Enthusiastic Despair

Double Silence | Silencio Doble

2011-08-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

There are some qualities —some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence —sea and shore
—Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!

Edgar Allan Poe, "Silence," sonnet, 1839

Francis Bacon
Two Figures | Dos Figuras
1961

Hay algunas cualidades, algunas cosas incorpóreas,
Que tienen doble vida, que muestran
Una especie de doble entidad que emana,
De materia y luz; sólido y sombra.
Hay un Silencio doble— mar y costa—
—Cuerpo y alma. Habita en lugares desolados,
Reciente la hierba sobre ellos; algunas gracias solemnes,
Ciertos recuerdos humanos y llorosa erudición,
Quítale el terror: su nombre es "No Más”
Él es el corporativo Silencio: ¡no le temas!
No tiene el poder del mal en sí
Pero de llevarte alguna veloz suerte (¡inoportuno lote!)
Al presentarte su sombra (anónimo duende,
Que se hizo sentir en solitarias regiones donde no anduvo
Hombre ninguno), ¡encomiéndate a Dios!

Edgar Allan Poe, "Silencio," poema, 1839
Traducción libre de Mariano Akerman

Zissou on Bacon

2011-08-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

"As I flicked through the big book of Bacon’s works I felt a spark of something I had never felt before – a style I had never seen, a sense of mystery, of subversion, even menace – and yet the forms and flow of the lines felt so elegant and natural to me. It felt as if Bacon discovered a way to visually expose, even for just a fleeting moment, the inner soul of the sitter, it felt honest.
His works, particularly in the middle years of his career, have always managed to draw me in. I am regularly seeing them in different ways. The same painting can often drum up a completely different emotion each time I view it. I spot another technique or another form. They have made me think about art and life probably more than any other works that I have encountered." - Zissou

These words reflect with admirable precision what Francis Bacon's art keeps on producing in myself too. Thank you Zissou for such significant words. - M.A.

By the way, Zissou's work is fascinating.

Notas sobre Francis Bacon en Español

2011-08-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

El poder de la palabra es un sitio serio dedicado a la cultura -literatura, arte, música, arquitectura, cine- y por ello altamente apreciado. Acerca de Francis Bacon: "Pintor británico de origen irlandés, cuyo personalísimo estilo expresionista, basado en un simbolismo de terror y rabia, le ha convertido en uno de los artistas más originales del siglo XX. Nació en Dublín, de padres ingleses, el 28 de octubre de 1909 y llegó a Londres a finales de la década de 1920. Entre 1927-1928 pasó algún tiempo en París y Berlín, donde hizo trabajos de decoración y comenzó a realizar dibujos y acuarelas, tras la impresión que le produjo una exposición de Pablo Picasso. En 1929 volvió a Londres y se inició como autodidacto en la pintura al óleo. En 1944 ante el escaso éxito de sus obras destruyó casi todas las pinturas que había hecho hasta entonces. El Tríptico Tres estudios de figuras junto a una crucifixión (1944) marcó el reinicio de su carrera sobre unas bases totalmente nuevas. En 1948 el Museo de Arte Moderno (MOMA) de Nueva York compró una obra suya y en 1949, año de su primera pintura inspirada en el cuadro de Velázquez, Inocencio X, comenzaron una serie de exposiciones individuales. Una buena parte de su obra está constituida por autorretratos y retratos de amigos suyos como el Retrato de George Dyer en un espejo (1968, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Fiel a la idea de que el arte más grande te devuelve siempre a la vulnerabilidad de la situación humana, su obra es una constante reflexión sobre la fragilidad del ser. En cuadros como Cabeza rodeada de carne de vaca (Estudio después de Velázquez) (1954, Art Institute of Chicago) y en una serie pintada en 1952 sobre perros que gruñen, Bacon intentó impactar al espectador al hacerle tomar conciencia de la crueldad y violencia" (ME).

Francis Bacon, Tres estudios para una crucifixión, 1962
Panel central, óleo sobre lienzo, 198.1 x 144.8 cm
Museo Guggenheim, Nueva York

Baconiana 1

2011-07-31T23:29:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon, Figure Study, c. 1990-1
Oil on canvas
Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2005 (artshooter)

"You can't be more horrific than life itself." Francis Bacon

Self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in British painting. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of the 20th century. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art. His artwork is well-known for its bold and austere, often grotesque imagery.
In his work, Bacon explores his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and '50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, loneliness and couplings, mortality.
In the 1960s, working in his style much looser and colorful, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated. In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to suggest ideas about sensation and violence
Central to an understanding of the artist's working methods his archival materials, which have only become available since Bacon's death (especially the contents of the artist's famously cluttered London studio). These include 65 items from the studio, his estate, and other archives, pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for his paintings.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion "seems derived from Picasso's Crucifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sence of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [to me] symbols of outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays" (Raymond Mortimer, New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1945).

Study for a Portrait, Man Screaming, 1952. Christie's catalog: "On great occasions human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth, anger makes one clench one's teeth, terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth the organ of tearing cries." (Georges Bataille, reproduced in Documents, no. 5, Paris 1930, pp. 299-300).
Bacon often claimed that his paintings, which to many seemed macabre distortions of reality, were purely the result of his "trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can". Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) clearly illustrates that Bacon was evidently a more sensitive and responsive to the raw end of his 'nervous system' than most. In a remarkable piece of understatement, Bacon once explained that Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) was part of a series, "done of somebody who was always in a state of unease," and that, "in attempting to trap this image, as this man was very neurotic and almost hysterical, this may possibly have come across in the paintings."(Francis Bacon, reproduced in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 82).
"I've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can,' Bacon told David Sylvester, "and perhaps, if a thing comes across directly people feel that that is horrific. Because, if you say something very directly to somebody, they're sometimes offended, although it is a fact. Because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth." (ibid. p. 82).
The present work is one of the most powerful examples from an important series of portrait heads that Bacon painted in the early 1950s. A dramatic and intense depiction of a tormented and almost bestial man screaming into the face of the viewer, it is a remarkable painting that conjures a unique vision of a man at his most primal and, Bacon would probably have argued, at his most real.
With its paint smeared, scrawled, smudged and pasted into a striking and surprising unity, this work is also a haunting expression of the 'heart of darkness' that lay at the centre of Bacon's own psyche. For as well as being an evocative and powerful portrait, Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) also coordinates many of the artist's key obsessions into one concentrated image.
Chief among these obsessions is the image of an almost autonomous screaming mouth, which here forms an eerie kind of vortex at the centre of the painting. For Bacon, the screaming mouth was an image of peculiar and disturbingly sensual beauty. "I've always been very moved by the movements of the mouth," he recalled. "People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth, and perhaps I have lost that obsession now, but it was very strong at one time. I like, you may say, the glitter and the colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." (ibid. pp. 48-50).
As a young man he had been mesmerized by a book on diseases of the mouth in which there were a number of detailed hand-coloured illustrations. These obsessed him for many years. Similarly, he also became fixated on the mouth of the screaming nurse shot through the face in Sergei Eisenstein's epic film Battleship Potemkin. This particular image was, for Bacon, the ultimate expression of the human scream and one that in the early 1950s, along with Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, he directly sought to emulate by using as source for his own work.
Begun in 1951, his famous series of screaming Popes were an attempt at combining these two obsessions into one united and 'true' expression of humanity. In Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming), the figure of a Pope has been transplanted by that of a suited businessman. For Bacon, the two figures were interchangeable; each an impressive symbol of authority, power and worldly distinction who in Bacon's hands was brutally reduced to a raw and base animality. At the heart of all these works is the scream, which in the present work is evoked so powerfully that it seems almost audible. With the shimmering grey veil of the painting's curtain-like background acting as a visual echo, the piercing resonance of this man's silent scream seems to vibrate everything around it, save the cold, impersonal and solid metal armature of his papal-like throne.
The radiating flicker of this grey vibrating enclosure creates a sense of transience and motion reminiscent of ghosting effects found in photographs and X-rays - both of which were another obsession and important source in Bacon's art. Photography, had a shadow-like quality that for Bacon, often revealed the essence of an image - a trace of the subject's 'aliveness' that struck at the true reality of his sitter far more closely than any outward feature. "I think it is (photography's) slight remove from fact which returns me onto the fact more violently", Bacon once observed.
Working indirectly from photographs of his subjects, rather than from directly within their presence was normal practice for Bacon. His aim in portraiture was to capture the enigma of the raw and violent essence that he saw resonating at the heart of his subjects. "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them like a snail," he told David Sylvester, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime... When I look at you across the table I don't only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. 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 screens." (op. cit, p. 82).
The ambiguous curtain-like enclosure which seems to flicker and resonate from the scream of the tormented man in Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) is like a literal realisation of the screens that Bacon mentions "clearing away". Yet in this work, as in many of his portraits of screaming Popes, these transparent screens which may originate with Titian's Portrait of Archbishop Filippo Archinto seem to enclose and imprison the figure at the very same time that they reveal him in his true state of being. Like hospital curtains from some Orwellian isolation chamber they are the sterile and impersonal apparatus of a terrifying mental landscape of fear and anguish.
Using thick strokes of black paint that pass both in front of and behind the figure whose features also seem blurred by the shimmering motion of this veil-like curtain, Bacon stresses the spatial ambiguity of the scene and adds to the psychological power of the painting. For, while the tormented animation and quivering flesh of the man are deliberately contrasted with the inanimate stillness and cold impersonal emptiness of his surroundings, as a whole, the surface of the painting seems to have been activated by the scream into a corrugated wave that threatens to penetrate even the viewer's space.
Huddled and shaken on his golden throne, seemingly trapped within the painting and sealed off from all possibility of communication, this authoritarian figure crouches in a dark alienatory space emitting a terrifyingly primal scream. In one of his most unforgettable images Bacon captures a full range of human emotions that combine a sense of anger, fear, violence, and erotic intensity into a single haunting portrayal of a human scream which through the magic of Bacon's artistry seems to have actually burned itself onto the canvas to reveal the tormented essence of one human life.

Although Francis Bacon is best known for his alienated and often hideously distorted human figures, animals are the subject of at least a dozen of his canvases. He rarely worked from nature, preferring photographs, and for images of animals he often consulted Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion, Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, and pictures from zoological parks. Intrigued by the disconcerting affinities between simians and human beings, he first compared them in 1949 in Head IV (Man with a Monkey), in which a man’s averted face is concealed by that of the monkey he holds.
Like his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are shown in formal portraits or candid snapshots in which they are passive, shrieking, or twisted in physical contortions. The chimpanzee in the Peggy Guggenheim work is depicted with relative benevolence, though the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, makes it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the fifties by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enabled Bacon to "see" the subject better, while the monochrome background provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define form (Lucy Flint, Guggenheim Museum).

In Figure with Monkey from 1951, a man and monkey are separated by a fence painted from a blur of diagonal hatching marks in brilliant purples and deep blues. The man reaches up for the animal, and the hand and mouth meet in a confusing few swaths of fleshy colored paint. Is this gentle touching or biting? And, for that matter, who is caged, man or monkey? (Mary Louise Schumacher, "Screaming in Paint: Exhibit Plumbs Depths of Bacon's Unsettling Works," Journal Sentinel, 2007).

There's a picture of a screaming chimpanzee -a simian form with bared mouth- that goes to the core of Bacon's work. If you then look at Head 1 from 1948 and Head 2 from 1949, say, both are half-animal, half human, as if morphing between forms. There was no difference to Bacon. He knew humans were animals: primal and confrontational. You see it also in his figures of screaming popes. He always saw the animal in man, even in in the supreme pontiff. There's that ambiguity with Bacon: you don't know if you're witnessing a scream of pain, anger or release. I think probably that's why Bacon was such a great artist (Michael Peppiatt, "Great British Bacon," Radio Times, 19-25 March 2005).

"The question Deleuze poses to an artwork is not What does it mean? but rather How does it function? Deleuze [...] attempts to isolate and identify the components of [a Bacon painting ... and he thus] frequently returns to [...] three simplest aspects—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a "highly precise system" that serves [Bacon] to isolate the Figure" (Daniel Smith).

What Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility, or undecideability between man and animal. [...] It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal. Bacon pushes this to the point where even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure, man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, 1981).

Triptych Studies of the Human Body, 1979. Sotheby's auction catalog, 2001: "[This work] sees the confluence of two of Bacon's greatest inspirations, Eadweard Muybridge and Michelangelo in one of his most beautiful and erotically charged compositions. Through its slight ambiguity of content, this work teems with sexual energy and tension, born of Bacon's deep instinctual understanding of the painterly language which he so uniquely manipulated. [...] Against this calm and spare background, the players fidget and buzz with energy. [...] Bacon frames his figures as if in a spectable: we are watching them and they seem to know it. They are cognizant of our attention, the left-hand figure turns away to bare the gash on his back whilst the right-hand figure turns toward us to flex his biceps. The triptych format seems to hint at a narative between the panels, but that narrative remains ambiguous. [...] Here the nature of the human form, which has been mediated through a number of representative media is adapted through Bacon's mind and hand to be at once amorphous, yet totally real. Through moments of magic, Bacon coagulates color and form to achieve a heightened sense of figurative reality, which leaves the viewer thrilling to the sensations of his subjects. This is nowhere more dramatic than in the present composition."

Forerunner of Post-modernity. Post-Modernism doesn't reject Modernism and can be seen to be in critical dialogue with it (reassessing Modernist ideas). Modernism sought to create something entirely new, breaking from traditions and moving towards abstraction. The idea of "art for art's sake" become prominent.
Post-Modernism first gained use in the art world around the 1980s, when an economic boom allowed graet investments in art. Art had become big business and big money. Movements such as Minimalism and Conceptualism had pushed artists to the limit, the aesthetics were extremely simplified and ideas were the focus. The exploration into the nature of art during Modernism was developed in such a way that when Post-Modernism came about artists felt the exploration of the new was exhausted and started to look back at pre-Modern art traditions.
Post-Modernism allowed art to refer to past traditions and concepts, rather than having to create something entirely new and original (S&A).
Bacon was in a sense a pionner of Post-Modernity. Yet, paradoxically, his approach and modus operandi lead him to created something that is new and original too.

Bacon Affinities Gallery

Scattergood-Moore, Bending Figure after Muybridge, 1966. Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Boston

Co Westerik, Schoolmaster and Child (Schoolmeester met kind), Holland, 1961. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88,5 x 110 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Timothy Jacob Fuller, The Yellow Bull. Los Angeles, United States

Mariano Akerman, Three Figures before the Window, mixed media, 1989

Yue Minjun, You're So Bacon, 2001

Alberto Petrò, Bacon's Eggs, 2008. Silver gelatin print, 60 x 50 cm.

Matt Thomases, Francis Bacon, bronze, 2008

Alex Wolff, Reinterpretation of Francis Bacon's Study from the Human Body 1949, collage, 2010

Tim Hancock, Fury 1, 2011. Oil on canvas, 58 x 84cm.

Georges Bataille: The Mouth

2011-07-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighbouring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like the beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. In a strict sense, he starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of attracting attention and it is the eyes or the forehead the play the significatory role of an animal’s jaws.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1953
oil and sand on canvas, 88 x 77 cm
Tate Gallery, London

Man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Among civilized men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state: it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire, applied to the cannons men employ to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: fury makes men grind their teeth, terror and atrocious suffering transform the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that 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 in normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact simultaneously highlights the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses: equally one sees that a man is able to liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial method of liberation. Whence the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.

Georges Bataille, "La Bouche," Critical Dictionary, as published in the journal Documents, c. 1930

To consult
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Bacon by Akerman: Best of Google Knol

2011-07-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Grotesque in Francis Bacon's Instinctive Paintings is a Knol by Mariano Akerman and has been chosen as "The Best of Google Knol" by the Knol Publishing Guild on June 28, 2011 at 10:48 PM

The KPG includes Spiros Kakos, Gust Mees, Garry Jenkins, Peter Baskerville, Norman Creaney, Jag Nambiar, Krishan Maggon, and Murry Shohat.

Source: The Best of Google Knol, Scoop.it, 6.7.2011, p. 1

Love is the Devil

2011-06-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

Derek Jacobi as Bacon

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig.

A biography of Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon (Jacobi), it concentrates on his strained relationship with George Dyer (Craig), a small time thief. The film draws heavily on the biography of Bacon, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson.

The year is 1971 and controversial British artist Francis Bacon is welcomed as the "greatest living painter" by officials and the press at the Grand Palais in Paris. As the ceremony takes place, George Dyer (Daniel Craig), Bacon’s model and lover of seven years, takes a cocktail of pills and alcohol in their hotel room. Slumping into blackness, Dyer recalls the fateful day in 1964 when he attempts to burgle Bacon’s house, but meets Bacon instead. From then on his life takes on an entirely different course. A powerful and dangerous relationship develops between the flamboyant artist and the man who becomes his lover and the model for some of his most intense and celebrated paintings. SBS

Daniel Craig as Dyer

The powerfully complex relationship between the flamboyant artist and the man who became his lover and muse (for some of his most intense and celebrated paintings), explores the territory where art, love and sex dangerously collide. Cannes Festival 1998

Maybury’s biopic tells the story of the troubled relationship between painter Francis Bacon and his East End lover George Dyer. An impressive and disturbing look at the internal life of an artist. Indie

This British biographical drama probes the life of painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), critically acclaimed as the outstanding British painter of the latter half of the 20th Century. This unsympathetic portrait of Bacon begins when George Dyer, a small-time criminal from working-class East End environs, drops through a skylight to rob Bacon's studio--and is ordered into bed by Bacon. The two become a familiar couple at Bacon's hangout, the Colony Room in Soho. Bacon's sexual interests lean toward S&M, but as the cruel Bacon loses interest in Dyer and begins to look elsewhere, the couple splits. Left to his own devices, Dyer turns to drugs and alcohol--and a tragic suicide. Visual grotesqueries and a trancelike Ryuichi Sakamoto music score capture the essence of Bacon's work (although paintings by Bacon are not seen onscreen here). The film is told in the form of a flashback from Bacon's successful 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris to a period in the mid-'60s. Bacon biographer Daniel Farson (The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon) served as consultant on the film. Bhob Stewart

A short but suitably warped account of the love affair between the painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and a small-time criminal named George Dyer, who was to model for some of Bacon's most convulsive works. The action, for what it's worth, starts in 1963 and ends in 1971, but the director, John Maybury, is only fitfully tempted by the demands of plot. He prefers to function in impressionistic bursts; we get a series of flickering, semi-linked scenes in which Bacon gambles, brushes his teeth with bleach, drinks with his appalling cronies, braces himself for masochistic sex, and even occasionally begins to paint-although, since the film was forbidden to show any authentic Bacons, he never gets very far. What rescues the enterprise from indulgence is, first, the audacity of Jacobi's performance, with its blend of caution and abandonment, and then Maybury's honorable attempt not so much to mimic the blurting violence of Bacon's imagery as to suggest the ways in which it was triggered by ordinary life. Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Photographs and clippings recalling those Bacon once kept in his South Kensington atelier.

"Francis_Bacon_Inspiration_Sources_Muybury_Reconstruction" by Mariano Akerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A thief breaks through a skylight and lands in the middle of an artist's studio. His flashlight shows paints and brushes and canvas, and scattered thick on the floor pictures and newspaper photographs of carnage, accidents, executions. Peering at him from a slightly open door is the artist. "Not much of a burglar, are you?" the artist says. "Take your clothes off. Come to bed. Then you can have whatever you want."
The artist is Francis Bacon, one of the great painters of the Twentieth Century. The burglar is a working class, not-too-bright man 30 years younger than Bacon named George Dyer. Love Is the Devil tells of Bacon's relationship with Dyer from 1964 until Dyer commits suicide in 1971.
People probably react to this movie much the same way they react to Bacon's paintings and his life. Fascinated or repelled. Or both. Bacon's view of life is certainly there for all to see. He was an aggressive masochist where pleasure is pain and degradation is arousal. On the way to a boxing match with George, he says that "boxing is such an aperitif for sex. Like bull fighting, it unlocks the bowels of feeling." Bacon's circle of friends are brittle, obnoxious, clever queens, whether or not they are gay. They may accept George as Francis' plaything but not as a serious lover. Bacon is aroused and energized by the perversity of life. "We all have nightmares," he says to George unsympathetically one night. "They can't be as horrific as real life." His paintings are usually grotesque manipulations of the human body, where the body can look like an opened side of beef and a face can look like its been turned inside out. One critic called him the morbid poet of the world of evil. That seems to me to be superficial and ignorant. A person may not like Bacon's work, but his stuff is powerful and fascinating. C.O. DeRiemer

John Maybury provides viewers with a creative portrayal of the English painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was fascinated with violence both in his paintings and in his personal life. This is evident from the very first scene in which Bacon confronts George Dyer, the inept burglar who has fallen into his studio. Jacobi's chilling, yet mesmerizing, portrayal of Bacon is seen as Maybury closes in on Jacobi's face as he deliciously anticipates being bedded and dominated by this strange young man. And while the film's frank portrayal of lust and sexual dominance is clearly evident it also explores the life of a man who consciously chose the dark side of life. The performances of both Jacobi and Daniel Craig, as Dyer, are outstanding as is the inventive camera work of Maybury, who mimics the surreal images of Bacon's paintings. Jacobi's performance and voice-over narration help to illuminate this disturbing and fascinating man. Disturbing because he revelled in the violence and pain that most of us abhor and fascinating because Bacon was so unabashedly honest in his approach to life and his work. Brenda Griffey

One character in this film describes Francis Bacon's art as "portraitures of pain," also an apt description of this movie [...]. John Maybury, the director, obviously wants the viewer to be reminded of Bacon's paintings since there are many distorted and fragmented shots. Additionally, many of the artist's friends from the bar have very unsymetrical faces. Bacon makes himself up in front of three mirrors. There are several shots where the characters are so close to the camera so as to give a fish-eye effect. There is also a scene where victims of an auto accident are lying in positions similar to those of figures from Bacon's art. For the most part these "portraits of pain" work. H.F. Corbin

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, 30 years Bacon's junior, accepts. Bacon finds Dyer's amorality and innocence attractive, introducing him to his Soho pals. In their sex life, Dyer dominates, Bacon is the masochist. Dyer's bouts with depression, his drinking and pill popping, and his satanic nightmares strain the relationship, as does his pain with Bacon's casual infidelities. Bacon paints, talks with wit, and, as Dyer spins out of control, begins to find him tiresome. J. Hailey

Maybury's Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists. His bleak, disturbing paintings display an intimate relationship with the darker side of life – a constant probing of the horrors of existence that most men and women shy away from. Bacon's brilliance lies in his ability to unflinchingly depict the most grotesque aspects of the human experience. In attempting to bring a segment of Bacon's life to the screen, writer/director John Maybury has adopted a cold, distant tone that effectively captures the painter's world-view while keeping the audience at arm's length. (Curiously, none of Bacon's paintings appear during Love Is the Devil since the artist's estate refused permission for them to be used.) However, despite brilliant performances by both lead actors, Love Is the Devil is paradoxically both intriguing and uninvolving. It's what I like to call an interesting failure.
Love Is the Devil transpires in London during the late-1960s and early-1970s. It tells of the unlikely seven-year affair between Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and a lower-class burglar named George Dyer (Daniel Craig), and, in its best moments, echoes Stephen Frears' brilliant Prick Up Your Ears. The overall story – about how the homosexual relationship with Bacon destroys Dyer – is relatively static, but there are several interesting subtexts, such as the connection between art, obsession, and cruelty, and the ability of love to manifest itself in such a damaging form. Unfortunately, there's not a great deal of new material in Love Is the Devil. We've seen this kind of story – about the sordid life of a great artist – many times in the past, so much of this movie seems to be covering familiar ground.
The first image presented to us is of Bacon smelling the pillow where a lover slept. It is perhaps the most evocative moment of the film. Soon, the artist is surprising Dyer in the act of breaking into his studio. Instead of summoning the police, Bacon orders Dyer to undress and join him in bed, promising that he can take anything he wants later. Once in Bacon's life, Dyer never leaves. For a while, the painter treats his new lover with respect and affection, but, eventually, he begins to tire of him, and the less Bacon needs him, the more desperate Dyer becomes, resorting to suicide attempts. The end is perhaps inevitable.
One of the film's greatest detriments could easily have been one of its greatest assets, if director John Maybury had exercised a little restraint. His visual style is distinctive, but he doesn't know the meaning of the word subtlety, and a provocative approach turns into overkill. Maybury is fond of using odd camera angles, quick cuts, and distorted views of the characters to emphasize how skewed Bacon's world is. Good idea; bad execution. In the end, it seems like Maybury is more interested in advertising his uniqueness and versatility as a director than in making a stirring movie. He's showing off, and it hurts the film.
The thing that almost saves Love Is the Devil is Derek Jacobi's performance. Jacobi, the only actor capable of challenging Ian McKellan as the best Shakespearean thespian of this generation, is so good as Bacon that it's frightening. Jacobi is mesmerizing, and, when he's on screen, it's difficult to turn away. Daniel Craig is frequently lost in Jacobi's shadow, but never fully eclipsed. Craig does a credible job portraying Dyer as he traverses the uncertain emotional territory from a tough burglar to a weak-willed, clinging parasite. Tilda Swinton has a supporting role as the proprietress of a drinking club that Bacon frequents.
Love Is the Devil is constructed almost like an impressionist painting: it's comprised of numerous vignettes that, when pieced together and viewed from a distance, represent a larger image. However, what works well on a canvas doesn't necessarily translate to the screen, and this method occasionally makes the movie seem disjointed. Combined with Maybury's stylistic flourishes, it's enough to prevent the viewer from ever connecting with either Dyer or Bacon. We watch them from a detached perspective, observing their actions with curiosity, but never identifying with them or being drawn into their world. Although, considering Bacon's nihilistic perspective of life ("I'm optimistic about nothing," he says more than once, and he means it), perhaps that, like the movie as a whole, isn't all bad. James Berardinelli

Three Studies for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

This film will insinuate itself into the images under your closed eyelids. Meat, blood, cuts, scars, wounds, assassinations, executions, dismemberments, car accidents, beatings, and burnings will all rush together in an explosion of pain, longing, and unsatisfied hungers. Homosexual sado-masochism, not gay love. The absolute evil of pure genius. A paint brush slashes the spirit as a razor, the body. The tormented torments; the masochist punishes the sadist. Flesh is set aflame with a cigarette, not a kiss. Francis Bacon is the one true artist of the postwar era. He understood that humanity had irrevocably crossed the barrier between reason and madness. This film casts us into the abyss of the collective unconscious where we may swim or be burned to a crisp. Hold your eyelids open with sharp orange toothpicks and suck on the bloody images. Watch the film five times and then seek out Bacon's work, at least in books, if not in museums.

Visual imagery. Only missing are Bacon's pics of wild animals, vaudeville actors and reproductions of Velázquez's paintings and Muybridge's photos.
"Francis_Bacon_Inspiration_Sources_Muybury_Reconstruction" by Mariano Akerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Pope with Owls, 1958

2011-06-09T02:19:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon, Pope with Owls, 1958. Oil on canvas, 198 x 142 cm. Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

La série d'études de têtes de 1949, caractérisées par les bouches criantes laissant apparaître les dentiers articulés, est annonciatrice de la série, la plus connue des années cinquante, inspirée par le portrait du Pape Innocent X, peint par Vélasquez. Dans la version bruxelloise, réalisée à Tanger en 1958, le Pape est assis sur un trône dont le dossier supporte, aux extrémités, deux hiboux. En dépit de tout protocole, le souverain pontife, apparemment inquiet, regarde attentivement vers sa droite, dans la même direction que les hiboux ; il est plongé dans le noir absolu et comme isolé dans une cage de verre à la perspective curieusement déformée. Certaines interprétations veulent y voir une ressemblance avec Pie XII, dont le silence face à l'Holocauste fut une source de controverse après la guerre. Il faut sans doute y voir d'abord le plaisir de l'artiste à subvertir une représentation vénérée par un traitement violemment expressionniste.
La force des portraits papaux réside dans les contorsions expressives du visage, dénué de toute sérénité et de toute splendeur baroque. L'arrière-plan est réduit à une surface monochrome noire permettant de mettre en valeur un espace géométrique schématisé. L'artiste déforme le visage et les vêtements papaux par de sauvages et gestuels coups de pinceau. Ce sont surtout le visage et les mains qui sont transformés en une sorte de masse de chairs torturées. La monture des lunettes est tordue et cache un regard énigmatique et distant. Bacon va plus loin que Edward Munch, qui exprime avec "Le cri" l'agonie névrotique humaine. Avec cette traduction picturale de l'image humaine oppressante, Francis Bacon est le principal interprète de l'angoisse existentielle de l'après-guerre (Jacques Lust, Musée d'Art Moderne: Oeuvres choisies, Brussels: MRBAB, 2001, p. 208-209).

Realism in extremis

2011-06-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, oil on board, each panel 198.2 x 144.8 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Bacon, letter to Michel Leiris, November 20th, 1981: "For me, realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me."

The painter, photographed by Daniel Farson, London, c. 1965

Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1961. Oil and sand on canvas, 198.5 x 142 cm. Edward R. Broida Collection, Los Angeles

New Figuration. A very broad term for a general revival of figurative painting in the 1960s following a period when abstraction (particularly Abstract Expressionism) had been the dominant mode of avant-garde art in Europe and the USA. The term is said to have been first used by the French critic Michel Ragon, who in 1961 called the trend "Nouvelle Figuration" (Ian Chilvers, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, 2004).

Bacon, Paralytic Child on All Fours (after Muybridge), 1961. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague

Nouvelle Figuration. La Nouvelle Figuration est un mouvement artistique qui fait la transition entre l’abstraction et une figuration dite narrative. Dès 1958, la mise en place d’un régime présidentiel invite un certain nombre de peintres abstraits à traduire leur ressenti face à une actualité menaçante. Ils s’affranchissent de la neutralité du signe par le passage du signifiant au signifié.
Un esprit frondeur traite avec insolence les sujets les plus graves : les dangers du nucléaire, les effets de la psychanalyse sur l’aliénation, l’envoi d’un homme dans l’espace, l’accouchement sans douleur, l’attentat entre factions rivales, la circulation automobile arrivée à saturation, etc. (WKP).

Bacon, Man With Glasses IV, 1963

Careful Planning

2011-05-18T04:33:00.001-07:00

Matilda Battersby, Beneath the Layers of Bacon, Independent, 24 March 2010

A new exhibition seeks to shed new light on Francis Bacon's working practises and expose the fallacy of the artist's own myth.

“I can dream all day long and ideas for paintings just fall into my mind like slides,” Francis Bacon once said. The self-promulgated idea that the Irish-born figurative artist’s wonderfully twisted and subversive imagery appeared fully formed in his mind, not demanding high levels of planning, drawing and experimentation, provides an interesting mythical basis for Bacon’s genius.

But a new exhibition of torn papers and photographs, manipulated film and other archival material harvested from Bacon’s studio, seeks to some way dispel this myth, by revealing the practise-runs, thought processes and scrawlings behind some of Bacon’s best work.

Co-curators Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison have placed the scavenged studio artefacts alongside well known Bacon oil paintings, including five works never shown before in the UK, to demonstrate the root of some of his ideas, exhibited at the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire from this Saturday.

“No one ever saw Bacon work. But our research reveals a very different man from the public persona, which demands we unlearn what we think we know about him,” Martin Harrison said.

The notion that Bacon was only a spontaneous creative whose work emerged effortlessly and straight into paint, is rendered “unsafe” by the exhibition, the researchers claim. Bacon’s “collusion” in such ideas has been well documented, as is his devotion to other artists who often bypassed the drawing process, such as Picasso and Chaim Soutine.

Bacon said of himself that he “never knew what to paint,” yet pages of lists from a notebook taken from his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington stand testament to his careful planning. As do the influences of other artists, particularly Velazquez, and even filmmakers like Buñuel and Resnais, according to the Harrisons.

“There’s a real risk that the myth of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded- is all we will hand on to future generations. Yet the paintings are still by far the most important thing – it is only by reaching into those that we will ask the right questions and do justice to Bacon’s real genius,” Martin Harrison said.

Francis Bacon: In Camera is at Compton Verney gallery from 27 March until 20 June 2010.

Francis Bacon: Decoration and Rugs, c.1929-30

2011-02-07T01:41:00.000-08:00

"The 1930 Look in British Decoration," Studio, Vol. 100, August 1930, pp. 140-41

Rug, c. 1929. Wool, 212 x 126 x 1.5 cm. Private collection

Rug, c. 1929. Hand knotted shirt runner, 224 x 91cm. Netherhampton Saleroom, Salisbury, Wiltshire

Rug, c. 1929. Wool, 213 x 125 x 1 cm. Private collection

Rug, c. 1929. Wool, 212 x 126 x 1.5 cm. Private collection

Roya Nikkhah, From Decorator to Painter: Francis Bacon's Interior Designs go on Show, Telegraph, 27.9.2009

Rare rugs and paintings which Francis Bacon completed when he was working as an interior designer are to go on display for the first time.
Hidden in private collections for decades, they escaped the artist's attempts to destroy his early artworks which he believed were inferior to his later masterpieces.
Experts claim the pieces give a vital insight into how his interior design work influenced his more famous works.
To mark the centenary of Bacon's birth on October 28, Francis Bacon: Early Work at Tate Britain will include three rugs and a painted screen dating from 1929 when the then 20-year-old Bacon was decorating homes in London.
On loan from a private collection, they will be shown alongside some of his earliest surviving paintings, including Composition 1933, which echoes patterns in his rug designs, and his 1944 breakthrough work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
From 1928 to 1930, Bacon worked in London, Paris and Berlin, designing entire interior schemes together with individual pieces of furniture. He began to incorporate some of his interiors work into his first paintings, such as Watercolour (1929), his earliest surviving painting which appears to have evolved from his carpet designs.
Aged 19, his studio in South Kensington was featured in an interiors magazine in a piece entitled "The 1930 Look in British Decoration".
His clients included the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, who later became his mentor, and Sydney Butler, the daughter of the art collector Samuel Courthauld, for whom he designed a dining table and set of stools for her London home.
Matthew Gale, the curator of Modern Art and Head of Displays at Tate Modern, said that the new display which opens on October 26 would come as a "tremendous surprise to a lot of people."
He said: "Seeing where an artist comes from is always an incredibly intriguing and revealing thing. Not many people know that Bacon started out in interior design because he didn't make a big thing about it in later life.
"He tended to enforce the sense that the Three Studies... was where his career as the great British painter all began, but his design work was also a crucial moment.
"These works show him linked to a European modernist tradition, with a debt to Picasso and building on cubism as he made the shift from decorator to painter."

Focus on Francis Bacon: Newsweek 1977 and The New York Times 1989

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Edward Behr, Carter S. Wiseman, and Patricia W. Mooney, "Agony and the Artist," Newsweek, 24 January 1977. For weeks the Parisian art world has been gearing up for the great day. French Minister of Culture Francoise Giroud will be there in company with other prominent government officials. So will the cream of le tout Paris and a legion of Europe’s top art critics. (One group of Italian critics and gallery owners plans to arrive in ii chartered jet.) To make sure things don’t get out of hand, the section of the narrow rue. des Beaux . Arts that runs in front of the Galerie Claude Bernard may well have to be closed to traffic an understandable precaution in view of the fact that the staff of the fashionable gallery is braced for, an onslaught of as many as 5,000 people within a matter of a few hours.
For any living painter to be the object of this kind of hub-bub is unusual. What will make this particular hubbub all the more remarkable is the fact that the occasion for it will be the opening this week of a six week showing of a selection of recent works by English artist Francis Bacon a man whose painting critics have variously described as “ nightmarish,” “grotesque” and “sadistic.”
And not without reason. One of Francis Bacon’s favorite themes is a human face – often his own caught as if at the instant of a nuclear holocaust. Another is a disembodied mouth, teeth bared in a scream. A third recurrent subject is a contorted nude figure retching into a bathroom sink in one version, nailed to a cot by a hypodermic syringe in another. Whatever the theme, the mood is one of stark isolation and the impact is always disturbing.

HIGH PRICED. Bacon’s grisly visions have outraged scores of critics and made devoted disciples of many others. And the furious controversy that has swirled around him and his paintings has helped make Bacon one of the world’s highest priced and most courted artists. One work by Bacon that sold in 1953 for a mere $85 is now valued at $171,000, and among the paintings on display in the Claude Bernard show will be a massive three panel work priced at $500,000. (A painting by jasper Johns that sold for $240,000 in 1973 holds the price record at Sotheby Parke Bernet for a living American artist.) When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a three month show of Bacon’s work two years ago, nearly 200,000 people flocked to see it.
Bacon’s road to such international renown and financial success has been neither short nor straight. Although his appearance is that of a man in his early 50s, he was born 67 years ago, the son of an English trainer of race horses in Dublin. (Some biographers have said that Bacon is a collateral relative of the Elizabethan philosopher Sir Francis, but the painter himself has never bothered to verify the claim.) By the age of 16, Bacon had become a wanderer: he spent most of his youth in Paris and Berlin, dabbling in the seamier sides of life and working intermittently as an interior decorator and furniture designer. Despite the fact that both the French and German capitals were humming with artistic experimentation at the time, Bacon recalls that he had little real interest in becoming an artist. “I regret not starting to paint earlier,” he says now. “It is one of the few things I do regret.”
It was not until World War II that Bacon, who by then had returned to Britain, got down to painting in earnest. Excused from his duties on a civil defense team because of asthma, he found himself with little to do and turned increasingly to art. Characteristically, he shunned any form of professional instruction and his early, work showed it. He managed to get individual pictures into group shows off and on for a number of years, but none attracted much serious attention. Only with his first, major one man show in 1949, when he was 40, did Bacon’s name begin to come up regularly in critical circles.

DEFIANT PURSUIT. What drew attention to Bacon then was his striking use of diverse, visual references to produce a style that resembled virtually nothing else that was happening in the art world at the time. While most mainstream artists in Europe and America plunged eagerly into abstraction and then pop, Bacon defiantly pursued his own brand of allusive realism. One reference that appears repeatedly in Bacon’s paintings of the 1950s is, the portrait of Pope Innocent X by the seventeenth century Spanish master Velázquez; in Bacon’s hands, Innocent frequently becomes a shrieking demon strapped to his throne
Another of Bacon’s favorite references. during this period was the bloody face of the wounded governess who appears in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, “Battleship Potemkin.” A third source was a series of motion studies by English-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge,, whose nudes are transformed in Bacon’s early paintings into writhing, faceless victims of unknown agonies.
At first, many. critics condemned Ba¬con’s quasi realistic style as outdated and. his choice of subject matter was branded as sensational. (His reputation in the U.S. was not helped by his description of the work of pioneering abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock as “a lot of old lace.”) But despite all resistance, Bacon’s reputation continued to grow. In 1965, he was hailed by the influential English art critic John Richardson as “the first modem painter of international caliber that the British have produced.” A 1971 retrospective of 108 Bacon paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris was an overwhelming success. And the turnout for the 1975 show at New York’s Metro¬politan Museum which seldom grants such an honor to a living artist constituted a triumph in a bastion of anti Bacon feeling.

EVEN MORE TORTURED. The show that opens in Paris this week includes 37 major works, many of which have never been shown publicly before. In addition to the $500,000 “Triptych” one of a series Bacon has done over the years in the traditional three panel form some of the most intriguing works on display are the portraits of George Dyer, a close friend of Bacon’s who died five years ago. Bacon insists that he dislikes using himself as a model, but there are also several self portraits in the show. “I have been reduced to doing a lot of them recently,” he says, “because all my friends are dead.”
In contrast to much of Bacon’s earlier work, many of the paintings at the Galerie Claude Bernard show a greater assurance in choice of color and line. The technique is no less striking, but it is subtler, even mellowed. What has not mellowed is Bacon’s choice of subject matter. His faces are less crude, but their expressions are no less agonized. The figures are more refined, but, if anything, they are even more tortured. There is no better illustration of this than the painting entitled “Three Figures and Portrait,” done in 1975. The left hand figure is bent double on his knees, his hands apparently tied behind his back as if to await execution. The neck is wrenched at an impossible angle and the vertebrae of his spine have been entirely stripped of flesh.

‘MAN IS AN ACCIDENT.’ If Bacon’s painted images leave any doubt about the persistence of his grim interpretation of human experience, his words do not. In an interview fourteen years ago with David Sylvester, a British art critic and personal friend, Bacon declared: “Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.” In a talk with Sylvester only last year, Bacon said: “I think of life as meaningless; we create certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless, really.”
It is Bacon’s refusal or inability to abandon this litany of despair that has provoked most of the criticism of his work in recent years. In a review of the Metropolitan show, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times asserted that, in the wide open world of contemporary art, “to traffic in images of sexual violence and personal sadism is a good deal less shocking than, say, to be avowedly Methodist.” Prof. Rainer Crone of Yale University’s Department of Art History faults Bacon for not participating in any of the new technical developments of contemporary art. Bacon, argues Crone, “is still dealing with the issues that were relevant before or during cubism.” Even more bitingly, André Fermigier, art critic of Le Monde and one of France’s most influential writers on art, has admitted: “Personally, I find Bacon’s obsessions somewhat monotonous.”
A renegade from the outset of his career, Bacon has never set much store by other people’s opinions about art, wheth¬er his own or anyone else’s. He dismisses ,that durable favorite of the critics Joan Miró as “pleasing and decorative, but definitely lightweight.” He finds the current school of hyper realism “boring.” And he has little patience with criticism of his own work. In response to attacks on his fascination with grim subject matter, Bacon recently declared: “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 is horrific. People tend to be offended by facts or what used to be called the truth.” Curiously enough, while American scholars and critics have proved to be some of Bacon’s most energetic oppo¬nents, American artists have provided him with some of his strongest support. Pop master Larry Rivers, who concedes that Bacon does some “very peculiar work,” nevertheless considers the Englishman “one of the best” of living artists. Another American who has high praise for Bacon is Jim Dine, a leading figure of the New York school of pop art. “There are only a handful of painters in the world whom I respect,” says Dine, “and I consider Bacon a great, great painter.” Andy Warhol, the man who enshrined the Campbell’s soup can and is now virtually an institution in the U.S art world, admits to paying Bacon the sincerest form of flattery. “I copy his color,” says Warhol, “and his skulls.”
Despite his conspicuous success, Bacon pursues a private life little changed from that of his Wanderjahre before the war. He occasionally shares a fiat with a friend in Paris and he owns a small country house near Colchester in Essex. But he spends most of his time in the familiar clutter of his London studio. The furnishings of the living area there include two battered sofas, a broken mirror and naked lightbulbs. The workroom, also lit by a bare bulb, is piled literally knee deep in torn photographs, art books, medical texts and assorted other detritus of Bacon’s craft.

‘MEMORY TRACKS.’ Bacon once explained the semi squalor of his quarters to Henry Geldzahler, the organizer of the Metropolitan show in New York, by saying that “the places that I live in … are like an autobiography. I like the marks that have been made by myself, or by other people, to be left. They’re like memory tracks for me.” For all the grim themes of his paintings, Bacon revels in witty and amusing company. But he seldom goes out on the town and when he does, the destination is likely to be Muriel’s, a London watering hole frequented by a mixed crowd that includes a sprinkling of Fleet Street journalists. He drinks heavily (champagne bottles tend to pile up around his works in progress) and on those occasions when he indulges in luxury outings to London’s better restaurants he tips outrageously and refuses to let anyone else contribute to the bill. Although discreet about details of his social life, Bacon makes no secret of the fluet that he is homosexual and occasionally jokes about the turbulence of his emotional affairs.
Although the massive amounts of cash paid for his paintings have not tempted Bacon to put a fresh coat of paint on his studio walls or even to add much to his two suit wardrobe, they have given almost free rein to his longtime passion for gambling. In his early years in London, Bacon used to convert his Cromwell Place studio into a nighttime casino hilly equipped with a roulette wheel and a chemin de fer table. The artist himself served as croupier, and to hear him tell it, he made a bundle. “But,” he recalls, “as soon as one could travel after the war, I went off to Monte Carlo and lost the lot in two weeks.” The experience did little to cool his preoccupation with gaming and he continues to bet with enthusiasm. But his luck has apparently not changed significantly since the early days. “As an ex croupier,” he says, ‘I know how to gamble, but that’s never helped me much.”

“INTUITION AND LUCK.’ Perhaps more than anything else, Ba¬con’s devotion to gambling offers a clue to his refusal to abandon his own visions and join the mainstreams of contemporary art. In 1953, in a tribute to the British painter Matthew Smith, Bacon wrote that “painting tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brush stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance” More recently, Bacon told David Sylvester that painting is “pure intuition and luck, and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the bits down.”
Bits of paint, chips, dice or cards. At the gaming table, ‘says Bacon, “I feel I want to wins but then I feel exactly the same thing in painting. I feel I want to win even if I always lose.” If the excitement surrounding the new show at the Galerie Claude Bernard is any indication, Bacon is riding a winning streak.

‘I Only Paint for Myself.’ On the eve of Francis Bacon’s major show at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, European Regional Editor Edward Behr sat down with the artist for a wide ranging discussion of his life, his work, his critics and the contemporary art scene in general. Below, excerpts from their conversation:

BEHR: How do you account for the hostility your paintings arouse?

BACON: If I thought about what the critics said, I shouldn’t have gone on painting.

Q. But how do you feel about the critics who say you put too much emphasis on death and decay and angst? Self portrait, 1969: ‘Death is always with us’

A. To me that is so totally stupid. If one thinks of life, what is it? The inevitability of death is always with us, from birth onward. I don’t emphasize it. I accept it as part of one’s existence. One is always aware of mortality in life, even in a rose that blooms and then dies. I’ve never understood this aspect of criticism against me and I don’t, now, take any notice of it. It seems to me that the people who think in this way have never really thought about life. ‘One has only to turn to the great art of the past to Shakespeare, to the Greek tragedies to realize how much of it was concerned with mortality. I’m not interested in violence. During the Vietnam war there was more violence on American television every afternoon than there is in all of my work. I accept violence, yes, I accept it as part of one s existence.

Q. What about the so called morbid aspect of your paintings? Some say that you have even used anatomical books for inspiration.

A. There was this book, which I picked up at a secondhand bookstore in Paris a long time ago before I really began painting at all, that was about skin diseases in the early nineteenth century. It was hand colored and very beautiful. I’m allergic to turpentine and wear gloves when I’m painting. But nevertheless, I occasionally get rashes on my hands and their color is tremendously suggestive to me, not necessarily horrific.

Q. There’s also the charge leveled against you that you are a loner who has failed to influence anyone else.

A. True, I don’t know of any painter whose work interests me and in whose work I see any [of my] influence.

Q. Are there any young painters whom you find to be interesting?

A. Not at the moment, and I consider that an unfortunate thing.

Q. What does interest you as you survey the current art scene?

A. I have the feeling that something very remarkable will come out of the United States. As I’ve repeatedly said, I also feel that someone like Jackson Pollock is the most overrated artist. Americans are determined to make an American art that hasn’t been influenced by anything else. I’m not sure this won’t limit them in some way. Communication being what it is, why not accept the whole thing?
I’m not interested in the abstract artists. I understand that this type of painting was a logical course to embark on. But it seems to me the subject matter in abstract art, no matter how far you take itand how far you destroy it, instantly seems to degenerate into a form of decoration. And just now figurative art is the most difficult and problematic thing. Many people are trying to return to it, but what are they returning to? They’re returning to illustration and hyper realism and what’s the point of that? It’s of no interest at all. I must say that to me pop art is more interesting than abstract expressionism and hyper realism, which are ridiculous and boring.

Q. Is there anyone among recent con¬temporary painters you admire?

A. I admire Marcel Duchamp. He explored things within his lifetime in a remarkable way. Though he wanted art that wasn’t art, he was the, most esthetic, probably, of all artists of the twentieth century.

Q. Were you influenced by Duchamp?

A. It’s difficult to say. I have been influenced by practically everything from prehistoric artifacts onward. I have looked at everything. I am rather like a grinding machine through which everything has gone. And what comes out is what comes out. All visual things have always been of immense interest and assistance to me. How are the influences felt? One would have to know how the unconscious works.

Q. Have you ever been tempted to undergo analysis to find out how your unconscious works?

A. I don’t feel it would help me in my work and it wouldn’t help me otherwise. I’ve never had those problems in my life because I accept my problems.

Q. You’ve repeatedly described how at a certain point in your work, accident and irrationality actually take over, that you are, in effect, a medium through which the paintings actually happen. Are you also a medium in other respects, are you interested in the occult?

A. It’s perfectly true that I work hoping that chance and accident will just run for me. But I’m not interested in the occult nor do I believe in it. I’m a very rational person. I use my sensibility in painting. I don’t think I’m one of those gifted people. But I’ve looked at everything, and I think that I am profoundly critical and that out of my critical sense I’m able to use the accident that comes to me.

Q. In the past you used a number of key paintings the Cimabue crucifixion, the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X as keys which unlocked some of your own visual experiences. But you have not done so in the last ten years. Why not?

A. Maybe it’s because I’ve absorbed them all and they’re beginning to make their own compost within me.

Q. When you were in Rome, I understand. you, did not. bother to see the original of Pope Innocent.X. Why not?

A. I’m a very lazy person. When I see pictures even that I like I can’t. look, at them for long because I find that it’s afterward that they begin to work on me, that they unlock valves of sensation within me. It’s what I receive from them that counts.

Q. To what do you attribute the devel¬opment of the: idea for the $.500,000 “Triptych” that is included in the Paris. show?

A.The center panel came to, me after’ I’d looked at photos of some Australian cricketers. Suddenly this, image, which was nothing like cricket, began to form itself. The head in the left panel happens to be someone I know.

Q. Everyone who writes about you notes how ‘much younger you look than you really are. Do you do anything to keep that way?

A. It’s a family thing, I think. We tend to look younger than we are. But apart from my mother, who lived to be 87, we also tend to die young. Do I consciously keep in shape? No, I don’t. I do a lot of’ standing, especially with the big canvases, and I like that. There are certain days when you feel the muscles are not going to work for. you. I like living in an overheated atmosphere because for me that’s when. brain and muscle come to¬gether. I’ve always drunk too much. I’m not a person who can sit down and relax. I’m always active in a sense. And work breeds work.

Q. Do you have any interest in your paintings when they’re finished?

A. I can’t believe my paintings are for people. I can only paint for myself. I try to give myself a kick. But I don’t know where my paintings are.
It used to be a real production line. They used to go to the Marlborough Gallery in New York and then they just went.. I didn’t want to see them again. The few I own are at the Paris showing; Living as I do, what am I going to do with them? I’m glad when they go.

Q. But don’t you care about people’s reactions to your work?

A. One’s always pleased when a few people one likes and whose opinions one respects happen to like one’s work or’ part of it. But otherwise I don’t really care, because I don’t think many people are interested in painting. Oh, yes,’ there’s a great interest in the financial side of it in painting as business, as a stock market, but very few people have any real, feelings about painting certainly not the critics.

Q. But surely you’re glad that your works is in the major museums around the world?

A. Except for a few people, it’s the only way the larger triptychs can be seen. Most people simply don’t have enough room for them.

Q. Would you like to see some kind of Bacon Foundation to house a permanent collection of Bacons after you’ve gone, as some other major painters have made provision for?

A. I don’t care. I find the profound vanity of these old men who try to im¬mortalize themselves through founda¬tions very boring. I hope there’ll be a foundation for the best of Picasso’s work, but they would have to be so carefully selected that I expect it’s out of the question.
I’m lucky, ‘since my work is not really liked and difficult to sell, to live my life by. something that obsesses me to try and do. I paint to please myself. I suppose I could have done other things. But it’s real luck to be able to earn something by doing what you obsessively feel you have to do.

Michael Kimmelman, "Unnerving Art," New York Times Magazine, 20 August 20 1989. The doorbell to Francis Bacon’s ramshackle mews house in South Kensington, London, has not worked for some time. Visitors knock loudly and then cling to a rope bannister while climbing the steep, narrow stairs that lead to the kitchen, bedroom and studio. Bacon cannot paint anything so large it won’t fit down the steps and out the door. On those infrequent occasions when the artist permits someone to see him at home, he must usher guests past the kitchen that includes a bathtub to the cramped bedroom that doubles as a living room. He has lived in this place for more than a quarter of a century. Widely regarded as perhaps the greatest living figure painter, a man whose works have lately sold for millions of dollars at auction, Bacon presumably could live anywhere in London. A few years ago he set himself up in a handsome and spacious home on the Thames, but he says the speckled light that reflected off the river and into his studio’s windows proved too distracting, so he moved back here.
Even more than most people, Bacon is full of contradictions. He will turn 80 in late October, yet his wide eyes, chubby cheeks, pouting mouth and hair failing casually over his brow give him an astonishingly boyish look. Although he moves gingerly nowadays, his step retains traces of the jaunty side to sidespring that was a characteristic of his youth.
He can be intensely private yet disarmingly frank. With almost no prompting he details his fondness for alcohol and for men, his kinship with gangsters and drunks, his antipathy toward certain politicians, fashion designers and fellow painters. If coaxed just a bit, Bacon tells wonderful stories about being in Morocco with the novelist and composer Paul Bowles or wandering through galleries with Giacometti (“He liked all the wrong pictures,” Bacon recalls with a laugh). Friends know he can be ornery and unpredictable, especially after a few drinks, but they also know him as a man of tremendous generosity, wit and vulnerability. Although he has created some of the most alarming and outrageous images ever painted, Bacon is in fact immensely likeable and kind, a true gentleman.
He is especially eager to express opinions about art and literature. A few days earlier, over a leisurely lunch of wine, oysters and deviled crab at Bentley’s in London, Bacon talked about Velàzquez and Degas, Boulez and Freud (“Does anyone go to analysis anymore?” he asked with apparent sincerity), Proust and Yeats (whose productivity in old age particularly intrigues Bacon) with the passion of the self educated. A recent exhibition of early works by Cézanne prompted waves of enthusiastic commentary, although when the conversation eventually turned to American painters, he became coy. “He does those women, nice man, what was his name?” is the extent of Bacon’s remarks about Willem de Kooning, and about Jackson Pollock he said: “I can’t see the point of those drips, and I think he couldn’t do anything else particularly well.” Subtly, Bacon manipulates a conversation so that it never strays from subjects he is prepared to discuss, and it is almost impossible to get him to talk about anything else.
He particularly dislikes analyzing his own work. “If you can talk about it, why paint it?” is one of his favorite ripostes and he tends to fall back on canned remarks as a way of sidestepping queries.
Bacon hates pretense, and he can be modest to the point of self deprecation. When London’s National Gallery asked him four years ago to do the first of the “Artist’s Eye” shows, in which prominent British painters juxtaposed their works with favorites from the museum’s collection, Bacon refused to include his own canvases.
He eschews almost all the trappings of success. Whennecessary, he reaches into his pocket for a wad of cash to cover expenses, which may include an elegant suit, gambling debts, medical costs for an ailing friend, lunch at a swank restaurant or champagne for everyone at the Colony Room, the rundown drinking club in Soho he has been going to for more than 40 years. In an art scene that has become dominated by commercial excess and ironic posturing, Bacon seems like a character from an altogether different time, a genuinely serious painter, a survivor from the generation of post war intellectuals for whom culture was not largely a matter of money.
Now he is the subject of a retrospective, on the occasion of his upcoming birthday, that open in Oct. 12 at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The first Bacon exhibition in the United States since a modest show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975, it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February 1990 and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1990.
Bacon settles himself behind a table next to the single window in his bedroom where four bare bulbs hanging on wires from the ceiling provide most of the illumination on a gray day. A cot is tucked at the far end of the room behind two old couches and a couple of dressers. There is a space heater in one corner. Years ago, Bacon owned paintings by the English artists W.R. Sickert and Frank Auerbach, but he gave those away. Several tattered photographs of his own works are now taped above the kitchen sink and around his studio. Otherwise the walls are bare. “I cant live with pictures,” he explains.
Only after a little while does the artist suggest taking alook at the studio, and even so, he clearly feels some hesitation about it, as if fearful of revealing one of his more intimate secrets. Bacon can appear very open and jovial to strangers, but he can be extremely reticent when it comes to certain aspects of his work, and this room is one of them.
The studio, on the other side of the kitchen, is shaped like the bedroom but has a skylight that Bacon installed some years ago. It is a mess. Aged paint tubes, discarded rags, brushes, papers and dust (he has incorporated the dust in certain paintings to suggest sand dunes) have at cumulated over the course of two decades and been swept into waist high piles around the floor.
Bare bulbs dangle from the ceiling. “I once bought a beautiful studio round the corner in Roland Gardens with the most perfect light, and I did it up so well, with carpets and curtains and everything, that I absolutely couldn’t work in it,” he once told an interviewer. “I was absolutely castrated in the place. That was because I had done it up so well, and I hadn’t got the chaos.”
Bacon has noted, only half in jest, that the closest he comes to abstract painting is on the walls of his studio: he uses them as a palette, and they are covered with multi-colored dabs of pigment. On one easel rests a small portrait of Bacon’s friend and, for the last several years, favorite subject, John Edwards, but all the other canvases have been turned to the wall, and the artist declines to show them. “There’s nothing on them,” he says. Bacon remains in the doorway throughout, anxious to leave.
He suggests a walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum before lunch. “If you’d like, we can see the Constables,” he offers, and a minute or two later slips a leather jacket over his turtleneck sweater and eases himself down the front steps and toward the street.
In April 1945, Bacon exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London a triptych entitled “Three Studies for figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” now at the Tate Gallery. Bacon’s trio of half-human, half animal creatures, mutilated and eyeless, their necks elongated and teeth I, were perched on tables or pedestals in rooms with disorienting fun house proportions. They were roughly, angrily drawn, suggesting both Picasso’s and Francis Picabia’s works from the 1920’s and something of German Expressionism. But nothing precisely like the “Three Studies” had been seen before. Bacon’s tortured and menacing figures seemed to capture perfectly the anguished claustrophobic of war ravaged England. At a time when painting in Britain, like so much else, had become enervated, these potent images were a sign of renewed vitality. Those who went to the Lefevre Gallery may not have liked Bacon’s work, but they surely wouldn’t forget it. Bacon had made his mark.
During the next decades the artist developed his now famous repertory of blurred figures, screaming popes, butchered carcasses and twisted portraits images that continue to occupy his attention today. They have inspired critics to classify him as a surrealist or an Expressionist, and skeptics to describe s a sensationalist or a lunatic.
Bacon insists he is a realist, that he does not paint merely to shock. “What is called Surrealism has gone through art at all times,” he says. “What is more surreal than Aeschylus?”
Bacon maintains he is simply aiming to reproduce as immediately and directly as possible, what his friend, the French anthropologist and poet Michel Leiris, calls “the sheer fact of existence.” This can encompass, Bacon points out, both violence and beauty, absurdity and romance. “You can’t be more horrific than life itself,” he is fond of saying. Still, his paintings have lost none of their power to unnerve.
In part for this reason, private collectors have not stood in line to buy, and although the work has always been very popular in France, Italy and Germany, it has engendered more respect than enthusiasm in the United States and even in Britain. The poet Stephen Spender, one of Bacon’s oldest friends, says, “I wanted to get a painting, but no one in my house really wanted one.” Margaret Thatcher once described the artist as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” And in the recent film “Batman,” the only painting in Gotham City’s Flugelheim Museum that the Joker prevents his henchmen from destroying is a Bacon.
“I think Americans have tended to measure him against de Kooning and find him less good,” says David Sylvester, an English art historian, author of a book of penetrating interviews with Bacon, and one of the painter’s most devoted friends. Spender insists that “American artists provide for Americans a foreground of activity that they can’t see beyond.”
Yet a third view is held by Lawrence Gowing, the English art historian and painter who has been an admirer of Bacon for many years. “Abstract Expressionist taste was buoyed up by a solid optimism and a feeling that painting was getting better, that a way was opening to something fruitful,” he states. “But Bacon’s painting is rather tragic, and his whole work is an overt criticism of abstract art.”
There are, however, few important museums of 20th century art that do not own, or at least covet, one of Bacon’s paintings, and his canvases are prominently displayed in London’s Tate Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Bacon’s work has increasingly been so ambitious in scale and polished in execution that it looks specifically designed for public exhibition, as if the artist were demanding his place in the museum beside Manet, Picasso and the other modern masters. Gowing describes these latest canvases, even the most violent, as “classically serene”.
Consider, for example, one of his most recent works a second, much larger and arguably more affecting rendition of the “Three Figures,” in which Bacon has added an element of ambiguity to the gruff original by refining its forms. The new version is like a memory of the earlier one, still vivid but less tactile. After an initial reaction of horror or wariness, the viewer’s attention almost invariably focuses on the strange lyricism and meticulousness of the paintings. Bacon has a quirky and rather wonderful sense of color, and there have been very few artists who have ever managed to depict flesh in such a voluptuous way. The word “shocking” is still constantly used to describe Bacon’s works, but in fact they can be exceptionally beautiful and very moving.
The artist insists that his paintings be hung in gold frames and protected by a sheet of glass, which he thinks imparts evenness and sheen to his unvarnished surfaces. This style of presentation recalls the Old Master pictures that Bacon so admires; it also heightens the tension that comes from representing bizarre or subversive scenes in a highly formal, elegant way. He may depict two Michelangelesque nudes thrashing on a bed, but he shrouds the details behind seductive, titillating veils of paint. There is decorum to Bacon’s impropriety a paradox that describes the artist himself: He talks about sex and alcohol the way most people discuss the weather, but he also exudes a natural courtliness and grace, as if he were a good boy trying to be bad.
The son of a racehorse trainer (and a collateral descendant of the great Elizabethan statesman and philosopher), Bacon moved with his family between Dublin and London during the first years of his life. He was the second of five children He never got along with his parents, who, in turn, never supported the idea of his becoming a painter.
Asthma made school a problem, so he was tutored by clergymen at home, where in general he was left to his own devices. These involved what his heavy-gambling but strict father considered behavior so unacceptable-Bacon had sex with some of the grooms at the stables and was once caught trying on his mother’s underwear-that he banished the youngster. At the age of 16, Bacon set out for London, and then Berlin.
There, in a city devoted to extravagance and excess Bacon could indulge in sexual escapades and gambling sprees; he spent long nights in transvestite bars and endless hours with the sort of rough-and tumble characters who would always form a part of his social circle.
“Berlin was a very violent place emotionally violent not physically and that certainly had its effect on me,’ Bacon says. But I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in art until about 1930. 1 lived a very indolent life. I was absolutely free. I drifted for years.” He smiles. “You know, when you’re young, there are always people who want to help.”
He also spent time in Paris and although he says he was not interested in art, Bacon remembers attending an exhibition of Picasso’s surreal, biomorphic bathers painted in the 20’s. Over the years, he has given different accounts of how significant this event was to his own development but he certainly left Paris with a particular notion of artistic life properly spent. Bacon has always cultivated an image of himself as an instinctive painter, a loner, someone who is unconcerned with success qualities that make him resemble more the French artist of the 20’s than the celebrity artist of today.
He returned to London in 1929 and for a brief period deigned modernist furniture producing works that earned him a reputation as innovative and highly talented but that he now dismisses as “absolutely horrid” and “ghastly stuff.” A Cubist inspired pattern for a rug suggests Bacon’s interest in Picasso was not entirely casual. Unfortunately, Bacon came to consider the paintings from these years “so awful” that he painted over most of the canvases and bought back others in order to destroy them; virtually none exist.
Bacon participated in group show in 1933, the same year that the critic and historian Herbert Read reproduced the artist’s ghostly “Crucifixion” in his book “Art Now.” The next year, Bacon organized a solo show, and in 1937 his work was included in an exhibition at Agnew’s in London.
But that was the last time Bacon put his paintings on public view until 1945. More than lackadaisical about his career, he was totally indifferent. Bacon had never had any formal art training, and when he began to teach himself to paint during the 30’s it seems to have been little more than a distraction from drinking, gambling and wandering around the edges of London society. “Bacon before 1939,” writes John Russell in his monograph on the artist was “Marginal Man personified.” When the Second World War began, he tried to enlist but was turned down because of his asthma. He took a variety of odd jobs, working, for a time as a house servant and a secretary. It was not until 1944, when he began to work on “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” that Bacon says that his career as a painter began in earnest. Yet the years spent in Dublin, Berlin and Paris, and in London during some of its grimmest days, clearly left their mark. The emotional turbulence of Bacon’s life, the restlessness, the sexual indiscretions, the sense of frustration and claustrophobia he felt as a boy, the offhand disregard for social mores and, importantly, the complete lack of concern for what others might think all these became distinguishingly features of his art. Only towards the end of the war, when he was already 35 years old and just beginning to take himself seriously, did Bacon finally realize that painting was the best way for him to bring order to the chaos of his life, to translate what he calls his “obsessions” into concrete images.
Upon arriving at the Victoria and Albert, Bacon immediately marches down one of the museum’s cavernous halls looking for an elevator to the floor where Constable’s paintings are displayed. He quickly becomes lost, asks directions from a guard, takes another wrong turn and again loses his way. The circuitous routed leads him past some pottery, a display of raincoats, medieval wood carvings and jewelry, and in every case the artist becomes momentarily absorbed by what he sees. Just as he feels socially at ease with both petty thieves and wealthy patrons, he can become deeply intrigued by a Turner hanging at the National Gallery and also by a chair he glimpses in the window of Conran’s on his way to lunch. Not surprisingly, Bacon’s paintings are full of references to Ingres and the daily press, to Picasso-who, with Duchamp, remains just about the only 20th century artist he admires-and the latest fashion show.
Finally, Bacon stumbles upon the elevator and finds the Constables. “These are pictures I could live with” he says enthusiastically, bounding toward the great sketches for “The Hay Wain” and “The Leaping Horse.” Although Bacon spent a good portion of his youth in the Irish countryside, he has painted very few landscapes. Yet he feels a particular affinity with these scenes and with many of the small sketches displayed in cases nearby because, he explains, they exemplify Constable’s “free style, his tremendous spontaneity.”
“I know that in my own work,” he continues, “the best things are the things that just happened images that were suddenly caught and that I hadn’t anticipated. We don’t know what the unconscious is, but every so often something wells up in us. It sounds pompous nowadays to talk about the unconscious, so maybe it’s better to say ‘chance.’ I believe in a deeply ordered chaos and in the rules of chance.”
Bacon never makes preliminary drawings but works directly on unprimed canvas, where a, wayward brush stroke cannot easily be disguised. Sometimes he will toss a bucket of paint across the canvas in order to promote spontaneity. “I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing,” Bacon says, “because I can’t erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.” Arriving at another of his favorite phrases, he adds, “I want to create images that are a shorthand of sensation.”
Photographs have always been a source of inspiration for Bacon. Many of his ideas, and quirky compositional devices have originated in the newspaper and magazine snapshots that he collects, and especially in the famous sequential photographs of prancing animals and walking, running and wrestling men that Eadweard Muybridge took during the last quarter of the 19th century.
In the twisted, awkward, even bizarre movements of Muybridge’s figures, Bacon sees a potential repertory of images that are at once startling and commonplace, and it is this impression of something sudden and unposed, yet absolutely true to life, that the painter wants to convey in his own work. In painting portraits, he dispenses with a sitter and relies solely on photographs and memory. Bacon uses only intimate friends as subjects, and he fears they might be offended to see him maneuvering and rearranging their faces despite the unmistakable likeness that emerges.
Bacon has also based works on paintings by Van Gogh, films by Luis Buñuel and poems by T.S. Eliot During the 50’s, he combined references to Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” and a still photograph of a screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s film “The Battleship Potemkin” to create his series of screaming popes, which have achieved a degree of fame he now finds tedious. “Those references were just mental starting points, armatures on which to hang the pictures,” Bacon says. “Actually, I hate those popes. I think the Velázquez is such a superb image that it was silly of me to use it.”
Bacon insists his paintings are not about anything in particular, that nothing should be read into his borrowings from certain images, and that even his triptychs, which might seem to, be recounting a tale in three scenes, are in no ‘way narrative. He compares them to police mug shots of a suspect’s face and profiles.. Nonetheless, his paintings often contain arrows, circles, mirrors and boxes that seem to single out one or two elements as having special significance. Bacon disagrees. “I’ve no story to tell,” he says.
It is early afternoon, and so far Bacon has had nothing to drink. Once, when asked to sum up his life, he said it consisted of “going from bar to bar and drinking and that kind of thing.” The walk is short from the museum to Bibendum, the elegant restaurant in a former Michelin tire factory where Bacon has made a lunch reservation and where he is greeted warmly as a regular. He orders oysters and the first of what will be many glasses of champagne. By the end of the meal he has also drunk the better part of two bottles of wine. When the idea of a trip to the Colony Room comes up, Bacon agrees, saying that he hasn’t been to the bar in months.
It is a small, oddly shaped and rather claustrophobic place not unlike many of the rooms in Bacon’s paintings and it is almost impossible to find the entrance from the street. Photographs and caricatures of the owners and regular patrons hang haphazardly on the dark green walls. The dozen or so people who are there getting drunk in the late afternoon seem very happy to see the artist, and he seems utterly at home joking and laughing with them. They are not part of the London art scene but clearly know he is a famous painter and don’t seem to care. This especially pleases Bacon. He offers drinks all around, then orders a bottle of champagne, then another. Most people couldn’t stand up at this point, but Bacon is just getting started.
Nikos Stangos, an editor at the British publishing house Thames & Hudson, who has edited books about Bacon and known the artist for many years, notes that “Francis never expresses moral indignation about anything.” And in fact, chatting easily over drinks, Bacon recalls without the least sense of outrage or distress episodes like his arrest in 1970 for drug possession. “It was obvious at the trial that the police had planted marijuana on me, because I’m asthmatic and can’t smoke,” he says drily. “I wasn’t really worried anyway, since I recognized some criminals on the jury.”
Still, a vein of deep compassion and sorrow runs just beneath the surface of Bacon’s images. These feelings occasionally emerge in conversation, as when the subject of George Dyer comes up. A heavy drinker, Dyer was the artist’s closest friend throughout the last half of the 60’s; he died in a hotel room in Paris in 1971 at the age of 37, just two days before a Bacon retrospective opened at the Grand Palais.
Bacon did a series of three triptychs that, despite the artist’s repeated statements about never painting narratives, are transparent meditations on Dyer’s death. Dyer, naked or almost naked, is shown slumped on the toilet, vomiting into a sink or slouching in a chair, either half asleep or in a drunken stupor. Parts of his limbs and chest are invariably missing, as if they had evaporated. In all the scenes Dyer is alone and in the sort of bare, windowless room that is a trademark of Bacon’s work but in this case specifically evokes the hotel in Paris. The flesh is both roseate and ashen voluptuous and deathly and in several of the scenes Dyer casts a pink shadow that does not conform precisely to the shape of his body but resembles a thick pool of liquid or a spectral presence, like a shadowy version of the beastly Furies Bacon later painted in a triptych based on the “Oresteia.”
Perhaps the most memorable of the scenes, the centerpiece of “Triptych August 1972,” represents Dyer as hardly more than a lumpy, oozing form, his face obliterated, his body prone across a blackened doorway. There is something of Muybridge and of Michelangelo in this twist¬ed, fleshy figure, something, as well, of the Manet who painted “The Execution of Maximilian,” which was among the works Bacon chose to include in his “Art¬ist’s Eye” exhibition at the National Gallery.
To see figures that look at once corporeal and ghostly; sensual and morbid, beautiful and horrific, is to understand why Bacon has come to be regarded as one of the most distinctive and difficult figure painters of the century. The triptychs of Dyer’s last hours demonstrate what the artist means when he describes himself as a realist, as a painter devoted not to Expressionism or Surrealism but to what he has called “the brutality of fact.” During lunch at Bentley’s, Bacon had described old age as “a desert because all of one’s friends die,” and the paintings of Dyer exude this despair. The only faith they can be said to express is in the power of paint.
“I am an optimist, but about nothing,” Bacon says, repeating another of his favorite phrases. “It’s just my nature to be optimistic.” He stops to polish off the last drops from a glass of champagne. “We live, we die and that’s it don’t you think?’

Michael Kimmelman, "The Master of the Macabre: Francis Bacon," The New York Times, 26 October 1989, The Arts. Since he exhibited “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion” at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44 years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing half-human, half animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon’s nightmare was fundamentally his own.
Coming as it did at the end of World War Il, in a city that had been devastated. by bombings and spiritually enervated, the display of “Three Studies” at Lefevre seemed to many of those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the pre eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last four and a hair decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation.
Now he is the subject of a very handsome retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday. The show remains here through Jan. 7, after which it is to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May 31 to Aug. 28). With nearly 60 works from public and private collections around the world, this is the first major overview of the painter’s achievements held in the United States since 1963. The exhibition has been organized by James T, Demetrion, the Hirshhorn’s director, who obtained many of Mr. Bacons best known paintings.
There is, for example, one of the startlingly colored works the artist based on van Gogh’s “Painter on the Road to Tarascon.” There are a handful of the Popes that the artist created by combining elements of Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X with the image of a screaming nurse from “The Battleship Potemkin,” the Sergei Eisenstein film. The artist’s arresting “Man With Dog” of 1953 can be seen here, and so can at least one canvas, depicting a paralytic child walking on all fours, that Mr. Bacon derived from Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century photographer whose studies of figures in motion have had a profound impact on the painter.
There area dozen or so small and strangely beautiful portrait heads of friends and associates as well as a handful of large triptychs from the 1960’s and 70’s, including a work from May to June 1973 that is Mr. Bacon’s wrenching meditation on the death of a friend, George Dyer.
There is not, unfortunately, the ‘Three Studies of Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion” from the 40’s, which was deemed too fragile to travel from the Tate Gallery in London. But a second version of this work that Mr. Bacon completed last year is on view, and to see it is to realize both how much the artist has changed over the years and how much he has stayed the same.
Mr. Bacon has stayed the same in (he sense that his subjects have not really varied, nor have the essential elements of his imagery. His focus remains on the human body. He continues to twist it, mangle its features, X ray it and make it evaporate, transmogrify and bleed. His figures huddle and struggle in windowless rooms, lighted only by a bare bulb that dangles from the ceiling. They vomit into a sink, find themselves pinned to the bed with a hypodermic needle or face to face with one of the ancient Greeks’ Furies.
When two men are engaged in sex, as they sometimes are in his paintings, they seem to be wrestling each other to the death. When the artist paints himself in a state of repose, it appears as if he is recovering from a crippling hangover. Even when Mr. Bacon is creating imaginary creatures, as in the second version of “Three Figures,” the references to sex and violence cannot be missed. Mr. Bacon’s images are rarely subtle.
But over the years they have been more beautifully rendered. The encrusted paint and vibrating atmosphere of such early works as “Head 1” of 1948 and “Study for Portrait (Man In a Blue Box)” from 1949 have given way to a more serene’ and fluent style. Mr. Bacon Is one of the greatest painters of voluptuous flesh. Few artists can make the body seem so palpable or transform a man turning a bathroom faucet into a figure of Michelangelesque proportions.
The artist has always imagined himself as engaged in a dialogue with past masters, not only Michelangelo and Velázquez and van Gogh but also Manet and Picasso and Ingres. At the same time, his paintings make conspicuous references to the latest furniture and clothing designs and they borrow freely from photographs in newspapers and magazines. His figures even occasionally bring to mind Willem de Kooning’s paintings of women. But Mr. Bacon says he admires almost nothing contemporary in art. Abstract painting is to him a version of wallpaper. He insists he is a realist, that he re creates the violence of everyday life.
There are times, of course, when Mr. Bacon seems more like a Surreal And there are times, it must be said, when he seems to have fallen back on tricks and melodramatic gestures. The images of cricket pads, the arrows, the swinging light cords and the slabs of beef are shallow devices ‘to which the artist succumbs. The fact is that Mr. Bacon is often most affecting when his work is least theatrical.
It is clear, for example, from paintings like “Study of Figure in a Land that Mr. Bacon can depict the outdoors vividly on those rare occasions when he puts himself to the task. His portraits, which at first look merely contorted, capture perfectly a likeness. They can also be witty. Several of the self-portraits are among the more endearing paintings in the exhibition because Mr. Bacon presents himself as charmingly ill at ease.
There are also striking images like the darkened figure entering an ‘empty house from the triptych “In Memory of George Dyer” (1971) that speak in an unusually hushed tone. And there are a few works that seem to be the beneficiaries of chance. Mr. Bacon is a believer In spontaneity, and several of his paintings have been given a jolt of energy by a sudden splash of paint or a slip of the brush.

One of the most memorable canvases in the exhibition is also one of the artist’s most recent works, his “Study for Portrait of John Edwards” from 1988, Here Mr. Bacon somehow manages to create a figure that looks at once fleshy and spectral, ashen and roseate. There is, in some ways, more of Velázquez in this austere portrait than there is in the early Popes. The work is neither histrionic nor shocking. It is mysterious and introspective and it underscores that, at the age of 80, Mr. Bacon has not missed a step.

Baconiana Issues, 1998-2009

2010-12-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

David Sylvester, The Human Body, 1998 (London, Hayward Gallery, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, 1998). Bacon has lately survived exposure to two vast museum spaces that could have been killers ‑ the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. They brought out a grandeur in the work that had tended to be less manifest than its expressiveness and its vitality. Some paintings seemed to possess a Matissean severity and serenity that had not previously been suspected. Canvases hung in the two daylit areas of the Paris showing had a vibrancy that made Bacon look as much a colourist as a dramatist: the grisaille paintings of the late 1940s and early Fifties had a hushed lyricism; the monumental triptychs of the 1970s seemed to derive their power from their abstract qualities: in the great black triptych recording George Dyer’s death alone in his hotel room, this document about pain ‑ the protagonist’s pain, the artist’s pain ‑ what mattered most was the density and incisiveness of the black and maroon quadrilateral shapes.
Where the constructed setting in Paris provided a relatively neutral modernist framework for the paintings, the grandiose neo‑classical spaces at Munich were as much a theatre as a set of galleries. You saw a picture in another room through a portal on which it was centred and it looked like a Velázquez hanging in the Prado.
Bacon’ s choice of pictures from the National Gallery’s collection for his exhibition in 1985 in the series called The Artist’s Eyeshowed a strong bias towards serene and monumental works such as Masaccio’s Virgin and Child and Seurat’s Baignade. He did have a still life and a landscape by van Gogh, but there was no figure‑painting that was at all expressionistic or even vigorously dramatic: Rubens’ Brazen Serpent had been on the list of possibles but was eliminated. Another artist left out in the end ‑ in this case one who would have fitted in was Raphael. He was left out because there was no particular example that Bacon loved enough, but, had the NG’s collection included the tapestry cartoons, which he often went to see at the Victoria & Albert Museum, I feel sure that The Miraculous Draught of Fishes would have been in the exhibition.
Something in the hang came as a revelation to me. In the middle of the best wall Bacon placed three great nudes: Degas’ pastel, Woman Drying Herself in the centre, flanked by Velázquez’ Rokeby Venus and the Michelangelo Entombment. Degas was the marriage of Velázquez and Michelangelo and thus Bacon’s key painter. It was a revelation because of the way it made an unwitting art historical point, not because there had ever been any doubt about how crucially those three artists had influenced Bacon. For example, in his earliest surviving image of a nude, Study from the Human Body, 1949, the treatment of the spine clearly reflects his fascination with how the top of the spine in Woman Drying Herself ‘almost comes out of the skin altogether’, as he put it, making us ‘more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body’. In other respects this particular Bacon nude is less like a Degas than many others in that the realisation is more smudgy and atmospheric and evanescent, less incisive, than in later works. It is wonderfully tender and mysterious in its rendering of the space between the legs and its modelling of the underside of the right thigh. Its use of grisaille is breathtaking. None of Bacon’s paintings puts the question more teasingly as to whether he is primarily a painterly painter or an image‑maker. Does this work take us by the throat chiefly because of its lyrical beauty or because of the elegiac poignancy of its sense of farewell?

David Sylvester, The Supreme Pontiff, 1998 (New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon: Important Paintings from The Estate, 1998). Francis Bacon’s first painting of a pope was Head VI of 1949, a head‑and‑shoulders image which already presented the inspired conflation between the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X and the close‑up of the nanny shrieking from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. While that conflation was often repeated, not all Bacon’s popes have open mouths, nor are these necessarily shrieking. There are times when the open mouth looks as if it is silent, is the mouth of an asthmatic trying to take in air or that of an animal in a threatening or defiant pose.
Furthermore, not all Bacon’s popes are based on the portrait of Innocent X, though most of them are. He had a tremendous drive to make variation after variation on this image. Velázquez was his preferred painter and this particular portrait could have been expected to have an especial appeal to him in that the paint is freer and looser and the whites more flickering than in any other Velázquez, almost as in a Gainsborough. But Bacon never in fact saw the work in the original, not even when he spent some weeks in Rome in 1954; he knew it only in reproduction, and reproductions convey no hint of its freedom of handling.
Was Bacon, then, drawn to this particular Velázquez by its subject? The Pope is Papa and Bacon had very strong feelings about his father. “I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with, that I realized that it was a sexual thing towards my father.” Painting popes in their isolation could well have been, among other things, a way of bringing back his father, of spying on him, of demolishing him. Bacon believed or said merely that the Velázquez Pope was “one of the greatest portraits that have ever been made” and that he was obsessed by it because of “the magnificent color of it.” But in the forties and fifties he toned down the magnificent scarlet to a muted purple. It was not until the sixties that he was able to bring himself to match the scarlet.
Of all the innumerable popes, the greatest, it seems to me, were painted at the beginning ‑ Head VI and then the earliest of the versions in which the Pope is shown seated, Study after Velázquez, 1950. Behind the Pontiff is a heavy curtain with deep parallel folds; a second curtain, attached to a curved rail, is spread out across the foreground. This curtain, of course, alters the composition radically. The Velázquez is a seated three-quarter length portrait, cut off at the knees, and therefore still a medium close‑up. This Bacon Pope is cut off just above the knees, but then the foreground curtaining intervenes and, animated by the thrust of its radiating folds, pushes us back and creates a gap like an orchestra pit between audience and scene. We are made to keep our distance.
The figure is at once monumental and evanescent. Its majestic composure is frayed at the edges by a flicker that could mean both an emanation of its own nervous energy and a bombardment by pressures in the atmosphere. The mouth is immense in power and anguish. As we zoom in, it threatens to engulf us, to swallow us up. This is a mouth that is breathing in, or trying to. It is uttering no sort of cry. It is open and silent.
Magnificent and vulnerable, this personage has the withdrawn look of many Velázquez portraits, for instance, of the late head‑and‑shoulders of Philip IV in the National Gallery, London ‑ and not only the withdrawn look but the elongated Bourbon features. Velázquez is also there in the beautiful dryness of the paint. For me, this picture’s closest rival among the three‑quarter‑length popes is the gorgeous version done in 1953 which belongs to Des Moines, one of those Bacons that is peculiarly evocative of Titian, a painter in whom Bacon was not greatly interested. When we were talking about Titian once, he said: “When I think of the Pope painted by Velázquez, of course he wanted to make it as much like a Titian as he could, but in a curious way he cooled Titian.” It was this cooling that made Bacon love Velázquez as he did.

Hugh M. Davies, Bacon's Popes: Ex Cathedra to in Camera, 1999 (San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, 1999). Throughout his long career, Francis Bacon (1909‑1992) steadfastly focused on the human figure as the subject of his paintings. Unlike other major artists of his time who reveled in abstraction, such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Bacon never deviated from his commitment to making images of people. Yet while extending the timeless tradition of figuration, he invented profound and startling new ways of portraying people as he distorted the inhabitants of his painterly world in order to “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.”
Bacon’s most recognizable image, and hence most famous painting, is the screaming pope of Study after Velazquez ‘s Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953. The picture was inspired by Diego Velázquez’s extraordinarily lifelike portrait of a powerful and unscrupulous pope who duplicitously took the name Innocent. Painted in i6o at the height of the Baroque period, shortly after his arrival in Rome from Spain, it was Velázquez’s eminently successful attempt to rival the portraiture of Titian and the great painters of Italy. The subject of the painting is arguably the most powerful man in the world. He sits confidently on the papal throne, fully at ease ex cathedra‑literally, from the cathedral seat‑as God’s representative on earth.
The true brilliance of Velazquez’s accomplishment in this painting is to have satisfied his demanding papal client with a flattering, beautifully rendered portrait while at the same time passing on for the ages the unmistakable hint of corrupt character and deep‑seated deceit behind that well‑ordered and stern façade.
“Haunted and obsessed by the image … by its perfection, 112 Bacon sought to reinvent Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X in the papal portraits that form the focus of this book. In the great painting from the Des Moines Art Center, the Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Bacon updates the seventeenth‑century image by transforming the Spanish artist’s confident client and relaxed leader into a screaming victim. Trapped as if manacled to an electric chair, the ludicrously drag‑attired subject is jolted into involuntary motion by external forces or internal psychoses. The eternal quiet of Velázquez’s Innocent is replaced by the involuntary cry of Bacon’s anonymous, unwitting, tortured occupant of the hot seat. One could hardly conceive of a more devastating depiction of postwar, existential angst or a more convincing denial of faith in the era that exemplified Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead.
In Bacon’s words: “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. Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.”’
In much the same spirit that Velázquez went to Rome, determined to vie with the state portraits of Titian and remake them in the image of his time, Bacon’s papal variations are his attempt to reinvent or reinterpret Velázquez’s image in a way that would be valid for the mid‑twentieth century. To accomplish this reinvention, Bacon essentially replaced the grand, official state portrait with an intimate, spontaneous, candid camera glimpse behind the well‑ordered exterior. While Velázquez portrayed the pope ex cathedra, Bacon might be said to have captured him in camera‑as if behind a closed door or through a one‑way mirror. While Innocent directly confronts his audience with a confident, almost contemptuous gaze, Bacon’s pope, preoccupied by pain, seems oblivious to observation.

Richard Calvocoressi, Bacon: Public and Private, 2005 (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, Francis Bacon, Portraits and Heads, 2005). Now that Francis Bacon (1909-1992) has been dead for over a decade, and we can begin to form some sort of perspective on the twentieth century, the scale and significance of his achievement are becoming increasingly apparent. With the exception of Picasso and Andy Warhol, both of whom have museums dedicated to their life and work, we probably know more about Bacon than any other modern artist. This is ironic given how extensively Bacon edited his artistic past. But the gift, in 1998, of his London studio and its contents to the city of Dublin and its faithful reconstruction in the Hugh Lane Gallery, have transformed Bacon studies. Some 7,500 items were discovered in the studio, where the artist lived and worked for over thirty years, and the gallery has catalogued and entered every single one onto a special database. These entries give a unique insight into Bacon’s eclectic sources, preoccupations and working methods.
A handful of exhibitions has been staged in the last three or four years exemplifying this new, analytical approach to Bacon’s art, culminating in the magisterial Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art (Vienna and Basel, 2003-4). This examined the full range of Bacon’s work in the context of those artists from European high culture whom he appropriated and assimilated Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Picasso as well as the motifs and subjects that obsessed him: papal imagery; curtains and veils; the open mouth; the cage; circular forms, spaces and structures; the male human body; portraiture; mirrors and reflections; the shadow; the Crucifixion; meat and flesh. More recently, Martin Harrison in his book In Camera has revealed the extent to which Bacon based many of his most memorable images on ‘low art’ sources such as photographs and film stills torn from books, magazines and newspapers. In his interviews with David Sylvester from the early 1960s onwards, Bacon readily admitted his debt to the great art of the past, which he knew only in reproduction, and often referred to his use of Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of human figures and animals in action. But Harrison draws attention to a stratum of less elevated imagery which fascinated Bacon and which his friend the painter and photographer Peter Rose Pulham called ‘bad Press photographs reproduced through a coarse screen on bad paper’.’ Harrison also convincingly points to an obscure German book on spiritualism, with trick photographs of ectoplasms, emanations and other psychic phenomena, as an important source which the artist did not acknowledge; a paint spattered and well thumbed copy was found in Bacon’s studio.
Bacon liked the news photograph because it was instantaneous and to a large degree reliant on chance. In its fluidity and suppression of detail, it suggested transmutation and flux qualities he tried to capture in his own radical manipulation of paint. David Sylvester, in a lecture on the artist (given in 2001 but not published until this year), argues that the main reason Bacon worked from the photographic image rather than from life was that ‘it is easier to make a flat image … based on the observation of an existing flat image than it is to make a flat image based on the observation of something in the round’. In other words, Bacon, who lacked the traditional artschool training of painting or drawing from a living model, found that photographs had already done some of the work of translating threedimensional form into twodimensional form for him. Bacon painted a small number of portraits from life in the 1950s but from the early 1960s preferred to work from commissioned photographs of friends and lovers which functioned as a kind of aidememoire while he tried to imagine their presence on canvas. Their actual presence in the studio, he claimed, would have inhibited his freedom to ‘distort’.
Until recently, Sylvester’s series of conversations with the artist, first published in 1975 and twice expanded in the 1980s, was one of the most quoted texts on any twentieth century artist. Interviews with Francis Bacon helped make Bacon a public figure, or at least a very public kind of artist, in his lifetime. Shortly before his death in 2001, Sylvester published Looking back at Francis Bacon, a collection of essays, thoughts and new biographical material to which he added previously unpublished extracts from his recorded interviews with the artist. In one section, ‘Bacon’s secret vice’, Sylvester was forced to correct the impression, which Bacon himself had been careful to promote in their conversations, that the artist never made preliminary studies before starting a painting; over seventy rapid, perfunctory sketches were found in Bacon’s studio before it was transported to Dublin. Bacon also made lists of ideas for paintings on scraps of paper and on the inside covers of books. But both categories should be seen as substitutes for fully workedout compositional studies in the same way that photographs were including photographic reproductions of his own work, which Bacon increasingly ‘quoted’ as he got older. So, in spite of such minor ‘economies with the truth’, Interviews with Francis Bacon will remain an essential resource for many years to come, especially when read in conjunction with Sylvester’s final revisions and reflections on this most profound and complex of painters.
There is another, more obvious sense in which Bacon was a public artist. From 1962 until his death thirty years later, he released into the world, at the rate of almost one a year, twenty eight large triptychs: that is to say, canvases each nearly two metres high by one and a half metres wide, grouped in threes eightyfour panels in total. Each panel usually contains a centrally placed figure, or a pair of coupled figures, alive with painterly incident, set off against broad, flat expanses of thinly applied colour that appear to parody abstract painting. Although presented serially, the narrative link between each panel is not always clear, if indeed it exists. A number of these triptychs hang in prominent museums around the world, where they are difficult to ignore: like the medieval or Renaissance altarpiece from which their format derives, they imply portentous, if highly ambiguous, public statements. Many of them address archetypal subjects, such as violent death, sexual ecstasy (and their interconnection), mutability and loss, and invoke earlier treatments of these themes in classical Greek tragedy, Christian iconography and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. A few incorporate images of contemporary political figures or events. Even when they have a commemorative purpose, as in those recalling Bacon’s deceased lover George Dyer, there is something theatrical about them, reinforced by the spaces in which their dramas are enacted, like stages or arenas, which presuppose an audience. As Sylvester commented, ‘Bacon had something of Picasso’s genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight’.

Martin Harrison, Studying Form, 2005 (London, Faggionato Fine Art, Francis Bacon Studying Form, 2005). Since David Sylvester was too unwell to deliver Francis Bacon and The Nude in person, he wrote down the lecture and tape‑recorded it: the transcript is published here for the first time. I was unable to attend the transmission of David’s talk in Dublin, and did not see the text until after my book, In Camera: Francis Bacon was on press. Had I done so, I would either have modified, or expanded, my readings of three decisive Bacon paintings. I saw David fairly frequently towards the end of his life, and although we talked at length about everything from Flemish tapestry to Barnett Newman, to my regret we seldom spoke about Bacon. In the hope that it may inform both my own text and David’s, I shall begin this essay by instigating an unrealised dialogue.
In his analysis of Study from the Human Body, 1949, Bacon’s first (extant) painting of the nude, Sylvester remarked on the significance of the example of the pastels of Degas for the striated treatment of the curtain the “shuttering” as Bacon termed it. He cited an interview he had conducted in which Bacon explained that by using shuttering, “the sensation doesn’t come straight out at you but slides slowly and gently through the gaps”: this was a lucid description of a technique of optical disturbance, one of Bacon’s tactics for obstructing narrative and destabilizing and fragmenting his figures, and a strategy that is partly in conflict with his professed aim to achieve the ‘brutality of fact’. Almost as an aside, Sylvester mentioned the conviction of Bacon’s cousin, Pamela Firth, that in Study from the Human Body the figure’s truncated arm referred to her husband, Lt Col Vladimir Peniakoff (of Popski’s Private Army renown), who had lost his left hand in battle. While this is perfectly plausible, I would propose another, and perhaps in Bacon’s thinking prior, quote (consistent with Bacon’s synthesizing of multiple quotations): the figures at the left and right sides of Matisse’s Bathers by a River, 1909‑16. Sylvester believed that the same Matisse had informed Bacon’s Painting 1950, a painting for which I proposed a wider range of ‘sources’, including a different Matisse: on this point we may both be right.
Regarding Triptych–Studies of the Human Body, 1970, Sylvester confessed his theory that the source for the figure in the right‑hand panel was Caravaggio’s Narcissus, was “pure supposition”; however, having absorbed the remarks on this painting in Looking Back at Francis Bacon, my subsequent comparison of the figure’s prominent right shoulder with Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist appears to strengthen the fink.’ Francis Bacon and the Nude proved to be Sylvester’s final contribution to Bacon studies. In the course of it he also discussed one of the paintings in the present exhibition, Lying Figure, No 2, 1959, which he related, convincingly, to the two Tate gouaches; indeed he linked the gouaches to all of the paintings of lying and reclining figures that Bacon painted between 1959 and 1961. Since he also believed that, for these figures, “no prototype in art or photography has been traced”, presumably he was convinced neither by the arguments for the sculpture of Rodin nor the fragmented statues of antiquity as significant precedents for their extravagantly and unconventionally splayed limbs.’

Victoria Walsh, Real Imagination is Technical Imagination, 2008 (London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2008). Like Oscar Wilde, with whom he shared a love of literature, theatre and creative artifice, Bacon was acutely conscious of the value of constructing a public image and perfectly adept at carefully orchestrating both it and the reception of his work from an early stage. Marking out his serious pedigree in 1950, he identified himself in the catalogue to the exhibition London-Paris: New Trends in Painting and Sculpture as “the collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher”; he latter admitted in an interview in 1973 that he had no firm evidence for this, although he shared a homosexual disposition with his purported eponymous ancestor. In interviews, Bacon held tight control of the final published texts and indeed, while they have attained a canonical status in Bacon studies, the published interviews with David Sylvester only represent a fifth of the original exchanges between the two. In the Preface to the interviews, Sylvester acknowledged, in what almost reads as an apology or disclaimer, just how radical their reformatting and editing had been:
“since the editing has been designed to present Bacon’s thought clearly and economically…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 combines 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.”
Whether it was Bacon’s concern to maintain the accumulative aura of his work or his disdain of potentially reductive interpretations, his desire to frustrate an empirical analysis of his oeuvre was highlighted in a now legendary anecdote: on a visit to the artist, a researcher enquired of Bacon whether he intended to bequeath his archive at the end of his life, to which Bacon promptly responded by sweeping up everything in sight, placing it in plastic bags and creating a bonfire of all the contents. As Martin Harrison also noted, Bacon “effectively censured…the iconological study of his paintings, initially by denying their iconographies. Most critics acquiesced in this denial of content, and those who transgressed risked his non co-operation regarding reproductions rights: this enforced collaboration in this information clamp-down helped to censure that Bacon’s paintings, and his procedures were investigated and understood largely on the terms he dictated, or of which he approved.”

Manuela Mena, Bacon and the Spanish painting: « The way to dusty death », 2009 (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Francis Bacon, 2009). Francis Bacon died in Madrid on April 28, 1992 and was incinerated the following day in the prosaic cemetery of La Almudena without any witness or ceremony. « The way to dusty death » brought him to the same city where Velázquez died. Surely, he would have liked this coincidence, which seemed like a voluntary homage to the Spanish painter or was it intentional? MacBeth impressed him with “his famous lines about death and the shortness of life, about the passing of time and then nothing makes any sense at all” and this also reflected his own vision of man: he is nothing but an accident of life, a “completely futile being that has to play out the game without reason”.
The concept of Shakespeare on the shortness and vanity of life and the inexorability of death also imbued with the Spanish culture of the 18th century at the time of Velázquez.
Therefore, as Bacon admitted, there were still “a certain type of religious possibilities” to which man could hold on to but now in the 20th century, “has had completely cancelled out for him”. The same idea had been expressed by a contemporary of Bacon: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian whose writings Bacon most certainly knew: “We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more”. With everything, Bacon wanted to fill the futile and gratuitous journey towards death with ”certain grandeur” –in his case with his art. He always considered life, this journey between birth and death, like “an unbearable idea” and endeavoured to throw himself into an activity, which would give “a sense to this pointless existence.”

The State of Francis Bacon

Viewpoint: Zervigon on Bacon

2010-11-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

Andres Mario Zervigon, Francis Bacon, GLBTQ - An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, Chicago: GLBTQ, 2002-5. See also: John Singer Sargent and 20th Century European Art

"Fancis Bacon is widely recognized as Britain's most important twentieth-century painter. Through beautifully composed works featuring screaming faces and beaten bodies, Bacon marked the violent trauma characterizing Europe's past century. [...] In 1953 he exposed [...] sexual desire [...] with his Two Figures, a painting featuring photographer Eadweard Muybridge's famous wrestlers taken from the mat to the bed. The result was an unmistakable representation of one man raping another.
Remarkably, post-war Britain acclaimed this work and others as profound reflections on the century's trauma. Bacon's work was touted as England's enlightened alternative to American Abstract Expressionism."

Due to Bacon's well-known predilection for ambiguity, Two Figures can hardly be unmistakable as Zervigon supposes.

"Perhaps one day I will manage to capture an instant in all its violence and all its beauty" - Bacon, quoted in The Grotesque in the Instinctive Paintings (2009).

In the 1950s, Bacon gave this painting to Lucian Freud, as a present. Afterwards, the picture was very rarely exhibited, and even if illustrated in Bacon's second retrospective catalog at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the painting was surprisingly not included in that show. As his namesake predecessor once put it, "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." - And Bacon the painter knew very well how to do that.

On the other hand, not every act of copulation is necessarily a case of rape in Bacon's imagery. Yet it is far from being either this or that. On the contrary, it usually involves being both this and that.

Illustrations. 1. Two Figures, 1953; 2. Two Figures, 1961; Two Figures in the Grass, 1954.

Considerando que leyó lo que publicó ese al que se le dijo qué es lo que posiblemente pudo haber sucedido...

2010-05-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

Eduardo Suárez, "El sadomasoquismo de Bacon subyace en sus mejores obras," ArteFe, Santa Fe (Argentina), 24.11.2009.

Célebre por sus excesos y sus excentricidades, Francis Bacon pasa por ser el prototipo del artista perturbado e irreverente. En lo que no habían indagado los académicos era en la relación de su obra con sus instintos sadomasoquistas.
Lo ha hecho ahora John Richardson, biógrafo canónico de Picasso y académico de prestigio, que ha desnudado la sexualidad de Bacon en un largo artículo en la 'New York Review of Books', quien afirma que "el sadomasoquismo de Bacon en sus tormentosas relaciones con sus amantes homosexuales subyace en sus mejores obras".
Richardson repasa sus momentos con el pintor británico -al que trató entre los años 50 y 70- e indaga en la sexualidad torturada del artista, cuya raíz adivina en la paliza que su padre le dio cuando un día le encontró en casa vestido de mujer.
Por el artículo desfilan las relaciones de Bacon con sus dos amantes más duraderos: Peter Lacy y George Dyer. El primero lo torturó durante años. Al segundo lo condujo al suicidio.
Que Lacy maltrataba a Bacon ya se sabía. Pero el académico detalla su asalto más sanguinario. Aquel en el que éste arrojó a Bacon por una ventana de vidrio laminado en un estado de frenético alcoholismo. "Su cara estaba tan dañada", recuerda Richardson, "que le tuvieron que volver a poner en su sitio el ojo derecho. Después del incidente, Bacon amaba a Lacy aún más. Y durante semanas no pudo perdonarle a Lucien Freud los reproches a su torturador".
En cuanto a George Dyer, Richardson recuerda la relación tortuosa que mantuvo con Bacon y que desembocó en su suicidio en el lavabo de un hotel parisino en la víspera de la inauguración de la retrospectiva del artista en el Grand Palais de París.
"Bacon solía acosar a George hasta el punto de dejarle en un estado de crisis psicótica", recuerda Richardson. "Luego", añade, "en las primeras horas de la mañana se levantaba y exorcizaba su culpa y su rabia pintando imágenes de su amante".
La tesis del profesor Richardson va más allá de estas y otras anécdotas. Según él, el instinto sadomasoquista fue el motor artístico de Bacon. Cuando desapareció, se esfumó su arte y sus últimas obras fueron irrelevantes.

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ACERCA DEL ANECDOTARIO, por Mariano Akerman

1. El sadomasoquismo no es exclusividad de Francis Bacon, cuya imaginería plástica es, por otra parte, sumamente alusiva. Si bien en cierto sentido ella puede llegar a ser asociada con el sadomasoquismo, ello de hecho no invalida otras tantas posibilidades o posibles alusiones. Véase, por ejemplo, mi análisis de su Figura yacente en un espejo de 1971; ver también la nota El juego de Bacon (2009).

2. En lugar de investigar en detalle la obra plástica de Bacon, se nos propone aquí especular acerca de su vida privada a partir de anécdotas cuestionables y en parte tendenciosas. Una argumentación seria se basa no en especulaciones, sino en evidencias.

Three reviews from Studio International

2010-04-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

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1) McKenzie, Janet. Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, Studio International, 22.9.2005. Ref. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, June-September 2005.

The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s was such that the human image in art became increasingly difficult to portray. The existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea (1938),1 found a visual counterpart in the images of despair and alienation of Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions of Arthur Boyd. For the most part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated because, after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found images of humanity impossible to create.

'Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads', in Edinburgh during summer 2005 to coincide with the Edinburgh International Festival, leaves one in no doubt as to the importance of the potent nihilism of one of Britain's most important artists. John Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently described him as the 'prophet of a pitiless world':

He repeatedly painted the human body, or parts of the body, in discomfort or agony or want. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical.2

Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the inescapable suffering of human existence dominate the exhibition, and yet, the 50 paintings at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art stress the dialogue that existed between Bacon and his subjects, and the wider world. In establishing the dialogue, it is possible to experience these images beyond the hideous, expressionistic despair. This is partly because, since the artist died in 1992, sufficient time has passed to make a revision of the significance of his work. In spite of the bewilderment that most of Bacon's portraits express, there is an unexpected affirmation in the choice of formal language and the precision and care applied to the act of painting: the placement of each head, each brush stroke, every subtle hue, the manner in which the figure inhabits the space, the form within the picture plane. There is a common purpose for human existence established in the tradition of portraiture, the primal act of painting that links him in formal terms to the Old Masters, and to the history of art itself. A quiet authority is established by the artist amid the shrieking pain; the curators have echoed this in the elegant hanging of the works and the subtle interconnection of the works within the whole exhibition.

The critic, John Russell, described 'Bacon's Heads' from an existential standpoint as 'a knowing inversion' of what we usually understand by portraiture:

Looking at them, we realise that although European painting includes a great many portraits of individuals in rooms, they are never about what it feels like to be alone in a room: the painter always makes two ... The garbage of the psyche has been put out at the back door; all buttons are done up ... What painting had never shown before is the disintegration of the social being, which takes place when one is alone in a room which has no looking glass. We may feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all ear, all nose.3

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of his life in London, working as a painter from the 1930s. The human figure was central to his work throughout a long and productive career. He died in 1992. No other painter delivered as potent a message of nihilistic despair as Francis Bacon in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Viewing Bacon was a mandatory but oppressive experience. His work was truly shocking:

Bacon was a very overt atheist. Maybe this seems irrelevant, but you only have to visit an Old Master painting collection - such as the Doria Pamphilj palace, in Rome, where the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X that obsessed Bacon can be found - to see that oil painting and religion are intimates. All the Madonnas, all those popes. Bacon took the spiritual heart of high culture and stuck a knife right through it.4

The Vatican never openly condemned Nazism. Yet, to place the Pope in a glass booth with a howling face and the top of his head missing was more than just a departure from tradition - it was a Judgement Day with a personal vendetta. Hieronymus Bosch made apocalyptic images where humanity en masse was condemned, but Bacon takes the traditionally edifying form of portraiture and slashes it. His disturbing image is like the burning of a very lifelike effigy, leaving one feeling physical revulsion.

The Edinburgh exhibition (it will travel to the Hamburger Kunsthalle this autumn) begins with small single heads from the late 1940s. In these works, the act of painting is immediately felt: the beautifully balanced shapes, the simultaneously interlocking and falling away of forms. The movement and the silence evoked so allude to individual character and to ephemeral emotional states as to be disconcerting. In the small heads, the apparent despair gives way to intimacy and even trust. These are moments caught by impeccable painterly techniques. A likeness to the sitter or individual (for they were often based on photographs, not sittings) is captured in spite of the obvious distortion of features. Bacon exposed the fragility of the individual (especially his friends and lovers), transient moments, and the weakness of flesh. He exposed mortality itself.

There follows a group of large single portraits; some are full length. The core of the exhibition comprises small heads of friends from the artistic and social milieu of London's Soho - Lucien Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and Bacon's lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer. From 1961-62 the portraits are often in triptych format, which enabled Bacon to reveal three aspects of the one individual. 'Bacon compared his small triptychs to 'police records' in which the suspect is photographed in three contrasting positions - right profile, full-face and three-quarter view (left side)'.5 Peter Lacy, with whom Bacon had an often dramatic relationship, dominated the portraits of the late 1950s. Five portraits of Lacy are included in this exhibition. 'Self-Portraits', which date from the 1950s, reveal a range of images of self. In 1975, Bacon told David Sylvester, 'I loathe my own face, but I go on painting it because I haven't got any other people to do'.6

The Edinburgh exhibition includes important loans from many public and private collections. It was selected by Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council; Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Christoph Heinrich, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Richard Calvocoressi's searching essay, Bacon: Public and Private, examines recent scholarship since Bacon's death in 1992. It has revealed the sources of his imagery and examined his work in the context of 'European high culture'. Calvocoressi lists Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh and Picasso as the artists Bacon appropriated and assimilated. 'The motifs and subjects that obsessed him were: papal imagery; curtains and veils; the open mouth; the cage; circular forms, spaces and structures; the male human body; portraiture; mirrors and reflections; the shadow; the Crucifixion; meat and flesh'.7 Bacon also used 'low art' sources: photographs, magazine cuttings, newspapers. He used the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, 'The Human Figure in Motion' (1887).8 The moment, the chance pose or fluid movement interested Bacon and led him to develop portraits of a fleeting glance or nuance of expression.

David Sylvester, who championed Bacon's work and carried out a series of revealing interviews with the artist, argued that he often chose to work from photographs rather than life because, 'It is easier to make a flat image ... based on the observation of an existing flat image than it is to make a flat image based on the observation of something in the round'.

'In other words', Calvocoressi observes, 'Bacon, who lacked the traditional art-school training of painting or drawing from a living model, found that photographs had already done some of the work of translating three-dimensional form into two-dimensional form for him'.9 Commissioned photographs of friends became aides-memoires. He felt less inhibited when he wanted to distort their faces when they were not present. Sylvester's highly esteemed Interviews with Francis Bacon (1975) became a key source to understanding the complex artist. Sylvester more recently revealed that contrary to the impression given by the artist himself, Bacon did, in fact, do preliminary studies. In one of the later interviews Bacon revealed his aims in painting:

The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person ... Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a kind of coloured photograph of themselves instead of having themselves really trapped and caught. The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation.10

The theatrical nature of Bacon's work is accentuated by formal devices such as his use of the triptych and linear transparent enclosures around figures. 'These paintings are the equivalent in visual art of Bacon's great post-war drama contemporaries - he is the Beckett, Ionesco or Pinter of art'.11 The spotlight in 'Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror' (1968), places him firmly on a stage, a theatre of the absurd. The mirror resembles a painting or even a television screen - art as performance, communication in various forms. Bacon considered that those who found his portraits shocking or offensive, were themselves, cocooned in fantasy, in a world unable to confront uncomfortable truths. He expanded this point:

When I look at you across the table, I don't see you but I see a whole emanation, which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. 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.12

Time has played a part in the recognition of Bacon's complex work, as extended by recent world events, where the confrontation of terrorism has questioned of our faith in humanity anew. 'Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads' is a major exhibition and with the excellent catalogue, succeeds in establishing a heightened awareness into the work of a true prophet.

References
1. Sartre JP. La Nausée. Paris, 1938. See Martin Hammer's discussion in Clearing Away the Screens. In: Hammer M, Bailey P. Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, in association with the British Council, 2005: 18.
2. Berger J. Prophet in a pitiless world. The Guardian, 29 May 2004. Quoted ibid: 15.
3. Russell J. Francis Bacon , London: Thames and Hudson, 1979: 38. Quoted ibid: 17.
4. Jones J. The beast within. The Guardian, 9 August 2005: 13.
5. 'Self-Portraits'. Op. cit: 65.
6. Ibid: 65.
7. Calvocoressi R. Bacon: Public and Private. Ibid: 9.
8. Muybridge E. The Human Figure in Motion (1887). London and New York: Dover Publications, 1955.
9. Calvocoressi R. Op. cit: 10.
10. Bacon to Sylvester, quoted by Hammer, ibid, p.24.
11. Jones. Op. cit: 13.

2) Sally Davies, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Studio International, 30.10.2006. Ref. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, September-December 2006

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts seems like a fitting starting point for this fascinating touring exhibition. During the early part of Francis Bacon's career, the collectors Robert and Lisa Sainsbury provided crucial support to the artist as friends, patrons and, eventually, as financial guarantors, and the 13 works that they purchased in the 1950s provide a valuable foundation for this show, which sheds new light on the development of the painter's practice.

In the exhibition catalogue, Michael Peppiatt, Bacon's biographer and guest curator of the exhibition, describes the 1950s as the period in which Bacon 'came of age as a painter'.1 However, this was by no means a time of contemplative development for the artist: homeless, saddled with debt and caught up in a tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy, Bacon's peripatetic existence could have put a great strain on his ability to work. Nevertheless, Peppiatt portrays this time as the most richly inventive period of Bacon's career, drawing an analogy between these 'Wanderjahre'2 and the artist's search for the appropriate subject matter and technique with which to express himself fully.

Concentrating as it does on this key period in the artist's life, the show cannot help but have a certain biographical emphasis, and Peppiatt's catalogue essay, peppered with anecdotes, acknowledges the continuing fascination that Bacon's life story inspires. However, the selection of work brought together here is no less fascinating. During his lifetime, Bacon was an exacting self-critic, who destroyed, 'lost' and re-bought paintings that he felt were deficient or for which he developed a dislike. Yet it seems that sufficient time has elapsed since Bacon's death in 1992 for Peppiatt to look beyond the standardised canon that the artist fostered, showing works that Bacon would not necessarily have included in a retrospective.

The curator has also sought to illustrate the working processes behind Bacon's oeuvre by displaying some of the archival material, which became available after Bacon's death. In the 'Link' section of the gallery, between the two exhibition spaces, visitors can see an assortment of visual materials recovered from Bacon's London studio by conservators from the Hugh Lane Gallery, including photographs, book plates and magazine cuttings, and a number of drawings lent by Tate. However, Peppiatt has to admit that 'all the sources in the world … will never do more than illuminate the matrix out of which a powerful work of art has emerged'.3 Rather, it is the simultaneous presentation of 50 paintings, including some rarely seen works, which provide the viewer with a detailed insight into Bacon's artistic preoccupations during the 1950s and beyond.

The first room of the exhibition provides an overview of the wide range of subjects that Bacon painted during this decade and it is interesting to see early portraits and familiar studies after Velázquez's 'Pope Innocent X' exhibited next to rare paintings of animals and landscapes. 'Owls' (1956) and 'Figure with Monkey' (1951) are quietly unsettling figurative studies, while 'Elephant Fording a River' (1952) and 'Figure in a Landscape' (1957) explode with uncharacteristic colour and movement. The startling 'Study for a Portrait of van Gogh V' (1957) shows its eponymous subject in a brightly coloured natural setting, casting a strong shadow on the path behind him. This creates a sense of depth, which appears remarkable to viewers more familiar with the claustrophobic interiors of his other work. At the same time however, Bacon was also producing images like 'Study for a Figure VI' (1956-57) showing a man framed by a low ceiling, and the beautiful 'Study of a Nude' (1952-53); a delicate figure suspended or poised to dive at the edge of an imagined space rendered in black, blue and white.

The second room of the show contains a number of portraits and figure studies from the later 50s and early 60s, while the inclusion of 'Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards', from 1984, shows where this work would eventually lead. While the selection of paintings on show here is perhaps less surprising than in the first room, it is still a rich and enjoyable one, with works such as 'Seated Figure' (1961) showing the coming together of Bacon's earlier compositional and technical investigations. Bacon saw painting as 'a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance',4 and his frequent return to certain subjects yielded a wide stylistic variety. Two variations that demonstrate his range are the portraits of Lisa Sainsbury, which are normally dispersed among the Sainsbury Centre's collection. In the 1956 'Portrait of Lisa', Bacon has laid the paint on and then scraped it off, so that the subject is barely present on the canvas, while in the version dated 1957, the paint is laid on so thickly round the eyes and forehead that her face becomes a moulded and gouged mask. This latter approach to portraiture appears again in Bacon's studies from the 1960s of his friends, Isabel Rawsthorne and Lucian Freud. Here, the heavy swirl and strike of the paint transforms brows, noses and mouths into snouts, muzzles, tusks and markings, the primal reading of expression obscuring the figurative appearance of the face beneath.

This invigorating exhibition, which will travel to Milwaukee and Buffalo in 2007, provides a thorough account of Francis Bacon's early practice. It reveals the strength of the Sainsbury Centre's own collection of Bacon works and, in focusing on the 1950s, shows the painter at his most open and experimental, in the process of becoming the iconic artist whose paintings still challenge and compel us today. The exhibition travels to Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA, from 29 January-15 April 2007 and then to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA, from 5 May-30 July 2007.

References
1. Peppiatt M. Francis Bacon in the 1950s. Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, 2006: 14.
2. Ibid: 16.
3. Ibid: 10-11.
4. Ibid: 46.

3) Janet McKenzie, Francis Bacon, Studio International, 30.12.2008. Ref. Centenary retrospective, Tate Britain, London

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) at Tate Britain heralds the artist’s centenary in 2009. It is the first retrospective since 1985, enabling a re-assessment of his work, although the exhibitions in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (2005) and Norwich, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre have been significant. The present exhibition is informed by the revelation, following Bacon’s death in 1992, of the contents of his studio. His working methods were revealed, especially his reliance on photographs.

In interviews, Francis Bacon insisted that he never drew, and that his compositions were intuitive. These claims were refuted by the posthumous revelation of figure studies from the 1950s. Bacon usually commenced painting a figure on to the blank canvas. In 1962 he claimed that the genesis of his paintings came whilst daydreaming. In fact his methods were often more orthodox. The works on paper and lists that came to light after his death indicate that he collected a wide range of material to use as points of reference. The present exhibition, which makes a powerful impact on the viewer, comprises 65 paintings and 13 major triptychs. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date, which examines the artist’s sources, processes and thoughts. It is accompanied by an excellent, scholarly catalogue; edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens; with essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh.1

Widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon can also be seen as one of the most powerful and searing commentators of the human condition in Britain since the Second World War, expressing unflinching images of sexuality, violence and isolation. The exhibition is profound, haunting and iconic. Bacon’s philosophy as an atheist is explored: man in a godless world is presented as simply another animal, subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear. In this Bacon personified the age. The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s was such that the human image in art became increasingly difficult to portray. The existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea (1938), found a visual counterpart in the images of despair and alienation of Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions of Arthur Boyd. For the most part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated because, after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found images of humanity impossible to create.

John Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently wrote:
“He repeatedly painted the human body, in discomfort or agony or want. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical”.2 In spite of the hellish drama expressed, Bacon’s work is inspiring in the very dedication to the craft of painting, and the intellectual dialogue created. This is a profound exhibition, at once challenging and awesome. In spite of the bewilderment that can so often be experienced in confrontation with his painting, there is an unexpected affirmation in the choice of formal language and the precision and care applied to the act of painting: the placement of each head, each brush stroke, every subtle hue, the manner in which the figure inhabits the space, the form within the picture plane. A quiet authority is established by the artist amid the shrieking pain, due in large part to the dialogue he has with art from the past.

Bacon’s sources have been divided by various commentators now, to include ‘high art’ sources and ‘low art’ sources. Bacon chose only the most remarkable artists to aspire to: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Picasso. He also chose inspiration from the modern world: men in suits, modern furniture, dangling light bulbs, gay comic books. He depicted a low-life from gangster boyfriends, heavy drinking and sexually dissipated Colony Room artists and intellectuals, a collision of high and low culture, survival and destruction. Chance played an important role in Bacon’s work – spontaneity was of key importance in a Post-Surrealist context. Although he retained the human figure in his work, he embraced the Abstract Expressionists’ love of chance in art as in life. A primordial energy is central to many works, the Bullfight paintings in 1969 being perfect examples of how Bacon infused the image on canvas with a reckless, fatal movement. Describing the collision of illustration of facts and an expression of the very deepest feelings, Bacon noted: “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. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”3 Bacon had the highest ambition from a young age, claiming that his work should either be in the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between. His ambition as a painter was to define his existential, atheistic stance in a post-photography world. Bacon was a habitual destroyer of paintings; in 1962 he remarked that over-working was a form of destruction, of clogging. Spontaneity was a vital quality, which Bacon sought to capture.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of his life in London, working as a self-taught painter from the 1930s. The human figure was central to his work throughout his long and productive career. He died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Time has played an important part in the appraisal of Bacon’s work; his unflinching approach to violence and the human condition is more poignant than ever. In 1973 he attributed his preoccupation with violence and war to the times in which he grew up, interwar Germany and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland:

I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long time…And then I was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole life had been lived through a time of stress, and then World War Two, anyone who lived through the European wars was affected by them, they affected one’s whole psyche to that extent, to live continuously under an atmosphere of tension and threat.4

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which the most scholarly essays, explore the lasting significance of his work for the present day. Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the inescapable suffering of human existence dominate the exhibition.

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain is broadly chronological. Room One, Animal, examines Bacon’s early work from the 1940s where his attitude to humanity is already evident. His bestial depiction of the human figure combined personal feelings of anxiety with broader references to the Second World War. He used reproductions from books, catalogues and magazines. The male figure is used repeatedly in Bacon’s long career; he often includes a scream or shout to reveal the internal repressed and violent anxieties. The open mouth represents the tension that exists between the individual and the broader context of time and place.

Room Two, Zone, examines Bacon’s work of the 1950s where he carried out complex experiments with pictorial space. He described the processes, in 1952, as ‘an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment’. This work established his easily recognisable images with boxed figures in cage-like structures. Hexagonal ground planes establish tense psychological zones; the use of shuttering, the vertical lines of paint merge the foreground and background. This is the period in which Bacon came of age as a painter. Yet his personal circumstances were extremely difficult: homeless, in debt and in a tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy. During this time he searched for and found appropriate subject -matter with which to express his deepest anxiety. In the 1950s Bacon used the painting by Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, (c.1650), as his starting point to explore the insecurities of the powerful. For Bacon, the choice of the portrait of a Pope had nothing to do with religion; as a non-believer he was concerned with the way man behaves to each other. For Bacon the portrait by Velazquez was one of the greatest portraits ever painted for it opened up feelings and prompted the imagination, beyond any real individual or other art work. The colour is magnificent, prompting Bacon to give his own images a sense of tragic grandeur, a sense of authority in painterly terms. The Pope as a unique figure in the world suited Bacon’s ambition to create a powerful image in which power is stripped of its essence.

Room Three, Apprehension, explores the pervading anxiety in all of Bacon’s work. The Cold War anxiety that limited movement and personal freedom was combined in Bacon’s case with the illegality at the time of homosexuality. His sometimes, violent relationship, with Peter Lacy, is captured in the Man in Blue series, which concentrates on a single anonymous figure in a dark suit. Although inspired by the greatest artists from history, Bacon powerful images are achieved by combining the authority of the history of art, with contemporary life. The figure is portrayed in isolation, sitting at a table or at a bar. Like many artists in the twentieth century, including the Italian Futurists, who worked with the figure, Bacon drew from the photographic work of Edweard Muybridge’s, The Human Figure in Motion, (1887) sequential photographs of animals and humans, which Bacon described as ‘a dictionary’ of the body in motion.

Room Four at Tate Britain is devoted to one of Bacon’s most famous and iconic series, of the Crucifixion. He made works throughout his career at pivotal moments. As an atheist Bacon saw the Crucifixion as a particularly poignant act of man’s violence. Brutality and fear are developed in a particularly cruel evocation of the famous religious scene. The ritual of sacrifice is given a new dimension, the brutality emphasised with extreme abandon. Meat carcasses are used by Bacon to diminish the human notion of superiority in the wider scheme of life according to Christianity. In an early interview Bacon describes how existing images breed others. He chose the Crucifixion by Cimabue as a starting point, but readily admits that without all the paintings that have been done on the subject, his could not have produced his own. Often under the influence of alcohol, and prone to drug abuse, and frequently suffering acute exhaustion, Bacon would create Crucifixion images of profound despair. He also juxtaposes fragments of films, such as those of Eisenstein, and isolated stills allowing accident to play a major part in the creative process. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (c.1944) is a key work and one that paved the way for his use of the triptych format, and numerous later themes and compositions. The bestial depiction of the human figure was central to Bacon’s oeuvre. Displacing the traditional saints in Crucifixion paintings, Bacon later referred to them as Furies from Greek mythology. In interview with David Sylvester in 1966, he was asked about the use of meat carcasses in these and other works. He stated, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses”.5 Being human in Bacon’s world was utterly debased. Bacon took works from the history of art that were created within a spiritual context and slashed them to bits. In this he felt completely justified, for the Vatican never openly condemned Nazism. This was Bacon’s vendetta for the hypocrisy played out in the name of God. Where artists such as Hieronymous Bosch created devastating images of humanity in works such as his Judgement Day paintings, Bacon chose the traditionally edifying form of portraiture, which entails a degree of trust between painter and sitter, and destroyed it. His disturbing papal images are like the burning of an effigy, leaving the viewer with a sense of physical revulsion.

Room Five Crisis, focuses on the period 1956-1961. Bacon travelled widely in Monaco, France and Africa, mostly with Peter Lacy. He used new methods of painting, choosing thicker paint, strong colour, often violently applied. Using a self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, as his source and inspiration, Bacon painted works that were criticised for their ‘reckless energy’. With hindsight the energy and drama in these works was necessary in introducing chance into the painting process itself.

Room Six is the Archive in the Tate’s exhibition, based on the revelations made by scholars after Bacon’s death. The source material found in Bacon’s studio revealed his reliance on photography and other sources that had not been fully examined during Bacon’s lifetime. There were photographs of athletes, film stills and reproductions of works of art. Further, his practice of commissioning photographs of his friends by John Deakin was fully realised, and formed an important component of the exhibition in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, (2005). Bacon also took many photographs himself, preferring to draw from photographs, for they were already two-dimensional images. In his studio there were also lists of potential subjects and preparatory drawings, which Bacon had denied making, preferring to emphasise the spontaneous nature of the act of painting directly onto canvas.

Room Seven Portrait, is important given the findings in Bacon’s studio. In descriptions in interviews, most famously those with David Sylvester, Bacon describes his intention to reinvent portraiture. He drew upon the works he admired of Velazquez and Van Gogh. His abiding concern was how a painter should create portraits in an age dominated by photography. He distorted the sitter’s appearance in order to extract a greater, more complete likeness, informed by internal issues of personality and mood. George Dyer his lover is depicted with a mixture of affection and contempt. Three Figures in Room, (1964) expresses a range of human characteristics including absurdity, pathos, and isolation.

Room Eight Memorial, is dedicated to George Dyer, Bacon’s closest companion and model from the autumn of 1963. Two days before the opening of Bacon’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer committed suicide. The void created by Dyer’s death, under such tragic circumstances prompted Bacon to produce a number of works in his memory. The large-scale triptych suited the grand nature of Bacon’s statements, enabling him to isolate and juxtapose simultaneously. The energy in these works is overwhelming. The depths of despair experienced in the loss of his lover, are expressed with consummate skill and heartfelt anguish. Bacon told Sylvester shortly after Dyer’s death: “You don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal” He referred to his repeated depiction of homosexual copulation as a form of exorcism. Although he regretted its ‘sensational nature’, he was compelled to paint, Triptych, May-June, 1973, “to get it out of his system”. As well as repeated posthumous images of Dyer, he also made numerous self-portraits.6

Room Nine, Epic, examines the work Bacon produced in response to poetry and literature, particularly the work of T.S Eliot. Bacon was emphatic in wanting to make works that evoked the meaning and mood of the written word. They were not illustrations.

For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me. As for my latest triptych and a few other canvases painted after I read Aeschylus. I tried to create images of the episodes created inside me. I could not paint Agamemnon. Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting when all is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an image of the effect that was produced inside me. Perhaps realism is always subjective when it is most profoundly expressed.7

Bacon felt a great affinity for poetry, perhaps more so than contemporary art. He appreciated a wide range of poetry ranging from the work of Aeschylus, W.B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and especially T.S. Eliot. From Aeschylus’ Oresteia Bacon found an evocative image: “the reek of human blood smiles out at me”.8 In turn Bacon admired T.S. Eliot’s recasting of Greek tragedy, seeing in it an appropriate model for modern society. Bacon appreciated Eliot’s preoccupation with, ‘mortality, the pathetic futility and solitude of life’, and the manner in which he located ‘those existential conditions within a specific set of modern circumstances’.9

Bacon’s description of the tightrope between abstraction and figuration can also be used for poetry. “You have to abbreviate into intensity”, he remarked, also an apt description for Eliot’s poetry. Bacon chose painting to assuage the futility of life as he saw it. “I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game within reason... You can be optimistic and totally without hope”. Later, he said, “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our existence”.10 By contrast, Eliot had a Christian faith and belief in an afterlife.

The use of triptych, Bacon insisted was its resistance to narrative: “it breaks the series up and prevents it having a story, that’s why the three panels are always framed separately”. Yet the sequence created by three canvases side by side could equally create a story through the interrelatedness of the three images and specific references within each. Specific intended meaning is always speculative in Bacon’s work. The triptych emphasises Bacon’s fascination with theatrical devices to observe the human condition. Likewise Eliot’s Wasteland, ‘describes specific scenes and events but does not tie them to a single story’.11

Room Ten Late, examines the last decade of Bacon’s life. The confrontation with mortality was an abiding theme in his work, having lost key figures in his life already. In 1993 he stated: “Life and death go hand in hand …Death is like the shadow of life. When you’re dead, you’re dead, but while you’re alive, the idea of death pursues you”.12 The very black paintings made in the 1970s which confronted the death of George Dyer, gave way to more contemplative works, with a palpable restraint and composure. In several paintings he draws on his admiration for the work of the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Numerous reproductions of Ingres’ work were found in his studio, which he combined with incongruous images from sporting figures. Bacon also employed a controlled element of chance by throwing paint at the canvas. The aftermath of violence, blood gushing from a victim onto the pavement, for example, Bacon found exhilarating. Blood on Pavement, (c1988) is presented with the artist’s extraordinary detachment. “Things are not shocking if they haven’t been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it’s just blood splattered against a wall.”13 The theme of detachment from violence and suffering is achieved throughout Bacon’s oeuvre, from an early Wound for a Crucifixion (c.1934) to the Bullfight works in the 1960s to Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, (1983). The last paintings are the antithesis of Bacon’s early frenzied works, and have been criticised for being formulaic and lacking in tension. They have a monumentality and order, yet returning to the same themes that had occupied him for forty years. His last triptych of 1991 returns to the issue of sexual struggle, which permeates much of his life’s work. His most private feelings are laid bare, and to which he referred in 1971/3, “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not trying to say anything”.14

References
1. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, Francis Bacon, Tate Publishing, London, 2008.
2. John Berger, “Prophet in a pitiless world”, The Guardian, 29 May 2004.
3. Gale and Stephens, “On the Margin of the Impossible”, op.cit., p.26.
4. Quoted by Stephens, “Epic”, op.cit., p.218.
5. Quoted by Matthew Gale, “Crucifixion”, ibid, p.137.
6. Chris Stephens, “Epic”, ibid, p.214.
7. Ibid, p.216.
8. Gale and Stephens, op.cit., p.26.
9. Ibid, p.26.
10. Ibid, p.26.
11.“Epic”, op.cit., p. 213.
12. Rachel Tant, “Late”, p.233.
13. Ibid, p.233.
14. Ibid, p.237.

Art Documents: Francis Bacon, Remarks

2010-03-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

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Bacon, interview with Melvyn Bragg, South Bank Show, London, 1985

3. The Art of Francis Bacon, with Derek Jacobi quoting the painter, UK: Illuminations, 2007

Wrestlers' contact sheets, 1975

2010-03-12T04:12:00.000-08:00

Peter Conrad, Grappling with Francis Bacon, The Guardian, 14.2.2010. "Previously unseen images of wrestlers made in Bacon's studio demonstrate the artist's love of the visceral. / 'Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants?' ... The wrestling session commissioned by Francis Bacon.

Two bodies in a bare, drab room, experimentally trying all the things they can do to each other, from grappling, groping sex to choke holds and karate chops: here is a privileged, confidential glimpse of Francis Bacon's secret theatre, never seen before. It comes from a pile of contact sheets given by Bacon to an electrician who worked in his south Kensington studio [...].
Nothing is known about this long session of polymorphous play. Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants, obliged to wear swimming caps that make them look like medical orderlies kitted out for surgery? Where was the room, which might be called clinical if only the sheet on the floor were cleaner and smoother? And who gave the orders, sitting behind the anonymous photographer and directing the two men as they showed off wrestling holds? That presumably was Bacon: he commissioned the photographs, and used a felt pen to mark the images he fancied, sketching a red cage around the hired thugs.
Bacon admired photographer Eadweard Muybridge's studies of bodies in motion, which treat the physique as an apparatus with elegantly calibrated, agile parts. But his own version of those athletic displays is perverse, an exercise in abstracting the body by force. Picasso would have appreciated the frames in which the two men, wrestling or perhaps sexually coupling, merge into a monstrous quadruped with a pair of arses, one trailing dislocated arm, and no head.
They have come together to cause each other pain: a wrestling bout is the spectacle of physical agony, accompanied by grunts, groans, cries of excruciation. Unlike boxing, wrestling has no neatly aimed knock-out blows, no strict sporting etiquette. Here the coup de grace is delivered with an elbow or the back of a hand, after which one man shoulders the other and carts him off like dead meat. Bacon was a connoisseur of abbatoirs, and all that's missing in these photographs is blood, although the scrap of tape on the corner looks like the trace of some intimate, dried-up fluid. Or does this stand for the imprint of Bacon's thumb, gripping the page and depositing an equivalent to the smudges left on the floorcloth by the soles of the wrestlers' dirty feet?
Like Greek tragedy, it is all a performance, as the men demonstrate when they forget their feud and start to jump and skip or dive into a non-existent pool. Opposed moods chase each other across the page like black and white, the two extremes of the photographic spectrum. Brutality at the top left changes to friskiness at the bottom right. But the change happens imperceptibly: sex often looks, and almost always sounds, like murder.
The detail that intrigues me most is the light socket halfway up the wall. [...] Apart from any clue it might give about time and place, it functions, like every object in a Bacon painting, as a memento mori. In this impromptu gymnasium, energetic life goes through its paces, and soon enough confronts death; the light that floods the scene is raw and harsh, but the current can be turned off in an instant. Then perhaps an image will materialise in that dark, empty square at the centre. Some photographs – the nastiest, the most cruelly truthful – have to be looked at with your eyes closed.

Anonymous photographer, Men Wrestling, contact sheet [42], New York, c. 1975. Vintage silver gelatin print with Francis Bacon working drawings on surface, 16.5 x 20 inches. Found at the painter's studio (Michael Hoppen, TEFAF, Maastricht). A series of wrestling photographs were commissioned by Francis Bacon in c 1975. Bacon used these images as working documents to paint from as he did with Muybridge's photographic sequences. The document comes from Bacon's studio. Other similar examples reside in the Hugh Lane Collection in Dublin. Cf. Martin Harrison, In Camera, p. 192 (TEFAF).

Concerning Bacon, typical of the media is to insist again and again on the morbidity of his imagery. The photographs of a couple of men wrestling men constitute no big revelation at all. Bacon's interest in this type of imagery is known to all of us and from the very begining. One only needs to check the sources. Muybridge's sequences of men wrestling in the nude communicate the type of immediacy Bacon was looking for. This is not the first time Bacon had commissioned photographs from somebody (remember, for example, the Deakin photographs of the 1960s). The contact sheets show Bacon's concern with physicality: tension, movement and change. In this, Bacon follows a long art-historical tradition. The pics in the contact sheets also convey theatricality. It should be noted that the material requested by Bacon has little to do with a tragedy and quite a lot of tragicomedy and grotesqueness.

Bacon's Studio: A Deeply Ordered Chaos

2010-02-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

Is Francis Bacon's atelier chaotic? In a sense, yes. It is also consistent with a grotesquely suggestive idea expressed by the artist himself (in numerous interviews which took place in the second half of the twentieth century). Indeed, Bacon's studio happens to be compatible with his cherished image of "a deeply ordered chaos."
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1. "The 1930 Look in British Decoration," Studio, Vol. 100, August 1930, pp. 140-41
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2. Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon in his Studio, photograph, 1959
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3. Jorge Lewinski, Francis Bacon in his Studio, photograph, 1963
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4. John Deakin, Peter Lacy in Bacon's Studio, photograph, c. 1964
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5. Francis Bacon’s Studio, photograph, c. 1975. Mac Robertson Collection, London
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6. Francis Bacon in his Reece Mews Studio, 1977
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7
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8. Jesse Fernandez, Francis Bacon in his Studio, photograph, 1978
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9
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10. Bruce Bernard, Francis Bacon in his Studio, photograph, 1984
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11. Perry Odgen, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio, photograph, 2001
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13. John Edwards, Francis Bacon in his Studio, photograph, 1984
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14. Perry Odgen, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio, photograph, 2001.
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15. Odgen, 7 Reece Mews, 2001
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16
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17
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18. Francis Bacon once said: “Images [...] help me find and realize ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.”
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19. Odgen, 7 Reece Mews, 2001
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20. Ibid.
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21. Ibid.
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22. Ibid.
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23. Linda McCartney, Francis Bacon's Studio, London, photograph detail, 1997
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24. Edwards, Bacon in his Studio, 1984

25

Pride and Prejudice

2010-02-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

Coulter, Gerry. "Please... Just Make It Go Away," Euroart Web Magazine, Issue 10, Fall 2009.

“This painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world. […] Bacon is Ruskin’s antitype: in his ferocious sexual frankness, of course, but most of all in his denial that human life has any ‘higher purpose’, or that art and nature connect us in some way to God” (Robert Hughes, 2008).

I. Introduction
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective (66 paintings and 65 objects from his studio) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET) seeks to reevaluate the artist’s work based on new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992. The exhibition was organized by Gary Tinterow of the MET (along with Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale of the Tate Britain). The main point of the show is to demonstrate that Bacon did not lose his force and vitality as a painter after the 1960’s (he lived until 1992). The show, which succeeds in this goal, has already appeared at the Tate Britain, London, and the Prado in Madrid. A major Bacon retrospective is an event and an important part of such an event includes the critical reception of it. As such, I’ll not only discuss the show at the MET (§ III) but also its critical reception (§ II). Most of New York’s leading art critics are so charged with predetermined vitriol for Bacon the man, and for his art, that it seems they would have preferred the show never took place. Bacon is a challenging artist and it appears that New York critics were not prepared to meet the challenges laid down by the exhibition.

Mariano Akerman, Connoisseur (after Brueghel the Elder), 2010

II. Critical Responses to Bacon’s Centenary Shows
a) New York
Taken as a whole, the response of New York critics to the MET show is at best unfortunate, and at worst, embarrassing. The most intelligent and sensitive of the New York reviewers was Roberta Smith (2009). She explained Bacon’s significant contributions to artistic representation, including his path-breaking images of male-male sexuality, but could not stop herself from referring to the artist’s best known works as barely paintings.
Howard Halle unfavourably compares Bacon’s works to popular American horror films (Jason and Freddy Krueger in particular). Halle finds Bacon’s work “hard to take seriously” and most of his review does not. We learn more about Bacon’s choice of lovers than his art in this review. Halle acknowledges that Bacon was among the first to foreground photographs as subject matter for painting but ultimately finds his canvases “a bit of a mess”. In the end Halle finds it all “oppressive”.
Lance Esplund (2009) calls the Bacon show “a histrionic horror show”. Like other critics it is the surface tortures on the body in Bacon’s painting that Esplund finds most objectionable. Bacon’s influence has been a bad one says Esplund as he has led a generation “to take the path of least resistance”. Like many critics labouring under the burden of American mythologies of abstraction from an earlier generation of critics (Rosenberg and Greenberg in particular), Esplund is bothered by Bacon’s “mannerism”. Why is it that calling an artist a mannerist today in America is [...] damning [...]? Is it such a terrible thing for an artist to find his or her idiom and to elaborate upon it in ways that show us how the work was made? I think even Barnett Newman would be amazed at his lingering influence on New York critics today. Must all painting be flat, abstract, and look as though any one artist could have produced all of the works in a room?
Jerry Saltz (2009) says that Bacon is more of a cartoonist than a great artist. Bacon is “an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst”. What seems to touch a nerve with Saltz, who claims to have also seen the Bacon show at the Tate and the Prado (for someone who dislikes Bacon’s work he certainly goes out of his way to see it), is the tortured nature of Bacon’s figures at which viewers “gape in wonder”. Americans are perhaps more sensitive about images of tortured figures since photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse by American GIs, at Abu Ghraib prison, grabbed headlines in the world’s magazines and newspapers. Perhaps Americans have not yet come to terms with being torturers and would rather that such things happen quietly, elsewhere in the night. The future of the naïve posture of American exceptionalism may depend on it.
Saltz offers up perhaps the most shallow critical comment of the year when he adds: “Bacon has no idea what to do with the edges of his paintings”. If Bacon’s edges trouble Saltz one can only wonder how he feels about all the edges of geometric abstraction. Ironically, British critic Adrian Searle (2008) notes that the edges of Bacon’s canvases are as controlled as those of Barnett Newman!
Saltz says Bacon stagnated after the 1960’s – a ludicrous claim as I show in § III). Mark Rothko is invoked in whose shadow Bacon “seems mannered, conservative, simplistic”. The presence of Rothko is interesting here in that Saltz accuses Bacon of ceasing to innovate. That said Bacon’s Blood on the Sidewalk and a late Rothko sit rather well beside one another.

[Bacon has incorporated the colors standing for Pan-Arabism in his picture. But nobody has written a word about it, as this may involve prickly matters, such as considering the question "If you prick us, do we not bleed?". As I've wrote in 1999 and later, Bacon's suggestions involve considerable grotesqueness. On this aspect, see also Alyson Muezer's 2004 overview on The Grotesque in Twentieth-Century Art].

Jed Perl (2009) charges Bacon with “preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism”. Bacon produced, says Perl: “not paintings… [but] rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti: angst for dummies”. Perl, who has erected for himself a lofty reputation as one of America’s foremost priggs, doesn’t like the “fact” (which is never established), that Bacon, like Caravaggio “is admired not because he was a good painter but because he was a bad boy”. To me this is utter nonsense. Bacon’s social “respectability” seems to still be an issue in New York – it is interesting that Perl chose the gay Caravaggio as another overrated “bad boy”. Perhaps what troubles Perl, and the right wing magazine he writes for, is that he might have to sincerely engage with Bacon’s homosexuality to take his art seriously. Perl, like many of the other New York critics, won’t allow Bacon the status of a painter and here he puts him in very good company [...].
If Bacon is aggressive it is only in shoving our face into an uncertain rendering of what we are – in all of our unspectacular, unholy, ignoble bestiality. Bacon’s Crucifixion represents not only his positive encounter with Picasso’s work but, in displaying the dead Christian God as Soutine presented a carcass of beef [...], the artist stresses the lack of holiness, nobility, and hence increases the kind of uncertainty that those who ascribe divinity to Jesus Christ attempt to stave off. Perl wants no uncertainty, no irony, nor anything unsettled – while living in a country up to its neck in all of these things. But that is the point isn’t it? Many American critics find Bacon so hard to take today because he painted unsettling and uncertain images which are like portraits of not only his own life – but the living life of history today. Many Americans have had enough of that history – it ended, they hope, with the beginning of the new order on the morning of September 12, 2001. For Perl Bacon leads a revulsion against painting and refuses to probe the meaning of Bacon’s remark that (like someone who has just finished eating a steak) “we live off one another”.
What is striking about most of the New York based reviews is that they do not often mention the paintings (if so only one or two) and objects on view. It is as though most critics attending the Bacon show at the MET had an axe to grind with Bacon and their mind was made up before going to the museum. I wonder if it is really Bacon the New York critics detest or is it the fact that he reminds us just how intolerable life has become – even in the [...] U.S.A. The isolated figures in “cages and boxes” make Perl, like so many other critics, uncomfortable. “Shock tactics” Perl says. Maybe so, but with all those gaping mouths on the gallery goer’s faces maybe what we have here is a genuine case of “shock and awe”.
b) Critical responses to Bacon at the TATE Britain.
While London too experienced a horrific terror attack (7/7) the damage done to New York by the attacks of 9/11 may have done significant harm to the city’s aspirations to be a world cultural capital. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (New York’s famous 9/11 mayor) perhaps indicated best the damage done to New Yorker’s higher cultural aspirations when he called for censorship (a decency panel) in deciding what could hang on the walls on New York’s museums. Most of New York’s art critics would not openly support such a position of course but it is interesting that the response to the current Bacon show has come together as one loud and pathetic plea: “please… just make it go away!”
Unlike their American counterparts, the British critics tended to focus more sincerely on the paintings on display and to take seriously the new research on Bacon which the MET show also stressed. Unlike most American reviewers, who often went out of their way to deride Bacon the man and the painter, the British critics arrive at his work with an acknowledgement that his art is simply an accepted aspect of contemporary culture (as are the Rolling Stones, the Internet, Picassos, or Americans. The British critics write with an élan and cosmopolitanism that we once would have expected from now increasingly insular New York. To the Brits the fact that many view humanity as just [any] another animal in a universe without God, subject to the same urges and violence [proper to the beasts] (Bacon’s understanding), is an accepted (if intolerable) aspect of existence. The British responses to the Bacon show did not seek to protect the public from Bacon [the message of New York critics is clearly “avoid this show”] but rather to see him in a new light (the focus of the exhibition). It is not the case that the British critics like Bacon because he is British and the American’s dislike him as a foreigner. While a little of that may underwrite the position of the reviewers what is fundamentally different about the British reviews is their willingness to take Bacon seriously – something the American critics so refuse to do and it prevents them from penetrating the surface of his canvases.
Among British critics John McAuliffe (2008) is typical in his focus on the art on display rather than feeling uncomfortable with Bacon’s “bad boy” reputation or his images. McAuliffe demands a show that does more with the artist and his work – especially his relation to abstract art which Bacon came very close to at times despite the care he took to express distain for it. [... Yet] much more could have been done with this artist who straddled both figurative and abstract realms (but not necessarily realism).
John Molyneux (2008), writing from a leftist perspective, encourages the Left not to reject Bacon’s work. Molyneux goes on to make an interesting, if unconvincing, argument that Bacon is staring down alienation as a man who takes on the horror of the world. In Bacon Molyneux finds hope for resistance. In Britain, apparently, even the socialists approve of Bacon’s art. One can only wonder: Do New York socialists, their newspapers having long ago been forcibly closed down during a succession of communist witch-hunts, like Bacon too?
Rachel Campbell-Johnston (2008) tellingly, in strong contrast to her American counterparts, penetrates the shocking and disturbing aspects of Bacon’s oeuvre and finds in it philosophical depth and sumptuousness. The straightforward correlations between art and life which so occupied American reviewers are found to be reductive by Campbell-Johnston. Indeed, a key point of the show is that Bacon’s work derived from images he encountered and kept in his studio as much as from his life. Unlike the New York critics, Campbell-Johnston analyzes and penetrates her own biases and fears to take seriously the fact that Bacon offered us a unique depiction of the meaninglessness of life in modern times. Typical only of the British critics she isn’t embarrassed when she admires Bacon and his work.
Tom Lubbock (2008) notes [...] that mature critics and gallery goers have experienced a great change of view toward his art, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Lubbock says that Bacon’s work, which “used to look like death” now “looks like life in abundance”. Lubbock, like none of the New York critics, delves into Bacon’s work to find not merely violence and things that disturb the faint of heart, but also comedy, tenderness, and the artist’s generosity. Like most London based critics Lubbock refuses to be distracted by the theatricality of Bacon’s images as most New York critics were (by their own admission they went looking for it). Lubbock though seems to anticipate precisely what may have been the biggest problem the Americans would have with Bacon: “He doesn’t have any puritan qualms about being gorgeous. He’s a vulgar entertainer”.
Charles Darwent (2008) focused on Bacon’s painterliness (no tirades about mannerism here) and his [...] use of colour and its role in Bacon’s understanding of evil as generic. The American critics do not speak of evil. As far as colour is concerned Bacon came alive after the early 1960s – why don’t the New York critics (who normally speak to colour with great expertise) recognize this?
Finally, Adrian Searle (2008) weighs the reasons why we might admire Bacon’s work one moment, and dismiss him the next. Searle captures very well the ambivalence Bacon’s work arouses in some critics while not forsaking his job as a critic to assess the work on display. Searle believes that Bacon’s best work was behind him by the 1960s but he is willing to assess the work, make his case for and against it, and to present an understanding of its seductiveness, plausibility, and relation it holds to the horrors of the twentieth century. Searle’s review, while ultimately turning a thumb down to Bacon, does so in an analytical and sensitive manner which was lacking in the New York critics. What Searle is aware of is that one can be distracted by the artist’s life and hence he is very careful not to let this get in the way of his criticism of the specific paintings. Searle, unlike the New York critics, relishes the experience of being taken out of his comfort zone and this allows him to criticize Bacon in a much more convincing manner.

III. Bacon at the MET
For my part I did not know that we required a Bacon retrospective in order to demonstrate something which has long struck me as obvious – that Bacon does not lose force as he ages. Indeed, I have thought of it the other way around – if anything, his artistic powers strengthened and became slightly more polished with time. Witness his last great Triptych of 1991 and his Portrait of John Edwards, 1988 (both on display at the MET). There is a precision and an economy of means in each which tells us that we are dealing with a more mature version of the man who painted George Dyer in Three Figures in a Room (1964) or any of the popes for which he is so well known. Bacon’s great care over these late works is not surprising as they include the two men most important to him at the end. In the 1991 Triptych Bacon’s Spanish Lover [left panel] bears a remarkable resemblance to that of then Brazilian Formula-1 race car driver Ayrton Senna (whom Bacon painted from a magazine cover).
The 1991 Triptych is refined and accomplished and to me it is the last of his masterpieces – one that gathers up everything he ever knew about art and life and brings it to bear in these images. Bacon shows himself in the frame on the right – his face painted from a Polaroid of himself which he liked from the late 1960s. Interestingly, Bacon who was 82 when he painted this work, represents himself (and his significantly younger lover) as highly sexualized males. Two male figures are shown coupling in the middle frame. So much of Bacon’s severe philosophy (humanity is an accident – we live, we love, we die), is here in this extraordinary image. The whole story goes untold however and the enigma remains in all of Bacon’s triptych’s as Gilles Deleuze recognized three decades ago. Deleuze also saw the triptych as a form which allowed Bacon to engage in figurative painting without surrendering to conventional story-telling (Deleuze, 1981; see also Nochlin, 2008). The 1991 Triptych shows that Deleuze’s insight would remain relevant of Bacon’s painting to the end.
The Portrait of John Edwards is a painting of the man in London whom Bacon was closest to at the end – his illiterate heir and gentle companion. Edwards is an image of temporality – especially the unfixed nature of identity – a subject on which Bacon is the absolute master. The portrait of Edwards shows the man disappearing before our eyes. His left foot, and even the chair upon which he sits, have begun to dissolve into a puddle and his arms have evaporated. All that is solid melts into air [...], right before our eyes. Bacon understood that we capture, at best, only a fleeting glimpse of the real which is hidden under appearances which we rarely penetrate and then never for very long (see Coulter, 2007). Like so many of Bacon’s paintings the Portrait of John Edwards is painted from a photograph – the artist shifting his perspective to the left of an image which was originally taken straight on – of his former lover George Dyer.
Among the strengths of the MET show is the way in which it brings so much archival material (found in Bacon’s studio at the time of his death), to bear on his paintings. So many of these images have not simplified our understanding of Bacon but added a delicious complexity. This is only appropriate as Bacon’s paintings do not make our world more commonsensical, but rather, make it more enigmatic (Ibid). The MET show gave us a more complex Francis Bacon.
If Bacon’s work began to weaken in the late 1960’s (the dominant New York critical position), then you cannot see evidence of it in Bacon’s paintings of his friend and lover Isabel Rawsthorne. His paintings of Rawsthorne are not simply great; they are among the most sensitive images of woman painted by a man in the later half of the twentieth century. Rawthorne (who was also a model for Giacometti) is shown in one of her then fashionable outfits as a woman about town. She is shown looking cautiously (?) over her left shoulder at a bestial figure moving behind her in the street. We are left uncertain as to how she feels about this attention as that enigmatic swirl of paint representing unknowability appears in the middle of her face and she is just about to step out of the light into the darkness.
If, in a thousand years, this Portrait of Rawsthorne is the last surviving work by Bacon then people in the future will still know the artist. It will be possible for them to know what it was like to be a figurative painter while acknowledging the impossibility of realism. They will also know both the excitement and danger present for women in the streets of the great cities of the end of the second millennium.
If Bacon is exhausted by the 1960’s why then does his best portrait (of Michel Leiris) not appear until 1976? This is another way of asking why is it that critics cannot let go of the popes and heads of the 1940s and 1950s and realize that the portraits replaced them as a more sensitive and subtle (yet still highly evocative) form for Bacon? [...] Leiris is a wonderful portrait which is a strong likeness. The rest, as in all of Bacon’s portraits, remains behind the mask. There is a significant epistemology of identity at work in this manner of representation for which Bacon has not received sufficient credit (see Coulter, 2007). Leiris is also indicative of Bacon’s deep admiration for Picasso. This portrait, an homage to Picasso, is as close as Bacon ever came to cubism – it is also a great tribute to Leiris [...].
If Bacon is “over” by the 1960s then why do we find so much innovation in his later works? This includes a move into landscapes which are, according to an insightful take by MET curator Gary Tinterow, Bacon’s way of engaging with abstraction on his own terms (see Tinterow, 2009). Perhaps his Jet of Water is the best of these works in the MET show.
Against the narrativizations of abstraction Bacon uses abstract elements to reference the unknowable and enigmatic. Bacon’s genius is for touching on temporality without narration. He pushes the swirl of unknowability out into the face and in Jet of Water across the surface of an everyday scene. That white splash is a portrait of time itself, frozen, in the act of wasting each of us.

IV. Conclusion
Bacon’s work doesn’t attempt to lift us up rather; it puts us in our place and forces us to look at ourselves. It does so with sympathy and a generosity of spirit.
Why do Bacon’s popes scream? Surely because, after World War II, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the pope realizes that only a few believe in God. [...].
Bacon is not as violent as he is raw. I do not find him hysterical but he is very intense. When such a number of his works appear in one place the artist is humanized and it is a lack of recognition of this that makes so many of the words of the New York critics ring hollow. For them Bacon’s raw intensity cannot be just another view of us, he cannot be just like the rest of us – his vision cannot count as does “ours”. [...].
The Metropolitan Museum has been attempting (with some success) to better serve contemporary culture over the past twenty years. The Bacon retrospective fits well into this programme and behind the show there has been some excellent curating and sound scholarship. [...]
Every nasty thing the New York critics had to say about Bacon is true but only if you are willing to protect yourself in a prejudiced insular shroud before viewing Bacon’s work. Bacon does paint exaggerated figures, some of his work might be hysterical, it may not be gruesome but that’s a fair word, and his palate provokes the eye. Bacon is also not a better painter than Ingres, Velasquez, or Picasso – but he never claimed to be [so]. Bacon had no illusions about his talent – far less than the New York critics managed to invent. When you are in the presence of his work, without prejudice, without the enormous weight of American modernism on your shoulders, you can simply relish the experience – the way Bacon’s paintings attract and repel at the same time. The ugly is as attractive as the beautiful – it is the lesson of fashion shows for the past fifty years.
Most intelligent people who find themselves with Bacon’s work, no matter how it may challenge them, realize how fortunate they are to be in its presence. This is something the British critics were very aware of unlike their American counterparts who fail, spectacularly, to explain why Bacon’s work is so compelling. While the New York critics attempted to convince everyone that Bacon’s work is a horror show, it isn’t good, it isn’t even painting, let alone compelling art – the people came in droves as to any major art event. In the rooms there were, as at all Bacon shows, many open mouths – not only the ones in the paintings – so many viewers transfixed and moving much more slowly than people tend to do in museums. The only horror actually present in the event was the embarrassing criticism. What irony that Bacon – the painter who understood and represented, perhaps better than anyone else in his century, the anxieties which swirl around seeing – is treated in this manner in the city Baudrillard described as “the epicenter of the end of the world” (2002:14).
Bacon’s work may suggest violence but no one is tormenting his characters more than they are themselves within the confines of the social. The social is the greatest terrorist the individual will ever face and Bacon, a gay man in London when gay men were put in jail, understood that very well. In 2009 he still isn’t acceptable among New York art critics. New York really is not the centre of the art world anymore and its critics show it to be, in the case of Bacon, no longer a cultural capital either. [...].

References
Baudrillard, Jean, and Jean Nouvel. The Singular Objects of Architecture, University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Coulter, Gerry. “Overcoming the Epistemological Break. Francis Bacon and Jean Baudrillard and the Intersections of Art and Theory,” Euro Art Magazine, no. 5, Winter 2007
Campbell-Johnston, Rachel. "Francis Bacon at Tate Britain," The Times, London, 9.9.2008
Darwent, Charles. "Francis Bacon, Tate Britain," The Independent, 14.9.2008
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sensation (1981), University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Esplund, Lance. "A Histrionic Horror Show," The Wall Street Journal, 5.7.2009
Halle, Howard. "Francis Bacon. A Centenary Retrospective," Time Out, New York, 2009
Hughes, Robert. "Horrible!," The Guardian, 30.8.2008
Lubbock, Tom. "All hail a vulgar entertainer. Francis Bacon retrospective," The Independent, 10.9.2008.
McAuliffe, John. "Francis Bacon – Tate Britain," The Manchester Review, 21.11.2008
Molyneux, John. "Francis Bacon at Tate Britain," Socialist Review, 2008
Nochlin, Linda, et al., “Francis Bacon,” Tate Etc., Issue 14, 2008
Perl, Jed. "Slaughterhouse – Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective," The New Republic, 17.6.2009
Saltz, Jerry. "Francis Bacon at the MET," New York Magazine, 25.4.2009
Smith, Roberta. "If paintings had voices Francis Bacon’s would shriek. Francis Bacon, A Centenary Retrospective," New York Times, 21.5.2008
Tinterow, Gary. Interview with Charlie Rose, 2009.

Caricature: Francis Bacon, by Andrés Cascioli. It shows part of the left-hand panel of Bacon's Three Studies for a Self-Portrait of 1979-80, a small triptych that belongs to the MET.

"If a man begins with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content with doubts he shall end in certainties." Sir Francis Bacon

Centenary Exhibition 2009. Paintings, sources of inspiration and other work documents

2009-12-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

Francis Bacon (self-taught painter, 1909-1992), Centenary Exhibition. Tate Gallery, London; Museo del Prado, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum, New York. 2009. List of works and archive items numbered and edited by Mariano Akerman

• Paintings

Crucifixion, 1933. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 47 cm. London, Murderme

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c. 1944. Oil on board, each 94 x 73.7 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Figure in a Landscape, 1945. Oil on canvas, 144.8 x 128.3 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Figure Study I, 1945-46. Oil on canvas, 123 x 105.5 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Figure Study II, 1945-46. Oil on canvas, 145 x 129 cm. Huddersfield Art Gallery

Painting, 1946. Oil and pastel on linen, 197.8 x 132.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Head I, 1947–48. Oil and tempera on board, 100.3 x 74.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Head II, 1949. Oil on canvas, 80 x 63.3 cm. Ulster Museum, Belfast

Head VI, 1949. Oil on canvas, 93.2 x 76.5 cm. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

Study from the Human Body, 1949. Oil on canvas, 147 x 134.2 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Study after Velazquez, 1950. Oil on canvas, 197.8 x 137.4 cm. Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection

Pope I – Study after Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, 1951. Oil on canvas, 197.8 x 137.4 cm. Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Study of a Dog, 1952. Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 137.2 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Study for Crouching Nude, 1952. Oil on canvas, 198 x 137.2 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts

Untitled (Two Figures in the Grass), c. 1952. Oil on canvas, 147.3 x 132.2 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London

Study of a Nude, 1952-3. Oil on canvas, 59.7 x 49.5 cm. Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich

Man with Dog, 1953. Oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. Oil on canvas, 153 x 118 cm. Des Moines Art Center

Study for a Portrait, 1953. Oil on canvas, 152.2 x 118 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle

Study for a Portrait, 1953. Oil on canvas, 197 x 137 cm. Hess Art Collection, Bern

Study of a Baboon, 1953. Oil on canvas, 198.3 x 137.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Figure Study II, 1953-55. Oil on canvas, 198 x 137 cm. Private Collection [Shown only in Madrid]

Man in Blue IV, 1954. Oil on canvas, 198 x 137 cm. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna

Man in Blue V, 1954. Oil on canvas, 198 x 137 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Chimpanzee, 1955. Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 117 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake),
Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Figure in a Mountain Landscape, 1956. Oil on canvas, 152 x 119 cm. Kunsthaus Zurich

Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962. Oil on canvas, each 198.2 x 144.8 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Figures in a Landscape, 1956-57. Oil on canvas, 150 x 107.5 cm. Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI, 1957. Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 142.2 cm. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin, 1957. Oil on canvas, 198 x 142 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours (from Muybridge), 1961. Oil on canvas, 198 x 142 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague

Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier, 1963. Oil on canvas, 198 x 145 cm. Private collection, London

Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963. Oil on canvas, each 35.3 x 35.5 cm. Private Collection

Three Figures in a Room, 1964. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Crucifixion, 1965. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1965. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Basel

Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 68.6 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Henrietta Moraes, 1966. Oil on canvas, 146 x 152 cm. Private collection

Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 1967. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, 1967. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Study of George Dyer in Mirror, 1968. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere

Lying figure, 1969. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Basel

Three Studies for Portraits including Self-Portrait, 1969. Oil on canvas, each 35.5 x 30.5 cm. Private collection

Triptych–In Memory of George Dyer, 1971. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Basel

Triptych–August 1972. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Self Portrait with a Watch, 1973. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Triptych, 1976. Oil on canvas, 198 x 197.5 cm. Private Collection

Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1979. Oil on canvas, each 37.5 x 31.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981. Oil on canvas, each 218.5 x 167.5 cm. Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo

Study from the Human Body, 1981. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Triptych, 1983. Oil and pastel on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Colección Juan Abelló, Spain

Figure in Movement, 1985. Oil on linen, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Triptych, 1987. Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London

Blood on Pavement, c. 1988. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Portrait of John Edwards, 1988. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London

Jet of Water, 1988. Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection

Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988. Oil and acrylic on canvas, each 198 x 147.5 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Triptych, 1991. Oil on linen, each 198.1 x 147.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Sources of inspiration and other work documents

News, cinema and medical imagery
. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation, 1920. Book, 25.1 x 34.8 x 1 cm. To be displayed open to image (fig. 64) opp. pg. 141. Private owner, London
. Overpainted and mounted leaf with still of screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin', 16 x 17 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Nicole Vedrès, Images du Cinéma Français, 1945. Book, 28 x 43 x 3.5 cm. To be displayed open to p. 106 (fig. 187). Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. Roger Manvell, Film (1944) [film still from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, 1925?]. Book, 17.9 x 11 x 1 cm. Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. Rachael Low and Roger Manvel, The History of the British Film 1896-1906, 1948
Book, 24.1 x 16.1 x 2 cm. Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. K.C. Clark, Positioning in Radiography, London, 1939. Leaf (p. 19) torn at bottom left with five illustrations concerned with the spine, page heading reads: Vertebral Column, Cervico-thoracic region. Book, 29.1 x 22.7 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Illustration of Viktor Bulla's photograph of Nevsky Prospekt demonstrators being
fired on in Petrograd, 17 July 1917. Black and white newspaper cutting. Tate Library and Archive, London (David Sylvester Archive 200816, item 3)
. Leo Longanesi, Il Mondo cambia: storia di cinquant’anni 1900-1950. Book, 31.6 x 23.6 x 3.6 cm. To be displayed open to double spread of images entitled ‘Prigionieri e internati civili in Austria’ and ‘1916. Natale di Guerra’. Private owner
. Sam Hunter, Photomontage of sources from Bacon’s studio, c. 1950. Photograph. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Facsimile of Images du Monde, 10 Facsimile of newspaper, 35 x 27.2 cm
(27 August – 10 September 1955). Tate Archive 9810/6
. Two Black and white photographs of a wounded man, undated. Each, 6 x 10 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. The true aspects of the Algerian Revolution, Ministère de l’Algerie, Cabinet de Ministre, 1957. Leaf showing images of severed and shattered limbs, 23.8 x 16 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Mounted leaf with black and white still of Emmanuelle Riva in Alain Resnais’ film ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ (1959), date unknown, 32.4 x 24.8 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Leaf from unidentified French magazine with black-and-white illustration of dead bodies in a damaged interior, c. 1970s, 30.2 x 23.2 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Leaf from unidentified French magazine with black-and-white illustration of a massacre (possibly in Zaire), 30.2 x 23 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Wild animals
. Marius Maxwell, Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, 1925. Book, 31.7 x 51.3 x 7 cm. To be displayed open to p. 112. Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. V.J. Staněk, Introducing Monkeys, London, c. 1957, four facsimile pages, with handwritten lists of works (11, 13, 17 December 1958). Facsimile of book page, 28.6 x 21.1 cm. Tate Gallery Archive, London
. V.J. Staněk, introducing Monkeys, trans. by G. Theiner, London, Spring Books, c. 1957. Leaf with handwritten notes in blue ink by Francis Bacon, 1958. Book, 28.4 x 21.2 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. V.J. Staněk, Introducing Monkeys, c. 1957, with annotations by Francis Bacon. Book, 28.6 x 42 x 20 cm. London, Tate Gallery Archive, 9810/5

Sport
. Reproduction of Boxers. Studio item 25. Book page pasted onto the back cover of a book, 28.5 x 21.5 cm. No date. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London
. Jack Dempsey (verso Gene Tunney). Loose page taken from a boxing magazine. With overpainted photograph showing Jack Dempsey, 27.5 x 20.8 cm. London, Tate Archive, 9810/8, item 1
. Overpainted magazine page showing Carpentier-Bogeyman to British Heavy-weights: Joe Backett v Georges Capentier (verso: The Revenge…: Schmeling batters young Joe). Loose pages from five taken from a boxing magazine, 27.5 x 20.8 mm
London, Tate Archive, 9810/8, item 2
. Mounted leaf torn from unidentified book with colour illustration of three cricketers, ‘2nd test India V Calcutta’, 30.4 x 38.8 cm, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Wrestlers
. Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (1907). Book, 24.8 x 31.3 x 2.8 cm. To be displayed open to plate 63. Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (ed. 1955). Book, 27.9 x 20.8 x 2.5 cm. To be diplayed open to plate 56. Tate Britain Curatorial Department, London
. Working document: ‘Men Wrestling’, plate 69 from Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, 1955 edition. 19.7 x 27.3 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Black and white photographic contact sheets of wrestlers, c. 1975. Black and white photographic print, 40 x 50 cm. Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

Mickelangelo
. Ludwig Goldscheider, The Sculptures of Michelangelo: Complete Edition (2nd ed. London 1950). Book, 36.1 x 53 x 4 cm. To be displayed open to pages 117-118. Private owner
. Leaf from unidentified book with black and white plate of a study by Michelangelo for an ignudo for the Sistine Chapel Ceiling 1508-12, 31.7 x 23.3 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Van Gogh
. Ludwig Goldscheider, Wilhelm Uhde, Vincent Van Gogh, London, 1945. Book, 36.1 x 53 x 4.5 cm. To be displayed open to figs. 68 & 69, or fig. 69 to be lifted out and displayed loose. Private owner

Bullfight
.Unknown photographer, Llegó la cornada. Studio item 4. Black and white photograph, 31.8 x 23 cm. No date. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London
. Manuel Granero Killed in the Madrid Ring. Studio item 26. Black and white page torn out of a book, 14.5 x 21.6 cm. No date. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London

Photographs
. Nigel Henderson, Three stressed photographs of male bathers, 1950. Gelatine silver print, 12.7 x 89 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 40
. Passport photo-strip of Francis Bacon, c. 1950. Gelatine silver print, 19.8 x 4 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, Portrait of Peter Lacy, c. 1959. Gelatine silver print, 19.5 x 25 cm.
The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 14
. Ibid., 25.5 x 20.7 cm
. Photo booth strip of Francis Bacon, 1960s. Gelatine silver print, 20 x 4 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, c. 1960. Gelatine silver print, 29.5 x 25 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon
. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes lying on a Bed, c. 1963. Gelatine silver print, 20.7 x 24.9 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, Henrietta Moraes lying Naked on a Bed, c. 1963. Gelatine silver print, 24 x 30 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon
. John Deakin, George Dyer and Francis Bacon in Soho, c. 1963. Gelatine silver print, 30 x 24 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London
. John Deakin, George Dyer and Francis Bacon in Soho Studio, c. 1963-4. Gelatine silver print, 30 x 24 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 36
. John Deakin, George Dyer, c. 1964. Gelatine silver print, 30.2 x 30.4 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio (sitting), c. 1964. Gelatine silver print, 30.2 x 30.2 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, George Dyer (cut-out head), c. 1964. Thirteen pin-holes near top. Gelatine silver print, 22.7 x 15.2 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Deakin, George Dyer standing in Francis Bacon’s Studio (covering himself), c. 1965. Gelatine silver print. The Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 28
. John Deakin, George Dyer standing in Underpants in Francis Bacon’s Studio (leaning), c. 1965. Gelatin silver print, 30.3 x 30.5 cm. The Estate of Francis Bacon, London
. John Deakin, Lucian Freud on Bed, c. 1964. Gelatine silver print, 29.7 x 30.3 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon
. John Deakin, Lucian Freud on Bed, c. 1964. Gelatine silver print, 30 x 29.3 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon
. John Deakin, Isabel Rawsthorne in Dean St., Soho, c. 1965. Gelatine silver print, 30.3 x 30.5 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon
. John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, c. 1965. Gelatine silver print. Estate of Francis Bacon
. Unknown photographer, Three photo strips of Francis Bacon, George Dyer and David Plante, Aix-en-Provence, 1966. Gelatine silver print. Mounted on book cover, 25.9 x 22 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 34
. Profile of John Edwards seated in an interior, late 1970s. Gelatine silver print, 25.4 x 30.4 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
. John Edwards by washbasin in 7 Reece Mews with Francis Bacon reflected in a mirror, no date. Gelatine silver print, 30.2 x 23.6 cm. Estate of Francis Bacon, studio item 32

Work documents, lists, notes, sketches
. Two leaves with handwritten lists of works. Paper, 18 x 11 cm.
Tate Library and Archive, London (David Sylvester Archive 200816, items 1-2)
. Loose sheet with autograph of Francis Bacon, dated 10 December 1957 and headed ‘The Series of Nudes.’ Pen on paper, 27 x 20.8 cm. Tate Gallery Archive, London
. Handwritten notes by Francis Bacon, 1974. Blue felt-tip pen on blank sheet of paper, 22.8 x 17.7 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Francis Bacon, Edweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (ed. 1955) with list of ideas for painting dated 2 January 1962 and a sketch in oils of a figure on a couch on half-title page. Ill. Harrison, In camera p. 181, framed pages from book, 27.3 x 39 cm. Peter and Nejma Beard
. Reproduction of ‘Study for crouching Nude’ (1952). Overpainted by Bacon.
1964. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Mounted leaf from Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, with black-and-white plate series of a man shadow-boxing. Black over-painting by Francis Bacon on image ‘II’. 21 x 33 cm. Date of edition and intervention unknown. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Leaf with black-and-white illustrations from Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (Ed. 1955), with handwritten note in blue ink by Francis Bacon, “Make shadow into separate unit”. 31 x 23.5 cm. Date of note unknown. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Overpainted reproduction of Bacon's 'Figures in a Landscape', 1956. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Figure in a Landscape, c. 1952. Pencil and oil on paper, 33.9 x 26.3 cm. Tate
. Bending Figure, No. 2, c. 1957-61. Ballpoint pen and oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm
. Blue Crawling Figure, No. 1, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Blue Crawling Figure, No. 2, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Composition, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Falling Figure, c. 1957-61. Pencil and oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure bending forwards, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure Crawling, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure in Grey Interior, c. 1957-61. Pencil and oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure Lying No. 1, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure Lying No. 2, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Figure with Foot in Hand, c. 1957-61. Ballpoint pen and oil on paper, 27 x 34 cm. Tate
. Figure with Left Arm Raised, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Pink Crawling Figure, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Two Owls, No. 2, c. 1957-61. Oil on paper, 34 x 27 cm. Tate
. Turning Figure, c. 1959-62. Oil on paper, 33.9 x 26.3 cm. Tate
. Reclining Figure No. 1, c. 1961. Ballpoint pen and oil on paper, 23.8 x 15.6 cm. Tate
. Reclining Figure No. 2, c. 1961. Ballpoint pen and oil on paper, 22.2 x 15 cm. Tate
. From Eadweard Muybridge, “Woman Walking Downstairs, Picking up Pitcher, and Turning”, plate 24 from Human Figure in Motion, 1955 edition. Bacon isolated the figure turning c. 1965, in preparation for the figure in the left-hand panel of Crucifixion (1965). 27 x 19.6 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
. Three cuttings mounted on board with a needle. One leaf fragment from a book with black-and-white illustration of a Gustav Courbet painting of two lovers; one leaf fragment with two black-and-white images of nude wrestlers by Edweard Muybrigde; one cutting from a magazine with reproduction of ‘Painting’ (1946) and brief biography of Francis Bacon. 29.3 x 40 cm. Date unknown. Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

El maletín de Bacon: ¿Grotesco tocinesco?

2009-11-17T19:42:00.001-08:00

.
Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Archivos privados, Madrid: La Fábrica, 2009

La Fábrica. En Archivos privados se reúnen los documentos más importantes que sirven de utilidad para que el lector tenga una visión más exacta de las influencias que provocaron y motivaron la pintura de Bacon.
Elaborado por Martin Harrison, Rebecca Daniels y Barbara Dawson, el libro posee información proveniente de la Galería Municipal de Dublín (The Hugh Lane), que es donde se preserva toda la documentación hallada en el estudio de Bacon (donada a la ciudad en 1998). Se trata de más de 7.000 recortes y objetos que forman parte de la 'base de datos' visuales del artista.

El contenido del libro sugiere los métodos artísticos y el vocabulario pictórico de Bacon. La obra contiene material acerca del cuerpo humano, animales y otros. Las más de 160 fotografías de estos estímulos contenidas en el libro, están acompañadas por comentarios que desbrozan aún más el contenido del mensaje que pretendía utilizar Bacon en el momento de llevar a cabo su evocación/provocación visual. Bacon trabajó a partir de la apropiación y posterior manipulación de imágenes sacadas de libros, fotografías, revistas, catálogos, en fin, mass-media. Arrugar, doblar, rallar, pintar, pegar... Tal deliberada manipulación de la imagen apropiada resultaba para él un estudio previo al trabajo final. El carácter reservado de Bacon respecto a la acumulación de imágenes diversas puede producir en quien se dedica a su estudio cierto desconcierto. De tal material emerge el interás del pintor por la obra de Miguel Ángel, Velázquez, Rembrandt y Picasso. Segun Harrison, las figuras de Bacon representan al hombre del siglo XX, uno "angustiado por la vida, pero entusiasmado por el arte".[1]

Rancho News. Documentación que sugiere y da testimonio acerca del proceso creativo de Bacon se reúne en Archivos Privados, volumen que recopila 160 fotografías, seleccionadas y comentadas por Harrison, Daniels y Dawson. Se trata de un corpus de más de 7.000 recortes, objetos y piezas. Parte de los mismos se hallan ilustrados en el mecionado volumen.[2]

Graciela Marín. "Bacon [...] sólo dejaba entrar a su taller a sus amigos más cercanos. En parte, porque era su mundo creativo. Pero también porque era casi un basural. Miles de papeles arrugados, cortados, manchados y doblados en el suelo, dispersos en un espacio de 6 por 4 metros. Entre medio, cuadros destruidos, despedazados y apuñalados, muchas veces por el mismo artista. Bacon nunca estuvo dispuesto a revelar demasiado de su intimidad. Su vida y su forma de trabajo eran privadas y le gustaba conservarlo así. Pero también era un asunto práctico: nadie más que él podía circular entre tanto desorden.
A 100 años de su nacimiento, las perturbadoras pinturas de cuerpos deformes y sufrientes de Bacon son más famosas que nunca. Desde el año pasado, una gran muestra retrospectiva se exhibe en [Londres], [Madrid] y Nueva York. Todas las exhibiciones se han repletado, aunque cada visitante abandona la muestra con reacciones distintas: algunos se incomodan, otros se horrorizan y varios se asombran ante las pinceladas que dan forma a retratos distorsionados, de ojos desorbitados y bocas aullantes.

[... Además, la] Galería Hugh Lane, de Dublín, exhibirá en octubre una gran muestra con los secretos de su taller en Londres, con fotografías, pinturas y documentos que revelan su proceso de creación. Son materiales que también se muestran en los Archivos privados de Francis Bacon, [... por] Martin Harrison. Es un libro que [...] descubre las obsesiones, dudas y experimentaciones que marcaron la obra de uno de los artistas más singulares del siglo XX.
[...] Bacon nunca siguió las modas. Cuando el arte abstracto estaba en su punto más alto, él lo despreció por considerar que era incapaz de reflejar las emociones del ser humano. En especial, aquellos que más le interesaban: la pasión, la rabia, la angustia y la desesperación. El arte abstracto le parecía [...] estéril [... e] inútil. Tampoco le interesó sumarse a los surrealistas. En una opción que lo aisló de sus contemporáneos, optó por la realidad. Durante años le pesó: en 1936, una galería de Londres rechazó exhibir sus obras, simplemente porque ofrecía un arte que era "insuficientemente surreal".
A él le parecía inconcebible un arte alejado de la realidad. Aunque en su caso, se trataba de un mundo hostil y violento, que se reflejaba en retratos desfigurados y sufrientes. Son pinturas que le ganaron el título de "artista del horror". Sin embargo, a Harrison no le parece tan así. "Pocas veces veo horror. Veo mucho más asco. Asco consigo mismo, con la raza humana y con el hecho de que seamos mortales", dice a La Tercera.

Y eso era algo que Bacon conoció muy de cerca. Nacido en Dublín en 1909, antes de los 10 años ya había sufrido la muerte de dos hermanos y conocido el horror de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Desde niño sufrió de asma crónica: cada cierto tiempo, sentía que se asfixiaba y sólo podía calmarse con morfina.
A los 16 años, su padre lo exilió del hogar familiar al descubrir que era homosexual. Tuvo muchas parejas, pero su relación más significativa fue con George Dyer, al que conoció tras sorprenderlo robando en su departamento. Estuvieron juntos siete años, pero Dyer no soportó la presión de ser la pareja de un artista que, a esas alturas, era famoso: en 1971 se suicidó con barbitúricos, en la pieza que ambos compartían, mientras Bacon estaba afuera preparando [su] exhibición [retrospectiva en el Grand Palais de París]. El artista jamás dejó de sentir culpa y [...] en [...] sus trípticos más impactantes, pintó la muerte de su amante. Y continuaría retratándolo hasta el final.

Bacon trabajaba con rabia, pero también impulsividad: así como destrozó en múltiples ocasiones sus obras, también arrugaba, rayaba y destruía el material con el que trabajaba en su taller. Muchos de esos papeles inicialmente se confundieron con basura: ahora, relata Harrison, se les considera gérmenes de las obras del pintor. "Los descubrimientos de su estudio confirman qué tan privado era él y [revelan] muchos de sus secretos. No de su vida íntima, pero sí sobre su forma de trabajar con otras imágenes", explica Harrison. "Son lo que él estudió, muy cercanamente, e investigó".
Bacon se obsesionaba con la realidad, pero no necesariamente con el mundo vivo. Jamás trabajó con modelos reales, pese a que muchos de sus retratos mostraban a sus parejas y amigos. "No era bueno para dibujar y le tomaba bastante tiempo lograr un parecido con sus modelos", agrega Harrison. "Su 'realismo' no era una copia directa de la naturaleza. El decía que los modelos vivos lo inhibían y le creo: pienso que lo insegurizaban y avergonzaban".
Son conocidos los estudios que Bacon hizo de cuadros de Van Gogh y Velázquez. Pero menos se sabe de su afición a la imagen fotográfica, que fue su principal medio de acercamiento a la realidad. Le fascinaban los detalles que podía captar una cámara, y que el ojo humano, en forma natural, pasaba por encima. Por lo demás, la fotografía le daba la insospechada licencia de retratar el mundo de una forma no-ilustrativa. Era la realidad, pero no igual a ella: era su esencia emocional. Una versión mucho más intensa.
Así se explica la destrucción de los documentos de su archivo. Durante años se pensó que se debía simplemente al descuido del artista. Hoy se piensa que era su método de trabajo. Rayones, manchones, dobleces sobre fotografías y recortes de diarios y otras publicaciones no eran más que otra forma de concentrarse en ciertas partes y movimientos del cuerpo, o una ayuda para imaginar cómo un cuerpo podía ser deformado. El más importante sería su estudio de las secuencias fotográficas de cuerpos humanos de Eadweard Muybridge, que le permitieron crear formas que, aunque estáticas, demuestran movimiento.

Pero no es claro que esa misma razón haya motivado la eliminación de sus obras. Hoy, sólo sobreviven 600 de sus cuadros. Hay etapas completas, como la que va entre 1929 y 1944, que él se encargó de destruir casi completamente, cuchillo en mano. "Ciertamente, no creo que podamos encontrar todas las partes que faltan de este puzzle," [...] sostiene Harrison. "Mucha gente intenta desentrañar a Bacon, pero nada que podamos decir o hacer puede disminuir el efecto de sus pinturas. Aunque su psicología era extraña, las pinturas aún resuenan intensamente [...]. Son obras que se entienden en términos universales, sobre pasiones y sentimientos muy humanos"."[3]

Oviedo. Hacia 1930, la vida de Francis Bacon (1909-1992) experimentó dos vuelcos fundamentales, ambos estrechamente relacionados entre sí. Por un lado, culmina el deambular incierto, lleno de episodios que sólo auguraban más confusión y fracaso y que lo habían alejado de Irlanda. Su permanencia durante unos pocos meses de 1928 en Berlín le permitió observar sagazmente los signos inexorables del final de la república de Weimar. Por ese entonces, la capital de Alemania concentraba las experiencias culturales más radicalizadas de toda Europa. Con menos de 20 años palpa el turbio clima de una urbe que mezcla la miseria de los desclasados y el derroche más insolente. El tríptico La gran ciudad, pintado por Otto Dix entre 1927 y 1928, refleja ese áspero contraste que más tarde Bacon podrá asimilar como algo también muy cercano a sus todavía rudimentarios tanteos en el terreno de la pintura.
Educación estética. El otro hecho, desde luego revelador, ocurre en 1930, cuando está viviendo en París, una ciudad con hallazgos prometedores para un autodidacta como Bacon, provisto de una versatilidad irreverente que elude los caminos sistemáticos o lineales. Allí visita la muestra de Picasso en la galería de Paul Rosenberg [...]. Un núcleo realmente decisivo de su formación irrumpe en esta oportunidad, la vocación artística de Bacon funda allí un punto de partida enunciado con la frase: "Picasso me ayudó a ver".
Simultáneamente, el otro llamado que recibió fue el de la fotografía, pintores como Man Ray o Max Ernst adoptaban con entusiasmo esta práctica con la cual Bacon no tardó en establecer una afinidad profunda. Asimismo, el cine de Buñuel (El perro andaluz y La edad de oro), la secuencia de la niñera que grita con desesperación en las escalinatas de Acorazado Potemkin y, conectada a ésta, el grito desgarrador de una madre en el cuadro La matanza de los inocentes de Nicolas Poussin contemplado en el museo de Chantilly, esbozan buena parte de la educación estética baconiana. La consulta de manuales de medicina con fotografías sobre afecciones bucales preanuncia que el deseo de pintar de Bacon está reuniendo aceleradamente muchas de sus inquietantes búsquedas.
Si bien en la historia de la pintura occidental el motivo de la crucifixión abarca un extenso recorrido iconográfico (de Cimabue y Grünewald a Felicien Rops y Picasso), el ciclo de las crucifixiones baconianas, a través de sus consecutivos escalonamientos, une la casi totalidad de su actividad como pintor. A veces se interrumpe, y cuando así ocurre es para reaparecer más adelante con elementos igualmente perturbadores. Ya en Londres incluye las primeras crucifixiones en una exposición del año 1933. Más tarde, en 1944 presenta [...] Tres estudios de figuras al pie de una crucifixión, punto de inflexión de su "carrera" de artista y obra maestra que excede esa misma carrera.
Como su título lo indica, las tres figuras de cada uno de los paneles aparecen, contra un fondo anaranjado, aisladamente, y de ese modo cumplen con el postulado baconiano de evitar cualquier tentación narrativa "que hable más alto que el propio cuadro". Una rápida descripción no podría omitir ni las deformaciones (que se proyectarán raudamente a las exacerbadas distorsiones de los cuerpos y rostros baconianos) ni las bocas de esas criaturas zoomorfas con dientes filosísimos que desde sus cuellos alargados hacen el ademán de saltar y que además parecen emitir con sus fauces abiertas un mudo aullido estremecedor. Según lo admitió el propio Bacon, son imágenes engendradas por una lectura de la Orestíada de Esquilo que se conectaban con recónditas capas de la culpa y la perdición que siempre atormentaron al pintor.
Léxico de las imágenes. Con posterioridad, se suceden, en 1950, Fragmento para una crucifixión, y 12 años después Tres estudios para una crucifixión, mientras que de 1981 es Tríptico inspirado en la Orestíada de Esquilo; por último, Segunda versión del tríptico de 1944 fue pintado en 1988: corrobora una tenaz obsesión de Bacon que en nada atenúa la ilimitada ferocidad de esas temibles "Hijas de la Noche" [Euménides]. Más allá de interpretaciones psicologistas, para Bacon –en una de las insoslayables entrevistas de David Sylvester– las crucifixiones se asociaban a "un autorretrato". ¿El suyo, cabe preguntarse? Lo cierto es que tanto el autorretrato como su par complementario, el retrato, fueron un "género" sobre el cual produjo una meditación plástica impostergable dirigida a registrar una cascada de fisonomías que nunca parecen agotarse.

Según sus palabras, se trata de "atrapar lo que no deja de transformarse". Así como poder capturar la descomposición del movimiento del cuerpo (utilizando las fotos de Muybridge), la inestabilidad y los cambios a menudo imperceptibles de las facciones lo condujeron a no someter su pincel al sosiego o a la inercia, por el contrario, el detalle de una boca se asemeja a un cuadro de Turner o una cabeza puede emular un muñón. Las espesas capas de óleo acumuladas, sus irregulares definiciones crean protuberancias y relieves que operan una drástica distorsión de una cara cuyos rasgos tambalean y pierden su identidad. Abundan los autorretratos que se concatenan como fotogramas; otro tanto ocurre con los retratos. [...] Difícilmente se podría pasar por alto que este género practicado con asiduidad por Bacon implica la presencia de modelos para ser representados. Sin embargo, en ese lugar baconiano por antonomasia que era su atelier londinense (el de Reece Mews, conservado por varias décadas) raramente los modelos de la realidad existían para Bacon. Prefería con frecuencia apelar a las fotografías. "Su realidad –afirmó con desparpajo ante David Sylvester– es mayor que la de las cosas".

Para pintar las más de 40 versiones del Retrato de Inocencio X de su admirado Velázquez utilizó una reproducción.
Una reciente publicación titulada Archivos privados pone justamente de relieve el rol central de un vasto repertorio de imágenes extraídas de recortes periodísticos, de revistas, de libros, de páginas arrancadas a libros de arte que solían hallarse dispersas y caóticamente amontonadas sobre el piso del atelier de Bacon. Un material heterogéneo (más de 7000 impresos) constituyeron, como se ha podido establecer, la matriz casi secreta del trabajo visual del pintor.
Láminas plegadas una y otra vez dislocan o dejan truncas imágenes, las arrugas les otorgan una nueva visibilidad, manchas, goteos, salpicaduras, caprichosas intervenciones del pintor, un material en el que hormiguean fragmentos sueltos: van entregando una suerte de léxico de las urgentes formas de la pintura baconiana. Y en este sinnúmero de restos que ahora componen una engañosa unidad, la obra de Bacon encuentra un cauce para ofrecer los umbrales siempre cambiantes de sus expresiones.
Perfil. Francis Bacon nació en Dublín el 28 de octubre de 1909. Su infancia y adolescencia transcurrieron en medio de los salvajes enfrentamientos entre católicos y protestantes. Antes de dedicarse a la pintura ejerció los más diversos oficios. Tras las Segunda Guerra Mundial, proliferan las exposiciones y retrospectivas de sus pinturas en las grandes ciudades de Europa y Estados Unidos, México y San Pablo. Su muerte ocurrió en Madrid el 28 de abril de 1992.[4]

Desesperación entusiasta. El maletín de Bacon: ¿repleto de material que testimonia un proceso de trabajo fuera de lo común o un extraordinario grotesco tocinesco?

Referencias
1. A partir del material publicado por La Fábrica, "Nota de prensa," 27.1.2009, http://www.lafabrica.com/notas_prensa/notas_prensa.php?ola=97
2. Es paráfrasis de "Libros, España: « Francis Bacon, archivos privados»," Rancho Las Voces, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 29.1.2009, http://rancholasvoces.blogspot.com/2009/01/libros-espana-francis-bacon-archivos.html
3. "Los secretos que escondía el taller de Bacon," La Tercera, Chile, 30.08.2009, http://latercera.com/contenido/661_175552_9.shtml
4. Antonio Oviedo, "Formas urgentes de la pintura," La Voz, Argentina, 22.10.2009, http://www.lavoz.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=561202

Imágenes, en orden de aparición:

1. Reproducción del Retrato de Felipe IV (Diego Velázquez, 1655; Museo del Prado, Madrid), ilustrando la tapa de Archivos privados.
2. Dos páginas sujetas con clips a una cartulina, c. 1984. Izq. nota de Bacon en referencia a una de sus obras: "The image of body to come over white circle" («La imagen de un cuerpo a ser ubicada sobre un círculo blanco»). Der. fragmento sujeto a un catálogo ilustrando la obra de Paolo Gilio, L'uomo de Eakins, 1982; con fragmento del libro Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, de George B. Bridgman, Nueva York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1952, p. 31. Bacon le añadió a pluma negra el taburete bajo la figura de la esquina inferior izquierda. El taburete se parece a un diseño frecuente en la pintura de Bacon y es similar al del panel izquierdo de Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (Tres estudios para un retrato de John Edwards), 1984.
3. Francis Bacon, Peter Lacy, fotografía, Ostia, 1954. Las fotos que Bacon y Lacy se tomaron entre sí en su viaje a Italia figuran entre las primeras que influyeron sobre la obra del pintor.
4. Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon en su taller, fotografía, 1960.
5. Página del libro Velásquez, de José Ortega y Gasset, París: René Julliard, 1954, lámina 98: Diego Velázquez, El infante Felipe Próspero, 1660
6. Fragmento de una fotografía con la porción superior del rostro de Bacon (Source 243, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublín).
7. Imagen titulada "Cómo juzgar el carácter de una cara" (Londres, 1952).
8. Tres pequeños retratos realizados por Bacon y posteriormente lacerados por su autor (The Irish Times, 27.10.2009).
9. Fotografía con el rostro de Bacon, empleada por el pintor para realizar numerosos de sus autorretratos.
10. Fotografía color impresa en papel brillante de Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sideways), 1971
11. Reproducción del Retrato de Inocencio X (1650), por Velázquez. Datos del retratado.
12. El maletín de Bacon (Bacon Briefcase), concebido para el Centro de Belleza VLCC en 2007 (fuente).

Extraordinario: "Alive with Bacon Taste"

Traducción - « Vivo, con gusto a tocino ».

The Greatest Painter or a Fascinating Mess?

2009-11-16T21:12:00.000-08:00

.
In "Sacred Monster,"[1] a review of Bacon's Centenary Retrospective at the Met in 2009,[2] Jerry Saltz asks: Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth century, or just a fascinating mess?

Whatever the case in point, problematic is first of all the "either-or" nature of Saltz's question. Master of the Uncertain, Francis Bacon was both one the greatest artists of the past century and a well-calculated mess too. Saltz's ideas, however, seem to have a lot to do with some certainties of his own. Some of them are appriopriate, others sound quite objectionable. At any rate, here they are.

Francis Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective opening this week, is the [...] artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind when thinking about his paintings and tumultuous life: “Rage.”
Those who knew the artist—some of them his friends—described him variously as “devil,” “whore,” “one of the world’s leading alcoholics,” “bilious ogre,” “sacred monster,” and “a drunken, faded sodomite swaying nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho.” Bacon was no kinder: He called himself a “grinding machine” and “rotten to the core.” This hasn’t stopped admirers and critics alike from proclaiming him “the greatest painter in the world,” “the best … since Turner.” Never one to spare hyperbole, Robert Hughes wrote, “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread, and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late-twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world.”
For me, Bacon—who may be the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat—has always been more of a cartoonist. He’s an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst. His early accomplishments are undeniable, and the Met’s survey of 66 paintings and a cache of [...] source material is peppered with high points, especially the signature paintings of the forties and fifties: Canvases with twisted masses of faceless flesh and otherworldly homunculi, creatures of the id posed in living-room wastelands and Stygian prisons. The best of this work shrouds you in a sulfuric gloom where strange powers transform human souls into delirious monsters. These paintings make audiences stare as if they were looking at animals in a zoo, trying to come to terms with these merciless inhuman presences. You’ll see this at the Met: people blankly gaping in wonder.
To understand Bacon’s impact, look no further than the young Brits emulating him. Jake and Dinos Chapman place tortured figures in glass cases; Jenny Saville’s contorted Gargantuas are direct descendants of Bacon’s golems; Tracey Emin works with blood and guts; Sarah Lucas gives us spooks and deformities. Damien Hirst not only makes vitrines straight out of Bacon—he puts meat and carcasses in them. Like Dalí and Munch, Bacon is an artist we love when young. Tantalized by the urgency, angst, weirdness, blood, sex, and bodies, we think, That’s me! That’s how I feel!
You might have reconsidered feeling like Bacon if you’d lived in his skin. His love life is a study in emotional privation and degradation. “We are meat,” he often remarked—understandable, given his adolescence. Bacon, who was given morphine as a child for his asthma [...], always knew which way his erotic compass pointed, which is not to say that he approved of its inclination: He called his homosexuality “a defect” and a “limp.” And no wonder. When Bacon was 16, his father—the artist derisively called him “a failed horse-trainer”—caught the boy wearing his mother’s underwear. (“Fishnet stockings were an essential part of the artist’s wardrobe for most of his life,” one biographer notes.) As punishment, the father had him horsewhipped by the stable hands, whom, Bacon later claimed, he then had affairs with. Bacon Sr. asked a family friend to “straighten the boy out” by taking him to Berlin. The man complied—and subsequently bedded the younger Bacon, then abandoned him in the city that W. H. Auden called “a bugger’s daydream.”
Endless liaisons with rent boys and society types followed, until Bacon’s predator-prey notion of love and his “desire to suffer” reached new heights, in 1952. At the age of 43, he met a former RAF pilot, Peter Lacy, in London’s Soho. They spent a lot of time in Tangier, a refuge for gay men looking for freedom. “I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,” Bacon said. “Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start.” Bacon couldn’t live with or without him: “Being in love in that extreme way,” he said, “being totally obsessed by someone, is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” They experimented with the far reaches of S&M. The end was horrid, too. On the day before his first Tate retrospective opened, in May 1962, Bacon learned Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from drinking.
Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer—reportedly when Dyer broke into his studio to rob him. For the next seven years the relationship rocketed up and down, then history repeated itself. On October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris opened, Dyer overdosed and died in their Paris hotel room. Bacon, then 61, was again devastated. No wonder he talked about “the destruction” of love.

All this manifested itself in his art, which rattled the cage of English painting like nothing before it. Compared with the prevailing emphasis on the literary and the anecdotal (the sappy Victorian painter George Frederic Watts is considered “England’s Michelangelo”),[2] Bacon came out of nowhere. His unfinished surfaces, saturated color, and nonstories make him a near anomaly in the history of his country’s painting. He never attended art school [...] but he devoured art history, and you can easily spot his influences: Cubism, Romanticism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Chaim Soutine, Goya’s late paintings, and the figures of Michelangelo.
In 1927, a year after he was banished from home, Bacon went to Paris, where he saw a survey of over 100 Picasso drawings. The show tattooed itself on his brain and left him thinking that Picasso had come closer than anyone in the century to “the core of what feeling is about.” He became “the reason I paint,” Bacon said, “the father figure.” [...]
In 1929, back in London, he set himself up creating furniture and rugs based on modern French design. He tentatively showed a few paintings in his own home, but it wasn’t until April 1933, when he was 24, that Bacon exhibited his first painting, at the Mayor Gallery in London’s West End. Interest was immediate and word spread. Within months, a painting of his was reproduced opposite a recent Picasso in art historian Herbert Read’s book Art Now.

That work, Crucifixion (1933), which vibrates off the walls at the Met, [... is] a haunted little thing, with no sense of devotion to anything except painting—an ectoplasmic alien shape with phosphorescent wings and outstretched arms standing in a murky monochromatic ground demarcated by lines forming invisible planes. The macabre work was influenced by the almost unknown Catholic Australian painter Roy de Maistre (Bacon’s mentor and lover) and owes much to Soutine and archaic altarpiece painting. Yet it also epitomized Bacon’s astonishing description of what a painting should be: “a snail leaving a trail of the human presence.” Crucifixion radiates what Deleuze called “cosmic dissipation.”
But just as it appeared that he would take the English art world by storm, Bacon’s trail dissipated. He exhibited works the following year, to little attention and bad reviews. Stung, he destroyed every painting from the show. By the late thirties, he had quit painting. He “abandoned himself with a vengeance to drifting, from bar to bar, from person to person … setting up a series of private—and totally illegal—gambling clubs,” says his biographer Michael Peppiatt.

Then came the “night of the world”: the Second World War. In April 1945—a month of simultaneous relief and unimagined horror—Mussolini was hanged upside-down, Hitler committed suicide, Roosevelt died, and the nightmares at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were revealed. And Bacon, then 35, exhibited a painting that still induces shudders. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a triptych depicting howling, deformed, harpylike goblins. There are intimations of real space, but these raving underworld visitants mostly exist in a universe of animal instinct. A lamentation for the dead and living, a retaliation for his personal traumas, the painting exudes venomous visionary force. Reviewers were shocked and awed: “Images so unrelievedly awful that the mind snaps shut,” wrote John Russell after first seeing Three Studies. “We had no name for them, no name for what we felt about them.” (Years later, in 1953, the Tate had to be persuaded to accept the painting as a gift.)
Bacon had broached a new door, and to his enormous credit, he kept doing that for fifteen years. Painting, from 1946 (bought by the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 for £280), was an even bigger breakthrough. In this coagulated masterpiece, a grinning or grimacing man—only the bottom of whose face is seen—is jammed between splayed cow carcasses and what looks like a witness stand. An umbrella is over his head. Here, Bacon hits on many of the themes, techniques, and formal concerns that occupied him for the rest of his life: Man, animal, and meat merge. There is no narrative, just a conjuration of some malevolent force. As with countless subsequent figures, Bacon isolates this one within an enclosure in the middle of the canvas. The space feels hallucinatory, menacing, sullen, shallow. Best of all, the paint is physical and visceral—clotted, smeared, wiped off, applied with rags and fingers and brushes or straight from the tubes. Intense lilacs, pinks, and magentas multiply the effect. Within a few years, Bacon was applying great unbroken fields of orange, apricot, and red. Some of this color is so intense and modern it keeps even the worst of his oeuvre alive.
By the fifties, Bacon had hit his stride, painting what he called “figures … [in] moments of crisis … [with] acute awareness of their mortality … of their animal nature”—truths hauntingly self-evident in his large pictures of naked beefy men crouching in transparent cases, making love with or attacking one another; dogs cowering on dark streets; sphinxes; businessmen; and howling monkeys. Adding to this symphony of hatred, longing, and pain are his many portraits of popes.
This period of Bacon’s paintings was revolutionary for two reasons, both hard to see now. First, an openly gay man was painting gay subjects at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime in Great Britain. (Sodomy laws remained in effect there until 1967, and sentencing could involve hard labor.) Introducing overtly queer subject matter into grand painting without dressing it up in classicism or coy kitsch was as unheard-of as it was dangerous [...]. One of Bacon’s first solo exhibitions [...] in the fifties included [Two Figures,] a painting of two naked men grappling on a bed. It had to be installed out of the way, on the gallery’s upper floor, in case of a police raid.
The other striking invention is his use of photography. Unlike his contemporaries, he didn’t project (or paste) photos onto canvas, and he freely admitted his hatred for working from life. His visions came mostly from stacks of photos he kept for decades: images from radiography textbooks; Muybridge pictures; Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; Grünewald paintings; pictures of Nazis, athletes, friends, lovers, and his own face, which he claimed to loathe.

In 1957, while going though one of his tumults with Peter Lacy and with the pressure of an imminent solo show building, Bacon, who in his own words was in a “bad way mentally and physically” and was trying to avoid a crackdown on homosexuality in Tangier, tried to make a move in his work. This, for all practical purposes, was the last time he’d attempt to break from predictability. He painted a series “at high speed,” based on Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, experimenting with more viscous surfaces and strident light. The color is flamboyant and brassy; space is flatter, less reliant on perspective; subjects are outdoors. In the one Van Gogh painting at the Met—a stunner—you can see him giving up his tricks, breaking out of his style to fantastic effect. But when the series first appeared, some of his most ardent supporters turned away. Russell called them “clamorous,” “hectic,” “perhaps the weakest” he ever did; Lawrence Alloway dismissed the series as “an outburst from a gypsy violin.”

Bacon and his work were becoming parodies of themselves. ‘‘I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.”

I believe the Van Gogh series marks the beginning of the end for Bacon. It’s true that he painted for another 35 years, and that in the sixties and seventies he produced arresting triptychs of bloody figures—in fact, it’s doubtful that Bacon would be nearly as famous without them. Bernardo Bertolucci based scenes in Last Tango in Paris on them. A so-so 1976 example sold in 2008 for $86.3 million, setting an auction record.
But the Metropolitan’s retrospective, like most Bacon shows, makes it clear that he kept working his theme until it became a gimmick. The calculated pictorial repetitiousness and lack of formal development wear thin. Except for a number of fabulous portrait heads and the astounding Jet of Water—made in 1988, just four years before his death, featuring an enormous streak of blue paint across an interior—Bacon’s formula had grown stagnant by 1965.
Once you’re aware of this point, it becomes all you see. He has no idea what to do with the edges of his paintings. Everything that happens in Bacon’s work happens in the middle of the canvas; at times you don’t have to look anywhere else. The bottoms of his paintings are always the same, too—a receding plane curves up at the sides, like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens or from inside someone’s eye sockets. He neutralized his paintings further by insisting they be framed behind glass. (“I even like Rembrandts under glass,” he once said.)
Last fall, when I saw this Bacon retrospective at the Tate, it ran concurrently with a Mark Rothko show. Rothko and Bacon were virtually the same age; both worked away from Paris and took “anguish” as their subject. Yet compared with Rothko’s glowing blank Buddhist television sets, Bacon’s work seems mannered, conservative, simplistic. Bacon said that “only by going too far can you go far enough,” yet in giving up all the conventions of painting, Rothko went further. When I saw the Bacon show again at the Prado this past winter—near the galleries full of Velázquez masterpieces—Bacon’s work seemed dead and canned. His supporters often refer to the rousing chaos of his studio (Cecil Beaton noted its “discarded paintings, rags, newspapers, and every sort of rubbish”). If only his late work had some of that anarchy.
What’s especially poignant about Bacon is that he knew he’d built his own prison. As early as 1963, he referred to “my rigidness.” He talked about the “drawback” of his style and how he used painterly tics as a “device.” In 1970, drama turned to tragicomedy when Dyer falsely accused Bacon of marijuana possession. A police raid was followed by arrest, public humiliation, and trial and acquittal. By then Bacon and his work were becoming parodies of themselves. You can see this at the Met; the bright chalky color in his work is vibrantly alive, but everything else is flat. And he seems to have recognized that. He’d sealed himself off from the art of his time. “I stay here in my cage,” he said. Bacon disliked abstract art, saying it was “too weak to convey anything, and had “nothing to do with the avant-garde.”
When you watch the 1985 BBC film of Bacon being interviewed in that grubby studio and hear him spout bromides he’d repeated for decades (he was “an optimist about nothing,” he said again and again), one of his self-assessments seems apt: “I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.” The more one looks at his long career—especially the last 25 years of it—the more Bacon strikes you not as an artist unafraid of the darkest within himself but as an artist who didn’t go to that source enough. Bacon wanted to “remake the violence of reality itself,” and for a time he succeeded. But in the end, he seems less a modern painter than the last of a breed of Romantics—one who, in his final interview, plaintively stated, “I painted to be loved.”

Notes
1. Jerry Salzt, "Sacred Monster," New York Magazine, 25.5.2009, http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/56786/; Bacon's images are from Artnet, 27.7.2009, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/francis-bacon5-27-09.asp

2. Watt's Hope (1886) may well have illustrated Saltz's article.

Centenary Exhibition Reviews - New York

2009-11-15T00:04:00.000-08:00

The first major exhibition in New York in twenty years devoted to one of the most important painters of the twentieth-century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective features 130 works (65 paintings and 65 archival items) that span the entirety of the artist’s full career.[1]

Roberta Smith. Francis Bacon is an artist for our time. You may love or hate his work, which is still vigorously polarizing after all these years. But more than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World War II, his work tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of the moment.
For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1992 at 82, Bacon worked the fault lines dividing abstraction and representation and sometimes photography, where many contemporary painters from subsequent generations have staked claims of one kind or another.
His contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his flanks of beef and crime-scene gore, and his wrestling lovers bring to mind [...] a taste for hokey humanism, spectacle and sensationalism that often seems pervasive today. His emphasis on loaded narrative over form, which can make his art seem formulaic and repetitive, is now nearly epidemic.
The stately if cursory survey of Bacon’s paintings that opened Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests a more lasting pertinence: Bacon’s depiction of the love that until a few decades ago dared not say its name, much less demand the right to marry. Bacon convincingly painted men having sex and sometimes making love. Whether this makes him a great painter [or not], it certainly secures him a place in the history of both painting and art. He emphatically turned the male gaze toward males.
Bacon did for men in lust or in love what his hero Picasso had done for [...] women. He turned sex and genuine passion into a pictorial event, using paint on canvas with finesse and no small sense of drama and without getting clinical. He operated, like Picasso, under cover of modernism. Picasso often diagrammed an itinerary of heterosexual engagement by mapping the female orifices and curves in a flattened Cubo-Surrealist style. Bacon specialized in blur and atmosphere; he captured the tumult of homosexual sex in motion by borrowing from photographs, film stills or images of other art, conveying a sense of athleticism and sweat, violence and tenderness, furtiveness and shame. Homosexual sex was a criminal act in Britain, where he lived most of his life, well into the 1960s.

The show, which originated at the Tate Britain last fall, has been slightly reconstituted and installed at the Met by Gary Tinterow, the curator in charge of 19th-century modern and contemporary art. It is freshest where it delves into Bacon’s use of photographs, not only those clipped from magazines and books but also images he had taken of friends and lovers. He often blew up images and used their cut-out forms as templates. (You can see this especially with George Dyer, his handsome, distinctively profiled companion, whom he painted often in the 1960s and ’70s.)
“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” begins in full cry. First come the screeching fiends of “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” the triptych with which Bacon announced himself to the London art scene in 1944. Against bright orange grounds that would become something of a signature, gape-mouthed furies — part human, part monster, and one per canvas — foretell postwar deprivation, rage and existential doubt. The dogs of war are not going to be leashed anytime soon; the world itself is on the cross.
These overwrought creatures work better in movies, like “Alien.” Their screams continue in the next gallery, where the open, dentally precise mouths gradually migrate to human heads, mostly from 1949, and the first of Bacon’s famous, often glib screaming popes, after Velázquez, arrives. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Painting” from 1946 is also here, encapsulating much of the Bacon repertory: matching slabs of meat that might be said to couple, a seated male, a half-hidden screaming face and the luxurious surface and color. Even so, his mastery was more than a decade away.
Only in the third gallery does this show dial back the hysteria and risk real emotion, in particular the tenderness passing between two men in “Untitled (Two Figures in the Grass),” from around 1952. Pale, soft-fleshed and naked, his back to us, one sits with his legs tucked beneath him, bowing his head over the other, who apparently lies in the grass, his presence indicated mostly as a pair of bent knees that are, ominously, faintly touched with red. Theirs is a sorrowing intimacy stolen amid a gale of blue-black strokes. The faint outlines of a bed and room hint at an imagined interior, a safe, private haven.
Bacon later said that he regretted having wasted so much time while young. Instead of learning his craft, he was often drinking, gambling, sleeping around and having a brutal affair with a violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted sadist named Peter Lacy that sometimes made his friends fear for his life.
This show concurs by bringing on more popes, along with screaming apes, slinking dogs and mute businessmen. Scant of surface and image, with glancing, uneasy brushwork, they imply a divided attention and a reliance on pictorial short cuts and ambiguities to disguise limited skills. Although they are some of Bacon’s best-known works, they barely pass muster as paintings.
Yet the Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art declined, indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual.
Bacon may have been saved by the physicality of Van Gogh’s art, as evidenced by the 1957 “Study for a Portrait of van Gogh VI,” with its thick, troweled paint, raking light and a plowed field that resembles a butterflied slab of meat marbled with red and green. In the same room “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” from 1962 announces Bacon’s maturity: in pulsations of red, orange and black we see two assassins; the bloody pulp of their victim, curled on a striped mattress; and a hanging side of beef — with human teeth — that suggests a saint’s martyrdom.
In the show’s second half Bacon paints from his life, his imagination or somewhere in between, uncoiling new, ambiguous narratives that were often enhanced by the expansiveness of the triptych format. These paintings may not always work, but it is rarely for lack of trying. Sex, both violent and not, takes place; crimes are committed; guts are spilled. Colors become electrifying, textures enrich. The curved shelf of space that becomes the norm circles around, implicating us as intimates, voyeurs or unwilling witnesses.
Often we seem to see people posing in the studio, fidgeting, ready to jump out of their skins (even though Bacon didn’t paint from life, only from photographs). In “Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” the subject sits near a canvas that is pinned with a nude picture of him, which is truer to Bacon’s working method.
An especially fraught 1967 triptych that Bacon allowed to be named for T. S. Eliot’s poem “Sweeney Agonistes” has two scenes of lovers on low platforms raised above grass-green carpet. They flank an interior in which a hideous partial carcass is propped up before a window. One imagines it as the remnants of a man who, from loneliness, has literally howled out his heart to the implacable black sea visible beneath a violet sky. Except that the violet plane is a window shade, a regal color commensurate with the sacrifice. Whatever Bacon’s mangled, solitary or coupled beings meant to him, they starkly remind us that, while we look at the painting, others are dying, seizing up with loneliness or having sex. I’m not sure that this show will do much to alter the polarities of opinion around Bacon; that will take much more curatorial precision and imagination. But it is always bracing to see his work and to realize that part of its energy derives from its refusal to go softly in art history. He reminds us that in the end very little about art is fixed, and that we should always be ready to turn on a dime.[2]

Huntley Dent. Why did many articles proclaim that Bacon was at once great but not credible? [...] Yet [...] Bacon's work jumps off the canvas and aims a dart into the soul as obviously [...] as Rembrandt's or Turner's. If the greatest achievement of art is to communicate the consciousness of the artist, how can anyone deny Bacon's power? When you visit the Tate Britain in London, [...] the [only] two painters capable of flaying the heart (in a good way) are Turner and Bacon. [...] I think ordinary viewers grasp this instinctively. [...] An appalled shiver unites the crowds, which are thick and constant at this exhibit. In addition to the paintings themselves, the Met has devoted one dimmed side room to a display of flotsam and jetsam from Bacon's famously chaotic studio (now transferred in toto to Dublin), where layer upon layer of compositing photos, news clips, magazine articles, and artistic shards formed a sedimentary deposit. Bacon left the studio in that condition, he said, because he was inspired by chaos, and he liked to await the arrival of happy accidents, a chance glance at a scrap or image underfoot that caused his mind to take flight. [...] Among all the detritus that satisfied his nesting instinct, I was struck by two images from Bacon's studio. One was a page torn from the studies of bodies in motion taken by the nineteenth-century photographer, Eadward Muybridge. These became famous as the first stop-action portrayals of men running, leaping, wrestling, and the like. Muybridge married science and art. His images supplied painters with thousands upon thousands of new poses, all in real-time motion, never dreamed of in anatomy classes. At the same time, they removed any hint of idealism, since not every gesture made by the human form is beautiful.

Bacon used Muybridge as a major inspiration; in this case, he saved a page showing two nude men wrestling, amounting to over a hundred postage-stamp sized shots in sequence. It's not only that he transmuted them into men having sex (never explicitly portrayed -- they could be men fighting or even merging like melting jelly or pooled liquid flesh). The startling part is how literal Bacon could be in lifting Muybridge's poses while simultaneously making them so disturbing, as if his own desire-repellence was a transmuting force all its own, capable of damning-celebrating, looking-not looking, touching-cringing at the same time.

The other scrap that caught my eye was of one of Bacon's young, usually thuggish, moody lovers, George Dyer. After Dyer's suicide by overdose in 1971, a grief-stricken Bacon began to paint him even more obsessively than he had in life. According to the painter, the two met in 1964 when Dyer was attempting to burgle Bacon's apartment, a likely story given that Dyer later planted some marijuana in the apartment, which he now shared with Bacon, and then called the police to come and seize it, arresting Bacon in the bargain. Rough, handsome, and no doubt adept at various tinges of sado-masochism, Dyer happened to have a classic Roman nose in profile. But in this particular photo he sits grinning in a chair facing us. It's an ordinary snapshot. What makes it striking is that Bacon has trampled and folded it many times, adding streaks of color such as a red slash here and there. This deliberate manhandling -- forget the psychological overtones -- gave Bacon access to visual distortions that leapt on to the canvas as distortions of face, figure, character, and mood.
[...] Bacon's existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them. [...] In the audio guide and a projection at the end of the show, there's quite a bit of Bacon talking about himself [...] constantly evading the pain and honesty of his canvases. Bacon flouted a quotation he lifted from Aeschylus: "The reek of human blood smiles out at me."[3]

Scott Jackson. The retrospective [...] on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows Bacon’s belaboring exploration of the grotesque. He is fixated on both religious iconography [...] and malformed depictions of enigmatic carcasses. Though Bacon seems to recycle the same sort of grotesque in his oeuvre to an extent that becomes exhausting there is something still powerful in his poetics of the grotesque. He reminds us of bygone times before the age of the laboratory and medicalization of illness when the temple was a site of ritual killings and sacrifice. As Yve Alain Bois remarks in his essay, "Base Materialism," on Bataille and the photographer Eli Lotar: We live in an age where the slaughterhouse, just like the madman, is quarantined from everyday life. In his triptych [...] after the T.S. Eliot poem Sweeney Agonistes, Bacon depicts enigmatic fragmented lumps of life matter. The extreme upward tilt of the paintings draws the viewer into the painting, while having the contradictory effect of flattening the picture plane. In portraying such liminal figures that hover between life and death and inserting them between flat and deep space, one confronts the return of the repressed. That which is repressed and sublimated inevitably intrudes as the signified momentarily catches up to and disrupts the signifier. The horror in these works is in their representing the repression of violence. As Bois argues: "To show violence purely and simply would be a way of incorporating it; it is more effective to underscore how it is evacuated."
Bacon’s painting Blood on Pavement similarly hovers between deep and flat space. The obscure blood stain is a trace of a violence and trauma that remains absent. The horror of Bacon’s imagery lies not in its portrayal of violence, but rather in its undefinability that places the viewer between the sublimation and intrusion of the trauma. It is a horror that remains truly other and resists incorporation and resolution in the quotidian. He reminds us that the comforting sanctity of our daily latte and other objects of commercial consumption is continually haunted by wars, sweatshops, and environmental devastation. Bacon does not naively revel in the violence of the status quo, but rather exposes the ways in which we sublimate and expunge the traces of violence in presenting objects which remain liminal and resist foreclosure.

References
1. Archival items include pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches.
2. Roberta Smith, “If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek,” The New York Times Art Review, 21.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/arts/design/22baco.html
3. Huntley Dent,"Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective," The Berkshire Review for the Arts, 8.8.2009, http://berkshirereview.net/2009/08/francis-bacon-metropolitan-museum-of-art/
4. Scott Jackson, "Francis Bacon’s Poetics of the Grotesque," Ghost Island, 21.8.2009, http://ghostisland.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/francis-bacons-poetics-of-the-grotesque/

Centenary Exhibit Reviews - Madrid

2009-11-14T10:06:00.000-08:00

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Notodo. Bacon [...] es, sin duda, uno de los artistas más destacados, incisivos, brillantes y geniales del siglo pasado. [...] Dicen que el arte de Francis Bacon gira obsesivamente sobre temas como la muerte, la soledad y el aislamiento del hombre moderno, la fragilidad del ser humano y el angustiante paso del tiempo. Dicen que en su obra la humanidad sigue sufriendo lo mismo que sufrió durante los dos conflictos mundiales sin poderse recuperar, ninguno, ni la humanidad, ni el mismo Bacon, del sentimiento de pérdida y del luto que estos trágicos eventos comportaron. Pero ésta es una verdad a medias y la colosal exposición que el Museo del Prado acoge en estos meses es una buena ocasión para averiguarlo. Sólo [basta] con acercarse al rojo [...] de Estudio de figura 1 y 2, a las increíbles variaciones de azules oscuros de Hombre en azul 4 [...]; sólo con mirar desde cerca el Estudio para retrato de Van Gogh, [...] o [...] la impertinente provocación del tríptico [Tres] Estudio[s] para una Crucifixión. Sólo con pasear por esta espectacular retrospectiva, no se tardaría [...] en descubrir que Bacon es, también, otra cosa. Bacon es instinto, es pasión, violencia, sexo y curiosidad. Sin llegar a ser joie de vivre; Bacon es pura vida y es esto, [...] su principal obsesión. [...]
Bacon es uno de esos artistas que dividen, que destapan polémicas (todavía), que gustan o que se odian pero su obra es tan profundamente humana que, al fin y al cabo, nos resulta imposible no rendirnos a su poder.[A]

Peio Riaño. El grito de Francis Bacon (1909-1992) sale de lo más profundo de su estómago. Las materias convulsas que revuelven los cuerpos que retrata, de cientos de recortes de periódico, de libros desmigados y de miles de revistas apiladas en el pequeño estudio en el que habitó desde el verano de 1961 hasta su muerte, en el número 7 de Reece Mews de la ciudad de Dublin.
Era una pequeña habitación de 6 x 4 metros, “repleta de desperdicios en montones”, recuerda Barbara Dawson, directora de la galería municipal de Dublín The Hugh Lane, que recibió la donación en 1998. “Comenzamos a trabajar como si de una excavación arqueológica se tratase”, cuenta Jacobs en el prólogo del libro Francis Bacon. Archivos privados, que edita La Fábrica, y que aparecerá en las librerías el 2 de febrero, justo un día antes de la inauguración de la que será la gran exposición del año del Museo del Prado (con permiso de Sorolla).
Precisamente, la comisaria de la muestra en la pinacoteca nacional, Manuela Mena, explicó a Público que ésta “no será una exposición fácil”, en referencia a la crudeza del imaginario del pintor irlandés.
Meses atrás, cuando la gran retrospectiva del artista echó a andar en la Tate Modern de Londres, su comisario Matthew Gale avisó de que “Bacon emerge de la tradición europea, la reta, la revisa y la socava. Así se labra un puesto indiscutible en la evolución de la Historia del Arte”. Bacon volverá al Prado, para señalar el curso natural de su educación. Sin crispaciones, porque para Manuela Mena, entre Bacon y el resto de la colección del Prado no hay disparidad.

“Las veces que venía al Museo del Prado no veía ninguna línea que dividiese su trabajo de la pintura anterior al siglo XIX. Se plantaba delante de un cuadro de Velázquez, como si estuviese compitiendo con él”, explica para señalar la continuidad creativa. Para cuando se abran las puertas de la gran muestra, recomienda, para hacerla más digerible, dejar a un lado la visión del horror del pintor y meterse en la materia de su pintura, “leer la cronología, los textos de las salas, leer para no llevarnos la primera visión del horror de su pintura”.
Barbara Dawson señala que “lo que se encuentra bajo la superficie es igualmente importante que lo que se puede ver”. El material se acumulaba por capas en su estudio. Partes emborradas con pegotes de pintura, otros materiales redibujados o desgarrados aposta, varias fotos arrugadas hasta crear una silueta distorsionada…
Hoy padecería el síndrome de Diógenes. Acumulaba y acumulaba, y aunque hizo varias limpiezas de su particular documentación, en esos casi 30 años que estuvo en el pequeño estudio, siempre estuvo repleto de lo que para cualquiera fuera de la mente y las tripas de Bacon serían desperdicios a montones.
Como en su casa. Así que todo apunta a que una de las paradas obligadas y que más comentarios de la exposición suscitará será la sala dedicada a su estudio. Será el espacio menos convencional de toda la exposición del Prado, donde habrá vitrinas con parte de la documentación que bullía por los cuatro costados de aquel estudio minúsculo. De las paredes colgarán dibujos y bocetos, a pesar de que él dijera en vida que no hacía dibujos preparatorios, que se tiraba a bocajarro a la tela directamente. Tras morir, en dicho estudio, se encontraron esos breves dibujos. En este lugar, entre las casi 70 pinturas que componen la extensa retrospectiva, intimaremos con el artista, conoceremos sus referencias, descubriremos intereses y, quizá, lancemos conclusiones sobre por qué tanto dolor, tanto desgarro y tanto grito.

El archivo visual de Bacon contiene más de 7.000 objetos. Y los estudios de los mismos están aún en pañales. Sin embargo, si partimos de las pruebas que van saliendo a la luz, poco a poco, “podemos afirmar que dichos objetos son fundamentales para comprender en toda medida los métodos de Bacon, su vocabulario pictórico”, cuenta Martin Harrison, el editor del catálogo razonado de las obras del pintor, que en la actualidad prepara el comisariado de una exposición sobre los últimos trabajos de Bacon, Death Shadowing Life, que se inaugurará en el museo Hermitage de San Petersburgo en 2010. Este especialista cree que son materiales reveladores.
¿Y qué es lo que se puede encontrar entre todos esos montones? Referencias a Velázquez, Miguel Ángel, Rembrandt y a los estudios sobre la figura cinética de E[a]dw[e]ard Muybridge. Como explicó el propio Bacon en una ocasión: “En realidad, Miguel Ángel y Muybridge se entremezclan en mi mente”. La iconografía baconiana incluye temas distintos a la figura humana. De hecho, desde su infancia, a Bacon le fascinó la carne que se colgaba en las carnicerías. “Cuando entre en una carnicería, siempre me sorprende no ser yo el que está ahí colgado, en lugar del animal”, dijo el pintor.
Todo vale. Bacon se hacía con imágenes de todo tipo. Quién podría llegar a pensar que un libro sobre técnicas de golf podría interesarle. Ese libro guarda un significado especial, mayor de lo que en un principio podría parecer, según Martin Harrison, porque Bacon llevó el diagrama de una postura de golf a su cuadro Dos hombres trabajando en el campo, de 1971, en el que lo añadió como detalle. Es más, fue preguntado por esas flechas direccionales que empezó a incluir en sus obras a partir de ese mismo año, a lo que él contestó que las había sacado de un manual de golf. Debió de ser de las pocas veces que se mostró conciso al revelar algo sobre su trabajo.
Una fotografía gigante presidirá la sala del Prado dedicada al estudio, para que el espectador pueda imaginarse las verdaderas dimensiones en las que se movía Bacon para pintar. Sobrecogedor.
De hecho, una de las principales críticas a esta misma exposición en la Tate fue la falta de sensibilidad al utilizar salas muy amplias para cuadros que fueron pintados en un cuchitril. Aquí han primado los espacios más cerrados y se han colgado las obras más bajo de lo normal para que el visitante no pueda escapar de ellas. Para quedar atrapado en sus obsesiones.[B]

AFP. Le musée du Prado de Madrid accueille, après la Tate gallery de Londres et avant le Metropolitan Museum de New York, une rétrospective de l'oeuvre de Francis Bacon, à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance d'un des plus grands peintres du XXème siècle. Le présence de son oeuvre au musée madrilène a "une charge émotionnelle extraordinaire", a souligné Miguel Zugaza, directeur du Prado en présentant cette exposition organisée du 3 février au 19 avril. Pour le Prado, la rétrospective de ce peintre moderne au parcours tourmenté, dans un musée qui accueille généralement des oeuvres d'artistes plus classiques, s'explique notamment par la spécificité et la biographie du peintre britannique. Bacon a fait sur la fin de sa vie de nombreux séjours à Madrid, où il est décédé d'une crise cardiaque en avril 1992, à l'âge de 82 ans. Selon Manuela Mena, commissaire de l'exposition, il avait l'habitude de se rendre au Prado et de s'en "faire ouvrir les portes les jours où le musée était fermé pour pouvoir étudier les oeuvres", en particulier celles des maîtres espagnols Francisco Goya et Diego Velazquez.[C]

Jocelyne Artigue. Francis Bacon quitte son Irlande natale très jeune et voyage beaucoup en Europe. En 1927 à Paris, il tombe sous le charme des dessins de Picasso. Son entrée officielle dans le monde de la peinture "surréaliste" commence en 1945 : le tableau Trois études de figures au pied d'une crucifixion est d'une rare violence expressive, les corps sont laids et font même peur, les personnes de cette époque préférent oublier les horreurs de la guerre et admirer des tableaux qui leur apportent sérénité et joie de vivre ; elles sont un peu choquées à la vision de ces tableaux. J'avais visité l'exposition consacrée à cet artiste en 1996 au Centre [Pompidou à] Beaubourg et j'en ai un souvenir très étrange, glauque et surtout sanguin. L'ensemble de l'exposition dégageait une tristesse absolue, en rapport avec cette citation de l'artiste lui-même: " je crois que l' Homme aujourd'hui réalise qu'il est un accident ,que son existence est futile et qu'il a à jouer un jeu insensé". Côté technique , une puissance soutenue s'est dégagée. Il faut [...] citer Gilles Deleuze: "la viande n'est pas une chair morte, elle a gardé toutes les souffrances et pris sur soi toutes les couleurs de la chair vive. Tout homme qui souffre est de la viande, et la viande est la zone commune de l' homme et de la bête" (Francis Bacon, logique de la Sensation).[D]

Victoria Burnett. On the afternoon of April 30, 1992, a plain coffin bearing the body of the Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon arrived at the brick and white-stone chapel of the vast Almudena Cemetery in Madrid. The artist then made the quiet exit he had sought. He was cremated with minimal ceremony, with no mourners present; his ashes were sent to England.
Bacon had spent his final six days in a Madrid clinic, wheezing oxygen from a bottle and nursed by nuns. He charmed them with his basic Spanish, but he asked for no visitors and reportedly received none. After he died of a heart attack on April 28, his London dealer sent a Spanish colleague to collect Bacon’s brown suitcase and his leather jacket.
Bacon’s solitary death at 82 in Madrid seems a desolate, slightly random, parting for a London dweller whose foreign playgrounds, over the years, included Berlin, Paris and Tangier. In fact, the Spanish capital became something of a haunt for the artist in his final years, which he spent entwined in an on-and-off relationship with a handsome, young art-loving Spaniard.
So the retrospective of Bacon’s work that opened at the Prado Museum in Madrid this month is something of a homecoming for the painter. [...] “Madrid was quite a late discovery for Bacon,” says Michael Peppiatt, an art critic and biographer of Bacon. “It was very seductive: there was the Prado, which was a summit on his horizon, and, into the mix, a very good-looking Spanish friend who he was completely in love with.”
Bacon’s discreet trips to see his lover rounded off a long-standing interest in the home of the bullfight and of the two painters who, arguably, most influenced him: Picasso and Velázquez. He was charmed by the city, with its late rhythm, its bars that emptied at dawn, its dry, baking heat and narrow, seamy streets.
“He loved the heat, he loved the food, he loved the pictures, he loved the look of it,” said Janetta Parladé, a friend whom Bacon visited in southern Spain.
In the evenings, he and his Spanish friend would stop in for a dry martini — or three — or a bottle of Champagne at Bar Cock, a rather baronial-style bar frequented by actors and artists on a downtown street, then derelict and lined with heroin addicts. From there, a favorite destination was La Trainera, a landmark seafood restaurant whose beamed dining room is decked with nautical gear.
Patricia Ferrer, an owner of Bar Cock, remembers Bacon, immaculately dressed, having a drink just days before his death. “Here he was, a perfect dandy, sitting with his back beautifully straight,” she said. “He certainly died with his boots on.”
Bacon was fascinated by the bullfight, or corrida, a motif that recurs in his work in the form of circling bulls, ringed spaces, thrusting horns, gored legs. He described the corrida as “death in the sunlight” and “a marvelous aperitif of sex” and probably went to see fights in Madrid at Las Ventas bullring.
“He was captivated by the torero — the sexuality, the elegance, the outfit, the ballet of it,” said José Capa Eiriz, who, as director of exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, put on the first show of Bacon’s work in Spain in 1978.
For Bacon, the artistic high point of Madrid was, naturally, the Prado itself, home to a large collection of works by Goya and by Velázquez, whose 1650 “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” Bacon revered and transformed — some would say deformed — in his paintings of agonized, screaming popes. (Velázquez’s pope is at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.)
Manuela Mena, the Prado’s curator of 18th-century painting and Goya — and of the Madrid retrospective — remembers Bacon asking to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed to the public. He would stand for long stretches before a work by Velázquez or Goya, peering up close, “thrusting himself right into the painting,” she said. “He wanted to see the brush strokes, the texture, the canvas.”
The retrospective offers a rare opportunity to see Bacon’s work in conjunction with some of the Spanish paintings that influenced him, according to Ms. Mena, who said she found echoes of, and allusions to, many of the Prado’s works in Bacon’s paintings.
In the “Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho,” Ms. Mena sees the self-assuredness of Velázquez’s black-clad “Pablo de Valladolid.” The stairs in the central panel of “Triptych — In Memory of George Dyer” (1971) are a reference to the Paris hotel where Dyer, Bacon’s lover, committed suicide, but they are also an allusion, Ms. Mena said, to the stairs leading to a half-open door in “Las Meninas” by Velázquez.
The purplish blood that soaks the clothes in the middle panel of Bacon’s “Triptych Inspired by T.S.Elliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ ”; the rusty, mottled patch in “Blood on Pavement” — these surely owe a debt to the sticky crimson smear on the dead man’s face and the blood mingling with the earth in Goya’s “Third of May 1808,” Ms. Mena said.[E]

Vidal. Un indudable acierto de la exposición monográfica dedicada a la obra pictórica de Francis Bacon en el Museo de Prado es el de recuperar, como telón de fondo de una de las salas (la sala 9, del Edificio de los Jerónimos), una ampliación de una fotografía tomada en el taller para documentar en el estado en el que se hallaba aquél en el momento de la muerte del pintor, en una sala dedicada a mostrar algunos de los motivos fotográficos de los que se apropió el artista. Del mismo modo, la sala se dedica a la exhibición en vitrinas de algunos de estos materiales, tales como recortes fotográficos o libros y obras realizadas con diferentes finalidades por Bacon sobre papel.[1]
Constituye la práctica de rastrear el débito contraído por Bacon con referentes fotográficos uno de los temas más estudiados actualmente por los investigadores. Algo, asimismo, al alcance actual de los amantes de su pintura a través [... del] volumen editado por Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Archivos privados (Madrid, La Fábrica, 2009).[2] Una publicación que dedica casi dos centenares de páginas a la reproducción de sendos recortes fotográficos encontrados en el taller de Bacon. Con una introducción de su responsable, Martin Harrison (autor, asimismo, del catálogo razonado –en curso- de la obra de Bacon) y un apéndice en el que se reconocen las fuentes o motivos de algunos de estos recortes, la publicación nos remite a los motivos que habrían de ser [... incluidos] en la obra pictórica de Bacon. Motivos que proceden de la herencia artística de la escultura griega (y, concretamente, el tema del desnudo masculino preclásico, kouroi), el Renacimiento (los cuerpos viriles tensionados tan característicos de Miguel Ángel) o del Barroco español (particularmente, de Velázquez, origen incesante de relecturas por parte de Bacon), así como de los estudios del fotodinamismo de Eadwe[ar]d Muybrigde (cuerpos desnudos masculinos desempañando diversas acciones [... en] su volumen The Human Figure in Motion), diversas publicaciones de difusión científica (principalmente de zoología) e imágenes extraídas de los medios de comunicación de masas.
[...] Bacon ha despertado el interés de una pléyade de creadores de diferentes disciplinas como probablemente no lo haya hecho ningún otro pintor que haya desarrollado su producción durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. [... En] Francis Bacon: lógica de la sensación, Deleuze comienza [...] obra mostrándose sensible, pero en modo alguno lamentando el hecho de que exista en la producción de Bacon un repertorio muy limitado de escenarios, cuyos procedimientos pictóricos califica de “casi rudimentarios” (p. 13).[3] Su vocación es la de instaurar a Bacon en un lugar exclusivo entre los lenguajes figurativo y abstracto [...]. Si la obra de Bacon no puede calificarse de abstracta, como es obvio por la incorporación e la figura, del mismo modo, [tampoco] es susceptible de insertarse en la corriente figurativa. Aduce para ello el hecho de que estas representaciones antropomorfas carecen de narratividad, se muestran individualizadas en extremo. Imposibilidad de una interpretación narrativa e indefinición clamorosa de la escena (“una especie de circo” la denomina [4]) conducen a Deleuze a sostener que ante los cuerpos solitarios de Bacon nos hallamos ante “la Figura”. Figura que representa la voluntad de apelar y mostrar no ya la visibilidad, sino la “sensación” [...] del hombre [...] en [...] "completa soledad y [...] vacío metafísico”. [...] Deseamos recordar aquí [también] a Leiris, Sylvester y Kundera. El surrealista disidente Michel Leirs dedicó un ensayo a Bacon [...] en el que predica el poder inmediato de fascinación que ejercen, en su opinión, las obras de Bacon en su diagnóstico de una magnífica traducción en el arte pictórico no de la iconografía sino de la esencia misma del erotismo ([...] la obra baconiana como [...] lúdica y conscientemente amoral).[5] Este carácter de inmediatez lo corrobora Leiris en su reconocimiento en las obras de Bacon de tres importantes elementos: el tamaño próximo al natural de muchos de sus protagonistas, el hecho de que habiten un espacio en modo alguno detallado pero que se hace continuar idealmente en el espacio que ocupa su espectador y la ausencia de cualquier vocación por introducirse en la psique de sus personajes. Para Leiris, [...] Bacon [...] se presenta como un infatigable buscador de nuevas soluciones [... y sugiere un] “salvaros del desastre superponiendo al mundo cotidiano un mundo diseñado [...] de acuerdo con un orden íntimo que, en cuanto tal, contrasta con los inverosímiles desbarajustes de la realidad ambiente”.[6] [...] Leiris se basa [...] en su contacto directo con Bacon [... y] las conversaciones que éste mantuvo con el historiador del arte David Sylvester [...].[7] Mantenidas entre 1962 y 1986, sus nueves [sic] entrevistas constituyen en su conjunto, por ser las declaraciones más extensas y continuadas con las que se cuenta de Bacon, una introducción única al personaje. En ellas, Bacon se refiere al porqué de sus apropiaciones religiosas o, de modo mucho más jugoso, de fotografías. En este sentido, resulta revelador la confesión de su preferencia por partir de fotografías incluso cuando pinta a sus amistades en lugar de pintarles del natural, y que justifica afirmando, “si son gente a la quiero, no deseo realizar ante ellos la ofensa que les hago en mi trabajo”.[8] Otros interesantes asuntos estriban en su comentario de la obra de pintores coetáneos (sitúa a Michaux por encima Pollock), o de [...] sus trabajos iniciales como diseñador de muebles, reservando para su última entrevista [...] su infancia. Finalmente, [...] Milan Kundera ha dedicado su atención al pintor. Y [...] lo ha hecho al evocar su encuentro en la Praga de 1972 con una joven a la que habían interrogado sobre su propia persona. Kundera afirma entonces haber sentido el deseo de violarla y es [con] este deseo insensato [que nos] remite a la imaginería de Bacon. Al hacerlo, Kundera introduce una fértil reflexión, “el arte de nuestra mitad de siglo [XX] está embadurnado de una logorrea teórica, ruidosa y opaca que impide que una obra entre en contacto directo, no mediatizado, con el que la mira”.[9] Kundera está cargado de razón, pero no podemos olvidar [...] que otra de las amenazas a las que se encuentra expuesto el espectador de obras de arte es el de una ingente literatura barata, carente de cualquier legitimidad metodológica, tópica y conservadora de estereotipos maniqueos. Una escritura, en definitiva, que [se] ha excitado [... con] la obra de Bacon por su carácter propiamente exhibicionista.[F]

References
A. "Bacon, Bacon, Bacon," Notodo, January 2009, http://www.notodo.com/expos/exposicion_de_pintura/636_francis_bacon_museo_del_prado_madrid.html
B. Peio H. Riaño, "En las tripas de Bacon," Público, Madrid, 21.1.2009, http://www.publico.es/culturas/193114/tripas/bacon
C. "Francis Bacon au Prado, après Londres et avant New York," AFP, 30.1.2009, http://fr.movies.yahoo.com/30012009/10/francis-bacon-au-prado-apres-londres-et-avant-new-york.html
D. Jocelyne Artigue, "Francis Bacon au Musée du Prado," Arts-Up, 3.2.2009, http://www.arts-up.info/JA/JA_Bacon.htm
E. Victoria Burnett, "Francis Bacon, Seduced by Madrid," New York Times, 22.2.2009, http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/travel/22culture.html?fta=y
1. En 1998 la integridad del contenido del taller, sito en la calle londinense de Reece Mews, fue donado a la ciudad de Dublín, concretamente a la institución municipal The Hugh Lane Gallery.
2. Francis Bacon: Incunabula, Londres: Thames & Hudson, 2008.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: lógica de la sensación, tr. Isidro Herrera, Madrid: Arena, 1ª ed., 2005, p. 13 (cf. Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, 2 vols., París: Éditions de La Différence, 1981).
4. Ibid.
5. Michel Leiris, "Francis Bacon, cara y perfil," en Francis Bacon, tr. Ramón Ibero, Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2008, pp. 10-33.
6. Ibid., p. 12.
7. David Sylvester, La brutalidad de los hechos: entrevistas con Francis Bacon, tr. José Manuel Álvarez Florez, Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2009.
8. Ibid., p. 33.
9. Milan Kundera, "El gesto brutal del pintor," en Bacon: retratos y autorretratos, Madrid: Debate, 1996 (pp. 7-18), p. 12.
F. Julio César Abad Vidal, "Francis Bacon en el Museo del Prado," Arte10.com, January 2009, http://www.arte10.com/noticias/monografico-342.html

Centenary Exhibition Reviews - London

2009-11-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

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Brian Sewell. Francis Bacon died in April 1992, to the very day six months short of his 83rd birthday, and Tate Britain is about to open a centenary retrospective exhibition of his inseparable art and life. Long in the planning, this is to be shared with the cities of Madrid, where he died of the cumulative effects of pneumonia, asthma and a heart attack, and New York, where he had his most profitable success.
Inseparable art and life? For most of his many years it was simply not possible to speak or write of Bacon’s private life, whispered to be not merely disreputable but punishable, at least in his first half century, by sanctions almost as harsh as those for treason and murder. Though to critics of any sensibility it was obvious that this private life was largely the source of imagery and energy in his paintings and unquestionably crucial to his aesthetic development, there were others who — through overwhelming prominence on the Arts Council and our television sets, almost as celebrated as himself for their performances as his interpreters — gave us a Bacon distorted and bowdlerised. In their constructs he could discern little of himself, but in a sense he was content with their dissembling, for it kept him camouflaged and his private life remained largely private to the end. Though he knew them to be in error, his conviction was that in time their interpretations would be recognised as fraudulent, then discarded, letting his paintings at last speak for themselves — “painting is its own language and is not translatable into words”.
I first encountered Bacon’s paintings when I was a schoolboy and am convinced that at the Hanover Gallery, Erica Brausen, his first dealer until 1958, showed paintings that I have not seen since, either in the flesh or published in the many books produced by Johnnies-come-lately; this is true, too ,of an exhibition at the old Beaux-Arts Gallery, where Helen Lessore had his paintings in 1953. It is therefore with great interest that I await the publication of a catalogue raisonné. In London in the Fifties it was impossible not to be aware of Bacon; and after his transference to the Marlborough Gallery and the Tate’s first retrospective of his work in 1962, it seemed to me from then on that no matter where I went in Europe and America I ran into more or less the same travelling Bacon circus — in Chicago and New York, in Turin, Kassel, Mannheim, Zurich — and it became increasingly evident that the formerly slow-thinking and slow-painting painter, in abandoning the considered, deliberate and frequently revised terribilità of the early works, was at risk of becoming slick and habitual, even intellectually easier and emotionally shallower, and that the output of his pictures of ambitious scale was mightily increased, raised to some 20 canvases a year instead of two or three.
It was at this point of sudden but shrewdly engineered success that I first encountered Bacon. I was to know him for 30 years or so. Our acquaintance developed from an enquiry I had to make when a painting said to be by him was delivered to Christie’s and I doubted it. Bacon was not then the sort of painter whose work Christie’s liked to sell, but was nevertheless one whose work I thought they ought to sell — though not if it was a forgery, and I knew that in Milan a forger was producing, even at that early stage, almost plausible pastiches. As Bacon answered neither telephone nor letter, I risked knocking on his door on my way home, was kindly, if briefly, received, and the picture’s authenticity denied. Milanese forgeries again came into play in the later Sixties (a small London dealer was importing them, their quality menacingly improved), and again I had reason to see Bacon, the acquaintance cementing to the point where Bacon felt that he could, for example (since I lived only half a mile away), telephone at crack of dawn and ask me to drive his lover, John Edwards, disablingly hungover, to a family conclave in Long Melford.
For me the most fruitful period of our relationship began when Harrods opened a juice bar in a corner of the food department. Thither went Francis almost every morning and if our paths crossed I joined him for his breakfast. Chipper in mood, no matter how little sleep he’d had, spruce in clothes a shade too bright to be described as dapper, his cosmetic adjustments perfect, he often carried a brown paper bag containing a kohlrabi or other exotic vegetable just bought from the family greengrocer on the corner of Glendower Place; this the girls behind the bar then reduced to a slush that could be added to more common brews. Asked why, he told me that he liked to fart and to this end would drink any foul concoction. And there at the juice bar he held court, with me the only courtier, confiding his contempt of Rothko, De Kooning and Matisse, and of such panjandrums as John Berger, who early expressed his loathing, and David Sylvester and Melvyn Bragg, his notorious apologists.
All this was long before I began to earn my living as a critic and, naïve, as I neither took notes nor made recordings to publish as a precious interview, I recall only disconnected jottings, as it were, with the occasional interjections of let wind. I formed the opinion that we spoke of two honest Bacons, with an unmentionable commercial third Bacon waiting in the wings; the first was the kaleidoscopic, fragmentary Bacon, wit, gossip, gambler, drinker, traveller, willing supporter of such unlikely young painters as Anthony Zych and Michael Leventis, social performer and frivolous lost soul, and, in strong contrast, Bacon the found soul, the melancholy painter, utterly intense, the one a relief from the other, though the onlooker could never quite tell which of these lives he found the more unbearable. The third Bacon was the painter preparing for the next commercial exhibition, the repetitious Bacon, the Bacon who had done it all before, the idea and image stale, the clashing fields of colour too much assured with practice, the drawing and construction occasionally so casual as to deprive the painting of any intended significance. The third Bacon resorted to tricks and cyphers without meaning in the early Eighties to flat arrow-heads in black or white or red that seem to act as jarring indicators (but of what?), and in the late Sixties to splashes of dense white paint strung across the surface. In his Study of George Dyer in a Mirror, a portrait that is as carefully calculated as could be in terms of space and composition, in the suggestion of movement, in the delicate fusion of oils and water-based pastels that give us the immaculate surface, caressed with the fingertips as colour is rubbed into the texture of the canvas, we have the perfect example of this assault, disruptive, assertive, violent, irrelevant, futile, an act of vandalism, an ejaculation in the face. This was in 1968, exactly a decade after telling his close friend Daniel Farson that the only interesting thing about splashes of paint on the canvases of Jackson Pollock was that they had “more vitality than the inanities of academic art”. But this picture is neither academic nor inane; in destroying his unfinishable canvases with slashes of the knife he has my sympathy, but in smirching this fine finished painting he played the deplorable iconoclast.
Bacon had no formal training as a painter and for some time worked as an interior decorator, maker of furniture and, occasionally, as a gentleman’s gentleman. Little is known of his early paintings, rejected by English Surrealists (whom he would otherwise have joined) as not sufficiently surreal, and he destroyed most of them before exhibiting, in 1945, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, one of the disappointingly few works in the permanent collection of Tate Britain. With this, a work as important to Bacon as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Picasso, he emerged as a painter of pessimistic imagination, his images coldly barbaric, in full command of the techniques of oil painting, to assault the nervous system of the orthodox and frivolous art world of post-war Europe. Orthodoxy capitulated and Bacon became the most exhibited of British painters. Successive directors of the Tate described him as Europe’s or Britain’s greatest living painter, though none in America or any other continent was greater.
Bacon continued the line of ancestral European painting, the descent from the grandeurs of the High Italian Renaissance and the bloodstained violence of its German equivalents — two years before his death he went again to Colmar to Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece — when all about him the aesthetic nonsense of abstraction and a host of pretentious transitory fashions were the norm. He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications, and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir, running with blood. He took the mouth, made it obscenely genital and used it exclusively as a feature of violent expression, deafening us with its screams. He took the portrait and, refusing to chart features or delve into character, became the harsh interrogator provoking the betrayal of body language, the man outside the ring of light, the man with the lash and cigarette butt, the man with his finger on the button that sends fierce currents into the electrodes buried in the private recesses of the body and the mind. His prisoners, presidents popes and lovers squirm. All are, in a sense, himself. To women, however, always on a smaller scale, he applied only the torments of his style.
He was capable of an extraordinary fusion of intellectual and painterly devices that are spatial, flat, abstract and narrative, the logic of their complexities never failing even at the end — not for Bacon the empirical incompetence of Picasso’s dotage, the last years as an idiot in the antechamber of death. He used the image of the trap, the cage, the cell, the X-ray field and the heavy fall of light from the single naked bulb to imprison and torment his subjects, to distil and heighten the violence of sexual contiguity in his coupling nudes, and to assault complacent senses with graceless nakedness on the lavatory pan and vomit in the washbasin. His insistence that his pictures be protected with plate glass instead of varnish deliberately added a disturbing layer of illusion when the visitor inevitably found his own reflection between himself and the subject within, seeming to play some part in the sordid drama, spectator become participant.Bacon and his images were nourished by his extensive knowledge of paintings by old masters, Cézanne, Degas and Picasso, by his interest in the subconscious development of images, his enquiry into the quasi-supernatural field of the emanations, auras and energies of his subjects, by his interest in crime, violence and disease, by his collection of the horrible in medical publications. He took the vile, the shudderingly visceral, the sexually and politically obscene, and so lifted them with paint that we can contemplate ferociously profane images of sodomy and torment, cruelty and despair, even the vulgar commonplaces of the lavatory, and perceive in them an inheritance from the great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power, the classical pantheon of ancient gods, the Christian pantheon of martyrs. Titian, Rembrandt and Velázquez, were they to beg entry to this latest exhibition, might not care for Bacon’s personal pantheon, but I have no doubt that they would recognise kinship in his mastery of paint and the profound pessimism of his images. As an atheist and as an artist for whom money was at least as important as the message of his work, far too often letting loose the second rate (as well as farts), he was the perfect mirror of the spirit of his age.[1]

Rachel Campbell-Johnston. Tate Britain's marvellous retrospective gives us a haunting vision of life stripped to the bone, a sense of macabre desolation.
He is the single greatest artist that Britain has produced in the hundred years that have passed since his birth in 1909. There is no great secret to his success. Francis Bacon is quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters. And you don't need to study the intricacies of art history or peruse complex philosophies to see why. You just have to look at those shocking, disturbing and sumptuous canvases. This was the man who (to steal a line from Paul Valéry) aimed to evoke sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul.
Tate Britain's Francis Bacon is a classic show. It moves chronologically - except in a few cases where works have been reshuffled to thematic galleries - through the artist's career, examining its principle phases through a succession of mostly superlative paintings. From the first thickly encrusted canvases of a maverick who, coming late to painting after an abortive career as an interior designer (you can still spot its legacy in the strange tubular steel furniture) at the age of 35, it moves through all the most famous images - the popes screaming in their gilded prisons, the howling baboons, the wrestling copulators, the haunting triptychs, the Furies, the handgrenade faces - to the late but still unflinching meditations on the futility of life.
This is a show that invites us to consider Bacon's place in the postwar pantheon. It coincides with two other shows that offer an illuminating context: Mark Rothko at Tate Modern represents all that Bacon struggled against as, stubbornly resisting the forces of abstraction that were flourishing in America, he sought a place for the figurative in a disillusioned postwar world. Damien Hirst, whose glitzy spectacular is now at Sotheby's, is Bacon's closest successor. At his most powerful he translates it into 3-D.
But 15 years after Bacon's sudden death in Madrid, neither the artist nor the critic David Sylvester, that impassioned purveyor of his reputation to the public, is there to put the works in their usual biographical context. Does the legacy need the legend? Or can it stand alone?
Straightforward correlations between life and art are reductive, but Bacon's work, more than that of any other artist of his generation, has been illuminated by his infamous life story. It was, after all, through his upbringing as the rebellious son of a racehorse trainer in Ireland, the decadence of Paris and Berlin, the drinking and gambling and sadomasochist homosexuality of his “gilded gutter life” in Soho that he discovered his subjects.
The man whom his former friend (their paths later diverged) Lucian Freud described as the wildest and wisest person he had never known wilfully flouted convention, working to make himself as unnatural as he possibly could, espousing a philosophy of futility with an almost religious fervour. “We are born and we die,” he said. “But in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.” These were the drives - the lusts, the despairs, the cruelties and the loves - that lent frenzied life to the carcass of a creature that was fundamentally no more than meat.
This was the philosophy that, passed down by Sylvester like an article of faith, became the single most powerful shaping force on our perception of his work.
But now we are asked to reconsider. A few years ago, great bundles of overpainted newspaper clippings and sketches were discovered in Bacon's studio. And yet this was the artist who supposedly (remember that ludicrous biopic) hurled fistfuls of paint, swiped handfuls of rags and pitched buckets of turpentine at his canvases, allowing his creations to grow, or destroy themselves with complete spontaneity. He had always said that he didn't draw; that he didn't want the brain to interfere with “the inevitability of an image”, that accident was essentially at the heart of his vision, that he wanted to trap its vitality with “the foam of the unconscious locked around it”.
As the tattered studio relics are given a focal place in this show, curators ask us to think about the processes of making. Wall texts pick over the paintings in technical detail like beetles pick over the skeletal mechanics of a corpse.
They can't spoil the show. These paintings are too powerful. You only have to look at the portraits that attack and brutalise the human appearance, mashing and twisting it into bruised hues that show us not how repulsive but how beautiful violence can be. You only have to stare into those bright uninflected arenas against which human life struggles like some half-squashed insect. You only have to listen to the primal scream of those popes. A gallery dedicated to images of crucifixions, including three triptychs, is the high point of this show. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, man is butchered like an animal on the cross of his life. The raw brutality of pain is overpowering.
Another key gallery, themed around Bacon's late lover George Dyer, is equally evocative. A haunting triptych from 1973 unfurls across the walls telling the story of how, on the night of Bacon's first great triumph (a Parisian retrospective) his lover stayed up in the hotel bedroom and took an overdose. Vomiting into the basin, hunched over the lavatory, he died alone under the stark electric light. With all its macabre desolation it is one of the most haunting images of our era.
This show offers front-row seats in an arena in which atrocities as complex and cruel, as flamboyant and painful, as the bullfights that inspired Bacon take place. Maybe, ironically, there are too many great paintings. Visitors should certainly head for the “crisis” gallery, which presents Bacon in the late Fifties fumbling clumsily amid thick pigments and garish colours for a fresh way forward. Here are some disasters. And you need them. Bacon does not always pull off his impetuous canvases. He destroyed countless works. But surviving mistakes remind us how much of a gambler he was, of how close to the ridiculous, the melodramatic, the downright ludicrous his vision could be.
“I am greedy for...what chance can give me far behind anything I can calculate logically,” he once said. As a young man staying in Monte Carlo, Bacon ended up one night winning the (in those days vast) amount of £1,600 in a casino. He used the money to rent a villa which he stocked with food and wine for friends and ten days later he hadn't the cash to buy his ticket home.
This is the sort of gamble that every Bacon painting takes. Curators will not establish his place in posterity through technical analysis. The works are not illuminated by logic. Photographic images, from pictures of mouth diseases through Muybridge's motion studies, to a golf manual (the arrows with which he peppers his later works supposedly come from it), may, undeniably, have inspired him, but they are not the key to his paintings for at the heart of his work lies an essential mystery. You can't just fill in the blanks.
So far better to ignore those irritating wall texts and pass over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings do their work.
These are not canonised masterpieces they are desperate gambles. Each time we look at them the dice are rolled again. Maybe for another generation they won't work. But for now watch your reflection glide across the glazed darkness of his surfaces. The blackness has a bottomless depth in the gallery's stark brightness. The colours glow lurid and vivid. As you step across those images of crushed flesh and gristle, of mankind crouched, knotted and crawling, broken and yowling, you are stepping into an arena where human flesh wrestles with its terrible fate. Bacon paints the frenzied reality that lies beneath the veneer of civilisation. His vision is as powerful as that of the great Renaissance Masters except that he reveals savage mystery where others sought redeeming grace.[2]

Fisun Güner. There is a painting in this excellent Tate retrospective that is so uncharacteristic of anything you may be familiar with in the work of Francis Bacon, that encountering it is a jaw-dropping moment.
Study For A Portrait Of Van Gogh VI, 1957 is a Fauvist riot of neon-bright streaks depicting a landscape through which a shadowy black figure roams. Oddly, Tate has used it on much of its exhibition memorabilia. Perhaps they want to entice us with something less familiar, amid so much that is almost too intimately known.
When he painted the piece, Bacon had already achieved some of his greatest works: his famous post-war Crucifixion series and his 1953 Study After Velázquez's Portrait Of Pope Innocent X, a magnificently dissolving and screaming visage suggesting both terror and unspeakable rage. Greater paintings were still to come, though at the expense of Bacon's private life.
Upon the suicide of lover George Dyer in 1971, Bacon embarked upon a series of extraordinarily powerful triptychs showing Dyer's final, desperate moments. A whole room is devoted to them here, and it is the best room by far. But the few seemingly out-of-place – and, especially in later years, duff – paintings are shown here to be worth considering, too: they offer insight into Bacon's constant artistic struggle.
Rather than varnishing his paintings, Bacon preferred to cover them in glass, so that in their darkly reflective surfaces our own image is imprisoned in Bacon's hellish vision of humanity: we are forever forced to be mere helpless witnesses to others' pain.
And just as you find your own image reflected in the paintings, so Bacon's own haunted and fleshily dissolute features are reflected squarely in the centre of one of the glass doors as you turn to leave. This is rather neat. The image is of the small self-portrait situated at the far right corner of one of Bacon's late triptychs. Whether this ghostly encounter is the result of pure chance or an act of genius placement by the curator, I have no idea. Yet, just as we are haunted by Bacon's nihilistic vision, it seems entirely apt that we should find his painted ghost confronting us on our exit.[3]

Louise Jury. You might not be able to pay £43 million to own a Francis Bacon triptych.
But for the next four months, you can visit Tate Britain and see the three-part work that set a world record for Bacon at auction in New York in May.
The private owner is lending the paintings, inspired by Greek mythology, to the first British retrospective for 23 years.
Although the exhibition will go on to the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, London is the only city where the triptych can be seen.
The loan is one of many from private hands for the exhibition of around 70 masterpieces that marks the centenary of Bacon's birth.
Works depicting the crucifixion from key stages in Bacon's career - including his first published work and the first masterpiece of his maturity - are being shown together for the first time.
The exhibition also includes the three different triptychs of his lover George Dyer, including the one produced in the outpouring of grief that immediately followed Dyer's suicide in 1971.
Another highlight is the first fulllength painting of a pope - one of five in the show - which was thought to have been destroyed by the artist but was found rolled up after his death.
All are being exhibited with the first display in Britain of archive material found in his studio that shed new light on his working methods. It includes crumpled photographs of his friends and lovers including Dyer and Peter Lacy, many splashed with paint.
Chris Stephens, the co-curator, said he hoped the exhibition would show Bacon, who died in 1992, was the father of British Pop in depicting everyday subjects and using photography and the key figure of the immediate post-War.
He was not as violent as people imagined, Dr Stephens said. "His underlying philosophy as an atheist was we have a limited time, we're simply the same as other animals with uncontrollable urges, fears and lust. But he wasn't that nihilistic. He was optimistic and a very warm person. There's something very different about seeing his greatest works in the flesh." The exhibition is at the heart of a Bacon bonanza this autumn. The Andipa Gallery is showing Bacon graphics, Christie's is selling a portrait-of Bacon by Lucian Freud for an estimated £5 million to £7 million, and Thames and Hudson is publishing Incunabula by Martin Harrison, documenting Bacon's working methods.[4]

Adrian Searle. A major new retrospective of Francis Bacon's work explores the darker reaches of humanity. What a shame he became a parody of himself, says Adrian Searle
(Image caption: Animal carnality ... Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York).
For several reasons, Francis Bacon continues to be extremely popular. His art deals with human suffering, and timeless tropes of the human condition: solitude and isolation, anxiety and ennui, horror and tragedy. Bacon's paintings have sex, violence and death in them - but then so do CSI and Miss Marple.
None of which would count for very much if the artist, almost entirely self-taught, didn't have such a good nose for paint. His paintings look like real art with a capital A, and they have the gold frames to prove it. They have the touch and manner of great, painterly painting, fetishised, and all the more tantalising and unworldly, for being always shown, at the artist's insistence, under glass.
Bacon learned by getting up close to paintings and observing their surfaces. He looked at how paint behaved both as a substance and as a visual surrogate for all the textures there are in the world: for cloth, grass, fur, porcelain, skin. And in Bacon's case, one might say: for chrome, mattress ticking, vomit, meat.
Bacon not only borrowed from, but added to, the vocabulary of painting. He also tainted it, and made certain ways of approaching painting untouchable. Knowing this would, I think, have pleased him. He developed all sorts of interesting shorthand ways of describing things. He had a good sense from the first of what paintings should feel as well as look like, what the variety and drama of their substance and textures should be. So we find congealed masses of dried opaque colour next to the thinnest stains, whose edges are as controlled as a Barnett Newman. We find graphic outlines and contours filled-in with compound, and often contradictory gestures that somehow manage to pull themselves into a figure, even if it is a figure that is pulling itself apart. This sort of dichotomy makes Bacon exciting.
Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal. Bacon invariably fell back on something like illustration, for all that he disdained it. He overtly references Velázquez, Van Gogh and Ingres, and steals backgrounds from Mark Rothko and British colour-field paintings of the 1960s, about which he was always dismissive. He was a card. Maybe he thought no one would notice.
Bacon also depicts a modern world - modern furniture, men in suits, dangling lightbulbs, plumbing, fitted carpets and floor-to-ceiling curtains. His early career as an interior decorator informed his art. He had a keen feel for the psychology of a space. All this gave his art a sense of the timely, and lent it a kind of spooky realism. At the same time, Bacon was an almost entirely mannered and theatrical painter. Sometimes I think this is all that's left for painting now anyway. But all his affectations seem at one with Bacon's personality: his stylistic and technical tics are at one with brushing his teeth with Vim and dyeing his hair with shoe polish.
The cast of sexy low-life gangster boyfriends, louche dissolutes, Colony Room renegades and hard-drinking, hard-smoking Soho gorgons who people Bacon's art also keep the paintings alive and vivid for us. These feature animals, captains of industry, dead politicians, Renaissance popes, Mick Jagger and Ian Botham, though the last two have wisely been left out of Tate Britain's retrospective.
Bacon's art also contains an entire repertoire of bruises, wounds, amputations done up with soiled bandages, Nazi armbands and other paraphernalia verging on cliché. There is much blood, and a great deal of alizarin crimson. Unconvincing jets of water struggle to clean all the muck away, though the flying spunk clings on like ectoplasm, unless it's just a spatter of white paint that has fallen off a passing Miró. While we are at it, Bacon is very good at male feet and footwear, at sneakers and Hush Puppies. It is often the details - a doorknob or a wristwatch, teeth or toiletware - that make his paintings plausible and seductive.
The horrors of the 20th century echo through Bacon's sparse interiors. A man swerves in his chair. There is death or a lover at the door. There, I'm at it now. Next I'll be going on about Bacon's Grand Guignol dramas, the encroaching blackness and intimations of mortality, the horror that lurks beneath the skin. Everyone else does. The catalogue to this retrospective has a screaming pope on the cover, unless it's a pope at the dentist or a yawning pope, with Bacon's name picked out in gold.
Protestant Irish-born 99 years ago, Bacon grew to be the most famous British painter of the latter half of the 20th century. Myth, rumour and anecdote about his life have come to dominate discussion of his art, in the same way that his art fed on the litter of medical illustrations, books of nature photography, cricket annuals, newspaper clippings and gay body-building comics that he tramped underfoot in his midden of a studio, now rebuilt in Dublin. All those published conversations with David Sylvester, the hilarious drunken TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, John Maybury's biopic with Derek Jacobi, and the appearance of Bacon paintings in the credits to Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris - all these things add to the intensity of Bacon's painted scream. Aaaaarghhhh.
But it is a hollow cry. Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement - yours as well as his - setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was. Bacon died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Velázquez will kill him there again, when the show comes to town - but then Velázquez kills everyone.
Devoting almost an entire room of Tate Britain to Bacon's 1950s businessmen, with their Giacometti-derived faces looming from the Prussian blue darkness of their shadowy lairs, works very well. They evince the power of well-bred English mafiosi, with the right sort of animal carnality beneath their suits. This room is titled Apprehension. Others are called Zone, Animal, Crisis, and so on.
One room contains nothing but crucifixions, including Bacon's terrific 1933 Crucifixion, a white and grey Picassoid figure, now in Damien Hirst's Murderme collection. The contrast between the Tate's 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and a second version of this triptych, painted in 1988 and installed in the vestibule outside the exhibition proper, could not be more painful. The 1988 painting, like almost all late Bacon, is a tired and unnecessary display of hackish technical virtuosity.
But there are paintings I miss here, especially the Museum of Modern Art in New York's Painting, 1946, and the painting Two Figures, 1953, a frank depiction of two men fucking on a bed, often described as "wrestling"; these two works seem to me essential. Much else is not.I have been looking at Bacon for 40 years now, after being an adolescent fan - the grisly aspects of his art appeal to the teenage mind - and I still ask myself if he was the real deal. When asked about the proliferation of fakes of his work, Picasso said that he sometimes faked Picassos, too. Bacon, an authentic fake, whose debt to Picasso was enormous, spent over half his career producing Bacons rather than paintings. "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends," he said - more than once.[5]

Peter Bradshaw. I was in Room 6 of the exhibition, which the curators have entitled "Archive", because it attempts to excavate Bacon's working practices, and shows the way he uses found images and pictures ripped from magazines: photographs and stills from movies. Famously, Bacon was inspired by Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, particularly the nurse with the broken spectacles, which he transformed into his characteristically disquieting 1957 painting Study For The Nurse From The Battleship Potemkin.
The exhibition displays Bacon's copy of Film, a 1946 Pelican publication by movie historian Roger Manwell, which shows stills from the famous Odessa Steps Sequence, including of course the nurse, which so transfixed Bacon. Intriguingly, the exhibition juxtaposes Bacon's copy of this battered paperback with his copy of a book called Phenomena of Materialism: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics, by Baron Von Shrenk Notzing. This contains blurry images of what appear to be strange contorted apparitions - again, grist to Bacon's mill.
Looking at this, I pondered Bacon's perception that still movie images detached from a motion picture sequence have an uncanny, deathly quality: undead, zombie forms deprived of the "life" that the moving picture gave them, yet not entirely dead - and also ghostly. [...] In Room 10 of the Tate exhibition (entitled "Late") one can see Francis Bacon's last triptych from 1991, the painting that he may well have been working on when I telephoned. The catalogue observes of this piece: "He faced death with a defiant concentration on the exquisiteness of the lived moment."[6]

Tom Lubbock. It used to look like death. Now it looks like life in abundance. And it certainly doesn't look like going away. Francis Bacon's art has survived to his birth centenary, or I guess it will, since that falls next year. So this retrospective at Tate Britain, which opens tomorrow and just squeaks into January, is a centenary show.
But survival itself didn't need proving. Since its appearance on the London art scene in the 1940s, attention has never drifted from Bacon's work. What does need marking is how our view of that work has altered. And it seems to me that its whole place has changed. Bacon no longer stands as an artist among artists, not even a very special artist. He won't be grouped with the School of London, say (Freud, Auerbach, Kitaj), or under Post-war European Figuration (Giacometti, Balthus). No, he now looks simply like an icon of general British culture. He's a familiar. You talk about Bacon as you talk about The Beatles or Monty Python.
When the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage entitled a piece of music Three Screaming Popes – referring to Bacon's well-known series of images by a nickname – you could see what was going on. A "refined" art was drawing strength and vitality from a more popular art. He might as well have called the piece Three Dead Parrots. And if an unaccustomed levity seems to have entered the discussion, that's no mistake either. Bacon has a very British mix of violence, comedy and bloody-minded big-heartedness. And perhaps you hadn't noticed how fond of animals he is.
Bacon's art is not a tunnel vision of horror, expressing the futility of the human condition or the special nightmare of the 20th century. And going to this retrospective, you shouldn't expect to be inching forward in agony through frescoes of the skull (to use a Beckettian phrase). You should expect your money's worth – and you'll get it. The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It's a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring.
Its theatricality is obvious. Bacon's paintings are scenes, made of distinct stage areas, backdrops, doorways and assorted props and actors. His people are presented full on, usually centre-frame. I don't deny that those people are sometimes in a terrible mess. Everyone, on their first encounter with Bacon's art, gets an impression of car crash, bomb damage, burns, meltdown, slaughterhouse. The red paint and the open mouths, of course, encourage this response. But they shouldn't distract you from the amazing performance that's going on before your very eyes. Bacon is a magician, a quick-change artist. He brings off the most sudden disappearing and reappearing acts, fusions and transformations. The flesh slips, slurps, smears, flares, blurs, fades, evaporates, abruptly dematerialises. Legerdemain: you just can't see how it's done, how it moves from solid to film to spook to gleam to void and back.
All this "damage" is in fact animating. There isn't a corpse anywhere in Bacon's work. His savage treatment is an extension, an exaggeration, of the body's own movements, sensations, expressions. And though his use of oil paint gives him a more liquid language, it wouldn't be wrong to see him in the line of English graphic caricature, and the way it uses distortion, not only to play with likeness, but to inject energy and rub the nerves raw.
Yet, strangely, Bacon's bodies are both sensational and invulnerable. They're in an awful state – and nothing can harm them. Whatever catastrophe befalls their flesh, they're saved by their firm, curvy, bouncy outlines. They seem held within a mould. Often they look like inflatables. Or rather, they seem invulnerable because they are both flexible shape-shifters and sturdy thick-skinned creatures, who can always bounce back. They carry a double fantasy of survival, familiar from animation: total plasticity, total resistance. Another name for this is slapstick.
And so we watch them, on their stages, in action: shouting, racing around, on the loo, sitting chatting, buggering, blowing smoke, throwing up, shaving, turning a street corner, writhing on beds, lolling. Their human shapes are joined by others, and dance with them, elliptical forms that might be areas of spotlight, amoeboid blobs that could be shadows or pools of spilt drink, except the colours and tones are all wrong: they're more like thought bubbles, or ectoplasm.
Sometimes, Bacon sticks in an overt artificial device, a geometrical circle, a road-sign arrow, a lopsided cubical structure framing the action. These perform a focusing, pointing, intensifying function – look at that, feel that. They show how far Bacon is from purism. If the act needs one of these extra winks, nudges or double-takes, he throws it in. If not, not. He never plays with the language of painting for its own sake.
It's a surprisingly large and embracing art. Bacon's one of the few modern artists to do cars – see them racing across in the background like little Monopoly pieces. And there's his menagerie of animals, real and fantastical, from the monster critters in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, to monkeys, dogs, owls and bulls. And somehow one leaves to this late point the primary fact that Bacon is a sumptuous, delicious colourist. I wouldn't call him a real explorer in colour, but he is a great decorator, a great maker of tastes, and the point is: the tastes are rich and sweet, the harmonies are major key. Again, it's a shamelessness, it's showbiz. He can do it and he does it. He doesn't have any puritan qualms about being gorgeous. He's a vulgar entertainer.[7]

Oginia O’Dell. Amid economic meltdown and on the eve of being sucked into a black hole, it was perhaps unusual to see a London exhibition opening featuring on the BBC's News at Ten. Then again, Tate Britain's centenary retrospective of Francis Bacon, which opens to the public tomorrow, has been widely anticipated as a major art highlight of the year. Irish-born artist Bacon, widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, is known for his giant canvasses spilling out nightmarish visions and contorted bodies in their raw and fleshy glory. The Tate retrospective, arranged broadly chronologically, brings together approximately 70 of the most important paintings from the artist's turbulent life, including his portraits of Pope Innocent X and celebrated triptychs such as Three Studies for a Crucifixion. The exhibition will travel to the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York next year.
For Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writing in the Times, Bacon is "quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters … His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul." Campbell's high point of the five-star show is the "gallery dedicated to images of crucifixions, including three triptychs … In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962, man is butchered like an animal on the cross of his life. The raw brutality of pain is overpowering."
She is less impressed, however, with a room devoted to archive material found in Bacon's studio. This collection of source material - including preparatory sketches, photographs of close friends, film stills and images of violence, animals, athletes and medical examinations - was revealed posthumously when Bacon's studio was painstakingly dismantled and relocated piece by piece to a Dublin gallery. It now sheds light on some of his working methods and dramatically dispels Bacon's self-mythologies about the spontaneous nature of his own work.
For Campbell-Johnston, it is "better to ignore those irritating wall texts and pass over the tatty memorabilia as a mere sideshow. Let the paintings do their work."
She also highlights a theme that troubles nearly all the critics: Bacon's monumental legacy and fame. There are almost "too many great paintings" on show, she writes. Overfamiliarity is also the subject of Fisun Güner's [...] review in Metro. The retrospective is "excellent" but Güner immediately highlights the "jaw-dropping" incongruity of Bacon's Van Gogh series of paintings made in north Africa in the late 1950s. Notably, Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI - a "riot of neon-bright streaks" - is used by the Tate on some of the exhibition memorabilia: "Perhaps they want to entice us with something less familiar, amid so much that is almost too intimately known," writes Güner. The Independent's Tom Lubbock agrees: "[Bacon] now looks simply like an icon of general British culture. He's a familiar. You talk about Bacon as you talk about The Beatles or Monty Python."
Lubbock's review goes on to focus on the artist's shameless, showbiz approach to his art, calling him a "vulgar entertainer" whose art was rooted in shape-shifting theatricality: "The art of Bacon is a variety bill. It's a hall of mirrors, a crooked house, a peep show, a ghost train, a circus, a limbo dance, a stand-up act, a piece of conjuring … Bacon is a magician, a quick-change artist."
The Guardian's art critic, Adrian Searle, admits to being an adolescent fan ("the grisly aspects of Bacon's art appeal to the teenage mind") but after looking at the artist for 40 years, he is still troubled by the "myth, rumour and anecdote about his life [that] have come to dominate discussion of his art". Searle writes: "Bacon fakes his boneless anatomies, and has the ingenuity to make us believe them, too. I vacillate between admiration and dismissal ... Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. This retrospective … is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was". He concludes: "I still ask myself if he was the real deal."[8]

Richard Dorment. A beautifully presented show at Tate Britain casts intriguing new light on Francis Bacon's visceral visions of humanity, says Richard Dorment
Francis Bacon is something of an artistic chimera, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't mixture of British insularity and modernist sophistication.
Born in Ireland in 1909, he belonged to a generation of British artists and draughtsmen loosely identified as the Neo-Romantics. No one denies that he was the most naturally gifted painter to emerge in this country after the war, but from the perspective of international modernism that dominated art during the 20th century his paintings never transcended the time and place in which they were made.
But step back and look again and suddenly you see another Francis Bacon, this one the heir not to any British painter but to Cézanne and to Picasso.
In the nocturnal Study for Nude (1951), the shadowy form in front of the black curtain is just as likely to be a gorilla as a person. Typically, Bacon has taken an idea that is only implied in Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon - that women are creatures of the jungle - to its logical conclusion: whether you paint an animal or a human being, it's pretty much the same thing. Here, the broad facets of pink and black paint Bacon uses to create volume are lifted directly from Cézanne, who also shared Bacon's obsession with eternal movement and constant change.
The Bacon retrospective that opens today at Tate Britain is the third to be held at Millbank, but the first since the artist's death in 1992. It is also the first major show in years not to be selected and installed by his formidable champion and interpreter, the late David Sylvester.
As an exhibition organiser, Sylvester was a magician who made any work of art he touched somehow look better than you'd ever seen it look before. Yet even he never convinced me of Bacon's artistic stature, so I was curious to see whether the Tate show would be the beginning of a major critical re-evaluation downwards.
That that has not happened is a tribute to the organisers, Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens. Rigorously chosen for the quality of the pictures, the show is also beautifully displayed to take us through Bacon's career chronologically and thematically. What it does that is new is to focus our attention on the specificity of Bacon's art by making us see how much of it is rooted in visual (as opposed to emotional) experience.
In part this is possible because a vast archive of Bacon's photographs, ephemera and drawings has become available to scholars in recent years. A whole gallery has been given over to showing a fraction of this material, and in some ways it is the armature around which the whole show has been built.
In a 1952 painting showing a mad dog running in circles, for example, Bacon captures in paint the panic and frenzy of the abandoned animal in a way I've never seen done in art before. Panting from thirst, the possibly rabid creature is a moving blur that yet seems to pause for an instant to look directly out of the picture at us, a living embodiment of the futility of existence. But, for all its metaphysical content, before it is anything else the picture is the expression of Bacon's pity and horror for the plight of a specific animal abandoned near a highway in a hot country.
Likewise, the snarling dog that bares its teeth in Man with Dog becomes, in Bacon's hands, an embodiment of evil, a Cerberus who guards the entrance to an underworld represented by the sewer in the street. Once again, however, it is the visceral immediacy of the image that captures and holds our attention, not its symbolic content. The dog is so vividly rendered in silvery blacks and blues that your first thought in front of the picture is that it would bite your arm off if it weren't restrained by its chain.
Later, in a section of Bacon's portraiture, you have the same sense that, far from painting vague evocations of friends and lovers, each person in these pictures is an instantly recognisable personality. Bacon was working from the specific to the general, never losing a connection with his source of inspiration, even if, as was usually the case, that source was a photograph.
Where I lose patience with Bacon is in pictures such as the famous Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), where three armless and legless torsos howl with rage and despair. His attempt to symbolise the human condition might appeal to an adolescent or a fan of science fiction, but for me the picture fails because I can find no equivalent to its histrionics in my own experience.
Bacon returned to the subject twice. In the version of 1965, he included the figures of two comic-book mobsters standing at a bar to watch the show, and adding utterly unnecessary details such as the Nazi armband worn by the eviscerated and mutilated carcass at the far right.
I just hate art that makes me feel manipulated. What other possible response could we have to these images of blood-smeared Nazi amputees beaten to a pulp than blank revulsion? I'm not saying these things don't happen or that artists shouldn't paint them, but that it is all too easy to get a response by depicting them.
After a sustained period living in the South of France and North Africa, in the Sixties, Bacon begins to drench his pictures in lush, saturated colours. But, for all his chromatic extravagance and technical virtuosity, at precisely this period he also starts to work on a scale that is just too big. Whether it is the female nude on the bed in Lying Figure (1969) or the Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer (1971), wonderful passages of bravura painting are set against large areas of pure colour that read not as space or light but as dead background. American painters from Pollock to Johns were concerned at this date with precisely this problem of how to sustain visual interest over every inch of the canvas surface. Bacon doesn't seem to recognise the problem exists.
Whether this is a good thing depends on your point of view. When I first started to look at Bacon's work in the Sixties, it puzzled me that he couldn't have cared less about the integrity of the picture plane. From the very first pictures, Bacon created the illusion of three-dimensional space by encasing his figures in linear cubes that look like glass vitrines. Symbolically, their function was to render the powerful figures inside them powerless. But formally the device makes the pictures look as old-fashioned as anything by Bouguereau.
But in art nothing ever stands still. Looking at these works in 2008, the way Bacon separates his central images from the flat areas of colour surrounding them feels curiously modern - simply a device he uses to foreground the picture's subject rather than draw attention to its formal properties. Bacon had no interest in contributing to the history of art or its advancement. I faulted him for this, but now that lack of interest looks like the most avant garde thing about his work.I'll never be completely sold on Bacon, but that's my loss and certainly won't stop the crowds from pouring into Tate Britain.[9]

Laura Cumming. The visceral punch of a Francis Bacon painting is beyond dispute. But at Tate Britain's world-class exhibition - which brings together 100 of his works and reconstructs the photo-plastered walls of this London studio - we come face to face with the existential agony at the heart of his anarchic vision.
There are exhibitions - rare, superbly curated - that redefine an artist for a generation. The presentation of 100 works by Francis Bacon at Tate Britain until January, then at the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is just such a world-class event. Everyone knows what a Bacon looks like, and since his death in 1992 there have been other shows to remind us, but none has revealed quite as clearly as this one just how mysterious and anarchic his art remains.Take the content of the paintings. What exactly is going on here? Clearly there are the simple auction-house categories: screaming popes and writhing figures, suicides and crucifixions, grand triptychs of agony and violence bought for record sums by Russian oligarchs. And perhaps it seems that violence must therefore be Bacon's theme: bodies splayed and disembowelled, heads twisted and split as in some motorway pile-up. The naked bulb dangles over an amputee (or so it seems). Tobacco bursts from the stubbed fag like the innards of a corpse and the suicide retches his last breath. Even the beds on which lovers grapple are more like mortuary slabs. It is certainly true that Bacon did not paint flowers - although there is in fact an amazingly eerie image of hydrangeas in the opening room - and that his popes and martyrs are consummate horror shows. Ectoplasm, gore, mucus, all sorts of nameless substances are evoked and even imitated by the paint itself, and his stated ambition was to make the pictures look 'as if a human being had passed between them, leaving a trail of the human presence as a snail leaves its slime'.But Bacon was a gregarious Soho bohemian. His people are almost always portraits of lovers and friends. What might look like botched surgery - and like is the operative word since one is always searching for analogies to make sense of his art - is performed on images of drinking companions. Nor could anyone fail to notice just how gorgeous and balletic his pictures are, with their jewel-rich colours and precise choreography; or that his draughtsmanship is so buoyant and deft, even cartoon-like.John Berger long ago compared Bacon to Walt Disney and, before reeling at the supposed heresy, ask yourself whether these paintings don't have a similar sort of fiendish exuberance in their leaping lines and curves. Tom the cat runs smack into the frying pan, his face flattens, but he bounces back. What is shocking is that Bacon's figures stay stuck in their extreme distortions.The truth is that time passes and Bacon no longer comes across as the master of the bloody chamber, of images of torture and degradation the like of which had never before been seen in British art. This is partly because he is practically an old master by now, sanctified in museums the world over, his newness erased by familiarity, his revelations superseded by the pictures of real-life horror that flood into our living rooms. But it is also because what he made of his subject matter now seems so much more important - and this is the true action of the paintings: Bacon's obsessive reinvention and restatement of those isolated figures in their cages and cells.A very early work from 1945, for instance, shows a howling woman bent over naked, a man's overcoat slung across her hindquarters. It is a subject fit for any number of 20th-century artists. But what makes it so devastating here is some sort of nerve-wracking tension between the ravishing orange backdrop and the disembodied mouth with its animal teeth, between the beautifully described tweed of the coat and the outlandish body forms, anticipating David Lynch's Eraserhead by 30 years. And all capped by a funereal umbrella: once seen, never forgotten.It is a tremendous piece of image-coining and there are so many others in this show, the screaming popes immured in their thrones, the stripped child lolloping on all fours, the dog straining at its chain in the drowning darkness. And put like this, the irresistible comparison ought to be Goya. But the stylishness, the sheer operatic charge of these works has nothing to do with the Spaniard, no matter that Bacon studied the old masters from first to last, harking back to them in his heavy gold frames.Often, Bacon's showmanship is deliberately apparent. The way he uses the rough reverse of the canvas, the colour seeping into the hessian like blood - burnt orange, royal purple, midnight blue, crimson - or congealing stickily on the surface. The way he keeps every flailing figure in check with a precise geometry of glass boxes, elliptical arenas, the vertical striations of those dividing curtains at the back that suggest that this is just the ante-chamber to something worse.Look at a particularly camp pope in a monocle - one revelation here is of Bacon's humour - wedged to the waist in his chair like Winnie in Happy Days (Bacon, incidentally, precedes Beckett) and you see that what appears to be an accidental black spatter has been primped up with red so that it looks as if the painting itself spurts blood. But it is what Bacon does to the figures themselves that resists analysis. The curators of this show have reconstructed the photo-plastered walls of his London studio, about which so much nonsense has been written as if Bacon simply transcribed Eisenstein, Eadweard Muybridge, photos of Nuremberg, textbook shots of mouth diseases or patients positioned for X-rays. This proves crucial. It shows that Bacon never paints an exact moment of violence, nor its aftermath, nor anything captured in a photograph; he invents some split-second transition - his characteristic stop-start mutation.And where do those wildly aberrant faces come from? They might recall Henry Tonks's studies of First World War soldiers, but Bacon is not recording actual injuries; and this is not just some new variant of modernism either. The eyes want to straighten them out, these heads, put them back together. But the mind cannot.One of the greatest works here is also the smallest, a portrait of Bacon's lover George Dyer. A nearby photograph shows the same handsome profile, the curved nose echoed by the gleaming black quiff. But the painting, with its swerves and swipes, despite being instantly recognisable, is another thing altogether. Photo-real yet caricatural, molten but graphic, muscular and yet diaphanous, it moves seamlessly through its transitions. Whatever Dyer once was before his suicide, he has become a force-field of deathless matter. No stories, only images: that was Bacon's claim for his art and even though the late works seem to imply a narrative with their props and locations - the hotel, the telephone, a door flung open, a man hunched over a mirror - they never resolve into simple conclusions. His images are indelible, irrational and beyond summary, and his modest ambition for them - that they should be as vividly realised as possible - has surely turned out to be true.[10]

Rebecca Daniels. Despite claims that the Tate’s Francis Bacon exhibition is the biggest retrospective of him ever staged, it is, in fact, substantially smaller than the gallery’s 1985 show. [...] [T]this is the first exhibition held here since Bacon died and, without the control he exercised over the previous Tate show, the curators have had a new freedom in the presentation and reassessment of his art. There are two principal thematic detours from what is a loosely chronological hang, and these provide the most dramatic and visually powerful displays in the exhibition. The first features Bacon’s recurring preoccupation with the theme of the Crucifixion, the earliest version being the haunting Crucifixion (1933, Murderme, London), which Herbert Read illustrated in Art Now (1933), when Bacon was unknown. Bacon’s art is often characterised as violent and brutal but, with a few exceptions, this does not hold up under analysis. However, the Crucifixion triptychs are indeed violent, as the exhibition’s curator Chris Stephens noted in a BBC interview, and the decision by him and his co-curator, Matthew Gale, to hang Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Crucifixion (1965; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich) facing each other, as if in gladiatorial combat, is inspired.
A source for the mutilated bodies that appear in both the 1962 and the 1965 Crucifixion paintings is probably, as Martin Harrison has observed in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, an illustration in a book Bacon owned, The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (1957). The prominence of carcasses in both triptychs was prompted by a feature on abattoirs in Paris Match in November 1961 (which was found in Bacon’s studio). Furthermore, the controversial inclusion of a swastika in the 1965 Crucifixion was influenced by photographs of Hitler and his entourage. Therefore, the inspiration for the motifs in these important triptychs is drawn, as in so much of Bacon’s art, from magazines, newspapers and books. Yet, despite the importance of this material, several reviewers have denounced the exhibition’s inclusion of a room devoted to archival material as a distraction from the paintings. To me, the archive room enhances the experience of Bacon’s work, as it adds to an understanding of Bacon’s preparatory methods in the same way that Michelangelo’s preliminary studies (incidentally a major source of inspiration to Bacon) enhance an understanding of his finished frescoes.

The second thematic room, ‘Memorial’, is devoted to triptychs of George Dyer, Bacon’s lover and muse. The three large triptychs were all completed in the years following Dyer’s death in October 1971. The first, Triptych – In memory of George Dyer (1971; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel) is unusual in Bacon’s oeuvre as it appears to illustrate episodes in Dyer’s life, while Triptych, May-June 1973 (1973; private collection, Switzerland) recalls events of his lonely suicide by graphically showing him vomiting in a sink in one panel and in another slumped on a toilet (where he was found dead). Despite Bacon’s dislike of narrative interpretation, these triptychs seem to encourage a biographical reading, an approach that the curators have invited by collecting these works under the heading ‘Memorial’.
While it is tempting to analyse these works solely as a sentimental and nostalgic pining for lost love – and there is undoubtedly an element of that poignantly expressed in Bacon’s diary on 24 October 1972 (‘George died a year today’) – it must also be remembered that shortly before his death Dyer had planted drugs in Bacon’s studio, leading to Bacon’s arrest and trial only four months before Dyer’s suicide. It is perhaps because such complex personal emotions underlie these works that Bacon, unusually, has been unable to frustrate a narrative reading of his works. Bacon’s penchant for painting in themes is well represented and there is a good selection of popes, businessmen, crouching figures and animal paintings.

The decision to hang the paintings at an extremely low level (often just above the skirting boards) enables the viewer to examine the variations in Bacon’s application of paint. Nowhere is this more marked than in Head II (1949; Ulster Museum, Belfast), where the top half of the canvas has paint so thick that it seems impenetrable (Bacon was trying to capture the effect of rhinoceros skin) but the lower left is just raw canvas (revealing also that Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas). Subtle nuances in technique and colour can be appreciated with the low hang of the series works, particularly of the Popes, where the marked differences in such compositional elements as the ‘space frames’, curtains or ‘shuttering’ and the depiction of the throne are worthy of close attention.
The one problematic aspect of the hang is the decision to break up the series paintings, particularly the crouching figures, which are displayed over several different rooms and therefore offer no chance to view them comparatively. Nevertheless, in the case of the businessmen – which are all hung in one room – interspersing them with animal paintings forces one to view them independently of each other, and subtle differences appeared that I had not noticed before. The exhibition also has a wonderful range of Bacon’s important late works, particularly a room filled predominantly with triptychs from the 1960s to 1980s, including Triptych (1976; private collection), which was recently sold in London for the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art.
The quality and range of the works on display provide an opportunity to show Bacon at his best [...]. I left the exhibition feeling, as one should, visually exhausted but exhilarated.[11]

References
1. Brian Sewell, "The Francis Bacon I Knew," Evening Standard Online, 5.9.2008, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23551317-the-francis-bacon-i-knew.do
2. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, "Francis Bacon at Tate Britain," Times Online, 9.9.2008, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4706909.ece
3. Fisun Güner, “A Bad Dream come[s] True with Francis Bacon,” Metro.co.uk, 9.9.2008, http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/article.html?A_bad_dream_come_true_with_Francis_Bacon&in_article_id=301028&in_page_id=263
4. Louise Jury, "Francis Bacon: Triptych at the Tate," Evening Standard Online, 9.9.2008, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23552706-francis-bacon-triptych-at-the-tate.do
5. Adrian Searle, "Painted Screams," Guardian Online, 9.9.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/09/bacon.art
6. Peter Bradshaw, "My Encounter with Francis Bacon," Guardian Online Film Blog, 10.9.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/sep/10/bacon
7. Tom Lubbock, "All hail a Vulgar Entertainer: Francis Bacon Retrospective," Independent Online, 10.9.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/all-hail-a-vulgar-entertainer-francis-bacon-retrospective-924347.html
8. Oginia O’Dell, "Reviews Roundup: Francis Bacon at Tate Britain," Guardian Online, 10.9.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/10/bacon.tate.reviews
9. Richard Dorment, "Francis Bacon at Tate Britain: Bacon's Merciless Slices of Life," Telegraph Online,11.9.2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3560223/Francis-Bacon-at-Tate-Britain-Bacons-merciless-slices-of-life.html
10. Laura Cummings, "A Wayward Genius and his Chambers of Horror," The Observer (Guardian Online), 14.9.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/14/bacon.art
11. Rebecca Daniels, "Bacon in Close Focus" (21.10.2008), Apollo Magazine, November 2008, http://www.apollo-magazine.com/reviews/2535466/part_1/bacon-in-close-focus.thtml

Figura en el espejo, 1971

2009-11-05T05:37:00.000-08:00

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Francis Bacon, Figura yacente en un espejo (Lying Figure in a Mirror), 1971. Óleo sobre lienzo, 198.5 x 147.5 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao
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Figura en un espejo es un cuadro misterioso y sugestivo, dado que el espejo de Bacon refleja una figura cuya identidad y condición son equívocas..[1] Así, la naturaleza de la “figura” se nos presenta vagamente definida.
En efecto, podría tratarse tanto de un ser humano como de un monstruo o un animal. Sin embargo, el espejo eventualmente podría estar reflejando una escultura moderna (semejante a las realizadas por Henri Moore, por ejemplo).[2]
Al considerar la información que provista por la pintura en Bilbao resulta difícil establecer si la “figura” de Bacon es un ser vivo o uno inanimado.
Y en caso de tratarse de un ser vivo, tampoco queda demasiado claro si la “figura” en cuestión está viva o muerta.
De estar viva, parecería experimentar cambios drásticos en su cuerpo, es decir, una importante transformación o un avanzado estado de metamorfosis en el que la figura se retuerce, ya de dolor, ya de placer, ya de ambos.
La convulsión de la figura yacente frente al espejo acaso simbolice (entre otras cosas) el desgarro y la desesperación existencial propios del hombre contemporáneo. Pero tal convulsión también sugiere un cierto erotismo y éste depende en gran medida de la pose de la figura, cuyos referentes visuales se encuentran en la escultura clásica.
La contorsión de la figura puede bien aludir a las luchas intestinas del artista por crear su propia obra. Aunque Bacon también parece haber diseccionado la figura, reduciéndola casi a su mínima expresión, para luego reconstruirla... grotescamente.
Sea como fuere, la deformación prevalece en la figura, desdibujando su identidad y sugiriendo un estado monstruoso.
¿Deformación hermosa o belleza deformada? Ambas.
¿La agonía o el éxtasis? Esto y aquello simultáneamente.
¿Humanismo, deshumanización, re-humanización? Todos a la vez.
La habitación en la que la figura y el espejo se encuentran presenta paredes violáceas, suelo amarillo-anaranjado y ventanas cubiertas por cortinas de enrollar negras. Las cortinas aíslan la habitación del exterior y le confieren cierta atmósfera de intimidad.
Importante en la obra es el rol del espejo (dado que la escena es en gran parte percibida a través suyo). Es decir, aquí lo percibido es gran parte algo reflejado. Ello indudablemente confiere ambigüedad al lienzo.
El marco del espejo, Definido sólo por dos líneas blancas, el marco del espejo es un recurso técnico sumamente útil: acota la habitación, limita el suelo y la pared, otorga profundidad a la obra y divide el cuadro en dos áreas interdependientes.
Notablemente, existe un fuerte contraste entre la riqueza formal de la figura y la austeridad de los elementos que la rodean.
Posiblemente el objetivo de Bacon no haya sido el crear desasosiego ni transmitir la angustia existencial de la sociedad contemporánea, sino el poder expresarse libremente y plasmar sobre el lienzo su propio estado anímico. Alguna vez Bacon habló acerca de su deseo de abrir las “válvulas del sentir.” El espejo de Bacon aparentemente funciona como un medio de apertura de las válvulas del sentir tanto del pintor como de quien contempla su obra (e inmediatamente cae presa de ella).
Algunos conceptos respecto a la obra de Bacon continúan siendo repetidos, pese a que son harto estereotipados. Así, se dice que su obra es inquietante, violenta, cruel...
Por momentos ello tal vez sea cierto. Pero la obra de Bacon es también impactante, lúcida, conmovedora.
Se comenta insistentemente que hay en la pintura de Bacon angustia, opresión, soledad... Pero estas nociones de hecho forman parte de nuestra condición humana.
A la gente podrá gustarle más o menos el trabajo de Bacon, pero lo cierto es que él no pinta ningún paraíso prometido, sino que captura y reformula la realidad según él mismo la percibe.
A diferencia de otros artistas que se interesaron exclusivamente en las posibilidades estético-decorativas que ofrece la abstracción, Bacon concentró sus esfuerzos en explorar nada más ni nada menos que la existencial humana, o inhumana si se prefiere. Y lo hizo a calzón quitado. En este sentido, Bacon fue el principal heredero de Picasso e indudablemente uno de los mayores creadores del siglo XX.

Notas
1. El cuadro de Bacon en Bilbao es también conocido como "Figura tumbada en un espejo" o "Figura tendida ante un espejo.
2. Figura reclinada (Reclining Figure, 1951), véase http://documenta-akermariano.blogspot.com/2009/11/moore-reclining-figure-1951.html

Acerca del presente texto. Escrito 3.4.2007 e inicialmente publicado en Flogup (Mariano Akerman, "Bacon y la Figura en el Espejo de 1971," Plenitud, 4.3.2008, www.flogup.com/akermariano/810256), mas en esta versión se halla editado y puesto al día. Cita. Akerman, Mariano. "Figura en el Espejo, 1971" (Bacon y la Figura en el Espejo de 1971, 3.4.2008), Enthusiastic Despair, http://fb-akermariano.blogspot.com/2009/11/figura-en-un-espejo.html.