Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery1
in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she
climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon’s studio at
7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it4
was when he passed away, on April 28 1992, and it was a
chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths,
brushes, champagne boxes, and a large mirror. She stood and7
stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, “and actually it
became quite beautiful.” She began to see “paths cut through
it,” and details. “The last unfinished painting was on the easel10
when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was
a short article on George Michael, the singer, about how he
liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking13
into somebody’s mind”.
7 Reece Mews was tiny, and apart from the studio
consisted of two rooms — a kitchen that contained a bath, and16
a living room that doubled as a bedroom. The studio had one
skylight, and Bacon usually worked there in the mornings. He
tried to paint elsewhere — in South Africa, for example, when19
he was visiting family, but couldn’t. (Too much light, was the
rather surprising objection.) He liked the size and general
frugality, too.22
Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of
Bacon’s art in a more profound sense than just being a
comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not25
be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had bequeathed
Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking
cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers,28
the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in 1998. It
was opened to the public in 2001.
What is visible now, in a climate-controlled corner of31
the gallery, a gracious neo-classical building on Parnell Square
in Dublin, is in fact a kind of faithful “skin” of objects; the
tables and chairs have all been returned to their original places,34
the work surfaces seem as cluttered as they were — but the
deep stuff, the bedrock, has been removed and is kept in
climate-controlled archival areas. In the end, there were 7,50037
items — samples of painting materials, photographs, slashed
canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books,
champagne boxes.40
Bacon was homosexual at a time when it was still
illegal, and while he was open about his sexuality, his notes for
prospective paintings refer to “bed[s] of crime]”, and his43
homosexuality was felt as an affliction, says Dawson. It wasn’t
easy. The sense of guilt is apparent in his work, as well as his
fascination with violence. “His collections of pictures, dead46
bodies, or depictions of violence — he’s not looking at
violence from the classic liberal position”. It was all, concedes
Dawson, accompanied by intellectual rigour, and an insistent49
attempt at objectivity — “he’s trying to detach from himself as
well.”
Everything was grist, and in his studio even his own52
art fed other art. He returned to his own work obsessively,
repeating and augmenting. And of course, he responded
negatively — and violently — as well as positively; a hundred55
is a lot of slashed canvasses to keep around you when you’re
working, especially when they are so deliberately slashed. In
a way, all this might serve as a metaphor for the importance of58
our understanding of his studio as a whole.
Aida Edemarian. Francis Bacon: box of tricks.
Internet: <www.theguardian.com> (adapted).