FRANCIS BACON 1909-1992
|
|
INFLUENCES on FRANCIS BACON
"Georges Bataille 1897-1962 was familiar with Bacon's work, regarding the painter as 'among the most important of his generation.' Although Bacon was often reticent about his influences and sources, they were extensive and highly diverse, ranging from Greek tragedy to Velazquez, from T.S. Eliot to Eisenstein. Bacon's voracity for source material is well known. He stated: 'I've looked at everything,' adding, 'I'm like a grinding machine. Everything I've seen has gone in and been ground up very fine.' "
Source: Bacon and Bataille by Peter Jones |
|
Talking about painting is like reading a bad translation from a foreign language, the images are there and they are thethings that talk, not anything you can say about it. Bacon refered to himself as an ''image maker" who often "pulverizes" images drawn from other sources, including photographs and film, paintings by Velazquez, Ingres and Van Gogh as well as poems by Aeschylus and T.S. Eliot.
Every artist will beg, borrow or steal anything that they think will be of any use to them. Francis Bacon
|
|
|
|
DIEGO VELAZQUEZ
Pope Innocent X, ca. 1650
Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome
pass cursor over image
FRANCIS BACON
Study after Velazquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953
oil on canvas 60.25 x 46.5 inches
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
|
If you look at Velazquez, his greatness is his interest in people. . . Velazquez came to the human situation and made it grand and heroic and wasn't bombastic. He turned to a literal situation and made an image of it, both fact and image at the same time. The Pope (Innocent X) is like Egyptian art; factual, powerfully formal and unlocks valves of sensation at all different levels.
Francis Bacon
|
pass cursor over image
Still from Sergei Eisenstein's film
"Potemkin" - Odessa steps sequence
(nurse hit by bullet)
Bacon's "Man with Meat," 1952
oil painting (detail)
|
|
|
|
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
Two Men Wrestling
from
Human and Animal Locomotion, 1887
pass cursor over image
FRANCIS BACON
Two Figures 1953
oil on canvas 60 x 45.75 inches
private collection, England
|
|
|
"The real painters do not paint things as they are . . . They paint them as they themselves feel them to be", Van Gogh (1885)
VINCENT VAN GOGH
Self Portrait (detail), 1885
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Hold cursor over painting:
Click on painting  to view close-up
FRANCIS BACON
HEAD OF MAN, 1959
(Study of Drawing by Van Gogh)
Oil on canvas; 26 x 24 inches
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Cooper, Los Angeles
Study after Vincent van Gogh's self-portrait drawing of c.1885. The drawing was reproduced in The Collected Letters of van Gogh- a book that Bacon owned and admired. |
. . . to me Van Gogh got very close to the real thing about art when he said, I can't remember the exact words, it's one of those extraordinary letters to his brother, which I read over and over again. "What I do may be a lie," he said, " but it conveys reality more accurately." That's a very complex thing. After all, it's not the so-called "realist" painters who manage to convey reality best. I mean, I saw an extraordinary picture by Monet in an art exhibition in London the other day. I'd never seen it before, even in reproduction. It was one of his views of the Thames, but you couldn't make anything out in the first instant because everything was covered with seagulls. It's the most extraordinary inventive thing, and yet very real - a kind of fog of seagull wings over the Thames.
Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a Lie,
by Michael Peppiatt
Art International, 1987
"Homage to van Gogh," oil, 86,5 x 86,5 cm
source
|
|
SLIDE SHOW
PHOTOGRAPHS by JOHN DEAKIN
|
John Deakin's photograph of George Dyer, c.1960
Francis Bacon's Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967
John Deakins' photograph of Henrietta Moraes, c. 1960
Francis Bacon's Reclining Woman (Henrietta Moraes), 1966
|
Influence and Inspiration
Francis Bacon's Use of Photography
|
|
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Oedipus and the Sphinx," 1828
pass cursor over image
Francis Bacon
"Oedipus and The Sphinx," 1983
Click on image to enlarge |
|
|
RECOMMENDED LINKS
Use your brower's "back" function to return to this site
MORE IMAGES HERE |
Image above: Eadweard Muybride's
"Mastiff Walking," 1887
Rollover image: Francis Bacon's
"Dog," 1952 (detail)
|
|
RETURN
|
Bacon's choice of art: Egyptian sculpture. Masaccio. Michelangelo, the drawings above all, perhaps. Raphael. Velsquez. Rembrandt, mainly the portraits. Goya, but not the black paintings. Turner and Constable. Manet. Degas. Van Gogh. Seurat. Picasso, especially where he is closest to Surrealism. Duchamp, especially the Large Glass. Some Matisse, especially the Bathers by a River, but not wholeheartedly: "he doesn't have Picasso's brutality of fact." And Giacometti's drawings, but not the sculpture.
His choice of literature: Aeschylus. Shakespeare. Racine. Aubrey's Brief Lives. Boswell's Johnson. Saint-Simon. Balzac. Nietzsche. Van Gogh's letters. Freud. Proust. Yeats. Joyce. Pound. Eliot. Heart of Darkness. Leiris. Artaud. He liked some of Cocteau but generally had a positive dislike for homosexual writing, such as Auden and Genet.
Notes on Francis Bacon
by David Sylvester
Independent, July 14, 1996
|
|
