Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  A year or two later, Jones had another, even more illustrious visitor in the figure of Joan Miró, an artist he admired greatly: ‘I loved that idea of the colour floating free of its form, in [Alexander] Calder and Miró.’ It was, then, an exceedingly gratifying experience to be visited by such an established artist:

  Roland Penrose rang up and said that Miró was in town for his exhibition at the Tate and wanted to see some young artists’ work. For me it was wonderful to have someone who could have been an old master, come to my studio, grip my arm and say, ‘Bravo!’

  It was certainly a completely different response from the one Jones had received, just a few years earlier, from Ruskin Spear on a grey day in a grey room at the Royal College of Art.

  Chapter thirteen

  THE GRIN WITHOUT THE CAT: BACON AND FREUD IN THE 1960S

  ‘The naked truth’; I’ve always rather liked that expression.

  Lucian Freud, 2010

  In 1962, at the age of fifty-three, Francis Bacon had a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery. This came about through the diplomacy of Harry Fischer of Marlborough Fine Art and Bacon’s own friendship with John Rothenstein, director of the Tate. The Tate Trustees agreed to the show, Rothenstein noted, with ‘a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm’. One, John Witt, wrote him a letter complaining – in essence – that it was a mockery to call this a retrospective since Bacon had destroyed virtually all his early work. Rothenstein was warned that the painter would be a headache to work with; but, within limits, he proved highly cooperative, affording ‘the utmost help’ and producing new paintings especially for the occasion.

  The exhibition was scheduled to open in the last week of May. Towards the end of March, Rothenstein received an urgent invitation to Bacon’s studio. The artist had finished a large painting, a triptych in fact, which he hoped the director would like enough to include in the show. When Rothenstein was admitted to Bacon’s tiny new flat at 7 Reece Mews, he saw an epic painting, on the scale of the largest Renaissance altarpieces: ‘A huge triptych (it is eighteen feet wide) stood across the studio like a wall of lurid orange, red and black; two Nazi-like figures with butchers’ carcasses on the left panel.’ In the centre was a ‘crushed, bleeding body on a shabby bed’. To the right there was another carcass – perhaps human, perhaps animal – hanging suspended, with a dog’s head silhouetted at the bottom. Rothenstein was indeed sufficiently impressed to make this work the culmination of the exhibition.

  Bacon later told David Sylvester that he had painted the entire triptych in a fortnight, ‘in a bad mood of drinking’. Sometimes, the artist added, he was so drunk that he hardly knew what he was doing. But what did it all mean? Bacon, typically, was extremely careful to avoid giving more explanation than afforded by the work’s title: Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). For some years, a celebrated American scholar of modern art and curator at the Metropolitan Museum, James Thrall Soby, had been struggling to write a book about Bacon. Marlborough Fine Art had proposed the publication even before the artist had agreed to work with them. Such a project was an integral part of elevating an artist’s status, just as arranging exhibitions in major museums was. It was reported that Bacon used to do imitations of Fischer [who came from Vienna] saying, ‘We vill make you famous, people vill write books about you.’ Ostensibly, he thought this was hilarious. Soby, author of studies of Joan Miró and the Cubist Juan Gris, was just the kind of writer who could help raise Bacon into the international pantheon of modern art.

  However, the painter had not made it an easy process. He might have found Fischer’s blandishments funny, but his behaviour suggested that the prospect of the book also made him anxious. Bacon flatly refused to meet the author. Instead Soby had to communicate via correspondence with Fischer and the critic Robert Melville. They, in turn, would ask Bacon questions and report back. Progress was slow. Soby still hadn’t finished his text when Bacon produced Three Studies for a Crucifixion. Everyone agreed that this was an important work, a turning point, and that Soby would have to describe and analyse it. He guessed that the central panel was a deposition from the cross, and that the figure on the right was an image of St Peter, since it seemed to be crucified upside down. The left panel, however, had him stumped.

  FRANCIS BACON Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

  Fischer questioned Bacon about it, and reported back that ‘the two figures on the left are Himmler and Hitler opening the doors of the gas chambers – that you may quote’. But when Soby did just that, Bacon immediately back-pedalled. He complained that Soby’s text misrepresented his art and asked for publication to be postponed. Furthermore, he insisted that the two figures on the left weren’t Himmler and Hitler after all. Perhaps, Fischer wrote wearily to the long-suffering Soby, he hadn’t been serious when he said that in the first place. At any rate, it was agreed that ‘the iconography of the Triptych is difficult to ascertain’. Soby’s book never appeared. In 2008, the Bacon scholar Martin Harrison pointed out that there was still no consensus about the subject of Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

  Obviously, this was what Bacon wanted. Yet a few clues hint at the fact that the triptych may not have been created in quite such an alcoholic cloud of unknowing as the artist later claimed; that there may have been, if not exactly a nameable subject, at least a series of linked images in his mind before he picked up his brushes and began to work. A list of potential subjects for paintings in Bacon’s notes from earlier in 1962 includes ‘Butcher shop hanging meat’; and on a sketch from around the same time he wrote ‘Collapsed image of Christ/Pool of flesh’.

  There are also some (rather faint) echoes of old master paintings scattered throughout the three panels. The carcass on the right recalls Rembrandt’s great Slaughtered Ox (1655), itself a poignant metaphor for the Crucifixion, which had been paraphrased in Bacon’s breakthrough work, Painting 1946. In the triptych, however, Rembrandt’s ox has been turned upside down and melded with another of Bacon’s touchstones, Cimabue’s serpentine Crucifix of the thirteenth century in Santa Croce, Florence, in which, as he admiringly said, the Christ figure seemed to crawl down the cross like a worm. The dog at the bottom brings to mind the scene from one of Goya’s Black Paintings in which a little dog is gazing into a gulf of nothingness. The mangled body lying on a bedstead in the centre panel makes one think of the nudes of Walter Sickert, such as L’Affaire de Camden Town (1909), which refers to sexual murder. And, whatever Bacon may have insisted, the figure on the extreme left does bear a resemblance to Heinrich Himmler (and to the photographs of Hitler and his entourage that Bacon kept in his image bank). He told David Sylvester that he had been looking at them before he painted another triptych, Crucifixion, three years later, in 1965. These images gave him the idea of putting a swastika armband on a figure in this later work, but he claimed, disingenuously, that he intended by this not that this was a Nazi, but simply to make it work ‘formally’.

  While Bacon may have been extremely keen to rebut the idea that his pictures were – in the Victorian manner – telling a story, he nevertheless didn’t want to remove all hint of a narrative. Bacon liked to quote Paul Valéry’s remark that ‘modern artists want the grin without the cat’, explaining that ‘I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said – to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.’ This statement gives some idea of why Bacon disliked being interrogated about the meaning of his work. He had put together an image that imparted the emotional charge of tragic drama – horror, suffering, sadistic violence, the existential void – but with no script, no key, just an overwhelming sensation of a story. It wasn’t meant to be decoded, by Soby or anyone else; it was meant to confound.

  Though the triptych format of Three Studies for a Crucifixion was an obvious reference to late medieval altarpieces, its sheer size, simple geometric shapes and strong colours had a good deal in common with the work of the hard-edge abstractionists shown in the ‘Situati
on’ exhibitions. It was, however, even bigger than the largest works by Richard Smith or Robyn Denny – and into it Bacon had introduced all the anguish and terror of human existence.

  Perhaps that was why, when Bridget Riley made a list of her artistic heroes, it included Francis Bacon. The others she named – Mondrian, Klee and Pollock, for example – were all more or less abstract painters. She added Bacon because, in her opinion, he had ‘a great deal of an abstract painter in him’. Indeed, for her, this was the most expressive aspect of his art. Riley revered these great predecessors because they had kept painting alive in the hostile environment of the modern world. ‘The extraordinary thing about those brilliant men,’ she said, ‘was that they above all wanted to continue working in this visual medium. So that meant finding out what to do.’

  The problems for handmade art – and for painting in particular – were already evident in the early nineteenth century. It had a dangerous rival in photography, first announced in 1839. It was also menaced by – in Nietzsche’s phrase – the death of God. The philosopher Hegel, among others, had argued that serious art could not exist without a spiritual tradition such as religion. ‘Art,’ Hegel concluded, ‘considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’ Of course, painting and sculpture might continue to be made but they would be trivial, offering ‘fleeting play’ and ‘decorating our surroundings’.

  Bacon, too, talked about the predicament of the painter in the modern age, faced with the extreme difficulty of what to paint and how to paint it. Echoing Hegel’s words, ‘decorative’ was his favourite term of denigration for abstraction, and, as we have seen, he dismissed most figurative art as mere ‘illustration’. The first had no connection with the drama and tragedy of human life; the second was just duplicating the work of a photograph. Bacon strove to walk this tightrope – and to do so while using photographs as a source and loudly protesting that he believed in nothing, not God nor conventional morality nor the afterlife, and that life was meaningless and pointless.

  As an art student in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the painter John Wonnacott spent a good deal of time ‘making Francis talk about painting. I must have been extremely irritating. As soon as he came into a bar, I’d pounce on him.’ Wonnacott’s conclusion from these discussions was a surprising one. ‘In an odd sort of way I think Francis thought of himself as a religious artist.’ Certainly, Bacon’s beliefs and behaviour were wildly out of line with those of any known denomination. Nonetheless he reverted more than once to the most important of all Christian subjects, the crucifixion. But his was a Calvary with no salvation, only cruelty, evil and suffering.

  *

  When Bacon’s Tate exhibition opened on 24 May 1962, it included ninety-one paintings, nearly half the number that had survived his own destruction of his early work (and the slashing and burning of others by Peter Lacy). ‘The impact is immediately shattering,’ wrote Eric Newton in the Observer, and it became more so as one went through the five galleries of the show. Others denounced the exhibition as a sensationalist chamber of horrors but, despite the doubts – indeed horrified distaste – expressed by some critics and visitors, the exhibition was a triumphant success, all the more extraordinary since almost nobody had heard of the artist a decade and a half before. A copy of the catalogue was sent to Picasso – another high-voltage painter and Bacon’s principal inspiration – who responded with ‘an admiring message’.

  When the paintings were all installed, Bacon took his friend Daniel Farson on an after-hours tour of the exhibition galleries. Farson sensed that ‘Francis was deeply content, possibly as satisfied with his work as he had ever been – yet overwhelmed too, and possibly frightened.’ The next night Bacon arrived at the formal opening wearing a check shirt and jeans, with the result that he and an equally casually dressed friend were initially refused entry (something that amused Bacon no end). Though drunk, the artist behaved with poise. The following day, the public began to pour in, including – according to Rothenstein – unprecedented numbers of ‘teddy-boys’, though since this youth style was by then at least a decade old, perhaps Rothenstein simply meant informally attired younger people. In any case, their attendance indicated the breadth of Bacon’s appeal.

  Farson had missed the opening party since he had been in Paris on a television assignment. Returning, he headed straight for the Colony Room in Soho only to find it ‘full of tearful drunks’. He was seized by Elinor Bellingham-Smith, who tremulously asked him if he had heard the news. Thinking she was overcome by the triumph of the exhibition, he replied ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Francis must be delighted.’ At which she slapped him hard across the face. Bacon himself then appeared and took Farson to the privacy of the lavatory, where he explained that in among the telegrams of congratulation that morning he had found one announcing the death of his lover Peter Lacy the previous night, the same day as the opening party. He had succumbed to drink. Lacy’s consumption, according to Bacon, had reached three bottles of wine a day, ‘which nobody can take’, and eventually his pancreas had simply ‘exploded’. To Bacon, it seemed a clear case of suicide, as well as an act of fate.

  Bacon may not have had faith in God, but he does appear to have believed – or half believed – in the Greek Furies, the Eumenides or Erinyes, the trio of female goddesses of vengeful pursuit. Bacon wrote in a letter to the Tate Gallery that the terrifying creatures in his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (the painting that had made his reputation and which the Tate had acquired as a gift from Eric Hall in 1953) were ‘sketches’ of the Eumenides. At the very moment of success, the furies had struck; they were to do so again – with the same precision of timing – on the eve of his next great exhibition a decade later.

  *

  We have seen that Bacon often used photographs as the starting point for his imagery. For a long time these were all images he had found while riffling through books and magazines: the still from Battleship Potemkin of the screaming nurse, reproductions of old masters, images of Nazi orators and so on. However, from 1962 onwards, Bacon used photography in a different way, commissioning his friend John Deakin to take pictures for him in highly unusual photo shoots. The subjects were the artist’s friends and fellow habitués of Soho: Muriel Belcher, Isabel Rawsthorne, Bacon’s new lover George Dyer, Lucian Freud and Henrietta Moraes. Bacon would specify the poses he wanted but was not present at the photo sessions. In this way he built up a private image bank of people he knew well and saw almost every day.

  It was a highly idiosyncratic way of working, and its explanation takes us to the heart of what he was trying to do. The question for him, when painting a portrait, was ‘how can I draw one more veil away from life and present what is called the living sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more violently?’ This assault on the nerves might involve intense distortion, which was easier to achieve when the subject wasn’t there sitting in front of him. He didn’t like people watching him committing ‘the injury that I do them in my work’. Bacon also felt he could record ‘the fact of them more clearly’ in their absence. By working from photographs of people he knew immensely well, he could ‘drift’ more freely from the literal facts of what they looked like.

  Once Deakin’s prints were delivered to the artist, a metamorphosis began. They joined the mulch of debris that thickly covered his studio, and would become torn, crumpled and spattered with paint, as if they were already turning into paintings. Bacon was not copying Deakin’s photographs as a photo-realist might; he was using them as an aide-memoire. When he painted a picture of Belcher, Freud, Moraes or Rawsthorne, his mind would have been full of fresh impressions of their recent encounters. David Sylvester asked him if he was really painting these memories when he was working, rather than the images captured in the photographs? Bacon’s answer was ‘yes and no’. In a way he wasn’t after either, but something more elusive – the actual experience, vivid and raw. He was trying to find a configuration of paint, probably not a
literal resemblance at all, which – just as Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea – would bring back the sensation itself, not merely what it looked like, but how it felt.

  Henrietta Moraes was, in one respect, the most unusual of Bacon’s subjects, his only female nude. This was perhaps an odd choice for a man who had virtually no sexual interest in women. Indeed, it was not he who had a relationship with her but Lucian Freud, who recalled, ‘Francis met her through me, but I don’t think he saw all that much of her.’ Moraes – born Audrey Wendy Abbott in 1931 – christened herself with her first name and gained the second from a marriage to the poet Dom Moraes. She was a staple figure in Soho from the late 1940s until the 1960s; subsequently she had a brief career as a cat burglar, resulting in a term in Holloway Prison.

  Henrietta Moraes, late 1950s. Photo by John Deakin

  The qualities that appealed to Bacon (who painted her some sixteen times) were perhaps the combination of shamelessness and utter lack of inhibition – a mixture of pride and degradation – that Freud no doubt told him about: