The one article I did read about Bacon (in the Observer) quoted Damien Hirst as saying that the quality of Francis Bacon's work with a brush forced him to give up painting. I can only speak as a writer, but I doubt reading Blake has stopped any wordsmith from being what he is by nature, even if the market is stacked heavily against him in favour of those who merely draw up sentences on demand (or have others do it in their name). As genius is born, not man-made, this revealing statement says less about what Damien Hirst is than what he isn't. It further suggests that his eye was always focussed on profiting from the main chance rather than toiling towards the walls of history.

A preliminary scoot around the wing of Tate Britain dedicated to the Bacon exhibition confirms a spectacular array of Bacon's paintings have been gathered, and also the startling talent in the tip of Bacon's brush. The exhibition is spread across ten themed rooms and there are adequate notes at the entrance to each room to forearm we ignorant.

'His approach was to distort appearance to reach a deeper truth about his subjects', read a note in the 'Portrait' room.
Huh?
This is the kind of art-speak nonsense that should never be left unchallenged but invariably is.
How is it possible to reach a deeper truth about anything through distortion?
This is like trying to find lyrical meaning in randomly assembled lines, or mysticism through a strong skunk weed or tab of acid, when the clear truth is you can't—only clarity is equipped to clarify the depths. This is especially true in the highest art of the written word, where the clarity of a Dostoievsky or a Montaigne tramples the fashionably vague into the dusts of time, and the mysteries of the most spellbinding poetry is cast out by famously clear minds.

Bacon's Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne is quietly amusing, and in the 'Lying Figure' of a naked Henrietta Moraes, the sitter has a syringe stuck in her, which Bacon informs us 'simply fixed the image down', though she had been so heavily bitchered that a shot of morphine was no doubt needed to kill her pain.
Francis does distort famously well, but then so does Photoshop and a convex mirror. In fact some of his studies for portraits, including his self-portraits, look like in-camera multiple exposures, or Photoshop filters in the hands of someone who can't wait to try them out.

There are numerous studies of George Dyer and Bacon twists and distorts poor George with the relish of one who loves to twist. Like much of Bacon's work, his workings of Dyer stem from the shallow pool of (clippings and) photographs that have been expertly assembled in the 'Archive Room', and the painting entitled George Dyer Riding a Bycilcle is a spectacular piece of enslavement. As Bacon wills Dyer along the road to nowhere, George peers forlornly from within the frenzy of movement in which he is trapped, making uneasy viewing for any kindly viewer who might feel the urge to set him free. For me, George Dyer's ride to nowhere is the star turn of the entire exhibition. All of Bacon's other efforts in the portrait 'Room 7' are wilfully disfigured. I doubt Bacon surrendered willingly, but in this painting George Dyer makes a last stand and the subject conquers the hand of the master, effectively forging a life beyond art-captivity and he becomes an uncomfortable relevance in our midst.

Alas, by the Room 8, 'Memorial', George has become a lifeless memory and 'In Memory of George Dyer' the same photograph by John Deakin appears again—with all the lifelessness of a distorted painting of a photograph.
In Room 9, 'Epic', there is colour aplenty but little by way of life. Bacon appears to have lived in a kind of twilight and the shadows appear to be where he works best. He is at home in the mess of his studio and the shallow gene pool of his subjects, and grand literature cannot be contained beneath the low ceiling under which he worked. This makes his implied love of T.S. Eliot hard to fathom, because he never looks beyond and above. 'Birth, copulation and death' may well have echoed the painter's view of life, but it did not echo Eliot's.

I could not relate to any of the works in Room 10, 'Late', which seem to me to be entirely commercial enterprise and the busying of an old body who keeps going over old ground. So I too wandered back to the old ground of Room 1, 'Animal', where his Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 'The Screaming Pope', was still welcoming new arrivals. This is one of his most famous and ferocious works, and the noise of Bacon's talent assault's the eye drums from the outset.
What I'd really gone back to view were the bars and frames that he imposed on his earlier works. To my eyes these are visible manifestations of a restraining order on both his art and his humanity, from which Bacon never quite escapes. These cages have a whiff of formaldehyde, too, as Bacon unwraps the human form and splays it wide. However, too much of the human condition eludes Bacon and he finds nothing inside, except his own rummaging hand and the blood and guts that figure in so many of the archive clippings, which he plays with in cold view of his detached retina.

Francis Bacon's take on The Crucifixion, Room 4, gets nailed to no higher plane than the abattoir, because the cage in which he chooses to exist bars him entry to the realm of the non-physical. His Crucifixion is the antithesis of Ribera's best efforts, because Francis either doesn't know there's another domain or he simply doesn't want in: the glorious surrender of humility is not of his world.
As in much bad religious art, Bacon sees the Crucifixion as 'just an act of man's behaviour'. Rather than lending his brush to the heart of the matter, he subordinates it to his ego, and by inflicting the abattoir he reveals the limitations of the cage and no transfiguration takes place.

Graham Greene once wrote that writing was the best kind of therapy and that he didn't know how people who didn't have this safety valve survived. Bacon had a brush in place of a pen, but the outcome is a kind of botched exorcism, in which Bacon fails to rid himself of his demons and the spreading of the paint only manages to expand his shadowy innards across the canvas.
His failure to feel deeply forbids him entry to a place that would've tested his ability to the full and taken him out of his self-inflicted comfort zone, rather than gorging on his own entrails.

But this only makes him less of a visionary, not less of a painter, and this exhibition is worth the journey for the skill of his brushwork alone.

Bacon Interview
There is a marvellous Bacon interview on the BBC website, from 1965 (and produced by Melvyn Bragg), in which Julian Webb gargles with a mouthful of marbles as he encourages Bacon to demonstrate just why he paints (as opposed to more precise methods of communication).
'The great recording of fact today can only be made through accidents...out of which he (the painter) finally chooses the marks'.
Huh? One of the best demonstrations of art-speak I've ever seen.
Priceless stuff.




.

The one article I did read about Bacon (in the Observer) quoted Damien Hirst as saying that the quality of Francis Bacon's work with a brush forced him to give up painting. I can only speak as a writer, but I doubt reading Blake has stopped any wordsmith from being what he is by nature, even if the market is stacked heavily against him in favour of those who merely draw up sentences on demand (or have others do it in their name). As genius is born, not man-made, this revealing statement says less about what Damien Hirst is than what he isn't. It further suggests that his eye was always focussed on profiting from the main chance rather than toiling towards the walls of history.

A preliminary scoot around the wing of Tate Britain dedicated to the Bacon exhibition confirms a spectacular array of Bacon's paintings have been gathered, and also the startling talent in the tip of Bacon's brush. The exhibition is spread across ten themed rooms and there are adequate notes at the entrance to each room to forearm we ignorant.

'His approach was to distort appearance to reach a deeper truth about his subjects', read a note in the 'Portrait' room.
Huh?
This is the kind of art-speak nonsense that should never be left unchallenged but invariably is.
How is it possible to reach a deeper truth about anything through distortion?
This is like trying to find lyrical meaning in randomly assembled lines, or mysticism through a strong skunk weed or tab of acid, when the clear truth is you can't—only clarity is equipped to clarify the depths. This is especially true in the highest art of the written word, where the clarity of a Dostoievsky or a Montaigne tramples the fashionably vague into the dusts of time, and the mysteries of the most spellbinding poetry is cast out by famously clear minds.

Bacon's Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne is quietly amusing, and in the 'Lying Figure' of a naked Henrietta Moraes, the sitter has a syringe stuck in her, which Bacon informs us 'simply fixed the image down', though she had been so heavily bitchered that a shot of morphine was no doubt needed to kill her pain.
Francis does distort famously well, but then so does Photoshop and a convex mirror. In fact some of his studies for portraits, including his self-portraits, look like in-camera multiple exposures, or Photoshop filters in the hands of someone who can't wait to try them out.

There are numerous studies of George Dyer and Bacon twists and distorts poor George with the relish of one who loves to twist. Like much of Bacon's work, his workings of Dyer stem from the shallow pool of (clippings and) photographs that have been expertly assembled in the 'Archive Room', and the painting entitled George Dyer Riding a Bycilcle is a spectacular piece of enslavement. As Bacon wills Dyer along the road to nowhere, George peers forlornly from within the frenzy of movement in which he is trapped, making uneasy viewing for any kindly viewer who might feel the urge to set him free. For me, George Dyer's ride to nowhere is the star turn of the entire exhibition. All of Bacon's other efforts in the portrait 'Room 7' are wilfully disfigured. I doubt Bacon surrendered willingly, but in this painting George Dyer makes a last stand and the subject conquers the hand of the master, effectively forging a life beyond art-captivity and he becomes an uncomfortable relevance in our midst.

Alas, by the Room 8, 'Memorial', George has become a lifeless memory and 'In Memory of George Dyer' the same photograph by John Deakin appears again—with all the lifelessness of a distorted painting of a photograph.
In Room 9, 'Epic', there is colour aplenty but little by way of life. Bacon appears to have lived in a kind of twilight and the shadows appear to be where he works best. He is at home in the mess of his studio and the shallow gene pool of his subjects, and grand literature cannot be contained beneath the low ceiling under which he worked. This makes his implied love of T.S. Eliot hard to fathom, because he never looks beyond and above. 'Birth, copulation and death' may well have echoed the painter's view of life, but it did not echo Eliot's.

I could not relate to any of the works in Room 10, 'Late', which seem to me to be entirely commercial enterprise and the busying of an old body who keeps going over old ground. So I too wandered back to the old ground of Room 1, 'Animal', where his Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 'The Screaming Pope', was still welcoming new arrivals. This is one of his most famous and ferocious works, and the noise of Bacon's talent assault's the eye drums from the outset.
What I'd really gone back to view were the bars and frames that he imposed on his earlier works. To my eyes these are visible manifestations of a restraining order on both his art and his humanity, from which Bacon never quite escapes. These cages have a whiff of formaldehyde, too, as Bacon unwraps the human form and splays it wide. However, too much of the human condition eludes Bacon and he finds nothing inside, except his own rummaging hand and the blood and guts that figure in so many of the archive clippings, which he plays with in cold view of his detached retina.

Francis Bacon's take on The Crucifixion, Room 4, gets nailed to no higher plane than the abattoir, because the cage in which he chooses to exist bars him entry to the realm of the non-physical. His Crucifixion is the antithesis of Ribera's best efforts, because Francis either doesn't know there's another domain or he simply doesn't want in: the glorious surrender of humility is not of his world.
As in much bad religious art, Bacon sees the Crucifixion as 'just an act of man's behaviour'. Rather than lending his brush to the heart of the matter, he subordinates it to his ego, and by inflicting the abattoir he reveals the limitations of the cage and no transfiguration takes place.

Graham Greene once wrote that writing was the best kind of therapy and that he didn't know how people who didn't have this safety valve survived. Bacon had a brush in place of a pen, but the outcome is a kind of botched exorcism, in which Bacon fails to rid himself of his demons and the spreading of the paint only manages to expand his shadowy innards across the canvas.
His failure to feel deeply forbids him entry to a place that would've tested his ability to the full and taken him out of his self-inflicted comfort zone, rather than gorging on his own entrails.

But this only makes him less of a visionary, not less of a painter, and this exhibition is worth the journey for the skill of his brushwork alone.

Bacon Interview
There is a marvellous Bacon interview on the BBC website, from 1965 (and produced by Melvyn Bragg), in which Julian Webb gargles with a mouthful of marbles as he encourages Bacon to demonstrate just why he paints (as opposed to more precise methods of communication).
'The great recording of fact today can only be made through accidents...out of which he (the painter) finally chooses the marks'.
Huh? One of the best demonstrations of art-speak I've ever seen.
Priceless stuff.




.