Art

Francis Bacon (Tate Gallery till 18 August)

Reservations

Giles Auty

Alast the opportunity has come to assess a lifetime's work by one thought by many to be the world's foremost living painter. However, amid the Niagaras of praise tumbling from other pens, I find myself an isolated advocate of caution.

To explain my reservations I should quote first the well-known tale of the disillusioned art lecturer who said, 'By now, all art students know that Rembrandt was a very great artist. The problem is that none of them know why.'

So, too, with Bacon.

Within the pages of this paper, two weeks ago, Daniel Farson wrote 'With Chagall's death, and Dali just alive but no longer painting, Bacon is the most impor- tant artist who is working today.' I doubt whether Bacon would necessarily be flat- tered by the company chosen for him, but in the Sunday Times Magazine Lord Gow- rie makes a rather more attractive com- parison: 'Francis Bacon is the greatest

painter in the world and the best this country has produced since Turner.' Alan Bowness, director of the Tate, makes an equally ambitious and rather more con- troversial claim: 'His own work sets the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predica- ment with such insight and feeling.' With the wind of such words gusting in our ears, it is hard to keep hold of our critical hats.

Unlike many writers, including my co- correspondent on this journal, I have not spoken to the artist for many years. The last time we exchanged words, as I recall,

was in a British Rail dining car, wherein the ferocious appearance and expressions of the artist's travelling companion ren- dered the railway fare even more indigesti- ble than usual to the more typical run of passenger. Before this our paths had cros- sed briefly in Cornwall where the artist was once kind enough to share a bottle of the excellent whisky sent him by his gallery for Christmas. An afternoon of interesting and perceptive conversation — on the artist's part, at least — about Bonnard, among others, was abbreviated by the return of an earlier companion of the artist, to whom art discussion was clearly anathema. I claim no insight whatsoever from these brief talks, other than to suggest that much of the artist's work is far more personal than earlier schools of criticism have claimed. Unlike Dr Bowness, I do not feel that the artist presents the human, so much as his own, predicament in his work. His view of the world and its flesh, however

powerful, is deeply idiosyncratic. As I wrote many years ago, attempts by others to discover universal truth in the artist's highly personal vision, probably irritate him even more than they do me.

In the past decade, there has been a major shift in the critical tack. Wisely many critics have dropped the 'universal predicament' story. Manifestly the artist's intensely urban and claustrophobic vision is not, for example, about a young farmer's struggle to make a living for his family in the Scottish or Cymric hills. Of course, the farmer — and his family — will no doubt die and decay in God's good time, but not necessarily from wounds which are self- inflicted.

More recently we have been generally enjoined to concentrate on the painterly, rather than the vision-bearing aspect of the artist's abilities. Here I am in much stron- ger agreement. The artist's formal audacity and versatility have built up steadily from years of dedicated work. Bacon's discover- ies are made in the physical battleground of the studio, rather than in the arid contemplation of art magazines or work by contemporaries. Equally I share the depth of the artist's respect for past art and lack of interest in purely abstract forms. Bacon is a powerful, original and unfashionable form-maker, whose use of colour can be darkly sensual. For most visitors to the Tate, however, colour will probably seem a secondary issue compared with the often grotesque ambiguities of the fleshly forms. Accident and physiological re-arrangement combine with stock Baconian devices circular areas of magnification and point- ing arrows, for instance — to form unnerv- ing distortions. Simply with paint, Bacon makes creatures with a worrying credibil- ity, whose souls may be laid bare before us like secrets divulged under torture. Indeed torture — literally twisting — whether of paint or bodies is a pervading presence. Perhaps the psyches that we glimpse in his portraiture are those which only pain or fear would ordinarily uncover. But are these revelations ultimately 'truer' than those encouraged by love or compassion?

Earlier, I wrote of Bacon as an 'un- fashionable' artist, whose great strength lies in discovering his own formal means of personal expression. Yet, in another sense, the artist has always been unwittingly fashionable, the violence and nihilism in

his work providing a frisson for those whose first reaction to risk in life would be to run for their insurance brokers. At a lower level, admittedly, films of violence and horror are notably popular with la jeunesse doree. The automatic equation of despair with artistic force is a fallacy so obvious that it needs pointing out only to art bureaucrats. This is not the fault of this or any other artist, of course, but is a tendency that should be noted.

In her explanatory essay in the exhibi- tion catalogue, Dawn Ades writes, 'Bacon's figures . . . are painted not as self-controlled, social creatures, but as beings driven by those urges or instincts Bacon describes as the irresistible counter- point to the despair of contemplating death.' And later, 'The meaninglessness that Bacon takes for granted is that of life lived without belief in an after-life, or any moral absolutes.'

The superbly mounted and organised Tate Gallery retrospective, containing many works never previously seen there, show Francis Bacon to be an immensely powerful and inventive artist. Within the gallery walls, time is indeed suspended in an atmosphere at once hypnotic and claus- trophobic. On leaving the exhibition I called in briefly to look at the Turners. Outside, cloud to the South of London was breaking up. Mercifully, the sun, when it finally appeared, did not dangle naked from the sky by a length of flex.