MARK ROTHKO AND FRANCIS BACON
Mark Rothko retrospective, The Tate Modern, London
Francis Bacon retrospective, The Tate Britain, London
Two simultaneous retrospectives of two major 20th century artists seems indulgent, also the decision to depict Rothko as a major modern, Bacon as a major Brit. However, perhaps this division is telling and necessary. Rothko's painting is obviously hardly painting in the traditional sense but that's not the point, is it? It's an architectural style of painting, his works sit well in large buildings like the Tate Modern or in the skyscrapers of New York, Frankfurt or Tokyo. The dimensions of his canvases are a statement of their own, his work is consistently bold and large with a masculine and legitimate bravura. But the works are essentially viewed in their context, just as the music of Mozart or Schubert (cited as influences on Rothko) need to be set in their specific contexts as well as being liberated from that by the process of analogy. It's clear in Rothko's final works that he's referencing Schubert's decline into ill health (syphillis), insanity and death and the darkness of his final work, a penumbra of light which occasionally seems entirely joyful, yet also sweetly melancholic if melancholy can indeed be sweet. Viewing Rothko's works is like filling in the dots in a vast snow blasted landscape, then viewing the same landscape on a sunny day. Rothko's works seem to hang a massive emptiness at their centre, the viewer is pushed between scepticism and acceptance of these vast decontextualised abstracts as a certain tendency is pushed towards it's conclusion.
By contrast Francis Bacon never gives way to abstraction entirely, which he perhaps regarded as a one hit wonder (just before his death in the car crash Jackson Pollock was being asked the same thing...). Instead Bacon is the visionary and naive artist questioning the boundaries of what can be thought, said and done. Bacon's own life was essentially irregular to say the least. Bacon lived on the edge literally as he managed to survive in London by dodging the rent and through petty crime, then as a gentleman's companion (basically a rent boy, forced into a sordid trade of sex for money), eventually meeting his gangland opposite or doppelganger, George Dyer. It's hard though not to like the Francis Bacon we meet in the interviews he gives. Bacon is expostulating about his Anglo-Irish background, about form and abstract expressionism, about a life of hope after reading Nietzsche. His atheism is something we feel as a lucid force which also comes to seem paradoxically both spiritual and Christian. (echoing Nietzsche's untimely meditation that he would one day be called Holy: His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!") Bacon's painting never loses touch with it's roots in figurative painting and in photography, especially the work on movement and human anatomy of Eduard Muybridge. Bacon also collected files of magazine photos of politicians, bullet-riddled corpses, sportsmen, even more bullet-riddled corpses. Bacon seems to want to stand outside the evils or negligence of the world but is always edging closer to it. He references Vincent Van Gogh's lost painting The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, then attempts to make a pastiche of it or a re-interpretation, seems to get everything almost right, but ultimately the painting seems abandoned, as do many other Francis Bacon paintings. Bacon's triptychs and portraits never lack the Bacon voice and it seems that finding a style was as fundamental to Bacon as finding his way back to his life as a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in Dublin at the time of the Irish Civil War, or being made an outcast by his father for 'improperly' donning his mother's undergarments or his lovers jealous, embittered suicide in a Parisian hotel, echoing in some sense Joe Orton's murder at the hands of Kenneth Halliwell. Dyer's death is recorded in one of Bacon's most stunning, yet sobering (in terms of its absolute honesty) triptychs. His development was thus degenerate in the sense that he was the member of a degenerate class that had finally been removed from Ireland and taken up an abode in a South Kensington squat that was a studio and somewhere to live too. It's possible to hear a real trembling in his throat as he describes the way in which South Ken is becoming yet more cosmopolitan and 'infested with foreigners'. In every way Bacon seems to be the last postscript in an unfolding evolutionary development that has now faded away into insignificance. In every way his palpable personal difficulties, the sometime horrors of his own life and the relationships he enjoyed is mitigated by his desire to be creative in spite of severe technical limitations and deficiencies.
Paul Murphy, London
Two simultaneous retrospectives of two major 20th century artists seems indulgent, also the decision to depict Rothko as a major modern, Bacon as a major Brit. However, perhaps this division is telling and necessary. Rothko's painting is obviously hardly painting in the traditional sense but that's not the point, is it? It's an architectural style of painting, his works sit well in large buildings like the Tate Modern or in the skyscrapers of New York, Frankfurt or Tokyo. The dimensions of his canvases are a statement of their own, his work is consistently bold and large with a masculine and legitimate bravura. But the works are essentially viewed in their context, just as the music of Mozart or Schubert (cited as influences on Rothko) need to be set in their specific contexts as well as being liberated from that by the process of analogy. It's clear in Rothko's final works that he's referencing Schubert's decline into ill health (syphillis), insanity and death and the darkness of his final work, a penumbra of light which occasionally seems entirely joyful, yet also sweetly melancholic if melancholy can indeed be sweet. Viewing Rothko's works is like filling in the dots in a vast snow blasted landscape, then viewing the same landscape on a sunny day. Rothko's works seem to hang a massive emptiness at their centre, the viewer is pushed between scepticism and acceptance of these vast decontextualised abstracts as a certain tendency is pushed towards it's conclusion.
By contrast Francis Bacon never gives way to abstraction entirely, which he perhaps regarded as a one hit wonder (just before his death in the car crash Jackson Pollock was being asked the same thing...). Instead Bacon is the visionary and naive artist questioning the boundaries of what can be thought, said and done. Bacon's own life was essentially irregular to say the least. Bacon lived on the edge literally as he managed to survive in London by dodging the rent and through petty crime, then as a gentleman's companion (basically a rent boy, forced into a sordid trade of sex for money), eventually meeting his gangland opposite or doppelganger, George Dyer. It's hard though not to like the Francis Bacon we meet in the interviews he gives. Bacon is expostulating about his Anglo-Irish background, about form and abstract expressionism, about a life of hope after reading Nietzsche. His atheism is something we feel as a lucid force which also comes to seem paradoxically both spiritual and Christian. (echoing Nietzsche's untimely meditation that he would one day be called Holy: His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!") Bacon's painting never loses touch with it's roots in figurative painting and in photography, especially the work on movement and human anatomy of Eduard Muybridge. Bacon also collected files of magazine photos of politicians, bullet-riddled corpses, sportsmen, even more bullet-riddled corpses. Bacon seems to want to stand outside the evils or negligence of the world but is always edging closer to it. He references Vincent Van Gogh's lost painting The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, then attempts to make a pastiche of it or a re-interpretation, seems to get everything almost right, but ultimately the painting seems abandoned, as do many other Francis Bacon paintings. Bacon's triptychs and portraits never lack the Bacon voice and it seems that finding a style was as fundamental to Bacon as finding his way back to his life as a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in Dublin at the time of the Irish Civil War, or being made an outcast by his father for 'improperly' donning his mother's undergarments or his lovers jealous, embittered suicide in a Parisian hotel, echoing in some sense Joe Orton's murder at the hands of Kenneth Halliwell. Dyer's death is recorded in one of Bacon's most stunning, yet sobering (in terms of its absolute honesty) triptychs. His development was thus degenerate in the sense that he was the member of a degenerate class that had finally been removed from Ireland and taken up an abode in a South Kensington squat that was a studio and somewhere to live too. It's possible to hear a real trembling in his throat as he describes the way in which South Ken is becoming yet more cosmopolitan and 'infested with foreigners'. In every way Bacon seems to be the last postscript in an unfolding evolutionary development that has now faded away into insignificance. In every way his palpable personal difficulties, the sometime horrors of his own life and the relationships he enjoyed is mitigated by his desire to be creative in spite of severe technical limitations and deficiencies.
Paul Murphy, London
Comments