How to Sound Cultured by Van Den Bergh Hubert;W. Hodgkinson Thomas;

Author:Van Den Bergh, Hubert;W. Hodgkinson, Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books, Limited

Not to Be Confused With

The blush of shame is rarely hotter than when one confuses one important cultural figure with another. So note well the distinctive features of the following.

Francis Bacon, artist (1909–92)

USAGE: Score extra points by referring to him as ‘Fran’ Bacon, which was what his friends called him.

The painter Francis Bacon may occasionally have been confused with his 17th-century namesake (see previous entry) but there’s little chance of his paintings ever being mistaken for anyone else’s. They are, it must be said, not the sort of thing most people would want to hang in the home. His works are bleak, distorted, his human figures hunched or twisted like trapped animals. Yet to admirers, these glimpses of emotional pain say something profoundly, if depressingly, accurate about what it meant to be alive in the midst of the gratuitous 20th century. To make the point, a figure in one painting wears a swastika armband. (Bacon claimed, not very convincingly, he had included it only because he liked the symbol’s shape.)

Sad to say, but if you really want to capture the public imagination, it helps if your private life is as colourful as the work you produce. And it was in the case of Bacon, a pudgy homosexual with a face like a boxing glove, who haunted the dives of Soho in London. As well as fellow artists such as Lucian Freud, he enjoyed the company of ruffians such as his long-term boyfriend George Dyer, whom he met when Dyer tried to burgle his flat. Dyer bungled it and Bacon bundled him into bed. The relationship was tempestuous, eroded by alcohol and the fact that Dyer couldn’t understand Bacon’s art. ‘I fink they’re reely ’orrible,’ he once observed of some intense but tender portraits the artist had done of him. Yet when the affair ended in 1971 with Dyer’s suicide, Bacon was devastated.

After that, death became more than ever a theme in his work, along with pain and decay (he was particularly inspired by a book of photographs illustrating diseases of the mouth). A rare example of an important British painter, Bacon today routinely commands prices in the tens of millions.

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