Francis Bacon at Tate Britain

The large retrospective exhibition currently hanging in Tate Britain is the third in a series through which the Tate Gallery has paid homage to Francis Bacon. It endeavours (more or less chronologically) to represent the key moments of Bacon’s artistic development with the sixty works on display. Yet even in the first room, certain problems arise. The earliest exhibited works are only from the mid forties. Chris Stevens, the show’s curator explains the absence of any paintings from the thirties by saying that: “Bacon was so organised in the destruction of his earlier work, that hardly anything has survived; and those that have only managed to do so because they were out of Bacon’s reach”.

The introductory series of screaming heads is followed by a set of screaming figures, re-workings of Velazquez’ “Portrait of Pope Innocent X.” One can almost hear the screams of Bacon’s popes; their deformed bodies, almost obscured by fragments of other objects, have different expressions, and are often enclosed, as if imprisoned in a cage-like structure. Bacon succeeded in depicting a striking sense of uncertainty and a plague of inner doubt concealed behind a mask of elevated formality in these paintings. Bacon was deeply fascinated by the work of the old Spanish master, but ironically it would appear that he never actually set eyes upon Velazquez’ original, having always only worked from reproductions.

One of the highlights of the current exhibition is the fourth room, labelled ‘CRUCIFIXION’. This contains three triptychs and one smaller painting with a biblical theme. Bacon, an avowed atheist, did not explain the works in a religious way, but as studies of human behaviour; a mixture of brutality and fear, combined with a deep fascination for ritualistic sacrifice. Bacon’s triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” of 1944 remains to this day one of the most powerful and emotionally moving paintings both of Bacon’s oeuvre, and in European painting as a whole. The three figures on an orange background are deformed to such an extent that they have metamorphosed into strange beasts, whose heads have been reduced to gaping mouths emitting horrendous screams. The other two triptychs dealing with a similar theme clearly reveal that the source of inspiration were the horrors of the war; for example a swastika can be observed on the arm of one of the figures.

Studies and Experimentation
The room that follows holds a remarkable surprise. It presents a turning point, if not a 180 then certainly a 90-degree turn. The room has been aptly entitled ‘CRISIS’. The post war art scene was dominated by abstract expressionism and even Bacon could not resist flirting with new approaches as is demonstrated in a series of canvases inspired by van Gogh’s painting of “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon” (1888). At the time of its creation, Bacon’s new direction was well received, but soon afterwards was criticised, and from today’s perspective it is also difficult to consider it as anything other than an ill-judged path taken by a great painter. Nevertheless, this exhibition’s curators should be commended for not hesitating to include works from the artist’s less certain periods. In no way does it suggest a diminishment in Bacon’s talent. Rather it adds another dimension to our understanding of his continual process of searching and experimentation.

The centre of the exhibition is called ‘ARCHIVE’. This smaller room, evocative of a studio atmosphere presents dozens of photographs, sketches, notes and drawings which Bacon created in the preparatory stages of working on a piece. Thousands of such examples were found in his studio, dispelling the myth that the artist himself spread; that his works were creations of spontaneous inspiration, products of his subconscious, executed without preparation. Ranging from reproductions of Michelangelo’s drawings, newspaper clippings with pictures of boxers, bullfighters and cricketers to a specially commissioned series of photographs of men wrestling, these preparatory materials also include pictures of the artists’ friends and lovers. In the room that follows it is hard not to be reminded of these photographs, as many of the paintings have, at times, evidently been directly or indirectly inspired by them.

The Mature Work
If we consider the room labelled ‘CRUCIFIXION’ to be one of the highest points of the exhibition, then the other would undoubtedly be the series of triptychs created after the tragic death of George Dyer. Intense grief combined with lingering feelings of guilt gave rise to a set of truly remarkable works, portraying Dyer in a range of situations, including his last moments. “Triptych May-June 1973” is especially emotive; the two side canvases portray Dyer in a bathroom, sitting on the toilet in front of a sink, apparently vomiting into it. The central canvas presents the figure of Bacon’s dying lover beneath a light bulb, his shadow strangely being transformed into a giant bat.

The enjoyment of the remaining rooms is complicated by a number of factors. The prevalence of true masterpieces in many preceding rooms causes the eye of the beholder to become somewhat tired by the time Bacon’s later works are reached. Perhaps even more than the eye it is the mind that grows weary. After all the works one has been exposed to are not idyllic pastoral landscape scenes. Rather the visitor is engaged in an aggressive aesthetic struggle. Besides this, it should be said that the later works could be seen as becoming a little repetitive, as if the artist had achieved perfection on the technical plane, yet experienced a plateau, an ebb even, in terms of new content. That said this does not lessen in any way the phenomenal contribution that Francis Bacon has made to the art of the 20th century. One might be reminded that even Pablo Picasso experienced a similar plateau of self-emulation towards the end of his life.

Curators: Matthew Gale, Chris Stephens

Tate Britain, London; 11.09.2008 - 04.01.2009

Published in Art & Antiques, October 2008 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)

Francis Bacon – life of the ultimate artist

The life of Francis Bacon has all the elements of an exciting cinematic thriller: sex, violence, glory and money. The current retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain serves to remind us again that ultimately, Bacon was first and foremost an outstanding artist.

Bacon was born in Ireland in 1909, to an English family living in Dublin. His father, a Boer War veteran, taught horse riding, and his mother had inherited a steel business and coal mines. It was with marked irritation that his strict father noticed an increasing effeminacy in the young Francis, which reached its peak in an incident where the sixteen year old was caught by his father dressing up in his mother’s underwear, and admiring himself in the mirror. Francis left home and travelled to London, where he lived off an allowance from his mother, odd jobs, and occasional petty theft. It was in 1927 that a family friend, who had a secret weakness for young men, took him to Berlin for two months, and introduced him to the city’s decadent nightlife. Bacon then travelled to Paris, this time alone, where he would spend the next year and a half. Here he encountered and, as he himself admitted, was strongly moved by Nicolas Poussin’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, and a series of drawings by Pablo Picasso in the gallery of Paul Rosenberg. On his return to London he worked as an interior designer. He also started to have advertisements printed in The Times, offering his services as a “gentleman’s companion.”

Replies soon poured in, and it was a few of his admirers and lovers from this period who became the first collectors and patrons of the up and coming artist. Around 1930, at the age of only 21, he had already earned himself a considerable reputation as a designer and had received a number of prominent commissions for furniture design. It was also during this time that he increasingly started turning to painting as a medium. By the mid-thirties he had a number of exhibitions under his belt, albeit not particularly successful. While visiting Paris in 1935 he managed to see Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”, and purchased a book dealing with various diseases of the mouth, vividly illustrated with numerous hand coloured images. Both these experiences came to be reflected in Bacon’s subsequent work. In 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition took place in London, yet Bacon’s work was rejected by the renowned art critic Herbert Read on grounds that it was not sufficiently surreal.

Initial Breakthroughs
Bacon was exempted from military service in the Second World War because of his chronic asthma. During this difficult time he made extra money by organising gamblers’ evenings in his house. The creation in 1944 of the “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” turned out to be a pivotal point in his career. The picture was exhibited the following year to great acclaim. However; this newly found appreciation paradoxically led Bacon to destroy as many of his previous works as he could get his hands on. He then proceeded to announce the well-received triptych as his first ‘mature work’. From the mid-forties onwards he became interested in studies of heads, exemplified in his of reworking of Velazquez’ famous “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” of 1650 (now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome).

Testament to the dramatic growth of Bacon’s international acclaim at this time were numerous foreign exhibitions, and the purchase of one of his works by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1954 Bacon even represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, together with Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson. In contrast, the Czechoslovakian Pavilion, which stands not far from that of Great Britain, exhibited, among others, the following works: Václav Rabas’ “Tractors at Work”, “The Apprentice Miner” by Oskar Kozák, Jan Lauda’s “Lenin”, and “The Partisan” by Vincenc Makovský. The striking difference between East and West at the time could not have been more lucidly demonstrated.

Immortality
Ten years later, George Dyer entered the life of Francis Bacon. This meeting and subsequent romantic relationship between the artist and the thirty-nine year old with a criminal past had a great influence upon Bacon, both personally and creatively. He used to enjoy telling of how their unorthodox meeting had come about; the painter having apprehended Dyer while the latter was attempting to break into Bacon’s flat. Their passionate and complicated relationship was brought to an abrupt and violent end by Dyer in 1971 when he committed suicide the evening before the opening of a great retrospective exhibition of Bacon’s work in Paris. The artist was utterly devastated, and initially could not bring himself to accept that the death had been a suicide. In the years followed, still harrowed by a sense of guilt, he produced a series of paintings in honour of his dead lover. These rank among the very best of Bacon’s works, and in a way he succeeded, through these lasting mementos, in securing Dyer’s immortality. Bacon continued painting until the very last years of his life. He died in 1992 whilst on a visit to Madrid, coincidentally the city in which, over 300 years before, an artist who was to have such a great influence upon Bacon’s work, had also found repose; Diego Velazquez.

Bacon’s studio
Francis Bacon’s cramped little studio in London’s South Kensington, in which the by then established and famous artist had worked in up until his death, was donated to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin in 1997. Following a meticulous two-year process of analysis and documentation, the whole studio was transported and rebuilt, almost like a shrine in the Irish capital, opened to the general public in 2001. The contents of Bacon’s studio presented a number of considerable surprises to art historians, as well as the sensation-seeking public. Throughout his life Bacon always claimed in interviews that he never made preparatory sketches, insisting that he worked ‘a la prima’. Yet what he has left behind reveals that the opposite was the case. Amongst some 7500 objects found in his studio are around 1500 photographs which often directly inspired his works. The same might be said of various books, drawings, sketches, and the hundred or so cut up canvases. As has become apparent, Bacon not only studied, laboured over, and prepared his compositions, but also engaged in rigorous self-censorship.

Published in Art & Antiques, October 2008 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)