The life and work of the painter Francis Bacon is a well of inexhaustible fascination. There has been so much talk about his private life that it seems that we know everything about him, but we don't really know anything because his work is a dark and sensational moat of which no background is yet known. The Center Pompidou in Paris invites to make caving of Bacon with the great exhibition that opens its season.
The Pompidou is one of those institutions that has the will to progressively reexamine the legacies of the great names of art, that is, to ensure that each exhibition offers an enriched perspective on what has been said before. André Derain, Henri Matisse or René Magrite have already been the subject of these 'postmortem cows' and now it is Francis Bacon's turn. No more no less. If Derain, Matisse or Magritte symbolized unquestionable ruptures in the language of art relating, for example, to the use of brushstrokes, color or the development of a more cordial surrealism, Bacon is loaded with another type of gunpowder. The explosions of Bacon arise 'de profundis', are those that detonate with the morbid, with the accident, with the sexual excitement. If Bacon were a tarot card, it would be the devil's.
A galloping semblance of Francis Bacon (Dublin 1909 - Madrid 1992) draws him as a self-taught artist with a somewhat tortuous childhood and a life and work marked by fire for his homosexuality and relationships. His painting faithfully transparent its complexities and results in an unmistakable style that swings between abstraction, deformity and psychological portrait. In this sense, Bacon shares with Lucien Freud (the other mythical painter of contemporary British culture) a brutal capacity to penetrate the portrayed individual .
Francis Bacon is often very interested in his personal life, which we will not enter here today. Neither I nor the Pompidou, since the exhibition that opens the museum presupposes that the public is already on the way to Bacon. From here, what is offered is a tour that delves elegantly into the artist's drives through literature. 'Bacon en toutes lettres' explores the influence of literature on Francis Bacon's painting . There is no doubt that it is an enriching starting point with respect to the biographical interpretations that are usually made of Bacon's work: through literature we reach the artist's marrow, at an intimacy of which his literary diet is the best testimony It is as if we got on the train of the witch to the ins and outs of Bacon and our wagon were his books.
The exhibition is organized around six central rooms that allude to six core authors in Bacon's life. They are Esquilo, Friedrich Nietzsche, TS Eliot, Michel Leiris, Joseph Conrad and Georges Bataille . These writers inspired Bacon's work and images but mainly shared with him a certain spiritual atmosphere characterized by pessimism, atheism and distrust of any moral value.
Esquilo is the first author we met when we entered Bacon's guts. The matter that unites both is the talent for the construction of the tragedy. Bacon claimed to know by heart fragments of the Greek playwright who breathed certain poetic images into him. The painter did not share a philosophical point of view with Esquilo as much as a compositional instinct for the spectacle of doom. The exhibition shows a triptych of the artist inspired directly by the 'Orestíada', and another whose central theme is the crucifixion (one of the privileged reasons in Bacon's work) and evokes the death of his lover George Dyer a few days before of his great exhibition in 1971 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Death and celebration, cry and laugh: here is the key to the tragedy of life.
Nietzsche and Bacon
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Bacon inevitably get along. The painter's own existence can be a living illustration of the melee battles between the Apollonian and the Dionysian spilled in the German essay 'The Dionysian vision of the world' (1870). Dionysus invites ecstasy and drunkenness as an incentive for creation, magical and frantic dance for the transformation of the spirit. It is only through this perpetual friction that - Nietzsche concludes - "the human being is no longer an artist: he has become a work of art."
The third literary station of our inner journey through Francis Bacon is the poet TS Eliot, whom the painter honored directly on his fabrics on several occasions. Works by the American writer such as 'Wasteland' (1922) or his play 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1926) inspire visions of Bacon, but also a certain way of representing fragments, pieces, different perspectives that are shown simultaneously . Bacon is fragmentary because he has not ceased to have been a distant fan of cubism: hence the multiplicity so characteristic of him that the artist usually drags to the monstrous deformation.
The French writer Michel Leiris was a good friend of Bacon. Leiris translated in French the interviews that the painter had with the influential art critic David Sylvester and that have passed to posterity as his most eloquent testimonies. Leiris and Bacon shared a fondness for bullfights that they considered rites of high symbolic, aesthetic and sacred value: "In the bullfighting pass, the bullfighter, in short, with his calculated movements, his science, his technique, represents beauty superhuman geometric , the archetype, the platonic idea. That all ideal, timeless beauty, only comparable to the harmony of the stars, has a relationship of constant contact, friction and threat with the catastrophe of the bull, "Leiris would write in his essay 'Mirror of bullfighting' (1981). Catastrophe and pleasure are conjugated in the same sensibility where the two friends met. Along with beautiful textual fragments like this, the Pompidou shows the canvases that Bacon made about his common imaginary, as well as a disturbing and beautiful portrait of his much appreciated colleague.
The final stretch of the exhibition is significantly overshadowed by demonstrating that 'Bacon en toutes lettres' is an exhibition device effectively curated. The texts of Joseph Conrad and Georges Bataille close the tour. Horror and the sublime are the emotional textures that link Conrad with the painter through one of his favorite novels 'The Heart of Darkness' (1902). But there is something in Conrad's novel about the exploitative-exploited relationship, about the awareness of the injustice in the colonization of the other, that establishes a direct connection with Bacon's sentimental relationships, who destroyed his lovers and ultimately destroyed himself. Likewise. It is the horror of 'The Heart of Darkness' the abyss that Bacon himself evokes when he paraphrases Wilde saying that man kills what he loves.
Bataille is the last literary stop, a hard and cold dessert, a frozen profiterol. The 'Critical Dictionary' (1939) of the French thinker makes a critical spin of the colloquial use of certain terms, and among them, the word chosen to end the exhibition is "Slaughterhouse" . Bataille affects his dissertation in animality and blood as necessary resources for any spiritual metamorphosis, tragic assertion that has a lot to do with the deep motivations of Bacon's work.
'Bacon en toutes lettres' is a very interesting exercise in what refers to the exhibition possibilities of literature, but above all it is a journey through the bowels of the artist who ends - as we have seen and sorry for the 'spoiler' - in the slaughterhouse, in the temple of flesh, blood and bones. As Unamuno said, with whom Bacon would surely have shared perspectives, "the only truth is physiological life."
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