Arts

A cause for celebration

Daniel Farson

A major retrospective of Francis Bacon's work opens at the Tate Gallery on 22 May

Rumour has it that Mrs Thatcher ex- IN.pressed dismay when she was told that Francis Bacon is recognised as our greatest

living painter: 'Not that dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures!' The reac- tion is not uncommon. Though it is a compliment to Bacon that he retains the power to shock, this rarely comes from people who have seen the original canvases which reveal his mastery of paint, and never from those who know the man himself. Far from the tortured figure of his reputation, Francis Bacon is usually in excellent humour. The quality his friends would agree on is that of laughter. He is the strongest-minded man I know, and devoid of doubt.

Anyone attempting to write about him will know the hazards involved. The late Frank Norman abandoned the attempt after trailing him for several days around the bars and restaurants of Soho: `I felt like a spy,' he wrote to me later. 'He spoke marvellously about Berlin in the 1920s but things soon deteriorated and I was reduced to keeping my ears open, nipping into the lavatory to scribble notes on bits of toilet paper! In the morning I'd find all these screwed up pieces in my pockets scrawled in a barely legible hand with such choice remarks as: "I have never had love in the whole of my life and what's more I don't want it. All I can do is cast my rod into the sewers of despair and see what I come up with."'

I can hear Bacon's voice ringing with ridicule as he said it, for mockery is the pivot for much of his conversation. 'De- spair? I have grown accustomed to its face,' he told me in a burst of laughter, 'I don't believe in tragedy.'

His wit is hard to convey in the cold print of morning because his intonation is inimit- able. 'I'm just a simple idiot' sounds trite unless you heard him declare it over dinner at L'Escargot, pronounced with an ex- aggerated emphasis as iddy-ote. Then it was hilarious. When my lamb arrived in a succulent sauce he studied the plate with a bemused expression, 'I hope I don't have gravy on mine,' he said, investing that word with the dolefulness of a Victorian workhouse.

Though he can be extraordinarily kind, the precision of his voice, varying from Mayfair-cockney to a carefully injured French, can lacerate. I achieved a final reconciliation with Graham Sutherland with whom he exhibited as far back as 1937, though they had fallen out since then. We met in the neutral territory of Jules Bar in Jermyn Street and after a moment's hesitation they leapt on each other like dogs welcoming their owner home. It was heartening to witness and when Bacon suggested moving on to Wheeler's fish restaurant in Old Compton Street, Graham and Kathy Sutherland, who had vowed to do nothing of the sort, agreed without a flicker of apprehension. As soon as we sat down I sensed that Bacon's mood had changed and winced when Graham Sutherland leant forward sympathetically and confided, 'I've been doing some portraits, I wonder if you've seen any of them?'

'Yes, I have,' said Francis emphatically, and the warning bells began to ring, though not for Sutherland who continued: 'And what did you think of them?'

'Very nice, if you happen to like the covers of Time magazine.' They did not meet again, which was sad for they had been the closest of friends.

As I know from experience, it can be an awesome moment when he turns, though he argues — 'If you can't be nasty to your friends, who can you be nasty to?'

He does not like being reminded of remarks he has made in the past. When Barry Driscoll, the wildlife artist, asked him, `Tell us, Francis, if you weren't an artist what would you have liked to have been?', Bacon replied with deceptive art- lessness — 'a mother'; but when Driscoll

was rash enough to quote this two years later, Bacon swung round imperiously: 'I never said such a thing.' Turning to Dris- coll's two sons who happened to be stand- ing nearby, he demanded, 'Do you like your father?'

'Of course,' they stammered.

'Well I don't. I think he's an absolute bastard.' Since then he greets Driscoll warmly, without the slightest indication that they have ever met before.

When I reminded him of his claim that 95 per cent of people are passive, waiting to be entertained and brought to life, he stared at me suspiciously: `Did I really say that? How foolish of me. I should have said 991/2 per cent.'

Bacon is that other half per cent. Lord Gowrie says he is one of the most intelli- gent men in the country and even Mrs Thatcher might succumb if she dared to meet him, though.Bacon would probably decline the invitation.

One of his outstanding qualities is con- stancy. He has gone his way regardless of fashion or expedience. In the early 1950s he was so poor that he lived like a millionaire, lunching on oysters at Wheel- er's before moving on to the Colony Room in Dean Street where he ordered cham- pagne on credit, pouring it with gusto as he echoed the Edwardian toast: `Champagne for your real friends; real pain for your sham friends!' The Colony was an after- noon drinking club enlivened by the wit of the woman who owned it, Muriel Belcher, one of the few people Bacon has been fond of. When the club opened in 1948 she offered him £10 a week and free drinks to introduce new members who might be good 'spenders'. Both she and Bernard Walsh, who owned Wheeler's, had faith in his future and when he sold a painting he lopped something off their bills. Once he needed cash immediately and asked me if I knew of someone who might buy one of the large canvases based on the Velasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. I persuaded a college friend to do so, almost wrecking his marriage for his wife grew to detest the figure which screamed in silence at the top of the stairs terrorising their tiny cottage. To my surprise when I handed over the 1150 in notes, Bacon gave me £15 as a dealer's commission; he has always been a generous friend. Today that picture Is worth far more than £150,000.

Little has changed since the time whe,° he lived 'between the gutter and the Ritz • The mews house in South Kensington still looks as if it is waiting for the furniture to arrive, with blankets over the windoWs instead of curtains, and naked light bulbs glaring down on a debris of brushes and exhausted tubes of paint. Wheeler's re- mains his favourite restaurant, and though Muriel is dead he frequently continues t° the Colony where he has a sparring rela- tionship with her successor, Ian Board. The champagne might be replaced by a better vintage and the caviar sent back because it tastes too salty, otherwise he IS uncorrupted by success. While some art1StS

would sell their reputation for a knight- hood, he has rejected the honours which have been offered to him with the same contempt that he treated his accountants when they suggested he should move to Switzerland — 'Can you imagine anything more boring? All those views!'

Bacon distrusts the blandishments of television, which most people seem unable to resist, and agreed to be interviewed by me at Wheeler's in 1958 simply because Bernard Walsh was prepared to wipe out his appalling bill by charging it to publicity. On that first appearance, I mentioned that some critics found his work unpleasant: 'Sometimes I have used subject matter Which people think is sensational because one of the things I have wanted to do was record the human cry — the whole coagulation of pain and despair — and that In itself is something sensational.' Since the curious Arena on BBC2 last year, Bacon has vowed that he will not appear on television again.

Consequently, because his face is un- familiar, it is possible to drink with him in a pub where he is so unknown that he was Offered a job decorating a house when someone heard he was a painter. With Chagall's death, and Dali just alive but no longer painting, Bacon is the most impor- tant artist who is working today. There is no hint of this when you are in his company though there was a moving moment at a recent lunch in Wheeler's when an Amer- ican couple stopped at his table to tell him, Shyly, how honoured they were to be in his Presence. His reputation is higher in New York and Paris than it is here.

To say he looks young for his age is Irrelevant to a man who has always been ageless. At 76 there is a harder edge to his lean distinction and after a night of drink and gambling he can look fiercely haggard, though later in the day he might be radiant. Ile still dresses with studied carelessness, entering a room with a curious tread as it he is venturing out on deck in a high sea, Clutching his throat as if to protect himself against the wind, with a smile breaking across his face. Young admirers of his work Who might be daunted by his reputation

are disarmed when they meet him: 'He hits sn deep, his triptych of Christ is really

horrific,' an art student told me, but she added: 'yet whenever I have met him he has the most darling sweet face and one wonders where the pessimism is.' It comes as a jolt to hear him described aS pessimistic, but critics go further than

af: 'His blood-chilling pictures of alcoho- °ex and madmen, sadists and perverts.

epitomise all the sickness of our period,' ‘b'rote John Richardson, a view confirmed Y. an arty television programme which ;nixed the newsreel clichés of Hitler, illiroshima and Buchenwald with illustra- kInns of Bacon's screaming figures and .uleeding carcases of meat, concluding that !he artist was tormented by the atrocities of ;he 20th century. If proof was needed of Ine .arrogance in interpreting an artist's Itt°fIves this was it, for Bacon is fascinated

by the image rather than the message. As he explained to Miriam Gross, his attrac- tion to raw, red flesh is simpler: 'You've only got to go into a butcher's shop — it's nothing to do with mortality, as people often think, it's to do with the great beauty of the colour of the meat.'

This does not mean that Bacon is indiffe- rent to the violence around us; when I asked him for his definition of 'horror' he gave it instantly: 'People bashing some- one's brains in for no particular reason, just to pass the time — pour passer le temps.'

Now he is poised for the most crucial exhibition of his life, 25 years to the day after that first memorable retrospective also held at the Tate. It is a cause for celebration, but with the opportunity to see his recent work assembled with the old this will also be the ultimate test of his genius. Increasingly, he expresses his dis- illusionment with contemporary art, asking, 'Does it do anything that a colour photograph can't do better?' Equally, he has little patience with abstract design.

In one of his rare tributes to another artist, he wrote: 'I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splosh the bits down, and in this game of chance Mathew Smith seems to have the gods on his side.' Bacon may have been thinking of himself as well, but this is slightly disingenuous for he knows better than anyone that the creative accident needs a calculated audacity too.

The new paintings will speak for them- selves — 'If you could say it, you wouldn't paint it' — but the last time we met he stated his aim: 'It is necessary to re-invent

'The point is, some liberties are more civil than others.' the language.'

It is a measure of his originality that he has done exactly that, even if some people find it hard to understand.