Francis Bacon

"I once worked on an exhibition of Picasso and British art, and it was an enlightening experience for me as a historian of British art. If you’re working with British artists, you start by reading everything about that artist. And I mean everything. In most cases, you’ll do that in a day. With Picasso, obviously you’re not going to be able to do that. The material is simply too abundant. “Bacon is very easily situated into a painterly tradition of using paints and the material itself as vehicles of meaning” Similarly with Francis Bacon, in contrast to many British artists, there’s a huge literature, and it has mushroomed in recent years. That interests me. People have written about Bacon from a sociological point of view and a psychological point of view, they’ve looked at his work in a French Structuralist way and in a Postmodern way. I think the brilliance of John Russell’s book is that he writes with a great sophistication. His is no bland, formal biographical account, but has a simplicity and clarity to it. The writing itself is very beautiful in its simplicity. Moreover, he really gets to all the really fundamental things about Bacon and his art and the concerns that underlie it, not to mention his later influence and everything that happened subsequently. The book was the result of conversations that he’d had with Bacon over many years so there’s an immediacy of account here. Although they’re also very heavily edited and moved around chronologically, Russell’s independence in arranging the material is not at all problematic. The accounts are credibly in Bacon’s own voice, and as a result have achieved a kind of iconic status. I hesitate to say yes, but it’s quite hard to think of a modern British painter who’s more important than him. In a way, I believe he is archetypal, even if it would be difficult to say exactly what that means, really. Another reason I hesitate, perhaps is because in his lifetime, and particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a way of marginalising British art by stereotyping it as figurative. And if any art that matters at that time in Britain is still figurative, it therefore cannot be as great as that of someone like Mark Rothko’s, of this visual tradition of Modernism that culminates in the vision of American abstraction. Go to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, where until recently, there will be one exhibition room after another of French artists and artists from America. There is without a doubt a very important formal aspect to Bacon’s work. He’s very easily situated into a painterly tradition of using paints and the material itself as vehicles of meaning, aside from the image-making. Bacon himself would say, rightly, that that tradition isn’t particularly British, because the father figures are Rembrandt or Velazquez . Bacon’s abstraction is wilfully anti-abstract. The thing I love about Bacon is his ambition: an artist who only wants to paint about life and death and the horror of living in a godless world. There were so many vain, self-important artists in any given period. He says, well, maybe history will judge that the 20th century had a great artist or maybe it will not. Not every century does."