Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent lecture at the National Portrait Gallery putting Bacon into the context of queer life in post-war Britain. Gregory Salter from the University of Birmingham led us clearly through a complex subject starting with how Bacon was exploring masculinity particularly with his depiction of men in suits. He discussed how suits were used to display conventionality but could also be a mask. He went on to discuss why Bacon placed his sitters in abstracted domestic settings partially on the context that the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 particularly allowed it in private putting it into domestic rather than public space. Finally he looked at queer networks and their role particularly around Soho. He looked at how Bacon used the photographs of John Deacon as part of his process although crumpling them up and his use of triptychs to   explore aspects of a person rather than an accurate physical depiction. I came away with lots of new thoughts on the show and a need ...

Brilliant exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery examining Francis Bacon and portraiture. It took a broad look at the subject not only including portraits of friends and lovers but also his interpretations of Old Masters, so there were quite a few screaming popes. The section at the end on friends and lovers included short biographies and I’m off the investigate a few of the colourful characters. The show included several of the source photographs and magazine cuttings direct from his studio, crumpled and splattered in paint. I loved the use of quotes from Bacon which gave an insight into his ideas and aims. I particularly like his theory that a portrait should “Give over all the pulsations of a person” but it did get a bit overused in the show. I’m not sure I will ever love Bacon but I came away with a much better understanding of him. I think my favourite works were the triptychs of a sitter. Closed 19 January 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening St...

Charming exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill of photographs by Bruce Bernard of artists who appear in the other exhibition in the gallery, Freud, Auberbach, Bacon and Andrews.   These were gentle and often funny photographs of the artists in their studios. It was fascinating to see them against paintings that you know well such as Bacon with “Street Scene (With Car in the Distance)”. The Freud pictures were most telling as they showed him larking around with his daughter Bella and Celia Paul, not a view we often have of him. I spotted in these light hearted works that he has on the boots he wears in the later naked self-portrait. I’d missed the note to say there were no photos in the gallery and a nice guard came up to tell me and watch me delete the two I’d taken (not this one it’s from the web). He then had to come back to ask me to delete them from the recycle bin and he had to show me how to do it! All fine very nicely and politely but it was a first for me in my wande...

Stunning exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill looking at the work of Lucien Freud and his Soho artist friends. The show told the story of the links between four artists, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, with a fabulous selection of works by them. With this year being the centenary of Freud’s birth there are a lot of shows on but this one has a number of works I’d not seen before. The pictures were hung well to set up a gentle dialogue between them. My favourite hang was a row of pictures by Auerbach, Bacon and Andrews which all included steps. Upstairs was a room of portraits of and by the artists as well as. Closes 28 January 2023 Review Times  

Fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at how Francis Bacon interest in and observation of animals influenced his art. These works looked stunning in the space. They were hung quite sparsely against grey walls which made the rich use of bright red, which I think of as Bacon red, pop out from the walls. The works looked like modern secular altarpieces. I liked the use of quotes from Bacon in the commentary which gave me a better understanding of where the works were coming from such as that he aimed “to paint like Velazquez but with the texture of hippo skin” and “there is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of pain communicates more violently than anything else”. For those reasons it is wonderful to see these works in the flesh rather than reproduction because they are all about the brushstroke and objectness of the work. There were some great hangs such as a room of triptychs and the bringing together of three bullfight pictures for the first time whi...

Fascinating exhibition at Ordovas looking at the friendship between Francis Bacon and Peter Beard. The two men met in 1967 at one of Bacon’s openings at the Marlborough Gallery and the two men became friends and admirers of each other’s work as well as serving as each other’s subjects. Bacon painted nine pictures of Beard from sittings and from photographs that Beard sent him. The show included a lovely double portrait from 1976. Both men worked from collected and found images, Bacon piling them on the studio floor and Beard collecting them in his diaries and using them in photo collages. They also shared an interest in conservation. Beard photographer a series of aerial shots of dead elephant carcasses which he layered with other images. A number of these were found in Bacon’s studio. A number of these images were in the show and were shown with correspondence between them. Closed 16 July 2021

New display at Tate Britain curated by Tracey Emin to mark the return of her bed to the gallery. She includes some of her recent figure drawings in the room along with some paintings by Francis Bacon. In the commentary it says that both Emin and Bacon “retain a strong sense of the lived presence and memory traces of past events”. I guess that means they try to capture a moment in time while recognising that by definition by the time it is recorded it is past. Showing the bed with the Bacon’s does give a sense of what the purpose of it might have been but I’m not sure they sit well together. As for the bed itself, I get what it’s trying to do, I admire what it’s trying to do, I’m just not sure I want to look at it! I guess the optimist in me would want to pick a happier, tidier moment to record. Maybe mine would be called “My bed on a Tuesday after the cleaner’s been”! She does plump the pillows up really nicely and I do like nice bedding! Reviews Independe...

Confused exhibition at the ICA to mark 60 years since they hosted Francis Bacon’s first solo show. This show was a great idea and I can imagine the excitement of the meeting that thought of it. Then they went to the archives to put it together and found they only had an invite and a programme from it. Instead of then opting not to do it, someone then wondered what they could tie it to and decided that as there had been the ambiguous picture “Two figures in the grass” in the show that they’d link it to the fight to legalise homosexuality. Basically the Bacon bits were not much and padded out by catalogues of other shows. The material on the lead up to the Sexual Offences Act 1967 and the partial decriminalization of homosexuality was fascinating. There were law cases and books which I’d not come across. It was laid out well and told an interesting story. Hopefully in two years’ time when it’s the 50th anniversary someone will pit on a show taking an intense look at this. ...

Retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain of the work of Francis Bacon. When you first went in you immediately felt like you were being bludgeoned round the head but it was good to see so many Bacon’s in one place. In other galleries I find I have a tendency to say “Oh it’s a Bacon and move on” but here you couldn’t so you concentrated and learnt what he was about. Basically he paints the psychological state of himself and others. I particularly like the room dedicated to the archive which is now held in Dublin. I remember seeing the mock up of the studio there a few years ago and being so struck by the layers of creativity and inspiration in the room. This could in other words be called mess! Hard to pick a favourite in an exhibition which was not necessarily relaxing to look at but I’d pick the small portrait of his lover George Dyer which was distorted but showed wonderful detail in the hair. I also have a weakness for screaming popes! Reviews Times Guardian Daily Telegraph Independ...