Photographs, film stills, advertisements, postcards, and virtually anything else that came his way inspired artist Francis Bacon, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Is there room for yet another book on Francis Bacon? It's a reasonable question. Following on from the efforts of the late David Sylvester, including his enduringly outstanding Interviews with Francis Bacon, plus several other biographies and studies, what can Martin Harrison have to offer? Well, as the title, In Camera indicates, he has a specific subject to explore in Bacon's use of photographic imagery. It is a large subject, given that the artist looked directly to original photographs, some taken or commissioned by him, to film stills, to numerous photographic plates from books, including medical textbooks and wildlife studies, images from magazines and newspapers, advertisements, art reproductions in postcard or book form, and virtually anything else that came his way and struck him as being useful.
Furthermore, with the development of Bacon archive studies, not least the study of the huge volume of contents of his Reece Mews Studio, given to the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane by his heir, the late John Edward, a wealth of relevant material has become available for research. Bacon himself discouraged such research, dismissing requests for access to his source imagery, claiming that it would not be helpful in illuminating the meaning of his work. And he had a point. There is always the temptation to view the meaning of representational paintings as puzzles that can be solved, but, by no means untypically, much of the power of Bacon's painting lies in his ability to distil concentrated, iconic images from his experience of the world around him. Anecdotal or narrative explanations risk missing the point of the work in a wider cultural context.
Though Bacon was, up to a point, candid about some of his second-hand visual sources. He had to be, since he quoted or, to use a currently fashionable term, appropriated imagery in a highly visible manner. Beyond the obvious examples, it's entirely reasonable that he would be cagey about revealing trade secrets.
His systematic use of a wide range of second-hand imagery seems perfectly acceptable now, but in the mid-20th century there was an uneasy relationship between fine art and photography and mass media. To use photographs as sources was somehow suspect. This had to do with fine art snobbery, with artists' anxiety about the all-conquering ubiquity of photography and, to be fair, about a concern with the erosion of authenticity in images.
In reality, artists used photographic source material from the late 19th century, that is as soon as if became possible to do so. And indeed many historians have demonstrated that artists readily use any available technological resource.
Bacon's serial appropriation of Velásquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X is celebrated and well documented. Innocent (who never liked the original portrait, apparently) became the subject for what became known as Bacon's Screaming Popes, though Bacon remarked that he didn't intend the gaping mouth to signify a scream. He became obsessed with the Velásquez painting, saying that it was as if he had a crush on it.
It formed the basis for more than 30 of his compositions, which he himself felt was a bit excessive. Or rather, reproductions of Velásquez did, because Bacon never encountered the talismanic work in reality, preferring to know it indirectly.
Also previously documented is his recurrent use of images from Eadweard Muybridge's classic photographic study, Animal Locomotion, and the volume derived from it, The Human Figure in Motion. No less than four copies of the latter were among the books in his studio at the time of his death. He was drawn obsessively to relatively few sets of images. One of these sequences depicts two men wrestling, and it provided a direct source for Two Figures, in which wrestling is transformed into a violent sexual encounter.
More, though, Bacon's striking, characteristic way of painting the body in the form of a blur, a trace, as though knocked out of focus, was triggered in some way by the sequential dynamism of Muybridge's images. He also clearly liked the strategy of treating the human animal as a laboratory specimen.
It would be wrong to see Harrison's book as a demystification of Bacon's work and work practices. Just think of Picasso's remark: "If it's worth stealing I steal it."
It's not the case that identifying a source image, or a number of source images, explains Bacon's paintings away. That would be to reduce them to an inventory of their material content. Rather, he was clearly reaching for certain kinds of image, in his own imagination as well as in the world around him. When he based one of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion on a photograph from Baron von Schrenck Notzing's Phenomena of Materialisation, he was not stealing. Rather he recognised something in the supposedly uncanny image that he could work with.
In fact, Harrison's meticulous, detailed, forensic dissection of the sources and references with regard to particular works makes clear that many paintings synthesise a disparate range of material.
The landmark Three Studies also derives from aspects of Degas's La Coiffure, Picasso's biomorphic forms, Grunewald's The Mocking of Christ (1503) , and perhaps a work by Rogier van der Weyden, and probably other things, undoubtedly some of which remain undiscovered. In other words, the Three Figures are not at all untypical in deriving from a variety of influences and sources. It's something that artists do.
Harrison is a conscientious, erudite and perceptive writer. His book will not transform our understanding of Bacon but it does, so to speak, flesh out the picture considerably. It does so in the first instance by detailing the mass of visual source material that informs the paintings, but he is astute enough to realise that he must broaden his field of inquiry.
His text becomes an enlightening commentary on Bacon's life, career and the practice of painting in terms of myriad documentary sources and influences, but also, interestingly, in relation to the spaces he lived and worked in, and his absorption of other layers of influence.
Something else surely comes into play: the psychological principle of availability. Bacon used what was around him to shape his take on the world. To some extent his sources were consciously sought, but there is also an element of chance involved. He acknowledged that he allowed serendipity to play a central role in his painting. He made paintings out of the available material of his life as sifted through his singular sensibility, and this involved some measure of acceptance of what happened to be around him. Any useful detail could be pressed into service. There is a perennial fascination with the mess of his studio, as witness its installation in the Dublin City Gallery. It seems reasonable that he regarded this private, incredibly crowded, messy environment as a kind of humus which nurtured the growth of his paintings.
In Camera - Francis Bacon, by Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson, £35). View Francis Bacon's studio online at www.hughlane.ie/fb_studio