It is the perfect time for a Francis Bacon retrospective. History has had a
good tinker with the circumstances and arranged for everything to be just
so. In May, the auction record for a post-war artist was smashed like an
empty vodka glass by Roman Abramovich, who paid £43m for a Bacon triptych,
pushing him into art’s super-duper-league, alongside Picasso and Van Gogh.
Among scholars, meanwhile, the opening of Bacon’s re-created studio in
Dublin has triggered a frenzied exploration of his sources and meanings. And
to cap it all, next year is the centenary of his birth. It all adds up to
one of those stellar moments when the planets are in exactly the right
alignment for a really good reassessment.
The Bacon retrospective that has opened at Tate Britain is actually the third
such show. The first was in 1962 and the second in 1985.
I was too young for the 1960s exhibition, but I remember the next one. It was
disappointing. Bacon was still alive — he died in 1992 — and his wilful
tinkering with the trajectory of the display ensured that it offered no
revelations at the beginning, then dragged on at the end, with too many late
paintings. In particular, his superficial interest in cricket resulted in a
long and flippant finale devoted to images of Ian Botham in action. Whither
the dark angel of the 20th century?
So, although this is technically the third such retrospective, it actually
counts as the first objective assessment mounted without the controlling
presence of the artist. One thing I was certainly expecting from it was
fresh insight into his origins as a painter. Bacon was notoriously coy about
his beginnings. A mixture of fierce determination to control his image and
what appears to have been some unnecessary shame about his late development
resulted in a remarkable lack of information about his early art.
We know he was self-taught and that, according to his own version of his
story, he found his true voice only in 1944, when he painted the three
screaming blobs that direct so much noisy anxiety at us in the Tate’s savage
masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. By 1944,
however, Bacon was already 35. What on earth had he been up to before that?
Alas, this is not the show that tells us. Either they could not get hold of
the material or it simply isn’t out there any more. Bacon was a habitual
destroyer of his own art, and when it came to his early work, he succeeded
in getting rid of enough of it to preserve the illusion that he was a mighty
artist from the off. The show’s first paintings, dating from 1945 and after,
are already dark, twisted, overwrought. But the spiteful monkeys that snarl
at you as you enter are only fully convincing in the few square inches
occupied by their mouths, which Bacon has turned into a terrifying
portcullis of twisted fangs, barring the way to a bottomless abyss. The rest
of the paintwork is an unconvincing blur of pessimistic generalisations.
Thank heavens these early pictures appear to represent so vividly the seepage
of wartime terrors and angsts into the post-war era, because without that
excuse their ugliness might be inexcusable. At least the angry monkeys make
obvious the most important ambition in Bacon’s early art, which is to
insist, in picture after picture, on the interchangeability of animals and
humans. Neither of us has been put on earth for a decent reason.
The popes who fill the show’s superb second room are as nihilistic as
the monkeys, but much more compelling. Based on Velazquez’s great portrait
of Innocent X, of which Bacon was to produce no fewer than 50 versions, they
are usually understood as some sort of complicated reaction to authority.
Bacon’s father was a domineering presence, and the popes are seen as
stand-ins for him. On this evidence, however, I favour a less sophisticated
reading: the popes are as hopelessly trapped as the apes. The bars and cages
that inevitably surround them make it explicit. Their life is no more sacred
or meaningful than the life of an earthworm or a baboon. There is no hope.
There is no God. There is no plan. Not even for a pope.
Although the show is basically chronological, it pauses in a couple of
interesting places for a thematic sidestep. The first presents us with a
clutch of gory crucifixions, including the Tate’s aforementioned screaming
blobs from 1944. Although Bacon’s art is often accused of depicting oodles
of violence, it does not. The crucifixions are almost the only displays of
blood and gore on offer here. A proselytising atheist, brought up in papist
Ireland, Bacon is using every Catholic trick in the book to point out that
Christ, too, is just a sack of meat.
The 1950s, with the isolated black figures and pared-down colour schemes, is
presented here as Bacon’s greatest decade. But I would argue otherwise. The
show really sparks into life in the 1960s. A marvellous transitional room
sees Bacon trying out various styles and manners as he seeks to move on from
the gloomy single figures in a cage that have dominated his art until now.
His discovery of colour leads to the show’s most significant gear-change. The
startling brightness of Bacon’s version of a Van Gogh painting showing
Vincent traipsing through the fields outside Arles arrives out of nowhere
and seems to be the result of a deliberate change of tack. It’s as dramatic
as television’s switchover from black-and-white to colour — the entire
show changes key.
The best rooms are the ones that follow, and particularly the second of the
thematic sidesteps, dedicated to Bacon’s pictures of his tormented lover,
George Dyer, who committed suicide in a hotel room in Paris in 1971, the
night before Bacon was due to open yet another retrospective at the Grand
Palais. Dyer’s timing could not have been more hurtful or more
desperate. A set of memorial triptychs produced after the suicide, in which
Bacon’s love is darkly entangled with his guilt, provide the show with its
finest moments. In the most dramatic of the triptychs, Bacon’s burly lover
is shown seated on the lavatory in one panel and vomiting into a sink in the
other. In the centre, where the crucifixion usually goes, Dyer lurks in a
doorway, haunted by his own bat-shaped shadow. In the absence of any gods,
even a life as sordid as this is worthy of a lover’s worship.
Much of the recent interest in Bacon has been prompted by discoveries made in
the mess of photographs and books that were found in his studio after his
death, and a small documentary section deals with some of these pictorial
sources and issues with merciful brevity. The show is also excellently
concise in its treatment of the late work. Bacon became a slick pedlar of
elegant angst in his last decade, and it is sensible to hurry through his
repetitions. How astute, for instance, to include only one of the cricket
pictures.
So, what does it all add up to? How great was Bacon? Not as great as we
currently make him out to be, would be my answer. The show is impeccably
paced and makes excellent decisions about where to dwell and where to rush.
Yet Bacon himself lacked the range that we might fairly expect of a £43m
painter. His beginnings were clunky. His thinking was deceptively basic. For
a couple of decades, between 1955 and 1975, he was absolutely at the top of
his game, a fierce and exciting taker of big pictorial risks. But then he
petered out and even grew ghastly. Did he alter the course of global
aesthetics, as Picasso and Van Gogh did? Does he really deserve to share a
price bracket with them? I don’t think so.
Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, SW1, until Jan 4, 2009
Not to be missed
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) Bacon’s
first acknowledged masterpiece shudders with unbearable despair.
Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) The
greatest of the “screaming popes” is a remarkably delicate bit
of painting.
Triptych, May-June 1973 Bacon at his best, remembering George Dyer, his
dead lover.
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