Francis Bacon: lost and found: Martin Harrison analyses the information that has recently come to light about paintings that Bacon destroyed, mutilated or radically altered. What do such incidents reveal about Bacon's attitude to his art?

Apollo, March, 2005 by Martin Harrison

When Francis Bacon died, in 1992, the floor of his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington, was left in the state that had already become sedimented in the Bacon mythology, strewn with tattered magazines and books, and creased, torn and paint-spattered photographs (Fig. 1). Painstakingly excavated and transferred in its entirety in 1998 to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the city of Bacon's birth, Dublin, the studio is now preserved for study, and the cataloguing of its contents is enabling some of the obfuscation surrounding the relationship between Bacon's source material and his painting procedures to be penetrated.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Elsewhere, further previously unidentified artefacts continue to emerge. Among these documents is a handful of photographs that recorded, sometimes incidentally, paintings that Bacon subsequently either altered or destroyed: these, too, are proving to be invaluable in illuminating certain unresearched aspects of Bacon's practice.

Six months after Bacon's death, his paintings were hung together with Picasso's Crucifixion (1930), and some of the Crucifixion drawings Picasso made in Boisgeloup in 1932, in the exhibition 'The Body on the Cross' at the Muse Picasso, Paris. Intrigued and delighted at the prospect of sharing a space with the artist who, more than sixty years earlier, had inspired him to take up painting, Bacon agreed to be interviewed by Jean Clair for the catalogue of the exhibition. He told Clair of the profound impression made on him in 1971 when Valerie Eliot published her late husband's The Waste Land alongside the extensive corrections and deletions made by Ezra Pound to the original text. Although Bacon remained staunchly independent of any established literary or artistic circles, next to Picasso the poetry of Aeschylus and of T.S. Eliot inspired more of his paintings than the work of any artist. 'Pound made it ten times better', (1) commented Bacon on the excisions and alterations to Eliot's poem; he frequently reiterated his regret at not having a comparable guru figure to tell him what to discard, although he admitted that: 'Of course, it's true there are a very, very few people who could help me by their criticism'. (2)

It is hard to imagine Bacon being even remotely receptive to such trenchant advice, however distinguished its author. On the other hand, he was a ruthless self-editor, at least as hard on his own efforts as on those of his contemporaries. He was as scathing in condemnation of his widely-admired 'Popes', for example, as he was about the paintings of Jackson Pollock ('that dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace') or Mark Rothko ('rather dismal variations on colour'); (3) even when praising the masters he most admired--Velazquez, Rembrandt, Seurat--he seldom omitted to qualify his approbation.

Dissatisfaction with his own paintings usually resulted in their destruction. Indeed, he was so ruthless that from the first fifteen years of his career, between 1929 and 1944, only fourteen paintings and drawings survive. Subsequently, as Bacon came under increased pressure from his dealers to fulfil scheduled exhibition dates, it is probable that he jettisoned proportionately less of his work, but even towards the end of his life either he, or more usually a friend, maintained the ritual slashing with a knife-blade of rejected canvases.

Today, notwithstanding these depredations, Bacon's oeuvre comprises nearly six hundred paintings--sufficient, it might be thought, to represent a great artist. How, then, could the urge be justified to resurrect works that Bacon presumably wished to remain buried? Firstly, Bacon, unlike most artists, did not make preliminary drawings, although, consistent with the stimulation he found in literature, he frequently compiled hand-written lists of ideas for paintings. Apart from his mass-media source imagery and a handful of vigorous but fairly schematic compositional sketches dating from around 1960, (4) there is scant surviving material that might elucidate the evolution of his paintings. Secondly, even Bacon himself regretted having destroyed certain paintings, in particular one of his earliest 'Popes', Study after Velazquez (1950). He had intended to send the painting to the Festival of Britain exhibition '60 Paintings for 51', but withdrew it and--or so he misremembered later--destroyed it. Included in John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley's 1964 catalogue raisonne of Bacon as a 'destroyed picture', it was in fact removed from its stretcher and stored away at the Chelsea artists' suppliers Bacon used. It was not until 1996 that it was rediscovered.

David Sylvester both confirmed the genuineness of Bacon's expressions of regret at losing the painting, and gave his own opinion that it was the 'finest "Pope" ever', (5) Bacon's dealers, Hanover Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art, arranged as a matter of course for his completed paintings to be photographed, but those he abandoned were, understandably, seldom recorded. Study after Velazquez was an exception, no doubt reflecting Bacon's ambivalence about the painting. But fortunately, a few of the definitely lost works were captured, partly fortuitously, by the camera, and in somewhat different circumstances.