Picasso – Bacon with Michael Peppiatt

00:00:00: What comes to mind is kindness and cruelty, rawness and politeness, loyalty and its opposite.

00:00:10: All the extremes you can think of, generous and mean.

00:00:14: Bacon was completely like a drum, like the skin on a drum, tied taut between these two extremes.

00:00:23: Says Michael Peppiatt, curator, writer and one of the people who knew Francis Bacon most closely.

00:00:30: I was happy to meet Michael Peppiatt in London ahead of the current

00:00:34: exhibition Picasso – Bacon: What It Feels Like to Be Human.

00:00:39: My name is Felix von Boehm and I'm your host for this episode of Lange Ohren.

00:00:43: Lange Ohren, der ALBERTINA Podcast.

00:00:48: Michael Peppiatt first met Bacon in London in 1963, beginning a friendship and conversation that lasted almost 30 years.

00:00:56: In this conversation we will explore Bacon's world and the powerful role Picasso played in it.

00:01:01: As the artist who first made Bacon want to paint and as a great figure

00:01:06: he would measure himself against, too, for the rest of his life.

00:01:10: We'll speak about the similarities but also the crucial differences in their painting practice,

00:01:15: their images of the body, their views of women, and ultimately their understanding of our human existence.

00:01:23: Michael, you wrote a biography about Francis Bacon.

00:01:26: I had the pleasure to read it ahead of this conversation.

00:01:29: What's intriguing to me is that actually in this book, which was written a couple of years ago,

00:01:36: you're already mentioning that a show on Bacon and Picasso should happen and that

00:01:41: the influence that Picasso had on Bacon has not really been worked on enough by scholars.

00:01:48: I suppose.

00:01:49: I had it somehow in mind then.

00:01:52: If I said it, I'd actually forgotten that.

00:01:55: That's interesting.

00:01:56: I mean, I don't reread much my own books because I get annoyed that I didn't, you know, I didn't do better.

00:02:07: So I leave them in the past.

00:02:09: But you can't really approach Bacon without thinking about Picasso.

00:02:15: Because to begin with, and that is in a sense, the obvious premise for the show at the ALBERTINA.

00:02:25: To begin with, in Bacon's own version of how he became a painter, Picasso was absolutely the key.

00:02:33: He saw, apparently, an exhibition of Picasso drawings in Paris in 1927.

00:02:42: He would have been 16 at the time because he was born late in 1909.

00:02:49: 16 or 17, I've got some doubts now.

00:02:51: But I think he was still 16, so a very young man.

00:02:55: An adolescent, more or less.

00:02:57: And he hadn't traveled much before, but he'd had this sudden sort of impact of London, Berlin, and now Paris.

00:03:08: And so he was absorbing, as a young, bright, talented person would, everything going on.

00:03:15: And in his version, he just wandered into the gallery.

00:03:19: I think he knew who Picasso was and what he was looking at.

00:03:24: And these were quite naturalistic drawings of Picasso.

00:03:27: They weren't particularly revolutionary or even very exciting.

00:03:34: But he was very intrigued by them.

00:03:37: He'd seen very little art because he was brought up in Ireland and then went to boarding school

00:03:44: and was thrown out of that and went back to Ireland to his father's horse training farm.

00:03:53: Horse training, horse breeding, very much a country sort of life, which he detested because he loved the big city.

00:04:00: So he thought he was looking.

00:04:02: He thought about being an actor.

00:04:04: He was looking for what to do with the way forward.

00:04:07: And according to him, always, he thought, well, perhaps I could be a painter too.

00:04:14: I think he'd done a few sketches, a few drawings, a few.

00:04:18: He'd sort of, you know, done some very amateurish attempts.

00:04:23: I think it was the fluidity and the sense of ease, which he didn't have.

00:04:31: He was very, I mean, although we're showing the two artists together, he was extremely different from Picasso.

00:04:39: He was very different temperament, a very different approach to life.

00:04:45: In some ways, you could say there couldn't be more different, two more different artists.

00:04:52: But they were on the same quest somehow.

00:04:55: They were both fascinated by the human figure.

00:04:59: And Picasso obviously had this eloquence, this fluidity, this ability to, it seemed to do anything.

00:05:08: So as an untrained adolescent, of course, he would have been smitten.

00:05:13: And perhaps, as you say, too smitten if he'd gone into a whole exhibition of very revolutionary paintings.

00:05:22: This was something that he could feel at ease with and admire.

00:05:26: And from that moment on, he followed Picasso's course through magazines, through exhibitions.

00:05:34: I mean, that was just the beginning, the sort of the trigger.

00:05:38: But he was hooked from then on.

00:05:41: So he followed Picasso very, very closely through the late 20s into the 30s.

00:05:46: It's interesting you're using the word absorption when it comes to how Bacon really dived into art history

00:05:54: and was absorbed by Picasso.

00:05:56: Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on this very process of absorption for the young artist Francis Bacon.

00:06:03: I think he thought of himself as a kind of sponge, really.

00:06:08: He thought of Picasso also.

00:06:10: That's one thing I think they had very much in common, was their ability to absorb other influences.

00:06:19: And, of course, that's what all young people do.

00:06:25: You know, they need to absorb in order to find themselves, almost.

00:06:31: So I think he thought of himself as this sponge that could take in all the things, everything,

00:06:41: from a sort of a photograph of a car crash to a puddle in the street.

00:06:48: He was constantly assailed by images, absorbed them, and then sometimes they came through in the painting.

00:06:59: A kind of magpie.

00:07:00: I think that was the word he also used about himself.

00:07:03: You know, who sort of was attracted immediately by something that shone.

00:07:10: And he also thought of himself more as an image maker rather than a painter,

00:07:16: that he was looking for the image that would sum up, I suppose, as many things as possible,

00:07:24: many things about himself, his life, and the influences on him.

00:07:30: Coming back on that metaphor of the sponge that is really absorbing art history,

00:07:36: what's your feeling of how the lust for new images and innovative images, if I may say so,

00:07:44: was actually transformed into the praxis when it comes to Francis Bacon?

00:07:50: He probably, he took some time to know where he was going, what he wanted.

00:07:55: He said, you know, one must be allowed to drift, to drift and find oneself.

00:08:01: And so he was very much drifting right through his early life, really.

00:08:09: Accumulating things, trying to find his own voice, which was a very powerful voice.

00:08:15: And it took a long time for him to find it.

00:08:18: And also, I suppose, to have the courage to express it.

00:08:22: So he was always absorbing, but not probably thinking in terms of, I must make these arresting images.

00:08:32: I think to begin with, and this is one of the great enigmas still about Bacon,

00:08:38: that the first phase of his career, he, as a very young painter, a debutant, as it were,

00:08:47: he was very mild and almost pastoral.

00:08:52: He was a very sort of, a very different artist that's got nothing to do with the Bacon we know from this time onwards,

00:09:00: from the Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion.

00:09:04: It was almost polite, not shocking, very reassuring and calm.

00:09:13: So I think he was working his way through the very early influences he had with artist friends of his,

00:09:22: whom he absorbed.

00:09:24: And the arresting images came about quite mysteriously.

00:09:31: But they also came because of the influence of Picasso, didn't they?

00:09:35: Oh, well, yes.

00:09:37: He needed that impetus because I think what he had to say was shocking.

00:09:45: It was both a desire to shock and a need to shock.

00:09:50: And he saw that Picasso had found the way.

00:09:53: He'd taken the human being apart and reinvented it.

00:10:00: And I suppose since he was always focused on the human image,

00:10:08: which of course wasn't necessarily the taste of the day,

00:10:13: when it went very abstract and the human figure was eclipsed.

00:10:18: But he was drawn to the human image because he thought it was the natural and most expressive way

00:10:26: for an artist to approach the whole idea of reproducing reality.

00:10:34: Well, where do you start?

00:10:36: I guess with your own body, right?

00:10:38: Yes.

00:10:39: Yes, that's a very good point.

00:10:41: I suppose he was exploring himself.

00:10:45: After all, he was discovering himself.

00:10:47: He'd had a very difficult childhood.

00:10:51: He was probably a very difficult child.

00:10:53: And I think he may have exaggerated some of the difficulties of his family life.

00:10:58: But in his version, at least, he was thrown out of home.

00:11:04: It's all very dramatic.

00:11:05: I think it was probably, in reality, rather less dramatic than that.

00:11:10: He was thrown out of his home when his father had sort of definitive proof that he was homosexual.

00:11:19: And so that was shocking to a military man who bred horses and trained horses.

00:11:26: And he'd been a soldier.

00:11:28: And this seemed to him to be the last thing that he wanted in a son.

00:11:33: I don't think it was that abrupt or that violent in actual fact.

00:11:37: But in his mind, in Bacon's mind, his imagination, it was an abrupt sort of break with his family.

00:11:45: I mean, talking about his homosexuality, I always have the feeling when I look at Bacon's painting

00:11:53: that there is both an obsession with sexuality and at the same time maybe a kind of cure from that very obsession.

00:12:03: It's an almost ambivalent situation where lust and fear are meeting, aren't they?

00:12:09: Yes.

00:12:10: I mean, he did see his homosexuality as, he called it a defect, like a limp.

00:12:19: On the other hand, he was very open about it and very accepting of it.

00:12:25: I think he had a strong sense of guilt.

00:12:30: And to some extent, I think his sense of guilt came from that, that he hadn't turned out to be the sort of,

00:12:38: I don't know, the ordinary, normal heir to a family that bred horses.

00:12:46: I mean, I laugh because it's such a contrast when you think of Bacon, who was almost an Oscar Wilde figure.

00:12:55: I mean, very flamboyant, very gay, in inverted commas, in the sense

00:13:03: that he embodied a certain kind of flamboyant gay personality.

00:13:11: I mean, maybe the body is a good entry point to start comparing a bit the work of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,

00:13:18: looking in particular at the difference of the male and the female body.

00:13:23: Because obviously, Picasso, we know about his stories with women.

00:13:27: He's a kind of prototype of the heterosexual man, whereas obviously Bacon is a homosexual.

00:13:34: So what does that, how does that influence their way of picturing both men and women?

00:13:41: Well, I think that Picasso's women are extremely feminine.

00:13:47: This sounds a little bit of a banal point, but I think they're extremely feminine,

00:13:54: although under a fierce male gaze.

00:13:58: Bacon’s are still quite masculine bodies.

00:14:01: I mean, they remind me very often of Michelangelo's bodies, of the sculptures, you know.

00:14:07: I mean, they're almost men with breasts.

00:14:10: They're also very voluptuous to an extent.

00:14:14: They're certainly very fleshy.

00:14:17: But I don't think they feel particularly feminine.

00:14:21: I don't think the men feel particularly, well, if anything, they feel very masculine,

00:14:28: very muscled, very solid, very voluptuous.

00:14:33: That's certainly what he wanted.

00:14:35: He wanted to make his paintings as voluptuous as Michelangelo's drawings,

00:14:40: which he thought were particularly eloquent in that regard.

00:14:47: He was certainly fascinated by women.

00:14:50: I think sometimes he had a very distinct female side.

00:14:54: One of the strange and most basic things about Bacon is that he could be extremely masculine,

00:15:04: tough, taking a lot of pressure, pain, even tragedy,

00:15:09: and at the same time, very acquiescent, very, if that is a feminine quality,

00:15:17: very understanding, very tender.

00:15:21: So he kept these, I know less about Picasso in that way from a personal point of view,

00:15:26: since I was lucky enough to have this 30-year friendship with Bacon.

00:15:31: But I could see him passing almost from one extreme to another.

00:15:37: He could be very caring, very helpful, extremely generous with the people he liked, whether they were men or women.

00:15:47: He had quite as many close female friends as male friends.

00:15:53: Picasso, I suppose you could say the same thing,

00:15:56: but he was more the lover, rather, I get the impression, than the friend of women.

00:16:02: We know from the recordings and also from your biography

00:16:05: that Les Baigneuses of Picasso had a particular influence on Francis Bacon.

00:16:10: Maybe you could tell us a little bit how Picasso influenced his trajectory

00:16:15: throughout the career of that still young Francis Bacon.

00:16:20: Well, I suppose, so he continued to follow Picasso's path through magazines like les Cahiers d’Art,

00:16:30: and he would have seen certain exhibitions of Picasso in London and in Paris.

00:16:37: He continued to travel, of course, when he was in his 20s, and he was particularly struck by the scenes that Picasso did

00:16:46: beginning a new affair and had rented a beach cabin in Dinard,

00:16:53: where he had secret assignations.

00:16:57: I think Bacon was particularly impressed by the feeling of passion,

00:17:03: of guilt, of secrecy, of playfulness, that Picasso managed to instill in these strange,

00:17:11: sort of biomorphic figures floating across the canvas.

00:17:16: And he thought that Picasso had captured something that interested him in particular,

00:17:22: which was a sense that was very close to the feeling of passion, guilt,

00:17:31: and, I suppose, pleasure.

00:17:33: It is interesting that you are now mentioning the feeling as an importance for Francis Bacon in the works of Picasso,

00:17:41: because the show that has just opened in ALBERTINA is What It Feels Like to Be Human.

00:17:46: Maybe you could evolve a bit on that very title of the show.

00:17:50: Well, I think What It Feels Like to Be Human just came up in a conversation I had with Bacon,

00:17:56: and he said that about Picasso, that he gets really close to what it feels like to be human, not what it means to be human.

00:18:06: He’s sometimes misquoted, because I don't think any of us really know what it means to be human,

00:18:11: but I think we do know, we do sense what it feels like to be human, which is vulnerable sometimes, all the emotions,

00:18:19: and that he felt that Picasso had come very, very close,

00:18:24: closer than any other, certainly any other contemporary artist in his time,

00:18:29: to expressing that very mysterious and fleeting sense of being human.

00:18:37: And that, essentially, is what he wanted to transmit in his own paintings,

00:18:43: the sorts of things that people generally don't manage to express,

00:18:51: because they're too complex, they're too fleeting,

00:18:57: and very often they're not confident enough to simply express directly,

00:19:05: to transmit directly what they feel, what they think.

00:19:09: They tend to screen those sensations off and give mild versions of them.

00:19:18: Bacon, on the other hand, wanted to give a very brutal transmission of what it feels like.

00:19:25: He obviously felt and suffered very intensely,

00:19:29: and for him it was both the reason why he painted,

00:19:34: and I suppose it became the reason why so many people are attracted to those paintings,

00:19:40: because it's like somebody screaming in the middle of a crowd, or something like that.

00:19:46: You turn round, and you're immediately alerted, because this is very real.

00:19:52: It's something that rarely happens, and now it's happening in front of you, and you're stopped in your tracks,

00:19:59: and you wonder what's going on.

00:20:01: Talking about feelings in the work of Francis Bacon, I must say I really think there is a lot of honesty.

00:20:09: It's very real how close joy and pain are actually described by him.

00:20:16: I think since he was stretched so tautly between extremes,

00:20:24: extremes of, well, everything you can think of, what comes to mind is kindness and cruelty,

00:20:31: rawness and politeness,

00:20:36: loyalty and its opposite.

00:20:39: All the extremes you can think of, generous and mean.

00:20:43: Bacon was completely like a drum, like the skin on a drum, tied taut between these two extremes.

00:20:51: So I don't think, as he really assumed his role as a painter,

00:20:57: he could do anything else but express these ambivalences, these tensions, these extremes.

00:21:05: And I think he painted in order to live.

00:21:09: He said once, you know, if I didn't have to live, I wouldn't let any of this out.

00:21:14: It was a question of, it sounds very dramatic, life or death,

00:21:18: but I think he would otherwise have been something like a total alcoholic and just drunk himself to death.

00:21:26: He managed to keep all these extremes roughly in balance, but that meant going very far to one extreme

00:21:35: and then very far to another.

00:21:37: And I think in painting, he managed to find a balance of the extremes.

00:21:44: That's to say, to express things very rawly while containing them within an ordered composition

00:21:53: so that they could be grasped by somebody else.

00:21:59: Well, and that's actually something which we also know about Picasso.

00:22:02: So I'm wondering if it's not a pity that they did not meet.

00:22:07: But do you think maybe Bacon didn't want to meet him on purpose?

00:22:13: Well, I think he might have been,

00:22:16: there's another very obvious example of Bacon not wanting to meet his heroes, as it were,

00:22:26: because, as you know, he did 50 or more versions

00:22:32: of Velázquez's portrait of the Pope, Pope Pius X, I think he was.

00:22:41: No, Pope Innocent X.

00:22:46: And when he was in Rome and he could have actually seen the original painting,

00:22:52: he avoided going to the gallery to look at it because he felt vaguely ashamed, ill at ease,

00:23:01: because he'd done so many variations and felt he couldn't look at the original.

00:23:07: I think it was a little like that with Picasso that he'd taken a great deal.

00:23:12: He'd used it.

00:23:13: God knows Picasso did the same.

00:23:16: Picasso had used so many artists and made Picassos from them that Bacon would have felt tongue-tied

00:23:26: and a meeting would not have been equal enough, as it were.

00:23:33: He would have been in awe still of Picasso and feeling that, in debt to him, that he thought that it wasn't a good idea.

00:23:43: He'd taken what he wanted from Picasso, so meeting him wouldn't have made a great difference and, on the contrary,

00:23:50: might have destroyed, you know, what it's like.

00:23:54: I mean, if one meets someone one admires, then very often they have feet of clay.

00:24:03: Let's maybe shift to the Guernica incident, when Bacon first saw Guernica in 1937 in London.

00:24:11: Yes.

00:24:11: I don't think Guernica was a painting that he particularly admired.

00:24:19: He felt it was too illustrational.

00:24:23: He preferred very much, although, obviously, he was impressed by the whole point of Guernica,

00:24:32: of the suffering, being able to transpose a terrible event into painting like that.

00:24:42: But he was much more interested in Picasso's suggestive forms, as it were.

00:24:50: And these are very, they're very direct.

00:24:54: And I think Bacon always liked images that could be interpreted in many different ways.

00:25:03: Whereas in Guernica, they're very, very forceful,

00:25:07: very, as it were, true to, almost to photographic realism.

00:25:16: And it wasn't, it wasn't by any means his favourite pictures.

00:25:21: I suppose he could, he couldn't draw anything from them either.

00:25:25: It was very much, he felt, he was not a political painter either, Bacon,

00:25:30: though you might say that all painters, everybody, is political in one way or the other.

00:25:36: But he was much more interested in pure sensation.

00:25:42: How much did, how much did actually Francis Bacon and Picasso speak about themselves in their painting?

00:25:49: I think you could say,

00:25:52: probably for both artists, that they're in every, obviously, every picture they do, whether it's apparent or not.

00:26:00: And they're always talking about themselves.

00:26:04: They're always representing themselves.

00:26:09: The Minotaur, yes, well, Picasso did have that sense,

00:26:17: that very ancient sense.

00:26:20: And they both go back to the beginnings of art.

00:26:25: I think they were both very moved and influenced by everything from Egyptian art through Greek and Roman art,

00:26:34: and returned to those sources.

00:26:37: That was an influence they definitely shared.

00:26:45: And they had, through the history of art, they had similar, if not the same, in certain cases, Velázquez influences.

00:26:56: Ingres, Degas, you know, they shared a lot of the achievements of the past

00:27:06: and had them very much in mind when they worked.

00:27:11: Talking about the achievements of the past,

00:27:14: obviously, we have to look a little bit closer to what Francis Bacon saw in Paris when he first arrived there.

00:27:20: So, obviously, it was Picasso, but it was also painters like Chaïm Soutine or the surrealists.

00:27:26: Yes, well, as I already pointed out,

00:27:33: Bacon was a terrific absorber of other people's works, other people's paintings.

00:27:42: He was a very literary painter in the sense that he read very widely, as indeed Picasso did.

00:27:49: But above all, he was drawn to images.

00:27:53: And there is an exhibition, an exhibition actually has been done,

00:28:00: of taking all the major influences that Bacon absorbed during his career.

00:28:09: And it never stopped.

00:28:11: You know, I remember, to take a very sort of ordinary,

00:28:16: but nevertheless quite significant example,

00:28:22: I was having a coffee with him in the morning once at the Coupole in Paris.

00:28:30: And there was spilt milk on the table.

00:28:34: And he kept looking at this puddle of milk on the table.

00:28:37: And almost as though he couldn't resist, like a child, he suddenly started drawing with the milk on the tabletop.

00:28:45: So everything in that sense was there for the taking.

00:28:52: And of course, I suppose some artists are like that. They, they're, you know, every second is,

00:29:03: is, there could be something there for me.

00:29:07: A dream,

00:29:08: for instance.

00:29:09: I know that occasionally he took images from dreams.

00:29:13: I mean, if he remembered them and tried to do something with them, of course, very often it didn't work.

00:29:20: And he painted over it.

00:29:21: But there were these impulses.

00:29:25: And I'm sure, you know, I've just been reading recently some of Picasso's writings.

00:29:31: And he did a very strange play called Desire Caught by the Tail.

00:29:39: I mean, it was a kind of nonsense, Dadaist play.

00:29:43: But he was very, very conscious of the, of the spoken word and the written word.

00:29:50: Friends, as they both were with writers.

00:29:53: Yeah.

00:29:53: Listening to you, I'm actually wondering which role did psychology play for both of them,

00:29:58: Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso?

00:30:00: I think they, probably their very first thing was a visual sense.

00:30:07: I think they lived,

00:30:09: it's obvious, they lived mainly through their eyes.

00:30:15: But it would be difficult to, I think, I think they both had a very acute sense of other people,

00:30:24: of the complexity of themselves and of other people.

00:30:28: I think, I suspect they were both very good judges of character, for instance.

00:30:37: That they saw people, they saw perhaps through people.

00:30:44: I think, without that, where, if they weren't

00:30:51: sublime psychologists, in a way, why would they paint the human being?

00:30:58: That obviously was the, the kind of, the mirror of everything, of all their sensations,

00:31:08: was the other, was the body, was the soul, whatever that is, was the psyche.

00:31:15: It's perhaps, now, an easier word,

00:31:19: because it sounds more scientific, though, I don't think we're any closer to understanding the psyche than we are the soul.

00:31:29: So,

00:31:30: yes, they were plumbing the depths of human consciousness and subconsciousness.

00:31:36: It was very disturbing in Bacon,

00:31:40: because if you, if you made an approximate remark,

00:31:46: or you said something interesting, it didn't happen very often in my case, but if you said something interesting, suddenly,

00:31:54: you get a look of recognition.

00:31:57: Very often, if you were being vague about something, or you weren't telling, as it were, the whole truth, you get a very,

00:32:05: discomforting glance that was cold and ruthless.

00:32:15: With Picasso, with those eyes, I would imagine, Bacon had very pale blue eyes, which were very piercing.

00:32:23: Picasso, one imagines, with his more Mediterranean gaze,

00:32:30: might have been less piercing,

00:32:37: but one suspects, perhaps,

00:32:39: very,

00:32:42: it was a very deep gaze.

00:32:45: He had la mirada fuerte, didn't he?

00:32:48: I liked that idea.

00:32:51: Lange Ohren,

00:32:53: der ALBERTINA Podcast.