FRANCIS BACON'S HORROR SHOW
Francis Bacon believed there was beauty in the colour of meat, and it was possible "to be optimistic and totally without hope." This year, the centennial of his birth, is a fine time to revisit his insights on art, writes Megan Buskey ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
If you were in London in the 1960s and wanted to chat up Francis Bacon, all you had to do was head to the Colony Room, a junky club on Dean Street in Soho, where he routinely held court. He was such a fixture there that the Colony’s owner and den-mother, a crass woman named Muriel Belcher, called him “daughter”. As Bacon’s critical reputation grew, so did his financial means, and he was known for covering the tab for his friends and leaving lavish tips. What he valued more than money was conversation, and he was as comfortable telling a dirty joke as he was discussing Aeschylus.
In 1962 David Sylvester, an art critic and friend, decided to bring Bacon’s pontifications to a wider audience. These long-form recorded interviews proved popular, largely owing to Bacon's insight, and in 1975 they were compiled as a book. “The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon” shed welcome light on Bacon's work, which many found inscrutable, if not disturbing.
Bacon is now enjoying a lot of attention, particularly since a few of his paintings sold for record-breaking prices in 2007. To celebrate the centennial of his birth this year, a grand retrospective of his work opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on May 20th (travelling from the Tate Britain via the Prado in Madrid). As a new generation struggles to come to terms with his dramatic, searing paintings, Bacon’s conversations with Sylvester are freshly relevant.“Interviews” is rare for the way it addresses big questions about the purpose and process of artistic creation. Which art is more true? Work that proceeds from a preconceived idea or work that comes from impulse? Is abstraction more powerful than figurative representation? What causes artists to fixate on certain subjects? Artists and writers regularly praise these interviews for Bacon's candid, plain-spoken perceptions of so tricky a subject. "I read and re-read the interviews and have carried on devouring them, like a bible to a believer," Damien Hirst has written. "[I]t was the way into art for me."
The answers “didn’t always come on the spur of the moment,” Sylvester wrote in “Looking Back on Francis Bacon”, a critical study he published after Bacon’s death in 1992. “Right up to the end of his life I would get a telephone call at eight in the morning trying out some formulation of a thought.” It’s true that Bacon sometimes struggled to express himself—he didn’t have much in the way of formal education. But his earnestness and self-awareness made up for his deficits in eloquence.
Bacon attributed the origins of his successful work to “accident[s]” born of impulse:
When I was trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint, and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn’t know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting.
Just how an artist made certain choices beguiled him, though he recognised that talent and dedication had influence. Bacon held that it was through “profound sensibility” that a master like Rembrandt decided to “hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another.” Balancing impulse with more deliberate aims was a challenge; Bacon thought it was easier to create when under the influence of drugs, alcohol, exhaustion or, in his case, “despair.”
The central question for Bacon was “how do I feel I can make this image more immediately real to myself?” Forms still had their purpose, but he arranged them in a way that courted an emotional response. Observe the mangled figures in Bacon’s paintings, with their misplaced arms, ears, legs and elbows. Blank backdrops, on the other hand, provided “a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself”. He used certain colours until he grew bored with them and moved on. The idea was to make work that “brought the figurative thing up onto the nervous system violently and poignantly.”
Bacon searched widely for inspiration. His chaotic studio on Reece Mews was carpeted with heaps of paint-splattered images culled from random sources. (He once had nicer digs in Roland Gardens, but he felt “absolutely castrated in the place” and summarily moved.) When he was painting a portrait of Sylvester, he constantly consulted photographs of wild animals. “One image can be deeply suggestive of the other,” Bacon said. “Rhinoceros skin would help me to think of the texture of human skin.” He credited Sigmund Freud for inspiring his careful play between reality and eerie dreamscapes. “I don’t think I’m gifted," he reflected. "I just think I’m receptive."
Recurring motifs in Bacon’s work, such as animal carcasses, black umbrellas and the detritus of drug use and illness, convey self-destruction. Bernardo Bertolucci described his portraits as “faces eaten up by something that comes from within”, and sent Marlon Brando to a Bacon exhibition at the Grand Palais during the filming of “Last Tango in Paris”.
But Bacon resisted the idea that his work was principally about inspiring horror. Horror was part of life, but not its sole constituent. “You must not forget the beauty of the colour of a piece of meat,” Bacon said. He acknowledged that his early life in Ireland and his adolescent forays into Berlin's harsh homosexual underworld made him “accustomed to always living through violence.” Yet he claimed his art was not a reaction to these fraught experiences.He did concede that his subjects appeared “doomed” and “in moments of crisis,” as Sylvester put it. Yet Bacon preferred to think of them as exhibiting their “mortality”, the inescapable condition that he could never stop thinking about. “If life excites you, its shadow, death, must also excite you," he said. "You can be optimistic and totally without hope.”
Sylvester was sceptical: “It’s not altogether stupid to attribute an obsession with horror to an artist who has done so many paintings of the human scream.” But Bacon maintained that his paintings of screams reflected his obsession with the aesthetic of the human mouth. The screams he most admired were in Poussin’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin“. I’ve always wanted and never succeeded in painting the smile.”
If that sounds glib, it’s on account of the risk that comes with Bacon using language to explain what he believed could only be conveyed through art. Yet his efforts to express himself in "Interviews" are nothing short of profound. “I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement when I was 17 and I suddenly realised, there it is–this is what life is like,” Bacon told Sylvester. “It tormented me for months. I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives. [Art] really comes from a feeling [that] it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens.”
Picture credit: "Head III", 1949, Private collection, courtesy Acquavella Galleries, New York © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London (detail); Photobooth portraits of Francis Bacon, George Dyer, and David Plante, ca. 1966–1967, courtesy Faggionato Fine Arts, London, and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London (detail); "Head VI", 1949, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London, © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London
(Megan Buskey is a writer based in New York.)
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