Extending the range of Bacon studies

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A collection of essays on Francis Bacon extends a lively field of enquiry

Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Rina Arya

 An interesting new interesting addition to the Bacon literature is Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, unfortunately published without illustrations. Rina Arya’s introduction suggests that this volume represents a new wave of Bacon commentary wherein Bacon (as himself ‘a critical and cultural thinker’) is analysed ‘with recourse to critical theory’, thus supposedly breaching the previous confines of art historical commentary.

The actual anthology of texts turns out to be less overturning of old methods than is claimed. Arya’s study of Bacon’s authentic philosophical existentialism and John Hatch’s study of voyeurism as theme extend the discussion of topics already broached in the first wave of Bacon literature. There is surprisingly little contribution from ‘queer studies’, except an interesting take by Nicholas Chare on the Barry Joule Bacon archive (Tate Gallery) that shelves the contentious issue of whether Bacon himself produced these sheets (alone/as artworks) and instead locates them within a play of gay sexuality.

Martin Hammer’s substantial essay focuses upon the pictorial mechanics of Bacon’s work, though he focuses more upon what Bacon covers over in repainting than on ‘how the works permit or encourage the interpretation of meaning’, as he claims. (There is much more old-fashioned ‘critical’ work to be done on how the ambiguity especially of Bacon’s earliest mature paintings works, what overtones and metaphors we might agree to and how far a determinate core expression is achieved.) (Martin Hammer’s own book on Bacon is reviewed separately in this issue of Cassone.)

There are studies of what Bacon might have picked up from the Surrealist Georges Bataille  or how the philosopher Gilles Deleuze interpreted Bacon’s work (by respectively Peter Jones and Darren Ambrose), but even these do not suggest any real paradigm shift in academic studies: if one consulted academic books from 50 years ago, one might find studies of comparable range considering, say, ‘Delacroix and Baudelaire’, ‘Baudelaire and Satanism’, ‘Baudelaire and Swedenburg’ or ‘Sartre’s Baudelaire’. Such has long been the normal stuff of expansionist humanities research. That point apart, there is some serious and important work in this essay collection which extends (rather than revolutionizes) the lively field of Bacon studies.

Rina Arya, ed., Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, is published by Peter Lang AG, Pieterlen, Switzerland, 2012. 207pp, £35. ISBN 978-3-0343-0889-2