Picasso – Bacon with Michael Peppiatt

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

00:00:09: And it's opposite.

00:00:11: all the extremes you can think of generous and mean.

00:00:14: bacon was completely like a drum likely The skin on a drum tied taut between these two extremes

00:00:23: says Michael Pepiat curator, writer and one of the people who knew Francis Bacon

00:00:29: most closely.

00:00:31: I was happy to meet Michael Papiert in London ahead of The Current Exhibition.

00:00:36: Picasso Bacon What It Feels Like To Be Human.

00:00:39: My name is Felix van Böen And i'm your host for this episode of Lange Ohren.

00:00:48: Michael Papier at first met Bacon in London in nineteen sixty-three beginning a friendship and conversation that lasted almost thirty years.

00:00:56: In this conversation we will explore Bacon's world, the powerful role Picasso played in it as an artist who made Bacon wanted to paint.

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 on women and ultimately they're understanding our human existence.

00:01:23: Michael you wrote a biography about Francis Baig And I had the pleasure to read it ahead of this conversation.

00:01:29: What's intriguing for me is that actually In this book which was written couple years ago you're already mentioning that a show on bacon and Picasso should happen, the influence that Picasso had on.

00:01:43: Bacon has not really been worked enough by scolars.

00:01:49: I suppose i had it somehow in mind then if i said it...i'd actually forgotten that!

00:01:55: That's interesting.

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

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

00:02:09: but uh... You can't really approach Bacon without thinking about Picasso.

00:02:16: Because to begin with and that is in a sense the obvious premise for The Show at the Albertina To begin 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 nineteen twenty-seven... ...he would have been sixteen at that time because he was born late in nineteen oh nine.

00:02:49: Sixteen or seventeen I've got some doubts now but i think it is still sixteen.

00:02:53: so very young man and adolescent more or less, and he hadn't traveled much before but had this sudden sort of impact London Berlin and now Paris.

00:03:08: And so he was absorbing as a young bright talented person.

00:03:14: would everything going on?

00:03:16: In his version He just wandered into the gallery.

00:03:19: I think he knew who Picasso was And these were quite naturalistic drawings of Picasso.

00:03:27: They weren't particularly revolutionary or even very exciting, 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 horse training, horse breeding.

00:03:55: A very much a country sort of life which he detested because he loved the big city.

00:04:00: so he thought about being an actor.

00:04:04: He was looking for what to do with The Way Forward and according him always he thought well perhaps I could be painter too.

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

00:04:18: He had sort of you know... ...done some very amateurish attempts.

00:04:25: It was the fluidity and sense of ease which he didn't have.

00:04:33: although we're showing two artists together it's extremely different from Picasso.

00:04:39: A 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 but they were on the same quest somehow both fascinated by the human figure.

00:04:59: and Picasso obviously had this eloquence, this fluidity.

00:05:04: This ability to it seemed do anything.

00:05:08: so as an untrained adolescent of course he would have been smitten perhaps you say too smitten if gone into a whole exhibition revolutionary paintings.

00:05:22: This was something that he could feel at ease with and admire, 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 trigger But he was hooked From then on.

00:05:41: So he followed Picasso very closely Through the late twenties into the thirties.

00:05:47: It's interesting you're using the work Absorption when it comes to how Bacon really dived into art history and was absorbed by Picasso.

00:05:56: Maybe he could elaborate a little bit more on this very process of absorption for The Young Artist Francis Bacon?

00:06:04: I think he thought himself as kind of sponge, really.

00:06:08: He also thought that Picasso is.

00:06:12: one thing they had in common was their ability to absorb other influences.

00:06:20: And of course, that's what all young people do you know they need to absorb in order to find themselves almost so.

00:06:34: I think he thought himself as this sponge could take everything from a sort car crash to a puddle in the street.

00:06:49: He was constantly assailed by images, absorbed them and then sometimes they came through in the

00:06:58: painting."

00:06:59: A kind of magpie I think that was the word he also used about himself.

00:07:03: you know who sort of was attracted immediately an image maker rather than a painter, that he was looking for the image.

00:07:19: that would sum up I suppose as many things as possible when it's 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.

00:07:37: What's your feeling about how lust for new images and innovative images was actually transformed into the praxis?

00:07:48: when it comes to Francis Bacon?

00:07:50: He probably took some time to know where he was going what he wanted... ...he said you must be allowed to drift!

00:07:59: to drift and find oneself.

00:08:01: And so he was very much drifting right through his early life, really accumulating things trying to find his own voice which is a powerful voice that took long time for him also I suppose have the courage to express it.

00:08:23: So He's always absorbing but not probably thinking in terms of, I must make these arresting images.

00:08:33: To begin with and this is one the great enigmas still about Bacon that first phase his career.

00:08:42: he as a very young painter debutante was very mild almost pastoral was a very sort of, a very different artist.

00:08:55: that's got nothing to do with the bacon we know from this time onwards.

00:09:00: From three studies for figures at The Foot Of A Crucifixion.

00:09:05: it was almost polite not shocking but reassuring and calm.

00:09:14: so I think he working his way through the very early influences he had with artist friends of his whom he absorbed and The uh, the arresting images came about quite mysteriously.

00:09:32: But they also came because of the influence of Picasso didn't they?

00:09:36: Oh well.

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

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

00:09:50: And he saw that Picasso had found the way, taken the human being apart and reinvented it.

00:10:00: I suppose since... He was always focused on the human image which of course wasn't necessarily the taste of day when it went very abstract and the human figure was eclipsed, but he was drawn to the human image because he thought it was the natural and most expressive way for an artist to approach the whole idea of reproducing reality.

00:10:34: Well where do you start I guess with your own body right?

00:10:38: Yes 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 He'd had a very difficult childhood... ...he's probably been a very hard child and i think that he may have exaggerated some of the difficulties in his family life but at least in his version 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 up to his own when his father Had sort of definitive proof, but he was.

00:11:17: he was homosexual And so that was shocking to a military man who bred horses and trained horses.

00:11:27: He'd been a soldier, this seemed him the last thing he wanted in his son.

00:11:33: I don't think it was that abrupt or violent an actual fact but in Bacon's mind is imagination.

00:11:41: It wasn't abrupt sort of break with family.

00:11:46: I mean, talking about his homosexuality... ...I always have the feeling when i look at Bacon's painting 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 almost ambivalent situation where lust & fear are meeting aren't they?

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

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

00:12:33: came from that, but he hadn't turned out to be the sort of... I don't know.

00:12:39: The ordinary normal heir to a family with breadhorses!

00:12:47: I laugh because it's such contrast when you think about Bacon who was almost an Oscar Wilde figure I mean very flamboyant, uh...very gay in inverted commas.

00:13:01: In the sense that he embodied a certain kind of flamborant gay personality.

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

00:13:19: Looking in particular at the difference between male and female bodies because obviously Picasso we know about his stories with women he's kind of prototype for heterosexual man whereas obviously bacon is homosexual.

00:13:35: so how does that influence their way of picturing both men and woman?

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 although under a fierce male gaze.

00:13:58: Vacums are still quite masculine bodies, I mean they remind me very often of Michelangelo's bodies or the sculptures you know?

00:14:07: They're almost men with breasts!

00:14:10: There also very voluptuous to an extent there certainly very fleshy but i don't think they feel particularly feminine...I don't.

00:14:25: 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 voluctuous as Michelangelo's drawings which you thought were particularly eloquent in that regard.

00:14:47: He was certainly fascinated by women I think sometimes female side.

00:14:54: One of the strange and most basic things about Bacon is that he could be extremely masculine, tough taking a lot of pressure pain even tragedy And at the same time very acquiescent Very if That Is A Feminine Quality 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 since i was lucky enough to have this thirty-year friendship with Bacon but i could see him passing almost.

00:15:35: From one extreme to another.

00:15:37: it would be very caring and 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 but he was more the lover rather i get the impression than the friend of women.

00:16:02: what we know from the recordings and also from your biography that Leban Hughes 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 throughout of that still young Francis Bacon?

00:16:20: Well, I suppose so.

00:16:22: he continued to follow Picasso's path through magazines like Les Cahiers d'Art and He would have seen certain exhibitions Of Picasso in London And In Paris.

00:16:44: by the scenes that Picasso did, beginning a new affair and had rented a beach cabin in Dina where he had secret asignations.

00:16:57: I think Bacon was particularly impressed with the feeling of passion, guilt, secrecy or playfulness that Picasso managed to instill in these strange sort of biomorphic figures floating across the canvas, and he thought that Picasso had captured something that interested him.

00:17:21: In particular which was a sense but it was very close.

00:17:26: what's 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, because this show has just opened up and Albertina says what it feels like to be human.

00:17:46: Maybe we could evolve a bit on that very title?

00:17:50: Well I think what he felt was about being human came into my conversation with Bacon who said that he gets really close 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 but i think we do know We Do Sense What It Feels Like To Be A Human Which Is Vulnerable Sometimes All The Emotion and that he felt Picasso had come very, very close.

00:18:24: Closer than certainly any other contemporary artist in his time to expressing the mysterious and fleeting sense of being human.

00:18:37: That essentially is what he wanted to transmit in his own paintings.

00:18:43: The sorts of things people generally don't manage to express because they're too complex, They are too fleeting and very often their not confident enough To simply Express directly.

00:19:05: To transmit directly what they feel.

00:19:07: What do you 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.

00:19:26: He obviously felt and suffered very intensely And for him It was both The reason why he painted I suppose became Why so many people are attracted To those paintings?

00:19:40: Because its like somebody Screaming in middle of 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, a night happening in front of you... ...and your stopped on your tracks.... And what's going on?

00:20:02: Talking about feelings in the work of Francis Bacon I must say i really think there are a lot of honesty.

00:20:09: it's very real how close joy & pain actually described by him

00:20:16: I think since he was stretched so totally between extremes, extremes of well everything you can think.

00:20:28: what comes to mind is kindness and cruelty rawness and politeness loyalty.

00:20:37: And it's opposite all the extremes You Can Think Of Generous and Mean.

00:20:43: Bacon was completely like a drum, likely the skin on a drum.

00:20:48: Tide-tort between these two extremes.

00:20:51: so I don't think as he really assumed his role As a painter He could do anything else but express These ambivalences these tensions these extremes 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.

00:21:15: It was a question that 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 and then very far to another.

00:21:37: And I think in painting he managed to find a balance of the extremes, that's to say to express things very rawly while containing them within an ordered composition so 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 is not a pity 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... There's another very obvious example of Bacon not wanting to meet his heroes as it were because As you know He did fifty or more versions of Velasquez's portrait Of the Pope.

00:22:37: Pope pious the Tenth?

00:22:43: Innocent the Tenth.

00:22:46: And when he was in Rome and could have actually seen The Original Painting, He avoided going to the gallery To look at it because he felt vaguely ashamed, ill at ease Because he'd done so many variations and felt that he couldn't Look At The Original.

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

00:23:12: He 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.

00:23:23: But Bacon would have felt tongue-tied And if a meeting would not of would not have been equal enough as it were, he would've been in awe still of Picasso and feeling that in debt to him.

00:23:39: That he thought that wasn't a good idea.

00:23:43: He'd taken what he wanted from Picasso meeting and wouldn't made great difference on the country might have destroyed.

00:23:52: 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

00:24:10: and in the biography you're talking about Bacon having a kind of Guernica moment, his own practice as well.

00:24:31: Yes but I just interjected that it was Marie Therese who iIwas floundering for.

00:24:38: so should we get into or do that?

00:24:41: You could

00:24:45: say three times Marie Thérèse with Marie Théresse.

00:24:52: This makes life a lot easier, I must say.

00:24:55: Yes well quite yes i have the same thing Marie-Thérèse Valterre and to go back to your... I don't think Guernica was a painting that he particularly admired.

00:25:16: He felt it illustrational.

00:25:20: He preferred very much, although obviously he was impressed by the whole point of Guernica's suffering being able to transpose a terrible event into painting like that.

00:25:39: but he was much more interested in Picasso's suggestive forms, as it were.

00:25:47: And these are very direct and I think they can always light images that could be interpreted in many different ways whereas in Ghanika their very forceful true to, almost photographic realism.

00:26:13: And it wasn't by any means his favorite pictures.

00:26:18: I suppose he couldn't draw anything from them either.

00:26:23: It was very much... He felt there's not a political pain for either Bacon though you might say that all painters, everybody is political in one way or the other.

00:26:33: But he was much more interested.

00:26:37: I never actually, uh...I must look.

00:27:08: I must look it up!

00:27:10: I can't remember saying that but you know just thirty years ago.

00:27:14: so um..uhhhh

00:27:30: But

00:27:31: uhh....I'll

00:27:34: look again

00:27:47: Does he?

00:27:51: Well, in self-portraits.

00:27:58: I don't think he has an alter ego like that or even a symbol... What would you see then as the symbol?

00:28:10: It's interesting idea but i dont' think thats necessarily one of them probably for both artists that they're in every obviously, every picture.

00:28:24: They do whether it's apparent or not and They are always talking about themselves.

00:28:31: Let us shift

00:28:32: to the Guernica incident when Bacon first saw Guernika.

00:28:39: Yes, well it... How

00:28:43: much did actually Francis

00:28:44: Bacon and Picasso speak

00:28:46: about themselves

00:28:47: in their painting?

00:28:48: They both go back to the beginnings of art.

00:28:51: Talking

00:28:52: about the achievements of the past.

00:28:54: obviously

00:28:54: we have look a little bit closer

00:28:56: at what Francis

00:28:57: Bacon saw

00:28:58: in Paris when he first arrived

00:28:59: there.

00:29:00: so obviously it was Picasso who also painted like Chaim

00:29:04: Soutigne or Cerise.

00:29:09: Yeah, listening to you I'm actually wondering which role

00:29:11: did psychology play from?

00:29:14: They had similar if not the same in certain cases for laska says

00:29:20: michael pepiat who had the enormous pleasure to

00:29:23: meet for a podcast of lega.

00:29:26: you know uh they shared a lot

00:29:29: just ahead of the opening of um the show Picasso bacon what it feels like

00:29:34: very much in mind.

00:29:35: Michael Peppia deserve

00:29:36: writer

00:29:37: curator and one of the people who knew francis bacon most closely.

00:29:42: i'm philx von rum and I am your host And I'm your host for this episode of Lange Ohren.

00:29:52: Michael Peppiert first met Francis Bacon in London in nineteen sixty-three, beginning a friendship and conversation that lasted almost thirty years together.

00:30:06: In the conversation we will explore Bacon's

00:30:10: world as the artist who first

00:30:14: made

00:30:14: it

00:30:15: as the artist who first made Bacon want to paint, and a great figure he would measure

00:30:20: himself against with his painting career.

00:30:31: Together we will speak about their similarities but also crucial

00:30:34: differences in painting.

00:30:36: The

00:30:36: images of the body... ...their views on women,... that

00:30:45: Bacon absorbed

00:30:46: during his career.

00:30:48: And it never stopped, you know?

00:30:51: I remember to take a very sort of ordinary and but nevertheless quite significantly example was having coffee with him in the morning once at the Coupon in Paris on the table and he kept looking at this puddle of milk, almost as though he couldn't resist like a child.

00:31:20: He suddenly started drawing with the milk on the tabletop.

00:31:25: so everything in that sense was there for taking.

00:31:34: some artists are.

00:31:42: is there could be something there for me, a dream.

00:31:48: For instance I know that occasionally he took images from dreams if you remembered them and tried to do some of the things with it.

00:31:57: Of course very often didn't work.

00:32:02: there were these impulses and I'm sure you know, i've just been reading recently some of Picasso's writings.

00:32:10: And he did a very strange play called Desire caught by the tale...I mean it was kind of nonsense dadaist play but uh..he was very conscious friends as they both were with writers.

00:32:32: Totally,

00:32:33: I'm just thinking about

00:32:35: psychology

00:32:36: and comparing these two artists.

00:32:40: which role did the psyche

00:32:42: play

00:32:43: for both of you?

00:32:45: Because obviously we are talking both Bacon and Picasso?

00:32:51: I

00:33:03: think probably their very first thing was a visual sense.

00:33:13: It's obvious, they lived mainly through their eyes but it would be difficult to...I think they both had a very acute sense of other people and of other people.

00:33:32: I think, I suspect they were both very good judges of character for instance that they saw people... They saw perhaps through people.

00:33:45: um i think without that where if they weren't sublime psychologists in a way, why would they paint the human being?

00:34:01: That obviously was the kind of... The mirror.

00:34:08: Of everything-of all their sensations.

00:34:11: was the other, was the body Was the soul Whatever that is!

00:34:17: Was the psyche Perhaps now an easier word because it sounds more scientific, though I don't think we're any closer to understanding the psyche than We Are The Soul.

00:34:32: So yes they were plumbing the depths of human consciousness and subconsciousness.

00:34:44: Yes It was very disturbing in Bacon Because if you made an approximate remark, or you said something interesting.

00:35:00: It didn't happen very often in my case but if you say something interesting suddenly You get a look of recognition Very often If you were being vague about Something Or weren't telling as it Were the whole truth?

00:35:22: that was cold and ruthless.

00:35:27: With Picasso with those eyes, I would imagine a bacon had very pale blue eyes which were very piercing.

00:35:34: Picasso on imagines with his more Mediterranean gaze might have been less piercing but one suspects perhaps It was a very deep gaze.

00:35:55: He had la mirada fuerte, didn't he?

00:35:58: I like that

00:36:46: idea.