Only Too Much Is Enough E-Book

Francis Bacon

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 57

Beschreibung

Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt were close friends for over thirty years. As Peppiatt, the editor of this volume, tells us in his illuminating Introduction, the two would regularly embark on night-time "odysseys around London and Paris", "ordering extravagant vintages, raising toasts to all and sundry, talking and laughing immoderately." Francis Bacon's conversation was witty, provocative, and profound. In this volume, his long-time friend, curator, chronicler, and biographer has gathered Bacon's most memorable aphorisms, evoking both the force of the artist's personality and the range of his interests. These sayings, assembled for the first time in Only Too Much Is Enough, form a brilliant accompaniment to Bacon's works, conveying not only a sceptical and sometimes disquieting outlook on human relationships, but also keen insights into his creative process.

Leseprobe

Only Too Much Is Enough

Only Too Much Is Enough

Francis Bacon in his own words

Edited and introduced by Michael Peppiatt

ERIS

An imprint of Urtext

Unit 3, 2 Dixon Butler Mews

London W9 2BU

All rights reserved

Copyright © Michael Peppiatt, 2021

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Printed and bound in Great Britain

The right of Michael Peppiatt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

e-book ISBN 978-1-91247-565-0

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Urtext Ltd.

Cover: Photograph of Francis Bacon by Dmitri Kasterine

Copyright © Dmitri Kasterine. Designed by Alex Stavrakas

Contents

Introduction by Michael Peppiatt

On art and the art world

On his own work

On other artists

On life

On himself

On sex and love

Introduction

When Francis Bacon entered a room, whether fashionable restaurant or dingy drinking club, the temperature went up as though suddenly everything had more point. Bartenders and waiters found more spring in their step, lovers resumed their tryst as if it might be their last, corks flew off the champagne with increased alacrity. Whether people recognised him or not, Bacon’s presence gave off something almost spookily electrifying. And that was before he began to ‘carry on’ (as he put it), ordering extravagant vintages, raising toasts to all and sundry, talking and laughing immoderately.

Above all, Bacon loved to talk. If he hadn’t been devoted to inventing and crafting complex pictures in oil on canvas, he would have liked nothing better than to talk and drink day and night with a regularly changing roster of people in the bars and clubs where he felt most at home. Bacon readily acknowledged this by characterising himself as ‘garrulous’. But talking for him was a compulsion, very similar to the one that made him paint every morning, at first light, in the studio. Talking, analysing, defining for Bacon provided a parallel means of recording his own experience of life. Just as he took up the brush in search of an image which would capture his thoughts and feelings in memorable form, he talked about all the great questions of life, hoping to pin down the notions coursing through his mind as accurately and tellingly as he could. To this end, he would repeat a certain concept throughout an entire evening, abbreviating and modifying it as he went, until he was convinced he could not make the thought clearer or more compact. If you helped to find the clinching phrase, you were shot a rare approving look; but woe betide you if you missed the mark: any imprecision or half-truth was skewered instantly on Bacon’s penetrating gaze.

An indirect consequence of this compulsive rephrasing was that Bacon’s companions were treated, on top of lavish meals and drink, to the emergence of the artist’s innermost reflections on life and art, love and death, and a variety of other topics ranging from mutual friends to a sensational scandal or murder. By the end of a long dinner and a trawl through the Soho bars, they would have heard Bacon on this, Bacon on that, and Bacon on the other, not just once, but numerous times, in varying voices and moods, until the short, sharp phrases, slipped in as one bottle followed another, went circling round their heads for days on end.

For me, this manic repetition turned out to be a boon. Fascinated by Bacon from the moment I met him in 1963, when I was a student, I was able to remember clearly what he said and note it down—not, admittedly, as I staggered home, but in the grim, hungover days that followed. For one thing, getting his remarks down on paper helped to absorb their reverberating intensity and to restore some sense of normality after a Baconian bacchanal. For another, Bacon’s utterances, ranging from the pithy one-liner to the late-night confession, provided the basis for much of what I would later write about the artist, from his biography to a memoir of accompanying him on his nightly odysseys around London and Paris over a period of nearly thirty years.

So much of Bacon’s presence and his brilliant conversation on everything and nothing still haunts me. A lovers’ quarrel will break out beside me on the bus, and I’ll hear Bacon say: “Jealousy is like a ghastly disease I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy”; or I’ll recall his startling analysis of late Rembrandt portraits while I’m wandering around a museum, as well as his vehement attacks on abstract art as I pause in front of a huge Pollock. Choosing the best of Bacon’s sayings that I could remember or find in the various texts I have written about him came as easily as falling back into conversation with an old friend. What I hadn’t expected was that many of the remarks would come with images in tow, hauntingly familiar backgrounds to a cutting phrase: a dimly lit afternoon drinking club in Soho, Bacon’s pitiless, pale blue stare, the paint-daubed walls of the Reece Mews studio, oysters at La Coupole, the Seine, swollen, oyster-coloured and malevolent at dawn.

Bacon’s talk was by no means all jovial, drunken banter. Much of it was dark, threatening, even frightening, particularly when, as the evening wore on, he clung tighter and tighter to his nihilism with the fervour of a crazed preacher. Gone then were the amiable bons mots and well-honed maxims, and in their place the single concept of absolute nothingness, with Bacon repeating one word like a mantra for hours on end: Nada, Nada, Nada. But you stayed the course, out of love and admiration, and also because you knew there would be brighter, lighter things to come. Not Bacon’s least talent was that he could be breathtakingly bitchy, too, yet in such an unexpected and hilarious way that only later did you notice the vitriol that had been slipped into your ear.