Letter From Valencia: Francis Bacon
Ginger Danto
like a grinding machine. I’ve looked at everything and everything I’ve seen has
gone in and been ground up very fine. Images breed images in me.”
style=’mso-tab-count:4′>
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> – Francis Bacon (in conversation*)
Francis
Bacon famously worked amid chaos. From the knee-deep detritus of his studio,
photographed with archeological keenness by celebrated witnesses, came a
pictorial universe of pristine, pastel-toned spaces reminiscent of nowhere on
earth. Modernist interiors, revelatory of Bacon’s early employ as decorator,
cast in the utopic range of the Nabis palette: lavenders, pinks, oranges, field
greens and velvet blues. Beguiling hues, which barely offset the shrill subject
of flesh. For within these seductive enclosures, often delineated by some
architectural prop – a wall, door or vestige of furniture such as table or even
toilet, or just geometric lines roughed out in painterly chalk – some corporeal
presence struggles with its own battered anatomy. A man, sometimes a dog, more
pathetically a paralytic child or mere body part – and obsessively, through a
certain period, the iconic semblance of a Cardinal or Pope. It may be hard to
reconcile, regarding the artist’s working environment and the spartan world
Bacon cast upon preferably large canvases, such discrepancy of painterly
vision. But then, any glance at the protagonists – variously disfigured,
dismembered, eviscerated, or silently screaming – affords such a glossary of
private torment, that it becomes evident such figures are borne of somewhere
chaos reigns.
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The
paradoxical specter of Bacon’s oeuvre – the beauty of the composition versus
the hideous suffering depicted – challenged both the public and critics well
into the artist’s career. But as the power of art to shock has been mediated by
a world exponentially more shocking, an acceptance has come of Bacon’s
aesthetic prophecy of what is now everywhere around us. And people close to the
artist – reportedly a difficult man embattled by asthma, alcoholism and issues
of identity – have led the way in our appreciation. Among them is Michael
Peppiatt, a British critic and collector whose 30 year friendship with Bacon
yielded a major biography, scores of articles and, most recently, the curating
of the exhibit ‘The Sacred and the Profane’ at IVAM, the Institute of Modern
Art in Valencia, Spain.
The
original premise of the show, and its raison d’�tre for inaugurating in Spain,
was to present Bacon’s Pope series in its entirety: over 40 paintings inspired
by Diego Velazquez’ 1640 Portrait of Pope Innocent X
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, painted between 1949 and 1971 to
understand, if not fully why, to what extent Bacon was consumed by this single
and slightly sinister image. Image of another time, another country, even a
culture defined by everything Bacon denied, namely meaning and religiosity and
hierarchy before an uncertain God. Moreover, Bacon may never have seen the
actual painting, but worked off reproductions papered across his studio.
Doubtless
for practical reasons, the show’s focus shifted to a wider but no less relevant
theme of “The Sacred and the Profane.” Relevant because this premise highlights
a duality that applies to everything Bacon accomplished, from the matter of his
daily existence – maintaining a high-wire lifestyle alongside a disciplined
work ethic – to the disturbing dichotomy in his oeuvre, where horror occupies a
handsome setting. And indeed, as Peppiat notes in his catalogue essay,
alongside depictions of often sacred subject matter, Bacon celebrated the most
profane acts of man.
Anchoring
the exhibit is the 1640 portrait of Pope Innocent X, courtesy of the National
Gallery in Washington, and attributed to Velazquez’ circle. Its subject casts a
wary eye without, and serves as a template for Bacon’s interpretations – nine
gathered altogether on the papal theme. Here is a Pope cloaked in white, (Study
for a Pope III,
1961), with a red mantle and profile almost animal-like in its deformity. As if
the man inside the symbol of the man has usurped the physical features. Here is
another Pope, visibly aggressive, with mouth wide and teeth bared in some
perversion of papal dignity (Pope II, 1951.) It is as if the subject expresses, albeit
silently, a mime of outrage surely unavailable to the public figure. This
conflating of private and public self touches some essence of Bacon’s call: to
express the violent stuff within man, no matter his station.
Such
directive could explain the show’s three versions of Bacon’s Crucifixions,
including the perennially powerful Fragment of a Crucifixion
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (1950) where the scaffold of a
white cross is riven, not unlike a piece of wood beset by termites, by
imaginary fragments of the artist’s making: nebulous naked bodies, a gaping mouth,
pale blood. The imagery easily shocks, for all its cryptic sketchiness: viewers
at the IVAM opening were said to avoid it.
Beyond
these plays on ‘sacred’ subject, Peppiatt’s exhibit, drawn from major
international collections, surveys the more generically transgressive emblems
of Bacon’s oeuvre: a solitary dog caught in some inexpressible anguish (Study
of a Dog, 1952),
with a man’s face surreptitiously emerging from the wolf’s, and a naked man on
all fours, not un-dog like, bent down in the spiky grass (Man Kneeling in
Grass, 1952). Both
offer, along with the surreal Man with Dog (1953) casting two bodies indecipherable in a lunar
blue, a vivid portrait of ‘the beast within.’ Even, or especially when
portraying himself, Bacon was not exempt from some representational torment.
The serenely seated figure in Study for a Self-Portrait
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (1963) has the visage of a
monster. It thus shows a kinship with other models in Bacon’s gallery of
portraits, including George Dyer, Henrietta Moras or Isabel Rawsthorne, each
more gruesome than the next.
Bacon
favored triptychs, perhaps for their magisterial quality. Within the three
consecutive panels the artist could compose a narrative, while calling on the
viewer’s imagination to complete it. The final gallery, with several such
triptychs, almost feels like a sacred place, or its opposite, some form of
hell, so potent are the disturbing images. These include Triptych inspired
by the Orestia of Aeshylus (1981), one of several homages to Antiquity. Hung on the central wall,
but perceived from the entry like a beacon, with its riveting colors, is one Triptych
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (1987.) It shows a leg injury, not
unlike the sort matadors suffer, when they are gored by a bull. A bull’s horned
head depicted in the third panel corroborates such simple theory. And the blood
orange background, composed with an animal-hide gray, is every bullring in
Spain suffused with an evening sun.
There may
be no better place to address such a theme than Spain, which is also one of the
deeply religious western countries, where citizens seek a balance between
inculcated sacred ideals and ever-present evidence of a wayward world. And of
all the Spanish cities, with perhaps the exception of Seville, the most
appropriate may be Valencia, where day-long church services are held honoring
the various saints. Among the most popular is the Virgin of the Desparados,
surely the saint to whom Bacon’s subjects would pray, if they had the means.
The artist died in 1992 in Madrid, having sojourned for some time in a country
where his life and art came fragilely together.
* From
Peppiatt’s essay, ‘Francis Bacon: The Sacred and the Profane’ in the IVAM
catalog.
Francis Bacon: Lo Sagrado y Lo Profano (The Sacred and
the Profane) will be
at IVAM, the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia, through March 21, 2004.
