In Arthaus Music and Naxos' Francis Bacon, author Melvyn Bragg and director David Hinton spend a day in London interviewing the famous artist. The tour begins in the studio where everything is in disarray. There are opened paint tubes strewn across a table with plates and brushes, books and photographs, while large paint cans, brushes and papers carpet the floor. Everything's in total disorder. The only uncluttered object in the room is the canvas standing bare and naked on the easel awaiting the artist's touch. The walls are alive with color as the artist admits that this is where he tests his colors for his paintings. Bacon says, "I work much better in chaos ... chaos, for me, breeds images." He says his inspiration comes from regular work and photographs of action, especially muscular action. He says his works are not the "illustration of reality, but to create images which are concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation." He calls his works "deeply ordered chaos."
Bacon was born in Dublin of English parents in 1909. His father worked in the war office after WWI, traveling between London and Dublin. He was also a breeder and trainer of race horses. Francis was a sickly child, house-bound with asthma and was home-tutored. At the age of 16, he set out on his own going to London, Berlin and Paris where he viewed an exhibit by Picasso, where he decided to be a painter. His career was shaky; his first exhibition was unsuccessful, and, in 1936 he received a rejection from the International Surrealist Exhibition. In the early 1940's, he destroyed most of his art work, and continued to indulge in alcohol and gambling. However, this did not stop the artist. His first three serious works comprised a triptych entitled "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion." The screaming, howling biomorphic abstract forms created much audience discomfort, and when asked what it meant, he replied, "Nothing, except what people want to read into it. Nothing."
Bacon's inspiration came from the artists Grunewald, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Gogh and Picasso. He was also influenced by Eadweard Muybridge's photographs of animal and human movement. His studio is filled with photographs and books that became models for his work. He became obsessed with mouth diseases that he read in medical books, and were revealed in his earlier works as "beautiful vibrations of color." His screaming paintings were inspired by a scene of a horrified nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film The Battleship Potemkin and depict the agonies of life.
The lovers of the artist greatly contributed to his life and work. Among these were Eric Hall, Peter Lacy, George Dyer, and his beneficiary, John Edwards, who inherited an estate valued at 11 million pounds. After the death of George Dyer, he painted a tribute triptych that he says comes closest to his telling a story in images. He gained a great sense of mortality after the death of his two lovers, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, admitting that "if you have a very strong feeling for life, its shadow, death, is always with you." He confessed fondly that his portraiture of John Edwards, entitled "Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards 1984" most resembles the subject. Remarking on his self-portraits, he says that "life becomes a desert around you."
Francis Bacon continues to discuss the artist's paintings throughout the interview as it winds through Mario's Restaurant where he suggests that he's "made images that intellect will never make." They stop at Bacon's favorite haunt, the Colony Room Club, where he was a founding member in 1949. Gambling in Soho concludes the interview and evening with Bacon saying that he loves the atmosphere, because people are winning and losing, filling it with excitement and despair in a concentrated space.
This optimistically wobbly little man ends his evening contentedly saturated with spirits to chase away his "daemons." One would never have believed that he would have contained such an undercurrent of vile and grotesque images to creep out into the world in the form of art. Wyndham Lewis once commented about three canvases of Bacon's that they "prove him ... to be the most astonishingly sinister artist in England, and one of the most original."
Francis Bacon has bonuses including a Picture Gallery featuring photographic stills of the artist and his works and the Trailer gives highlights of the artists Degas, Magritte and Kahlo. The text "Impressum" is written by Susanne Heinrich, English translation by Cora Chalmers, French translation by Delphine Piquet, and gives a brief biography of the artist's life and accomplishments.
My comments on this documentary is that Francis Bacon's paintings represented in this documentary are abstractions of blood, guts, and gore. The material is totally unsuitable for children. I would caution any teachers to review the material before presentation. Even though Bacon was a celebrated artist of his day, his works, however talented, do display emotional violence and vulgarity. I do believe the interview gives very good insight into the artist and his work. Sadly, there are no subtitles at all.
