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Hommage à Bacon

EARLY IN 1969, four months after his New York show, Bacon received a letter from the French curator Blaise Gautier. Would Bacon be interested in a retrospective in Paris? It had been a pleasant surprise when the French government purchased his difficult triptych from the Maeght exhibition, Three Figures in a Room, 1966, in which George sat enthroned on the toilet in the left panel. Bacon was “hardly known in France” not long before that, said Jacques Dupin, the poet, art critic, and director of publications for Galerie Maeght, “and not at all liked.” (The Musée des Arts Décoratifs turned down his 1962 Tate retrospective.) It was a shock now to be offered a retrospective. Only Graham Sutherland among twentieth-century British artists had been honoured by a retrospective in Paris during his lifetime, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1952. Leiris was a willing advocate behind the scenes. He would write the catalogue essay.

In July 1969, Gautier came to London. He spent two days with Bacon making an initial selection of paintings. Bacon found him “charming,” he told Leiris. The exhibition venue remained in question. A new minister of cultural affairs—a lofty position in France—would soon succeed André Malraux. Bacon told Leiris he preferred the Grand Palais “because of the size of my paintings.” No doubt the idea of being honoured by the French in the same space where Picasso had been celebrated also appealed to him. That same summer Bacon painted the first of three bullfight paintings with a deep yellow background. The impetus probably came from Leiris, who loved bullfights and in 1966 sent Bacon a copy of his book Miroir de la tauromachie (Mirror of Bullfighting). Bacon was still working in his borrowed studio at the Royal College of Art, where he painted several works with the yellow background, including a large triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), which captured the taut energy of his friend. Bacon’s bullfight paintings—steeped in Mediterranean light—possessed the formal air of ritual typically seen in the bullring. Study for Bullfight No. #1 would become the image on the poster advertising Bacon’s retrospective in Paris.

During the negotiations over the venue, Bacon quietly orchestrated efforts to secure the Grand Palais. He made his desires clear to Leiris and other friends who could put in a word. He hosted a large dinner for Jacques Dupin and his wife at the White Tower restaurant in London, for example, which included David Sylvester, Sonia Orwell, and Isabel and Alan Rawsthorne, a well-connected group knowledgeable about the French art world. He also invited Isabel to a meeting with Blaise Gautier, who would enjoy seeing the former lover of Giacometti. The government granted Bacon his wish—the Grand Palais in the autumn of 1971. The deputy curators on the museum’s staff were already visiting him in London in December 1969. He treated them with his habitual good manners, but did not conceal from them the other aspects of his life. He asked Ann Fleming if he could bring a visitor from the museum to one of her dinner parties and Fleming was surprised—or perhaps not—when the evening collapsed into furious arguments. Calming things down, she said, was “like taking a bone from mad Alsatians [German shepherds].” Among the onlookers was a “French lady, unknown to me and imported by Francis; she is organising a retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Grand Palais; he is the first English painter to have such an honour bestowed upon him, tho’ I should think the occasion is in some jeopardy now.”

The Grand Palais was a bragging sort of building, originally built as the massive exhibition hall for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. In style, it was mainly Beaux-Arts, but contained some elegant touches of art nouveau and possessed the largest steel-and-glass domed roof in Europe. Above the grand staircase of the Entrée Clémenceau, where visitors would enter Bacon’s exhibition, was a quadriga by Georges Récipon (1860–1920): the female charioteer, Immortality, commanding four powerful horses, is seen springing forth into the air above the entrance, exulting in her victory over time. Over the years, the Grand Palais had housed exhibits of all kinds, from fashion to motorcars. It was where the fauves were first called fauves and where the French honoured Matisse after his death. And, of course, where Picasso ascended.

Bacon rapidly created twenty-five new works for the retrospective, including four triptychs. George was not an important part of this surge. Bacon and Dyer remained friendly, even after the drug bust and George’s slash-and-burn attack on the studio, but Bacon distanced himself somewhat from Dyer. He did not abandon George altogether as a subject; but in 1970, for example, he painted only one picture that included George’s features. Instead, he painted Henrietta, Isabel, Denis, Dicky, the composer Gerard Schurmann—Bacon’s Henley friend—and numerous self-portraits. In his Triptych of 1970, Bacon painted another man in whom he took an interest, which distressed George. In the late spring of 1971, with the show only weeks away, George entered a treatment programme at the Priory in Roehampton and was sedated for ten days. Nonetheless, he asked Bacon if he could attend the opening, and Bacon did not say no.

Among the 134 works selected for the Grand Palais—almost forty more than at Bacon’s 1962 Tate retrospective—were ten large triptychs painted since the first retrospective. It was not unusual in 1971 to come upon large abstract paintings in a museum, but figurative art seemed to have retired to the drawing room. The ambitious Bacon triptychs approached the scale of the history paintings in the Louvre. The catalogue essay by Leiris thrilled Bacon, who immediately cabled the writer: “THANK YOU MORE THAN I CAN EVER SAY FOR YOUR MARVELLOUS TEXT.” Uneasy about the installation, Bacon went early to Paris to help the curators. He might have stayed at the Ritz or the George V, but instead he shared a small suite with George at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères on the Left Bank, which he liked and which was popular with many people in his circle. (“We all went to that hotel at that time,” said Janetta Parladé.”) It was impressive, in its own way, that he should stay there. Bacon was not the more obvious sort of celebrity.

The Hôtel des Saints-Pères had three floors of rooms, a creaky staircase, and an interior courtyard. Bacon’s family reserved rooms at the same hotel, together with Valerie Beston and Terry Danziger Miles, who were assigned by Marlborough to assist Bacon and his family. Fearing that he would be unable to sleep—he had trouble at the best of times—Bacon asked his doctor, Paul Brass, for an additional supply of Tuinal, the barbiturate he used as a sleeping pill. Soon every last person Bacon knew appeared in Paris, or so it seemed. He did not have enough time in a day to go around, and the social pressure was intense. French president Georges Pompidou—himself a collector of modern art—planned to open the exhibition in person. His wife was hosting a reception two days before. The British ambassador would attend, of course. Bacon was naturally concerned about George, who could be difficult at openings. But he had interviews to give and details to sort out. Bacon also worried about his family. Who would look after Ianthe and her teenage daughter, Mary, neither of whom knew much about the art world? The day before the opening, Bacon asked Miles, an attractive young man, to entertain his niece, who clearly wanted to see some of the city’s famous nightlife. “She was 15 or 16,” said Miles, “and Francis asked me to do him a favour and take her on a Bateau-Mouches and he’d pay for it all.”

Valerie Beston—Bacon’s minder and devoted friend at the Marlborough gallery—with Bacon at the opening of his 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris

© André Morain, Paris

The day before the formal opening and the press view, Bacon had a long lunch with Dicky and Denis. As they passed the Grand Palais on their walk back to the hotel, they saw a guard of honour drilling on the steps in preparation for the opening: the ceremonial red carpet was being laid. Bacon was initially taken aback, but also honoured. France herself was rolling out the red carpet. He returned to his room to find something far less welcome—George drunk and incoherent with an Arab rent boy. The room stank. Bacon became incensed. Neither Bacon nor George held back when they had been drinking, and they had what Valerie Beston called “a terrific row.” Bacon left for a reception that evening, and afterwards he stayed out late gambling with Denis. When he returned to the hotel, the room still stank. It was too much: he could not spend the night before his opening sleeping in such a room. Between 1 and 2 a.m. Terry Miles, whose room was on the ground floor, heard a knock at his door. “I thought, ‘Bloody girl.’” Instead he found Francis at the door, asking if he could sleep in the second bed. “George has brought home this filthy Arab whose feet stink,” he said. “Do you mind?”

Early the next morning, Bacon asked Miles if he would check upstairs to see “if George has got rid of that bloody Arab.” On his way up, he ran into Miss Beston, on her way down to breakfast. They nodded a good morning on the stairs, and she asked him where he was going. He explained his errand. Together, they then climbed the stairs and knocked on the door to the suite. There was no answer. They edged it open, with Miss Beston pausing at the door. “The bed was all in a kerfuffle,” said Miles, “and there was no George, and I opened the bathroom door to check and see if he was in there and he was on the loo.” George sat leaning forward. Miles stared for a few moments. “For all intents and purposes he was dead.” He then turned around to tell Miss Beston, still pausing at the door, and “she says ‘You’re joking’ and I said ‘No, no, it’s like he’s got all his colour under his skin, as if his veins are all blown up and everything.’” Miss Beston said, “Oh God, close the door.”

They went downstairs and told Bacon. There was “no crying or anything,” Miles said. “He was a tough guy. He didn’t show too much emotion. It would have been more about ‘What are we going to do?’” Miss Beston, however, saw the “devastation” in his eyes. She accompanied Bacon up the stairs: he must see for himself. The official state opening and press view were scheduled for that afternoon, to be followed by the larger private view—a festive social occasion for the Parisian art world. Afterwards, a grand dinner was planned at the legendary restaurant Le Train Bleu, hosted by the Leirises and Sonia Orwell, who also planned an afterparty. “They called the [hotel] manager,” said Miles, “and explained what happened.” Would it be possible, they asked, to postpone George’s death until the following morning? His death would otherwise dominate news of the opening. The manager, like any good hotelier, was discreet. Illicit sex and unexpected death were part of the job. He understood the difficulties the situation presented. Yes, George could wait until the morning after the formal opening. The manager went upstairs to lock the room where George sat on the loo.

Nadine Haim rode with Bacon to the opening. Haim, the sister of the powerful French dealer Claude Bernard, was a new friend. Bacon looked distraught, she said; but when the car door opened onto the red carpet he walked confidently up the stairs, lined on either side by the guard of honour, to meet the waiting dignitaries. A large sign proclaimed—just below the Immortality quadriga—“Francis Bacon, 26 Octobre 1971–5 Janvier 1972.” Bacon, wearing a suit and a tie, became what he unfailingly became at such events: smiling, polite, effervescent. Inside, people pressed forward to congratulate le maître. Soon enough, the first faint whispers began. “Where is George?” He could usually be found pointing himself out in a picture. The few close friends who knew of George’s death, including Sonia Orwell, Isabel Rawsthorne, Nadine Haim, and the Leirises, were too shocked to keep the news completely to themselves.

Bacon himself, however, appeared at ease. He smiled, turned, and walked about in the vast galleries, the gilt frames of his paintings reflecting the grandeur of the space. He spoke French to the French, English to the English, either language to the bilingual. Would he say hello to Miró and Masson? Here was Michel Leiris. There was Salvador Dalí making a surrealist spectacle of himself with a statuesque blonde. Bacon was photographed and tugged at. His friends emerged for a moment, coming in and out of focus—Isabel! Muriel!—between the strangers being introduced. Beyond the revolving kaleidoscope, Bacon sometimes caught glimpses of paintings, including ones of George, staring back at their maker. Bacon surely heard the cruel rhyme now beginning to sound. Peter Lacy, dead at the opening of his Tate retrospective. George Dyer, dead at the opening of his Grand Palais exhibition. He would sense not only the tragic tolling, but also, probably, the ironic absurdity of the moment. In the corner of his eye, past the heads of friends and strangers, was the left panel of Three Figures in a Room, depicting George slumped over the loo. President Pompidou made a show of stopping in front of this very triptych, purchased by the French state.

Bacon performing at a glittering dinner the night of his private view in Paris—just after George died from an overdose of drugs and alcohol

© André Morain, Paris

Bacon talked his way through the opening and listened to toasts at Le Train Bleu. The Leirises had offered to cancel the dinner, but Bacon insisted that it go forward. He had often been to Le Train Bleu, located in the Gare de Lyon, on his way to the South of France, including with George when they travelled to Provence to visit Stephen Spender in 1966. By now, most people at the long tables had heard the news, and as they looked at Bacon, he possessed for them a strange new fascination: his art no longer seemed an exaggeration. It was the truth, imperfectly concealed by a party. The figures in his paintings might almost have jumped into the room. At the end of the evening, Bacon briefly stood to thank the Leirises and Orwell for hosting the dinner and everyone else for coming. He passed through Sonia’s afterparty. He spent the night—as he had the night before—in the hotel room booked for Terry Miles. As he lay down, George still sat upstairs.

The Times called the success of the Bacon show “astonishing,” running the headline “Francis Bacon Paintings Boost Britain.” “Long articles on him appeared in every newspaper with any artistic pretensions,” wrote its correspondent. “A film about his work appeared on television …” To many in England, it was a source of pride that Paris, widely acknowledged as London’s superior in the visual arts, should celebrate an English painter. Andrew Causey, in the Illustrated London News, wrote that Bacon’s retrospective “marks one of the rare successes of British painters in capturing the attention of a European public.”

Bacon was becoming a national figure, not just a modern artist. The exhibition also marked a success for the figurative tradition in Britain, a point that Bacon’s friend Louis le Brocquy—himself committed to representational art—stressed in a letter to Bacon about the “sweep of his achievement”:

Perhaps you yourself have reservations, but to me it is here in the Grand Palais—in the great circumstance of Paris—that your gesture is seen finally to assume and assert its universality … That you have sometimes been regarded as an outsider on the contemporary scene is perhaps the measure of the recent general indifference to this particular painterly tradition. That in spite of this you are progressively regarded as central to your time and pre-eminent in it is surely due to the overwhelming force of your vision.

Pockets of resistance remained, especially in Britain itself. The critic John Berger, still many years away from changing his opinion, compared the paintings to the work of Walt Disney. If the cartoonist made human behaviour look “funny and sentimental,” Berger wrote, Bacon imagined “the worst possible having already happened”—and yet Francis and Walt shared formal qualities and were equally interested in distorting reality. But most of the English art world had come around to Bacon. The first substantial book on the artist, which John Russell completed in 1971 to coincide with the show at the Grand Palais, was widely praised. The Continental Europeans were even more enthusiastic than the English. French reviews were largely favourable. After Paris, the show travelled to the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, where it was also well received.

Even before the Grand Palais show, French artists and critics, asked which artist they would like to see exhibited in Paris, overwhelmingly chose Bacon, and he polled well when Connaissance des Arts asked one hundred prominent people to name the ten most important living artists. The French novelist Marguerite Duras, now one of Bacon’s friends in Paris, conducted an interview for La Quinzaine Littéraire in which Bacon sounded very much like a Frenchman on the Left Bank. “To work I must be absolutely alone. Nobody in the house,” he told her. “My instinct fails when others are there.” He confessed to anxiety in the studio, recalling that Ingres wept for hours before he began a painting. And in an interview the day after George’s death with Jean Clair—the nom de plume of the art historian and essayist Gérard Régnier—he declared that for him love was “an obsession.”

The Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, after seeing the show at the Grand Palais, decided to use images from Bacon in the opening credits of Last Tango in Paris, a film that soon became a sensation. He brought his leading man, Marlon Brando, to the show because “I wanted him to respond to and reflect Bacon’s characters … I wanted Paul [Brando’s character] to be like Lucian Freud and the other characters that returned obsessively in Bacon’s work: faces eaten up by something that comes from within.” Bacon himself found Last Tango in Paris dreadful, telling friends that Brando droned on endlessly, and platitudinously, about the futility of life. But the appeal of Bacon’s work to a smart, glamorous director like Bertolucci conveyed how stylish the artist was becoming—an attraction that only increased with the death of George, a lover “eaten up by something that comes from within.”

Bacon was attracting attention as a social performer as well. His face was almost as memorable, and as calculated, as Andy Warhol’s. He could even fit into Vogue. He appeared to be a radical sexual showman, even if he was not, and his persona was that of a public man with fascinatingly dark secrets. He was a teller of mysterious stories—though he disliked “narrative” in art—set in grandiose frames. To some, he appeared to be a modernist searching for the dark and cathartic truth, with the death of George a sign of authenticity. To others, he seemed more and more to be a performer playing the role of tormented artist on the canvas. There was an intriguing tension developing in his paintings between up close and far away, reserve and revelation. The glazing and the frames created, among other things, a stage set. The iconoclast might even be an icon—an increasingly popular word in Western cultural discourse—especially if you placed “icon” in quotation marks.

The American critic Paul Richard, who admired Bacon’s art, once wryly captured the tension after watching Bacon at a press lunch:

“Life is wholly futile,” said English painter Francis Bacon. He ate another oyster. “Wholly futile,” he repeated. “Yet I have this eternal optimism about the day, the hour, an optimism about nothing, really.” He took another sip of wine … Bacon’s conversation often seems a construct previously prepared. “How can one remake the image without merely illustrating?” Bacon asks the question and Bacon knows the answer. “Some paint speaks directly on the nervous system; it does not merely tell a story.”

The critic’s eyebrow was nicely arched, but the answer to his implicit question about authenticity was not difficult. No one enjoys an oyster and a glass of wine more than a man intensely aware of death. As for the charge that Bacon was a performer reciting his lines … Well, of course! Sometimes there was that, too. Bacon could represent contrary things at once.