PENTHOUSE INTERVIEWS FRANCIS BACON: THE GREATEST, SWEETEST, DAMNED
(the text of this interview was published in "Penthouse" in the Italian edition of April 1981: "The greatest painter in the world speaks").
In front of him and his paintings Picasso felt humble like a student. His painting portrays the horror of our entire century, "but expressing horror", says Bacon, "does not mean becoming depressed in sadness, if anything it means preparing for defense".
Picasso called him "The only living painter in front of whose paintings I still feel like a schoolboy". Critics today tend to unanimously consider him, at least as a pure painter, the greatest of the century (and dealers too: the average price of a painting by Bacon today is around two hundred million).
When a few years ago the Vatican wanted to underline the continuity of his presence also in the art of today, inaugurating the new modern art rooms in St. Peter's, Gianni Agnelli gave Paul VI one of his three Bacons. It was part of one of the painter's famous series: the personal remake of Velasquez's Innocent
The Pontiff appears caged on a bench that looks more like an electric chair than a throne. His face is disfigured by a ferocious and frightened scream. His face is a flow of flaccid flesh, on the verge of exploding. Even in the eyes of a child, everything would have appeared as the symbol of a bloody and impotent power. Despite this, the Pope was happy to accept the gift.
Born in Dublin in 1909 and a direct descendant of Francis Bacon, the philosopher who laid the foundations of modern philosophy of science a few centuries ago, the painter grew up left to his own devices in an environment that he knew was both wild and highly refined.
His father, Sir Edward Anthony Mortimer Bacon, was too aristocratic to care for his children and his mother, a woman of extraordinary beauty, spent her days, perhaps as a reaction, fox hunting. The painter's only true companion was his asthma which tormented him since he was a child, perhaps always giving him a profound sensation of the human organism as something darkly foreign and threatening.
At seventeen he was kicked out of the house by his father who had caught him trying on clothes of a different gender in front of the mirror. Reality suddenly took him away from that sort of boring fairy tale that life in the family castle of Cheltenham had been for him; a reality that presented itself under the traumatic guise of post-war Berlin.
A city in shambles whose advanced level of disintegration is reminded of by a whole literature. "I was still almost a child", recalls the painter, "and I found myself in a city where there isn't an inhabitant who didn't seem capable of stabbing you for a few pennies at the first opportunity. But", he adds, "it was also fun. It was as if an entire population had stripped itself naked and no one any longer used any periphrasis to hide their rapacity or their unbridled passions".
To survive, the future painter got by as a furniture designer and apartment decorator. Then towards the Thirties the encounter with painting: it will be a definitive shock.
Nonetheless, the increasingly prestigious exhibitions that followed one another (at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Venice Biennale, at the Tate Gallery in London, at the Grand Palais in Paris) were unable to capture him, to make him an official character. Unlike another great English painter, Graham Sutherland, who loved to surround himself with famous names and titled people, Bacon always remained faithful to his childhood friends or strangers scattered around the world but who, after chance encounters, meant something to him .
He ordered an American television network that managed to make a program about him years ago that the interview take place in a tavern in a London suburb and that it involve elderly pensioners who drank or argued with him during the interview. “I don't see why they shouldn't have the right to speak too,” observed the English master.
Painter of atrocity, of the nightmare of everyday life, of the bloody thread that now increasingly links many of the events of these days (and in this sense many of his paintings from twenty years ago proved prophetic) to a direct contact Bacon reveals a person of extraordinary delicacy and psychological depth.
Unapproachable and ironic towards power (he did not show up either at the reception that Pompidou had organized in his honor for his great Parisian exhibition, nor at the reception that the White House had held after the purchase of two of his paintings) he instead proves available in moving manner towards anyone who approaches it in a non-institutional or arrogant manner. He even has a personal archive where he keeps all the correspondence it receives, even if the sender is unknown; and he never neglects to reply in his own hand to all the strangers who write to him from all over the world.
In fact, unlike many artists, he knows how to be great not only in his paintings. The following interview is the translation of an informal conversation that lasted many hours which took place in Calderino (Bologna).
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Penthouse: You are today considered by many to be the greatest painter of the century. Among so many definitions does he have one to give to himself?
Bacon: I have bad breath and I'm afraid I'll have to have gastritis surgery.
Penthouse: Wait a minute... I'm talking about self-definitions.
Bacon: I'm talking about myself. This is my self-definition today. A body like many others in the process of decomposing. Despite the definitions. Despite the glory. Despite the billions. All things that fill the books and at most a check. I give them in bulk to anyone who gives me back an ounce of health.
Penthouse: You've always been obsessed with the body.
Bacon: Well, that's another definition. He remembers what the critics say about me. Like tragic surrealism. Or: it paints the drama of life. It's like saying that I breathe or that I use brushes to paint. She tells me I'm obsessed with the body. Do you know anyone by any chance who doesn't? I am obsessed with the body as anyone in their right mind is bound to be. Think about it, when he reaches another galaxy man will have the same body as Adam. A body the same for everyone, the same eyes, the same mouth. Every now and then I read science fiction books. Mutants, multiple, elliptical bodies. Those are populations. That's normal. Not the nightmare of a humanity that is always the same.
Penthouse: Even the trees are all the same... does that seem wrong to you?
Bacon: I disagree. There is a creative difference between a plane tree and a mimosa. Furthermore, biocybernetics has shown us that the latter is equipped with a differentiated nervous system which perfectly equates it to a living being. And I don't know that plants, as thinking creatures, have ever bothered us.
Penthouse: In your opinion, why are poets generally poor and painters rich?
Bacon: Because painting can decorate the homes of the rich even if they don't understand it, while poetry can be read by anyone. Anyone can buy a book of poems and learn them by heart but they cannot do the same thing with a painting. Therefore, even if a poem is sublime, since it belongs to everyone it is worth nothing. A painting, even if mediocre, can be worth millions if it is owned. It's absurd but that's how it is.
Penthouse: She spends long periods alone. Do you go to the cinema for example?
Bacon: Actually, almost never. It scares me.
Penthouse: horror cinema?
Bacon: No, the cinema. We are so dominated by a culture of images that today only if something is simulated does it seem real to us. In Tangier I once saw three bodies crushed by a truck on the street. They looked fake. I'm sure the same scene seen at the cinema would have terrified me. Like when someone dies. In reality it is almost impossible to see someone die. We go to the funeral. At the cinema, however, they show you everything: antecedents, painfulness of the passing away, length of the agony, perhaps with your face in the foreground. It's too much.
Penthouse: That's why in her paintings...
Bacon: I already understand. And my answer is no. My paintings have no symbolism and are even less a periphrasis of the cruelty of the human condition. Whether this is cruel or not, I don't think after two thousand years there is any need for my paintings to find out. Simply a shattered face is more beautiful than a stretched face because it also shows its internal organs, blood, tendons. I have always maintained that realist painters are not realist towards the body but only towards its skin.
Penthouse: What do you do when you're not working?
Bacon: Generally we need to believe that an artist who has, let's say, a traumatic production leads a traumatic life. In fact, they have always described me as someone who put down his brush and went into demonic fury, a sort of smoking silhouette filled with drugs who gambled away his billions at the casino, perhaps with distraught, bloodshot eyes.
Penthouse: Actually?
Bacon: In reality, things like gambling or drugs are primarily tiring activities. And I'm lazy. Even though it may disappoint you, one of my greatest pleasures is going to a possibly anonymous café to have a drink while observing the people. They discuss, gesticulate, become passionate without any mask for a point in the game. I can even stay looking at them for hours. They seem extraordinary to me.
Penthouse: Are they the deformed subjects who populate his paintings?
Bacon: First of all I wouldn't call them deformed and then art has always deformed. An apparently classical painter like Ingres portrayed bodies that, when observed carefully, are anatomical contradictions. The heads in Michelangelo are often a thirteenth compared to the body: a Picasso-level reduction.
Penthouse: Is yours an art, as has been said, of "funeral realism"?
Bacon: No, mine is an anti-Hellenistic art with sulphurous influences. Joking aside, I don't know what to say on these topics... maybe I'd like them to stop considering me eminently tragic. I'm not tragic. If anything, I limit myself to making a few small comments on the horror we experience day by day. But I get the opposite effects.
Penthouse: In what sense?
Bacon: In the sense that people look at my paintings and react only with aesthetic reactions. That crooked eye is precious. That tangle of bodies is refined. It's incredible... maybe if I had painted carnations they would have been more shocked. Like Swift, no more, no less.
Penthouse: Can you explain the comparison to Swift better?
Bacon: It's simple, anyone who has read Gulliver's Travels in the original knows what it really is. One of the most atrocious and cruel books ever written. They made a storybook out of it. They removed it, a bit like what is happening to my paintings.
Penthouse: What influence did his education have on the themes of his paintings?
Bacon: Here's another definition coming. Some kind of laser. My father as the dark source of the screaming men of the first period... crucifixion as patricide... or maybe matricide, who knows. Psychoanalysis in art, we know, has very flexible tools to the point of making the tolerance of two opposing theses proof of its, let's say, complexity. A bit like the Catholic Church.
Penthouse: Is it all wrong?
Bacon: Well, of course we can't ignore who brought us into the world. Cite me an artist who doesn't make the family emerge somewhere in his work. However, it's something more for writers than for painters. When I was the distraught men in double-breasted suits of the first period, I certainly didn't think about my father. I thought... he knows what I was thinking. I do not remember. Except that I get a kind of... how can I put it?, itching when I meet a critic, perhaps a friend of mine, who says to me: "You know, I filled out the form for that painting of yours from '62", I laugh and he disappears. I get the card in my hands and I read: "the dominant color (blue) is dominant for this reason, the format of the painting for this reason, the position of the characters is due to this and this and this other cause again, and finally it is very clear why in the character on the left the nose is deformed and in the one in the center the foot". These critics. They know everything about me. Even what I have always ignored.
Penthouse: You often go to Africa or places like Tangier. What attracts you there?
Bacon: The lack of greed in beauty.
Penthouse: Greed?
Bacon: Yes, most populations are extraordinarily beautiful. In those parts the ugly ones are an exception, not the norm like here. But they don't feel like eternal fathers because of this. They don't make a career out of it. I remember once in South Africa a friend of mine and I met a black girl. My friend, an English doctor, was the ugly European type, small, flaccid, balding, with bridges on his teeth. Things that don't matter when you're like him in a university chair but that humiliate when you're in much more serious places, like a bed for example. That black girl had something of the apparition about her. It was as if nature had wanted to make an effort to extract the maximum splendor from all her anatomical details, from her toenails to the roots of her hair. She was washing clothes and didn't seem at all soured by the fact that so much brilliance wasn't being picked up by a film producer.
Penthouse: And what happened?
Bacon: Something happened that would have been simply impossible in Europe. My friend started crying, I'm not exaggerating, crying hot tears. For him such incredible beauty was the symbol of what he would never have, of what he would never be. He went close to her and, falling on all fours, said to her, hugging her knees: "Please don't reject me. I'm almost old, I'll never come back to these parts, in England women have always treated me like a disgusting worm. I've never even been able to touch a beautiful person. Please...". She certainly didn't understand his English but she sensed, instinctively, organically, that the other was at that moment a poor little man on the verge of madness. A thirsty, a dying man who asked, at least once, for absolution. I will never be able to forget the smile of infinite understanding and infinite goodness with which she returned his embrace. Now imagine the same scene in Europe. She would have given him a slap. She would scream hysterically that he was a pig. Or she would have asked him for money. Or with the penetrating gaze of corruption she would have scrutinized him as a potential industrialist. Oh yes, we have lost the art of giving.
Penthouse: It almost seems like the tale of the Good Samaritan in an erotic key.
Bacon: I expected you even spoke of late colonialism. You are young and can afford to be ironic but perhaps when you are sixty you will understand what I mean.
Penthouse: Has there ever been any figure who has profoundly influenced you?
Bacon: Culturally?
Penthouse: No, in direct contact.
Bacon: I don't know, maybe the philosopher Bertrand Russell, not only for his books but also for what he was as a person.
Penthouse: Did He Know Him Well?
Bacon: When I frequented his house for a few months I was still a boy. But I already knew how to observe. Perhaps he is the only man I have actually seen break the twenty-year law.
Penthouse: The Twenty Year Law?
Bacon: Yes, that law according to which it is almost impossible for a man and a woman to truly love if they are more than ten years apart. I've seen twenty-year-olds love thirty-year-olds. I've never seen 20-year-olds love 40-year-olds. I've never seen thirty-year-olds love fifty-year-olds. Beyond the fact that there are millions of couples who for other reasons, perhaps as serious as love (interest, fear of being alone), remain together with an even greater age difference.
Penthouse: And Russell?
Bacon: Well, I can testify that I saw some beautiful girls fall madly in love with him who was already an old person then. He was small, frail. But he had beautiful eyes and something clean about him. And above all he gave you the feeling that whatever you asked him, from an interpretative mystery in Hegel to how to grow a turnip, he had an extraordinary, definitive and simple answer ready. Ultimately it was like talking to God. Like someone who holds the keys to creation in his hands.
Penthouse: Isn't it a privilege of glory?
Bacon: Absolutely. For example, I don't think I'm a stranger, nor do I miss the joke. But I know nothing about millions of things, or I have a hasty and biased opinion. While Russell gave the sensation of speaking from another world. Maybe I could compare him to the saints. But he had neither the arrogance nor the ignorance of the saints.
Penthouse: Were the Saints arrogant and ignorant?
Bacon: Of course, that story where one establishes a direct line to God and then all he can do is roll his eyes and listen to the world. Too easy. Anyone could certainly do it.
Penthouse: Let's change the subject. Do you think that there can be the same passion between people of the same sex as in a heterosexual relationship?
Bacon: Morally it would be right, technically it is more difficult.
Penthouse: In what sense technically?
Bacon: Social techniques. A relationship is never a two-way relationship. He also lives on the sympathy and harmony that he knows how to create around himself. And since prejudices and hostility towards a same-sex couple are still very strong, it is more difficult for a couple of this type to go through these tensions unscathed.
Penthouse: Do you think that only young and beautiful people can happily fall in love?
Bacon: Young and beautiful and clean inside.
Penthouse: Yet they say that Picasso, until late in life...
Bacon: Of course. Love is one thing, having the power to carry out long sexual activity is another, just as not being a great writer does not prevent you from writing excellent letters. And despite her hundred lovers, I could tell her a thousand episodes about how he felt very alone. He knew that love is a cruel flower that lasts very little, for very few people. Which doesn't stop curing one's solitude with a hundred lovers from being pleasant.
Penthouse: What is horror for you?
Bacon: You are apparently a strong and happy boy. However, looking at her better, there are the beginnings of bags under her eyes which reveal the first liver problems. Five minutes ago she coughed and could get bronchitis. Maybe an hour after the interview her car will go off the road. Or when you return home they will tell you that someone dear to you has disappeared. So she without moving without having done anything. It is the horror that moves for us.
Penthouse: But are you always desperate?
Bacon: I'm afraid there's another definition coming... it's not about desperation. Camus wrote that it is one thing to have no hope, it is another to be desperate. Weighing horror does not mean exuding sadness. If anything, increase your defenses.
Penthouse: I know you knew Pasolini.
Bacon: She came to see me once.
Penthouse: What do you think of your work?
Bacon: I know enough ancient Greek to be able to judge Sophocles but not enough Italian to be able to ask where a good restaurant is. It's a translation problem. Dostoevsky said that Russian is such a bad language that any translation improved his work. However, this is generally not the case. I could tell you something about Verga because I read the extraordinary translation that Lawrence made of Mastro Don Gesualdo which already seems to be a masterpiece in the original. However, I am unable to ascertain this. Lawrence may have sublimated it as weighed down, who knows As you can see we are surrounded by the unknown.
Penthouse: What would you have wanted to do if you hadn't been a painter?
Bacon: The tennis player.
Penthouse: The tennis player?
Bacon: Yes, today I think it is the most rewarding individual activity in the world. What is extraordinary is this score which continuously changes, igniting in each of the players the sense of triumph or defeat. Then the fact, but here too I have to trust whoever explained it to me, that the blows arise not from the arm but from the balance of the whole body, so it is as if it were a language in which the whole organism finds its voice. I read somewhere that if the first man on the moon had landed at the same time as the Wimbledon final he wouldn't have had many viewers. I wouldn't find it hard to believe it.
Penthouse: Do you feel English or a citizen of the world?
Bacon: Proudly calling myself English has something military about it, proclaiming myself a citizen of the world would have something emphatic about it. These are the questions that especially drove our grandparents into a frenzy.
Penthouse: Do you think anything about the transformations in England and Europe in general?
Bacon: I don't think much has changed.
Penthouse: Yet England was a symbol of change.
Bacon: As a judgment it seems excessive to me. Lately he has been successful in some things like music or certain clothing items, that's all. This does not change a nation's tastes or style.
Penthouse: But the new youth talents...
Bacon: Even centuries ago, college students rebelled and grew their hair long.
Penthouse: Don't you think that England is still ruled by dukes and potentates?
Bacon: The coats of arms and formulas change but not the substance. Social theories delude themselves into thinking that they can mold men to an ideal of justice which, however, does not reside in the workplace or in the extension of civil rights, which are nevertheless sacrosanct.
Penthouse: Can you explain it better?
Bacon: Things like racism or social savagery haven't changed.
Penthouse: What racism?
Bacon: The racism that makes you interview me and not an unknown painter who is better than me. The racism whereby a tall woman will never love a short man, even in the most just of societies. In Lenin's last letter...
Penthouse: Have you read Lenin?
Bacon: Accurately. Not the writings which seem boring to me but the letters, which are formidable. Well, what we are talking about can perhaps be best exemplified by his last letter, assuming it is true, because to me it seems almost too funny to be true.
Penthouse: What is it?
Bacon: Historians remember this letter because Lenin wrote in it a very violent reprimand against Stalin. One can assume that he wrote it because he sensed a stink of conspiracy or ideological betrayal. Do you know why he got angry? Because Stalin had behaved in an "ungraceful manner". That's exactly what he wrote, in an "unpolite manner" during Lenin's wife's tea. Now I don't want to reduce a revolution to an anecdote (in any case we are talking about Lenin's last letter, not an anecdote) but it seems extraordinary to me that the last letter that two great revolutionaries wrote to each other hinged on a living room detail. Like two English lords.
Penthouse: Do you believe in God?
Bacon: You know, anyone with a minimum of common sense and a minimum of studies... at the same time I'm struck by what I would call the arrogant heroism of atheists. This doesn't exist here! That's fake right there! They may be right but nothingness is such a terrible entity that even the absurd angels of the Catholic religion would be funny compared to nothingness.
Penthouse: Where do you think you'll end up after you die?
Bacon: Let's say that compared to dust not even hell would seem so terrible to me. If I go, many of my friends will also go and I suppose we would know how to organize ourselves and as for the famous "nostalgia for God", well we have never known him, I don't have nostalgia for those who are precious.
Penthouse: Is it more important to be right or happy?
Bacon: Many who proclaim themselves righteous have ended up only knowing how to be massacrers of people. A specialty of the so-called greats of history. I would say that happiness is a much less dangerous goal.
Penthouse: Do you have any regrets?
Bacon: Everyone.
Penthouse: What, everyone?
Bacon: Everyone in the sense of everyone. I would have liked to be a person who could passionately love all human beings, and who all attracted me. I would have liked to understand the language of animals and that it would have been possible to have a relationship with each of them comparable to that with a human being. I would have liked the trees not to have such a closed character and to be able to play with me, perhaps tennis. I would have liked to be a less clumsy animal and at least know how to fly and take little trips, when I wanted to, at least in five other universes. I would have liked to meet Michelangelo while he was painting the Sistine Chapel and Mozart while he composed Don Giovanni. Not only that, but I would have liked to be the best friend of both of them and for them to proclaim that they had accomplished their best work together with me. And that's just the beginning of my endless regrets. Those, after all, of any man. Every now and then someone comes to tell me that I am the greatest painter of the century. I don't know if that's true. In any case, it's no consolation to me.
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