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| Stanley Spencer Christ carrying the Cross 1920 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Stanley Spencer The Resurrection, Cookham 1924-27 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Not surprisingly, Bacon and [Eric] Allden often went to museums. Allden did not record Bacon paying much attention to the decorative arts. In October [1929], Bacon wanted to show Allden "certain pictures in the Tate Gallery." They looked at the "long gallery filled with the French impressionists," but Bacon drew Allden's particular attention to two figurative paintings by the English eccentric Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Christ Carrying the Cross (1920) and The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-27)."
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| Yours Truly, Ernest Thesiger |
"Or possibly, [Jean] Shepeard and Bacon met through connections, such as the actor Ernest Thesiger, who was also a friend of Eric Allden (Allden's friends in the theatre world included Noël Coward as well). In her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, a close friend of Thesiger's, Hilary Spurling memorably captured Thesiger's manner: "He had enlisted as a private in 1915 and baffled his command officer by taking his needlework with him," she wrote. "Ernest Thesiger was a man who said, or is supposed to have said, when asked for a first-hand impression of Ypres, 'My dear, the noise!! and the people!!'"
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| Francis Bacon Gouache 1929 gouache and watercolor on paper Tate Gallery |
"As for money and a place to sleep, Bacon retained a certain class-based confidence. Money and a bed would occur. He could move from room to room. His mother probably continued to provide him with an allowance, and she could always help out in extremis."
"No one came to his show. Just friends. A couple of critics. . . . It was a devastating defeat. Once, during the course of the show, Bacon – standing in the middle of the gallery surrounded by his paintings – described his future as "so hopeless." . . . He was not even granted, at his first solo show, the dimly reassuring words interesting or promising."
"Bacon had few friends his own age. [Patrick] White was an exception, just three years younger than Francis, and each found much to like in the other apart from their similar backgrounds. Each was naturally shy. Each was struggling with his work. White's growing friendship with Bacon coincided with the Agnew's failure, and White himself suffered from the usual insecurities that afflict a young writer. (He could never have imagined that one day he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.) . . . The two went on excursions together. Bacon "opened my eyes to a thing or two," among them the strange charm of abstract graffiti scrawled across the wood of a temporary footbridge. "I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face," wrote White, "sometimes with too much lipstick on it."
"Robert Buhler, the faculty member who purchased Bacon's Cromwell Place lease, once persuaded him to give students at the the college a "critique," a conventional practice at art schools in which a teacher publicly discusses and analyzes the ongoing work of students. One student, Herbert Allen, described Bacon's critique: "He paced up and down in a bouncy way on his thick crepe soles smiling amiably and said, 'I am afraid that I just can't think of anything to say about these paintings. I am told that I should give three prizes but as they all apear equally dull I can't do that.'" Bacon then began to walk away. Buhler called him back. "Perhaps you could answer some questions, Francis?"
"No one came to his show. Just friends. A couple of critics. . . . It was a devastating defeat. Once, during the course of the show, Bacon – standing in the middle of the gallery surrounded by his paintings – described his future as "so hopeless." . . . He was not even granted, at his first solo show, the dimly reassuring words interesting or promising."
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| Patrick White |
"Bacon had few friends his own age. [Patrick] White was an exception, just three years younger than Francis, and each found much to like in the other apart from their similar backgrounds. Each was naturally shy. Each was struggling with his work. White's growing friendship with Bacon coincided with the Agnew's failure, and White himself suffered from the usual insecurities that afflict a young writer. (He could never have imagined that one day he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.) . . . The two went on excursions together. Bacon "opened my eyes to a thing or two," among them the strange charm of abstract graffiti scrawled across the wood of a temporary footbridge. "I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face," wrote White, "sometimes with too much lipstick on it."
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| Francis Bacon Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII) 1955 oil on canvas Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich |
"Robert Buhler, the faculty member who purchased Bacon's Cromwell Place lease, once persuaded him to give students at the the college a "critique," a conventional practice at art schools in which a teacher publicly discusses and analyzes the ongoing work of students. One student, Herbert Allen, described Bacon's critique: "He paced up and down in a bouncy way on his thick crepe soles smiling amiably and said, 'I am afraid that I just can't think of anything to say about these paintings. I am told that I should give three prizes but as they all apear equally dull I can't do that.'" Bacon then began to walk away. Buhler called him back. "Perhaps you could answer some questions, Francis?"
"So he stood smiling confidently at us, rather like an actor," Allen said, "apparently unaware that he now had a hostile audience, most of whom did not value him as an artist much anyway." One student asked why he found the paintings dull. "Because," he answered, "they are all based on someone else's painting." A student countered, "Mr. Bacon, in your last show all the paintings were based on Velázquez. How do you answer that?" And then: "Why are you painting the pope?" The annoying logic flustered Bacon, who, Allen said, "began to justify his work with impulsive, sometimes absurd explanations that he seemed to be making up under the stress of the questions." Bacon replied, for example, that he painted the pope because he wanted to use purple paint . . ."
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| Titian The Flaying of Marsyas ca. 1570-76 oil on canvas Kroměříž Archdiocesan Museum, Czech Republic |
"Writing in the New Statesman a few weeks after the opening, Sylvester admired the many passages of brilliant intensity, almost always in the way Bacon rendered the actual figure – "the paint that composes a head or a figure is marvelously alive: it seems to be generating form under our eyes." But the intensity was not always sustained throughout the canvas. Figure and ground did not always work well together: the artist failed to create a "coherent pictorial structure." The earlier "smoky, tonal paintings," while diffuse, remained marvelous, "with that quality of late Titian which Iris Murdoch has exactly evoked: 'full of great melancholy shattered forms.'"
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| Francis Bacon Three Studies for a Crucifixion 1962 oil on canvas Guggenheim Museum, New York |
"In the fall of 1963, a year after the Tate exhibition, a similar retrospective opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. . . . The Marlborough Gallery would have preferred a show at the Museum of Modern Art, heralding Bacon as vital to the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century, but the exhibit planned by Soby and Frank O'Hara never gained momentum. The Guggenheim was now more receptive than MoMA to contemporary European art and – with its traditional commitment to surrealism – more tolerant of difficult imagery. It was the Guggenheim and not the Modern that, much to James Thrall Soby's regret, purchased the extraordinarily difficult Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). MoMa could not figure out how, in the end, to approach the elderly lady on its acquisitions committee who would have been asked to fund the purchase."
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| Gustave Moreau Jupiter and Semele 1895 oil on canvas Musée Nationale Gustave Moreau, Paris |
"Bacon filled many hours when he would otherwise be alone exploring the city with Eddy and Reinhard. . . . The three went to the many museums of Paris, looking at Bacon's favorite painters, but "also those he detested." At the Musée Nationale Gustave Moreau, Bacon intensively studied the work of the symbolist painter and, asked what he thought, responded, "I want to vomit."
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| Francis Bacon Lucian Freud 1951 oil on canvas Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester |
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| Lucian Freud Portrait of Baron H.H. Thyssen-Bornemisza 1981-82 canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"In the early 1980s, said David Russell, the new driver for the Marlborough gallery, Freud would still occasionally show up at Reece Mews around dawn, and the two would head off to Smithfield Market for breakfast in Freud's Bentley, just as they had in the old days. But their relations gradually became so strained that other friends sometimes tried to bring them back together. John Edwards once set up a conciliatory lunch with Freud, who arrived for drinks at the Connaught with Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, the great art collector, whose portrait Freud had recently completed. Bacon came with Edwards and the Leventises, a couple whom he befriended in 1980 after the couple sent him a bottle of champagne in a Soho restaurant. "He was my iconic figure," said Michael Leventis. Michael, who was Greek, was a painter; Geraldine launched a successful restaurant in Maida Vale. Thyssen left after drinks, and the remaining party then went to lunch at the Dorchester. Freud was in a terrible mood. He had been with Baron Thyssen. Now, he was trapped with a cockney and some couple with a restaurant in Maida Vale? "Lucian made no effort at pleasantness," said Geraldine Leventis. He was particularly unpleasant to her. "You're in the restaurant business," he kept saying. "Why didn't you taste the wine?"
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| Francis Bacon Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 oil on panels Tate Gallery |
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| Francis Bacon Jet of Water 1988 oil on canvas private collection |
"The exhibition opened, without Francis Bacon, on the afternoon of September 22, 1988, at the Central House of the Union of Artists, across from Gorky Park. It was a "mini-retrospective" of twenty-two paintings that included five triptychs. It began with the Three Studies of 1944 and ended with the two new paintings, the large silent portrait of John Edwards and the second version of Jet of Water. The ceremonies were "unlike anything one might expect to see at a Western exhibition," reported Artnews. There were lengthy "adulatory speeches" by Russian dignitaries, the British ambassador, and other officials. "The opening reception was unbelievable," said Birch. "The entire Politburo and Soviet dignitaries attended." The British press did not make life easy for the Soviet officials, asking unnerving questions about Bacon's homosexuality. Why was the Soviet Union showing the work of a homosexual artist when homosexuality was outlawed in the USSR? Was it true that several paintings had been removed because they had homosexual elements? The first secretary of the Union of Artists, Tair Salahov, noted that the government's laws criminalizing homosexuality were under review and that "perhaps some day we will have another exhibition [of Bacon's work] that will show other sides of his creativity."
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| Francis Bacon Study for a Portrait 1991 oil and pastel on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
"The loveliness created a filter, like the frames and glazing, distancing the viewer from the subject. That distance had its own particular and disturbing power, one different from the immediate cathartic response Bacon earlier sought. Perhaps, finally, there was no true catharsis to be found, no violent impact on the nerves to be felt, no coin to be claimed at the bottom of the well."
– quoted excerpts from Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (New York: Knopf, 2020)
