Bacon and Woman in White at the Royal Academy

For years I did not “get” Bacon.

I did not like his contorted twisted forms, nightmarish figures and the liberal use of red paint.

I also thought his licentious lifestyle formed an unnecessary part of his artistic reputation.

One of the famous stories was of a friend bumping into him in St. Ives and Bacons’s lover commenting

“Come on Francis, you’re late for your beating.”

Largely due to my excellent art course teacher, I appreciated him as a colourist.

In studying him further, I appreciated too certain paradoxes.

Born the son of an Irish racehorse trainer with a house near the Curragh, he was never a practising Catholic.

Yet he liked the triptych, a medieval from of Catholic art and he admired Velazquez so much that he had an attempt at Pope Innocent himself.

Spending much of his youth with horses, his pictures in the exhibition titled Man and Beast at the Royal Academy reflects his empathy with animals.

Bacon also admired Picasso, a keen lover of bullfighting, and I thought Bacon ‘pictures of matadors were amongst the most compelling in the exhibition.

Bacon was evidently a social man and good company.

He was a founder member of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club – a notorious drinking haunt in Soho – and befriended Picasso, Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud (though they fell out over a gambling debt).

Ken Howard, who knew him, said his principal interests were sailors, champagne and gambling.

Bacon was also shrewd: he edited his works cleverly, in 1937 destroying all his studio altogether.

This, aside from attracting publicity, could only increase the value of his work.

In the early 60s you buy a Bacon for 100 Guineas but now one would set you back many millions.

I was pleased to see the exhibition and also Whistler’s Woman in White in the Sackler Wing made for an interesting comparison.

Picasso criticised British art for being too pretty, an accusation you would not make of Bacon whose pictures often have a character of primal fear.

James Whistler’s studies of his muse – the Irish redhead Joanne  Hiffernan – were more traditional portraiture.

Whistler shared his muse with Gustav Courbet.

In the Rust I have written previously of Courbet’s picture of her torso The Origins of Mankind in which her vagina with thick pubic hair forms the epicentre.

Aside from the curated notes referring to Courbet admiring her beauty there is no reference to this affair let alone the controversial picture.

I wonder why.

I am not the biggest fan of the Royal Academy.

I do not like what it stands for, its grandeur, pomposity and clubbiness but in recent years it has moved on.

Interestingly – although Bacon refused to be a Royal Academician – he was only the only artist (with Picasso) to have a retrospective in his lifetime, which took place at le Grand Palais in Paris.