Thursday, March 6, 2008
Quotes from Essays on Francis Bacon - Short Summary of Bacon and His Work
WEB OF IMAGES by DAWN SANDERS
"Bacon has always found this (the 'horrific' elements of his work) and irrelevant problem, denying that he ever intended to be 'horrific'. Yet he has, on the other hand, admitted that violence was central to his art."
"Others, still with the effect of making the paintings 'reflect' horror or violence in the world, describe it as mirroring the alienation and misery of mid-twentieth century man"
" 'This violence of my life, the violence which i've lived amongst, I think it's different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.' (- Francis Bacon) The main points here are, first, that violence in painting has nothing to do with illustrating violence; second, that the violence he is talking about can only be realized in a painted image.; third, that it is not to do with the violent application of paint, with 'expressionist' violence, but comes out of 'suggestion within the image itself'. "
" 'Illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact.' The opposition between intelligence and sensation is crucial for Bacon. Sensation may include intelligence but the intellect can bypass sensation. Bacon wants his painting to operate primarily through sensation, otherwise it becomes a mere vehicle: 'I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom come upon you.' "
"Bacon considers abstract painting to be a wholly aesthetic thing, and any 'visceral' response we may claim to to it is, he robustly asserts, just 'fashion'.
"There is no real precedent for the kind of tightrope walk he enacts between abstraction and figuration. The point is that he is trying to keep the 'recording' character of painting without slipping into illustration or story telling."
"The elements of his painting can be isolated as follows: there is the material ground (the surface structure of the painting), there is the figure itself, and there is the setting of siting f the figure, more or less allusively established, and sometimes, performing no more than a function of holding or isolating the figure. "
"Distortion, fragmentation, isolation then, are on one level the result of a pictorial battle against illustrative figuration, against a type of representation aimed solely at the intelligence. In his frequent uses of photographs - photography of almost any kind - the implications of these distortions can be seen as an attack on the too simple, too restricted, 'too ordered, too coherent' picture that photography 'gives of the interaction between man and his environment or one man and another', or indeed, of a single person"
" 'When I look at you across the table,' he says to his interviewer David Sylvester, 'I don only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And sometimes I think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.' "
"Bacon has always found this (the 'horrific' elements of his work) and irrelevant problem, denying that he ever intended to be 'horrific'. Yet he has, on the other hand, admitted that violence was central to his art."
"Others, still with the effect of making the paintings 'reflect' horror or violence in the world, describe it as mirroring the alienation and misery of mid-twentieth century man"
" 'This violence of my life, the violence which i've lived amongst, I think it's different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.' (- Francis Bacon) The main points here are, first, that violence in painting has nothing to do with illustrating violence; second, that the violence he is talking about can only be realized in a painted image.; third, that it is not to do with the violent application of paint, with 'expressionist' violence, but comes out of 'suggestion within the image itself'. "
" 'Illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact.' The opposition between intelligence and sensation is crucial for Bacon. Sensation may include intelligence but the intellect can bypass sensation. Bacon wants his painting to operate primarily through sensation, otherwise it becomes a mere vehicle: 'I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom come upon you.' "
"Bacon considers abstract painting to be a wholly aesthetic thing, and any 'visceral' response we may claim to to it is, he robustly asserts, just 'fashion'.
"There is no real precedent for the kind of tightrope walk he enacts between abstraction and figuration. The point is that he is trying to keep the 'recording' character of painting without slipping into illustration or story telling."
"The elements of his painting can be isolated as follows: there is the material ground (the surface structure of the painting), there is the figure itself, and there is the setting of siting f the figure, more or less allusively established, and sometimes, performing no more than a function of holding or isolating the figure. "
"Distortion, fragmentation, isolation then, are on one level the result of a pictorial battle against illustrative figuration, against a type of representation aimed solely at the intelligence. In his frequent uses of photographs - photography of almost any kind - the implications of these distortions can be seen as an attack on the too simple, too restricted, 'too ordered, too coherent' picture that photography 'gives of the interaction between man and his environment or one man and another', or indeed, of a single person"
" 'When I look at you across the table,' he says to his interviewer David Sylvester, 'I don only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And sometimes I think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.' "
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