El artista británico-irlandés Francis Bacon (1909-1992) y su relación con Joan Miró.
El pintor británico de origen irlandés Francis Bacon
(Dublín, 28-X-1909-Madrid, 28-IV-1992) se crió en una granja y se rebeló contra
el conservadurismo de su familia, formándose en Londres, Berlín y París, en ambientes
marginales donde vivió en libertad su homosexualidad y voluntad de transgresión
social.
Alcanzo temprana notoriedad desde 1933
con un célebre tríptico de un realismo cruel y formó con Lucien Freud la llamada
Escuela de Londres, de un realismo figurativo ajeno a la abstracción que dominaba
en EE UU y Europa. Fue un apasionado admirador de Picasso, los surrealistas Miró
y Max Ernst, y de los clásicos españoles, entre ellos especialmente de Velázquez,
cuyas obras contemplaba regularmente en sus frecuentes visitas a Madrid (ya había estado en la capital española en junio de 1956 junto a su compañero Peter Lacey, y sus visitas se incrementaron debido a que tuvo una
relación sentimental en sus últimos años con un español, José). A Velázquez dedicó unos famosos
estudios sobre el retrato de Inocencio X (pintado en 1649, en su segunda
estancia en Italia), que dio pie para una destacada exposición en la National Gallery
de Londres (1996) en la que se ponían en paralelo las obras de Bacon y Velázquez.
Inocencio X, por Velázquez y Bacon.
Siempre se proclamó un pintor independiente
de los movimientos, que aunque en 1936 quiso participar en la exposición internacional
surrealista de Londres, fue rechazado porque su estilo no se correspondía con las
pautas surrealistas. Su pensamiento se
resume en: ‹‹¿Cómo se puede pintar aquello que se desconoce, los otros, gente a
la que le falta la fe en sí mismos que tenían los personajes de un Van Dyck? ¿Cómo
se puede evitar, después de Freud, el intento de capturar lo que es irracional para
llegar a la personalidad del sujeto?››.
Su relación con Joan Miró.
Conoció a Miró en París en el periodo
de la posguerra [Rosa Gorcatel. Los amigos de Miró.
“Guadalimar”, año 27, nº 156 (febrero-marzo 2001). Reseña de *<Los amigos
de Miró>. Palma de Mallorca. FPJM (2001): 40.] y coincidieron en bastantes exposiciones colectivas. Miró y Masson asistieron a la inauguración de la retrospectiva de Bacon en el Grand Palais de París, celebrada del 26 de octubre de 1971 al 10 de enero de 1972 (hay una foto del encuentro de los tres, tomada por André Morain y propiedad de la Francis Bacon Foundation).
Considero que Miró, sobre todo con su simplificación de la representación a lo esencial,
su gestualidad y gusto por las bioformas distorsionadas, sería uno de los artistas
que le influiría en su etapa de experimentación surrealista de los años 30 (sobre
todo el impacto de la gran exposición surrealista en el verano de 1936, en la que
fue rechazada su obra por insuficientemente surreal
[Davies, Hugh; Yard, Sally. Francis Bacon. 1986: 13, en base a una entrevista de Davis con Penrose (29-III-1973). Los
autores tratan la influencia de la violencia surrealista en Bacon en las pp. 13-14,
sin citar a Miró.
La enseñanza de Miró
parece secundaria en comparación al impacto sobre Bacon del Picasso surrealista
y, en menor grado, de los figurativos Dalí, Bellmer, Brauner, Chirico, Max Ernst...
Bacon ciertamente admiró la crueldad mironiana en sus pinturas salvajes de los años
1934-1936, el mismo rasgo que le interesa en el Inocencio X (1649) de Velázquez, que él tomará como base
para una serie de obras en 1953. El pintor irlandés, empero, no rompe con la figuración
y la perspectiva tradicional, lo que le separa radicalmente de Miró.
Michael Peppiatt (1996)
apunta respecto a la temprana influencia surrealista sobre Bacon:
‹‹(...) ningún otro artista
inglés había respondido tan instintivamente a la esencia del surrealismo. (...)
Se podría afirmar que Bacon absorbió más surrealismo de lo que lo hizo Picasso,
en el sentido de que tomó de elementos que luego utilizó para sus propios fines;
o, en última instancia, que se empapó de surrealismo a través de Picasso. Lo que más le interesó a Bacon de los
surrealistas, tanto en cine como en pintura, fue que utilizaron imágenes realizadas
con elementos muy diferentes, por no decir recíprocamente antagónicos. Estas perturbadoras
combinaciones continuaron, por supuesto, tras la famosa frase de Lautréamont, Ael encuentro fortuito en una mesa de disección
de un paraguas y una máquina de coser”, que los surrealistas adoptaron como un grito
de guerra en su ataque contra las ideas inculcadas y las relaciones convencionales.
Bacon superó este ataque de forma brillante, y quizá más rotunda que ningún otro
pintor, con su inimitable combinación de religión y blasfemia, realidad e imaginación,
tradicionalismo y revolución, optimismo y depresión.››[ Peppiatt. Francis
Bacon. Anatomía de un enigma. 1999 (1996): 96-97. Su análisis de las influencias
surrealistas se extiende en 96-99. El libro no contiene referencias directas de
interés sobre Miró e incluye al menos un error [p. 150], al explicar que la marchante
Erica Brausen se estableció en Mallorca (donde tuvo un bar) en los años 30 llevada
de su admiración por Miró; un error debido probablemente a que Brausen admiraba la obra mironiana gracias
a su larga residencia en París desde c. 1930; y que el autor considerase que Miró
residía entonces en Mallorca, lo que no es cierto.]
Fuentes.
Internet.
Exposiciones.
<Francis Bacon>. París. Grand Palais (26 octubre 1971-10 enero 1972). Miró y Masson asistieron al vernissage de su amigo Bacon.
*<Francis Bacon. Pablo Picasso>. Madrid. Galería
Theo (marzo-abril 1977). Cat. Texto de Julián Gállego. s/p.
<Francis Bacon>. Barcelona. FJM (2 junio-16 julio
1978). Cat. Introducción de Antonio Bonet Correa (5-13). 50 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Recent
Paintings>. Marlborough Gallery (26 abril-7
junio 1980). Cat. 30 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Peintures
récentes>. París. Galerie Maeght Lelong (enero 1984). 16 obras. Cat. “Repères”
nº 10. Prefacio de Jacques Dupin. Entrevista a Bacon, por David Sylvester. 35 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Recent Paintings>.
Marlborough Gallery (5 mayo-5 junio 1984). Cat. 38 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Paintings>. Londres. Marlborough
Gallery (mayo- junio 1985). Cat. 46 pp.
<Francis Bacon>.
Londres. Tate Gallery (22 mayo-18 agosto 1985). Cat. Textos de Dawn Ades, Andrew
Forge. 246 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Peintures
récentes>. París. Galerie Lelong (septiembre 1987). 11 obras. Cat. “Repères”
nº 39. Prefacio de Jacques Dupin. Entrevista a Bacon, por David Sylvester. 44 pp.
*<De Bacon a oggi. L’otsider nella figurazione britannica>.
Florencia. Palazzo Vecchio (7 diciembre 1991-16 febrero 1992). Ed. Electa. Milán.
1991. 119 pp.
*<Homage to Francis Bacon>. Basilea. Galería Beyeler
(junio-septiembre 1992). Obras de Miró (Bandera española, 1925), Picasso,
Giacometti, González, Dubuffet, Tàpies, Rothko. Cat. 60 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Pinturas 1981-1991>. Madrid. Galería
Marlborough (8 octubre-14 noviembre 1992). Cat. Texto de Antonio Muñoz Molina y
entrevista a Bacon por Richard Cork. 47 pp.
<Francis Bacon. Figurabile>. Venecia. Museo Corner
(13 junip-10 octubre 1993). Cat. Textos de Achille Bonito Oliva, David Sylvster,
David Mellor, Gilles Deleuze, Lorenza Trucchi, Daniela Palazzoli. 134 pp. Texto
inglés.
*<Marlene Dumas. Francis Bacon>. Malmoe. Konsthall
(18 marzo-14 mayo 1995). Milán. Castello di Rivoli (5 junio-1 octubre). Cat. 199
pp.
*<From London. Bacon. Freud. Kossoff. Andrews.
Auerbach. Kitaj>. Edimburgo. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (1 julio-5 septiembre
1995). Luxemburgo. Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art (22 septiembre-5 noviembre).
Lausana. Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (16 noviembre 1995-4 febrero 1996). Barcelona.
FLC (16 febrero-7 abril 1996). Cat. 159 pp.
*<Bacon-Freud. Expressions>. Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Fondation Maeght (4 julio-15 octubre 1995). Cat. 208 pp.
*<1945. Les figures de la liberté>.
Ginebra. Musée RATH (27 octubre 1995-7 enero 1996). 200 obras de Miró (Bailarina
española, 1945), Van de Velde, Giacometti, Bacon, Kay Sage... Organizada por
Claire Stoullig. Cat. Skira. 328 pp. 175 ilus.
<Francis Bacon>. París. MNAM (27 junio-14 octubre
1996). Múnich. Haus der Kunst (4 noviembre 1996-31
enero 1997). Cat. 335 pp.
<Francis Bacon>. Palma de Mallorca.
Casal Solleric (mayo-junio 1998). Cat. Texto de Gabriel Rodríguez, Francis Bacon: la pasíón por lo real (11-14). 55 pp. Pasó a <Francis Bacon>.
León. Sala Provincia (enero-marzo 1999). Cat. 54 pp.
*<Francis Bacon et la tradition
de l’art>. Viena. Kunsthistorisches Museum (16 octubre 2003-18 enero 2004).
Basilea. Fundación Beyeler (8 febrero-20 junio 2004). 40 obras de Bacon y obras
y filmes de iziano, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Ingres, Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso,
Giacometti, Soutine, Eissenstein, Buñuel... Comisaria: Barbara Steffen.
*<Bacon. Picasso>.
París. Musée Picasso (4 marzo-30 mayo 2005). 100 obras de Bacon y Picasso, en diálogo.
<Francis Bacon>. Londres. Tate Britain (11 septiembre 2008-4 enero 2009).
Madrid. Museo del Prado (3 febrero-19 abril 2009). Nueva York. MET (18 mayo-16 agosto
2009). Comisarios: Matthew Gale y Chris Stephens.
Reseñas de Walter Oppenheimer. El aullido eterno de
Francis Bacon. “El País” (10-IX-2008) 32. / Luzán, Julia. Viaje póstumo de Bacon a Madrid. “El País” Semanal 1.687 (25-I-2009)
62-73. / García, Ángeles. Bacon distorsiona El Prado. “El País”
(31-I-2009) 36. / Cruz, Juan. Aquella
tarde londinense junto a la fiera humana. “El País” (31-I-2009) 37. /Calvo Serraller,
F. Bacon, la sensualidad de la herida.
“El País” Babelia 898 (7-II-2009) 18. / Argullol, Rafael. La estimulante desesperación de Bacon.
“El País” (13-II-2009) 29. / Marín-Medina, José. Francis Bacon. Patetismo y grandeza.
“El Cultural”
(30-I-2009) 24-27.
*<Let us face the future / Afrontemos el futuro.
Arte británico 1945-1968>. Barcelona. FJM (27 noviembre 2010-20 febrero 2011). Arte británico
de 1945-1968: 87 obras de 37 artistas: Bacon, Blake, Caro, Lucien Freud, Hamilton,
Moore, Bridget Riley… Comisarios: Andrew Dempsey, Richard Riley. Cat. Reseñas: Serra,
Catalina. Los submarinos del Arte británico.
“El País” Cataluña (26-XI-2010) 8. / Reseña de Molina, Ángela. Afrontar la insularidad. “El País” Babelia
1001 (29-I-2011) 18.
*<El factor grotesco>. Málaga. Museo Picasso (2012). 270 obras de 72
artistas: Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Dix, Gutiérrez Solana, Klee, Magritte, Juan Muñoz,
Thomas Schütte, Bill Viola... Comisario: José Lebrero. Reseña de Bozal, Valeriano.
Risa lúcida. “El Cultural” (19-X-2012)
27-29.
<Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture>.
Mónaco. Grimaldi Forum (2 julio-4 septiembre 2016). Sobre la relación de Bacon con Francia. Comisario: Martin Harrison. [grimaldiforum.com]. Cat. Francis
Bacon: France and Monaco. Albin Michel. París y The
Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation y Heni Publishing. Reseña de Ibarz, Mercè. Bacon el jugador. “El País” (21-VII-2016), con una foto de Miró, Bacon y Masson en la inauguración de la
retrospectiva de Bacon en el Grand Palais de París el 26 de octubre de 1971, tomada por André
Morain y propiedad de Francis Bacon Foundation.
*<Francis
Bacon. De Picasso a Velázquez>. Bilbao. Museo Guggenheim (30 septiembre
2016-8 enero 2017). 50 obras de Bacon y 30 de otros artistas. Comisario: Martin
Harrison. Reseña de Bono, Ferran. El
genio de Bacon se mide con Picasso y Velázquez. “El País” (30-IX-2016).
<Bacon con
todas sus letras>. París. MNAM (11 septiembre 2019-20 enero 2020). Las
referencias poéticas y filosóficas del artista. Comisario: Didier Ottinger.
Reseña de Vicente, Álex. La pasión literaría de Bacon. “El País”
(12-IX-2019).
Libros.
Anónimo. Francis
Bacon. Polígrafa. Barcelona. 1994.
64 pp. 122 ilus.
color, 12 b/n.
Bénézit, E. Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, désignateurs
et graveurs. Gründ. París. 1976. 10 vs.
Reed. Jacques Busse (dir.). 1999. 14 vs. Vol.
1, pp.
614-616.
Davies,
Hugh; Yard, Sally. Francis Bacon. Abbeville Press. Nueva York. 1986. 128
pp.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis
Bacon. Lógica de la sensación. Arena Libros. Madrid. 2002. 96
pp.
Gowing, Lauwrence; Hunter, Sam. Francis Bacon. Thames & Hudson. Londres.
1989. 187 pp.
Harrison, Martin (ed.). Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. Estate of Francis Bacon [francis-bacon.com].
Leiris, Michel. Francis Bacon. Polígrafa.
Barcelona. 1987. 128 pp. Eds. en español, francés, inglés (1988).
Peppiatt, Michael. Francis
Bacon (1909-1992). Anatomía de un enigma. Gedisa.
Barcelona. 1999 (1996 inglés, 397 pp.). 402 pp. La biografía de referencia.
Russell, John. Francis Bacon. Thames & Hudson. Londres.
1971. 192 pp.
Sylvester, David. The Brutality of Fact. Interviews with Francis Bacon. Thames & Hudson. Londres. 1975, 1980, 1987. 208 pp. Influencia surrealista (pp.
150 y 170).
Sylvester, David. Entrevistas
con Francis Bacon. Polígrafa. Barcelona. 1977. 143 pp. Reed. Editorial del Bolsillo.
Barcelona. 2003. 125 pp. Cinco entrevistas (1962-1975).
Sylvester, David. Francis
Bacon. Thames & Hudson. Londres. 2000. 272 pp.
Yvars, J.F. Al temps de les
formes. Notes d'art. Edicions 62. Barcelona. 2000. Recopilación
de artículos en “La Vanguardia” sobre Bacon, Bonnard, Duchamp, Moore...
Artículos.
AA.VV. Especial Bacon.
“Opus International”, París, 68 (verano 1978).
Schefer, Jean Louis; et al. Francis Bacon. “Artstudio” (verano 1990)
143 pp.
Goldberg, Itzhak. Francis bacon, la peinture à fleur de peau.
La passion selon Bacon en 14 stations. “Beaux Arts”, 147 (julio-agosto 1996)
46-57.
Jarque, Fietta. Bacon. Archivo inédito de cuerpos. “El País” Semanal (7-III-2010)
56-63. Fotografías de dos luchadores ordenadas por Bacon a principios de los
años 70 en Nueva York, para usarlas como inspiración en sus cuadros.
Tubella, Patricia. Una
amistad a merced del martillo. “El País” (10-II-2011) 38. La relación entre
Bacon y Lucian Freud, y Tres estudios
para el retrato de Lucian Freud.
Verdú, Vicente. Bacon no
quita el sueño. “El País” (3-XII-2011) 40.
Smith, Stephen. Francis Bacon: creating order from chaos. “The Guardian” (24-VI-2016).
Cruz, Juan. Por
donde entra el aire en los cuadros de Bacon. “El País” (11-VIII-2016). Cruz recuerda sus contactos en Madrid con el
pintor.
Apéndice. *Texto para comentario en clase.
Ante la anhelada aparición del catálogo razonado realizado por Marvin Harrison de las pinturas de Bacon, Stephen Smith escribe en Francis Bacon: creating order from chaos. “The Guardian” (24-VI-2016):
‹‹An unsparing observer of the human condition, Francis Bacon was as unsentimental about death as he was about life. "When I’m dead, put me in a plastic ag and throw me in the gutter", the old hellraiser told the proprietor of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den which was Bacon’s second home, if not his first. In his lifetime, the artist reportedly declined honours, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit. “They’re so ageing,” he complained. His friend Daniel Farson once asked if he was pleased that he had secured his place in the history of art. “Oh don’t talk such rubbish!” was the reply.
Bacon had little use for the arts establishment. Despite the lack of an art college education, or perhaps because of it, he emerged self-made. “No one could imitate Bacon without looking stupid,” wrote the critic Robert Hughes. “But to ignore him is equally absurd, for no other painter has set forth with such pitiless clarity the tensions and paradoxes that surround all efforts to see, let alone paint, the human figure in the age of photography.” Finding little to praise in the ranks of his fellow artists – or the critics – Bacon got on with his singular calling of confining screaming popes and anguished lovers to grid-like boxes, as rudimentary and lethal as gin traps. But posterity has refused to repay Bacon’s snub in kind. Since his death in 1992, the fashionable end of the art market has clasped him to its bosom. Three years ago, his triptych of fellow artist and one-time friend, Lucian Freud, set a record price for a work at auction. Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) went for £89m. And now every last shrieking pontiff and writhing lover has been hunted down and captured between the pages of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, a handsomely bound and presented five-volume box set the size and weight of a fully laden builder’s hod. Bacon is the one in a box now.
A cat res, in the art world shorthand, is an authoritative record of an artist’s oeuvre, to be consulted by scholars, gallerists, dealers and collectors. Bacon’s includes scores of previously unseen and little known works, and seems certain to challenge the established art history on him. It’s highly collectible in its own right: at 1,538 pages with 800 illustrations, it will set you back £1,000. It’s finished in a louring Baconian grey, the colour of a hospital gurney. Although its object couldn’t have cared less it has been produced with great gravity by the estate of Francis Bacon, which administers the artist’s staggeringly successful posthumous career. And it’s the estate, with its geologically deep pockets, that has supported years of painstaking research to make the catalogue possible. “Although the cost is not being disclosed, it probably amounted to several million pounds,” according to the respected Art Newspaper.
Such an inventory would be the work of a moment in the case of a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst. All you’d have to do is access the codes to the artist’s digital cloud and download a fully comprehensive record of every work, including the date, title and perhaps even the names of the men and women who actually made it. But such a neat and tidy solution wasn’t an option with Bacon. He lived a rackety version of the artistic life, gambling, picking up rough trade and shoplifting with his old nanny, like Soho’s answer to Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte. His art, too, involved a surrender to chance, accident and disorder. In BBC footage from the 70s, we encounter the painter at his home in Reece Mews, South Kensington. At first sight, it looks like an early pilot for one of those programmes where hoarders are talked out from behind their stockades of junk. Bacon blinks at the heaps of paint-soaked rags that clutter the place like grape skins in a winery. He says, “I feel at home here in this chaos. Also chaos suggests images to me. In any case, if I go into a new room, in a week’s time, the place is in chaos.”
“Can you imagine Francis Bacon keeping a record of a painting?” asks Martin Harrison incredulously. The editor of the catalogue raisonné, Harrison spent a decade tracking down all 584 surviving Bacons – the ones the artist didn’t destroy. For the first time since Bacon’s scandalising forms left his studio, they have been reunited on Harrison’s pages. At the gallery where we meet – where else but Soho? – he has the exhausted but quietly satisfied air of a priest who has performed an exorcism, and has just heard that a well deserved medal is on its way from the Vatican.
Harrison says the artist left him little to go on. “There are one or two diaries with a couple of lines in them. He’d get them from places like Charlie Chester’s Casino, where they handed out little leather-bound diaries. And like lots of us, by 4 January he’d given up.”
Before Harrison, the definitive guide to Bacon was a 1964 catalogue raisonné, published when the artist still had three active decades ahead of him. By then, Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair had begun to represent him, and the gallery’s administrator Valerie Beston proved to be “an assiduous recorder”, as Harrison puts it. But her ledgers only took him so far. “One was usually searching for paintings which one knew existed. You just didn’t know where they were. Either they hadn’t been exhibited for a very long time, or they had never been exhibited at all. If their owners were middle-aged or older at the time they acquired the paintings, they were almost certainly no longer alive, so the pictures had changed hands. But there were also paintings that turned up and came to my authentication committee that hadn’t previously been recorded at all.”
Harrison discovered that the painter of bracingly uninhibited homosexual encounters had actually produced more female nudes (18) than gay sex scenes (11). And his finds include what may have been Bacon’s “best pope”, which the artist wrongly believed he had scrapped. Bacon was obsessed with Velázquez’s famous study of Pope Innocent X and made variations of it until 1965. He told the critic David Sylvester that he regretted destroying what he regarded as his finest attempt after Velázquez. But perhaps he didn’t destroy it, and perhaps Harrison has found it: a figure in papal purple, legs crossed in a chair or throne, pinioned within a thicket of orange bars and roaring his head off. This pope, painted in 1950, is on the walls of the gallery, one of half a dozen unseen Bacons exhibited to promote Harrison’s text. He says, “Is this his best pope? We can’t tell. All we can say for certain is that this one was lost and has now re-emerged.” It belonged to a group of works that ended up in storage at an art lock-up in Chelsea. “There’s nothing recorded about this but I think Bacon simply forgot about them. After he died, a room was found there with a lot of paintings that he had abandoned.”
Compiling the catalogue demanded the skills of a gumshoe as much as an art historian. “You get on the phone and start ringing people up,” Harrison says. “You’re looking for someone and it turns out there are seven people in Welshpool who have the same name. Or someone would say of a painting, ‘Oh, there was someone in Turin who had it.’ So there was a lot of hopping on planes.” The editor’s labours recall the travails of Norman Sherry, the indefatigable biographer of Graham Greene. For the sake of his triple-decker life, Sherry went everywhere the globe-trotting novelist had been, exposing himself to every blowpipe and mosquito-loud interior. Sherry caught the same illnesses as Greene, and even parted with a length of his intestine. Happily, Harrison can still talk with relish of coming face to extraordinary face with the Bacons he found. “The excitement of getting up close to them is in the ravishing texture, power and energy of the paint, which truly does still turn me on. It’s spine-tingling.”
Though the catalogue raisonné has a steep price tag, it will be made available to deserving institutions free of charge through the largesse of the estate, says Harrison. It is also expected to appear online. “I know someone who ordered three already,” he says. “She owns about eight Bacons. Anyone who owns eight Bacons can afford three of these.” He has uncovered fascinating curios that future biographers will thank him for, including a photograph of Bacon in the unlikely guise of an air-raid warden during the blitz. Harrison’s research has led him to the “unfashionable” conclusion that there are psychological motivations for a lot of the artist’s imagery. “They’re not abstracts, and he’s so devoted to the figure, the human body. I believe things that came out of his own life and experience were crucial to that.”
But mysteries remain about Bacon’s subject matter and motives. Harrison hopes to tease out more about them with an exhibition he’s curating in Monaco next month, which looks at the time Bacon spent in Paris and the Riviera, and some of the artists who inspired him, including Léger and Toulouse Lautrec.
The French capital was the scene of one of the darkest episodes in Bacon’s life. In 1971, his lover George Dyer killed himself a few hours before the opening of a Bacon exhibition. Among the painter’s threadbare jottings, Harrison found a reference to the suicide. “George died a year ago today,” he wrote. A new book claims that he tried to hush up the death for the sake of his career, but that’s not how the tragedy is recalled by friends who were with him at the time.
Dr Paul Brass, Bacon’s former GP, told me, “I remember thinking that Francis wouldn’t come to dinner the night of the opening. But he did. I think he just had a feeling that he couldn’t let everyone down, and he had to go through with it.”
On more than one occasion, Brass was roused from his bed in the early hours of the morning to patch up the worse-for-wear artist. “I once found him in a bad way at his studio, and I said you’re going to have to see a plastic surgeon. He said ‘Absolutely not – you can stitch me up now.’ So we lay him on the table in his studio. I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused. He was so drunk I don’t think he felt anything.”
Brass once gave evidence for Bacon in court after Dyer, in a jealous rage, planted cannabis in the kitchen at Reece Mews and called the police. “Francis was a chronic asthmatic, and I was able to show that smoking cannabis would have made him very ill.” Shortly after Bacon was cleared, he left a brown paper parcel at Brass’s surgery. It was a thank you present, a self portrait, which the doctor and his wife sold after Bacon’s death for £350,000. It paid for the home they retired to on the south coast. A Bacon of similar size and quality recently went for £5m.
Brass said, “When Francis was very ill, he would say, ‘You know Paul, when I’m dead my paintings won’t be worth anything.’››
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