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| Francis
Bacon |
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| Painter
of a Dark Vision
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--Inseparable
Art and Life?
--For
most of his many years it was simply not to speak or write of
Francis 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 his 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 Francis
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".
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--We
are speaking of two honest Bacons, with an unmentionable commercial
third bacon waiting in the wings.
--The
first was the kaleidoscopic, fragmentary Francis 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
second Bacon was the painter preparing for the next commercial
exhibition, the repetitious Bacon, The Francis 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. |
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--The
painter looks at you from behind his easel, a palette resting
on his left arm, a long thin brush in his right hand, the ends
of his moustache curling upward, the cross of Santiago on his
chest.
--This
is the self-portrait of the Spanish master Diego Velázquez,
on a page of an old art book smeared with a cloud of pink paint,
fleshy and warm, as if a human body had burst in the air above
it, the aftermath of a conversation between two great artists
across the centuries.
--It
was found among the forest of paintbrushes, dollops of pointillist
graffiti and enigmatically suspended bare light bulbs in the studio
of the artist Francis Bacon, a tiny space in a mews near South
Kensington tube station where he worked virtually everyday from
the early sixties until his death in 1992.
--Today
the studio is preserved in its entirety at the Hugh Lake Gallery
in Dublin.
--You
enter a chilly refrigerated room and peer through narrow windows
into the terrifyingly claustrophobic interior of the studio, that
has in its own right taken on the intense presence of a work of
Art.
--Francis
Bacon joked that the daubs of paint he splashed on its walls were
his only abstract works.
--Now
the studio has become his only installation. It is fearsome with
its rust-flecked mirror, its gory detritus of paint cans and pigment.
--There's
an incredible power to this place and the creativity it commemorates.
The images on this article are part of its pungent archive of
a life lived in the magic space between mind and bodily act -
the life of a Painter of a Dark Vision!
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--Francis
Bacon didn't always tell the truth about his painting life. He
said he worked entirely by chance and accident, yet the secrets
of his studio revealed since his death, include plans for paintings,
rough sketches, and precise sources for images - such as the photograph
of a plucked and trussed chicken from the Conran cook book that
he directly copied on to a canvas.
--Evidently
his work was more thought-out and intellectual than he liked to
make it look. Further evidence is provided in Bacon's Incunabula,
a fascinating publication of the research materials from his studio.
That's the source of the pictures here. Its author, Martin Harrison,
says Francis Bacon's hoarded photographs of everything from physical
deformities to the faces of close friends, reproductions of Old
Master paintings and pages from magazines on cookery, golf and
soccer, appear to be essential to a proper understanding of his
aims and methods.
--Most
of all, though, and in an intensely moving way, these photographic
fragments are part of Francis Bacon himself, marked by his brush,
recycled through his enigmatic imagination. With their beaten
up, torn, stained scrappiness, you might almost imagine them as
digested and - to be Baconian about it - regurgitated or defecated
by him. |
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--Take
that portrait of Velázquez. It is a souvenir of love. Francis
Bacon idolised this 17th-century portraitist of the Spanish court.
--How
is it, he eloquently wondered, that an artist can so accurately
illustrate the faces of real people and "at the same time
so deeply unlock the greatest things that a man can think and
feel"?
--He
collected books about Velázquez for their reproductions
and in talking about his favourite, a portrait of Pope Innocent
X, explained how "it haunts me, and opens up all sort of
feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even
in me".
--That
says a lot about the process of creativity these fragments reveal.
--Francis
Bacon looked at photographs and reproductions to unlock his imagination
- a thoughtful process but in no sense rational.
--Some
artists use drugs or drink to disinhibit themselves. Francis Bacon
was a legendary drinker but claimed he rarely used drink creatively.
--He
got drunk instead on visual stimuli - gorged on images. This is
the aftermath of a visual orgy.
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--A
black and white photograph of a crowd being fired on in St Petersburg
in 1917, color close-ups of skin diseases from medical text book,
serial photographs of animal and human motion by the photographer
Eadweard Muybridge, art book reproductions of ancient Greek and
Egyptian sculpture and Michelangelo drawings next to photos of
wrestlers and boxers, street battles and Nazi rallies; Physical
instruction manuals on such matters as how to sit in an armchair
and how to hold a golf club.
--This
is the strange montage of noble and grotesque visual ephemera
that filled Francis Bacon's studio and his mind. It is up to academic
art historians to fret over the exact correlations between particular
photographs and paintings.
--What's
surely beyond dispute is the overall match between the photographic
museum nested in chaotic piles and boxes in Bacon's studio and
the uniquely uncomfortable world of his paintings.
--In
meditating continually on this strange mix of images he generated
his own painted reality - at once grandiose, Kitsch, horrible,
magnificent and modern, a painterly mirror of the 20th century
whose archetypal relic, the photograph, was his primary research
tool.
--In
the end, the reason we look at these tattered and crumpled and
marked images, the reason his studio is preserved as a holy- or
unholy - sanctum in Dublin, the reason his Tate Britain retrospective
will stun its beholders ... is that Francis Bacon was a genius
whose paintings are as shocking, sensational, disturbing and rewarding
now as in his lifetime - and will remain so for as long as human
beings look to Art for the "greatest things that man can
feel".
--Francis
Bacon is a Titan, a giant of painting. Look at these images long
enough and a strange frenzied reality - violent, sexual, godless
- flickers in your mind's eye. It is Bacon's reality. Look at
this paintings and that reality forces itself into the very pores
of your skin.
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--Oil
painting is so subtle, he insisted - it creates effects impossible
in any other art. Francis Bacon's paintings include achievements
that rival and revive for modern eyes those of the Old Masters
he so admired.
--Just
look at the shadows that seem to creep into his impossible rooms
as if from hell itself.
--Look
at his bodies, how they tie themselves in knots, get sucked into
a fourth dimension, crouch and crawl. --They
are Michelangelo's Ignudi put through a meat grinder and they
make you, painfully and scarily, aware of your own body, its needs,
powers, and inevitable fate.
--Francis
Bacon is an atheist with a sense of Hell whose paintings have
the scale of imagination of the Sistine Chapel.
--To
look through his photo-hoard is to travel, stumbling, behind a
Mind on Fire!
--Bacon's
sense of the body strikes people who look at his Art, first of
all, as cruel and vicious. He painted his best friends as if they
were maimed first world war soldiers, their faces shattered and
deformed into slabs of ill-sutured flesh with eyes scarily alive
inside the horror mask.
--His
bodies, grappling and broken, can seem merely ugly. One doesn't
fully grasp their beautiful dimension until one looks at some
of his paintings after seeing the many images of the classical
and Renaissance nude in his photograph collection - in reality,
even his most disfigured bodies still have nobility.
--They
are heroic!
--Velázquez
and Rembrandt, those philosophers of the portrait he so worshipped,
portray the very loneliness, pain and brevity of human life as
a heroic fact that makes the least of our actions, the most banal
of existences, courageous.
--Francis
Bacon was brave. His Art is brave and can make us brave.
--In
centuries to come, an artist will pore over reproductions of his
work just as he smeared his paint on Velázquez - in devoted
recognition of a Supreme Master!
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