Martin Harrison and Sophie Pretorius, the Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, supported by Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, in association with Thames & Hudson, London, 2024. ISBN: 978-0-500-96628-0. 167 pages, profusely illustrated. Hardback. £50.

Review by Adrian Clark, November 2024.

This beautiful book has been bound in the same way, with the same page format, as the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, published by the Estate in five volumes in 2016 (see our review). It on occasion serves to update the earlier publication, reflecting the new material which always haunts the compilers of catalogues raisoneés which can never be as definitive as they would like to be. The picture called “The Wrestlers after Muybridge”, of 1980 (number 80/07 from the catalogue) is an example of a work which can now be described more accurately.

The book is based on photographs taken by Bacon’s gallery, the Marlborough Gallery, of pictures which came to them for sale from the artist before being withdrawn at his request for some sort of reworking. Before this happened , some of the pictures had already been exhibited or used for marketing material. If the artist released the reworked pictures back to the gallery for them finally to sell, the gallery photographed them again. The book charts the differences revealed by the sequence of photographs, with a view to furthering knowledge of Bacon’s methods as a painter.

It is highly unusual for those wishing to interpret an artist’s work to have the luxury of photographs of it in its final stages of development; the nearest one might get to this is the habit of many artists to prepare preliminary drawings or sketches of their work. The comparison of drawings to the finished painting may demonstrate the trajectory of the artist’s thinking about his or her subject.

Photography is by definition only relevant to relatively modern works of art. There are photographs of particularly important pictures, such as Picasso’s Guernica, as it was being created, but that’s an exception.

A number of important pictures, often Old Masters, have now been analysed using various mechanical techniques in order to show earlier versions of the image left behind after overpainting. This has helped art historians to trace the ways in which the artist wished his or her image to evolve. But I would guess that not many images exist of apparently finished pictures being reworked right at the end of their lives in the studio.

The question of when a work of art is regarded by the artist as being finished has some history. Many modern artists from Bacon’s milieu have been notorious for reworking their pictures before allowing them to leave the studio. The most obvious example is Frank Auerbach, whose painting method involved constant scraping and repainting over sometimes many months before his eye decided that the picture could be released. Whether such artists are ever really convinced that their works could not be improved with more time and consideration is a vexed question. Bacon’s working practices demonstrate the conundrum to perfection. As this book says, “ All Bacon’s paintings appear to have existed for him on a continuum of incompleteness ” (p. 29).

One thing which came as a surprise to me was the fact that it would appear that the artist sometimes changed a picture because of comments made by the gallery’s Valerie Beston when the pictures first arrived from the artist’s studio . An example of this is “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus ”, of 1981 ( number 81-03). Here the author records a number of comments by Ms Beston and a number of what seem to be responsive amendments made by Bacon as a result. As the author cautiously says “Perhaps Miss Beston exerted more influence over Bacon’s paintings than has been previously been assumed”. One can see the PhD thesis resulting from that comment.

It is notoriously difficult for commentators to be persuasive in attempting to analyse why artists painted their subjects as they did. To be credible, the exercise requires from the commentator an unusual mixture of experience, insight, caution, prudence and modesty. What makes a form of image better than another form? What does “better” mean in this context? There is the possibility of applying a technical test in certain circumstances : an artist seeking to portray the branch of a tree in a lifelike fashion, its proportions mimicking nature, may achieve a more accurate depiction in such a way that an observer, starting with the artist, might conclude that one version was indeed “ better” than another. But such technical tests hardly apply to the work of Bacon.

Here the author, faced with the choice of trying to divine what was “better” about repainted passages, wisely chooses to express either the lightest of opinions or to eschew opinions altogether. Suggestions are sometimes made about changes made perhaps in order to address formal aspects of image creation. Was the artist seeking to improve the balance of the image by inserting a colour reflecting a colour used elsewhere? Does the added (or subtracted) passage improve the emphasis of whatever the artist was trying to convey? These are deep and dangerous waters; the artist himself may not have known exactly why he felt a change to be necessary. Although he must surely have regarded his changes as “improvements ”, if asked to explain in what way they were improvements he may have fallen back on the concept of instinct. Instead, best to let the viewer, presented with the photographic evidence, try their own hand at working out why the artist repainted something and whether, in so doing, he made it “better”.

The heart of the book touches upon the challenge lying within all great art. What can the viewer understand about what the artist was trying to achieve? One can learn a great deal about the work and the life of an artist such as Bacon. He has been extremely well served by the efforts of the Estate, publishing and encouraging careful and thoughtful analyses of the pictures, their origins, influences, composition and so on. As a result, we know more about Francis Bacon’s art than we do about that of many other artists. And yet, what do we know at the end of the day? What was he trying to achieve? Did he achieve what he wanted to? How do we judge one picture against another? Is the artist always best placed to judge completeness or success?

As Bacon began each new work, his head full of images from his sources, his knowledge of art history, his own prior body of work; his mood shifting between the normal poles of human experience; the day bright and promising or dark and unsettling; what was he doing as his hand reached for the brush and the brush started to address the (unprimed) canvas? I think even he found it hard to answer questions of this type: he did what he did was perhaps his way of responding. This book equips us a little more to stand alongside him as he worked towards whatever he happened to regard as an acceptable conclusion; it cannot go further than that and answer the question for us.

Martin Harrison and increasingly Sophie Pretorius are two of the most significant Bacon scholars working today. When they commit their thoughts to print, the Bacon community does well to read very carefully. Nothing is written without assiduous preparation and thought. This book matches their other work. They are in that comparatively rare category of authors writing about the art world whose work compels respect. I am already looking forward to whatever aspect of Bacon scholarship they turn their attention to next.