Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon: a novelist takes on the painter’s final days
Porter’s tribute to Bacon is a short work, dense with allusions, somewhere between a prose-poem and a play script.
Francis Bacon was very particular about the way his works were displayed. He chose theatrical gold frames and decreed that the paintings themselves – the brushwork that “slips, slurps, smears, flares, blurs, fades, evaporates, abruptly dematerialises”, as the art critic Tom Lubbock put it – should be seen behind glass.
The glass was there to protect the canvases (usually in a sorry state once Bacon had had his way with them) as well as to bring some unity to the chaotic whole. But the reflective surfaces have another effect: anyone who steps closer, hoping to decipher those slurps and smears, soon comes face to face with their own mirror image. This was the experience of the author, Max Porter, a teenage Bacon superfan, when he went with his mum to see a Bacon exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1998, and stood before