2021.03.25 弗朗西斯-培根早期失败中的辉煌

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BOOKS
The Brilliance in Francis Bacon’s Early Failures
A new biography of the painter sheds light on a little-known period of his life: the time he spent working as an interior designer.

By Sophie Madeline Dess
Bacon in a beige sweater sitting in his studio
Popperfoto / Getty
MARCH 25, 2021
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In 2013, Francis Bacon’s painting Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142 million, setting the world record (since surpassed) for the most expensive painting sold at auction. His second- and third-highest-selling paintings, one of which was sold as recently as the summer of 2020, place him firmly in the art-market ranks of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and other blue-chip masters. The similarities between Bacon’s three top sellers are clear. Each piece is composed of three panels and, as in much of his work, the central figures are grotesquely distorted: bodies compressed at their joints, expanded into fleshy puddles, coerced into jumbled parts. As with the best evocative art, many of Bacon’s paintings inspire discomfiting questions. Are Freud’s hands gruesomely melting or surreally clasped? Is he one- or three-legged? Is he lounging and relaxed, or is he caged, on the verge of a violent uncoiling?


These questions arise from a central tension, not just between what we might expect a portrait to look like and Bacon’s warped rendering, but between the body and the room it inhabits. Bacon’s rooms aren’t passive settings: They close in on and clash with the bodies inside them. Freud’s body, for instance, is conscribed by a rectilinear structure built around (or extending out of) a bed’s headboard. He sits on a delicate wooden chair, its casually curved legs and cane-woven bottom reminiscent of the spare chair one might keep in a closet. The simmering tension between the familiar space and the freakish, distorted figure is a quiet but major part of the work's allure. Baconian settings—which abound with doors, walls, windows, carpets, curtains, chairs, beds, and banisters—help stabilize the chaos and orient the gore. However—as the Bacon biographers Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens explore in their sprawling new biography, Francis Bacon: Revelations—the carefully painted rooms of Bacon’s oeuvre were not the first that he designed.

3 panel painting of a man in a room at different angles sitting on a chair in front of yellow wall
Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969. (Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969. © The Estate of Francis Bacon, 69-07. All rights reserved. Private collection, USA.)
Bacon, before most people had heard of him in the late 1920s and early ’30s, was briefly an interior designer. “A little-known fact that we discovered,” Swan explains in the 2017 BBC Documentary Bacon: A Brush With Violence, is that Bacon “was for three or four years part of a very important design and interior-decorating world.” He might even have studied—as the authors report in Revelations—in the workshops of such avant-garde designers as Evelyn Wyld, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, and Ivan da Silva Bruhns (the latter’s rugs are now auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars). Bacon was already sketching and painting, even as he was designing. But at age 18, he likely regarded a painting career as an intimidating, if intriguing, possibility—one that he lacked the formal training, connections, and overall artistic vision to fully indulge. The adjacent world of design was more accessible. “Bacon would only have to display an interest,” Swan and Stevens explain, and the design community would welcome him. And welcome him it did.


Read: The conundrum of Lucian Freud’s portraits

For a painter whose fascination with the grisly would eventually result in depictions of figures hacked to bits on a bed, shrieking into the void, or nailed to a mattress by a hypodermic syringe, Bacon excelled in a design style that was exceptionally sleek and clean. Born in 1909, he was in his teens and early 20s by the time postwar aesthetics took hold. The Bauhaus movement, for one, made quick work of disassembling the leafy tendrils and sweeping arabesques of the past Art Nouveau era. Organic, foliate forms were replaced with a crisper geometry. Circles, squares, and triangles found expression in cradles and tea infusers. A jointless steel chair was a triumph both material and existential—indeed, with its emphasis on seamlessness, Bauhaus took on universal and even democratic aspirations.

In addition to Bauhausian simplicity, Bacon enjoyed other modern, cubistic forms of design, as well as Art Deco trends, which used geometry a bit more ornately. These included the work of the designer Eileen Gray, whose showroom Bacon had apparently come across in 1928 while living in Paris (around the same time he studied in design workshops). Like most visitors, he was galvanized by what he saw. “Suddenly,” Swan and Stevens write of Gray’s studio, “the known world of rooms looked undone and emptied out, replaced by light, a few simple forms, and exhilarating open spaces.” This sight was one of the major aesthetic shocks Bacon experienced in Paris. Another was his first encounter with Picasso’s work, which sent Bacon reeling. “At that moment,” Bacon explained in an interview with the British art critic David Sylvester, “I thought, Well, I will try and paint too.” But paint like a master he could not. Not yet. Design like one, well—he could try. Or he could imitate.

Bacon's studio with tables and a rug
An outtake from The Studio photo shoot that Bacon sent to his mother, with detailed descriptions of his furniture and rugs. (Courtesy of Ianthe Knott)
By the next year, Bacon had opened his own design studio at 17 Queensberry Mews, London. He had sleek business cards made: “Francis Bacon,” they announced, “Modern Decoration, Furniture in Metal, Glass and Wood/Rugs and Lights.” A sign outside the studio read francis bacon, designer. According to Revelations, the space itself, a former automobile garage with lofted ceilings, offered “a beguiling mix of radiant white, gleaming steel, mirrored glass, boxy chairs, animal skins, and mysterious geometries.”

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If Bacon’s glass-topped tables looked suspiciously like Gray’s (they did), his wooden bench “was an almost exact copy” of an earlier Gray design. Still, in London—considered less artistically adventurous than the booming Berlin and Paris—Bacon’s studio made a splash. The influential British critic Madge Garland (whom Bacon had befriended) glowingly covered it, praising the studio’s windows—“curtained with white rubber sheeting, that hangs in sculptural folds”—and its rugs, which she admired as “purely thought forms.” The article generated attention and brought Bacon a few commissions, one of which inspired a subsequent review, likely also written, Swan and Stevens surmise, by Garland: “It is not often that you find painters turning into decorators, but … Francis Bacon has done this with marked success.”

That “turn,” of course, never happened, although Garland would have had good reason to expect it. By that point in 1934, Bacon had experienced a massive humiliation in his still-fragile painting career: He had put together the first solo exhibition of his paintings, which he had worked on concurrently with his designs; the show was sparsely attended and censured in the press for expressing more of the artist’s angst than his painterly skill. And yet, maybe confounding to Garland, it was the design world that Bacon mysteriously abandoned. Perhaps he felt he had pushed against design’s limits. A shapely rug or chair can take on only so much nuance (or expression of internal rage). Perhaps he sensed that he needed to test the constraints of paint, not so that he might conform to those constraints, but so that he might learn to exploit them most expressively.


Later in life, as Bacon accrued success with his shock-inducing paintings, he began to carefully reconstruct his past. Those decorating years? “He never mentioned” them, Bacon’s friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt explains in A Brush With Violence. “Decoration was one of the foulest words in his vocabulary after that.” Swan and Stevens back this up, writing that Bacon “went to great lengths in later life to conceal his early years … especially his life as a designer.” Why? No one is sure. Perhaps Bacon did not fail spectacularly enough as a designer. For a man whose difficult upbringing only enhanced his seemingly lifelong drive toward masochism and self-mythologizing, the most repulsive thing about his design years might have been their mediocrity. The contemporary artist Damien Hirst, a fellow record-setter, who owns one of Bacon’s earliest works, claims in A Brush With Violence that you can feel Bacon in these years “almost egging himself on to be confident enough to paint,” perhaps in the same way that Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol used their commercial-art experiences to help inform their eventual mastery. The difference is that those artists readily admitted to their history. Bacon, perhaps preferring to seem preternaturally fully formed, did not.

Read: Warhol’s bleak prophecy

Yet the design years’ influence is huge. Take Bacon’s painting of Freud. Not only does the immaculately painted room feel eerily emptied out (think of Gray’s “exhilarating open spaces”), but its clean geometric lines are direct echoes of the design styles with which Bacon once engaged. Bacon is, in fact, at his most profound when objects and bodies feel like rooms unto themselves—when his faces show us geometric panoramas of their profiles, reveal to us the torn hemispheric circles of skin and the curved sinew beneath them. In certain portraits, a viewer can practically descend into a subject’s eye socket as though down a spiral staircase. Recall Bacon’s studio and its half-circle glass tabletop, or the sculptural folds of its rubber curtains—are they not expressed in the famously bulbous tips of his figures’ heads, in the pleated, sculptural curves of the umbrella of death? It’s no surprise, then, to read in Revelations that one of Bacon’s painting tools was “a T-square used in his designer days, which remained in his studio for the rest of his life.” Caught in a design aesthetic that sought to efface the grisly, Bacon wanted to indulge it, and he would succeed in doing so. What he did try to efface was the role design played along the way.

Sophie Madeline Dess is a critic and writer based in New York.



书籍
弗朗西斯-培根早期失败中的辉煌
一本关于这位画家的新传记揭示了他生命中鲜为人知的时期：他作为室内设计师工作的那段时间。

苏菲-玛德琳-戴斯报道
穿着米色毛衣的培根坐在他的工作室里
Popperfoto / Getty
2021年3月25日
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2013年，弗朗西斯-培根的画作《卢西恩-弗洛伊德的三项研究》以1.42亿美元的价格成交，创造了拍卖会上最昂贵画作的世界纪录（后来被超越）。他的第二和第三高价画作，其中一幅最近在2020年夏天售出，使他在艺术市场上与巴勃罗-毕加索、克劳德-莫奈和其他蓝筹股大师的行列紧密相连。培根的三幅最畅销作品之间的相似之处很明显。每件作品都由三块板子组成，和他的大部分作品一样，中心人物都被怪异地扭曲了：身体在关节处被压缩，膨胀成肉泥，被胁迫成杂乱的部分。与最好的唤起性艺术一样，培根的许多画作激发了令人不安的问题。弗洛伊德的手是可怕地融化了还是超现实地紧握着？他是单腿还是三腿？他是悠闲地躺着，还是被关在笼子里，处于暴力解体的边缘？


这些问题来自于一种核心的张力，不仅仅是我们可能期望的肖像画的样子和培根扭曲的渲染之间的张力，而是身体和它所居住的房间之间的张力。培根的房间并不是被动的环境。他们逼近并与里面的身体发生冲突。例如，弗洛伊德的身体被一个围绕着床头板（或从床头板延伸出来）的直线结构所限定。他坐在一把精致的木椅上，其随意弯曲的腿和藤条编织的底部让人想起一个人可能放在衣柜里的备用椅子。熟悉的空间和畸形的、扭曲的人物之间酝酿的张力是作品魅力的一个安静但主要的部分。培根式的设置--到处都是门、墙、窗、地毯、窗帘、椅子、床和栏杆--有助于稳定混乱的局面和确定血腥的方向。然而，正如培根的传记作家安娜琳-斯旺和马克-史蒂文斯在他们庞大的新传记《弗朗西斯-培根》中探讨的那样。启示--培根作品中精心绘制的房间并不是他最先设计的。

3幅板画，画的是一个男人在房间里从不同的角度坐在黄色墙壁前的椅子上。
卢西恩-弗洛伊德的三项研究》，1969年。(Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969. © 弗朗西斯-培根的遗产，69-07。保留所有权利。私人收藏，美国）。
培根在20世纪20年代末和30年代初，在大多数人还没有听说过他的时候，曾短暂地当过室内设计师。"我们发现的一个鲜为人知的事实，"斯万在2017年的BBC纪录片《培根。与暴力擦肩而过，培根 "有三四年时间是一个非常重要的设计和室内装饰世界的一部分"。他甚至可能学习过--正如作者在《启示录》中报告的那样--在伊夫林-怀尔德、伊丽莎白-艾尔-德-拉努斯和伊万-达-席尔瓦-布鲁恩斯（后者的地毯现在以数十万美元的价格被拍卖）等前卫设计师的工作室中学习。培根甚至在设计时就已经在画素描和绘画了。但在18岁的时候，他很可能认为绘画事业是一种令人生畏的，但也是引人入胜的可能性--他缺乏正式的训练、关系和整体的艺术视野，无法完全沉浸其中。旁边的设计世界更容易接近。"培根只要表现出兴趣，"斯万和史蒂文斯解释说，设计界就会欢迎他。而他也确实受到了欢迎。


阅读。卢西恩-弗洛伊德的肖像画的难题

对于一个对可怕的事物着迷的画家来说，他的作品最终会导致人物在床上被砍成碎片，在虚空中尖叫，或者被皮下注射器钉在床垫上，培根擅长的设计风格是非常圆滑和干净。他出生于1909年，在战后美学盛行的时候，他已经十几岁到二十出头了。例如，包豪斯运动迅速拆解了过去新艺术时代的枝繁叶茂的卷须和横七竖八的阿拉伯式花纹。有机的、叶状的形式被更清晰的几何形状所取代。圆形、正方形和三角形在摇篮和茶壶中得到了体现。一把无接头的钢椅是材料和存在的胜利--事实上，由于它强调无缝性，包豪斯有了普遍的甚至是民主的愿望。

除了包豪斯的简约风格，培根还喜欢其他现代的、立体主义的设计形式，以及装饰艺术的趋势，这些设计对几何图形的使用更加华丽。其中包括设计师艾琳-格雷（Eileen Gray）的作品，培根在1928年居住在巴黎时显然看到了她的陈列室（大约在同一时期他在设计工作室学习）。像大多数参观者一样，他被他所看到的东西激励着。"突然间，"斯旺和史蒂文斯在谈到格雷的工作室时写道，"已知的房间世界看起来被取消了，被清空了，取而代之的是光线、一些简单的形式和令人振奋的开放空间"。这一景象是培根在巴黎经历的主要美学冲击之一。另一个是他第一次接触到毕加索的作品，这让培根感到震惊。"培根在接受英国艺术评论家大卫-西尔维斯特的采访时解释说："那一刻，我想，好吧，我也要尝试画画。但他无法像大师那样作画。还不行。像一个人一样设计，他可以尝试。或者他可以模仿。

培根的工作室有桌子和地毯
培根寄给他母亲的《工作室》摄影作品的节选，其中详细描述了他的家具和地毯。(Ianthe Knott提供)
到了第二年，培根在伦敦Queensberry Mews 17号开设了自己的设计工作室。他制作了光滑的名片。"弗朗西斯-培根，"他们宣布，"现代装饰，金属、玻璃和木材的家具/杯子和灯。" 工作室外的招牌上写着弗朗西斯-培根，设计师。根据《启示录》，这个空间本身是一个有阁楼天花板的前汽车车库，它提供了 "辐射状的白色、闪亮的钢铁、镜面玻璃、方型椅子、动物皮毛和神秘的几何形状的诱人组合"。

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如果说培根的玻璃顶桌看起来很像格雷的桌子（确实如此），那么他的木质长椅则 "几乎完全复制 "了格雷的早期设计。尽管如此，在伦敦，培根的工作室仍然被认为在艺术上没有柏林和巴黎的蓬勃发展那么冒险，因此引起了轰动。有影响力的英国评论家马奇-加兰（培根曾与她结为好友）对其进行了报道，称赞工作室的窗户--"用白色橡胶布做窗帘，挂着雕塑般的褶皱"--以及它的地毯，她欣赏这些地毯是 "纯粹的思想形式"。这篇文章引起了人们的注意，并给培根带来了一些委托，其中一篇激发了随后的评论，斯万和史蒂文斯推测，这可能也是由加兰写的。"你并不经常发现画家变成装饰家，但......弗朗西斯-培根在这方面做得很成功"。

当然，这种 "转变 "从未发生，尽管加兰有充分的理由期待它。到1934年的那一刻，培根在他仍然脆弱的绘画生涯中经历了巨大的羞辱。他为自己的画作举办了第一次个人展览，这些画作是与他的设计同时进行的；这次展览出席者寥寥无几，并被媒体指责为更多地表达了艺术家的焦虑而不是他的绘画技巧。然而，也许让加兰感到困惑的是，培根神秘地放弃了设计界。也许他觉得自己已经突破了设计的极限。一张有形状的地毯或椅子只能承担这么多的细微差别（或表达内心的愤怒）。也许他感觉到他需要测试绘画的限制，不是为了顺应这些限制，而是为了让他学会最有效地利用它们。


在后来的生活中，当培根凭借其令人震惊的画作获得成功时，他开始仔细地重构自己的过去。那些装饰的岁月？培根的朋友和传记作者迈克尔-佩皮亚特（Michael Peppiatt）在《与暴力擦肩而过》中解释说，"他从不提及 "这些年。"在那之后，装饰是他词汇中最肮脏的词汇之一"。斯旺和史蒂文斯支持这一点，他们写道，培根 "在以后的生活中不遗余力地掩盖他早年的生活......特别是他作为设计师的生活"。为什么呢？没有人确定。也许培根作为一个设计师的失败还不够引人注目。对于一个成长环境艰难的人来说，他的受虐狂和自我神话的驱动力似乎一生都在增强，他的设计年代最令人厌恶的事情可能是他们的平庸。拥有培根最早作品之一的当代艺术家达米安-赫斯特（Damien Hirst）在《与暴力擦肩而过》（A Brush With Violence）中称，你可以感觉到培根在这些年里 "几乎是在鼓励自己有足够的信心去作画"，也许就像威廉-德库宁和安迪-沃霍尔利用他们的商业艺术经历来帮助他们最终掌握艺术的方式一样。不同的是，这些艺术家很乐意承认他们的历史。培根也许更愿意让自己看起来先天完整，他没有这样做。

阅读。沃霍尔的暗淡预言

然而，设计年代的影响是巨大的。以培根的弗洛伊德的画为例。这个画得一尘不染的房间不仅给人一种被抽空的感觉（想想格雷的 "令人振奋的开放空间"），而且其简洁的几何线条直接呼应了培根曾经参与的设计风格。事实上，当物体和身体感觉像自己的房间时，培根是最深刻的--当他的脸向我们展示他们轮廓的几何全景图，向我们揭示皮肤的撕裂的半球形圆圈和他们下面的弯曲的筋脉。在某些肖像画中，观众几乎可以进入被摄者的眼窝，就像走下一个螺旋形的楼梯。回顾培根的工作室和它的半圆玻璃桌面，或者它的橡胶窗帘的雕塑般的褶皱--它们不是在他的人物的著名的球形头顶，在死亡之伞的褶皱、雕塑般的曲线中表达吗？因此，在《启示录》中读到培根的绘画工具之一是 "在他的设计师时代使用的T型方块，在他的余生中一直放在工作室里"，这并不奇怪。培根陷入了一种设计美学中，这种美学试图抹去可怕的东西，他想放纵这种美学，而且他将成功地做到这一点。他试图抹去的是设计在这一过程中扮演的角色。

Sophie Madeline Dess是驻纽约的评论家和作家。