The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch
And do you like the human race? No, not much
Aldoux Huxley -- Ape and Essence
"I myself and the life I've lived happen to be more profoundly curious than my work. Then sometimes, when I think about it, I'd prefer everything about my life to blow up after I die and disappear".
Francis Bacon
I opened this short post on Bacon by a quote from Huxley for a reason. First let me say that Bacon's paintings are really quite unsuitable for electronic viewing and must be experienced upfront. Sorry—back to Huxley. Huxley's last two works--after realizing that he was dying are: Doors of Perception, and Heaven and Hell. Although Huxley has always been a savvy commentator on arts and literature in his novels--these last two books are the only ones that directly approach Huxley's unique philosophy of arts.
The idea is that Huxley while on LSD, observes.... with the help of his second wife who was a concert violinist turned psychiatrist-- Works of visual arts, music, and literature in hopes of finding clues to the nature of creative process, beauty, and collective consciousness. Huxley's observations are astonishing at times, but he is driving at something even bigger--that there is a relationship between genius on one hand, and Psychosis and Schizophrenia on the other. He suggests that Blake's Poetry can only be imagined by an alternated mind --that his visions were not only the result of Opium (the use of which by Blake is well documented ) but also madness--that Van Gough did not imagine a violet sky with big yellow stars reflected in the dark blue water of the quay--he actually saw them that way. The examples are numerous in the two books and I recommend reading them to (well, almost) everyone.
I visited in 1993 an exhibition of Bacon’s works that had traveled through Europe--at the tiny Lugano Museum of Art which was literally overrun by the extensive show (there were paintings hanging in the stairs) . The result was overwhelming and well worth the long wait outside. It was there that I realized that bacon's paintings or at least important ones are reflections of what he had seen, and that seeing them had made him mad -- he merely was trying to affect us with his madness. His paintings so emotionally involve you that at one point I found myself under moonlight in a field of tall green blades of the most incredible dark-green where a boy couched on his knees where I could only see his buttocks, was softly crying.
Bacon remained to his last days a difficult, and unhappy person, you can see in his works reflections of a tormented life, a life that at the height of his success and recognition -- he was unable to accept. To me Bacon and William S. Burroughs are two shadows cast from the same central object during the middle of last century-- you can visualize Burroughs’ novels by looking at Bacons works as you can read Bacon’s works in Burroughs’ novels. By the way I am interested in knowing if the two men had met in real life. Anyone knows the answer?
I visited in 1993 an exhibition of Bacon’s works that had traveled through Europe--at the tiny Lugano Museum of Art which was literally overrun by the extensive show (there were paintings hanging in the stairs) . The result was overwhelming and well worth the long wait outside. It was there that I realized that bacon's paintings or at least important ones are reflections of what he had seen, and that seeing them had made him mad -- he merely was trying to affect us with his madness. His paintings so emotionally involve you that at one point I found myself under moonlight in a field of tall green blades of the most incredible dark-green where a boy couched on his knees where I could only see his buttocks, was softly crying.
Bacon remained to his last days a difficult, and unhappy person, you can see in his works reflections of a tormented life, a life that at the height of his success and recognition -- he was unable to accept. To me Bacon and William S. Burroughs are two shadows cast from the same central object during the middle of last century-- you can visualize Burroughs’ novels by looking at Bacons works as you can read Bacon’s works in Burroughs’ novels. By the way I am interested in knowing if the two men had met in real life. Anyone knows the answer?
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