Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels, Incunabula, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.
By 1949 Francis Bacon found his main subject, the human body, and from then on it remained his principal theme. But he did not paint from life. Instead, he took from images from the mass media and drew on them for his paintings. A previously unpublished selection of Francis Bacon's source material (photographs, books, magazine and newspaper clippings) offering insight into Bacon's method. This book presents 180 of these documents, about which Bacon was secretive but which, it emerges, were integral to creative process, along with some of the works that the material inspired. Culled from thousands of pieces of original material found in his studio, these items have each been researched to provide for the first time comprehensive details of the artist's sources. Previously unseen, these visually thrilling documents demonstrate Bacon's tactile, visceral relationship with his sources and his unerring eye for seeking out visual stimulation in the most unexpected places.
By Incunabula are meant the circa 180 full page illustrations of various objects that were found in Bacon's Reece Mews Studio formerly located in London and consequently moved to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. There is no Index, but the objects are divided into the following categories:
1. Art - Photography, mostly photos ripped out of Muybridge's book, The Human figure in Motion, books on sculpture, and erotic magazines.
2. Conflict - Mass Media, mostly images torn from newspapers and magazines, many of which depict violence or the aftermath of violence, such as dead bodies, effects from injuries, etc.
3. Action - Painting, more images from Muybridge, but also photos from art and sports magazines.
4. Science - Nature, images torn from K.C. Clark's book Positioning in Radiography, Schrenk-Notzing's Phenomena of Materialization, more Muybridge, and also images from cookbooks, etc.
5. Art - Photography, images torn from art books and catalogs, including Bacon's own work.
A mind on fire. Francis Bacon always said he worked entirely by chance. Images found in his studio - from plucked chickens to close-ups of skin diseases - show that this was far from the case, revealing a process of careful creativity at work.
"Even though it is claimed that many of the images have not been published before, I have seen more than three fourths in other books on Francis Bacon. I really do not know what purpose this book can serve, other than the fact that the objects are shown in a larger size than before with one image per page. As a collector of book on Francis Bacon I continue to be amazed how many recent books concentrate on his Studio instead of his art. The objects in the studio are supposed to be the "key" to Bacon's paintings, but I would argue they are in most cases only an inspiration. [...] The authors fail to make a case of how the majority of the images in this book are related to Bacon's paintings, which one would think is the whole point of the exercise." -Walter O. Koenig
___
Jonathan Jones, "A Mind on Fire," The Guardian, 6.9.2008
The painter looks back at you from behind his easel, a palette resting on his left arm, a long thin brush in his right hand, the ends of his moustache curling upward, the cross of Santiago on his chest. This is the self-portrait of the Spanish master Diego Velázquez, on a page of an old art book smeared with a cloud of pink paint, fleshy and warm, as if a human body had burst in the air above it - the aftermath of a conversation between two great artists across the centuries.
It was found among the forest of paintbrushes, dollops of pointillist graffiti and enigmatically suspended bare lightbulbs in the studio of the artist Francis Bacon, a tiny space in a mews near South Kensington tube station where he worked virtually every day from the early 60s until his death in 1992. Today the studio is preserved in its entirety at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. You enter a chilly refrigerated room and peer through narrow windows into the terrifyingly claustrophobic interior of the studio, that has in its own right taken on the intense living presence of a work of art. Bacon joked that the daubs of paint he splashed on its walls were his only abstract works; now the studio has become his only installation. It is fearsome with its rust-flecked mirror, its gory detritus of paint cans and pigment. There's an incredible power to this place and the creativity it commemorates. The images on these pages are part of its pungent archive of a life lived in the magic space between mind and bodily act - the life of a painter.
Francis Bacon didn't always tell the truth about his painting life. He said he worked entirely by "chance" and "accident", yet the secrets of his studio revealed since his death include plans for paintings, rough sketches, and precise sources for images - such as the photograph of a plucked and trussed chicken from the Conran cookbook that he directly copied on to a canvas. Evidently his work was more thought-out and intellectual than he liked to make it look. The survey of his paintings about to open at Tate Britain will stress this. Further evidence is provided in Bacon's Incunabula, a fascinating publication of the research materials from his studio that's the source of the pictures here. Its author, Martin Harrison, says Bacon's hoarded photographs of everything from physical deformities to the faces of close friends, reproductions of Old Master paintings and pages from magazines on cookery, golf and soccer "appear to be essential to a proper understanding of his aims and methods". Most of all, though, and in an intensely moving way, these photographic fragments are part of Bacon himself, marked by his brush, recycled through his enigmatic imagination. With their beaten up, torn, stained scrappiness, you might almost imagine them as digested and - to be Baconian about it - regurgitated or defecated by him. Anyway, to me they seem organic. Alive.
Take that portrait of Velázquez. It is a souvenir of love. Bacon idolised this 17th-century portraitist of the Spanish court. How is it, he eloquently wondered, that an artist can so accurately illustrate the faces of real people and "at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest things that man can think and feel?" He collected books about Velázquez for their reproductions and in talking about his favourite, a portrait of Pope Innocent X, explained how "it haunts me, and opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even, in me". That says a lot about the process of creativity these fragments reveal. Bacon looked at photographs and reproductions to unlock his imagination - a thoughtful process but in no sense rational. Some artists use drugs or drink to disinhibit themselves. Bacon was a legendary drinker but claimed he rarely used drink creatively: looking at these pictures, I believe him. He got drunk instead on visual stimuli - gorged on images. This is the aftermath of a visual orgy.
A black and white photograph of a crowd being fired on in St Petersburg in 1917, colour close-ups of skin diseases from a medical textbook, serial photographs of animal and human motion by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, art book reproductions of ancient Greek and Egyptian sculpture and Michelangelo drawings next to photos of wrestlers and boxers, street battles and Nazi rallies; physical instruction manuals on such matters as how to sit in an armchair and how to hold a golf club; this is the strange montage of noble and grotesque visual ephemera that filled Bacon's studio and his mind. It is up to academic art historians to fret over the exact correlations between particular photographs and paintings. What's surely beyond dispute is the overall match between the photographic museum nested in chaotic piles and boxes in Bacon's studio and the uniquely uncomfortable world of his paintings. In meditating continually on this strange mix of images he generated his own painted reality - at once grandiose, kitsch, horrible, magnificent and modern, a painterly mirror of the 20th century whose archetypal relic, the photograph, was his primary research tool.
In the end, the reason we look at these tattered and crumpled and marked images, the reason his studio is preserved as a holy - or unholy - sanctum in Dublin, the reason his Tate Britain retrospective will stun its beholders, is that Francis Bacon was a genius whose paintings are as shocking, sensational, disturbing and rewarding now as in his lifetime - and will remain so for as long as human beings look to art for "the greatest things that man can think and feel". Bacon is a titan, a giant of painting. Look at these images long enough and a strange frenzied reality - violent, sexual, godless - flickers in your mind's eye. It is Bacon's reality. Look at his paintings and that reality forces itself into the very pores of your skin. Oil paint is so subtle, he insisted - it creates effects impossible in any other art. Bacon's paintings include achievements that rival and revive for modern eyes those of the Old Masters he so admired. I'm not sure if any painter, ever, created blacker shadows - just look, if you visit the Tate show, at the shadows that seem to creep into his impossible rooms as if from hell itself. Look at his bodies, how they tie themselves in knots, get sucked into a fourth dimension, crouch and crawl and fuck: they are Michelangelo's Ignudi put through a meat grinder and they make you, painfully and scarily, aware of your own body, its needs, powers, and inevitable fate.
Bacon is an atheist with a sense of Hell whose paintings have the scale of imagination of the Sistine Chapel. To look through his photo-hoard is to travel, stumbling, behind a mind on fire. Bacon's sense of the body strikes people who look at his art, first of all, as cruel and vicious. He painted his best friends as if they were maimed first world war soldiers, their faces shattered and deformed into slabs of ill-sutured flesh with eyes scarily alive inside the horror mask. His bodies, grappling and broken, can seem merely ugly. I didn't fully grasp their beautiful dimension until I looked at some of his paintings after seeing the many images of the classical and Renaissance nude in his photograph collection - in reality, even his most disfigured bodies still have nobility. They are heroic. Velázquez and Rembrandt, those philosophers of the portrait he so worshipped, portray the very loneliness, pain, and brevity of human life as a heroic fact that makes the least of our actions, the most banal of existences, courageous. Bacon was brave.
By 1949 Francis Bacon found his main subject, the human body, and from then on it remained his principal theme. But he did not paint from life. Instead, he took from images from the mass media and drew on them for his paintings. A previously unpublished selection of Francis Bacon's source material (photographs, books, magazine and newspaper clippings) offering insight into Bacon's method. This book presents 180 of these documents, about which Bacon was secretive but which, it emerges, were integral to creative process, along with some of the works that the material inspired. Culled from thousands of pieces of original material found in his studio, these items have each been researched to provide for the first time comprehensive details of the artist's sources. Previously unseen, these visually thrilling documents demonstrate Bacon's tactile, visceral relationship with his sources and his unerring eye for seeking out visual stimulation in the most unexpected places.
By Incunabula are meant the circa 180 full page illustrations of various objects that were found in Bacon's Reece Mews Studio formerly located in London and consequently moved to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. There is no Index, but the objects are divided into the following categories:
1. Art - Photography, mostly photos ripped out of Muybridge's book, The Human figure in Motion, books on sculpture, and erotic magazines.
2. Conflict - Mass Media, mostly images torn from newspapers and magazines, many of which depict violence or the aftermath of violence, such as dead bodies, effects from injuries, etc.
3. Action - Painting, more images from Muybridge, but also photos from art and sports magazines.
4. Science - Nature, images torn from K.C. Clark's book Positioning in Radiography, Schrenk-Notzing's Phenomena of Materialization, more Muybridge, and also images from cookbooks, etc.
5. Art - Photography, images torn from art books and catalogs, including Bacon's own work.
A mind on fire. Francis Bacon always said he worked entirely by chance. Images found in his studio - from plucked chickens to close-ups of skin diseases - show that this was far from the case, revealing a process of careful creativity at work.
"Even though it is claimed that many of the images have not been published before, I have seen more than three fourths in other books on Francis Bacon. I really do not know what purpose this book can serve, other than the fact that the objects are shown in a larger size than before with one image per page. As a collector of book on Francis Bacon I continue to be amazed how many recent books concentrate on his Studio instead of his art. The objects in the studio are supposed to be the "key" to Bacon's paintings, but I would argue they are in most cases only an inspiration. [...] The authors fail to make a case of how the majority of the images in this book are related to Bacon's paintings, which one would think is the whole point of the exercise." -Walter O. Koenig
___
Jonathan Jones, "A Mind on Fire," The Guardian, 6.9.2008
The painter looks back at you from behind his easel, a palette resting on his left arm, a long thin brush in his right hand, the ends of his moustache curling upward, the cross of Santiago on his chest. This is the self-portrait of the Spanish master Diego Velázquez, on a page of an old art book smeared with a cloud of pink paint, fleshy and warm, as if a human body had burst in the air above it - the aftermath of a conversation between two great artists across the centuries.
It was found among the forest of paintbrushes, dollops of pointillist graffiti and enigmatically suspended bare lightbulbs in the studio of the artist Francis Bacon, a tiny space in a mews near South Kensington tube station where he worked virtually every day from the early 60s until his death in 1992. Today the studio is preserved in its entirety at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. You enter a chilly refrigerated room and peer through narrow windows into the terrifyingly claustrophobic interior of the studio, that has in its own right taken on the intense living presence of a work of art. Bacon joked that the daubs of paint he splashed on its walls were his only abstract works; now the studio has become his only installation. It is fearsome with its rust-flecked mirror, its gory detritus of paint cans and pigment. There's an incredible power to this place and the creativity it commemorates. The images on these pages are part of its pungent archive of a life lived in the magic space between mind and bodily act - the life of a painter.
Francis Bacon didn't always tell the truth about his painting life. He said he worked entirely by "chance" and "accident", yet the secrets of his studio revealed since his death include plans for paintings, rough sketches, and precise sources for images - such as the photograph of a plucked and trussed chicken from the Conran cookbook that he directly copied on to a canvas. Evidently his work was more thought-out and intellectual than he liked to make it look. The survey of his paintings about to open at Tate Britain will stress this. Further evidence is provided in Bacon's Incunabula, a fascinating publication of the research materials from his studio that's the source of the pictures here. Its author, Martin Harrison, says Bacon's hoarded photographs of everything from physical deformities to the faces of close friends, reproductions of Old Master paintings and pages from magazines on cookery, golf and soccer "appear to be essential to a proper understanding of his aims and methods". Most of all, though, and in an intensely moving way, these photographic fragments are part of Bacon himself, marked by his brush, recycled through his enigmatic imagination. With their beaten up, torn, stained scrappiness, you might almost imagine them as digested and - to be Baconian about it - regurgitated or defecated by him. Anyway, to me they seem organic. Alive.
 |
| Work document: "Poultry" A poultry page from a 1980 Conran cookbook The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin |
 |
| Francis Bacon Triptych 1981-82, left-hand panel Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 147.3 cm Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York |
Take that portrait of Velázquez. It is a souvenir of love. Bacon idolised this 17th-century portraitist of the Spanish court. How is it, he eloquently wondered, that an artist can so accurately illustrate the faces of real people and "at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest things that man can think and feel?" He collected books about Velázquez for their reproductions and in talking about his favourite, a portrait of Pope Innocent X, explained how "it haunts me, and opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even, in me". That says a lot about the process of creativity these fragments reveal. Bacon looked at photographs and reproductions to unlock his imagination - a thoughtful process but in no sense rational. Some artists use drugs or drink to disinhibit themselves. Bacon was a legendary drinker but claimed he rarely used drink creatively: looking at these pictures, I believe him. He got drunk instead on visual stimuli - gorged on images. This is the aftermath of a visual orgy.
 |
| Work document: A reproduction of Velázquez'sPortrait of Innocent X (1650) |
A black and white photograph of a crowd being fired on in St Petersburg in 1917, colour close-ups of skin diseases from a medical textbook, serial photographs of animal and human motion by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, art book reproductions of ancient Greek and Egyptian sculpture and Michelangelo drawings next to photos of wrestlers and boxers, street battles and Nazi rallies; physical instruction manuals on such matters as how to sit in an armchair and how to hold a golf club; this is the strange montage of noble and grotesque visual ephemera that filled Bacon's studio and his mind. It is up to academic art historians to fret over the exact correlations between particular photographs and paintings. What's surely beyond dispute is the overall match between the photographic museum nested in chaotic piles and boxes in Bacon's studio and the uniquely uncomfortable world of his paintings. In meditating continually on this strange mix of images he generated his own painted reality - at once grandiose, kitsch, horrible, magnificent and modern, a painterly mirror of the 20th century whose archetypal relic, the photograph, was his primary research tool.
In the end, the reason we look at these tattered and crumpled and marked images, the reason his studio is preserved as a holy - or unholy - sanctum in Dublin, the reason his Tate Britain retrospective will stun its beholders, is that Francis Bacon was a genius whose paintings are as shocking, sensational, disturbing and rewarding now as in his lifetime - and will remain so for as long as human beings look to art for "the greatest things that man can think and feel". Bacon is a titan, a giant of painting. Look at these images long enough and a strange frenzied reality - violent, sexual, godless - flickers in your mind's eye. It is Bacon's reality. Look at his paintings and that reality forces itself into the very pores of your skin. Oil paint is so subtle, he insisted - it creates effects impossible in any other art. Bacon's paintings include achievements that rival and revive for modern eyes those of the Old Masters he so admired. I'm not sure if any painter, ever, created blacker shadows - just look, if you visit the Tate show, at the shadows that seem to creep into his impossible rooms as if from hell itself. Look at his bodies, how they tie themselves in knots, get sucked into a fourth dimension, crouch and crawl and fuck: they are Michelangelo's Ignudi put through a meat grinder and they make you, painfully and scarily, aware of your own body, its needs, powers, and inevitable fate.
Bacon is an atheist with a sense of Hell whose paintings have the scale of imagination of the Sistine Chapel. To look through his photo-hoard is to travel, stumbling, behind a mind on fire. Bacon's sense of the body strikes people who look at his art, first of all, as cruel and vicious. He painted his best friends as if they were maimed first world war soldiers, their faces shattered and deformed into slabs of ill-sutured flesh with eyes scarily alive inside the horror mask. His bodies, grappling and broken, can seem merely ugly. I didn't fully grasp their beautiful dimension until I looked at some of his paintings after seeing the many images of the classical and Renaissance nude in his photograph collection - in reality, even his most disfigured bodies still have nobility. They are heroic. Velázquez and Rembrandt, those philosophers of the portrait he so worshipped, portray the very loneliness, pain, and brevity of human life as a heroic fact that makes the least of our actions, the most banal of existences, courageous. Bacon was brave.
 |
| Francis Bacon Sphinx: Portrait of Muriel Belcher 1979 Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 147.3 cm The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo |
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| Work document found in Bacon's studio Muriel Belcher at the Soho Drinking Club, London photograph detail The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin |
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| Work document. "An Eloquent Tribute" A review of dancer Marcia Haydée from 1978 The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin |
A lost group by Michelangelo
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| Work document found in Bacon's studio A reproduction of Michelangelo's Samson slaying the Two Philistines (1540; Museo del Bargello, Florence). The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin |
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| Bronze sculpture after Michelangelo's (lost group) Samson slaying the Two Philistines, c. 1540 Museo del Bargello, Florence |
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| Black chalk sketch after Michelangelo's (lost sculptural group) Samson slaying the Two Philistines, c. 1540 The Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
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