[hypergraphia]

From Tate.etc

Milan Kundera

For a long time, Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett made up a couple in my imaginary gallery of modern art. Then I read the interview Bacon did with Michel Archimbaud: “I’ve always been amazed by this pairing of Beckett and me,” Bacon said. “I’ve always felt that Shakespeare expressed much better and more precisely and more powerfully what Beckett and Joyce were trying to say.” And then later: “I wonder if Beckett’s ideas about his art haven’t wound up killing off his creation. There’s something at once too systematic and too intelligent in him, that may be what’s always bothered me.” And again: “In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough, but in Beckett I’ve often had the sense that as a result of seeking to eliminate, nothing was left any more, and that nothingness finally sounded hollow.”

When one artist talks about another one, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about him­self? That he is refusing to be categorised. That he wants to protect his work against clichés. Next: that he is resisting the dogmatists of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, the latter represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Whereas Bacon looks to the history of art in its entirety; the twentieth century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.

And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, fearing to stifle his creative unconscious; fearing also to allow his art to be turned into a kind of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because art is now clogged with a noisy, opaque logorrhoea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media-free contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener). Wherever he can, Bacon therefore blurs his tracks to throw off interpreters who try to reduce his work to an over-facile programme: he bridles at using the word “horror” with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting (chance turning up in the course of the work – an accidental spot of paint that abruptly changes the very subject of the picture); he insists on the word “play” when everyone is making much of the seriousness of his paintings. People want to talk about his despair? Very well, but, he specifies immediately, in this case it is a joyous despair.

From the reflection on Beckett quoted, I pull out this remark: “In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…” Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, filler, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with “filler”, do away with whatever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say). So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are hyper-simple, flat-colour; but in the foreground, the bodies are treated with a richness of colours and forms that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearian) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat-colour background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if “put on a diet”, as if diminished, and for Bacon the issue always and above all is beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems nowadays to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

Like Bacon, Beckett had no illusions about the future, either of the world or of art. And at that moment in the last days of illusions, both men show the same immensely interesting and significant reaction: wars, revolutions and their setbacks, massacres, the imposture we call democracy – all these subjects are absent from their works. In his Rhinoceros (1959), Ionesco is still interested in the great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea (1951). An inconceivable subject for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilisation (as Beckett and Bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society, with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological materiality of man. That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which used to concentrate within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a simple physiological scandal. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughter­houses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death…” To link Jesus nailed to the cross with slaughterhouses and animals’ fear might seem sacrilegious. But Bacon is a non-believer, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, “man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason”.

Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can be seen, for instance, in the pictures called Studies of the Human Body (1970), in which he unmasks the body as a simple “accident”, an accident that could as easily have been fashioned some other way, for instance – I don’t know – with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees. These are the only pictures of his that fill me with horror. But is “horror” the right word? No. For the sensation that these pictures arouse, there is no right word. What they arouse is not the horror we know, the one in response to the insanities of history, to torture, persecution, war, massacres, suffering. No. This is a different horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly unveiled by the painter, of the human body. © Milan Kundera.

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