Margarita Cappock
FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO
239pp. Merrell. £35 (US $59.95).
1 85894 276 4
The dismantling in 1998 of Francis Bacon’s London studio, wall by paint-spattered wall and object by distressed object, and its painstaking reconstruction in the Dublin City Gallery, ranks as one of the more extraordinary conservation projects of modern times. What Bacon would have made of the prospect of thousands of visitors every year gazing through internal windows in the Dublin museum at the hermetically sealed dust and intimate chaos of 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, is not hard to guess. He was a ruthless editor of his own work, destroying half-finished, and even finished, pictures, concealing as many of his sources as he revealed, and suppressing books and catalogues about himself that he did not approve of. It is said that on one occasion he even burned two sackfuls of crumpled photographs and press cuttings from his studio floor, in order to deprive a hopeful Tate Gallery of a potentially invaluable addition to its archive. In fact, as Margarita Cappock admits in this useful and beautifully illustrated book, colour photographs of Bacon’s studio taken in 1974 show it to have been even more congested than it was at his death: “. . . for all the sources that have survived, a great many must have mouldered away”.
It is nevertheless due to Dublin that we know considerably more about Bacon’s voracious but eclectic interests than before. The illustrated database compiled by Dr Cappock and her team at the City Gallery catalogues no fewer than 7,500 objects found in Bacon’s studio, including illustrated publications, photographs, press cuttings, notes, drawings, artist’s materials – among them several pairs of Marks and Spencer corduroy trousers used to apply paint – and slashed canvases. This remarkable research tool has already, in the four years since the studio opened, begun to change the face of Bacon scholarship. For instance, we now know that Bacon, contrary to what he maintained, sometimes made rough preliminary sketches, suggesting, as Cappock observes, that he “was much more premeditated in his approach to painting than he cared to admit”.
Dr Cappock herself adds to our understanding of Bacon’s complex relationship to photography. Some 1,400 photographs were found in Bacon’s studio, a considerable number of them portraits by the photographer John Deakin, including 129 alone of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. (The series of Lucian Freud on a bed may have been taken by Walker Evans, not Deakin.) Cappock argues that these photos, many of which were commissioned by Bacon, functioned as more than mere aides-memoire. Bacon stopped working from life in the early 1960s and relied increasingly on memory, or so he implied, when painting portraits of his friends. Deakin’s photos, writes Cappock, “were not just a means to reality; they often were the reality”. She coins the memorable phrase “destruction as a form of enquiry” to describe Bacon’s deliberate intervention in the surface of the prints – cuts, tears, creases, folds and paint marks.
Bacon’s aggressive manipulation of the photographic image for his own imaginative ends placed him in the role of editor rather than that of passive consumer. Sometimes disparate fragments would be joined by safety pins or paper clips; at other times Bacon would mount particularly telling details on to card. He even, on occasion, took photographs himself – most notably of his long-term companion and heir John Edwards, which informed a handful of comparatively benign late portraits. But it is in his painterly transformations of Deakin’s photographs that Bacon’s true originality lies, reinventing the human figure for an apparently post-humanist world. These records of his subjects’ appearance were recalled long after their deaths. Dyer’s features, for instance, dominated Bacon’s painting for some years following his suicide in 1971. And Bacon would sometimes transpose gestures or expressions captured by Deakin’s incisive lens from one subject to another.
Various photographs of Bacon himself were found in the studio, including several by Deakin, which the artist made use of for his own self-portraits. The automatic photo booth, where Bacon, frequently drunk, could experiment with different poses and indulge in the performative side of his character, was another catalyst. The potential of the multiple photo-strip to suggest a view of human personality as changeable and contingent would have appealed to Bacon’s sense of people in a state of flux. From the early 1960s he produced several small triptychs which show contrasting aspects of the same head.
Analysing the numerous books, magazines, loose leaves, newspapers and press cuttings recovered from the studio floor, Cappock identifies the principal themes that fascinated Bacon. Warfare, crime and political leaders supplied images of violence and power. Medicine, sport, wildlife and human locomotion – Bacon left four copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion – nourished his visceral and erotic iconography of the body. Humans and animals in extreme situations or moving at high speed provided the basis for many of his anatomical distortions, while Bacon’s interest in detailed photographs of injuries and skin disorders from medical textbooks influenced his palette as well as his depiction of flesh. Cappock speculates that the increasingly pathological view of human flesh in Bacon’s late work may also reflect the artist’s own physical decline.
The French publication on diseases of the mouth, which, Bacon told David Sylvester, was the origin of his obsession with the open mouth, was not found in the studio; but a fragment of a hand-coloured illustration of gum disease, almost certainly torn from it, was. Two copies of another book whose influence Bacon openly acknowledged, K. C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, were also found. But the most curious discovery made by Cappock and her colleagues was a well-thumbed and paint-smeared copy of a 1920 book on mediums, ectoplasms and other psychic phenomena by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, which Bacon never mentioned to anyone. As Martin Harrison in his recently published study of Bacon and photography has demonstrated, faked spiritualist photographs made a decisive impact on Bacon’s painting from an early stage.
That there is still more to be learned about Bacon is evident from this book, comprehensive though it tries to be. Faced with so much material, it has clearly not been possible for Margarita Cappock in the time available to follow up every lead. However, it would not have required much detective work to spot that the “Leaf from an unidentified book with black-and-white stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin . . . Date unknown”, has been torn from Roger Manvell’s 1944 book Film. This seminal little paperback includes five pages of stills from the famous Odessa Steps sequence that so haunted Bacon. Further research needs to be done on Bacon’s relation to the silent cinema, with its expressive facial close-ups. It is also tempting to look at Bacon against the backdrop of European avant-garde portrait photography, which, after the mass slaughter of the First World War, lost faith in the ideal of an integrated human face – and perhaps, by extension, in the notion of human identity as something immutable.
