A tender chaos

Francis Bacon: Five Decades at the Art Gallery of NSW

Time is beginning to afford us the distance with which to evaluate major artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century, most of whom have now either passed away or – dare we say it – entered the final phase of their creative careers. In current retrospective we find Francis Bacon and so too Jeffrey Smart; on these pages this month we also look at career-long appreciations of J. M. Coetzee and Les Murray; Leonard Cohen is doing farewell concerts; Phillip Roth recently put down his pen. These are but some famous examples; an entire generation, shaped largely by the postwar years and the long golden afternoon of the West, is bidding farewell.

It is twenty years since the death in Madrid in 1992 of Francis Bacon. Having died before communications technology transformed our world, and before the absolute commodification of contemporary art, he seems to belong to a world already lost in the distance; a world in which he stood with Picasso as an undeniable link back to the Old Masters with their painterly genius and their overwhelming dominance of the canvas as locus of expression. Bacon is very much of his century, the twentieth, a guide to its contortions and its triumphs. The surfaces of a Bacon canvas, seen here in sensual three dimensional detail, hold every nuance and texture imaginable; their contours map the pain and ecstatic pleasure of life, of its chance and whim, its unexpected turns; its bold truths and smooth lies. In chaos is both trauma and delight; Francis Bacon, operating beyond the guidelines laid down by an art school education – belonging rather to the ‘sacred monster’ school of artists, as Jim Sharman put it in a sparkling opening address to inaugurate this exhibition – mapped this chaos and gave us an entirely unique oeuvre, some of the highlights of which are now on display in Francis Bacon: Five Decades, at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Enter here and take a deep breath. Not because you will be shocked – Bacon was outrageous in the twentieth century but we are now well into the unshockable twenty-first – but because you will be thrilled by what lies in store. Curator Anthony Bond, in his last major show for the AGNSW, has pulled off a curatorial coup, arranging 50 of Bacon’s best and most representative works into a sequence of five decades, an arrangement that nevertheless transcends the typical strictures of chronology. Bacon comes alive through the overwhelming power of the hanging itself. It allows the viewer to follow Bacon past the charred waste of the postwar years, into the censorious and pallid 1950s before the breakout, via 1961, of the exuberant 60s, the creative peak of the 70s – one of the 70s rooms, while small, is collectively as visually and emotionally monumental as anything seen in any recent exhibition – and then the final, more sobering works of the 80s when Bacon, without knowing all there was to know, nevertheless had come to know his physical and stylistic limits, had explored his formal constraints to the very edges of pain, love, abuse and beauty, and came back from that journey, full of knowledge and life lived, stepping into the space marked ‘legend’ he now occupies.

Bacon is conveniently, and quite accurately, seen as a personification of the themes of the wracked century in which he lived – particularly its British iteration. Emerging out of the smoking chaos of war came images of modernism crucified, of despair and beauty, before plunging into the strictures of the 1950s – this period of repression, want and furtive sexuality is brilliantly portrayed by one of the exhibition highlights, a very long wall of caged figures, the background hanging curtains turning to blood and to prison bars, the entrapped figures ever more anxious while over and around all is an ongoing and ever-present uncertainty, not just as regards our own sudden mortality, but of the lumbering century itself, as it staggered from crisis to crisis, finding flower only for a brief decade or two before sliding back once again, as Bacon reached his final years, into the convulsive period that leads to now. But chaos, as Bacon himself noted, breeds images, and the gambler he was walked the fine line in his art, the tight balance between formal skill, composition, and chance – or, as the gallery notes accurately describe it, brinkmanship.

This exhibition allows slow study of the texture and volume of paint, the thick and the thin, the expanses of empty canvas used as colouring device. There are canvasses with paint applied in up to fifteen ways, surfaces that repay very close inspection. Many of Bacon’s subjects find themselves framed within some kind of arena, a sumo or boxing ring, a stage, a cage, a box, a gallows, a spot-lit theatre, and here at the AGNSW that role may be reversed: outside the glass and looking in, the spectator is alone, surrounded by the twisting surfaces of paint, the play of light on canvas or sand, the furious semi-circular brushstrokes that provide the emotional experience Bacon sought to provoke – an awakening to the glorious possibilities of life.

The visual material displayed along with the main exhibition is limited, allowing the paintings themselves to speak, largely unencumbered by parallel narratives, yet they clearly indicate the wealth of mass media material from which Bacon drew ideas and inspiration. Supplementary materials – such as items from Bacon’s studio – are left to a minimum, and they are all the more effective for that. Bacon’s subjects were drawn from popular magazines of every imaginable source – from gay fanzines of the time to gaudy 70s trucking magazines, from cricket almanacs to documentary photography and nature documentaries, from classical art references (most infamously, Velázquez) and from medical reference books. He was fascinated by the virility of the (male) body in movement, and drew heavily from the early photographic studies of human movement pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge. Athletic males leap from mass media origin into the frame – wrestlers/lovers, cricketers and boxers.

Much has been made of Bacon’s debt to Velázquez, discernible in the famous popes and here too in a seated dwarf figure. Perhaps this debt to the Spanish master is an over-laboured trope for art historians, but certainly, like Velázquez, Bacon could pull off a remarkable painting of a dog: one of the pieces here (Untitled [dog]), tucked into a corner, is barely three or four brushstrokes swirling on a pale green background, but is a genuine highlight for being so unexpected. Just as in many of Velázquez’s royal portraits, it is sometimes the hunting or parlour dog that steals the show. No doubt, despite a change in direction hinted at by one of the early works on display here, van Gogh was also a constant presence.

Prominent too are a series of arresting portraits. One of Bacon’s hopes was that a portrait would magically emerge from the creative thrust: “just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there,” he commented. His lover George Dyer or friends such as Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, Reinhard Hassert or Eddy Batache – quite apart from the self-portraits – were treated in this less than literal way which, as Bacon found, provided a means of revealing the subject more truthfully. Of special interest is a portrait of Lucian Freud based, improbably, on a photo of Franz Kafka.

Get to Sydney and witness Francis Bacon, and the way he witnessed a turbulent life. These paintings burst with energy; they twist and leap off the walls. Individually they are superb; as a cleverly curated collective they overwhelm. There is none of the darkness some might be expecting. Curator Tony Bond has been at pains to frame Bacon’s tenderness, understanding that behind the made-for-popular-consumption figure of the wild and violent artist, the cruel vivisector (as portrayed by Patrick White), lay the fragility of one searching for meaning and form amidst the chaos of a war-ravaged world, a furtive sexuality, a gambler’s turn and a lover’s all-or-nothing instinct. For that attitude to life alone, Bacon is worthy of our renewed and continued attention.

 

Francis Bacon: Five Decades shows at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 24 as part of the Sydney International Art Series. A second exhibition, Anish Kapoor, opens on December 20 and runs until April 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

artgallery.nsw.gov.au
mca.com.au

 

Images:

Three studies of the male back (detail), triptych 1970, Francis Bacon, Oil on canvas, each 198 x 147.5cm.

Self Portrait, 1973, Francis Bacon, Oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5cm.

Study for self-portrait, 1976, Francis Bacon, Oil and pastel on canvas, 198 x 147.5cm.

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