Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  Bacon depended, as Freud noted, on ‘inspiration’. By his own account, Painting 1946 had come into being – had virtually assembled itself – through a sequence of marvellous unconscious associations. How could he follow that? Naturally, he would have wanted to do something different – and better. His gambler’s instinct urged him to push his luck. On the other hand, his extraordinary capacity for self-criticism would have led him to destroy anything less than superb. None of Bacon’s pictures from 1947 survive, although he did attempt some unfruitful work on the Côte d’Azur. An undated letter to Erica Brausen’s business partner, Arthur Jeffress, thanks him for an advance of another £200 against new pictures. Bacon added guardedly that he was currently busy on ‘some heads which I like better than any I have done before’. He hoped that Erica and Jeffress would like them too.

  This optimism didn’t last. A second letter to Jeffress, dated 30 September 1948, asked for the exhibition of his work planned for Jeffress and Brausen’s new Hanover Gallery to be postponed to allow more time to prepare. Bacon wrote that he would be back in mid-November, bringing some of the ‘new stuff’. But he does not seem to have brought back much work, if any. There is just one extant Bacon painting dated 1948 – Head I – and that may well have been done back in his Cromwell Place studio.

  Montage of material from Francis Bacon’s studio, 7 Cromwell Place, c. 1950. Photo by Sam Hunter

  Despite having toyed with the idea of settling in the South of France, and later trying and failing to work in Tangiers, Bacon discovered that he could not paint well anywhere except London. Indeed, even there, he didn’t succeed just anywhere. The Cromwell Place studio, evidently, was inspiring; he had begun to make masterpieces shortly after moving in. Later he found a tiny upstairs flat at Reece Mews, Kensington, was also a fertile work-place. A more spacious apartment in London’s Docklands, however, proved sterile. It was almost as if he needed to be confined. Or perhaps it was that his inspiration needed the correct growing conditions in order to blossom. Bacon once described ‘the whole world’ as ‘a vast lump of compost’. This was certainly true of his own immediate working environment, which was increasingly strewn with source imagery of the most bizarrely diverse kind.

  More and more, the imagery in Bacon’s paintings developed out of photographs – often tattered, creased and stained ones. The first person to document this habit was an American writer named Sam Hunter, who visited Bacon in 1950 in order to write about him for the Magazine of Art. He was struck by the piles of ‘newspaper photographs and clippings, crime sheets like Crapoulos and photographs or reproductions of personalities who have passed across the public stage in recent years’. This was a strangely pallid way of referring to some of the ‘personalities’ in Bacon’s image bank: the murderous Nazi ideologues, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, for example. They both appeared in one of the photographs Hunter took of Bacon’s photographic archive, laid on the floor at Cromwell Place (while, Hunter recalled, Bacon looked on, apparently bored, or perhaps wary at having his creative processes examined).

  Next to Goebbels, Hunter put down a reproduction of Velázquez’s great portrait of Pope Innocent X, then Nadar’s photograph of the poet Charles Baudelaire. All of these source photographs show visible signs of neglect, wear and – literally – tear. They are creased, scuffed, dappled with patches of oil and drips of pigment. Later Bacon explained this as the result of casual ill-treatment by his visitors – ‘people walking over them and crumpling them and everything’. But, as the Bacon scholar Martin Harrison has pointed out, Bacon worked alone, had no models, and his cleaner was under orders not to touch his studio.

  These neglectful ‘people’ must have been Bacon himself. Presumably he liked his working materials in this state; Freud went further and suspected Bacon actually ‘improved’ their tattiness a bit, adding a crease here and a dab of oil paint there. It would be characteristic if he had; he didn’t draw in a conventional fashion, but he did doodles of found imagery, such as the cuttings and clippings Hunter arranged on his floor. It was perhaps a way of easing the transition of the found image into a painting.

  Every modern painter has a relationship of some sort with photography. Bacon’s – as with many of his relationships – was highly unusual. Like Coldstream, he accepted that photography had dealt with what he called ‘illustration’ – the everyday reality of things. Consequently, he did not propose to paint that kind of picture. Nor was he interested in photography as an art. In some ways, he was most interested in its failures: he liked blurring, and described how he chose to paint bodies ‘slightly out of focus to bring in their “memory traces”’. This last phrase gets close to what he was after. ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them,’ he once remarked, leaving a trace of human presence ‘as a snail leaves its slime’. There was indeed a hint of mollusc-like secretion in the paintings he did in the late 1940s. The elderly painter Wyndham Lewis remarked on Bacon’s liking for ‘liquid whitish accents … delicately dropped on sable ground like blobs of mucus’.

  Memory was also important – not so much of what a thing or a person looked like, but of what it felt like to see them, the effect they had on ‘the nervous system’. This was a piece of physiology of which Bacon was highly aware, and often mentioned. Presciently, he understood what psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman have since revealed. That we have not one mind but two: a narrating one which arranges our experiences, as far as possible, into an orderly story; and an experiencing mind – Bacon’s ‘nervous system’ – which is constantly quivering with fear, rage, pain, pleasure or desire. Bacon wanted his pictures to bring back the feeling on the spectator’s nerves of seeing something ‘poignantly’.

  The role of his photo library was, in the first place, to recall such experiences to his own nervous system. Bacon never worked, as many artists have, from photographs he took himself. And it was not until the early 1960s that Bacon would work from shots taken for him by other people. His anarchic archive consisted entirely of items he’d found, and which had taken his fancy, in books and the press. The array was, culturally speaking, eclectically democratic. Newspaper clippings lay side by side with photographic reproductions of great works of art, including Rodin’s Thinker and Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X. When Bacon used a great painting or sculpture as a source for his own work, he was never copying the original, ‘painting paint’ as Freud put it when he made a series of versions of Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress (?1735–36) many years later. Bacon, in contrast, was transforming a photograph of a great work of art into his own sort of painting.

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  Bacon’s first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery finally opened in November 1949. It consisted of much starker works than the ones he had made in the mid-1940s. A series of six Heads were edited down to essentially one ingredient, which was not even as expansive as the titles suggested. They really portrayed just the lower part of a head: a gaping mouth, with prominent jagged teeth – with, appended, an ear and a suggestion of neck and shoulders. These were pictures of a scream – or perhaps a shout or a howl – in a black void. To Bacon the mouth was a crucial organ. Through it he obtained much pleasure – sexual, gastronomic, social – as a lover of food, drink and talk. It was also his prime means of aggression. He was a golden-tongued speaker, who would spend hours in conversation with a stranger in a pub, and also given to sudden bursts of verbal viciousness.

  In some pictures these terrible jaws were presented on a small stage, backed by the thick curtains that can be seen in photographs of Bacon at Cromwell Place. Others were enclosed in a framework, like a rectangular wire cage. This ‘space frame’ appeared tentatively in Head I, the only work from 1948; and more clearly in Head VI (1949), which, like most of the works in the exhibition, was finished in a desperate rush in the few weeks leading up to the opening. It is possible, though not certain, that Bacon borrowed this idea from Alberto Giacometti, who was just emerging as the great artist of postwar Paris. Early in
1948 Giacometti had his first exhibition for thirteen years, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. A clear example of a work with a space frame, The Nose (1947), was included in this. The catalogue, with an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre and a letter written by Giacometti himself, was like a ‘talisman’, in the words of David Sylvester – another youthful London critic who spent a great deal of his time in Paris.

  The space frame was not the most extraordinary aspect of Head VI. In this work, for the first but not the last time, Bacon spliced together two images that were lying about on those tables in his studio. One was of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, clad in papal robes and seated on a gilded throne. The other was a film still of the screaming, wounded nurse on the Odessa Steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). This was lifted, like many of Bacon’s sources, from a Pelican book called Film by Roger Manvell, published in 1944. Why did Bacon blend these utterly dissimilar pictures into one? Clearly, to him, they seemed to fit. They made his nervous system vibrate, as they have done those of innumerable viewers since. But perhaps he also merged them because they so dramatically didn’t fit. He admired Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) partly because it was so ‘impervious to interpretation’.

  FRANCIS BACON Head VI, 1949

  Film still from Battleship Potemkin, 1925

  Head VI was only the first of Bacon’s screaming popes, as they came to be known. This was an image he returned to again and again. Velázquez’s picture ‘haunted’ him, he told Sylvester; he bought reproduction after reproduction because it opened up ‘all sorts of feelings and areas of – I was going to say – imagination even!’ In the end, however, he came to regret having done so, because he thought his now celebrated sequence of popes was unsuccessful; they were ‘distorted records’ of a great masterpiece, and he roundly, and characteristically, dismissed them as ‘very silly’. Evidently, Velázquez’s pope had some deep resonance for him, and it is not too hard to guess what it might have been. Angry, authoritative, older men were emotionally very important to Bacon. The world in which he grew up had been violently disrupted by the dictators of the 1930s; closer to home, his father had thrown him out of his house. Even if some of the stories Francis told of Captain Bacon’s brutality to him were fantasies, or part of his own invented mythology, it remains unquestionable that his relationship with his father was highly acrimonious.

  Perhaps it was for this reason that Bacon was attracted to older men, as he told Lucian Freud around this time. Freud recalled, ‘When he went with a younger man, Peter Lacy, I asked him about it, and he said, “I’m still attracted to older men, but now because I’m older, they’re so old they can’t do anything.” Rather sad really.’ Bacon’s partnership with Eric Hall was apparently loving, but he was excited by violence and ill-treatment.

  On the other hand, the nurse figure from Battleship Potemkin resembled Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon’s old nanny, mother-substitute and partner in petty crime – they wore the same glasses, for one thing, and the character in the film is famously chasing a runaway pram at the moment she is shot. What’s more, the papal robes look like a sort of dress, and wearing woman’s clothes had been Bacon’s ultimate crime, at least in his father’s eyes. For all these reasons, the combination of screaming nurse and angrily glaring pope must have made Bacon’s nervous system quiver. But he was at pains to deny that this was what the paintings meant – and rightly so. These were merely among the reasons they had come about.

  Questioned about his screaming pope by some students from the Royal College of Art a couple of years later, Bacon grew agitated and came up with various ‘absurd’ explanations. More than once he said he had painted the pope because he wanted to use purple; that it was ‘the magnificent colour’ of the Velázquez that attracted him. It was, one witness felt, as if ‘there was an aspect of his work he was anxious not to reveal or else that he really did not know consciously what he was doing’.

  Perhaps what Bacon was struggling with was his sense – which he expressed lucidly in later interviews – that a good painting needed, in the words of the American painter Ed Ruscha, to be ‘confounded’. If it ceased to be enigmatic, the image would lose its power. Bacon himself said on one occasion, ‘I can’t explain my art, or even my working methods. It’s like the person who asked [Anna] Pavlova, “What does the Dying Swan signify?” and she answered, “If I knew, I wouldn’t dance it”.’

  This view of Bacon’s – a very strongly held one – was in part a legacy of Surrealism. It was also an attitude he passed on to several younger painters: painting wasn’t a craft, nor merely a matter of turning out a saleable product. On the contrary, it was dark and it was immensely hard, and the inscrutability and difficulty were connected to what made it worthwhile at all.

  Chapter six

  LEAPING INTO THE VOID

  The next time something as big occurred as Pasmore going abstract was probably twenty years later, when the American Philip Guston did the same thing in reverse, turning from an Abstract Expressionist to a figurative painter.

  John Kasmin, 2016

  Towards the end of the war, Lucian Freud took Sandra Blow, a twenty-year-old art student, to the top of St Anne’s, Soho. Blow recalled, ‘The church was bombed but there were two towers left. One dreadful day he dragged me to the top and when we got there he leapt over this huge gap. Then he said, “Jump!”’ She protested, ‘You can’t possibly expect me to do that’, to which he replied, ‘Just think of it as if you were on the escalator in Selfridges.’ She jumped.

  In 1947, Blow took another leap into the unknown. She travelled to Italy and settled in Rome. Italian art of the Renaissance and antiquity had been deeply familiar to British artists and art lovers for centuries. Indeed, it was a staple part of art education. As far as contemporary art was concerned, however, Italy was – and to an extent still remains – terra incognita to the eyes of London. In Rome, Blow made some enlightening international contacts including Nicolas Carone, an Italian American from Hoboken, New Jersey, who formed a bridge between New York and Europe. He had become part of a movement that was still not much more than a rumour in London: Abstract Expressionism. But he had also attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, at which he encouraged Blow to enrol. There she met another, even more remarkable artist, Alberto Burri, who was ten years older than her. Blow had declined to be Freud’s lover, but began a relationship with Burri that lasted for several years.

  At this point Burri was just beginning his own journey into the unknown, in terms of art. From being a figurative painter, he moved to abstraction of an experimental type, using such materials as tar, sand, zinc, pumice, glue and aluminium. He was not depicting the materials of the world, but incorporating them physically into the surface of his pictures. A few years later he added sackcloth to his repertoire.

  Together Blow and Burri travelled to Paris, where they encountered the beginnings of a new movement among some of the younger artists. It was a mood so diffuse that it did not yet have a name, but it soon gained several. In 1950, the critic Michel Tapié came up with the term ‘Art informel’, meaning an essentially abstract idiom without formal structure, not sharply geometrical like Mondrian or the works of the Russian Constructivists, but loose and free. The next year another term was coined: ‘Tachisme’ – from the French word ‘tache’, meaning stain. The year after that, Tapié returned to the naming game – somewhat despairingly – with a book entitled Un art autre (‘Art of Another Kind’, 1952), in which he described the wave of artists using gestures of the brush, the free flow of paint and their own painterly instincts to make pictures. These terms, particularly Tachisme, were much used in London in the mid-1950s – an era when few people had heard of Abstract Expressionism, let alone seen any.

  Blow was thus catapulted into the heart of the avant-garde in several cities – all far away from London. In Paris, Rome, New York and elsewhere, many artists in the late 1940s and 1950s were tempted to make the leap into the unknown territory of abstraction. Though
these developments were much talked about in Britain, the response they got was not necessarily a positive one.

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  In 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain’s celebration of national creativity, the Arts Council organized a Festival of the Arts. This took place in London in May and June, with concerts of music by Edward Elgar, Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten, alongside performances of works by William Shakespeare. There was a great deal of discussion about what form the display of visual art should take. One suggestion was for a panorama of British life in the form of portraits of recipients of the OBE. Finally it was decided that sixty contemporary artists should be asked to enter a competition, out of which five would be awarded prizes of £500 each. The show was to be entitled ‘60 Paintings for ’51’ (although, in the end, only fifty-four artists took part, despite the then considerable inducement of free canvas on which to work).

  Sandra Blow, 1962

  The judges – a not particularly avant-garde trio including the art critic for The Times and the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam – met on 16 April 1951 to make their choice. All of the works eventually submitted to the competition went on show on 2 May at the Manchester City Art Gallery. But even before they were unveiled, the event caused one of those outbursts of rage about modern art that punctuate postwar British life. On this occasion, the outrage was particularly provoked by just one of the successful entries.

  Four of the five winning submissions – by Ivon Hitchens, Robert Medley, Lucian Freud and Claude Rogers – were received without much ado. It was the remaining winning entry, Autumn Landscape (1950–51) by William Gear, which caused consternation. This was, as its title suggests, a light and lyrical – albeit essentially abstract – piece of work with a strong hint of falling leaves and October sunlight about it. But these qualities were not enough to save it from the rage of the philistines.