Cutting a rug with Francis Bacon, interior designer
What triggered the radical change from ‘politely decorative’ to ‘howling figures’?
Anumber of myths about the great 20th-century British artist, Francis Bacon, have been exploded since his death in 1992. He liked to convey the illusory impression his paintings arrived fully formed: the extent to which he in fact relied on preparatory sketches and photographic imagery has since been fully explored. To maintain his image as an artist incapable of inferior work, he also tended to destroy work he was not happy with. This is normal practice for any artist, but with Bacon, that habit almost eliminated an entire chapter of his life in which he was an interior designer – prior to his sudden eruption on the art scene in 1945 as a fully fledged painter of human anxiety.
Fortunately, Bacon’s attempt to eradicate his early design-orientated production was foiled by his earliest patron, an art-loving civil servant called Eric Allden, whom he met on a cross Channel ferry in 1929, aged just 19. Bacon had recently returned to London after a three-year jaunt around Paris and Berlin, and was consumed with enthusiasm for the fashionable artistic styles of the Continent, including art deco, synthetic cubism, surrealism and the Bauhaus movement.
Although he had no official training, he had set himself up as an interior designer, producing and selling modernist furniture and rugs from his studio.
Through his friend, the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, he designed furniture for the likes of Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, Sydney (a glass and steel table and a set of stools), the art historian, Douglas Cooper, and the writer, Patrick White. But he later dismissed it all, telling art critic David Sylvester they were “over-influenced by the French and not very original”.
However, Allden hung on to his Bacon rugs and early Bacon paintings and sold them to a modern design enthusiast, Francis Elek, in the late Forties.
Elek then added a strikingly painted 1929 screen that had belonged to De Maistre and kept the collection together until he died in 2008. The following year they were lent by his family to Tate Britain on a long-term loan. But they have now been handed to Christie’s, which is to sell them next month.
Few examples of Bacon’s work from this period remain extant; fewer than 10 are known to have sold at auction before. But they do not command such astronomic prices as his more familiar images of screaming popes and contorted portraits. While a 1972 painting of his lover, George Dyer, could make £20million in the same sale, the early works are estimated from £70,000 for rugs and up to £1million for a three-panelled painted screen.
The price disparity is largely to do with an art world snobbery, which classifies design as a mere craft – inferior to the more elevated inspiration and production of fine art. The rugs, with their interlocking forms, are in the modernist idiom purveyed by the furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray, and the art deco textile artist, Ivan da Silva Bruhns.
The paintings have a more surreal content, influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Jean Lurçat, with elements of Fernand Léger. The screen is perhaps the most impressive of these early works, anticipating the triptych format that Bacon adopted for his paintings. However original they may or may not be, Tate Britain clearly felt the whole group was of more than purely archival interest. That they displayed them with early paintings from Tate’s and Damien Hirst’s collections indicated the importance they attached to them.
A number of commentators have sought to establish links between these youthful works and his later mature pieces. They point, as Christie’s does, to certain compositional devices: his use of geometric structures and “spaceframes”, which herald his later cage-like structures for the popes, for instance, and the narrative element and biomorphic figures of the screen panels that continues in his triptychs.
But there is a puzzle here. In the artist’s catalogue raisonné, the first four entries of which were all owned by Allden, there are just 20 works made between 1929 and 1936, and none between 1936 and 1944. What was Bacon making in all those years?
And, while there may be some formal connection between the early and later works, what triggered the radical change in content from, as his biographer, Michael Peppiatt puts it, his “politely decorative” designs to his signature “howling figures”? Was it the war, or some deep personal tragedy, or, as Peppiatt suggests, his desire to “surprise and astonish”, to make an impact?
Whatever the answer, the market now has its best ever opportunity to judge the import of Bacon’s earliest known works of art.