Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  ROGER HILTON August 1953 (Red, Ochre, Black and White), 1953

  Ayres marked a passage in a statement Hilton wrote, in which he mused on whether abstract painting could change the world. Could the artist, with just brushes and colours, create a boat ‘capable of carrying not only himself to some further shore, but with the aid of others, a whole flotilla which may be seen eventually as having been carrying humanity forward?’ Such ideas were in the air (even if, in retrospect, the answer is quite clearly, ‘no’). But then, all sorts of ideas were flying around in the studios, galleries and pubs of London in this period. According to Ayres, ‘It wasn’t like the Americans who all got in a huddle and wanted to make Great Art. I don’t think people in England behaved like that, I didn’t mix with people who did anyway. They’d say a line, and you might like the line they said.’ Hilton was one compelling talker at the time; another was William Scott. But there was no movement, even as diffuse and fissiparous as the ones that existed in New York and Paris.

  The nearest thing to a manifesto that the London avant-garde ever got was a little book published in 1954 entitled Nine Abstract Artists. And this was more reflective of a polite agreement to differ than a united front. The nine divided broadly into two groups. On the one side, there were the Constructivists, whose work was based on geometry and mathematical proportion and who, in several cases, had made the step from painting into three dimensions and were making sculptures in relief. These included Pasmore, Anthony Hill, Kenneth Martin and his wife, Mary. In the middle was a sculptor, Robert Adams. On the other side were four painters, dedicated to juicy painting with visible brushstrokes, namely Hilton, William Scott, Terry Frost and Adrian Heath. These artists came up with the idea of the book themselves, and each contributed a personal statement (Hilton’s contained the passage that Ayres had marked).

  The nine artists approached a young critic, Lawrence Alloway, to write an introduction to the book. In his essay Alloway drew a distinction between ‘pure geometric art’ and ‘a sort of sensual impressionism without things’: an idiom, in other words, with all the pleasures of painting, the colours and textures, but no actual subject (which presumably was where Hilton, Frost and Scott fitted in). However, Hilton – for all his bravado and talk of swinging out into the void – was deeply unsettled by the position in which he found himself. His notebooks reveal an artist wrestling with himself. ‘The tyranny of the image must be overcome,’ he proclaimed at one point; at another, he acknowledged that ‘very often in the course of working your medium will say something you hadn’t thought of’, and by that, among other things, he meant ‘subject matter’.

  One problem was that real objects kept appearing, even in his most pure moments. The large red form in August 1953, for example, has contours very much like a naked woman’s torso; a similar shape in February 1954 has fairly unequivocally sprouted legs and breasts. After a short time, Hilton swung back out of emptiness, and became, as he put it, a figurative artist without being descriptive. He wrote to Terry Frost, announcing that ‘I am going in future to introduce if possible a more markedly human element in my pictures.’ The decision was a relief – ‘I already feel much happier.’ Soon he was painting nudes.

  William Scott was a painter in a similar position: in the border zone between abstraction and figuration. Some of his paintings of the early 1950s fit Alloway’s description of a ‘sensual impressionism without things’; in others, the sensual brushstrokes are the same, but things – frying pans, tables, plates, bodies – are blatantly, distinctly there. For the rest of their careers, Hilton and Scott remained semi-abstract artists. What they did was often powerful and beautiful, but unlikely to change the world or, indeed, ‘carry humanity forward’.

  *

  It was left to others to push ahead with Hilton’s idea of forms that flew out of the picture and into the room. In 1956, two artists got together and arranged for this to happen quite literally: they orchestrated a whole gallery full of shapes that had escaped from the boundaries of the picture frame and entered the same zone as the people who were looking at them. The daring duo were Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton and the project grew out of a series of exhibitions Hamilton organized at the ICA. In 1955, he was the curator of ‘Man, Machine and Motion’, a show that examined the futuristic subject of automation. It consisted of over two hundred photographs of machines and mechanisms that somehow added to the powers of the human body. Prior to being shown in London, the exhibition had also been staged at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, the city where both Hamilton and Pasmore were teaching art at the time.

  WILLIAM SCOTT Still Life with Frying Pan, c. 1952

  Pasmore was characteristically quixotic in his reaction to ‘Man, Machine and Motion’: ‘It would have been very good if it hadn’t been for all those photographs’ (in other words, without most of the exhibits). In response, Hamilton proposed that he and Victor should put together an exhibition with no images, photographic or otherwise – ‘a show which would be its own justification: no theme, no subject; not a display of things or ideas.’

  This was to be a ‘pure abstract exhibition’: in other words, a display about nothing except pure form. Eventually, Hamilton and Pasmore put this project into effect under the title ‘an Exhibit’ (it was shown in Newcastle and also at the ICA in London). The display was made up of prefabricated acrylic panels of a standard size, forty-eight by thirty-two inches, in four varieties: transparent, white, red and black. These were suspended from the ceiling with piano wire, at right angles to the floor and to each other. The result was a walk-in Mondrian, a room-sized version of the relief constructions that Pasmore was making at the time. Underlying it was a stark message: the easel painting, as many people liked to say at this time, was dead.

  Chapter seven

  LIFE INTO ART: BACON AND FREUD IN THE 1950S

  I suppose I actually spoke about painting more with Francis Bacon than to anyone else, partly because he liked making statements, formulating dogma, laying down rules. Of course they changed all the time. We talked – slightly drunkenly and wildly – for about fifteen years. It was mostly about painting.

  Frank Auerbach, 2009

  Francis Bacon spent a great deal of time talking to many people; chance acquaintances, old friends, people he happened to meet in pubs. His life when he was not working was a mobile seminar, conducted on appropriately random terms, in which he would talk, often brilliantly, for hour after hour, most of his words disappearing into the smoky air of Soho.

  The painter John Wonnacott – then an art student – was once walking down the street with him. It was, he remembers, ‘one of those days when there is quite a strong sun coming down. Suddenly Bacon stopped and pointed at a horizontal shadow. He said, “Do you see the way that eats into the figure, like a disease?” The moment I heard that, I rethought shadow. That’s proper teaching. It sent you back to Goya. Some painters see shadow as a way of making things real, creating an illusion, Bacon didn’t.’ On the contrary, he seems to have thought of them as spectres accompanying the living: ever present reminders of death. He once dreamed that he removed his own shadow from a wall, thinking, ‘This will be useful for my art’.

  Bacon’s work of the 1930s and 1940s was entirely spun out of his head, from his imagination, starting off from extraordinary images that dropped into his mind, ‘like slides’. He was much closer to the line of Symbolists, such as Gauguin, and to Surrealism than to naturalistic painters who worked from observation, from life. This remained true of many of his pictures throughout his career. But around 1950 there was a change. Bacon began to make portraits of specific people, though his was portraiture of a most unusual kind.

  In a later interview with the American critic John Gruen, he began by confessing that he was ‘very interested in painting portraits which now is almost an impossible thing to do’. The essence of the impossibility was that Bacon wanted to create a likeness that was not a likeness. That is, he wanted to create a powerful sense of a certain person
– their presence – without in any conventional fashion documenting their features. The dilemma he had came in two parts. Firstly, ‘how are you going to make a nose and not illustrate it?’ Secondly, what stroke will make it a strong nose? It was a matter of continuous ‘hazard, chance or accident’. Everything depended on the way the paint behaved and that, in this sort of picture, was not entirely under the artist’s control.

  The question then arises: What were those things he wanted to pack in? It was not by any means simply a question of likeness, or of the kind of meticulous observation that Coldstream or a Euston Road painter would have taken as a starting point. While struggling to explain to David Sylvester why he didn’t admire Matisse nearly as much as Picasso, Bacon came up with a remarkable phrase. He’d always found Matisse ‘too lyrical and decorative’ – both minus points in Bacon’s eyes; ‘Matisse never had the – what can one say? The brutality of fact that Picasso had.’ The remarkable point here is not so much his mention of brutality, which was, after all, Bacon’s stock-in-trade, but his stress on the harsh facts that are the reality of this world – and not fantasies conjured up in the imagination.

  Bacon had said much the same earlier in that interview, when talking about his own work of the early 1950s, especially a series he had painted that Sylvester characterized as ‘men alone in rooms’ with a claustrophobic quality, ‘a sense of unease’ that was ‘rather horrific’. Bacon replied that he was not aware of this feeling himself but, he went on, those pictures were mostly of a man who was ‘always in a state of unease’, ‘very neurotic and almost hysterical’. Those qualities, Bacon imagined, might have come across in the paintings because he had always hoped ‘to put things over as directly and rawly’ as he could. This could cause offence ‘because people tend to be offended by facts, or what used to be called the truth’.

  Peter Lacy, c. mid-1950s. Photo by John Deakin

  The man in those pictures was Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot seven years Bacon’s junior whom he met one evening around 1952 in the Colony Room. Lacy was, by Bacon’s own account, the love of his life, and that was also Lucian Freud’s view: ‘He was only in love once really while I knew him, and that was with Peter Lacy.’ But with Lacy, Bacon experienced ‘four years of continuous horror, with nothing but violent rows’. In retrospect, he described him as ‘marvellous-looking’, witty, ‘a kind of playboy’, with plenty of money, a fact that made him feel the ‘futility of life’ more clearly. Lacy was also the most ‘terrible kind of drunk’.

  FRANCIS BACON Study for a Portrait, 1953

  According to John Richardson, who knew them both, ‘drink released a fiendish, sadistic streak in Lacy that bordered on the psychopathic’. Theirs was a sado-masochistic partnership with Bacon as the passive partner. Lacy would attack him, frequently and viciously. He hated Bacon’s painting – which he probably saw as a rival for the artist’s attention – and recurrently slashed his canvases to shreds and sometimes his clothes (this could have a comic side as, when they once went on a journey by sea, Lacy almost immediately threw all of Bacon’s suits out of the porthole leaving him to spend the rest of the voyage in shorts).

  On another occasion – in ‘a state of alcoholic dementia’, as Richardson put it – Lacy threw Bacon through a plate-glass window, with the result that the painter almost lost an eye. At that point, Freud decided things had gone too far: ‘One day I saw Francis and he had been so badly beaten up – his eye was hanging out over his face – that I made a stupid mistake and went to see Peter Lacy and said, “This is really too much,” and so on. Then they were both very angry and wouldn’t speak to me.’

  While all this was going on, Bacon’s pictures were becoming more permeated by a visible reality; less fantastic, but with an even greater charge of visceral aggression, menace and energy. The early 1950s saw Bacon achieve many of his greatest images. A particularly fertile year was 1953, which produced a crop of Bacon masterpieces: blue-suited men, chortling, screaming, in a threatening state between despair and euphoria. These were all, more or less directly, portraits of Lacy. In Study for a Portrait this man in blue is seated on a bed, fully dressed, laughing the kind of laugh that might be heard in Dante’s Inferno. Concurrently Bacon painted a magnificent series of pictures of animals in a state of aggression, such as snarling dogs, ready to spring, as well as apes and naked men copulating – or perhaps fighting – in the grass.

  If his paintings seemed violent, Bacon mused, it was because most of us observe our surroundings through ‘screens’. Lift those and immediately you are aware of the ‘whole horror of life’. His was a vision of Hobbesian savagery: Bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.

  It is a difficult question to decide: which of the two was the true victim in the relationship between Bacon and Lacy. The former suffered the violence – the destruction of his possessions, the near loss of an eye. Ultimately, however, it was Lacy who lost his life. He drank himself to death in Tangiers in 1962, ‘destroyed’ by the breakup of their love.

  According to Freud, ‘Francis complained that he spent the whole of his life looking for the roughest, most masculine men that he could find. “And yet, I’m always stronger than they are.” He meant that his will was stronger.’ It seems he not only saw life as a struggle – his ideal of a friendship was two people ‘tearing each other to pieces’ – he also fed off it, creatively.

  The dreadful, alcohol-sodden, sado-masochistic affair with Lacy, and a similar relationship later with George Dyer, produced much of Bacon’s finest work. It was a fight for domination in which the painter, and his work, came out triumphant, while Lacy and Dyer both lost their lives. As Bacon later reflected, ‘People say you forget about death, but you don’t. After all, I’ve had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I’ve been really fond of have died. And you don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal … one of the terrible things about so-called love, certainly for an artist, is the destruction.’

  *

  What Bacon was trying to do was enormously challenging. He wanted somehow to combine the compelling sense of reality that could be found in the greatest pictures of Velázquez and Rembrandt with the chance effects – the result of what the Surrealists called ‘automatism’ – of the artist ceding conscious control. Only in this way did he think that it was possible to create an image of reality that went beyond photography; a truly fresh, figurative painting. To bring this off, he rolled the dice again and again; usually, as at the roulette tables, he lost. Hence the paintings that were slashed, discarded, thrown away.

  There is an intriguing eyewitness account of Bacon’s working method at exactly this time. He had been brought in to fill in for John Minton at the Royal College of Art between 1951 and 1952 and, while he was there, a student, Albert Herbert, observed him painting. ‘He was not secretive,’ Herbert reminisced. ‘He left the door of his studio ajar and during his very long lunches I often went in to see what he was doing.’ Inside the studio were twenty or so canvases stretched the wrong way round. The student continued, ‘At one stage he filled a bucket with black house paint and with a broom from the corridor splashed it over the canvases. It also went over the walls and the ceiling.’ But then he took chalk and pastel and drew out the composition in a conventional fashion. So his methods, Herbert concluded, were not quite as spontaneous as Bacon would later claim.

  Probably, however, Bacon wanted the spontaneity in the way the paint actually went on the canvas, not in the fundamental layout of the picture: that he had already visualized. Bacon seemed to rehearse the same type of image again and again. Herbert noted that most of these twenty paintings were ‘naked men in the grass’. One day Bacon slashed many of them to fragments and gave the pieces to Herbert to use for his student work.

  In fact, Bacon’s only contribution to teaching at the Royal College was to attend a Sketch Club, where he was supposed to give an opinion on students’ works. Bacon ‘paced up and down in a bouncy way in his thick crepe soles, smiling am
iably’ (he was dangerous when smiley). Then he announced that he just could not think of anything to say about these paintings. He knew he was supposed to give three prizes, ‘but as they all appear equally dull I can’t do that’. He proceeded to answer some questions from the hostile audience he had created. In response to the query, ‘Why are these paintings so dull?’ he gave a revealing answer: ‘Because they are all based on someone else’s paintings.’ Another sulky student wanted to know why then so many of Bacon’s recent pictures had been based on Velázquez’s pope. There followed ‘an intense argument in which Bacon seemed to lose his cool and justify his work with impulsive, sometimes absurd explanations’.

  It was, Herbert 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’. Paradoxically, Herbert found this in itself a profound lesson, the most important he learnt during his time as a student. His other teachers had talked about painting ‘as a craft which one went about in a rational, controlled way’. Bacon was indicating that this was not so; rather, ‘real artists are driven by unconscious motives’.

  *

  In the early 1950s Bacon and Freud were a team, if not a couple. Freud’s second wife, Caroline Blackwood – whom he married in 1953 – recalled or perhaps complained, ‘I had dinner with [Francis Bacon] nearly every night for almost the whole of my marriage to Lucian … we also had lunch.’ There is at least one account of Bacon and Freud getting into a fight together to help out a painter friend, Robert Buhler, after a night at the Gargoyle Club in Soho. Buhler had offended the writer James Pope-Hennessy, who was accompanied by ‘a couple of his paratrooper “rough-trade” boys’. Pope-Hennessy and his pals were waiting when Buhler left the club with Freud and Bacon and attacked them. ‘Lucian was very brave. He jumped on the back of one of the bully boys while Francis kicked at his shins. Every time one of the paratroopers came near him, Francis just kicked – in a very lady-like way, I must say.’ Probably, both Freud and Bacon enjoyed the aggro.