Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A walk along shady Rutherford Crossroad while GH ran, and then continental breakfast at the hotel. A lazy morning reading papers and Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies . We visited Rubicon Estate owned by Francis Ford Coppola, and admired its manicured grounds and house. There was an interesting display of magic lanterns. Behind glass windows and doors dusty vintage wines slept on undisturbed shelves, wines bottled as early as 1946. Drove to Calistoga, walked up and down its Main Street shops, and had lunch at a diner that is more than 100 years old. Clos Pegase was designed by American architect Michael Graves in an eclectic style that combines a Spanish courtyard, Greek pillars and geometric forms. GH was inspired by him to turn from designing teapots to designing buildings. Many sculptures stood around the grounds. I especially liked the mobile sculpture of George Rickey. Its two lancets rotated on their own center, and as they swung gently with the breeze they danced toward...

I saw again last night the huge Bacon retrospective at the Met. I had been dreading a second look because I had read some less than worshipful reviews in the meantime, and I wondered how they would affect another encounter with the works. I am glad to report that my worship has cooled down, not to disappointment, but to a strong admiration for the painter. It has become reasonable. It is not easy to be reasonable with Bacon, because his paintings elicit--strive to elicit, in fact--visceral reactions. That contorted, broken body on the divan: if you don't submerge your eyes in its pain, you will only see the ridiculous melodrama--the faulty epistemology--of paint imitating blood and semen. It's no longer a surprise to see modern works splattered with blood and semen--and shit--but Bacon is more painterly than that. The effect must be achieved through paint. That intransigency is a strength. No collages for him, no "real-world" objects. He relies on photographs but uses...

conduite / behavior Are the two men fighting or fucking on the bed? Are they two men or one? Is that a bruise or bed? After eating, he walked with me back to my room. He flipped through my art books while sitting on my bed. He eyed the twisting figures as I spoke of Bacon, the carcass on the cross, the violent mass in bed. We drained the bottle of Bordeaux between us. Our shoes removed, we remained fully clothed in bed. He stood up to go. He had to work tomorrow. He said he does not sleep well in a stranger’s bed. My hands have painted this night scene from many angles but have not grasped the lovely figure in the bed. In this manner he has taught Jee more about Bacon than any body who had fucked him in his bed.

This small book, by Christophe Domino, gives a generous selection of Francis Bacon's paintings, including  six foldouts of his triptychs. It also gives an interesting series of photographs of the artist at various ages in his London studio, the walls covered like a palette with daubs of paint, the floors littered with what looks like the debris of a bombed-out room. Bacon was a handsome youth, and he retained his good looks into old age, and so it was a surprise to read in the book that he hated his looks; his self-portraits, like those he drew of friends, artists and lovers, mutilated the head ferociously.  The text organizes itself into four chapters. The first, "Turning towards Painting," sketches the outline of Bacon's life. The second, "Creating an Oeuvre," traces the development of his career. As the title has it, the third chapter, "A Maker of Images" explains the different aspects of Bacon's image-making, including its obsessive iconogr...

TLS December 5 2008 from Alan Jenkins' review of Francis Bacon at Tate Britain: Yet, as John Russell pointed out nearly thirty years ago, "perhaps the most persistent of Bacon's preoccupations is the problem of what a man is to do when he is alone in a room" . . . * Bacon would sometimes, to achieve the desired "thickness", model his single figure on a sequence of photographs from Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Body in Motion that showed two men wrestling--though at a glance, they could be having sex. . . . Then, once he had begun to show two or more people, the coupling--as in those earlier exceptions--becomes explicit. * In her catalogue essay Victoria Walsh cites Foundations of Modern Art by Amédée Ozenfant (1931) as having perhaps fertilized the insatiably curious young painter's imagination in ways that would lie dormant for years: "The search for intensity dominates the whole of modern painting. There can be no intensity without simplifi...

after Francis Bacon Alecto Under the lip of the jar, after the passions’ flight, clings another passion, a bat the size of an orange sucked dry from within, on each shoulder no wing but a white finger. Her name is Expectancy. Blind, she sniffs, furry neck stretching, the burning leather, when a fierceness pierces a woman, and a germ is released. When the baby comes, slightly deflated, and cries for air, sucking it in like blood, a wing, pale, hairless, unfurls from its muscle of a heart. Joining in the cry, the internee bat keens and keens. Megaera The bandage over the window is soaked with sun, exposing the nerve in the wood, the stone fracture, the nails oxidizing in the burrows they bit through. It does not help to move house. The x-rays follow, filming the densest parts of passions, the skeletons of full-grown bats grasping their fingers in their arms. Over every bed, behind the eye, a shutter blinks. The fluorescence flutters. Hurry! The key, brass plated with nickel, is l...

after Francis Bacon Alecto Under the lip of the jar, after the passions’ flight, clings another passion, a bat the size of an orange sucked dry from within, on each shoulder no wing but a white finger. Her name is Expectancy. Blind, she sniffs, furry neck stretching, the burning leather, when a fierceness pierces a woman, and a germ is released. When the baby comes, slightly deflated, and cries for air, sucking it in like blood, a wing, pale, hairless, unfurls from its muscle of a heart. Joining in the cry, the internee bat keens and keens. Megaera The bandage over the window is soaked with sun, exposing the nerve in the wood, the stone fracture, the nails oxidizing in the burrows they bit through. It does not help to move house. The x-rays follow, filming the densest parts of passions, the skeleton of full-grown bats grasping its fingers with its arms. It does not help to return to a cell. Darkness calls to them. The fluorescence flutters. The one key, brass plated with nick...

July 13, Sun Arrived late at Parliament View Apartments, along Albert Embarkment. Danced at Fire, in Vauxhall. July 14, Mon Walked round Westminster and Soho. Watched Billy Eliot the Musical at Victoria Palace Theatre. Drank at Comptons.  July 15, Tue Spent afternoon with Anna and James at Hyde Park. Had dinner with Mary and Derek in Soho. Drank at Comptons and G-A-Y.  July 16, Wed Walked along South Bank. Visited Tate Modern: Bacon and Picasso room; Pollock's Summertime . Watched stand-up comedy at Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Drank at Barcode Vauxhall. July 17, Thu Watched King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe. Dinner at the Box. Drank at Rupert Street and 79 CXR.  July 18, Fri Visited the British Museum: the Parthenon Marbles. Danced at G-A-Y.  July 19, Sat Visited Sir John Soanes Museum: Hogarth's Election and The Rake's Progress . Visited National Gallery: Cezanne's Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses);  Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres;  and Velazquez's The Rokeby Ve...

In this book Sylvester reviews Bacon's painting more or less chronologically, but also organizes his discussion into themes: a late starter, a trail of the human presence, a state of unease, all the pulsations of a person, images in series, an escape from emotion, a picture but not a picture. Many sharp insights into the paintings, generously reproduced in the book. One I liked especially is that Bacon's heads are inspired by Picasso, his bodies by Matisse. Bacon preferred Picasso to Matisse because the former exhibits "the brutality of fact." After "Review," the section "Reflections" meditates, in short prose pieces, on different aspects of Bacon's art, such as "The painter as medium," "Bacon and poetry," "Bacon and Giocometti," "Bacon's secret vice," and "Images of the human body." The third section "Fragments of Talk" gathers together snippets of interviews and conversations Syl...

An interesting article on Bacon's paintings, and their necessary relationship with the painter's homosexuality. Study from the Human Figure (1949) Two Figures (1953) Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1967-8) Sleeping Figure (1974)