Hello Cunty: Sotheby s Appropriates The Colony Room - Darren Coffield artlyst.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from artlyst.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
John Minihan on Francis Bacon: Champagne and paint splatters in Soho John Minihan
9 min read
The Francis Bacon I knew had a reserve in him. He also had that Irish love for gambling and drinking and a perpetual desire to be somewhere else
Francis Bacon was a man whom I both knew and did not know. There was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity, and he was happier in the company of photographers, terrified of writers and biographers, and he had more reason than most.
Born in Dublin in 1909, certainly Irish by birth, if not by blood, he had the Irish love for gambling, drinking and perpetual desire to be somewhere else. I first met Bacon outside Marlborough Magistrates Court in London in 1971. The Daily Telegraph published a story, Irish Artist on Drugs Charge. He was acquitted. In his defence, he told the magistrate that he could not have smoked the can
Wild things: the beasts of Francis Bacon apollo-magazine.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from apollo-magazine.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Knopf, 880 pp., $60.00
This episode suggests
ruthless careerism, but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critics Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan write in their new biography,
Francis Bacon: Revelations,
the reality turned out to be more haunting. Beginning in 1972, Bacon regularly
checked into the hotel room where Dyer died. He slept in the same bed where
Dyer had cheated on him; he sat on the toilet where Dyer took his last breath.
Bacon wasn’t spiritual, but these private rituals, which could last up to two
weeks, had the intimacy of a séance. It was the closest Bacon came to
sentimentality.