It was Margaret Thatcher who referred to Francis Bacon as “the man who paints those dreadful pictures”, and they are dreadful in a way, but so damn interesting. The sweeping marks, the reinvention of the figure, his work is so different from any that came before him.
Francis Bacon worked in a cramped space from 1961 to his death in 1992. In 1998, his studio in London was documented, moved and re-constituted at the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane in 1998. Lucky for us.
I got to see this preserved studio in 2006, almost by accident. There was a window in a blank wall, and I walked up to it and looked into this horrible, fascinating creative mess. I was like a Norman Rockwell girl in pigtails with her hands cupped to a sweet shop window. I stood staring at the thousands of brushes and hundreds of cans of paint for so long that my friends went for coffee and left me there! I guess everyone gets their geek moment at one time or another.
The Hugh Lane gallery’s website has some great information about this installation:
Some two thousand samples of Bacon’s painting materials were found in the Reece Mews studio. These include hundreds of used paint tubes, jars of loose pigment, paintbrushes, utensils, tin cans, sticks of pastel, pieces of fabric, empty bottles of turpentine, cans of spray paint and of fixative, tins of household paint and countless roller sponges. No artist’s palette was found in the studio and the artist appears to have used just about anything he could find as a substitute. Even the walls of the studio itself were used to mix and test paints. From early on in his artistic career, Bacon tried out various materials in his paintings including aerosol cans of car paint, sand, pastel, dust and cotton wool. He also appears to have applied paint with the plastic lids from paint tubes and the open ends of bottles found in the studio.
And yet more about the move (I love the numbers here):
The Hugh Lane Gallery removed the contents of Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews in August 1998. This operation was conducted with the assistance of a team of archaeologists who mapped the space, and tagged and noted the positions of the objects. The reconstructed studio features the original door, walls, floors, ceiling and shelves. Over 7,000 items were found in the studio and these were catalogued on a specially designed database before their replacement in the studio… The database has entries on approximately 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves torn from books, 2,000 artist’s materials and 70 drawings. Other categories include the artist’s correspondence, magazines, newspapers and vinyl records.
It took me 3 days and about 12 carloads to move my studio from one part of the city to another. I can’t even imagine working in a space for 31 years, and leaving all that stuff behind for those people to so carefully document and move. Archeologists! Francis must have been laughing in his grave. Take that, Maggie.
