Francis Bacon Fragments Of A Portrait - interview by David Sylvester

i've always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth and i like the you may say the glitter and color that comes from the mouth and i've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like money painted uh a sunset but i've never succeeded in doing it but i was also very influenced by the eisenstein film the potemkin and the odessa sequence in which is this wonderful shot of the nurse screaming and also when i was first went to paris i found an old bookshop a book on diseases of the mouth which was beautifully colored hand colored the plates were hand colored and that it had a tremendous effect on me and i don't know if this obsession when i was much younger with the mouth has had sex a lot of sexual implications as people say it may have and i believe the psychologically just it disposed to but anyhow whatever it was i was that time very obsessed by that image so you might well have been interested in painting open mouths and teeth even if you hadn't been painting the screen i think i might nevertheless you did become involved with painting the human screen i did and i've always hoped i've always wanted and never succeeded in also painting the smile that i i i have never been able to do it actually in your work as a whole there are relatively few paintings that have ostensible subjects which might be called horrific and most of them are fairly straight subjects of figures seated in rooms and so on and yet people have a sense that your work as a whole is horrific um why do you think this might be well i don't think so i mean you may say the carcasses of meat it's true that when you go into a butcher shop you see the beauty of the meat how beautiful meat can be but if you when you think about it also you can think of the whole horror of life of one thing living off another and the the natural pattern of life and the the natural sequence of life i mean it's why when all these these stupid things about bull fighting um because what if you go people will eat meat and then complain about bull fighting the thing is they're mad they will go in and complain about bullfighting covered with furs and birds in their hair in their hair i mean it's so it's so illogical but yet people's sense of your work as being horrific um is not really justified by the ostensible subject matter why do you think they have this feeling that it is well the thing is i've always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as i possibly can and perhaps if a thing comes of course directly they feel that that is horrific yes because if you say if you say something even if you say something very directly to somebody about something they were they are sometimes offended although it is a fact because people tend to be offended by facts what used to be called truth let us say that you have a model somebody somebody you have already painted many times from memory yes have you ever had such a person sitting for you yes and what has happened they inhibit me they inhibit me because one of the things is i would if i like them i don't want to do to practice the injury that i do to them in my work before them if i like them i would rather i would rather practice the injury in private by which i think i can record the facts of them more clearly in what sense do you conceive it as an injury well because people nearly always believe that the distortions of them are an injury to them no matter how much they feel for or how much they like you they do nevertheless as most of them are not people who are concerned with art feel the distortions are forms of injury don't you think that instinct is probably right possibly do you not think that when you talk about recording different levels among other things you may be doing is precisely expressing while the same time a love of the person being painted and a hostility towards them and that the marks you are making are both a caress and a blow an assault i think that this thing is how uh i i think it it goes to a deeper deeper thing than this i think is how do i feel and this can only be feeling how can i make this image more immediately real to myself that's all we will not be making it more immediately real by summing up at one and the same time contradictory feelings towards what you're painting that would be making it very real i would have thought well i think then you would be going into psychological ways of unit of seeing i and i don't think but most painters do i think most painters are actually in a rate today are attempting to bring over the image that they want to record as strongly and as immediately as possible onto the nervous system and it is not actually as involved or they may be subconsciously involved with what you saved i think it's consciously involved it was consciously involved the result would be disastrous but don't you think and this is why i say that your sitter instinctively sees this sees this as an injury which in a sense might be thought naive but i'm suggesting that the sitter's instinct is right it may be realizing but then that's really going on what you're really saying is that while uh what wild said you kill the thing you love in the paintings of men in rooms there's somehow people feel there's a sense of claustrophobia and unease there are you aware of this yourself well i'm not aware of it but the thing is that most of those pictures were done of somebody who was always in a state of unease and whether that has been conveyed through these pictures i don't know but i suppose in attempting to trap the the this image that um and as this man was very neurotic and very um almost like hysterical that may possibly have come across in the in the paintings it's interesting that people want to read meanings into your pictures as if they were problem pictures or narrative pictures of some sort but one wants to read and people like to get a meaning from everything um but they want to get a sort of story don't they or to see the pictures as a kind of comment they do on society they do is it ever intended to be that no um when you do paintings say of nudes in rome yes male news yes sprawling across sofas or anything yes do you have in mind someone else or do you sometimes think of them as yourself no i think of them are not not as not as of myself i think of them some of those things have come up from photographs that i have and some of them have come from the my bridge book of the human body and movement which i have very often used figures from but i don't think of them as myself but it's true to say that of course that when you paint anything you are the same you you are also painting not only the subject but you are painting yourself as well as the as as as the object that you are trying to record because its painting is a double is a dual performance because for instance if you look at a rembrandt painting you know i feel i know very much more about rembrandt than i do about the sitter so there's so in the first place so you use existing photographs that you've come across like those in my bridge yes and then you use photographs like this which you have taken in order to paint from yes instead of getting a model to come and pose i have yes in fact even from friends who will come and pose i've had their photographs taken for portraits because i very much prefer working from the photograph and from there but now then you've also used photographs of works of art well i have and i think most unsuccessfully because i think it's already so remarkable that there's absolutely really nothing to do about it but i i used it out of obsession i don't think that any of these things that i have done from other paintings actually have ever worked in spite of the terrific importance that you give to you know to the to the paint itself in an artist like velazquez and rembrandt you paint again and again from photographs i mean when you were in rome um you went to see the velasquez the innocent no i didn't you never went no hell were you there i was i was around for about two months and you never actually went to see this painting which you'd been working i did after for years no it's true to say that at that time i was um i was extremely unhappy emotionally and i loathed churches but i spent most of my time in saint peter's just wandering around but um i think another thing was it was probably a fear of seeing the reality of the velasquez after my tampering with it i think it was i think it was probably a feeling of uh seeing this marvelous pain at least or what i'd always thought was a marvelous painting in photographs and then seeing the stupid things that one had done with it you've also got a lot of things around here of your own reproductions of your own work you look at them while you're working well i do very very often i very often think that i will be able to for instance i've been trying in this particular one to make this this image that i did in 1952 and i've been trying to turn to make this into a mirror so that this image is crouched before a mirror of itself i haven't it hasn't come off but i very often find i can work from photographs of my own things that have been done years before and they become very suggested do you make any use of preliminary studies or sketches of any sort yes i do i i nearly always make a make a sketch drawn i i generally just bake it out of them with thin paint and i especially in portraits i make a a kind of outline of the position in which i want to try i think i want to make the image but after that chance and well chance and what i call accident takes over and if anything ever does work in my case it works from that moment when my when consciously i don't know what i'm doing when you take chance you mean something more than improvisation you mean as if you're really working without making conscious decisions they're certainly not conscious decisions but what are you thinking about i mean how do you suspend the operation of rational decisions i'm thinking of nothing but how does how i at that moment i'm thinking of nothing but how hopeless and impossible this thing is to achieve and by making these marks about which i don't know how they will behave suddenly there there comes something which your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing by which it could begin to develop how much does it help to have had a certain amount of drink when you're painting well this is difficult thing to say i haven't done many things when i have had a lot to drink but i have one or two and i did the crucifixion 1963 which is one of the best things and that was done when i was on the drink on drink for about a fortnight and perhaps it was sometimes it loosens you and i think it works better but it's again i don't i i think it also dulls other areas you really don't want to lose a certain clarity you don't want to leave too much to chance do you i want i want a very ordered image but i want it to have come about by chance it's a matter of reconciling opposites i suppose of making the thing be contradictory things at once well isn't this that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do isn't that what all art is about if you think of the great rembrandt self-portrait in exxon provence for instance and if you analyze it you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes that is it is almost completely anti-illustrational and when the the brutal so-called brutal painting of of a jackson pollock or something like that i forget what that painting is called what is the technical term for it well abstract expression abstract expressionism that of course all that had been done by rembrandt in a painting like the self-portrait in exxon pervance but it had been done with the added thing that it was a it was an attempt to record a fact which was rembrandt's own appearance and to me therefore must be much more exciting and much more profound inevitably he's trying to do something much more difficult you're very preoccupied with the chance in painting you're also preoccupied in chance with gambling the thing is that um i do remember once when i i lived once for a long time in monte carlo and i became very obsessed by by the casino and i spent whole days there and i used to be think that i heard the croupiers calling out the numbers at roulette the winning number before the ball had fallen into the socket and i used to go from table to table and i won i remember one afternoon i went in there and i was playing playing on three different tables and i heard these echoes and i was playing rather small stakes but at the end of that afternoon uh chance had been very much on my side and i ended up with about sixteen hundred pounds the equivalent in frank's which was a lot of money for me then well i i immediately took a villa and i stocked it with drink and all the food that i could buy in but this chance didn't last very long because in about 10 days time i could hardly buy my fare out of the back to london from from monte carlo but it was it was a marvelous 10 days and i had an enormous number of friends you don't think you're working an obsession with christianity out of your system well i don't think so because my um common sense would not allow me to accept christianity it might not allow you to accept it but you're sure you've got rid of it well that one can never know because one knows how very potent some of the images of christianity have been and how they must have played very deeply on one sensibility so one could never say that once completely got away and after all without believing in one believes in the ethics of christianity or great number of them without actually believing in the in the practice of the church when you do a crucifixion i mean you've done triptychs based on figures yes and you've done these fairly complicated crucifixion images what is the difference in the attitude of working when you're when you when you start on a crucifixion well you are of course you are working then about your own feelings and sensations really it's you might say it's almost like nearer to a a self-portrait that you are working on all sorts of are very private feelings about behavior and about the way life is and the crucifixion is the armature for expressing it it is yes you often involve the painting of sides of meat in your paintings of the crucifixion the subject of meat is is such a marvelous subject matter and of course naturally meat has enormous overtones to it i've used i've used photographs and uh if you go to some of these great stores where you just go through these great halls of death you can see meat and fish and birds and everything else allowing did that there have been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered and i think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing which to me is very very near this whole thing of the crucifixion i know for religious people for christians the crucifixion has a totally different significance but as a non-believer it has just an act of man's behavior way of behavior to another as man realizes that he is an accident and his futility that he's a completely rarely futile being that he has to play out the game without reason i think that even when velasquez was painting even when rembrandt was painting in a peculiar way they were still whatever their attitude to life was they were still slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities which man now you could say has been completely cancelled out for him now of course man can only attempt to make something very very positive by trying to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves by prolonging possibly his life by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors you see painting has now become or all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself what is fascinating actually is that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all and return the onlooker to life more violently you

Channel: Janus Zeewier

Views: 415,813

Keywords: Francis Bacon, Interview, painting, painter, art, post war, british painting, Paint, visual art, Footage, Exclusive, United Kingdom (Country), fragments of a portrait, david sylvester, influences, rec

Id: xoFMH_D6xLk

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2013