NO ANGEL OF HISTORY or BRINGING HOME THE BACON

The Francis Bacon studio which opened at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin last May, on the face of it, is not extraordinary. It doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see or even accept that the historical logic of Hugh Lane’s pioneering interest in modernist painting would, ninety years on, ultimately lead to the construction of a temple to an openly gay Irish-born artist. But there are some who find it strange. Reading the report of the opening in the Irish Times one would have thought that a new milestone in the recording of absurd happenings had been reached. Underneath such rhetoric there lies a degree of disgust.

The artist himself did of course attract more direct expressions of disgust most notably from Mrs. Thatcher (‘that horrible man who paints those horrible pictures’) and from the then art critic of the Guardian (now head of arts programming for Channel 4) Waldemar Januszczak, who managed to publish a piece expressing his full loathing of Bacon a few days after the artist had died in 1992.

That disgust, felt on the part of the critic, could be used as a basis for rejecting an artist’s value or significance, seems absurd in itself. The walls of the world’s museums would be very bare if disgust were used as a criterion to collect and display art works. Not much of late- Picasso would be able to appear or any of Soutine, not to mention the best of Goya or Manet. No, it is something about Bacon himself that provoked the disgust even from those who consider themselves enlightened. For the cause, I believe, was Bacon’s homosexuality. Not that Bacon was gay, but that he used his sexuality as a forcing ground for much of his work which very often depicts the sexual action of gay male figures. That that action is often violent and visceral is, I suspect, the cause of much of the disgust. Which again is odd when one considers the now widespread acceptance of Picasso’s much more sexually explicit late work. 

Just after the glass door to the temple opens, Bacon’s voice can be heard while being interviewed. Taking your seat to watch the remainder on the large video screen, Bacon tells of his working methods, now and again, whether by accident or design, the screen freezes and Bacon, for a second becomes one of his own paintings. It is this sense of time stopping for an instant to allow us to take stock, which permeates the exhibit.

In the studio itself there was a lot more besides canvass, paint and brushes. Much of the debris          and chaos that Bacon said he needed to work in, is composed of fragments of his life and that which he found fascinating. 

The interactive database next to the studio illustrates in sound and image each class of object to be found in the studio. Of the most revealing items, there are those images that Bacon used as his source material. Looking at what caught his eye we can see how his eye worked for him in putting together his figures and subjects. Not surprisingly sporting images played their part, athletes, boxers, wrestlers, footballers, tennis and cricket (one must remember that Bacon’s eye was an Anglo eye - very few, English gay men don’t find men playing cricket, erotic). 

There are a number of specifically gay images and copies of gay publications of which only Bob Mizner’s Physic Pictorial can be seen in the studio which also features in the database and the larger exhibition of photographs of Bacon’s studio by Perry Odgen in the upstairs gallery.

In addition to the key sources of Maybridge’s Human Figure in Motion and the famous still from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin of the nurse screaming as she is shot through the eye, there are hundreds of other images torn from books and magazines. The interactive commentary works well in illustrating how he subsequently used the collected material for his later work. A good example is Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. Velazquez gave Innocent the penetrating eyes of judgment – ones that imposed torture and suffering. Bacon’s study visits his own asthmatic suffering on the Pope to the point where he is gasping for breath. In a number of his works men wrestle and grapple with one another and meld rather like wrestlers appear to do in the ring under overhead lighting. One of the more striking items is the contact sheet of photographs of the wrestling staged by Bacon in his studio, which later became the source material for this series of paintings.

These, plus the shards of Bacon’s personal history, friends, family and associates, form the accumulated detritus of some thirty years of living at 7 Reece Mews. Now that Bacon no longer remains to add to the heap, the studio has become his own ruin. The archaeologists who excavated’ indexed and reassembled these shards, have also given to future generations a degree of insight into what type of century the twentieth century was.

But it would be too easy to accept the view that Bacon was a painter who simply reflected in his work the horrors of his century. This is a well-established liberal arts view, held, for example by the critic Tom Paulin. Looking at the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of The Crucifixion (1944) it is not too difficult to see how its imagery could take on a symbolic meaning which the artist has little or no control over. As the number of art books and films quoting Bacon’s work as symbolic of the many horrors of the century, grew, Bacon as the producer of the images was simply erased and replaced by a series of symptomatic emblems.

What the exhibit at Hugh Lane gives us an opportunity to do is to put the artist back on a par with his work. Much has been made recently of the similarity with Yeats, who was also an exile from the decline of the Big House, and susceptible, like the majority of the moderns, to the various authoritarian ‘calls to order’. But the pair differ in one important respect, whereas modern life for Yeats gradually filled him with loathing, for Bacon it was the burgeoning bohemia of the post-war world that sustained and enabled him to continue working. It was the tension between bohemia and authoritarianism that kept him going.

The Francis Bacon Studio is at the Hugh Lane Gallery until 28 October 2001.

Brendan O’Connell
12 Parkville Court
Belfast
BT15 5EW
rumbles32001@yahoo.com

Tel Belfast 90772898