Damien Hirst hits Prague

Until the end of August 2009, visitors to the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague will have the opportunity to acquaint or reacquaint themselves, however fleetingly, with the work of the British artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965). Together the eleven exhibited works may only appear to represent a drop in the ocean that is Hirst’s seemingly infinite and unending output. Yet we should be pleased even for these, because none of his works have ever been shown in the Czech capital before.

Damien Hirst, a graduate of the prestigious Goldsmith’s College in London, became the main protagonist of the 90’s phenomenon labelled the ‘Young British Artists’ (YBAs). Following his success at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and his winning of the Turner Prize in 1995, his star has continued to rise to the superstar image he enjoys today. Hirst has innumerable supporters, as well as those critics who consider his international successes the result of a carefully calculated marketing campaign packaged with his superficially pleasing, sensation-seeking creations. Whatever the case may be, Damien Hirst is in a number of senses a unique phenomenon on the art scene.

All eleven works exhibited at the Rudolfinum come from a private museum; The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. These represent a balanced cross section of his work from 1994 through to 2006, which introduces the visitor to the main formal as well as thematic aspects of the artist’s work. One of these is his fascination with death and (im)mortality, although this isn’t a trait particularly unique to him; we need think only of the mediaeval veneration of relics, or baroque mysticism.

Despite the fact that as regards the number of the works involved, the exhibition is significantly limited, it clearly demonstrates that Hirst is primarily a master of installation art, while his paintings often teeter on the brink of a kind of viewer-friendly decorativism. One need think only of the 353rd variant of the work Beautiful Amore, gasp eyes going into the top of the head and fluttering painting (1997) or Chloramphenicol Acetyltransferase (1996) commonly known as ‘spin and dots paintings’ (respectively), and the feeling that one is basically dealing with a well-marketed formalism is inescapable. But with his installations we do not encounter this sort of doubt, at least not with the works currently on display in Prague. The creators of the exhibition have not presented us with any of Hirst’s animals floating in formaldehyde, and in doing so demonstrate that he has much to offer us even with works that have received less media attention, both conceptually as well as in terms of visual impact. If only for the pieces Adam and Eve Exposed (2004) or The Martyrdom of St. Peter (2003), this Damien Hirst exhibition is worth seeing.

Damien Hirst: Life, Death and Love

curators: Gunnar B. Kvaran, Petr Nedoma

Rudolfinum (small gallery) , Prague, 21. 5. 2009 - 30. 8. 2009

www.galerierudolfinum.cz

Published in Flash Art, Vol. IV No 13-14, June - August 2009 (http://www.flashartonline.com/)

The Futurists at the Tate Modern

We will:

• Destroy the museums, libraries and academies of every kind
• Rebel against the tyranny of words: “harmony” and “good taste”
• Regard art critics as useless and dangerous
• Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.
  
  Extracts from Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910)

A hundred years have passed, and Futurism is now considered a classic modern style within the canon of the early 20th century. Pupils are taught about it at school, and what’s more, the Futurists’ abhorred art critics and establishment’s European museums have prepared an expansive Futurist retrospective. After Paris and Rome, the Futurism exhibition has found its way to London’s Tate Modern.

The aims of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian poet considered the spiritual father of the whole movement, to shock and agitate are self-evident. Even a person of today, considerably numbed by modern times, stops to consider assertions such as: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene” or perhaps “The roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” We may imagine therefore the reactions of an ordinary citizen in early 20th century Europe. We can thus see in Marinetti not merely the initiator of a movement and the author of many a futurist manifesto, but also the forerunner of today’s gurus of advertising and PR. With opinions like that even negative publicity is publicity, and that one who is not talked about is as good as non-existent. Aside from the simple desire to shock and capture people’s attention we should perhaps interpret these assertions in their wider temporal and geographical contexts.

After the long centuries of the very prominent position which Italy held in the days of the renaissance and the baroque, the days when Europe, nay the whole world, eagerly awaited the next creations of the masters of the Apennine peninsula, the country now found itself at the fringes of artistic interest. New trends came from Paris, and nobody seemed to take any interest anymore in what happened on the other side of the Alps. Italy was still enthusiastically visited, but predominantly by artists loyal to the values of academic painting, who often paid little attention to the developments of their Italian contemporaries, but rather who travelled there to study the Old Masters. From this came a provinciality complex, mixed with a feeling of frustration at their lost glory, which became more of a hindrance than an inspiration for the new and unproven artists. It was this atmosphere which influenced Marinetti’s shocking statements about the desire to destroy museums and libraries and his assertions about the artistic academies, institutions he termed ‘sepulchres of culture’. Something of this has survived to our own day; still we see young Italian artists out to prove themselves, moving to London or New York if they wish to make a name for themselves on the international art scene. Their immense cultural heritage it has, it seems, the quality of almost becoming a trap, a straight jacket for those wanting to reflect topical themes and the problems of today in their work.

Given an understanding of this context, some of the Futurists’ other assertions come across as justified:
We will:

• Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.
• Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.
• Support and glory in our day-to-day world…

Apart form the poet Marinetti, the main representatives of the Futurist movement were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla. Most of these experienced their artistic beginnings in Divisionism, and they then, captivated by Marinetti’s rhetoric, were drawn to his new artistic language. The Futurists kept in close contact with the Parisian scene and so the evident stylistic similarities between Futurism and Cubism do not come as a surprise. The similar expressive tools they used, most concretely the simultaneous depiction of consecutive views, were deployed to achieve a very different aim than that of the Cubists however. Whereas the followers of Picasso concentrated on the still-life, the static view, expressed often with a limited scale of colours, the aim of the Futurists was to depict movement and its speed. They were fascinated by the city and by modern technology, and this is reflected in their choice of subjects; trains, cars, running horses and dogs, the flight of birds, cyclists, street commotion etc. as well as in the vibrant richness of the colours they used.

In February 1909 Marinetti published the First Futurist manifesto (that was to become one of many) on the front page of Le Figaro, the most prestigious French daily of the time. Reportedly this was possibly due to the influence of an Egyptian friend of Marinetti’s father who was an important shareholder in the paper. Although the avant-garde movement practically only ascended the stage of the international art scene three years later through the exhibition in 1912 hung in Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris, whence it travelled further through Europe (to London, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam and Munich among others). And it is this very first Futurist exhibition that the Tate Modern has aimed to reconstruct; as well as to explain the movement more fully in its wider context by showing Cubist, Orphist, Section d’Or, Russian avant-garde and British Vorticist works of the time in its other halls. From a historical perspective this is certainly an interesting enterprise, though from a curatorial perspective less so. A consequence of the desire to be as faithful as possible to Bernheim’s original exhibition has been the inclusion of a few lesser works, and conversely a few arguably essential works are missing. Umberto Boccioni, who was without doubt the most talented artist of the group, is represented in the first room by his emblematic sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and then by two excellent triptychs from 1911, Streets of Minds, and a canvas on loan from Osaka The Forces of the Street, which I personally considered the greatest surprise of the exhibition. Unfortunately however, the works The City Rises (1910) and Materia (1912) have not been included.

To take the trouble to present the Cubist and Orphist movements as well as the other avant-gardes of the day and thus to place the Italian movement into a broader web of contexts is undoubtedly a laudable enterprise. It is however a shame that the creators of the exhibition have not managed to acquire loans of the kinds of artworks for which such an exhibition would be best suited. I allude of course to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), a clear case of Cubo-Futurism, which Julian Street, an art critic of that period for the New York Times deridingly labelled “an explosion in a shingle factory”. The two pictures by František Kupka together with works by Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger represent Parisian Orphism. It is saddening that in their eagerness to present the spread of Futurist ideas to the east, the curators have limited their focus to the Russian avant-garde alone. A Czech artist, Bohumil Kubišta and his Train in the Mountains (1913) would certainly stand up to any comparison, as would his contemporary Otto Gutfreund with his Head IV (1911-1913), where similar issues are dealt with as in Boccioni’s Antigrazioso - A Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1913); the radical opening up of the sculpture into space.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Severini’s massive canvas (measuring almost 4 by 3 metres) La Danse du pan-pan au Monaco (1909-1911) which captures the atmosphere of a Parisian bar with wavy figures of men and women drinking champagne. Not merely through its dimensions, but by its subject matter and striking richness of colour, this canvas caused a significant stir among viewers when first exhibited. Severini was the only member of the Futurist movement to have his permanent residence in Paris, and because of this he became something of a bridge figure and mediator between the Futurists living in Milan and the Parisian scene. What connected Severini with the Futurists was their common interest in the depiction of movement. Though in his case this was generally to be found in his favoured bar and cabaret scenes, and not in representations of the speed of automobiles and other such celebrations of technology. It is a shame that none of the seductive dancers, nor indeed any other of the works in the notable Gianni Mattioli Collection, exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, are appearing in London.

In their celebration of technical progress and the perceived necessary fight for a new society it is understandable that the Futurists supported Italy joining the First World War, with many even volunteering themselves for the front. This was to be fateful for Boccioni who, falling off his horse on 1916 during a military exercise, died soon after of his injuries. His tragic death at the age of only 33 appears all the more eerily fatalistic when we consider how frequent a theme in his canvases the speed of a running horse was. The war and the death of Boccioni practically end the first wave of Futurism, as indeed they end the Tate exhibition. The notorious and problematic connection between Futurism and fascism in the 1920s is only dealt with very peripherally. It would be useful to have some further light shed on this overblown cliché, helpful too to be reminded that both Carrà and Balla set out in different directions following the war; that Russolo openly and directly opposed fascism, spending most of his time in Paris, with only Marinetti remaining from the original core group. Despite the fact that Futurism had its roots in anarchism, it was Marinetti, enjoying close ties with Mussolini, who pronounced the hitherto often repeated equation; that Futurism should be synonymous with fascism. It is to no avail that Mussolini, personally uninterested in art, never made any move to make Futurism an official art form of his regime. The fascist label is one from which even now, a hundred years on, this Italian avant-garde movement still finds it very hard to distance itself.

Futurism, Tate Modern, London; 12 June - 20 September 2009
Published in Art + Antiques, Summer 2009 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)

Martinec’s hyper-realism returns to NPG

London based Czech artist, Hynek Martinec, (born 1980) has at 28 not only completed the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague, but after having worked in New York (amongst others attended Jeff Koons’ studio ), Paris and London, also managed to win the prestigious BP Young Artist Award at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 2007. His work is to be found in many other respected public and private collections, notably including the British Museum’s collection of Prints and Drawings.

Martinec’s work oscillates between the abstract (as for example in ‘The Cables’ series from 2006-7) and classical figurative painting, with the latter being frequently reminiscent of the Old Masters (as in the ‘Lost in Time’ series from 2008). Awareness of his work has undoubtedly been significantly widened by his hyper-realistic portrait of his girlfriend ‘Zuzana in Paris studio’, for which he received the aforementioned prize in 2007. Two years later, Martinec was selected for BP Portrait Award again, and currently until the 20th September 2009 we can see his work depicting a Sri Lankan girl Angela (2008) at the NPG.

The connecting link between very different ways of working and apparently unrelated subjects is the theme of Time. Martinec has explored this concept with the use of varying perspectives, and by drawing on a diverse range of media. His most recent project also deals with the ephemerality of the moment . Entitled ‘At the Same Time…’ it captures the same instant in different locations. A number of canvasses from this series are to be exhibited at the 4th Prague Biennial.

http://www.hynekmartinec.com/

http://www.npg.org.uk/bp-portrait-award-20091/the-exhibition/exhibitors4/bp-exhibitor-37.php

Published in Flash Art, Vol. III No 11-12, March - May 2009 (http://www.flashartonline.com/)

Revealing rituals & taboos

The Czech artist, Tereza Bušková (born 1978), completed her MA in 2007 at the Royal College of Art in London, where she concentrated mainly on printmaking and short experimental film. She attained acclaim early with her first film ‘Wedding Rituals’ (2007) at the Pärnu International Film & Video Festival in Estonia in the same year, and then again in Canada at the AGH's 10th International Film & Video Festival in 2008. In this and in her next film, ‘Forgotten Marriage’ (2008), she has examined the roles and hidden meanings of traditional rituals. These are presented to the viewer as poetic events, while nonetheless retaining much in terms of dark sexual connotations, thereby evoking questions regarding primeval gender roles. The stories are presented without a narrative framework, which enables the author to work very loosely with visual, and often almost theatrical effects reminiscent of Tableaux Vivants. Tereza Bušková’s films encourage a multilayered interpretation, and her setting up of these different yet parallel layers of meaning makes for very compelling viewing. Bušková’s most recent project, entitled ‘Spring Equinox’ has gained the support of the British Arts Council, and is to be exhibited from 9 July until 16 August 2009 in Anita Zabludowicz’s 176 Gallery in London.

http://www.terezabuskova.co.uk/

http://www.projectspace176.com/

Published in Flash Art, Vol. III No 11-12, March - May 2009 (http://www.flashartonline.com/)

The Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea

The eagerly anticipated opening of the new Saatchi Gallery finally took place at the beginning of October 2008 in Chelsea, London. The gallery, with its generous exhibition space of 70,000 sq ft is already the third in which world-renowned collector Charles Saatchi has displayed his collections of contemporary art.

In 1985, he opened his first gallery in the space that had previously housed a paint factory in St John’s Wood, North London. The core of the collection at that time was mainly comprised of a selection of the work of American artists; Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Richard Serra and Cindy Sherman among others. His exhibition of Cy Twombly for example, the artist’s first in Britain, is testament to the fact that Saatchi has repeatedly anticipated the times and the trends followed by institutions. In the early nineties, the collector turned his attention from American to British artists. It is undeniable that Saatchi stands at the beginning of the phenomenally successful career of Damien Hirst as well as the rest of the generation known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Indeed it was with a retrospective exhibition of these artists’ work that he opened his new gallery in County Hall (the Greater London Council's former headquarters) on the South Bank of the Thames in 2003. The gallery was forced to move a mere two years later however, due to an unsuccessful legal battle with the owners of the space.

Saatchi’s new gallery in Duke of York's HQ on the King's Road opens with the exhibition “The Revolution Continues: New Art from China”. In thirteen halls it presents twenty four Chinese artists; all of whose works are from among the collector’s private acquisitions. These naturally include the names of the latest stars of the Chinese art world, like Zhang Xiaogang and Fang Lijun, also currently exhibiting in the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague. Much of the heat is on artistic pair Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. On the ground floor these artists present us with 13 incredibly lifelike figures of old men wheeling about on wheelchairs, all uncannily reminiscent of world dictators from recent history. The wheelchairs move around apparently aimlessly in various directions, resulting them to repeatedly collide before moving on in different directions.

To summarise the nature of this exhibition (which in a few months, will be replaced by one of art from the Middle East) we can highlight the following: in the majority of cases we’re dealing with figurative artworks, ones that often carry a strong political or social message; the quality fluctuates (the presence of a weaker work sometimes surprises one by sticking out amongst the masterpieces); the sculpture represented has more in terms of innovation and imaginative creation than the paintings, which in some cases betray an almost forced attempt to consciously define themselves against the established western corpus that has so clearly influenced them. The transfer of the gallery to a wealthy area, and the firm place the Saatchi label now holds on the ‘map’ of the gallery establishment has perhaps inevitably led to a lessening of its onetime status as a benchmark of controversy. To seek here for the Saatchi of the 90’s would indeed be a futile undertaking.

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

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/)