The Artist and The Prime Minister

     The Artist and The Prime Minister
    


          He was a painter whose distorted figures and faces of people he painted gave new meaning to the words 'mindlessness or 'airhead'. She was a no-nonsense prime minister who gutted one social program after another. Yet in one way they were very similar.
    Britain's Margaret Thatcher was prime minister when she found out that the visual artist Francis Bacon was going to have an exhibition of his works in Moscow.
     The very politically conservative Thatcher was astounded. "Not that dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures," she exclaimed. Now most people who read about Bacon or Thatcher would assume that they have nothing in common, except that both of them lived in Britain and for a while at the same time. Yet one thing did unite them and that was their politics.
      Thatcher was the most conservative prime minister that Britain had since the 1930's. But Bacon was a right-winger too.
     Thatcher was the daughter of a shopkeeper and a conventional house wife. She went to Cambridge University and became a trained chemist there in the 1940's. She married a wealthy businessman Dennis Thatcher and they had two children. One of them, their son Mark got into the public eye when he was mentioned by the media who claimed he  tried to cut a business deal selling armaments.
    Thatcher's politics first showed up in the 1970's when she became a cabinet minister in Edward Heath's government in the 1970's. "We called her 'Thatcher the Milk Snatcher'', a British man told me. "she tried to cut the milk ration to schoolchildren."
    Once Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 she slashed one social program after another. She abolished progressive city councils including the London City Council.In the mid-1980's she took on the coal miners who had helped bring down Ted Heath's government a decade before.
    Using the police, propaganda and her total belief in her own rightness, she crushed the miners when they went out on strike. She also waged war on Argentina in the early 1980's, when the even more right wing government of Argentina's General Viola seized the British-owned Falkland or Malvinas Islands in the south Atlantic Ocean.
     The British took some heavy casualties. Yet in the end they won. This war cemented Thatcher's power. "There is no alternative," she said when people complained about her policies.
     Francis Bacon might have said the same. He was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in 1909. His father was a horse trainer and a brutal man. He had Francis whipped when he found out that Francis was gay. Francis Bacon may have been a descendant of the 17th century philosopher of the same name.
    Yet Francis despite or because of his father's brutality, was attracted to his father who gave him a taste for whipping when he grew up.
     In the 1930's Bacon went  to Paris and Berlin and saw some of Picasso's paintings. He went back to Britain  and designed furniture and painted pictures which were influenced by Picasso's works. Bacon lived most of the time in London. In 1945 his painting 'Thee Studies for Figures At the Base of a Crucifixion' showed three long necks and shrunken heads coming out of bags.
  This painting established Bacon as one of the upcoming talents. He went on to paint screaming popes, crucifixions, men making love to each other, and portraits of his friends and male lovers. The figures in his paintings usually had twisted limbs and distorted faces. By the 1960's, Bacon became Britain's most famous painter.
     "Bacon's world," writes art critic Lawrence Gowing, "was centred on the human head." Many of bacon's paintings said Gowing, "show the abjrct physical reality, the unutterable misery of the knob that terminates the human being."
   Bacon, says his friend and biographer Michael Poppiatt wanted to capture man's instinct. For Bacon, says Poppiatt zeroed in on man's animality.
     Bacon made oodles of money and spent lots of it in drinking, gambling and eating expensive meals in fine restaurants. He bought a number of houses for himself and his lovers. Yet in London he lived in a very small house where his chaotic studio was.
    Bacon's politics matched Thatcher's to a t. Though she would have loathed his frantic Bohemian life style. Bacon had no time for progressive policies like universal medicare, social housing and decent pensions.
    One of his neighbours at Bacon's country home was newspaper editor Peregrine Worsthorne. Sir Peregrine was surpried by Bacon's right wing views. Bacon was a reactionary, Worsthorne said who "was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War."
     Bacon rejected all official honours that came from the British government. Still he was a hard core right winger who believed that life was a dog-eat-dog struggle for existence.
    "Politics make strange bedfellows," the old saying goes. Margaret Thatcher and francis bacon never hung out together yet they would have found much to agree on. Bacon died in Spain in 1991 at the age of 81. Thatcher passed away in the 21st century.
    Both of them achieved success in their careers. Famous in their lifetimes they are both remembered to-day.