Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

Author:Michael Peppiatt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781408856239
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Back in Paris, I went to the Grand Palais again several times before the exhibition closed. Now that George is dead, I noticed, the paintings have taken on a premonitory quality. Right from the screaming figures on the orange ground through the spectral figures in closed rooms to the images of George fragmented through every conjugation of chance injury, all the images spoke of death. ‘Death’, I hear Francis’s voice repeating once more as I walk through the galleries, ‘is only in the mind of the living.’ Here it is all pervasive, the one ultimate and unchanging theme, and towards the end of the exhibition I half wonder whether the paintings aren’t lining the walls of, and leading up to, a burial chamber.

It’s been a hard year for me. I’ve been in and out of several short-lived professional arrangements – writing, editing or translating – as I have brief and often painful love affairs. I keep telling myself that, since my goal is to preserve my freedom and use that freedom to write more creative things, my life can be seen as a success. But when I add the difficulties of scratching a living from freelance journalism to the insecurity of serial flings and the paucity of my literary ventures, I remain increasingly sceptical as time goes by.

It may be simply the spring and the promise of another summer to be spent overlooking the Mediterranean or watching the breakers crash on the Brittany coast, but I feel my life has taken an upturn in recent months. These things are never planned, of course, and you haven’t the slightest idea where they might lead, but I have begun a relationship with a woman who is considerably older than me. Since I am now thirty – ‘en l’an trentiesme de mon aage / Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues’, as I repeat smugly to myself – I supposed that, although I fantasized about it as a much younger man, I had reached an age when this would no longer happen to me.

Alice is in her mid-forties (for a while she kept her real age from me), an exotic mix of Caribbean African and Indonesian, petite and extremely lively. Brought up in the north of France and educated in Paris, she is married to the well-known art historian John Rewald, chronicler of the Impressionists and world expert on Cézanne. They live fairly separate lives, however, he mainly in New York and Alice in Paris, though they often spend part of the summer together in an ancient, hilltop fortress they bought and restored in Provence. Not only is there a strong physical attraction between us, but we share many of the same interests in art and literature. Alice has been part of the international art world for twenty years and has known most of the leading artists, museum people and dealers on both sides of the Atlantic. Since John has been successful as both an historian and an art adviser to some of the wealthiest American collectors, Alice lives a much more moneyed and sophisticated life than I do.

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