Francis Bacon by Michael Peppiatt

Francis Bacon by Michael Peppiatt

Author:Michael Peppiatt
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780337371
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2014-12-18T16:00:00+00:00


Part Three

1963–92

11

‘A Brilliant Fool Like Me’

1963–69

Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary.

Francis Bacon (in conversation)

Francis Bacon’s reputation grew spectacularly during the 1960s, with the impetus given by the Tate retrospective accelerating throughout the decade. Not only was his work shown prominently every year in major museums and galleries across the world, but the public perception of him began to change subtly from morbid maverick to ‘modern master’. The transformation was put in train by numerous, historically conceived group shows around the world, from ‘Constable to Bacon’ (1962) to ‘Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Masters’ (1966); and the publication of a massive catalogue raisonné as well as the first monograph on the artist by John Russell. Bacon also accepted two prizes: a Carnegie Award in Painting from the Pittsburgh International Exhibition, and the Rubens prize, worth around £1,000, which he donated towards restoring art damaged by the floods in Florence (the partial destruction of the Cimabue Crucifixion had especially affected him). The artist was none the less keenly aware of the danger of public honours to an independent spirit. As Baudelaire, one of his favourite analysts of human behaviour, had warned, they ‘encourage hypocrisy and freeze the spontaneous upsurge of a free heart’.1 Bacon himself, who later turned down all prizes and titles (he was offered a knighthood as well as the more prestigious Order of Merit and Companion of Honour), emphatically agreed. He put it more archly, however: ‘I’ve never wanted those things. They cordon you off from existence. Besides, they’re so ageing.’

With this notoriety came more frequent references to him in the popular press. In 1967, for example, when he returned for the first time in twelve years to South Africa to see his mother and two sisters, Bacon was hailed as the ‘genius of violence’, the ‘finest British painter of the present age’ whose recent show at the Marlborough was reported to have brought him over £60,000. It was during the 1960s, too, that several films were made, on both the work and the man. The most riveting of these remains the no-holds-barred interview filmed in 1964 for Swiss television.2 The film begins with the camera following Bacon round his Reece Mews studio like a hunter stalking its prey; but as the artist becomes progressively drunker and more unpredictable, he begins to send up and dominate the film completely, striking camp poses, turning suddenly serious and penetratingly precise, coiling the long microphone lead round his neck like a necklace, then, with his head thrown back in laughter, spinning like a dervish round the studio with the interviewer and cameraman struggling to follow. Outside the paintings themselves, there are very few records that communicate so vividly the demonic recklessness and delight in derision that surged through the artist as he appeared to abandon himself completely before the lens.

Bacon maintained this capricious, contradictory attitude towards his success, though in diminishing degrees, for the rest of his life. He played with success very much as he gambled,



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