half of the 1960s. His work is set against the evolving backdrop of an initial impulse to bury wartime memories and the gradual resurgence of interest, associated especially with a new focus on the Holocaust. Bacon’s pictorial project is also understood in the context of contemporary writers and thinkers, such as W.H. Auden, Berthold Brecht and Hannah Arendt, who likewise reflected on the deeper psychological significance of traumatic events."
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian Blog, 4 September 2012. "Francis Bacon was a shock merchant, not a Nazi. Reports that the artist was influenced by Third Reich imagery have missed the point: Bacon loved nothing more than to challenge and disgust the world with his work.
[...] A silly-season art story has it that Bacon made massive use of Third Reich imagery and that champions of his work deliberately ignored this. The story, inspired by a new book, is misleading in two ways. First, Bacon never concealed his interest in such imagery, and nor did critical admirers in his lifetime. Second, the "discovery" changes nothing about how Bacon's art ought to be interpreted. A man who painted his closest friends with vicious intimacy was never a sentimental liberal type full of good will. The malignity in Bacon is self-evident. What makes him a great artist is the visceral force of his sense of human life as a godless disaster area. The Nazis fit rather well into that vision.
Bacon's Nazi references are no mystery, and no surprise. It is false to pretend his admirers glossed over them. In [a] radio programme, his most famous champion, David Sylvester, discusses how Bacon used the swastika as an artistic image. And here is Sylvester again, on swastikas and cricket pads in Bacon's art.
The sensational speculations now being relished about Bacon hinge on the idea that, in seeing his second world war tropes as formal painterly effects, his fans have ignored the underlying issue – that Bacon was promoting Nazism, or sympathetic to it. This is a childish, glib, and leaden way of hitting a poetic artist on the head with the rolled-up newspaper of literalism. Bacon created a monstrous, surreal imaginative world of enclosed rooms and private hells. Nazi armbands fitted naturally into his vision too.
The impact of Bacon's art after the second world war had a lot to do with the fact that he was the first artist who captured what the war revealed about the terrible truths of human capabilities. The opening of concentration camps such as Belsen in 1945 and the images of industrial mass slaughter that were Hitler's ultimate legacy left most artists incapable of matching horror with horror. Picasso's painting The Charnel House barely hints at the real nightmare of the Holocaust. Yet when Bacon's wartime masterpiece Three Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion was first exhibited, it caused a familiar shudder: here was an art that rose, or rather sank, to the challenge of representing the worst crimes imaginable.
In his later paintings, Bacon shows people enacting brutalities on one another in a terror that never ends. It was not the Nazis who obsessed him. It was their crimes."
