John Berger Versus Francis Bacon: Who Was Right? Part One by Dave Jaffe

               Berger Versus Bacon by Dave Jaffe


     In 1972 in the pages of a British weekly, a great writer discussed the paintings of a famous British visual artist.
     The writer was John Berger, then in his mid-forties. Berger had been a visual artist and then had carved out a career as a novelist, screen writer and art critic. The visual artist was Francis Bacon then in his sixties.
     The Irish-born Bacon painted human figures, which were often distorted anguished creatures placed in usually airtight rooms. The figures were nearly always men. Bacon's paintings had made him rich and famous.
      According to author Kitty Hauser who wrote a book on Bacon, Berger didn't like Bacon's work because his paintings didn't condemn the suffering in his work. Berger at the time was a Marxist and he surely wouldn't have agreed with Bacon's views on life.
     Bacon had once said about life, "It's all so meaningless."  When he wasn't painting,the openly gay Bacon spent his time in London's inner city. Here he gambled, had sex with men, drank and then went to more upscale places where he hobnobbed with the rich and the famous.
    Bacon not only saw life as meaningless. He had little time for idealists like John Berger. For Bacon life was a brutal struggle for existence and anyone who tried to improve people's lives or fought for social justice were just wasting their time.
      Berger did praise the power in Bacon's work. Yet he obviously didn't agree with Bacon's views on life as Bacon had set them out in long interviews with the art critic David Sylvester. "The worst that has happened for Bacon," Berger wrote, "has nothing to do with the blood, the stains and the viscera " in his work. "The worst is that man has come to be seen as mindless."
    Berger compared Bacon's works with those of Walt Disney's. Disney's cartoons, says Berger, turn mindless, violent alienated behaviour into comedy. So people come to accept this sort of behaviour. "What Disney's creatures lack," writes Berger, "is mind." And Bacon's creatures like Disney's are also  mindless.
                 (End of Part One)