Francis Bacon in Your Blood
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism,History
Francis Bacon in Your Blood Details
It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes.... Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos Bacon created around him Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.
Reviews
Having very much enjoyed Peppiatt's biography of Bacon I looked forward to what I assumed would be a more subjective and intimate portrait of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. For the most part I was not disappointed. As Peppiatt well documents, Bacon had a remarkable ability to hold fast two conflicting Weltanschauungs. On the one hand, Bacon was convinced that life has no intrinsic value and is fundamentally meaningless. On the other hand, Bacon was convinced, increasing so as he got older, that his own painting sustained him, that it was life-affirming, in effect, meaning-conferring. As for Peppiatt himself (after all, the book purports to be a memoir of *his* life), he should be eternally grateful he can hold his liquor. Without his capacity to enthusiastically participate in the bacchanalia that was Bacon'e every afternoon and evening, he might still be wondering what to do with his life. On this last point, in his Epilogue, Peppiatt maintains that "I have always been imaginatively engaged in the whole of art history, from antiquity to the medieval, from the early Renaissance to our own time." Given this claim, I found it more than a little curious that in four hundred pages he never says a single interesting thing about art. Of course, it's a memoir, not a treatise, but still.