Francis Bacon's Studio
From Margarita Cappock
Merrell Publishers Limited, 2005, 240 pages, hardbound, $59.95
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was created in Ireland to British parents and now is known among the most critical post-war painters, his most upsetting oil portraits obtained by important museum collections worldwide. Bacon is remembered chiefly for his exemplary, gruesome portrait of Pope Innocent X. London/New York writer Merrell has generated a definitive, retrospective coffee-table quantity on Bacon with the apparatus of his distinctive (read unimaginably messy) studio since the springboard to his career and lifework.
Six years following his departure in 1992 the contents of his somewhat cramped London studio had been contributed to the Dublin City Council in Ireland together with all the understanding that it'd be recreated there together with its contents intact to public screening. Easier said than done, since the studio, Bacon's house and office since 1961, included 7,500 things - a treasure trove of valuable artifacts into an art historian. There are just two absorbing tales here: the battle of cataloging, hauling and reassembling the contents of this studio (front entrance, paint-encrusted walls and all) throughout the Irish Sea to Dublin, then the importance of each discovered item as it related to Bacon's oeuvre.
"Maintaining the studio just as it stood was critical to the encounter," Dr. Cappock writes. Therefore a group of photographers, archeologists, conservators and curators went to work, launch an indoor archeological dig to make a comprehensive diagram of where each object lay/stood/hung so the recreated space will be exactly accurate.Now the rebuilt studio is available to the General Public in Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Charlemont House, Parnell Square, Dublin 1, Ireland.
Obviously, the heaps and piles of clippings, photographs, sketches, catalogs, books as well as slashed canvases speak volumes into the historical arc of Bacon's work and Dr. Cappock finds within this detritus the inspiration for every stage of the artistic development. A number of the numerous graphic images Bacon accumulated over his life show the macabre foundation for a lot of his lead massacres, meat carcasses and the assassination of President Kennedy. Other photographs show the topics of the commissioned portraits such as Mick Jagger. From the previous page that the reader has obtained a comprehensive, insider's perspective of the creative development of Francis Bacon.
For anybody creating a library on 20th century art that this impressive, thick book, Francis Bacon's Studio, is essential.