[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: July 13, 2009]
Nothing to do with fresh pork belly: move along. Just to say that you have a long month left to see Francis Bacon, born '09, in retrospective at the Met. Which you certainly should, if you've not seen enough of his work over the years.
Aficionados will find little new here, but aficionados will go anyway, like I did. Bacon's painting, and to be honest his life as well, has been part of my intellectual furniture for more than twenty years. I can't have kept it much secret either, as when I moved on from a job in the late '90s, I was given as a leaving present not a tie, as was usual, but a book of Bacon's paintings. In fact, since I drew my conclusions about his work so long ago, I was inspired to say little about this show. And then I read the review in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl, and found some points worth making.
Schjeldahl begins by tagging Bacon as his "least favorite great painter," and proceeds to lay out the faults he finds in his work, from theatrical shock tactics to dead space. And yet the piece is fair to Bacon, for the most part. It does him more honor, for example, than the juvenile prurience about his sexuality exhibited in many of the wall plates at the Met: his lover Peter Lacey was violent to him? Well, so what as far as this painting is concerned? And Bacon was a masochist - you didn't know? - put some jelly on your shoulder, baby.
Schjeldahl makes about as good a (serious) case against Bacon as could be made, and I disagree with it, and I'll try to say why. He gives Bacon generous credit for anticipating the revival of narrative painting of the last decade or so, and in particular its reliance on photography and reproductions as a rich source of material. Bacon worked from photographs rather than from life. Not only, as is well known, from beefcake (as opposed, I guess, to cheesecake) magazines and Muybridge's clinical photographs of nude figures in motion - it's worth noting that the paintings he did after the grand masters, his studies after Velasquez's "Pope Innocent X" for example, are themselves studies based on reproductions of the works, and not on the works themselves.
To cut to the chase, there is a book which captures both Bacon's personal and artistic sensibility as well as his mental image trove between two covers in comprehensive fashion. It's called Century, and it's edited by Bruce Bernard. A small format edition of this disturbing book was issued by the publisher, Phaidon, but I own the original - huge, almost unliftable, twelve hundred pages of the twentieth century captured by the camera. As befits that century, the book is grimly, almost unremittingly violent, its merit being that of holding the atrocities captured in a steady, unflinching gaze.
Bruce Bernard was a friend of Francis Bacon. Brother of the writer Jeffrey Bernard, he drank in the same Soho pubs and clubs as Bacon, while maintaing a career as an art critic, photographer and curator of photographs. Century is Bernard's masterpiece, and I am convinced it's a close reproduction of the contents of Bacon's mind. Images of violence, atrocity, torture, ripped human bodies and the swastika (or the sickle) float through this endless, harowing book, just as they float across Bacon's canvases.
If the twentieth century at its bloodiest was one of Bacon's primary sources, filtered through the camera lens, and great art of the past, similarly filtered was certainly a second, the third was unquestionably his personal life. Looking, for once, from the inside out, this was a nocturnal, urban-bohemian life of very heavy drinking, unsentimental sex in the glare of unsentimental electric light, with some gambling and violence thrown in, lived in unlovely rooms, on rumpled beds, indoors in London. Bacon's closest friends were for the most part either gay - long before it was called that - alcoholic or drug addicted, dangerous, suicidal, or a combination of all. One lover killed himself, in an excess of spite, on the eve of one of Bacon's most important openings. (In fact, the devastatingly frank work based on his partner, George Dyer's, last hours is one of the paintings sorely missed at the Met. It is titled with emblematic, undeceived impersonality "Tryptych May-June 1973" . It is so important in understanding Bacon to understand why such a picture could not be called "For George").
Usefully, the exhibition includes a pertinent selection of the pictures from which Bacon painted. Of especial interest are his own copies of photographs by another Soho friend, the photographer John Deakin. Deakin's intrusive, aesthetically first rate portraits of people falling apart - Henrietta Moraes, for example, painfully naked and full of morphine - are the real-life coordinates of Bacon's personal imagery.
So much for theatrical shock tactics. Globally-politically as well as in his backyard, Bacon exaggerated nothing.
Schjeldahl gives Bacon credit too for formal innovations: the use, for example, of lines to indicate cubical space or "proscenium stages." The stage, I fear, is in Schjeldahl's head. A striking, overwhelming proportion of Bacon's paintings are set indoors. Not merely indoors - not in palaces or cathedrals -but in small, tight, overheated, single rooms. Details - a bare bulb, a light switch, a door - are often deployed to indicate the setting. Otherwise, the sketching of a cube does the trick. It's a studio, a bathroom, a bedroom, and where Schjeldahl sees a stage, one might more accurately see a bed; although it's a bed which quickly transforms to a wrestling ring. Speaking of beds, sometimes bloody beds (see the Sweeney tryptych), it's not emphasized enough that one of Bacon's immediate precursors was Walter Sickert, painter of bedsits, prostitutes and shabby murder; Patrick Hamilton with a brush.
(I admit there are a handful of landscapes in Bacon's oeuvre, but they occasionally have the feel of having been brought indoors to be painted.)
Schjeldahl's main formal objection to Bacon seems to be that he failed, unlike the Abstract Expressionists, to grasp the principle of all-over painting - the effect of filling the entire canvas with brushwork of interest rather than creating a frame for a central figure or narrative. Or, as Schjeldahl puts it - in the context of a comparison with de Kooning - the effect of reconciling "figure and ground." He acknowledges the vigorous painting of the grappling forms on which Bacon focuses our attention, but objects to them being increasingly surrounded "by dead space."
There can be no objection to Schjeldahl's description here. That is exactly what Bacon's paintings are like. Again, I disagree with his conclusion. For one thing, it is fundamental to Bacon's sensibility that the passions, screams and horrors he wrings from the paint (viscerally, as Schjeldahl admits) be surrounded by dead space, whether it be the realistic dead space of an electrically lit two a.m. bare-walled apartment, or the metaphorical - and for Bacon equally decisive - dead space of an entirely godless universe.
Schjeldahl mentions Bacon's militant atheism, but doesn't give it full due. Bacon imbibed Nietzsche - and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche - and is a rare example of someone who profoundly understood the consequences of god's "death." In this respect, carcasses were an important subject. In Bacon's early works especially, great bloody sides of beef seem to have been drawn from still lives and cast as characters in a Pinter play. In an interview, he mentioned that he found the contents of butchers' windows lovely in terms of color and form. I am sure he did, but he also had a profound conviction to express - that we are meat, and nothing but meat, in a frightening and deadly world. The sense of space and liberation found in the Abstract Expressionists, or indeed de Kooning's compulsion to set his fragmented figurative art in the context of a canvas full of vigorous painting - related, as Schjeldahl says, to the viewer's body - was all absolutely alien to Bacon.
For Bacon, there is the sensation - and it is one of terrifying intensity - and then there is dead space. "I want," he said with characteristic insouciance, "to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." And also, I suspect, to give the sensation without the pretension that it has any contextual meaning. This is an example of a starkly irreligious artist, educated in the tropes of religious art. In Bacon's many "crucifixions," it is never Christ that is crucified. Bacon's significance as an artist lies in the fact that he found in oil paint an extraordinary vehicle for the conveyance of that which tortured not him, so much, as the century in which he lived. One need not share Bacon's sensibility in order to understand it, and be perplexed at the complaint that it's a different sensibility from that of heterosexual outdoorsmen like Pollock, Still or David Smith. (Too much for now, but a topic to reflect on - just how not self-destructive Bacon was - an adolescent grab for attention aside: and compare the AbEx's).
I'll just note that, despite its gaps, the exhibition does include some works I, at least, hadn't seen before, such as an unusually ornamental tryptych from a private collection, related to the Oresteia. Otherwise, I could write all night. Rather than impose that burden on myself or the reader, two snatches of poetry to close.
Je pense à toi Desnos qui partis de Compiègne
Comme un soir en dormant tu nous en fis récit
Accomplir jusqu'au bout ta propre prophétie
Là-bas où le destin de notre siècle saigne
and
Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies...
If you want information about the show, click here. I haven't yet decided whether the Met's decision to sell tee-shirts bearing Bacon's signature cheer - "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends" - is despicable or gloriously funny.