Advertisement
Advertisement
LIFE
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more

Book review: This is Bacon, by Kitty Hauser

Francis Bacon's perversity is part of the attraction of his art, as is the terrifying realism that lies behind the tricks and tactics of his work. Few have been so insistent in their belief that humans and animals are both at the mercy of natural compulsions - lust, fear, anxiety or the urge to violence. Less easy to communicate is the exhilaration his work evokes.

LIFE
GDN

by Kitty Hauser
Laurence King

 

Francis Bacon's perversity is part of the attraction of his art, as is the terrifying realism that lies behind the tricks and tactics of his work. Few have been so insistent in their belief that humans and animals are both at the mercy of natural compulsions - lust, fear, anxiety or the urge to violence. Less easy to communicate is the exhilaration his work evokes.

Fascination with the British artist (1909-1992) was greatly stimulated by David Sylvester's conversations with him, first published in 1975. Since then, much of the literature has been a mixture of serious criticism and low gossip. Kitty Hauser follows in this vein, but her pithy introduction to the man and his art cuts to the quick.

"Popes and screams should not go together," she says of the disconcerting series of paintings based on Diego Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, which Bacon morphed with the screaming face of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's film . "The instinctual human - akin to an ape - breaks rudely through the surface of the civilised human, decked out in the pontiff's regalia. The pope is not, it turns out, immortal or inhuman. It's like seeing the Queen scream."

Hauser argues that this interest in the juxtaposition of public veneer with private reality recurs in Bacon's paintings. It directed his interest towards the portrait, and, though far from being a conventional portraitist, he made this his main focus during the 1960s and '70s. There is a connection here with his homosexuality, as Hauser suggests. Many deplore the double life that gays lived until homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967 - but Bacon liked it this way, preferring to regard his sexuality as perverse and punishable, relishing the criminal aura that clung to an activity forced underground. No role model, he, for gay rights.

Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, one of a series of paintings by Francis Bacon.

It could be regretted Hauser does not challenge the received view of Bacon, but in a book resting mostly on secondary sources, it would be a mistake to build a theory on the mythologies that envelop this artist. Instead, she repackages outrageous facts about Bacon's life, as well as observations on his art, with brevity and punch. There are no chapters in this book, merely brief thematic subheadings followed by passages lasting less than a page or two.

The result is nicely subversive. The book scorns good taste, the palaver of footnotes and decorous layout: it is funky, aimed at youth. It also carries descriptive illustrations by Christina Christoforou. Slipped in alongside reproductions of Bacon's art, they at first seem a jarring intrusion - Bacon strove hard to avoid what he called "the trap of illustration". But Christoforou's touch is lightly teasing, gently ironic.

People in extreme situations fascinated Bacon. He himself lived dangerously, gambled recklessly and regarded friendship as a situation in which two people can tear one another apart.

His desire for authenticity drew him to violence: he tore out of books, newspapers and magazines images of massacres, wounded bodies, severed and shattered limbs. These added to the litter, or "compost" as he called it, amid which he worked in his studio at 7 Reece Mews, Kensington.

Hauser takes the reader inside the three small rooms where Bacon lived from 1961 until his death in 1992, uncertain, as he used to say, whether his art would end up in Britain's National Gallery or the bin. If she underplays anything it is Bacon's persistent dedication. There is a need for a closer analysis of his source material and a sharper critique of his compositional strategies.

Art critic Robert Hughes was the first to point out a "staginess" that does creep in. Hauser reminds us that in the latter part of his career Bacon cannibalised his earlier work.

While the value of his paintings escalates exponentially, close critical examination of them seems to lag behind. This book does not rectify that situation, but it will for many sharpen the perplexing fascination of this great artist.

Post