Francis Bacon Artist Quotes

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.

If you really love life you're walking in the shadow of death all the time...Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life the more one is obsesses with death. I'm greedy for life and I'm greedy as an artist. Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson

Gilbert and George said: “But don’t you see? That’s how Bacon is. He is absolutely right to behave as he wants.” Not as he wants. As he has to behave. An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to “cosmic currents.” He has to behave as he does. If he has “the courage to be an artist,” he is committed to behave as the mood possesses him. “That’s the man who booed Princess Margaret!” —the peasantry shrink back from his sulfurous glow.

In October, Louise showed several new paintings at the Panoras Gallery on Fifty-Sixth Street. During this period, she painted nudes, interiors, several versions of MacDuff, many portraits, at least two paintings set in public buses, and other New York street-life subjects. Her stylized figures were often inspired by random encounters and eavesdropping. Observing underdogs and outsiders in action, she was drawn to faces and to cityscapes and to a style that incorporated storytelling and allegory. Louise’s new work was influenced by the scene painting of the Works Progress Administration and Mexican muralists; by Käthe Kollwitz and German expressionists like Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele; by Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, and other portraitists—and, to an increasing extent, by medieval tapestries and frescoes by Bolognese Renaissance artists such as Pellegrino Tibaldi. Louise kept working to reveal the lives behind the faces she portrayed—their backstory—and began to introduce some southern imagery from her own memories. She was fascinated by the story beneath the surface and whatever metaphysical qualities she could draw from the depths of her subject.

I am sad that I did not see any of this myself. By the time I had received the communication on television and in my morning paper, felt the tugging pull toward Manhattan, and made my preparations to migrate, I learned that the army ants had all died. The Art Form simply disintegrated, all at once, like one of those exploding, vanishing faces in paintings by the British artist Francis Bacon There was no explanation, beyond the rumored, unproved possibility of cold drafts in the gallery over the weekend. Monday morning they were sluggish, moving with less precision, dully. Then, the death began, affecting first one part and then another, and within a day all 2 million were dead, swept away into large plastic bags and put outside for the engulfment and digestion by the sanitation truck. It is a melancholy parable. I am unsure of the meaning, but I do think it has something to do with all that plastic- that, and the distance from earth. It is a long, long way from the earth of a Central American jungle to the ground floor of a gallery, especially when you consider that Manhattan itself is suspended on a kind of concrete platform, propped up by a meshwork of wires, pipes, and water mains. But I think it was chiefly the plastic, which seems to me the most unearthly of all man's creations so far. I do not believe you can suspend army ants away from the earth, on plastic, for any length of time. They will lose touch, run out of energy, and die for lack of current.

This Venus is also an abstraction. It is clearly a human body, but a heavily distorted one, with features that are well beyond realism. The breasts are colossal, and the head is tiny. She has a huge waist, and engorged labia. These enhanced sexual characteristics are also seen in some of the other Palaeolithic Venus figurines, which has led to speculation that these were fertility charms, or even goddesses of fertility. Some people have suggested that they might be pornography. While there is no shortage of art by men depicting sexualised women, we cannot know the motivation of the Venus sculptor. The similarities between the few Venus figurines that remain do suggest a sexual dimension to their existence, and imagining that they are fertility amulets is no more or less speculative than considering that they are the fantasy of a Palaeolithic artist. We’re not sure why the heads are often small: it might be to do with perspective, that you can’t actually see your own head, so relatively from one’s own vision it is small, and looking down, breasts may look disproportionally larger; though that doesn’t account for the fact that the artist could’ve seen the heads and bodies of other people. Maybe it was an artistic choice. If in one million years’ time, you discovered a Francis Bacon portrait or the Bayeux tapestry isolated out of any context, you might have questions about what was on the minds of those artists. We will never know what the Palaeolithic sculptors were thinking. What we do know is that their minds were not different to our own.

Perhaps there is a moral here which should not go unobserved, and which makes the artist’s problem greater. It also extends to the scientist, particularly as in the case of Darwin or Freud, or, in earlier centuries, such men as Giordano Bruno or Francis Bacon. “Humanity is not, as was once thought,” says John Dewey, “the end for which all things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is the center of interest and the measure of importance.