Never mind the Pollocks, says Bacon!
We like to think of great artists as above the fray, even though by now we should know better. Tapes have just emerged of Francis Bacon slagging off his fellow artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol in 1991.
Told that an abstract painting by Jasper Johns has just sold for £12 million, the 81-year-old Bacon says: ‘it is such a ridiculous thing. The whole thing, it is nothing. it is just a series of a number of diagonal scratches going in different directions in red and blue.’
in fact, Bacon’s feelings towards Jasper Johns surfaced over 30 years ago. in 1986, he was filmed gossiping with the demonic writer William Burroughs. ‘i try never to think about Jasper Johns,’ he said. ‘i hate the stuff and i don’t like him either.’
He was equally dismissive of Andy Warhol. ‘ These pictures are bad . . . very bad,’ he said. ‘it is dull really. i thought it might just have some superficial excitement, but it doesn’t even have that.’
Some think it astonishing that such a respected painter should be so bitchy about his fellow artists. But Bacon had a track record of camp put-downs of rivals. He once compared Picasso to Walt Disney and Jackson Pollock’s splashy abstract canvases to ‘old lace’.
At other times, he said Matisse painted ‘squalid little forms’ and, of David Hockney’s paintings, ‘there’s really nothing there’.
He was equally rude about some of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century. He pooh-poohed Samuel Beckett: ‘i loathe all those ghastly dustbins on stage.’
As a young man, he had been invited to lunch with Virginia Woolf. He remembered her as ‘a monster . . . she shouted all the way through lunch. She began by shouting and just carried on all the way through.’
Artists who considered themselves his friends were given short shrift as soon as their backs were turned. He complained that lucian Freud was too cautious a painter, whose best work was behind him.
He also put it about that Freud ended up as a heterosexual only because his private parts were too small to be of interest to the gay community.
But Freud was able to give as good as he got. He told his friend John Richardson that Bacon’s later paintings lacked inspiration.
‘What had been the subject matter of his pictures became paraphernalia,’ he said. ‘ . . . with the urgency gone, some elements just seemed to be in the way, like bits of gauze left inside a patient’s stomach by a forgetful surgeon.’
Such rivalry is nothing new, even among the very greatest. When Michelangelo visited Titian in his studio in Rome in 1545, he warmly praised his latest painting to his face. But when he left, he changed his tune. it was a shame, he said, that Venetian painters like Titian had never been taught to draw.
Around the same time, two sculptors, Cellini and Bandinelli, fell out over an ancient Greek statue. Cellini thought it magnificent; Bandinelli thought it useless. Their patron Cosimo de’ Medici asked Cellini to explain their difference of opinion.
‘Your Most illustrious excellency must understand that Baccio Bandinelli is thoroughly evil, and always has been,’ he said, as Bandinelli stood there in front of them. ‘So no matter what he looks at, as soon as his disagreeable eyes catch sight of it, even though it’s of superlative quality it is at once turned to absolute evil.’
CELLINI recalled that during this monologue, Bandinelli ‘ kept twisting and turning and making the most unimaginably ugly faces — and his face was ugly enough already.’ But by now Cellini had the wind behind him, and proceeded to write off every element of a particular sculpture by Bandinelli — head, shoulders, torso, arms, legs.
All in all, he concluded, it was sculpted ‘ so clumsily and unskilfully that nothing worse has ever been seen’.
All of which suggests that, in what Auberon Waugh used to term ‘the vituperative arts’, our own age lacks the magnificence of eras past. Compared to the great Cellini, Francis Bacon was almost sycophantic.