Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   20th Century  

On the subject of sketches and other forms of preparatory work, Francis Bacon was adamant. He had little talent and even less inclination for drawing, he said. What happened on the canvas was the only thing that mattered to him. He thought of painting as a rather mysterious process which was liable to be ruined by too much premeditation. Bacon believed that his most arresting pictures were those in which he had responded to “accidental” marks in a work-in-progress and gone on to create something unexpected from them.

The most celebrated (and best remunerated) British painter of the twentieth century explained all this and more in a series of now classic interviews with the critic and dealer David Sylvester, conducted in the 1960s and 1970s:

“The hopelessness in one’s working will make one take paint and just do almost anything to get out of the formula of making a kind of illustrative image - I mean, I just wipe it all over with a rag or use a brush or rub it with something or anything or throw turpentine and paint and everything else onto the thing to try to break the willed articulation of the image, so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own structure, and not my structure. Afterwards, your sense of what you want comes into play, so that you begin to work on the hazard that has been left to you on the canvas. And out of all that, possibly, a more organic image arises than if it was a willed image.”

So there it was: the painter of screaming popes, deformed children, copulating men, prowling monkeys, people with faces like open wounds and an inverted crucifixion designed to make Christ resemble “a worm crawling down the cross”, did not draw or otherwise prepare himself before springing into action in the studio. But after his death in 1992 it turned out in fact that he did. The evidence was there in his studio - and elsewhere.

The art market being what it is, and Bacon’s prices being at the level that they are, it did not take long for quantities of studies and drawings by the painter to emerge from various attics and safety deposit boxes. In 1996 the Tate Gallery paid an undisclosed sum for approximately forty Bacon sketches which the artist had given at different times to his friends Paul Danquah, Peter Pollock and the poet Stephen Spender. David Sylvester, perhaps regretting his own failure to have extracted anything in the same line from the artist, wrote a wry article in which he described drawing as “Bacon’s secret vice” and admitted that the painter had pulled the wool over his eyes in all those interviews of thirty years before. Meanwhile, expert opinion on the sketches has remained somewhat divided. Accusations of fakery have been made and subsequently retracted. The current critical consensus is that almost all of the works in question are, indeed, by Bacon, and that although they are not necessarily masterpieces they shed considerable light on the sources of his inspiration and his creative processes.

Just last year, yet more miscellaneous examples of Baconiana emerged from the so-called “Joule Archive” - Barry Joule being the artist’s driver, handyman and general factotum during his last years. Their relationship appears to have been close but (like most of Bacon’s relationships)  somewhat uneasy. One of Joule’s many allotted tasks was to slash and burn works deemed failures by the painter. On one occasion, following some unreliably boozy instructions issued to him by Bacon in an all-night drinking club, “Trasher” Joule went off and  Stanley-knifed the wrong painting. The artist did not speak to him for several months but eventually relented and rehired him. By Joule’s own account, a few days before Bacon died he entrusted his faithful retainer with a bundle of papers comprising approximately 1,000 separate items, saying only “You know what to do with this”. Joule claims that this enigmatic pronouncement was Bacon’s coded way of indicating a gift. Anyway, perhaps recalling the incident of the wrong picture destroyed, he put the bundle in a safe place. Now this mass of more or less dodgy Bacons - having so to speak fallen off the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine - has been edited down to form the body of  a new exhibition curated by Mark Sladen. It includes some striking and intriguing material. “Bacon’s Eye” may well turn out to be that rare event: an exhibition at the Barbican Gallery actually worth visiting.

Sifting through the “Joule Archive”, it is possible to see why Bacon might have wanted to suppress all knowledge that such material existed. He had after all been so careful to propagate the general belief - entirely contradicted by all these recent rediscoveries -  that his works developed spontaneously, growing out of his imagination without conscious forethought. Why might he have wanted people to believe this? Two principal reasons suggest themselves. First, Bacon was influenced by the ideas of the Surrealists, having spent several years in Paris when that movement was at its height, and was perhaps bowing to the Surrealist credo that the only truly authentic works of art were those that were “automatically” or spontaneously generated. (Joan Miro, who first rose to prominence in Surrealist Paris, was another artist who lied about his own practice of making preparatory drawings, and for the same reason.) Secondly, Bacon disapproved of people talking about the subject matter of his paintings. He believed that when people begin to see stories, allegories or narratives in art, they stop actually looking at the art itself. He wanted to operate at a deeper level, he said, to work on viewers’ “nervous systems” rather than their conscious minds. When “story” enters in, he said, “that is when the boredom begins.”

The “Joule Archive” material can be divided into two types. First of all there are works entirely by Bacon’s own hand, generally done in pencil or oil on paper. These include a number of recognisable sketches for extant paintings, including studies for a screaming pope picture, for a painting of a monkey sitting in the crook of a tree’s branches, and for a portrait of Van Gogh - an artist who meant much to Bacon - trudging down a dusty road in the South of France. Aside from scotching the myth of Bacon’s soi-disant “automatism”, such sketches are of little intrinsic merit, although they fail in interesting ways. They prove that he was indeed right to think of himself as a painter, rather than a draughtsman, since they are so plainly graphic works that aspire to the condition of oil paintings. Bacon smudges contours and tries to turn lines into marks more like stains. He blurs faces and accentuates open mouths that seem to protest or snarl. He wants to represent his sense that existence is fugitive and that life is fragile and vulnerable. Too much definition does not suit him.

The second type of imagery in the “Joule archive” takes the form of doctored photographs, most seeming to date from about 1955-63. Bacon collected pictures from newspapers and magazines, cut images from books and hoarded postcards. He also drew and scribbled on them, often with palpable vehemence. When Richard Hamilton, the founder and first describer of British Pop Art, saw these works, he commented that they show how close Bacon was to other artists of the time who came under the spell of mass media imagery - an interesting connection and one seldom made, Bacon generally being placed in Old Masterly juxtaposition to the Pop Artists.

The photographs Bacon collected form an index of his preoccupations and a kind of encyclopaedia of the iconography of his paintings. Although they do not, necessarily, explain his pictures, they do show the sort of thing he was thinking about when he was painting them: handsome young men, predictably enough, who might be members of the Kennedy clan, or boxers in action, or Elvis Presley singing; monkeys; people suffering from diseases of the skin or mouth; assassinations; Nazis and other murderers; paintings from the past that Bacon found moving. Often Bacon’s alterations to such pictures seem merely camp and mischievous - he gives the Kennedys a botched make-up job, smearing paint on their faces like poorly applied cosmetics, and he draws lines or arrows pointing at the genitals of sportsmen - but in other cases they seem more serious in character. A photograph of Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X has been almost obliterated by a grid or cage scratched into it by the artist; a photograph of Hitler has been eloquently defaced, slashed vertically on the axis of the Fuhrer’s pencil moustache. It would be tempting to read some revelation of meaning into these apparently inimate relics - Bacon confessing his hatred of authority figures, revealing his abhorrence of genocidal tyrants - but it would be as well to bear the artist’s own caution against literary or over-literal interpretation of his work.

Bacon lived through a bloody century, registering his deep-rooted sense of its many atrocities in his art. But he also loved violence, and depravity, and revelled nihilistically in his own perceptions of a world where the natural order of things seemed - in permanent spirit of carnival - to have been turned on its head. He was repelled but also excited by the sight of blood. He liked his boyfriends to tie him up and beat him. It is not easy to sum up such a man, with any degree of accuracy, using the familiar cliches of twentieth-century art history - “painter of existential doubt”, that sort of thing - which is just as Bacon himself would have wanted it. Nothing, in that sense, is changed by the discovery of new material from his studio floor. The meaning of his studies, sketches, doodles, mementoes - quite what he would have called them is unknown - is just as clouded as the meaning the paintings that they helped him in various ways to create. So Bacon need not have feared the effect that public exhibition of his leavings might have on perceptions of his art.

Perhaps, as Barry Joule maintains, he would not in the end have particularly objected to their preservation. I suspect that Bacon gave them away not because he wanted them destroyed, but because he could no longer bear to look at them. Having subsided into the truly execrable painter that he was, in his later years, a purveyor of smooth and fatuously anodyne compositions, principally inspired by the work of Knightsbridge’s slickest window-dressers, the last thing he wanted was to be reminded of the vitality of his youth.