Bacon dripping with confidence

Bacon

December 27, 1996

Francis Bacon appreciated what was expected of a great artist by his public and gave it to them with great style. In this book the publisher sets out to do something along the same lines. Like one of Bacon's paintings, it is constructed with confidence, full of quotes from its guests, and dripping with references to chance and gambling. Like one of Bacon's paintings, it forces us to ponder things we should disapprove of, carefully picking its way with a smooth magic towards a well-framed and sumptuous object: 220 colour illustrations of portrait heads cut at the neckline and three big photographs of the artist's studio framed by two essays.

The introduction "The painter's brutal gesture" by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera builds up on one side of the colour plates an equivalent in words to one of Bacon's canvases. In doing this, Kundera manages to juxtapose Jesus, Shakespeare, Picasso and Beckett. At the other end of the book an essay by the Belgian art historian France Borel entitled "Francis Bacon: the flayed face" takes us elegantly from the Colony Room via the artist's palette to the Apocalypse. Both essays share Bacon's relish for chaffing raw meat and rough trade into an elegant and apparently aristocratic dish.

Bacon's portraits are small by modern standards, allowing the photographer to go in close and focus on the tooth of the canvas. The result is that we can see quite clearly how the picture is made. This is what makes the book. To get some idea of the quality of the plates, compare the 1976 portrait of Michael Leiris with the same image in the 1985 Tate Gallery catalogue (also by Thames and Hudson). The comparison shows the benefits of new advances in photomechanical reproduction.

Bacon's paintings are usually trapped under plate glass which brings with it reflections and enhancements. Unglazed they are dry and rough like pastel drawing by Degas or paintings by Kitaj. Details become blurred; a half-tone is built into the brush stroke with dry paint dusting the surface of the canvas. The camera has caught this and allows us to see Bacon as a rebel taxidermist, a mature surgeon stitching away at his operations, a carnal consultant who blends in my mind with Henry Tonks, who trained as a surgeon then turned to art but kept a foot in both camps by practising plastic surgery during the first world war. Kundera expresses surprise at Bacon's ability to achieve a likeness through his distortions. If he had seen Tonks's images of disfigured soldiers he would see that likenesses survive the most extreme upheavals. The only one of Bacon's subjects I know well enough to comment on is Richard Chopping. I look at the small black and white illustration of him and compare it to Bacon's portraits. The real thing wins out. The photograph is more as I remember him. The painting makes him look too handsome, too nice. No psychological surgery seems to have taken place, just magenta cross-hatchings which on this occasion go across the sitter's lips like a barrier. More fetish than likeness. This book does not enquire into meanings or begin to question why Bacon's work is so highly valued. It celebrates, through the craft of making a book, the work of an important 20th-century artist and through new technology makes it more visible.

Stephen Farthing is an artist, painter and Ruskin master of drawing at University of Oxford.

Bacon: Portraits and Self Portraits

Editor - Milan Kundera With essay by France Borel
ISBN - 0 500 092664
Publisher - Thames and Hudson
Price - £39.95
Pages - 216

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