Source: Art China
The Release A photograph of Peter Beard taken in the 70s
If you look at Rembrandt's portraits, especially the eyes of self-portraits, you seem to be able to see a "soul." Religious ideas and books have influenced the creation of artists from the very beginning and continue to seduce us today. But Francis Bacon was the first artist to paint people as animals. People say his work has no soul, it's a mixture of flesh and bone, blood and brain—in short, like living flesh. Struggling with the relentless Darwinian life makes Bacon's work full of unsettling atmosphere. And his radical vision of human nature's natural history led him to a friendship and resonance with Peter Beard, one of the most prominent wildlife photographers of the 20th century.
After the Irish-born British painter died in 1992, more than 200 photographs of elephant remains were found in his London studio. It was given to him by Bacon's friend Peter Beard and was photographed by Beard on a low-flying plane flying over the Kenyan steppes. The two old friends would talk passionately about the images of these huge gray giants slowly decaying into white bones and ivory monuments in the African sun. These photographs inspired some of Bacon's sharpest ideas about art and life. He once said: "The picture of the elephant is naturally enlightening, and what he sees is 'a fuse – a release'.
Beard's photograph of the elephant's remains is currently on display in Odowas, London, along with Bacon's Two Studies for Portrait for Beard. The black void in Beard's face eroded his face, his left cheek was gone, and his mouth was stained with blood. This 1976 diptych portrait was most likely inspired by photographs of severe facial trauma on World War I soldiers. This is a great example of how Bacon let the photo "release" his mind.
Francis Bacon Portrait Studies Diptych, 1976 Image credit: Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS/Artimage 2021
The work reveals Bacon's complex feelings for someone he loves but can't have. Despite the destruction of his appearance, the painting still shows the photographer's world-famous handsome appearance. The two met in 1965, but their relationship grew closer in 1972, when Bacon was mourning the death of his lover George Dyer and wanted to recover from it. In 1971, Dale was found to have committed suicide in the toilet of a Paris hotel where he and Bacon were staying, just before Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais, which made Bacon the greatest painter since Picasso.
Bacon has always had this sad emotion in his artistic creations in the 70s, not only in his paintings about lovers, but also in a series of desperate self-portraits. Suddenly, in the midst of this pain, he begins to portray his friend Beard, where happy emotions begin to emerge. He was in love again. A friend noticed that Bacon had a "love" for the photographer. There is no need for gossip, Bacon's portrait says it all.
Beard, who married model Cheryl Tiegs, photographed Iman on a street in Nairobi and is therefore credited with "discovering" Iman. The wealthy-born New Yorker, who calls himself Ernest Hemingway, did not like hunting in Africa, instead depicting the dangers the animals faced in a photographic album the End of the Game, published in 1965. Beard died last year at the age of 82. Before his death he disappeared from his home on Long Island and wandered into the woods, where his body was found two weeks later. He suffered from Alzheimer's disease at the end of his life.
Bacon (left) and Beard In the 1979s Image credit: Estate of Peter Beard
Bacon wasn't just inspired by Beard's handsome face. The two often discussed topics about animals, Africa, and death, and gave Bacon unlimited inspiration. In The End of the Game, Beard's photographic catalogue includes photographs of live elephants or the rotting bodies and remains of animals starving to death due to poor management of wildlife sanctuaries. In each reprint of the photographic album, he added more images of elephant remains.
The photographs are taken from a top-down perspective, showing death with naked candor. Some pictures are of elephants when their offal is eaten. Some were photographed of elephants when they were left with only their white bones. Bacon found these photos to be more memorable than photos of live elephants. In 1972, the two met in London and recorded a series of conversations known as "interviews with dead elephants." Bacon told Beard, "Dead elephants are more beautiful because they inspire me more ideas than living elephants." When they are alive, they are just beautiful elephants, and the remains of the dead represent all kinds of beauty. ”
Bacon apparently acquired a perverse pleasure in what some might call horror. "I once saw a serious car accident on a major road," he said in an interview: "The remains are full of broken glass on the car, and there are blood stains and all kinds of objects, which are actually very beautiful." ”
"Grey Giant" filmed in 1984/2008 Image source: Peter Beard/Estate of Peter Beard
It sounds like Bacon's description is very much JG Ballard's novel Car Accident. In "Dead Elephant Interviews," Bacon unpretentiously declares that car accidents and elephant remains are beautiful, and he captures the dark side of the decadent years of the early '70s.
Of course, Bacon wasn't as evil as it sounded. He explained to Beard why death can be beautiful, and talked about how it was involved in very early art theory. He mentions the Isenheim altarpiece, a masterpiece of German Renaissance art in which Christ's gray-green body is covered with festering sores that had begun to decay while he was still alive on the cross. Bacon said, "Isn't it in such a great terror that infinite vitality is shown?" The same is true of ancient Greek tragedies such as Agamemnon. ”
"Horror, Horror" Beard's Dead Elephant Series Image Credit: Peter Beard/Estate of Peter Beard
In other words, a dead elephant is on par with Greek tragedy. It was the wreckage of a giant creature, and it was like a living world in itself. We're not the only animals impressed by elephant bones: these animals themselves recognize the remains of their species. They would stop next to the remains and touch the bones with their bodies.
Bacon also studied medical illustrations, female nudes, and Adward Mubrich's famous movement studies in his creations, and deformed them—referencing them in new contexts, incorporating them into the nightmares of love and death in the orange room. Bacon and Beard's friendship was a friendship between two artists. In the 1970s, photography did not have the artistic status it has now. Bacon convinces Beard that he is making art. Encouraged by this recognition, Beard created a collage and photo collection of his natural photographs. Bacon helped Beard see the art of photography in a new way.
One of their common hobbies was Joseph Conrad's 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, which was inspired by the later film Apocalypse Now. In the book, the narrator Marlowe steers a boat on the River Congo, where he meets Kurtz, an idealist and imperialist who is in fact a dying shell of moral nothingness. For Bacon, beard's last of the "great" white hunters had a hint of Kurtz in them. One of the photos Beard sent to Bacon was not taken by him, but by someone else: Beard shaved his head and was arrested for attacking a poacher on a kenyan ranch. Bacon painted the photograph as a huge and spectacular head portrait, The 1976 Triptych, in which a man holds a baby elephant in his arms. Bacon told friends that the painting was directly influenced by Conrad's novels as well as Greek plays. It also had a man holding an elephant fetus on his knee.
So does Conrad's story also explain the black hollowness in Bacon's diptych portrait for Beard? After all, the two works were created in the same year. After seeing the deaths of countless elephants, beard's face seems to have been swallowed up by darkness, as in the phrase "Heart of Darkness" "Fear, fear devours everything." "No modern artist has been able to create a personal myth as richly connotative as Bacon, and his paintings are like the claustrophobic theater of Greek tragedy. Apart from his feelings for Beard, Bacon couldn't control his creative impulses—turning those impressive things into ruins, tragedies, and the remains of an elephant.
"Wildlife: Francis Bacon and Peter Beard Exhibition" was on display at Odowas, London, from 12 April to 16 July 2021. (Author: Jonathan Jones Compiled by Meng Meng Source: The Guardian Image source: See note)