PARIS
Best Bacon
Sheldon Williams.
"Nothing really happened in the arts after 1930. If somebody offered me a Bacon, I would rather have a painting by Munch," said the dealer, his back to a little Picasso of pink bathers against a red-brown background (from the Douglas Cooper Collection). We were talking in his Rue du Faubourg-St Honore gallery. As everywhere else in Paris, the subject under discussion was the huge Bacon exhibition sharing the Grand Palais with the Fernand Leger retrospective; and this was the only Parisian I met who had a word to say against Bacon.
Contrary to the traditional British chauvinist belief, the French, once they have made up their minds, are quite prepared to accept an artist of ' alien ' origin — if he qualifies. A few years from now Gallic pundits may speak of Bacon as a Painter of the Ecole-de-Paris, but for the moment he rates as British. His proving time came in 1966 when he bad his important show at the Galerie Maeght. Optimists prophesied success, but even they did not foresee the eventual sell-out, and since that date he has been an established name at almost every aesthetic level in the French capital. The year 1967 confirmed his international prestige when he won the coveted Rubens Prize, receiving the honour, but rejecting the money. (Bacon is not a poor man; glory for him, quite rightly, is more attractive than tax).
At this stage of his development and notoriety, it is difficult for many to imagine a time when his name was not a household word in the Modern Art vocabulary. To be the first British artist to go on show in a Paris museum (occupying three floors with over 100 paintings, mainly of vast dimensions) seems a natural outcome for a painter of world reputation. But Bacon is over sixty. His whole character, direction and way of life were different when he was twenty-one. Little evidence of those early times survives, but there is an article in Volume 100 of The Studio called "The 1930 Look in British Decoration" which deals with his contribution of a not very exciting modernism to the furnishing world (with some tasteful watercolours thrown in for good measure). After that he gave up the interior decoration side of his activities and turned exclusively to painting.
It was 1933 which marked the beginning of his true artistic performance. Herbert Read chose a Bacon ' Crucifixion ' as an il lustration for his book Art Now. Sir Michael Sadleir bought one of his pictures at the Mayor Gallery. The Surrealist International made history by excluding him from the exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries on grounds that he was not surrealist enough. Bacon has shown himself to be his own most lethal critic. By 1942 he was determined to cut himself loose from the past. He set about destroying everything he had completed prior to that date. Only by chance and rare circumstance ten of his early works escaped. The Paris exhibition includes some .examples on loan from the Tate, Batley Corporation and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Contemporary Bacon really started twenty years ago. At that juncture the handwriting of his style became evident and easily identifiable. The pictures frequently fell into definitive categories: popes, figure variations inspired by kinetic sequences from the work of the early photographer Muybridge, the brightly coloured and fluent paraphrases of Van Gogh's self portrait in straw sun-hat plodding along an Arlesian lane (there is one in the Paris show), the studies of animals (especially a dog); all leading up to the sprawling nudes with their hypodermics and narcotic ambience. This latter period fanned the popular belief that he was obsessed with drugs and the drugged condition, a standpoint that armed his enemies with added firing power when they came to assess the latest.' Crucifixions.'
Out of this plethora of subject matter his style evolved and became permanent. Kinetic phrases of expression in the human face, •drawn as much from the nurse in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as from Muybridge's photographic ex periments, became intermingled with the agony of the human condition he had al ready injected into pictures of darksuited businessmen or gaudily robed popes, and are paralleled in fleeting glimpses of soporific hallucination that inform the prostrate nudes.
This culmination of style and intent has been matched by improved expertise. An instantaneous ease in every brushstroke stands out in contrast with the look of troubled invention haunting the early pictures. Bacon's unquestioned professionalism can no longer support the suggestion of Celtic fantasy (however dernier-cri) that used to pervade his eccentric imagery. It is as if the admirer of James Joyce's Ulysses, confronted by Finnegan's Wake, felt the author's genius had swept ahead of him.
Paradoxically, it is probably this brilliance of technique that endeared him to the French. Latin enthusiasm for craftsmanship (in and out of the fine arts) is a cultural dictum. It is evident all over Paris at this moment. Bacon is competing — successfully — against the skills of Dubuffet's architectural manifestations and figures at Galerie Jean Bucher as well as sexy sleeping girls in drawings by Balthus at Galerie Claude Bernard. Instinctively, maybe with his stable-mate Fernand Leger in mind, the Grand Palais picked Bacon's bullfight painting of 1969 — a composition of unerring competence — for the exhibition's poster.
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