Encounter (eBook)

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WHEN MICHEL ARCHIMBAUD WAS PLANNING A BOOK OF Francis Bacon’s portraits and self-portraits, he asked me to write a short essay for it. He assured me that the invitation was Bacon’s own wish. He reminded me of a short piece I had published a long while back in the periodical L’Arc, a piece he said the painter considered one of the few in which he recognized himself. I will not deny my pleasure at this message, arriving years later, from an artist I have never met and whom I so admired.

That piece in L’Arc discussed Bacon’s triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes; I wrote it in the very first years after I emigrated to France, still obsessed by recollections of the country which I had just left and which still remained in my memory as a land of interrogations and surveillance. Some eighteen years later, I can only begin my new consideration of Bacon’s art with that older text from 1977:

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“IT WAS 1972. I MET WITH A GIRL IN A PRAGUE SUBURB, in a borrowed apartment. Two days earlier, over an entire day, she had been interrogated by the police about me. Now she wanted to meet with me secretly (she feared that she was constantly followed) to tell me what questions they had asked her and how she had answered them. If they were to interrogate me, my answers should match hers.

“She was a very young girl who had little experience of the world as yet. The interrogation had disturbed her, and three days later the fear was still upsetting her bowels. She was very pale, and during our conversation she kept leaving the room to go to the toilet, so our whole encounter was accompanied by the noise of the water refilling the tank.

“I had known her for a long time. She was intelligent and spirited, she was very skilled at controlling her emotions, and was always so impeccably dressed that her outfit, like her behavior, allowed no hint of nakedness. And now suddenly, like a great knife, fear had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook.

“The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up, and I suddenly had the urge to rape her. I know what I’m saying: ‘rape her,’ not ‘make love to her.’ I didn’t want tenderness from her. I wanted to bring my hand down brutally on her face and in one swift instant take her completely, with all her unbearably arousing contradictions: with her impeccable outfit along with her rebellious gut, her good sense along with her fear, her pride along with her misery. I sensed that all those contradictions concealed her essence: that treasure, that gold nugget, that diamond hidden in the depths. I wanted to possess her, in one swift second, with her shit and her ineffable soul. But I saw those two eyes staring at me, filled with torment (two tormented eyes in a sensible face), and the more tormented those eyes the more my desire became absurd, stupid, scandalous, incomprehensible, and impossible to carry out.

“Uncalled for and unconscionable, that desire was nonetheless real. I cannot disavow it, and when I look at Francis Bacon’s portrait-triptych it’s as if I recall it. The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do conceal something—but in any case we each have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.”

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THE BEST COMMENTARIES ON BACON’S WORK ARE BY BACON himself in two long interviews: with David Sylvester in 1976 and with Archimbaud in 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926–32 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw an area open there “which has not been explored: an organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it” (the emphases are mine).

Aside from that short period, one could say that everywhere else in Picasso, it is the painter’s light gesture that transformed elements of the human body into a two-dimensional form exempt from any obligation to resemble. With Bacon, playful Picassian euphoria is replaced by amazement (if not by terror) at what we are—what we are materially, physically. Impelled by that terror, the painter’s hand (to use the words of my old piece) comes down with a “brutal gesture” on a body, on a face, “in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.”

But what is hidden there? Its “self”? Certainly every portrait ever painted seeks to uncover the subject’s “self.” But Bacon lives in a time when the “self” has everywhere begun to take cover. Indeed, our most commonplace personal experience teaches us (especially if the life behind us is very long) that faces are lamentably alike (the insane demographic avalanche further augmenting that feeling), that they are easily confused, that they differ one from the next only by something very tiny, barely perceptible, which mathematically often represents barely a few millimeters’ difference in the arrangement of proportions. Add to that our historical experience, which teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

It is in this moment of uncertainty that the rapist hand of the painter comes down with a “brutal gesture” on his models’ faces in order to find, somewhere in the depths, their buried self. In this Baconian quest the forms subjected to “a complete distortion” never lose the character of living organisms, they recall their bodily existence, their flesh, they always retain their three-dimensional nature. And moreover they look like their models! But how can the portrait resemble the model of which it is intentionally a distortion? Yet photos of the persons portrayed are the proof: it does resemble him or her; look at the triptychs—three juxtaposed variations on the portrait of the same person; the variations differ from one another but at the same time have something common to them all: “that treasure, that gold nugget, that hidden diamond,” the “self” of a face.

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I COULD PUT IT DIFFERENTLY: BACON’S PORTRAITS ARE an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

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FOR A LONG TIME BACON AND BECKETT MADE UP A COUPLE in my imaginary gallery of modern art. Then I read his Archimbaud interview: “I’ve always been amazed by this comparison between Beckett and myself,” Bacon said. Then, farther on: “I’ve always found that Shakespeare expresses more poetically, more accurately, and in a much more powerful way what Beckett and Joyce were trying to say.” And again: “I wonder if Beckett’s ideas about his art didn’t end up by killing his creativity…. There’s something too systematic and too intelligent about him, which is perhaps what’s always made me uncomfortable.” And finally: “Usually in painting, you always leave too much in that is habit, you never cut enough out, but with Beckett I often get the impression that because he wanted to hone down his text, nothing was left, and in the end his work sounds hollow.”

When one artist talks about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what’s valuable in his judgment. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about himself?

That he doesn’t want to be categorized. That he wants to protect his work against clichés.

Also: that he resists the dogmatists of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, modern art represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Bacon, though, looks to the history of art in its entirety; the twentieth century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.

And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, lest his art be turned into some sort of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because, in our time, art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media-free, not-pre-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener). 

Wherever he can Bacon therefore blurs his tracks to throw off the experts who want to reduce his work to a pessimism cliché: he bridles at using the word “horror” with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting...