As a young undergraduate at Cambridge in 1967, I visited Francis Bacon’s new
solo show at Old Bond Street’s Marlborough Gallery. Writing a review for
Varsity, the student newspaper, I described how the visceral impact of the
very first painting, hung opposite the entrance to the exhibition, made me
“bump into the cash desk”. I concluded by declaring that Bacon was “the
finest painter this country has produced since Turner”.
Today, Bacon is more likely to appear in the press for commanding dizzyingly
high prices at auction. In May this year, his 1976 Triptych sold at
Sotheby’s in New York for £43m, the highest price ever paid for a postwar
work of art at auction. The buyer, it turned out, was Roman Abramovich. But
publicity about prices and collectors obscures why Bacon really matters.
Hence the welcome prospect of the important retrospective of his work at
Tate Britain, which opens on September 11 and will redirect attention to his
turbulent vision of the world.
I first visited Bacon in October 1971, just before a monumental survey of his
paintings opened in Paris. I wanted to find out how he viewed his own
achievement, and what the man behind the work was really like. But I also
felt very uneasy. His paintings, with their violent and obsessive emphasis
on screaming or struggling figures, led me to imagine that Bacon himself
might be neurotic, withdrawn or explosive.
The first surprise was the ramshackle state of his house in Reece Mews, South
Kensington. The doorbell did not work, but once I began knocking, he opened
it and smiled, confessing that “I don’t actually want the bell to work,
because if it did, I’d have to see all sorts of terrible people I don’t want
to see at all”. We climbed the steep, narrow wooden stairs to his
studio. “Rather like a ship, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.
To my astonishment, Bacon was warm, communicative and hospitable. But the
studio was a small, shabby affair, heaped with detritus. The walls were
festooned with wild brushmarks, and the windows all sealed up. Only a
skylight prevented the room from looking ominously dark, and across the
passage there was an enormous cracked mirror. The sense of mortality was
reinforced by the ghostly presence of William Blake’s glacial life mask,
perched on the desk like a warning. But Bacon himself exuded energy,
gesticulating forcefully while he talked. “What I’m after is a seizure of
life,” he declared, before insisting that he wanted to “make things as raw
as possible”. He aimed to paint a nose “with all the violence of a real
nose”. But his vision of life was complex. At one extreme, he told me: “I’m
essentially optimistic, always grateful when I wake up each morning and
discover I’m alive.” At the other, he admitted that “even when one is in a
strong sun, casting a black shadow, death is always with you”.
Still, there was nothing morbid about this first meeting. Bacon uncorked our
first bottle of champagne soon after my arrival, and later on suggested
lunch at his favourite Soho restaurant. He insisted that we go by Tube, and
I noticed how much he relished the speed and the din. After vast quantities
of wine Bacon insisted we move on to the Colony Room, a legendary Soho
drinking hole. As he entered, the red-faced regulars stirred, blinked, swung
round, raised their arms excitedly and cried out, “Frrrrancis!” Waving back,
he at once ordered champagne for everyone there. News of his arrival must
have spread fast, for the Colony soon filled up with garrulous and
inebriated characters, including one of his gay East-End gangster friends
who, broken-nosed and flush-cheeked, described in vivid detail how men have
sex, and stared at me in a very pointed manner. It was time to leave.
Three days after my interview was published, Bacon sent me a letter, written
vigorously in brilliant purple ink, the words large and boisterous: “I
enjoyed enormously meeting you.” He then admitted he felt “sorry there was
not more about painting” in the article, “but I know editors always feel
that doesn’t interest anybody. Perhaps they are right”. His letter ended by
inviting me to a party in Paris, at the Gare de Lyon restaurant – “do hope
you can come”.
Bacon could never have guessed that his exhibition in Paris would be coupled
with gruesome tragedy. I remember the shock generated by the death from a
drugs overdose of his lover, George Dyer, just before the Grand Palais
exhibition opened. At first, Bacon vehemently denied that it was suicide,
but he later told a friend to “think of the timing – of course it was
deliberate”. The powerful, elegiac paintings inspired by Dyer’s death showed
just how profoundly his sudden loss affected Bacon.
However much he relished the company of fellow artists, as well as a bizarre
range of bohemians, charlatans, liggers and cheap crooks, he saw himself
essentially as a loner, a man apart. At the Colony Room I had seen him hold
court, making outrageous comments with immense theatricality and almost
bellowing with laughter as he bestowed his largesse on everyone around him.
But he could, without any warning, become waspish and venomous. Totally
amoral, he had no hesitation in terminating a long friendship with one
crushing remark.
Graham Sutherland, who had helped Bacon break through to his mature vision as
a painter, received the full, merciless force of Bacon’s disapproval over
dinner at Wheeler’s one night. Unaware that Bacon’s mood had shifted with no
warning from warm to icy, Sutherland leant forward with an unguarded smile
and said: “I’ve been doing some portraits recently. I think they’re rather
good. Have you seen any of them?” Bacon’s response was cutting. “Yes, very
nice,” he said, “if you like the covers of Time magazine.” Sutherland and
his wife, Kathy, left and never met Bacon again. From then on, Sutherland
referred to his former friend as “the monster”.
But Bacon was also capable of immense generosity. Daniel Farson, the writer
and television producer, used the word “quicksands” in an attempt to sum up
their long, turbulent friendship. Despite Bacon taking up with one of his
ex-partners, Farson paid tribute to his “rare ability to give one money
without making one feel wretchedly in his debt”. “I am sorry things are not
going well, ” Bacon wrote to Farson just before Christmas 1985, “but I am
sure they will. I enclose £1,000. I hope it will be some help.”
I experienced Bacon’s gloomier side the next time we met, to record a BBC
interview in 1985. Dressed in a black leather jacket, he seemed preoccupied
with thoughts of mortality. “I’m far too old… I’ve got an
infinite number of things I long to do.” Then he rallied: “Painting is
fortunately an old man’s occupation.” He insisted that the Tate show should
exclude his earliest work from the 1930s, little of which survived – “any I
could get I destroyed”. Bacon believed his painting career had only properly
begun in 1944, when he was 34.
His childhood, in Dublin and London, was plagued by asthma, so he had no
conventional schooling. He never attended art school, and struggled at
first. Only after serving in civil defence during the second world war did
he break through to his own vision. Dealing with dead and dying victims
during the Blitz pushed him into maturity, and in 1944 he suddenly produced
a nightmarish masterpiece, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion. Focusing on monstrously deformed hybrids, half-human and
half-beast, howling their grief against a vehement orange background, it set
the course for Bacon’s career. Why did he want to tackle such a religious
subject? He had never warmed to “depressing” Christianity, and lost his
faith entirely at the age of 17: “I remember seeing a lump of dog shit
on the pavement and thought, ‘Well, there it is, that’s how our life is,
unless you make something remarkable of it.’” But his images also convey a
sense of grandeur. When I asked about this paradox, Bacon quietly said: “I
think perhaps grandeur is to do with loneliness. People who think clearly
and directly and complicatedly about things are nearly always lonely people.
You’d need to do that, wouldn’t you, to have any quality at all.”
In January 1991, still fascinated by this complex man, I again met Bacon in
Reece Mews. He warned me about his door bell. “It still doesn’t work,”
he said, “so I’ll leave the front door open and you can make
your own way in.”
Mounting the precipitous stairs and holding on to a rope slung through hooks
on the left wall, I wondered why an 81-year-old asthmatic should have to
negotiate such a hazard.
Bacon was by now deeply involved with John Edwards, a young East Ender. But he
had vanished on a trip to Bangkok, and Bacon was anxiously phoning someone
about him when I arrived at the top of the stairs. Standing by the cooker in
a small kitchen area, Bacon looked fit and agile for his age. Rows of fresh
shirts had been laid out casually on the sofas; the mews looked like a
student’s digs. “Earning vast amounts of money doesn’t affect me one bit,”
he said.
“I’d be quite happy going back to the income I had as a young
man.” He did not even have any paintings on the walls. “At one stage I
bought a Sickert. But like a fool, I gave it to Lucian Freud.”
Soon enough we were drinking champagne out of glasses inscribed with the
initials FB – “the gift of an admirer in Germany”, he explained with a grin.
Were his paintings more admired there than in Britain, I wondered? “Oh, they
don’t like my work here at all,” he said briskly. “Maybe it’s the savagery
they find in it, or maybe it’s the homosexuality. I don’t go about shouting
that I’m gay, but Aids has made it all much worse, you know. People are
very, very odd about it. The other day a telephone engineer came round, so I
offered him a drink. He looked at me strangely and said, ‘You’re gay, aren’t
you?’ ”
Bacon was unable to stop worrying about Edwards. Weeks had passed without any
communication, and he was worried Edwards might have been arrested. His
anxiety reminded me of a mother’s concern for an errant son. Then a handsome
young Spaniard dropped in. He was clearly close to Bacon and treated him
with an almost parental firmness. A special-delivery letter arrived from the
Tate, following up on a promise Bacon had made to give the gallery his
recent version of the Crucifixion triptych. Now he seemed unsure and asked
both of us whether he should go ahead with the gift. I said it would be a
marvellous idea. But the Spaniard reminded him that he often made promises
at convivial parties. Eventually Bacon did give the work to the Tate.
Bacon’s mood lifted by lunchtime. As we walked to a nearby Italian restaurant,
his gait seemed positively jaunty. The laced-up gym shoes, fawn pullover and
corduroy slacks only accentuated the inner vitality of a man whose
enthusiasm was undimmed. During our time together we touched on T S Eliot,
Velazquez, Picasso’s sculpture, Stanley Spencer, Buñuel, Soutine, W B Yeats,
Proust and, to my surprise, Constable (“I love the freedom and vitality of
his oil sketches at the V&A, and often go there just to see them”). He also
talked wistfully about Eric Hall, an intelligent, sensitive civil servant
who gave Bacon’s great breakthrough Crucifixion triptych of 1944 to the
Tate. Over lunch, Bacon said he owed Hall an enormous amount: with his
support, he had become a serious, single-minded painter. He obviously missed
Hall a lot.
Later in 1991, I recorded an interview with Bacon for Radio 4. He was
convivial, as ever, but also still moody. Seeing a new Gilbert & George book
on his table, I asked him if he admired their work. “No, I think they’re
terrible, but for some ridiculous reason a friend imagined that I liked
them!” When it was time to begin, I enquired if he was ready. “Ready for
what?” he replied. “Well,” I said, trying to hide my puzzlement, “your radio
interview, of course.” There was a dramatic pause, then Bacon erupted.
“Radio interview?” he echoed in an astonished voice, as if we had never
discussed it. I reminded him that he had promised to do this. Another pause.
“Well, yes I did,” he admitted reluctantly, before adding impatiently: “But
what’s the point?” Finally, he relented.
“Ideally one would like to pick up a lump of paint and throw it at the
canvas,” he declared memorably. But then: “I’d like a very, very ordered
chaos.” Later, he insisted: “I can’t draw.” He also remarked: “There’s a
natural feeling that the human race is not continuing because of
homosexuality. In a sense, it’s a dead end.”
When I asked him if the urge to paint was still strong, he replied without any
hesitation: “Yes, stronger. The nearer to death I am, the stronger it
gets.” Why? “I’ve no idea, but I just feel more inventive. I certainly hope
I’ll go on till I drop dead.” Did he fear death? “Fear? I’ve got nothing to
fear about it, because, as I believe in absolutely nothing, I know that I
just won’t exist.”
Those words came back to haunt me when, only months later, Bacon died of a
heart attack in Madrid, aged 82. He had his last wish honoured when his body
was cremated with the barest formalities. His friend Ian Board said: “We can
remember Francis without a service.” And he was right: Bacon’s unnerving art
will not be forgotten as long as the paintings themselves survive.
Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain from September 11-January 4, 2009. Visit: www.tate.org.uk
. Four acclaimed paperbacks of Richard Cork’s writings on modern artists,
including Bacon, are published by Yale
