Francis Bacon Exhibition at Tate Britain

The Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain (opening 11th September) is stunning. It includes many remarkable paintings hung in a way that lets you get close enough to see the paintwork which is so easily lost in reproduction - Bacon liked the fact that the glass reflects the viewer's image, but I still find that a bit irritating..en masse the painted gold frames add an air of theatricality. The 60 paintings on show constitute about 10 percent of his known surviving output but most of the selection are from the top ten percent in quality and several are iconic. Enough to achieve Bacon's stated aim:

"To unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently"

The curators have wisely kept the two versions of Three Figures from the Base of the Crucifixion apart as the 1944 version (the first) is by far the more powerful and raw. There is a room of cuttings from magazines, photo-booth shots, and John Deakin's wonderful Soho portraits (this one of Francis Bacon included) commissioned by Bacon - all the better for being crumpled up, distressed, and spattered with paint. But if you want to understand the relation between sources and paintings, Martin Harrison's In Camera: Francis Bacon provides a superb and sensitive analysis that offers genuine insight to many of Bacon's paintings. His Icunabula: Francis Bacon, written with Rebecca Daniels was published yesterday and presumably carries on where In Camera left off.

For the next six days you can listen to Tuesday's BBC Radio 4's  Front Row interview with Maggi Hambling about the Bacon exhibition here  it runs from 8mins 45 seconds in to the streamed repeat. As you might expect, she emphasizes Bacon's painterly qualities.

Read the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Francis Bacon's Life (a bit prim)

Read Martin Harrison's discussion of the paintings Bacon mutilated, destroyed and threw out.

Watch a short video about the Tate Britain exhibition at Times Online (a grim irony that this begins with a plug for Jersey as a holiday resort, presumably as an antidote to the terrible crimes uncovered in the children's home there, and then this cuts straight into Bacon's images of flesh, suicide, man's inhumanity etc.)

Comments

[Martin Shellabarger]

I saw the Bacon exhibit at the Prado when it was in town, the first I have seen his works together -- heretofore I only had seen individual works and very few at that -- and I must say I was disappointed. They seem to me to have more force in reproductions than live. Strange, I thought I would be blown away by them.