Love is the devil: Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) film review
A review by John A. Walker (2009), the author of Art & Artists on screen.
In London, during the 1950s, it was Francis Bacon (1909-92), the virtually self-taught painter and homosexual, who emerged as Britain’s first post-World War II art star even though his full impact took another decade or so to achieve. He first became notorious for his striking and grotesque images of crucifixion scenes, screaming Popes and naked males grappling on the ground. Bacon’s painterliness always ensured that any disturbing content was tempered by aesthetic pleasure. Many of Bacon’s paintings were inspired by existing images: film stills, press photographs and reproductions of past art (such as works by Velasquez and van Gogh). One thematic exhibition held at the Hanover Gallery in 1957 was a response and contribution to the cult of van Gogh: it consisted of expressionist-style interpretations of Vincent’s The Painter on the road to Tarascon (1888).
Francis Bacon’s reputation as a painter gradually increased until some critics regarded him as one of the finest in the world. From 26 October 1971 to 10 January 1972, the French honoured him with a retrospective at the Galleries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris. (This exhibition was visited by the Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci and significantly influenced his film Last Tango in Paris (1972) starring Marlon Brando. Two of Bacon’s paintings appeared in the film’s credit sequence.) While Bacon attended official ceremonies, his then lover George Dyer died in their hotel bathroom from an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol.
During his career, Francis Bacon was interviewed numerous times by the critic David Sylvester and by the television presenter Melvyn Bragg and profiled in the art press repeatedly. In addition, photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Douglas Glass and John Deakin frequently photographed Bacon amidst the carefully cultivated debris of his London studios; the mess served as a vivid emblem of chaotic creativity, and as a sign of Bacon’s contempt for such bourgeois values as cleanliness and neatness. In 2001, the contents of his Kensington studio at 7 Reece Mews— even the dust (which he used to add to his canvases)— were placed on public display in Dublin, his city of birth.
As Francis Bacon became better known, art books and catalogues about him proliferated and stories about his private life filtered into the public domain; namely, his childhood habits of sleeping with stable boys (his father owned horses) and dressing in his mother’s clothes, the time he spent in decadent Berlin during the 1920s, the gambling and heavy drinking sessions in Soho pubs and clubs (particularly the French House and the Colony Room, a club depicted by the painter Michael Andrews in 1962), his circle of friends, his passion for violent sex with proletarian petty criminals, his bitchy table talk and his acts of cruelty and generosity. Frank biographies were an inevitable consequence. His long term drinking companion, the photographer and journalist Daniel Farson (1927-97), wrote one in 1995 in which Bacon’s life was characterised as “gilded gutter”.
Francis Bacon film (1998) review: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
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