Exhibitions
Van Gogh vu par Bacon (Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Palais de Luppe, Arles. till 6 October)
Homage to the master
Tanya Harrod
In the early part of 1957 Francis Bacon made eight paintings based on Van Gogh's autobiographical self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon'. Bacon knew the picture only as a colour reproduction in a Phaidon hook on the artist, The original, painted in Arles in 1888, had been destroyed during the second world war. Bacon preferred early Van Gogh but he had a special fondness for the picture — 'the one that was burnt in Germany'. In 1957 a solo exhibition of Bacon's work at the Hanover Gallery was looming and 'as nothing else had gone right I thought I'd try to do something with it'. The Tarascon paintings arrived barely dry and the crush at the private view was so great that Van Gogh was further translated, onto the clothes of an assorted crowd of students, friends, dealers, Teddy Boys and hangers on. The show was not well received and subsequently the critic John Russell, in the first full-length study of Bacon's work, dismissed the Tarascon series as 'perhaps the weakest of his groups of paintings'.
Van Gogh vu par Bacon reunites seven of them at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh at Arles, together with a couple of later Van Gogh-inspired paintings that have considerably less bite. Both the 1960 variant on Van Gogh's 'Self Portrait with a Pipe' and 'Homage a Van Gogh' of 1985 are recognisably by Bacon. But the 1957 Tarascon pictures are startlingly different — both from the rest of his oeuvre and from each other. Indeed, each can be read as a separate, remarkable essay on the practice of painting.
As Andrew Brighton has pointed out in his recent monograph on Bacon, the scholarship surrounding this late, great artist is still embryonic. No catalogue raisonne exists and the authenticity of a whole body of work — the Barry Joule collection of drawings — is uncertain. Meanwhile the existing literature seems stagily old fashioned — a mixture of plushly written formal analysis and mythologising of the gilded gutter variety. And Bacon poses problems for the younger art historian who will be less easy with Bacon's reinstatement of the Grand Manner, with the idea of Genius, high Bohemia and, even, with the last gasp of Expressionist painting.
This unease characterises David Alan Mellor's valiant catalogue essay for Van Gogh vu par Bacon. Mellor's special gift is for a kind of social history of art in which unexpected connections are made and overlooked figures are reinstated, Mellor therefore tries to normalise Bacon by, for instance, including him in a generalised flight south to the Mediterranean by artists after the war. He discusses Vincent Minelli's blockbuster film about Van Gogh. Lust for Life, which Bacon saw in 1956, his possible reading of Georges Bataille's essay on Van Gogh as Prometheus, the impact of Suez and of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and the conceivable influence of the sculpture of Eduardo Paolozzi. None of this seems entirely convincing, except perhaps the mix of high and low influences — the MinellifBataille nexus. For instance, Bacon may have been part of an exodus south after the war, but he chose to live in Monte Carlo. One imagines him firmly indoors amongst the velvet banquettes and chandeliers of the gaming house. Certainly his mediterraneisme did not translate very obviously into art. The utopia pastoral of the Midi went unrecorded.
Bacon's Tarascon series has little to do with Mellor's careful cultural mapping. We know, however, that Bacon greatly admired Van Gogh's letters, reread them constantly and kept a copy of them by his bed. It seems that in 1957 Bacon worked from two overt sources — the reproduction of 'The Painter on the Road to Tarascon' and the letters Van Gogh was writing to his brother Theo from Arles, the letters of un suicide. Bacon's description of the destroyed painting as depicting a 'haunted figure on the road — like a phantom of the road' capture the cadence of Van Gogh's own letters of 1888. But the letters also provide a more practical programme — with descriptions of the summer heat in Provence creating 'orange shades like storm flashes, vivid as red-hot iron', with ambitious dreams of night paintings in which he would express 'the terrible passion of humanity by means of red and green' and talk of using colour to suggest the emotions of an ardent temperament.
Bacon's tributes to 'The Painter on the Road to Tarascon' are his only plein air paintings, except of course they are not plein air at all, but dictated by a reproduction and some letters. In the background was an all-encompassing knowledge of other painting, aside from the obvious homage to Van Gogh. Mostly this erudition was something that Bacon did not flaunt, Film, documentary photography and modern design are more trackable sources for his art. But the high colour, thick impasto and allusive experiments with mark-making are unique to this series and alone worth the trip to Arles. Thus of the two versions from the Smithsonian, one quotes Daumier and Barnett Newman and the other Asger Jorn, The variants from Siegen and the Pompidou Centre take on Cezanne. The wonderful picture from the Sainsbury Centre honours Van Gogh by tackling the problem of night painting.
Working from a copy of a lost original sounds like a typically post-modern exercise in appropriation. Certainly in his early work Bacon tackled the myth of originality head on by reusing and reshaping a huge range of existing visual material. But he has ended up seeming the quintessential Magus artist, the man John Russell described as 'one of the most memorable men ever to hold a brush'. This magnificent small show at Arles suggests new ways of looking at Bacon and should not be missed. For students of the mythology there is a large, glamorous accompanying exhibition of photographs of Bacon at every stage of his life.
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