On Painting 1946 and the Magic of Art: The Malcolm McLaren Birthday Post (2024)

 

Francis Bacon: Painting 1946 (1946)

Oil on linen (78 x 52 in)

I. 

 

On this day, in 1946, Malcolm McLaren was born and I'd like to mark the event by reproducing above a typically brutal and disturbing work painted by Francis Bacon in this year, when the horrors of the Second World War were evidently still haunting his unconscious. 

 

 

II. 

 

McLaren was an admirer of Bacon's and I know they met on at least one occasion, when, having previously been introduced by the London art dealer Robert Fraser [1], they viewed the Manet exhibition together at the National Gallery in 1983. 

 

According to Malcolm, Bacon helped him understand that truly great artists are more than mere painters; they are also alchemists, who can transform ordinary objects and base materials into something magical [2]. 

 

 

III.

 

Painting 1946 was initially sold to the dealer and gallerist Erica Brausen in the autumn of that year, for £200 (Bacon used the proceeds to escape London for Monte Carlo). Two years later, Alfred Barr purchased the work on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has remained there ever since and is now too fragile to be exhibited elsewhere.

 

It's a great picture; one which even Bacon - who could be highly critical of his own work - was always proud. 

 

And, if only for the date of its composition, I think it makes a suitable image by which to remember McLaren on what would have been his 78th birthday [3].      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Robert Fraser - aka Groovy Bob - was a key figure on the London cultural scene in the Swinging Sixties and his Duke Street gallery became a focal point for contemporary art in the UK, helping to promote the work of many exciting new British and American artists, including Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, Richard Hamilton, and Gilbert & George. Many beautiful people - including writers, actors, and musicians - frequented Fraser's gallery and partied at his flat in Mayfair and, as a young art student, McLaren also visited exhibitions staged by Fraser, whom he later described as a major icon. 

      In 1983, Fraser opened a new gallery and was influential in promoting the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Sadly, however, he died from AIDS-related illnesses in January 1986. Those readers interested in knowing more should see Harriet Vyner's biography; Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser (HENI Publishing, 2016); originally published by Faber & Faber (1999).   

 

[2] See Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 480, where he mentions Mclaren's recollection of this visit to the National Gallery accompanied by Francis Bacon.

 

[3] McLaren died on 8 April, 2010, having beeen diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in October 2009. 

Revenge of the Macaques

Image: Suresh Jadhav for News18

 

That man and monkey be redeemed from the spirit of revenge - 

that for me is the bridge to our highest hope ... [1]

 

 

Well, it's clear now from recent news reports coming out of India that our simian friends are not Christian and do not believe in turning the other cheek [1], nor leaving vengeance in the paws of their god [2] ...

After a pack of dogs killed an infant macaque, an enraged troop of rhesus monkeys have launched a merciless month-long campaign of revenge, grabbing around 250 puppies off the streets and then throwing them to their death from atop buildings and trees.  

According to some reports, when the troop can no longer find any young canines, they begin chasing terrified schoolchildren and one unfortunate eight-year-old had to be physically rescued from their clutches. Other villagers have apparently been injured attempting to protect their pooches.

 

Thankfully, such organised primate attacks on other species are rare, although not unknown. And it certainly isn't the case that they are the only animals other than man who seek revenge; camels, elephants, lions, crows, are all known to enjoy getting their own back. 

 

Indeed, even some fish have been known to engage in what Francis Bacon (disapprovingly) termed wild justice ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II. 7 - 'On the Tarantulas'.

 

[2] Matthew 5:38-39 - "Ye have heard that it hath been said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'. But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

[3] Romans 12:19 - "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay', saith the Lord."

On the Art of Crucifixion

Horace Roye: Tomorrow's Crucifixion (1938)

Images of a crucified figure have a long history; one that it may surprise some readers to discover pre-dates the Christian era, although, of course, most such images are of Jesus hanging on the Cross and thus belong to a particular religious tradition of art.*   

Whilst crucifixion art had its heyday in the Middle Ages, when increasingly gruesome and realistic representations of suffering became de rigueur, modern artists have nevertheless continued to find inspiration in the subject matter.   

Dalí, for example, famously gave us his version in 1954: Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus); a surreal or, more accurately, nuclear mystical painting in which Christ is crucified not to a simple wooden cross, but to the unfolded net of what is termed within geometry a tesseract (i.e. the four-dimensional analogue of the cube). Some critics regard it as one of Dalí's most successful works, uniting science and religiosity in an ingenius manner.   

Francis Bacon was another 20th-century artist fascinated by all forms of physical torment and violent death in general. In 1965 he painted a triptych entitled Crucifixion that follows (in mood, colour and form) two earlier works: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962).

What I love about these works is - in contrast to Dalí's picture - the fact that there's nothing spiritual about them; in fact, they are obscenely material and treat human flesh as if it were butcher's meat on display. As Bacon confessed to the critic and curator David Sylvester when discussing the above works:

"I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses [...] There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour to another."

Finally, mention must be made of an extraordinary photograph from 1938 by Horace Roye, who is perhaps most fondly remembered today for his thousands of female nude portraits (or Eves without leaves as he jokingly referred to them).** Entitled Tomorrow's Crucifixion, it depicts a naked woman wearing a gas mask whilst nailed to a crucifix. Unsurprisingly, it caused a huge amount of controversy at the time, but is now rightly regarded as one of the most striking images from the pre-War period, anticipating the horrors to come.   

Notes

* Interestingly, in the first three centuries of Christian iconography the crucifixion was rarely depicted. It's thought that any such images were viewed as heretical by early church leaders who regarded the subject as unfit for artistic representation and preferred to focus the attention of believers on the miracle of resurrection.

** A bit like D. H. Lawrence three decades earlier, Roye was prosecuted in the 1950s for obscenity after refusing to airbrush out pubic hair from photos of his models. Defending himself in court, Roye successfully challenged the absurd idea that nudes were only acceptable if made to look as smooth and lifeless as marble statues, or as impersonal as dead fish. 

See: David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987).

The Colour Purple

I. On the Excretory Origin of an Exquisite Colour

My birthstone, as an Aquarian, is amethyst. And so I have an astrological attachment to the colour purple, in all its shades. Fortunately, I like this red-blue composite colour very much and appreciate the fact that it has a fascinating history that is ultimately rooted in what Bataille terms heterogeneous matter.

For whilst many people associate purple with imperial power or sacred authority, its origin is both base and profane. Indeed, this is revealed in the etymology of the word purple, which derives from the Greek name for a dye manufactured in the classical period from a mucus secreted by the hypobranchial gland belonging to a species of sea-snail.

Although the slimy secretion is milky and colourless when fresh, it stinks and turns into a powerful, long-lasting dye - known as Tyrian purple - when exposed to the air. Distilling it was a notoriously unpleasant task in the ancient world and required either wax plugs in the nostrils or a strong stomach (or both). As the poet and cultural critic Kelly Grovier rather amusingly notes: "Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure."

Not only was it a malodorous job, it was a tricky and time-consuming one. It took tens of thousands of hypobranchial glands to produce even a tiny amount of this miraculous colour which grows ever more beautiful over time - unlike other textile dyes whose lustre soon fades. Thus, naturally enough, Tyrian purple was expensive: very expensive, and soon became the colour of choice amongst kings, priests, and powerful magistrates:

"In ancient Greece, the right to clad oneself in purgative purple was tightly controlled by legislation. The higher your social and political rank, the more extracted rectal mucus you could swaddle yourself in."

Purple's discovery was also given a mythological origin, so that everyone might conveniently forget what it is and exactly where it comes from. (It was claimed that whilst Heracles was one day walking along the beach with the nymph Tyrus and his dog, the latter bit into a sea-snail, staining its mouth purple. Amused by the incident and dazzled by the colour, Tyrus subsequently requested that a garment be made for her using the same dye.) 


II. The Art of Purple

Of course, today no one knows (or cares) about any of this: purple has long since been synthesised artificially and become just another colour available to anyone who wishes to wear it. You can even get a pair of purple knickers from Primark for a fiver.

However, as Grovier points out, that's not to say that Tyrian purple has lost all its old magic; in the world of art, for example, it can still transform a canvas in a startling manner:

"When Francis Bacon resolved to reinvent Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X [...] he decided to recast the pontiff's vestments not as scorching scarlet as his Spanish forebear had, but as pulsating purple. The result was as quietly alarming as the mute caterwaul that howls from his subject’s tortured lips [...] as if the Pope were undergoing the excruciating disgorgement of millions of molluscs over many millennia."

It can, concludes Grovier, be regarded as "purple’s silent scream into anguished oblivion - the last gasp of a gorgeously appalling colour."

Francis Bacon: 

Study after Velázquez's Pope Francis X (1953) 

See: Kelly Grovier, 'Tyrian Purple: The disgusting origins of the colour purple', (1 August 2018), published on the BBC Culture website: click here. This is one of a series of essays on colours by Grovier. Other colours discussed with his customary brilliance include umber (the colour of debauchery), black, pink, orange, and silver. Readers who are interested in knowing more are encouraged to visit his website: kellygrovier.com    

A Fond Farewell to Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding as the fiendishly beautiful Valeria

 Carry On Screaming (1966) 

It is again with sadness that I mark the passing of another wonderful comic actress - just days after the death of Liz Fraser - Fenella Fielding, star of my favourite Carry On film, Carry On Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). 

The exotic-looking and exotic-sounding Fenella was born in Hackney, in 1927, to a Romanian mother and a Lithuanian father, with whom she had an unhappy (often physically violent) relationship. Spending much of her childhood in conversation with her dolls, she dreamed of becoming an artist and performer from an early age (much to the horror of her parents who hoped she would become a shorthand typist).

After eventually fleeing her awful home life, Fielding found herself in an amateur production at the LSE playing alongside Ron Moody, who encouraged her in her ambition to become a professional actress. Soon, she began appearing regularly in various reviews and by the end of the 1950s she had made something of a name for herself as a beautiful butterfly of comedy.

Throughout the following decade, Fenella was an established figure in Swinging London: Vidal Sassoon did her hair; Jeffrey Bernard took her clubbing; Francis Bacon and friends were all enchanted. She appeared on TV (in The Avengers, for example) and on film alongside male co-stars including Dirk Bogarde and Tony Curtis.

On stage, meanwhile, she pursued her real passion - drama. An accomplished and versatile actress, Fielding captivated audiences and critics alike with her interpretations of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Euripides. Noel Coward and Fellini both regarded themselves as fans of this highly intelligent and amusing woman who kept a copy of Plato by her bedside.        

Of course, this aspect of her life and work has been fatally overshadowed by her role in Carry On Screaming. It is as smoking-hot Valeria wearing a fitted red velvet dress with plunging neckline, designed by Emma Selby-Walker, that she has entered the popular and pornographic imagination and will forever be remembered.

Serious performers and dramatists may not like it, but classical theatre, it appears, cannot compete with cinematic camp-vamp. And if the role of Valeria provided the kiss of death to Fielding's career, it also guaranteed her cinematic immortality.

I don't know if Fenella will be buried or cremated, but I kind of hope it's the latter, so she may smoke for one last time and the ghost of Orlando Watt might look on and cry: Frying tonight!  

Note: those who are interested might like to click here to watch Fenella in her most famous scene as Valeria in Carry on Screaming, alongside the brilliant Harry H. Corbett as Detective Sgt. Bung.

In Praise of Euthanasia as a Practice of Joy before Death

Thanatos: god of death tattoo, by L4ndX

deviantart.com 

There are, apparently, over 850,000 people in the UK diagnosed with some form of dementia, including my mother. An ill-fated consequence of an ever-ageing population, this terminal condition is now the leading cause of death in elderly women.

According to the pressure group Care Not Killing, everything that can be done to extend the life of the individual should be done and whilst promoting more and better palliative care on the one hand, they campaign with conviction against euthanasia and/or assisted suicide, hoping to influence both public opinion on this issue and the opinion of the law makers.

To be fair, they do have arguments as well as moral concerns and some of these are perfectly valid and legitimate. But, ultimately, these arguments fail to persuade and I don't share their position. Nor indeed do I accept their narrow definition of euthanasia as the intentional killing a person whose life is felt not to be worth living.     

This definition not only robs the term of its gay and affirmative element which is clearly present in the original Greek, εὐθανασία, meaning a good or happy death, but it deliberately - and I think cynically - echoes the phrase Lebensunwerte Leben by which the Nazis designated sections of the population whom they judged fit for destruction.   

One of the regrettable things about National Socialism is that it continues to cast a dark and ominous shadow over several ideas - including euthanasia - that would otherwise be open for rational debate and calm philosophical reflection. 

If the Nazis hadn't spoken so callously of useless eaters and hadn't tied their thinking in this area to a genocidal machine, then perhaps those of us who, like the great English empiricist Francis Bacon, regard euthanasia not merely as a pragmatic measure in the face of pain and suffering, but also an ethical practice of joy before death, would be able to speak freely and not have to sit in silence as assorted humanists, healthcare providers, and faith-based busybodies lecture us about the sanctity of life. 

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part II) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

A rare but recent photo of Thomas Tritchler

taken in Salzburg, Austria

The dreary utilitarianism of the English intellectual tradition is of course a historical given. But recently this Orwellian weakness for plain speaking has been reasserted by Elliot Murphy in his otherwise valuable study of anarchism and British literature.

In Unmaking Merlin (Zero Books, 2014), Murphy devotes an embarrassingly reactionary chapter to mocking obscurantist French poststructuralism - the decadent representatives of which he is clearly far too real and rational to care to understand. Against those sceptical writers who value irony and regard critical thinking as an indispensable inheritance of that hermeneutic tradition inaugurated by the great masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), Murphy oddly joins hands with pantomime moralist Roger Scruton, for whom Foucault's The Order of Things  is to be dismissed as: 

"An artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity ... [whose] goal is subversion, not truth [that perpetrates] the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies - that 'truth' requires inverted comas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation ..."

 

Since I would gladly affirm Scruton's scornful review as a ringing endorsement, we at least both know where we stand; he in his Anglican pulpit haranguing the heretics and frauds of aesthetic thought; I, presumably, whispering to demons with a forked tongue in a Parisian graveyard. At any rate, it feels good to know that as well as wearing Prada and having all the best tunes, the Devil is also a chic-y postmodernist!

In an instructive essay on British anti-intellectualism, Ed Rooksby has traced such inverted snobbery to the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, who, in his repudiation of the romantic idealism of the French Revolution, subsumed the horror of free thinking beneath the twin lenses of natural prejudice and common sense. The inductive methodologies of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton would now underpin an ontological realism whose homespun incarnation assumed an irremediably naive strain.

Not for nothing did Oscar Wilde lament England as the 'home of lost ideas'. At the very least, in a culturally and financially bankrupt nation in which Stephen Fry offers the closest approximation of a public intellectual, it can be safely assumed one is unlikely to be breathing the rarefied air of grand thoughts.

    

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.