No such reservations assailed film critic and author Roger Manvell (writing as Roger Marvell), who observed Bacon’s Figure Study I and Figure Study II at the Lefevre Gallery in February 1946. However, as Picasso’s reputation revived in the years following the Second World War, Ayrton found himself increasingly isolated in the British art world. Pablo Picasso An Anatomy: Three Women 1933Īyrton’s antipathy towards Picasso - he had described him as a ‘master of pastiche’ in 1944 - accounts for his muted praise of Bacon’s work. Indeed, Bacon had produced three known works on the subject of the Crucifixion itself in 1933, the same year that some of Picasso’s Crucifixion and Une Anatomie drawings appeared in the French magazine Minotaure. Michael Ayrton also believed that Bacon possessed power, but saw Three Studies as ‘completely under the influence’ of Picasso’s “bone” period (1932-33), in which, said Ayrton, ‘Picasso reduced the gigantic achievement of Grünewald’s Isenheim Cr ucifixion to a series of French loaves, putty and damp cloth’ (Ayrton 335). (Raymond Mortimer New Statesman and Nation, 14 April 1945, 239.)įrancis Bacon Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 If Peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays. Bacon’s uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sense of the atrocious world into which we have survived seem to me symbols of outrage rather than works of art. In April 1945, Mortimer described the ‘ostrich necks and button heads’ of Three Studies as ‘gloomily phallic (Bosch without the humour)’, and then continued: I have no doubt of Mr. Mortimer was the first of several critics to contend that Bacon’s abilities were compromised by his choice of ‘shocking’ subject matter. The other - and very different - reviewer was Michael Ayrton, who was to become a good friend to Lewis, and often acted as his ‘eyes’ after Lewis went blind. In 1948 Lewis described Raymond Mortimer, who had attacked his America and Cosmic Man, as ‘an old Bloomsbury acquaintance with American history is probably no more than you could put in a thimble’ (Rose 460-1). Interestingly, the two critics who reviewed this early display of Bacon’s talents were both known to Wyndham Lewis. However, as is discussed in detail later, Lewis’s observation of these three canvases crucially disproves Robert Melville’s assertion, subsequently repeated by Ronald Alley (1964, appendix B: D6) and David Sylvester (2000, 44), that ‘the third version never saw the light’ (Melville 1951, 63).įrancis Bacon believed that his artistic career began with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (Tate Britain 1944), a work that was exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in the spring of 1945. His enthusiastic commentary on the latter proved premature, in that the pictures were withdrawn before the exhibition even began. Lewis’s enthusiasm is demonstrated by visits to the Hanover in advance of the 19 exhibitions in The Listener he discussed Head III in May 1949 and, briefly, three of the Study after Velázquez series in September 1950. Lewis’s writing was both fervently descriptive and critically incisive and in November 1949 he declared that ‘Bacon is one of the most powerful artists in Europe today and he is perfectly in tune with his time’ (Lewis 1949c, 860). Bacon expert Michael Peppiatt explains how Lewis ‘led the way with a review of the artist’s first show that was so far-seeing it can still be read with benefit today’ (Peppiatt 2006, 34). Lewis wrote about Bacon from 1946 until near the end of his writing career in 1954 his positive criticism of Bacon’s Hanover Gallery exhibitions of 19 are of particular significance. Wyndham Lewis became an art critic for The Listener soon after the Second World War and was an early and impassioned voice in support of the artist Francis Bacon. Back to Essays Wyndham Lewis and Francis Bacon
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