September 2024. Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

1975, Flammarion, 255 pages. Written in English, read in French.

Despite his parents’ apparent regard for old British philosophers of the renaissance, Francis Bacon carved out a unique path for himself as a painter with a distinct style — his paintings often appear as if they have started out as standard paintings — self portraits, portraits of friends and historical icons — and have devolved at some point to represent a chamber of hell that offers an echo of something from real life. Ancient and contemporary events led him to create images of crucifictions, portraits encased in glass cages, and various studies of screaming people.

David Sylvester, a renowned art critic and longtime friend of Bacon, compiled this book out nine interviews, chronologically ordered, which have taken place between 1962 and 1986. Some of the interviews were conducted specifically for the book; some have been conducted for other purposes, and have surfaced prior to the book as magazine articles, television programs and movie documentaries. Sylvester is careful to clarify at the beginning and end of the book that, apart of one interview which has been based on the transcript of a documentary filmed for television, none of the interviews were done in one seating, and their content is not even internally ordered in a chronological manner.

Sylvester constructs the interviews, as they appear in the book, as if we drop into a conversation that has already started, and may leave before the conversation ends — Sylvester has arranged for us to appear just at the interesting point. He discusses with Bacon a variety of subjects, ranging from Bacon’s biography and how it affected his painting, to the peculiar techniques he uses and their origins, to his regard to contemporary and old artists, to his non-committed choice of symbols carrying a lot of weight in his paintings. What the construction of the book creates, is a sense of “checking in” with an inspired and inspiring artist, witnessing the evolution of his views through time.

Bacon, as he recounts in the book, was born in Ireland to British parents and has spent his childhood moving in a pendulum-like way between Ireland, England and France. After being discharged from the army and from the defense service during the second world war and working a set of odd jobs, he has moved to Berlin and, in a Picasso exhibition, found his calling.

His art, as he explains his process during the nine interviews, appears to be born in a violent way — grasping and catching, laying traps and extracting, tearing and breaking, are the verbs he chooses to express himself in the responses he quite often gives Sylvester; he also talks about the random nature of his work, about happy accidents and gambles, and about the way an image, especially that of a real person, emerges out of a composition of shapes and colours not set out initially to represent that image. He also talks about his many unorthodox inspirational materials — images of wild animals and wrestling men, medical procedures and old movie scenes, Eichmann and pope Benedict X (or at least a painting of him by Velasquez).

Throughout the book we can find reproductions of his paintaings and reference materials — some in the context of which they are discussed, some — in color — clustered in a dedicated section of the book. After spending some time inside the mind of Francis Bacon the paintaings appear different — their mystery has been resolved, and another layer of mystery has been attached.

The October 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.