36

An Englishman Abroad

AS BACON WEARIED OF LONDON, Paris beckoned. “Parisian art-lovers were unanimous in considering Francis Bacon the most important painter in the world,” said the English sculptor Raymond Mason. “This, despite the existence of two Frenchmen called Balthus and Dubuffet.” Some younger people in Paris began to treat Bacon with the reverence accorded the fathers of twentieth-century art. During the summer of 1973, he was often seen in the boulevard Saint-Germain “somewhat inebriated,” according to the younger English artist Mark Lancaster, with people staring at him from a distance. “I once saw Francis walk straight into the traffic. I rushed over and grabbed him and put him on the traffic island. He said, ‘Oh, it’s you, dear boy. What are you doing here?’ We would have dinner at La Coupole. I’d bump into him at the Flore, and he always picked up the tab.”

Now that Bacon was spending more time in Paris, he became an object of particular interest to the flamboyant art dealer Claude Bernard Haim. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Bernard, having noted Bacon’s success at Maeght in 1966 and his triumphal show at the Grand Palais in 1971, began to court the emerging English master. The eponymous Galerie Claude Bernard was situated on the Left Bank, a reflection of its owner’s desire to develop a hipper reputation than a celebrated old shop like the Galerie Maeght on the Right Bank. His gallery in the 1960s mainly exhibited sculpture and works on paper, but Bernard now intended to enter the flashier and also more lucrative market for contemporary painting. During the 1970s, said Mason, Claude Bernard “was attracting as much attention on the Left Bank as Maeght was on the Right.”

In his effort to woo Bacon, Claude Bernard had a secret weapon—his sister, Nadine Haim. She was short, wiry, and bronzed from years of Mediterranean sun. She was also unusually independent, a lesbian who became another of the strong-minded women to whom Bacon was drawn. Nadine was adept, like Bacon, at mixing worlds. By day, she worked at the gallery. By night, she was a bright light in the homosexual demimonde. In the period before the show at the Grand Palais, she became a good friend of Bacon’s and their relationship strengthened during the 1970s. “We went out a lot together in Paris, to restaurants, bars,” she said. “We nearly always went out just the two of us. Sometimes we went to dinner with Michel Leiris and his wife. We saw each other all the time.” During this same period, Claude Bernard was also assiduously courting Balthus, then admired both as a painter and as the director of the French Academy in Rome, a post once held by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

In 1971, around the time of Bacon’s Grand Palais exhibition, Balthus agreed to a show at Claude Bernard. The art dealer decided it might be useful to cultivate a friendship between Balthus and Bacon. Neither liked the other’s work; yet neither could easily dismiss the other. If one could be persuaded to exhibit regularly at Claude Bernard, perhaps the other one would agree to the same. Sometime around the Grand Palais show, he invited both painters to dinner. It was not a successful evening. Bernard organized a second meeting. This time he included his sister, hoping she could relax Bacon. The group was supposed to meet for drinks at Nadine’s flat above the gallery. Bacon appeared on time, but Balthus did not. The situation became awkward. Bacon allowed Nadine’s son, an adolescent enthralled by photography, to take his portrait. “I asked him if he minded if I took pictures of him,” said Michel Soskine. “I took him to my room and I was very nervous. There was a little chair there and a light on his face.”

Once Balthus arrived, the silences lingered painfully. Neither painter was typically reserved. In fact, Raymond Mason, who knew each of the three artists whom Alfred Barr called the “mavericks” of modern art—Balthus, Bacon, and Giacometti—considered both Bacon and Balthus remarkably sociable and witty. Balthus was appreciated for his “mordant irony,” and Bacon enjoyed quips. When a deeply tanned man in a navy-blue blazer once walked into a party at Claude Bernard’s gallery, for example, Mason told Bacon that the man was very rich and lived year-round on his yacht in the Mediterranean. “‘Ah, a skipper,’ said Francis in a drawl. Then, looking a second time at the man’s tan, added: ‘Looks more like a kipper.’” But Bacon “didn’t say a word” as they were having drinks, reported Soskine, who had been allowed to sit on the floor and quietly take pictures—until Balthus irritably snapped at him to stop.

And still Bernard persisted. In February 1973, he invited Bacon to join him on a trip to Rome, where he arranged for Balthus to take Bacon on a tour through the grounds of the Villa Medici. Perhaps now at last, in this classical setting, they might come to a meeting of the minds, and Bacon would follow Balthus into his gallery. Balthus had spent years exquisitely restoring the gardens and Renaissance palace on the Pincian Hill, and there was much to admire, even in February: eighteen acres of considered greenery with splendid views. Bacon was not ordinarily interested in green unless it came from a tube, but the tour of the garden did give him the opportunity to employ one of the best and subtlest forms of insult: misdirected praise. With such lavish generosity did Bacon compliment Balthus on the garden that Balthus could only take umbrage: not a word, from this dreadful Englishman, about my art?

Bacon had last visited Rome in 1954, during his tormented months in Ostia with Lacy. Although he was now visiting the city as an important man—and consorting with the elegant Balthus—he did not put on airs. When a limousine pulled up to the flat that the artist Jeffrey Smart shared with his boyfriend, Ian Bent, in Trastevere, “the first person we saw coming up the steps was Francis Bacon,” said Smart, “followed by Sandro Manzo of the Il Gabbiano gallery in Rome. Then comes someone from the Maeght Foundation and finally Claude Bernard himself.” Bacon kept apart, but in a simple way. “Francis and I had a drink by the fire while the three gallery people talked to Ian down in his studio. I found Francis agreeable and extremely intelligent.” Lunch followed at a local restaurant. Bacon, genial and relaxed, displayed his authority in indirect ways, such as pleasantly mocking his own work. His paintings came to him relatively easily, he said, now that he rolled on the backgrounds in acrylic like any idiot. All that was necessary was to add “his gestural images, some of them from Eadweard Muybridge, some culled from medical books on plastic surgery …” At the end of the meal, despite the deep-pocketed men at the table, Bacon picked up the bill.

In London, Bacon’s prominence brought new friends and changed opportunities. If Bacon was now a modern master, reasoned David Sylvester, shouldn’t his views be widely disseminated? Their occasional interviews in the press could be reformulated into a “once-and-for-all” expression of Bacon’s views in book form. In the early 1970s, such books were rare: artist interviews were mostly published in small journals, art magazines, and the academic press. It testified to Bacon’s hold on the European imagination—and the interest people took in him beyond the small art world—that Sylvester found a publisher. Sylvester had already helped Bacon hone his ideas into epigrammatic form. Now, in 1975, the interviews would become canonic, the quotations repeated until the “Bacon line” appeared set in stone. (Sarah Whitfield, Sylvester’s companion later in his life, said Bacon would often telephone Sylvester to ask his advice about how to answer interviewers’ questions.) Interviews with Francis Bacon continued to sell over the years, helping consolidate Bacon’s reputation and develop his prophetic voice, particularly among rebellious young people. Together with James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait (1965), in which Lord recounted Giacometti’s struggle to paint Lord’s portrait, Conversations with Francis Bacon came to define for many people the existential quest to find a truthful image of the modern figure.

The American photographer/socialite/animal rights activist Peter Beard, whose chiselled features inspired nine major Bacon portraits

© Peter Beard. Courtesy Peter Beard Studio, www.peterbeard.com

Scholars were also beginning to take an interest. It was not common for graduate students in the conservative field of art history to study contemporary artists. However, one of Bacon’s earliest admirers in America, Sam Hunter, was a professor at Princeton who, as early as 1952, wrote an influential piece about him. In March 1973, Hugh Davies, a graduate student at Princeton and protégé of Hunter, decided to write his dissertation on the first twenty-five years of Bacon’s art. Without George to keep him company, Bacon welcomed the presence of the knowledgeable and appealing young man. What followed was a series of detailed interviews, among the lengthiest Bacon had done, that stretched from early March to early August. Bacon, as usual, allowed no impediment of profession, age, role, or station to develop between them. Davies became the friend who, after work, sat around with Bacon and the visiting William Burroughs in Narrow Street; or had dinner at Sonia’s with Bacon and Erica Brausen. (It was impossible for the art dealer to hold a grudge against her favourite artist.) There was even one memorably dreadful dinner in Wivenhoe when Denis Wirth-Miller exploded in a rage because Bacon brought along Davies, whom Wirth-Miller at first mistook for yet another good-looking sycophant.

One other younger admirer from America—the photographer Peter Beard—also became important to Bacon in the period after George’s death. Then in his mid-thirties, Beard possessed star power of his own. He was tall, athletic, and slightly otherworldly, with an outlook that Bacon once termed under different circumstances “exhilarated despair.” Beard was also impossibly good looking. He had been born in 1938 into an old WASP family and, like many of that time and with that background, cast himself as a Hemingwayesque adventurer. Instead of shooting animals in Africa, however, he photographed them, although usually when they were dead. His powerful images of dead elephants, collapsed within their skins, impressed Bacon. Beard was welcome in every celebrity bar. He knew Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol. He was also heterosexual. His first marriage had been to the Newport, Rhode Island, debutante Minnie Cushing—her name defined her milieu—whose family owned a grand “summer cottage” there. Beard’s lovers included Lee Radziwell, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 1981 he would marry Cheryl Tiegs, the American supermodel.

Beard and Bacon first met at Bacon’s 1965 Marlborough show and went to lunch together. Later that year, Bacon attended a party for Beard at the Clermont Club in Mayfair, which attracted high-end gamblers. The occasion was the launch of Beard’s book The End of the Game, a photographic testament to the rape and pillage of Africa by foreigners. Beard believed that “the deeper the white man went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush … vanishing in acres of trophies and hides and carcasses.” Bacon shared Beard’s fascination with the terrible slaughter of animals in Africa and still leafed through his well-worn copies of A. Radclyffe Dugmore’s 1910 Camera Adventures in the African Wilds (1910) and Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (1925).

Bacon also admired Beard’s restless existence. One day he was photographing Mick Jagger in Europe, the next living at Hog Ranch, his place overlooking the Ngong Hills of Kenya—a region first made famous by the writer Karen Blixen—Isak Dinesen. Beard photographed Bacon on the rooftop of his Narrow Street house in 1972, and in late March of that year, Bacon noted two words in a work diary: “Peter Beard.” Bacon was beginning a first, unrealized portrait of him. In the end, he would paint three tryptichs of Beard as well as individual portraits. Their long-distance friendship was nurtured by the many idiosyncratic postcards that Beard sent Bacon, embellished with photos, drawings, and bits of writing. He once sent Bacon a view of the Montauk cliffs on the eastern end of Long Island, for example, where he had a house that doubled as a retreat for the “beautiful people” of the Sixties and Seventies. “It’s the last house on Long Island,” he wrote. Beard often dropped into London between photo assignments and visits to Hog Ranch. “Peter was a lovely man,” said Wheeler’s barman John Normile. “He would come in in sandals, and the manager would look at him a bit funny. And he had big hands. You’d think he was a bush ranger or worked on the land.” Terry Danziger Miles also noted the attraction: “I’m not sure [Bacon] didn’t have a thing with Peter Beard. Not maybe gay, but Francis had a fancy. There was quite a lot of Peter around. He did love his photography.”

Marlborough wanted to capitalize on Bacon’s growing reputation and, as ever, hoped to crack the American market. Interest from an American museum would help, but it was not obvious how a museum exhibition—in New York or elsewhere—could equal or surpass the one organized by the Grand Palais. MoMA had by now moved on entirely from Bacon. The problem was no longer James Thrall Soby’s misbegotten effort to write a book. MoMA was becoming High Church in spirit, asserting a kind of pontifical power—assumed by the curator William Rubin—over what constituted or advanced the essential modernist dogmas. MoMA was not opposed to the English painter Francis Bacon, but he was now regarded as an outlier irrelevant to the development of important new art. The Guggenheim had also moved on: it had already exhibited Bacon in 1963. The only possibility left was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the encyclopaedic museum that had recently begun to exhibit and collect modern art. It was not a bad venue for Bacon, who revered ancient art and gave modern painting a sumptuous, old masterly feel.

It happened that the Met also wanted to exhibit Bacon. In June 1971, before the opening at the Grand Palais, the Met’s curator of modern art, Henry Geldzahler, approached Frank Lloyd at the Marlborough gallery in London with the idea of an exhibition. At heart a playful curator who did not share the earnest outlook of MoMA, Geldzahler was also intellectually and institutionally adroit. To counter an argument that he might not be as serious as the curators at MoMA, Geldzahler, in 1970, had organized New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, a triumphalist show that reflected the establishment view of recent art. (His controversial exclusion of the sculptor Louise Nevelson signalled his adherence to conventional modernist dogma.) With his bona fides established, Geldzahler could now roam more freely in modern art. Given his close friendship with the English figurative artist David Hockney, he could never quite treat figurative work as irrelevant, and he knew more about English art than most American curators did. Bacon and Hockney did not get along. But Geldzahler did not let that stand in the way. Bacon could draw a crowd, attracting people from the art and other worlds—including many homosexuals—interested in his tormented imagery.

Bacon was thrilled at the prospect of a show at the Met and wrote to Geldzahler to thank him. Unwilling to repeat the Grand Palais exhibition, Geldzahler hoped to concentrate on recent work, highlighted by the great triptychs painted after George’s death. Geldzahler had strong support for the show within the museum. The Grand Palais exhibition had deeply impressed both the museum’s director, Thomas Hoving, and its curator-in-chief, Theodore Rousseau. “We were both overwhelmed by the works of this ‘painterly’ painter of great sensitivity,” wrote Hoving, “and then and there started the ‘plot’ to have an exhibition here at the Metropolitan.” There was a problem, however, and a serious one: Bacon, despite his friendly letter to Geldzahler, wanted nothing to do with him personally. Not only had Geldzahler made his name showing art Bacon disliked—abstract art and pop—but he was a flamboyant social figure who cultivated fame and power. Hilton Kramer, the senior art critic for the New York Times, called Geldzahler “the Diaghilev—or was it … the Barnum?—of Pop art.” Worse, in Bacon’s view, was Geldzahler’s friendship with Hockney. “I don’t want my show hung by Hockney,” he told Pierre Levai of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, only half joking.

A persistent myth about Bacon was that he was too distracted by art to focus on the presentation of his work. In fact, he concentrated on exhibitions with the same intensity that he brought to everything else. He had always respected Harry Fischer’s ability to promote his work, but in 1971 Fischer left Marlborough to found Fischer Fine Art. Bacon himself now felt obliged to step into the discussions with the Met. He was polite to Geldzahler and exchanged a number of letters with him, but did everything possible behind the scenes to replace him. Theodore Rousseau requested a meeting with Bacon during a visit to London in June 1972, and Bacon, sensing an opportunity to press his case, obliged. When Rousseau afterwards wrote to thank him “for your delightful hospitality,” Bacon wrote back to repeat a pitch he probably made in person. “I did so much hope you were going to arrange the exhibition. Between ourselves, I do not have much confidence in Geldzahler’s taste.” He added a significant P.S.: “Can you and I make the choice of what is to be shown?”

Rousseau responded with a firm no. “I shall, of course, be here and will certainly keep an eye on everything,” Rousseau wrote back, but Geldzahler must be the one to “make a first selection with you.” Geldzahler initially envisaged only a show of “twelve to fifteen paintings, many of which should be diptychs and triptychs,” but then increased the number to about thirty-five. Bacon pressed for even more. Altogether, he wrote, he expected to be able to exhibit “between 60 and 70 canvases or more done in the last 5 years.” (The final count was thirty-six paintings, including eight large triptychs.) Bacon also made a bold bid for the grandest exhibition galleries in the museum: “I have one query as to the space—is this the same space, which Mr Lloyd described to me, as that given to the Lipchitz exhibition?” Bacon hoped to achieve in one fell swoop at the Met what he had failed to do over the last twenty years: win over New York.

Despite Bacon’s reservations, Geldzahler was a tireless advocate. He had originally hoped to open the show in March 1972, but timing problems pushed the date to the autumn; then to November 1974; and finally to March 1975. Bacon also became closely involved with the catalogue. Unwilling to put much money behind a difficult modernist, the museum refused to underwrite a catalogue with a good colour reproduction of each painting. Bacon told Geldzahler he was willing “to contribute whatever is necessary to have the catalogue in full colour. I understand the Museum has about 10,000 to spend. You can charge me with the difference.” In the end, Bacon would pay $50,000 for what remained a rather modest catalogue with colour reproductions, an interview, and a ten-page introduction by Geldzahler.

It was probably around Christmas 1974 when an idea arose seemingly from nowhere. The text of the catalogue could include an extensive interview, suitably revised, that Peter Beard had conducted with Bacon in March 1972; Beard called their collaboration the “Dead Elephant Interviews.” Beard had spent that Christmas with Bacon, Dicky and Denis, and probably several others at Narrow Street, and it was the sort of idea that emerged from a day of drinking, cooking, and fanciful talk. David Sylvester, who regarded himself as Bacon’s interviewer-in-chief, no doubt did not approve. Fischer’s strategy was always to bolster Bacon’s reputation with essays from writers who would impress the gatekeepers of art. Beard was not a Leiris, a Spender, a Gowing, or a Sylvester. Beard was instead glamorous.

But Bacon himself loved the idea of continuing his collaboration with the handsome American—two artists confronting subjects of mutual interest—and he was now mostly paying for the catalogue himself. Bacon and Beard also discussed collaborating on a book to be called Nor Dread Nor Hope Attend, a title (borrowed from Yeats), which sounded like Hemingway after too many martinis at Harry’s Bar. It would include an introduction by R.D. Laing and confront, wrote the Village Voice, “such things as stress, death, and a lugubrious future in ways that one can hardly predict, but the elephant motif gives an indication of its tone. This may be the project that finally defines Beard’s vision.”

Nor Dread went nowhere. The interview with Bacon proved productive, however, in ways that Marlborough would not have anticipated. Beard made Bacon more glamorous, much as Leiris made him more serious. To many stylish and well-connected people of the period, Beard was a figure of great fascination; nothing was more intriguing than a man who loved elephants, except possibly a Tibetan monk. Beard was also socially nimble. He was friends with both Jackie Onassis and Andy Warhol, who was Beard’s neighbour in Montauk and often partied at Beard’s house with stars from the 1960s and 1970s. Beard approached the Met interview the way a magazine editor might compose a celebrity shoot on a light board. On the back of a contact sheet that already contained thirty-two images of Mick, Bianca, and the Rolling Stones beside their private jet, Beard scrawled a message in orange grease pencil. “I have enlisted some professional help (an ex-ace reporter for Newsweek—Mrs Now Karen Lerner) to add style & genius (she is very good at this) to my reassembling—EDITING of our ‘interview,’” he wrote. “Believe me it will be GREAT, eventually, after CUTTING, reworking & later elaborating.” In the final version of the interview, Bacon sometimes sounded like Beard. “Dead elephants are more beautiful because they trigger off more ideas to me than living ones.”

In March 1975, a few days before the opening, Bacon flew to New York to begin the requisite lunches, teas, dinners, and interviews. Terry Danzinger Miles preceded him to unpack the crates—a separate crate for each canvas, each glass, and each frame. On his first night at the Carlyle Hotel, Bacon, who had been told he would not have much say in how the paintings were hung, told Miles, “I want my paintings where I want them.” The next morning, according to Miles, “We all fronted up at the Metropolitan and Geldzahler was there and the director at the time, and Geldzahler was all blahdiblahdiblah, showed him around. In theory we placed them all and then they were hung. Then Francis went out for lunch to meet dignitaries.” But Bacon was unhappy with the hanging. “Francis phoned me that evening and said, ‘Look, are you doing anything?’ and I said no, and he said, ‘Look, we need to go back to the Metropolitan—they’re going to let us in specially at night.’ So we went back and walked around and he said, ‘You know, I don’t like that one there, that doesn’t work.’ So with Geldzahler’s help we were allowed to move them around, even though they were hung. In the end, we moved two. And a third we moved and put back.”

Bacon with Frank and Gilbert Lloyd of London’s Marlborough gallery, at his 1975 show in New York at the august Metropolitan Museum

© Cheryl Rossum 1975

Bacon and Miles were unusual friends—the one a homosexual artist whose work shocked many people, the other a heterosexual handyman with a family and ambitions in the art world—whose relationship many people would not understand. Both took a personal dislike to Geldzahler, who was just too free and easy. He offended their sense of propriety. At one point Geldzahler, assuming that Bacon surrounded himself with decadent young homosexuals, stuck his hand down the front of Miles’s trousers. Miles was stunned. “I told him in no uncertain terms to fuck off.” Geldzahler then smiled conspiratorially at Bacon and said, “‘God, he’s touchy,’ or whatever an American might say in those circumstances,” and Bacon snapped back: “Serves you right.” Bacon was on his best behaviour with the press and seemed, thought Gilbert Lloyd, unusually articulate. It was no wonder: he was often repeating lines from Interviews with Francis Bacon. In London, the week of the opening, the Sunday Times Magazine came out with seven pages of excerpts from the book. His social schedule was full, thanks in part to Peter Beard’s participation. Lee Radziwill gave a luncheon where Bacon met Andy Warhol, who arranged to give him a tour of the Factory. John Russell—a great admirer of Bacon—was now an art critic for the New York Times and gave a party for him with his third wife, Rosamond Bernier, a popular lecturer on modern art. Geldzahler arranged oyster-and-champagne lunches with critics. Amei Wallach of Newsday reported: “The Metropolitan’s phone began ringing incessantly with requests from photographers like Richard Avedon and Duane Michals. They’d go anywhere, anytime, do anything for a chance to photograph Bacon.”

Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, 1968–1974 opened on March 19, 1975. About four hundred people in formal dress, freshly hatched from limousines, walked up the museum steps to the lavish party. Willem de Kooning greeted Bacon warmly. Several prominent younger artists came, among them James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, and Larry Rivers. Andy Warhol wore black tie and blue jeans. It was fortunate that the Americans did not know how Bacon regarded their work. He maintained a grudging respect for de Kooning, but Pollock remained “the old lace maker,” and he could not abide the work of Larry Rivers, who was an admirer of Bacon’s. Christopher Gibbs recalled a cork-popping lunch in London at La Popote, a restaurant favoured by “screaming queens” in the late 1960s and early ’70s, where “Francis had it in for Larry Rivers. He said, ‘She’s simply not a deep-end girl like myself, dear, she’s minnying along the sidewalk of life.’”

During the opening, according to Wallach, “Guests rose from the little pink tables with tulips on them to besiege him for autographs. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ one onlooker said. ‘You’d think these people would know better.’” Some friends came from London, among them Dicky and Denis and Helen Lessore, for whom Bacon continued to feel both gratitude (for helping him out in the 1950s) and respect (for what he considered her acute eye). The Met opening naturally aroused disturbing memories of his last two important museum openings, each overshadowed by the death of his lover. Nothing so dramatic happened at the Met. After the opening, a cocktail party was planned at the Algonquin, where George had taken an overdose seven years earlier, to be followed by dinner at Sardi’s, the celebrated theatre restaurant. But Bacon disappeared, taking refuge in the bar of the Stanhope Hotel across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum, where he asked the bar to stay open after closing.

Bacon was well served by the relative smallness of the show: the eye often loses focus if too many highly keyed paintings are hung together. Gilbert Lloyd said, “Geldzahler put on one of the best shows I ever saw.” Not only was the selection deft, but Geldzahler hung the work with flair. He filled most of the first two rooms with large, brightly coloured images and a smattering of smaller portraits and triptychs. Thirteen self-portraits—three of them small triptychs—stimulated the public’s fascination with the artist’s face, personal life, and star power.

Geldzahler crowned the show in the last room with three of the four triptychs made after George’s death—the first, In Memory of George Dyer (1971), was missing—including the graphic Triptych May–June 1973, with George dead on the toilet. Five other large triptychs were also on the walls. Some writers now referred to the George paintings as “the black triptychs,” invoking the example of Goya’s great “black paintings.” There was some advertising huff-and-puff in that signage, but the impact of the pictures on many people was undeniable. Norman Canedy wrote in the Burlington Magazine:

… In the climactic final gallery of the exhibition one is not prepared for the impact of the triptychs, an impact, one soon realizes, that depends initially on the palette. Whatever one ultimately comes to feel about the works to which the viewer is introduced first in the exhibition, the initial impression of highly sophisticated, decorator-coloured surfaces remains. The works in the last gallery, however, are realized with a palette seemingly comprised of black, white, red, and yellow … The resultant effect is one of dramatic gravity, so at odds with the gaily-painted settings of the pieces which introduced the period.

In his introduction, Geldzahler shrewdly deflected criticism of Bacon as a figurative painter and “master of the macabre.” He began: “It is a tribute to Francis Bacon that his work can still elicit adulation from some and be dismissed thoroughly by others”:

He has been a major figurative painter since the mid-forties, yet his work can stir as much debate as that of a debutant. Bacon himself says that his work is hated in America. This is both true and untrue. The audience that admires his work is large; the audience that dislikes it is smaller but more vociferous, made up of artists and critics committed to the idea that we live in an era when the human figure has simply defied being portrayed explicitly …

Geldzahler emphasized how contemporary Bacon’s figures were. They introduced a fresh kind of movement, different from that of the futurists, into the “‘static’ art of painting”: the “image of speed, the contorted body which can hold its position only for the moment it is pictured, or, most characteristically, the head in violent motion, sliding between attitudes …” The New York critics, most of whose views on Bacon were known, were just as grudging as Geldzahler expected. Hilton Kramer at the New York Times dismissed Bacon as a painter who “certainly left no discernible trace on American painting,” as if that were the purpose of an English painter, and would not “make the final cut.” Two leading proponents of abstract expressionism, Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg, were no more enthusiastic. Rosenberg reported that Bacon is generally regarded as a “‘horror’ artist” and dismissed his “self-conscious aestheticism.” Hess’s review in New York magazine—“Blood, Sweat and Smears”—found the recent work more theatrical and less powerful than earlier paintings. Although “superficially, everything looks better,” he wrote, Bacon was now “a virtuoso of his own eccentric manners.”

No doubt Bacon’s painting did not suit these critics, but a certain cultural touchiness also emerged. Proud that a once-provincial culture was now producing important art, American writers did not want to overpraise a figurative artist from Europe. They allowed for no influence from abroad and appeared eager to claim the cultural high ground from middle-class Philistines. “In the past few weeks, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other establishment resonators,” wrote Hess, “have thrilled their readerships with the glittering, tawdry, glamorous, fusty anecdotes that have become this artist’s peculiar litany.” This litany he attributed mostly to Bacon’s being English. He exhibited a condescension towards postwar European art second only to Bacon’s towards postwar American art.

The British always love a local lion; see how well they’ve done for such comparatively modest big cats as Benjamin Britten, Graham Sutherland, Christopher Fry, Henry Moore. The best writers introduce them … and the lions themselves are piquant, cultivated, above all interviewable. They expound beautifully about aims and means. How pleasant it must be to be English, able to express yourself accurately, with charm, and not to be tongue-tied like the Americans, impenetrable like the Germans, irrelevant like the French.

As if to confirm the darkest suspicions of such critics, the Bacon exhibition pleased the masses. One month into its run, Geldzahler gleefully reported 90,000 visitors. The show was extended through the popular July 4 weekend and drew nearly 200,000 people altogether. Not all American critics were grudging. The writer Susan Sontag—almost French when she wanted to be—cut sharply against the grain. She argued that the obsessional quality of Bacon’s art was a virtue, not a fault, and she regarded the period of work after the Grand Palais show as “one of bold development.” Years before other critics, she deftly situated Bacon in contemporary art:

Bacon is one of the least provincial of important modern painters. It is almost startling to remember that he is English—and not just because one has stopped expecting truly major, ambitious, full-blooded work in any of the arts to come out of England. Bacon seems particular—supra-national, almost ideally European. He is probably lucky not to have been born either French or American, and thereby to have been burdened with that load of chauvinist self-consciousness that has gone with the self-definitions of Paris (before World War II) and now New York as The World Capital of Art.

Sontag praised Bacon’s painterly isolation. It was a sign of his unique and inimitable position that “many lesser talents” should have more influence over contemporary painting than he did, and the echo from the old masters was not in her view a mannered weakness but a source of strength. “Bacon’s work seems so centred, so personal, so idiosyncratic, so powerful,” she wrote, “It is as if he were already a classic. As the last of the traditional painters, Bacon is both absolutely central to contemporary painting (by virtue of the quality and integrity of his work) and marginal to it (by virtue of the work’s authority, its completeness, its assuredness, its inwardness, its commitment to despair).”

Bacon spent a further five days in New York. He visited Andy Warhol at the Factory, then at its third location, 860 Broadway on the north side of Union Square. The waspish Dicky gave his impression:

Big scruffy building. Bullet proof door. Stuffed Great Dane in reception. Young man offered us champagne and magazines. Andy Warhol and Francis arrived. AW very frail, paint be-spattered … Strange atmosphere of dereliction. “My pictures are so fresh they stick together” Warhol. Art deco desk of brass and black marble. Moose head given by John Richardson. Huge black kitchen under construction. Furniture arranged like movie lots so that the whole place had the appearance of being lived in by absent people. All rather sad and a “has-been” feeling.

Warhol was nevertheless an American artist whom Bacon found interesting. He admired the Car Crash and Electric Chair paintings made in the Sixties. “I also think he did a thing which was perhaps different in that he made a serialization of those things,” Bacon told Sylvester, perhaps thinking of Eadweard Muybridge. “Being a serial production also made them interesting in a way.” Warhol also admired Bacon—and not just with the customary deadpan “Wow.” Warhol cheerfully confessed at the Met opening that he copied Bacon’s colour—“and his skills.” Warhol had noticed something rarely remarked about Bacon’s art—namely, his provocative use of keyed-up colour.

Not surprisingly, Bacon, growing weary of the unfamiliar social pressure in New York, enjoyed himself more at less formal occasions. Before the opening, Terry Miles had met an art restorer named Barney Brown who worked at Marlborough in New York and also sometimes looked after the Rothko studio for the gallery. “He was a tiny little guy, lovely man, as gay as gay could be,” said Miles. Barney was attracted to Miles but unfailingly polite and not the least bit forward sexually. Socially, it was a different matter. Barney wanted to introduce Bacon to his friends, but Miles doubted it would be possible, telling Barney: “Henry Geldzahler is one of those grabby-grabby people who will want to take him here there and everywhere.” Barney replied, “Well, he must have a night off in which case I’d like to give a party for him.” On Bacon’s first night after arriving in New York, Miles told him about Barney’s wish. “‘I don’t think he’s your type, Francis. He’s really a fairy-godmother type.’ And Francis said, ‘No, no, I’d love to meet him, he sounds wonderful.’”

In the end, Barney Brown had his night. All his friends came to his modest apartment on Lexington Avenue to have a party with Francis Bacon. And, said Miles, “it was great for Francis.” Another friend told Miles that Bacon, as a celebrated homosexual, would enjoy seeing the intense downtown gay scene, in particular the Eagle’s Nest, a famous leather bar located at Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-first Street. Bacon should also know about the anonymous sex available in the long, empty trucks (or lorry trailers) left parked overnight in the West Village near the Hudson River. “You’d go in one end,” said Miles, “and it would be all dark, and then come out the other end, and they’d done whatever they’d done.” Miles could wait in a regular bar close to the Eagle’s Nest, the friend suggested, while Francis explored the scene. “And I said, ‘You don’t know Francis—Francis would go in there [and] he’ll be there all night, and I’ll get chucked out in the middle of the night, and it’s not a safe area, is it?” No, the friend said, it’s definitely not safe.

In the taxi they took downtown, Miles told Bacon about the long trailer trucks. Bacon was not enthusiastic. “I don’t like the idea of it being all black so you don’t know who you’re with. It could be some really ugly duckling.” Instead, they went to a regular bar near the Eagle’s Nest to discuss the matter. The bar was lonely and not fashionable—something like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, but shuttered and serving rumpled alcoholics. “There were two or three guys, normal kind of old drinkers, all crowded around one end, and then there was a woman three quarters of the way along the bar, sort of an oldish woman, and again obviously a big drinker.” Miles and Bacon sat at the bar, and after a while Bacon turned and said hello to the woman. They began talking. Miles paid no attention, because “it was their conversation.” Not surprisingly, as Bacon grew more comfortable, he began to act the way he did at the Colony, another run-down place for serious drinkers. But this bar was not the Colony. Suddenly, from under the bar, “this handbag comes up and smacked Francis straight in the head. I mean, really badly.” The men at the bar leapt up. “I thought, ‘Oh shit,’ so I said to Francis, ‘Come on, got to go,’ and I shoved him out and then luck of the draw there was a cab dropping somebody off and I pushed him in and away we went.” Terry asked what on earth had happened. “He said, ‘I have no idea, the bitch just smacked me.’ And I said, ‘Well, you must have said something.’ And he said, ‘Well, I can’t remember what I said. I might have said she was an ugly old bitch or something like that.’” Getting smacked by a handbag, Miles believed, was Bacon’s favourite moment in New York.