Mexican Grizzly Bear Diorama Progress

Mexican Grizzly Bear diorama and background painting progress, with miniature model of diorama and mannequins of specimens. Also includes a coat on a hook and the Field Columbian Museum interior. Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, 1909

The Moon

Moon Model. Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, 1900

Letter to Husband

Letter to Husband, Emma Hauck, circa 1909

Sweetheart Come

Herzensschatzi komm. Letter written by Emma Hauck (born in Ellwangen, 1878, died in Wiesloch (asylum), 1928) to her husband while in a psychiatric hospital. The words 'sweetheart come' ('Herzensschatzi komm'), are written over and over filling the surface of the paper. Circa 1909.

Milk River

Milk River, Agnes Martin, 1963. Oil on canvas, 182.9 × 182.9 cm

I? I would not do that.

Differently, Erica Baum, 2009

Subway Passenger

Subway Passenger, Walker Evans, January 10, 1941

“I don’t want to come to your studio because I’ve seen your tie.”

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Caroline Blackwood


I first became aware of Francis Bacon shortly after World War II. I was then eighteen, and I was invited to a formal London ball given by Lady Rothermere, who was later to become Mrs. Ian Fleming. Princess Margaret was among the guests and could immediately be seen on the parquet floor wearing a crinoline and being worshiped by her adoring set who were known at the time as “the Smarties.” She was revered and considered glamorous because she was the one “Royal” who was accessible. Princess Margaret smoked, and she drank, and she flirted. She went to nightclubs and she loved show business and popular music.

As a guest Princess Margaret used to send out confusing signals. At times she seemed to ask to be treated as an ordinary racy young girl. But her conception of “ordinariness” sometimes made her behave in a manner that embarrassed rather than reassured those who entertained her. In order to put them at their ease so that they could forget that they had a royal figure at their table, she would pick up strings of tomato-pasted spaghetti from her plate and make loud sucking noises as she ate them with her hands. However, because she had emerged from the insulated capsule of her regal upbringing with ideas of “normality” that were askew, Princess Margaret inspired fear among her contemporaries. She encouraged familiarity and then, without warning, drew herself up to her full, small height and administered chilling snubs in which she reminded the socially inept that they had offended the daughter of the King of England.

Toward the end of the ball given by Lady Rothermere, after much champagne had been consumed, Princess Margaret seemed to be seized by a heady desire to show off. She grabbed the microphone from the startled singer of the band and she instructed them to play songs by Cole Porter. All the guests who had been waltzing under the vast chandeliers instantly stopped dancing. They stood like Buckingham Palace sentries called to attention in order to watch the royal performance. 

Princess Margaret knew the Cole Porter lyrics by heart but she sang all his songs hopelessly off-key. She was given unfair encouragement by the reaction of her audience. All the ladies heavy-laden with jewelry, all the gentlemen penguin-like in their white ties and perfect black tails clapped for her. They shouted and they roared, and they asked for more.

Princess Margaret became a little manic at receiving such approval of her musical abilities, and she started wriggling around in her crinoline and tiara as she tried to mimic the sexual movements of the professional entertainer. Her dress with its petticoats bolstered by the wooden hoops that ballooned her skirts was unsuitable for the slinky act but all the rapturous applause seemed to make her forget this. Just when she had embarked on a rendering of “Let’s Do It,” a very menacing and unexpected sound came from the back of the crowded ballroom. It grew louder and louder until it eclipsed Princess Margaret’s singing. It was the sound of jeering and hissing, of prolonged and thunderous booing.

Princess Margaret faltered in mid-lyric. Mortification turned her face scarlet and then it went ashen. Because she looked close to tears, her smallness of stature suddenly made her look rather pitiful. She abandoned the microphone and a phalanx of flustered ladies-in-waiting rushed her out of the ballroom. The band stopped playing because they felt it was unseemly to continue in the face of this unprecedented situation. There was a buzzing of furious whispers as Lady Rothermere’s guests started to take in what they had witnessed. 

“Who did that?” I asked the nearest white-tied and black-tailed man who happened to be standing next to me. His face was already red but rage made it look apoplectic. “It was that dreadful man, Francis Bacon,” he said. “He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in here. It’s really quite disgraceful.”

Advertisement

Later when I was married to Lucian Freud and I got to know Francis he once referred to this incident, which caused a scandal.

“Her singing was really too awful,” he said. “Someone had to stop her. I don’t think people should perform if they can’t do it properly.”

Francis had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique. I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the Royal family in a private house. Among all the guests assembled in Lady Rothermere’s ballroom, more than a few were secretly suffering from Princess Margaret’s singing, but they suffered in silence, gagged by their snobbery. Francis could not be gagged. If he found a performance shoddy no conventional trepidation prevented him from expressing his reactions. Sometimes his opinions could be biased and perverse and unfair, but he never cared if they created outrage.

He could be fearlessly outspoken and crushing if provoked. I remember him being pestered in a bar by a very bad and irritating artist who was trying to make him come to his studio to look at his work. The artist said that he had the feeling that Francis only refused to come and look at his paintings because they threatened him. Francis replied that he didn’t feel in the least threatened by the man’s paintings.

“I don’t want to come to your studio because I’ve seen your tie.”

This same quality of fearlessness manifested itself in his work. The critics who found his painting obscene and ugly did not intimidate him. With big and masterful brush strokes he continued to stamp his canvases with the bleak but beautiful images that expressed his darkly Irish, pessimistic, and extremely personal vision.

There was also a fearlessness in his attitude to money, a wildness in his reckless generosity. When I first got to know him in Soho he was forty and he had not yet found any gallery prepared to give him a show because his work was considered too off-putting. Francis was broke at that time but somehow, mysteriously, he still managed to pay for rounds of drinks and he kept the champagne flowing. Later when he became world-famous and very rich there was no basic change in his behavior. He continued to keep the champagne flowing, the only difference was that he filled his friends’ glasses with champagne of a very much higher quality.

His generosity like his fearlessness was infectious. Extremely stingy and mean-fisted people who hated to pay for others would suddenly and amazingly offer to pay for a round of drinks while they were in his company. He could always shame the miserly.

In the Fifties, I remember Francis joining Lucian and me for dinner in his favorite fish restaurant, Wheelers, in Soho. The owner was perceptive and he allowed him to eat and drink there in return for his paintings, which were still spurned by the art world. Francis arrived late because he’d just been to the doctor. He came rolling in with the confident walk of a pirate making adjustments to the slope of the wind-tilted deck. As usual his round cheeks made him look cherubic, but his eyes were far more intelligent than those of the average cherub.

He said that his doctor had just told him that his heart was in tatters. Not a ventricle was functioning. His doctor had rarely seen such a hopeless and diseased organ. Francis had been warned that if he had one more drink or even allowed himself to become excited, his useless heart would fail and he would die.

Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, and once we had finished it he went to order a succession of new bottles. He was ebullient throughout the evening but Lucian and I went home feeling very depressed. He seemed doomed. We were convinced he was going to die, aged forty. We took the doctor’s diagnosis seriously. No one was ever going to stop him from drinking. No one would ever prevent him from becoming excited. We even wondered that night if we would ever see him again. But he lived to be eighty-two. His attitude toward doctors and death was disdainful. They didn’t frighten him. In his way, he jeered at them just as he jeered at the bad singing of Princess Margaret.

A younger British painter, Michael Wishart, once said to me that he thought that Francis had two major ambitions. He wanted to be one of the world’s best painters and he wanted to be one of the world’s leading alcoholics. Whereas most people discovered that these two ambitions were contradictory and self-defeating he felt that Francis had pulled them both off.

There was an “Irishness” in Bacon’s temperament, although he vehemently denied it, having experienced his childhood in Ireland as traumatically painful. He found it impossible to return to Ireland although he loved its countryside. He developed a neurotic attack of asthma on the plane whenever he tried to get there. He could fly to any country in the world without physical mishap, but any flight to his homeland always proved disastrous.

“My father was a horse trainer,” I remember him saying to me with a shudder. “A failed horse trainer,” and he stressed the word “failed” with such disgust and anger that he made his father’s occupation sound utterly repulsive. When he was a little boy his parents had put him astride a pony and they had forced him to go fox-hunting. He loathed the brutality of the “Sport of Kings” and developed a violent allergy to horses. He turned blue once he found himself on the hunting field and he started to choke with chronic asthma. His parents were very soon made to realize that he was never going to be the son they had wanted.

“Surely there’s nothing worse,” Francis once said to me, “than the dusty saddle lying in the hall.”

Coming from Ireland myself, I sometimes tried to make him tell me more about his unlikely and horsey Irish upbringing. I wanted him to go on, I longed to hear more about his loathing of the awful dusty saddles that symbolically litter the Irish hall. But the subject made him freeze. He became agitated whenever I broached it. He started to tug at the collar of his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found asphyxiating; for a moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo purple as they go into the last stages of strangulation. I always stopped my questioning because it seemed cruel and tactless to upset him. I was told by a homosexual friend of Francis’s that he’d once admitted that his father, the dreaded and failed horse trainer, had arranged that his small son spend his childhood being systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms.

But with all his horror of Ireland he had the intellectual Irishman’s traditional dislike of Catholicism. The Popes that he painted were all screaming and distorted. Some of them were sitting on the lavatory. Although he stubbornly denied that he had been influenced by his Irish upbringing, the desolation of his vision was very similar to that of Beckett.

There was nothing tragic or untimely about his end, although his gallantry, his fearlessness, and his exuberance made one feel he could last drinking champagne forever. Fascinated by the inevitability of human physical decay, Francis, himself, never believed that he would last forever for one moment. 

From the New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992

Fragment of a Crucifixion

Fragment of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon, 1950

My Birth

My Birth, Frida Kahlo, 1932

The Two Fridas

The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo, 1939, Oil on canvas, 67" x 67", Collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

Arbol de la esperanza, mantente firme

Tree of Hope, Stand Firm, Frida Kahlo, 1946

Before the Operation

Frida Kahlo in New York, Nickolas Muray, 1946 (photo of photo: Marco Peláez)

Frida Kahlo at Xochimilco

Frida Kahlo at Xochimilco, Mexico, Fritz Henle, 1937

Alice Mary Hawes

Alice Mary Hawes, Southworth & Hawes, 1852

Post Mortem

Post-mortem, unidentified young girl, Southworth & Hawes, circa 1850

Black Eye

Black Eye, Sally Mann, 1991

Suburb Train

Suburb Train, Boris Savelev, 1988

Film in Stolen Camera, Location Unknown

Film in stolen camera, location unknown. New South Wales Police Dept. 20 October 1955

Film in Stolen Camera, Location Unknown

Film in stolen camera, location unknown. New South Wales Police Dept. 20 October 1955

Goods in Custody

Film found in camera of person charged with goods in custody, Sydney City Central. New South Wales Police Dept. 12 November 1952

Passageway

Access passageway, location unknown, ca.1935. New South Wales Police Dept.

Detective

Detective at foot of Argyle Steps, The Rocks (Sydney), late 1930s. Details unknown. New South Wales Police Dept.

Evidence from Scene of Poisoning

Evidence from scene of poisoning, Sydney City Central. New South Wales Police Dept. 8 July 1952

Man's Hat Lying on Grass, Beneath Wooden Bridge

Man's hat lying on grass, beneath wooden bridge. Details unknown, early 1940s. New South Wales Police Dept.

Central Investigation Bureau Suspect.

Central Investigation Bureau suspect. New South Wales Police Dept. 5 April 1950

Portrait of Bald Man from Rear

Cellulose negative in loose files, portrait of bald man from rear, location unknown. New South Wales Police Dept. [click image to enlarge]

This Man Refused To Open His Eyes

Mug shot of Thomas Bede, 22 November 1928, Central Police Station, Sydney.

”Thomas Bede was charged with 'suborn a witness' at Sydney Quarter Sessions on 11 December 1928, for which he was fined £8. No other details known.”

Alfred Ladewig, alias Wallace

Mug shot of Alfred Ladewig, date unknown, possibly Central Police Station, Sydney. [click image to enlarge]

”Alfred Ladewig, alias Wallace, and John Walker, alias Atkins, charged on provisional warrant with stealing by trick the sum of £204, at Brisbane (Q), the property of Alfred Walter Thomlinson have been arrested by Detective-constables Matthews and Jones, and Special-constable Bladen, Sydney Police.”

May Blake, 1 September 1930

Mug shot of May Blake, 1 September 1930, Central Police Station, Sydney. [click image to enlarge]

”The NSW Police Gazette 29 October 1930, p. 827 lists Blake as 'charged with having cocaine unlawfully in her possession.' She was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment and fined 250 pounds”

”An Atmosphere of Immorality and Dope”

Mug shot of Hazel McGuinness, Central Police Station, Sydney, 26 July 1929 [click image to enlarge]

"Hazel McGuinness was charged along with her mother Ada McGuiness with having cocaine (in substantial quantities) illegally in her possession. Police described a raid on the McGuinnesses' Darlinghurst house during which the mother Ada threw a hand bag containing packets of cocaine to her daughter, shouting, 'Run Hazel!'. Despite that, detectives spoke up for Hazel McGuinness in court, arguing that she had been led into crime by her mother ('the most evil woman in Sydney') who had raised her in 'an atmosphere of immorality and dope'. Hazel was given a suspended sentence."

Details Unknown

Mug shot of May Russell, 31 January 1922, Central Police Station, Sydney. Details unknown. [click image to enlarge]