2015.12.14 弗朗西斯-培根的死记硬背

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Francis Bacon by rote
The paintings he made at the end of his life are repetitive rather than innovative. But they satisfy our hunger for an artistic happy ending

Dec 14th 2015 (Updated Dec 15th 2015)

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By George Pendle

You’ve seen them before, those three eyeless monsters with their maws stretched taut in terrible screams. The unforgettable characters at the centre of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (above) were so shocking when they were first revealed in 1944 that the critic John Russell declared, “We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them.” Yet the three figures which have been on show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York do not fill the viewer with the same sense of terror. In fact the effect is quite the opposite. Here are the same shrieking creatures, but this triptych is much larger and neater than the original, which was as small as a devotional painting and as raw as a chunk of meat. That’s because this is not the same picture but a copy entitled “Second Version of Triptych 1944”, a painting made almost half a century later when the Tate wouldn’t loan the original out for an exhibition of Bacon’s work.

Gagosian’s show of Bacon’s late paintings is full of such double-takes and do-overs. All the signifiers of his best known pictures are here – the bare rooms, the fleshy shadows, the sickly puces and vulgar violets – but they appear in lesser known works. As the wall text proudly states, “there has until now never been a show devoted solely to investigating the innovations and departures of his late paintings.” Judging from the evidence, that is because Bacon appears to have innovated and departed not very much at all.


It’s true that in the last 15 years of his life he started using spray paint to add blossoming white lesions to his murky canvases. He also began imprinting them with strips of corduroy and developed a peculiar obsession with dressing his amorphous, fleshy lumps in cricket pads. But if there is one significant change it is that by the 1980s his once terrifying ghouls and gobbets had come to seem almost familiar. These are horrors drawn by rote. In his late paintings Bacon was no longer painting the void, he was decorating it.

It’s hard to venture into a museum these days without stumbling upon a “rediscovery” of the “late” works of a great artist. Matisse, Rembrandt, Malevich and Turner have all had major exhibitions devoted to such pieces over the last couple of years. Similarly, commercial galleries like Gagosian have been strip-mining artists’ late careers for hidden value. The question for today’s viewer is whether such art has an intrinsic value that has been overlooked, or whether it is derivative twaddle being revived purely for financial speculation.

The idea of a “late” period in an artist’s life comes from Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century tome, “Lives of the Painters”. He recalls a visit to the 70-something Titian in Venice, and remarks that “it would have been well for him in these his last years not to work save as a pastime, so as not to diminish with works of less excellence the reputation gained in his best years.” In Vasari’s eyes an artist’s work followed the path of an artist’s body, going through stages of maturation, mastery, decline and eventual decrepitude. Nevertheless, by the following century Titian’s late works were being roundly praised and have been ever since. Goethe called them a major revolution in painting, depicting “in abstracto those materials which he had rendered before concretely: so, for instance, only the idea of velvet not the material itself.”


Rembrandt’s late work is the examplar. The paintings made between the 1650s and his death in 1669 are wildly original and strikingly emotional. Nevertheless, as with Titian’s later works, they were not popular at the time. One of his most famous late paintings, the weird and mystical “The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis” (1661), was commissioned for the walls of Amsterdam’s town hall only to be taken down almost immediately. Similarly J.M.W. Turner’s late paintings, with their pre-Impressionistic take on natural phenomena, were roundly attacked by critics at the time for not telling “the general truth.” They are now among the most popular pictures in Britain.

What is it that these artists’ late periods have in common? Experimentation? Self-reflexivity? Unpopularity? In the 19th century a German word, “Altersstil”, was coined to describe this phase of an artist’s career. Yet while everybody could agree that such a thing existed, nobody was quite sure what it consisted of. When one thinks about it, the idea of any kind of late period that is common to all seems ludicrous: Rembrandt’s began in his 50s, Picasso’s in his 80s.

The fact is that we like narrative. We like continuity. The concept of a late period allows us a kind of happy ending, an artistic version of walking off into the sunset, all canvas spent. We like the idea that an artist’s last gasp creates something that is quite distinct from everything that has gone before, and yet unites it. What we seek in an artist’s late period is a form of aesthetic transcendence. The wall text at the Francis Bacon show hints at this, speaking of “fragments of classical figuration…pared down to their very essence” and “a celebratory sense of disintegration”. But perhaps the clearest description of what an artist’s late period is can be found in a 16th-century description of the medieval Chinese artist Ni Tsan: “In his old age he followed his own ideas, rubbed and brushed and was like an old lion, walked alone without a single companion.”



弗朗西斯-培根的死记硬背
他在生命的最后阶段所作的画是重复的，而不是创新的。但它们满足了我们对艺术大结局的渴求

2015年12月14日（2015年12月15日更新）。


作者：George Pendle

你以前见过他们，那三个没有眼睛的怪物，他们的嘴在可怕的尖叫声中绷得紧紧的。弗朗西斯-培根的《耶稣受难处的三个人物研究》（上图）中的这些令人难忘的人物在1944年首次曝光时是如此令人震惊，以至于批评家约翰-拉塞尔宣称："我们对他们没有名字，也没有名字来表达我们对他们的感受。" 然而，在纽约高古轩画廊展出的这三幅作品并没有给观众带来同样的恐怖感。事实上，效果恰恰相反。这里有同样尖叫的生物，但这幅三联画比原作大得多，也整洁得多，原作小得像一幅虔诚的画，生得像一大块肉。这是因为这不是同一幅画，而是一幅名为 "1944年三联画第二版 "的复制品，这幅画是在泰特美术馆不愿意借出原作参加培根作品展的情况下，在近半个世纪后创作的。

高古轩的培根晚期绘画展充满了这样的两面性和重复性。他最著名的画作的所有标志都在这里--光秃秃的房间、肉色的阴影、病态的白粉和粗俗的紫罗兰--但它们出现在不太知名的作品中。正如墙上的文字所骄傲地说，"直到现在，还没有一个展览专门研究他晚期绘画的创新和偏离"。从证据来看，这是因为培根似乎根本就没有什么创新和离经叛道。


诚然，在他生命的最后15年里，他开始使用喷漆在他阴暗的画布上添加开花的白色病变。他还开始用灯芯绒布条在画上打上印记，并发展出一种奇特的痴迷，用板球垫装扮他那无定形的、肉质的肿块。但如果说有什么重大变化的话，那就是到了20世纪80年代，他曾经可怕的食尸鬼和小人已经变得近乎熟悉。这些都是靠死记硬背画出来的恐怖。在他晚期的画作中，培根不再是在画虚空，而是在装饰它。

现在很难冒险进入一个博物馆，而不偶然发现一个伟大艺术家的 "晚期 "作品的 "重新发现"。马蒂斯、伦勃朗、马列维奇和特纳在过去几年中都有专门针对此类作品的大型展览。同样，像高古轩这样的商业画廊也一直在对艺术家的晚期作品进行剥离，以寻找隐藏的价值。今天的观众所面临的问题是，这样的艺术是否具有被忽视的内在价值，或者它是否是纯粹为了金融投机而被恢复的衍生品。

艺术家生命中的 "晚期 "这一概念来自于乔治-瓦萨里16世纪的巨著《画家的生活》。他回顾了在威尼斯对70多岁的提香的访问，并说："在他最后的这些年里，他最好不要把工作当作一种消遣，以免用不太出色的作品削弱他在最好的年华里获得的声誉。" 在瓦萨里眼中，艺术家的作品就像艺术家的身体一样，经历了成熟、精通、衰退和最终衰败的阶段。然而，到了下个世纪，提香的晚期作品受到了广泛的赞誉，并且一直到现在。歌德称其为绘画界的一次重大革命，他 "抽象地描绘了那些他以前具体呈现的材料：例如，只有天鹅绒的概念而不是材料本身"。


伦勃朗的晚期作品是一个典范。从1650年代到他1669年去世期间创作的画作具有疯狂的原创性和惊人的情感。然而，与提香的后期作品一样，它们在当时并不受欢迎。他最著名的晚期作品之一，诡异而神秘的 "克劳迪乌斯-克雷米斯领导下的巴达维亚人的阴谋"（1661年），被委托用于阿姆斯特丹市政厅的墙壁，但几乎立即被取下。同样，J.M.W.特纳的晚期画作，以其对自然现象的前印象主义的方式，受到了当时评论家的强烈抨击，因为他们没有说出 "一般的真相"。它们现在是英国最受欢迎的图片之一。

这些艺术家的晚期作品有什么共同之处？实验性？自我反思性？不受欢迎？在19世纪，一个德国词 "Altersstil "被创造出来，用来描述艺术家职业生涯的这个阶段。然而，虽然每个人都可以同意这样的事情存在，但没有人很确定它包括什么。当人们想到这一点时，任何一种晚期的想法都是共同的，似乎很可笑。伦勃朗的作品始于50年代，毕加索的作品始于80年代。

事实是，我们喜欢叙事。我们喜欢连续性。晚期的概念让我们有一种大团圆的结局，一种走入夕阳的艺术版本，所有的画布都花了。我们喜欢这样的想法：一个艺术家的最后一搏创造了一些与之前的一切截然不同的东西，但又将其统一起来。我们在一个艺术家的晚期所寻求的是一种审美的超越。弗朗西斯-培根展览的墙面文字暗示了这一点，谈到了 "古典形象的碎片......被压缩到它们的本质 "和 "一种庆祝性的瓦解感"。但是，也许对艺术家晚期的最清晰的描述可以在16世纪对中国中世纪艺术家倪瓒的描述中找到："在他的晚年，他遵循自己的想法，揉搓和刷洗，像一头老狮子，独自行走，没有一个同伴。"