Francis Bacon: In Camera

Margaret Thatcher famously described Francis Bacon as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures,” and if I am honest, before I visited Compton Verney's current Francis Bacon exhibition, the little I knew of his work had me thinking along the same lines. However, once there I found myself intrigued and surprisingly moved by the canvasses despite their abstract nature and I came away having thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I especially liked Untitled (sea) 1954.

Francis Bacon Untitled (sea) 1954; oil on canvas © the Estate of Francis Bacon courtesy of Faggionato Fine Arts, London and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

Certainly Bacon is well known for artwork which promotes an austere and bleak view of the human condition. Paintings such as the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) are grim and tortured and do not make for comfortable viewing. This fascinating exhibition, however, explores Bacon's work from the perspective of his working process and co-curators Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison have hung some wonderful oil paintings (from 1950 to 1989), five of which have never been seen before in the UK, alongside the artefacts and images that inspired them. The exhibition is also interestingly varied including film and video clips as well as installations of amassed photographs, ripped pages from magazines and newspapers that were found in Bacon's studio – a sort of artistic compost heap from which his paintings grew.

There are plenty of information boards to explain the connections between the paintings and the materials that triggered them but they are almost unnecessary since the visual connections are plain to the eye - a child could easily follow the theme.

Irish born Francis Bacon started work as an interior designer and designer of furniture and rugs. He started painting in his 20's but was self-taught. He always professed that he never drew or depended on preparatory work, preferring perhaps to promote a more romantic myth of spontaneous creativity - of pure emotion and sensation splashed directly onto the canvas. Since his death however, the contents of his studio show that he did in fact follow a complex form of preparation based largely on film and photography. Why he was coy about acknowledging this, one can only guess at. It may have been because photography was yet to be recognised as a proper art medium.

Or it may have been because Bacon felt reluctant to expose his lack of training by acknowledging his reliance on, for example, the photographic studies of the human body in motion by Eadweard Muybridge.

Certainly he disliked being observed at work. His sitters were never allowed to see the paintings he was working on and indeed after 1963 he gave up using live sitters because they inhibited him – being more comfortable working from paintings and from photographs, either those he had found or those he had commissioned.

One of the last rooms in the exhibition is a small video theatre showing an excerpt from Melvin Bragg's South Bank Show interview of Francis Bacon. Having just viewed several of Bacon's bold and powerful abstracts this comes as an endearingly human interlude. Bragg asks a question about his artistic intention and Bacon looks blank and then desperate as he falters and fumbles for the right words. He then rather sheepishly reaches into his jacket pocket and asks Bragg's permission to read from the scrap of paper on which he had written down a prepared answer. In this moment of comic pathos Bacon inadvertently reveals his need for preparation and in doing so further confirms the mythic nature of his ‘spontaneous’ brilliance - the exhibition's theme.

Typical of Bacon's painting – and this includes several in the exhibition e.g. Study for a Portrait of John Edwards 1989,

is an abstract figure isolated in a glass or steel geometrical construction.

This ‘cage’, however does not seem to threaten, rather it seems to provide a boundary or frame which offers to protect rather than trap the subject. Just as this exhibition is based on the contents of Bacon's studio which has now been transported and reinstalled in Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, the tiny cramped nature of the studio itself has also attracted some critical attention. In an article in The Guardian (5 September 2008) Aida Edemariam claimed that Bacon liked working in cramped conditions because as a young boy he had been frequently locked screaming for hours in a cupboard by a nanny who wanted him out of the way while her boyfriend visited. Apparently, the article states, Bacon said years later “That cupboard was the making of me.” Perhaps the protective cages are symbolic cupboards for his abstract figures. Who knows – you see the exhibition did leave me intrigued. Go along and see for yourself – the exhibition runs till June 20th.

Francis bacon Portrait of John Edwards 1988 Oil on Canvas 2010 the Estate of Francis Bacon, courtesy of Faggionato Fine Arts, London and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

Pictured on the front page is
Francis Bacon Untitled (figure with raised arm) 1949 Collection: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane © 2010.The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/ DACS, London.

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May 2010 page eight