SWITZERLAND Museum showcases Bacon's studio

The artist didn't use live models. He said they intimidated him.
BASEL, Switzerland (AP) -- Archaeologists had to retrieve the more than 7,000 objects cluttering the London studio of the late artist.
They collected countless brushes, empty tubes, rags and tin cans encrusted with paint. They also picked up many crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books. And they catalog close to 1,500 photos, often in poor condition.
Chaos seems an understatement in describing the place where Francis Bacon lived and worked for his last three decades until his death in 1992 at 82.
But the studio, since reconstructed to its original, messy state at The Hugh Lane gallery in his native Dublin, was a treasure trove for art historians seeking a deeper insight into the enigmatic painter's disturbing and distorted imagery.
Showcases with some 65 newspaper clippings, photos, book leafs and other samples from this "studio material" are for the first time part of a unique exhibition on the artist.
Titled "Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art," it focuses on his main sources of inspiration by confronting some 40 of his paintings with an equal number by old masters and other artists. They are on loan from museums and private collectors in the United States and Europe. The show runs through June 20.
Missing link
For Barbara Steffen, curator of the show at the Beyeler Foundation museum in suburban Riehen, the studio material presents the missing link between the "the sublime horror of Bacon's own imagery and the often complex, ambiguous beauty of the artists he accepted as his idols."
Among the paintings, special prominence is given to Bacon's interpretations of an austere 17th-century portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez, which fascinated him for many years.
Some of Bacon's images, which are up to 78 inches high, suggest the papal throne, supposedly a symbol of power, holds an anguished, isolated figure.
They include versions of his "screaming pope" shown together with the still of a terrified victim taken from film director Sergey Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," the 1925 silent film about the Russian revolution. Confronting them are sketches of a weeping woman by Picasso.
The close-up still, his source for the pope's stunned features, was found in Bacon's studio as were numerous color and black-and-white reproductions of the Velazquez original, which he never saw.
Also on view are other examples of how Bacon merged several sources from his studio collection into his paintings, sometimes with absurd results. In two versions for a "Study for Bullfight," shown along with Goyaesque prints on the same theme, Bacon has introduced a section of a Nazi party rally, presumably inspired by a newspaper photo.
"The arena doubles as a place for mass rallies where violence on a broader scale can be fomented," comments Margarita Cappock, co-author of the 400-page exhibition catalog.
Bacon became interested in bullfights during visits to Spain and southern France. Cappock notes he once told an interviewer that "bullfighting is like boxing -- a marvelous aperitif to sex."
Lurid, scandalous
Bacon was a flamboyant gay whose lurid sex life began long before 1967 when homosexuality ceased to be a criminal offense in Britain. In 1953, a painting suggestively showing two men on a bed caused a scandal when it was exhibited at London's Hanover Gallery. The painting was based on photographs of wrestlers by Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century American pioneer of photographic art.
Bacon kept several copies of Muybridge's book on "The Human Figure in Motion" in his studio. Several leaves from the book allow visitors to see how Bacon used them in depicting overtly homosexual themes through most of his artistic career.
A deeply shocking Bacon triptych displayed on view at the Beyeler Foundation museum recounts the 1971 suicide of George Dyer, an almost illiterate one-time petty thief and Bacon's lover for eight years, who became addicted to drugs and drinking.
On the eve of a large Bacon retrospective in Paris' Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead on the toilet in a Paris hotel where they had shared a room.
Bacon almost never painted from life. Even portraits of his closest friends were based on photos he had ordered for the purpose; sometimes they were based on pictures of other people. He repeatedly said he felt inhibited by the presence of models and that he needed a distance from what he was painting.
His many self-portraits, shown with some of the Rembrandts he admired, also were done from photos, including some taken in automatic photo booths.
No palette was found in his studio. Walls, doors and abandoned canvases served Bacon as substitutes. Sometimes, he left brushes aside and used his hand or rags to apply the paint.
XOn the Net: www.beyeler.com/fondation/e/html--05son/son--fs.htm