FRANCIS BACON

So I couldn't find any music to post this morning so there's this. My art series (occasional) discusses or illustrates some aspects of the art world that surprise or enlighten me. I might claim to be quite knowledge where the visual arts are concerned and consider myself a 'modernist' and regularly find my answers on quizzes like University Challenge are always augmented by the arts. True surprises are there few therefore and I always enjoy new discoveries. This is no exception. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant but please bear in mind it is really all I ever wanted to do from a precocious youngster to a practicing artist myself I found I was always more interested in what everyone else was doing and Fine Art is the subject of my first degree (under the tutelage of Fred Orton the noted historian and composer Gavin Bryars as I frequently mention) It is not meant to sound arrogant and there are huge holes in my knowledge not least the Renaissance and earlier. I am, as I say, nothing if not a modernist . . . . . . . 

Before one of our greatest ever painters found his true voice he was an interior designed and here's an example of his frankly beautiful designs from interiors . . . . the master Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, ‘Rug’, circa 1929. Wool. 83⅝ x 50⅜ in  © The Estate of Francis Bacon

Firstly check the date. I know he was being creative was early as that! Extraordinary man. Secondly look at this truly beautiful design I might have said 50s even sixties but no 1929!

HEROES

an occasional series

FRANCIS BACON

Perhaps our greatest modern painter

"I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance."

Francis Bacon Self-Portrait. 1969. 28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992

Francis Bacon 

An unfinished canvas was on an easel when Francis Bacon died, first thought to be a self-portrait, it actually resembles Bacon’s lover George Dyer and now resides in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon by John Deakin

“George Melly called him a “vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom”. Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton described him as “the second nastiest man I’ve ever met”. Even Daniel Farson, his most faithful friend, introduces him in his memoir sponging money in the French House, the Soho pub popular with artists and writers.

John Deakin was, by all accounts, not an easy man to like. As well as having a tongue like a file, he was a notorious miser and leech. Francis Bacon’s description offers some insight as to why. “A very amusing man,” he said. “Very sarcastic. But he needed drink more than anything else.” Deakin was a chronic alcoholic, but Bacon was the one with the limitless bar tab: his status as a photographer is almost obscured by his role as the painter’s court fool. Descriptions of Deakin are not kind: he had the “gait of a midget wrestler”, “Mickey Mouse ears”, and his pock-marked face was “wrinkled like a bloodhound’s”. In fact, after reading these accounts, pictures of Deakin provide something of an anticlimax. He was short, sure, but not actually demonic. It’s possible his personality had such a powerful effect that it rendered impartial description impossible.”

– Gordon Comstock