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Francis Bacon: Life as obsession

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 in Londonpubs Francis Bacon

‘Study for the Portrait of Innocent X’ was sold for 35 million euros
In April the exhibition closed its doors anthology, the first since his death in 1992, the Prado Museum dedicated to Francis Bacon. Now is the centenary of the birth of Irish artist and her figure has now reached the category of idol of crowds, an artist who reflects us with the fury of the mirror and the explicitness of the blood. As if the common taste for Van Gogh had moved to Bacon in the Prado, a place he loved, he was visited by crowds drawn by the cruel spectacle of her paintings behind which rabies can nest as much compassion. One Hundred Years of Bacon. One hundred years of horror, poetry, aching meat.
Born in Dublin on 28 October 1909, an Irish mother and Australian father of English origin but who had fought in the Boer War and would be devoted to training racehorses. That his name matches that of an English political philosopher of the XVI-XVII is also explained by the fact that his father was descended from a brother of the historical character. Moreover, her great-grandmother, Lady Charlotte Harley, was a friend of Lord Byron and she’s dedicated her poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ‘.
Suffering from asthma since childhood and a strong allergy to dogs and horses (remember his father’s trade), the morphine was constant in both treatment and addiction. Health influenced his academic irregular, full of absences, which would also be drastically affected at age 16 by the expulsion of the family home, when I lived in England after the First World War, by exposing his homosexuality brutally rejected by the father. Behind it was sad childhood, marked by fluctuations in the residence between Ireland and England, with the compass stopped after 1925 in England and marked by tutors and tutors rather than by the school.
London, 1926
London 1926 is the year and where they converge to determine the circumstances in which the artist will become Bacon. The economic distress that led him to work briefly as a servant and shop assistant, left his decision to help an elderly man in exchange for sexual favors, in addition to committing petty thievery to stay, show us someone who is slipping into the underworld London, yet is someone who travels to Paris and Berlin staying for long periods of learning and anxiety, which receives drawing classes and opts for engaging in interior decorating. In these crucial years of the 1920s, the artist born Bacon.
According to Bacon himself, taught himself to use the brush but not in the pen, was Picasso, visited an exhibition of drawings in Paris in 1927, did you guess that he too could be an artist. Picasso’s surrealistic forms referred to in a number of ‘Cahiers d’Art’ in 1929 end to assert their vocation. Beyond that, and going to how to deal with the creation, Bacon acknowledged his affiliation with Picasso, through to better understand the distortions present in either: “There is a domain that has open and Picasso, in a sense, has not been exploited: an organic form that approaches the human image, but that is a complete distortion.
Source of inspiration
In Paris he also receives, at a surprising rate, one of its most obvious sources of inspiration: a book about skin diseases provides aesthetic stimuli: “I like the brightness and colors of the mouth and I’ve always wanted to paint the mouth of the Just as Monet painted sunsets.
After being greeted by Wyndham Lewis, the father of British art with big words ( “one of the most powerful artists who are today in Europe … in perfect harmony with his time”), a first solo exhibition in 1934, received notorious indifference, it will take to disdain the art, to appease his passion to almost leave the brushes. Self-portraits and sketches of his obsessive theme, the crucifixion, predominate in these initial moments. But little has been preserved as painted by Bacon in his early years: a personal crisis in 1944, when he was a self-doomed, destroyed as preserved. It is also the moment he is reborn as the creator: while treading the rubble of the bombings in London, serving in the Civil Defense, the pain and anger combined with the fragility of the material. There is no step backward from that moment, Bacon is the portrait of the anguish of mortality.
In 1944 is the triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the base of a Crucifixion ‘, now in the Tate Gallery, which marks the birth of the artist but not genius. The three figures tortured and monstrous, populated by unreal but despair and pain too true on an empty background and red scenery announce the following decades, the empty spaces where the meat is consumed daily gestures.
Bacon painting to be shipped voraciously: the images of their study show a sea of fabric and papers thrown everywhere, paint-stained images of chaos and disorder, a manure pit in which a man confronts the canvas to emerge museums with treasures that will fight for care. Among the garbage Bacon treads are photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines, brochures and art books, the artist has used as starting points for his paintings and has since thrown, crumpled, those cuts with indifference. The image illustrates banal or has served well for doing an operation of alchemy. Just one image in a film, the foreground of the woman screaming in ‘The Battleship Potemkin’, so that these features distorted with pain multiply and recombine in many ways in Bacon’s paintings, open to multiple influences. Thus, the portrait of Innocent X by Velazquez will experience obsessively. Velazquez’s painting, you’ll never want to see in person for fear of being defeated as a painter, will be the starting point of ceaseless exploration, accounted for more than 40 paintings on this theme. Based on photographs, Bacon felt that the painting provides the differentiating factor of the texture while a stronger effect and direct. But like the Pope, painted by Velazquez, a self portrait of Van Gogh walking will also be your inspiration obsessive. Any image taken from the press or a book, however insignificant it may seem, is likely to be dignified and resized for painting.
At the same time, Bacon liked to explain his paintings through what he called “the accident” crucial moment in the development of his works: “In my case, all table-increasingly more as the years go by, is an accident. So what I foresee in my mind, I expect and yet almost never goes as I planned. It transforms the traditional world. I use very large brushes, and in the way they work, often do not really know what he will paint, and does many things that are much better than I could do. Is it an accident? Perhaps we could say that there is an accident, because it becomes a selective process that one chooses to retain some of this accident. It is intended, of course, maintain the vitality of the accident and yet maintain continuity.
This form of painting, in which the technical process is regulated by forethought but is altered by accidents, including the chance in the making of the work, is at the end of the metaphor of life, that mixture plans and contingencies, which makes Bacon’s painting is so intense, so true, so true. So touching.
Obsessions
Perhaps the best indication to understand Bacon’s work is that he, otherwise so rich in statements expressly allowed, “I think that art is an obsession with life and, after all, as we are human beings, our main obsession is with ourselves. Then, perhaps with animals, then with the landscapes. ”
‘Study for the Portrait of Innocent X’ was sold in 2007 for 35 million euros and 31 million it’s second studio version of bullfighting No. 1 ‘. A year later, the most expensive work on display at the ARCO art fair was also Bacon’s ‘Man with bowl’ cost just over 23 million. The seller, Marlborough Gallery, traditionally our painter, has something to do with these high prices. His careful control of the influx of Bacon’s works in the market, opening and closing the tap according to the present, has been crucial to the artist has increased its value, its prestige, its echo in the media that are collecting Bacon’s name and making it a level of popularity as they have only reached between us, and referring only to artists of the twentieth century, Picasso, Dali and Warhol.
In 1964, surprised a young man stealing from his studio. The outcome of this meeting will not be the police station but the bed. And immortality of George Dyer, his lover and become his role model to who commits suicide in 1971. A notable 1998 film ‘Love is the Devil’, reflects this stormy relationship and torn, giving wonderful traits Bacon Derek Jacobi and George Dyer those of Daniel Craig. Dyer’s death through ingestion of barbiturates in a hotel room in Paris, came two days before the opening of the major retrospective that the Grand Palais in Paris devoted to Bacon. A Dyer would succeed him as lover and model, and finally as heir, John Edwards.
Fleeting and austere
In 1971, the journal Connaissance des Arts, which annually publishes a list of the ten best artists of the world, places Bacon at the head of this classification. It is at this moment also one of the most sought after. It is also a shy, elusive, austere, driven by intensive work schedules and exhausting of non breaks loose and ending with nights of relaxation and talk quietly in pubs in London.
Having passed a cancer in 1989, Bacon in April 1992 against the advice of his doctor, traveled to Madrid to inaugurate the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery and try to redirect her relationship with her young lover Spanish. Shortly after arriving he began feeling ill and was admitted to the Ruber clinic. Room 417. Who died in the Tyrone Power, in which he died six years before Enrique Tierno Galván, which would be taken after attack José María Aznar. On April 28 will die from the confluence of an acute asthma attack and a heart attack. At her side, Sister Mercedes, a nun of the Order of the Servants of Mary. There was no reconciliation with the faith of their elders and that he had denied. The Irish nanny used to punish his days enclosing it in a drawer. He had vowed that would never happen again. Her ashes were returned to England and scattered in a private ceremony. In their study, on the stand, his last picture was about to end. The combined features of Bacon with George Dyer.