Nobody bought one of my paintings because they liked it
Francis Bacon didn’t pick up a brush until he was 30, but he became a 20th-century great – although his art was so disturbing it turned even Ronnie Kray’s stomach
Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait In Words Michael Peppiatt
Thames and Hudson €47
On holiday in Tangier in the late 1950s, the notoriously gay painter Francis Bacon palled up with the rather more repressed Ronnie Kray. The East End villain was, Bacon said, ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever met’. What Kray made of Bacon’s looks we do not know. But we do know what he thought of his art. When Bacon offered Kray one of his pictures, the vicious hoodlum barked, ‘I wouldn’t have one of those f ****** things’.
Anyone who has been to a Bacon show will sympathise. Bacon’s paintings are among the greatest of the 20th Century. But if a vicious gangland killer didn’t fancy living with one of those grimy yet luminescent torture-chamber images, then I think the rest of us are excused from hanging one above the fireplace. Nobody, Bacon once joked, ‘bought one of my paintings because he liked it’.
Yet for all their hellish weirdness, those paintings are Bacon’s autobiography. To look at his pictures of smeary popes howling inside silvery cages, of grappling naked men flailing at one another, of human flesh seen as so much dead meat, is to understand the life of this tortured amoral visionary. Next to such potent, piercing insights, how can Bacon’s letters and notebooks seem anything but surplus to requirements?
But here is Michael Peppiatt, Bacon’s long-time factotum, bag-carrier and amanuensis (the photographer John Deakin went so far as to call him the Boswell to Bacon’s Dr Johnson), with a collocation of those letters and notes, interviews and statements of artistic intent. The result is what is surely the year’s loveliest book. Gorgeously designed and laid out, handsomely illustrated and luxuriously printed and bound, Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait In
Words is a thing of beauty.
It is also – quite deliberately – strewn with errors. Peppiatt is a diligent editor, but he has quite rightly made the decision not to correct Bacon’s numerous spelling mistakes and punctuational
howlers. So it is that Bacon’s pal Denis Wirth-Miller is called Dennis throughout. As for Bacon’s triptychs, they are invariably referred to as ‘my tryptichs’.
Thosethree-panelimages,funereal apparitions of dismay and dismemberment invariably set against a lurid orange backdrop, were what first won Bacon an audience. Before then, he had lived a peripatetic and hardscrabble existence.
Though the Dubliner, whose family moved between Ireland and England several times, had been raised in the Irish gentry (he was a descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher, scientist and statesman who shared his name), he was thrown out of the family home at 17 after his father discovered him preening in front of a mirror in his mother’s underwear.
He spent the next few years drifting round Europe, unsure of what to do, making what money he could either by designing furniture, or by gambling. There were times, he said, when he considered becoming a male prostitute, joshingly adding that ‘through vanity I became a painter’.
Certainly he came to art late, not picking up a brush before he turned 30, just as Hitler was invading Poland. That coincidence is not insignificant. Though Bacon always played down the influence of history on his work,
Peppiatt’s careful curation shows that there can be little doubt that the horror of the war, not to mention the shocking revelation of the Holocaust, both licensed and heightened the Grand Guignol mood of Bacon’s masterpieces.
Asked by James Thrall Soby, a director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, about the meaning of the contorted bodies and smudgy faces in his Three Studies
For A Crucifixion, Bacon said that he not only did not know – he did not want to. But Bacon’s gallerist, Harry Fischer, was more forthcoming, quietly advising Soby that ‘Francis told me that the two figures on the left are Himmler and Hitler opening the door of the gas chambers’.
Critics not convinced by Bacon’s gruesome pictures have long denounced him as an illustrator rather than an artist. But Bacon himself was adamant he wasn’t just filling in pre-conceived images. ‘The brush stroke,’ he said, ‘creates form and does not merely fill it.’ If that sounds more abstract than anything Bacon ever painted, then a glance at, say, the smudgy face in the 1951 Head reproduced in this book shows what Bacon meant.
Though Bacon loved Velazquez and Monet, he didn’t have a lot of time for many other painters. He thought David Hockney’s work was popular because it was so ‘thin and bland… very subPicasso’. Picasso himself ‘let out more rubbish than anyone else’. Henry Moore’s drawings were just so much ‘knitting’, while Jackson Pollock’s massive canvases were the work of an ‘old lace-maker’.
Bacon defined true friendship as a relationship in which two people could ‘pull each other to bits’. As if to prove him wrong, Peppiatt has put together a book that allows you to see Bacon in the round. As Ronnie Kray could have told you, it isn’t a pretty sight. But it is an inspiring and invigorating one.
‘Bacon said Picasso made rubbish and that Pollock was an old lace-maker’