John Berger Versus Francis Bacon;Who was Right Part Three

          Part Three of Berger Versus Bacon: Who Was Right? by Dave Jaffe


     In her book on Francis Bacon, author Kitty Hauser mentions John Berger comparing Francis Bacon's figures to those of Walt Disney's. I get the impression that Hauser didn't like this comparison.
   Yet one artist I knew in the 1980's liked that comparison a lot. "Berger is really different from most art critics," Roger Jansen, a tall bearded artist and baker said in effect. "His comparison amazed me and I thought it was so true."
   Now time moves on. Francis Bacon died in 1992. John Berger went on writing. Then in 2004, a show of Bacon's works was held in France where Berger has lived for many years. Berger went to see the show and he was impressed.
    In a story Berger wrote for the U.K.-based weekly 'The Guardian', Berger switched positions on Bacon and his work. Now he saw Bacon's paintings as a key to understanding the state of the world. Bacon, Berger concluded, saw the world as a brutal place. 'Pitiless' was the word Berger used. And Berger said Bacon got it right.
     Bacon's views according to Berger, matched the world outside the gallery's doors. The year before the show opened in France, NATO forces led by the United States, had invaded Iraq. They overthrew the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, but then went on to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis and penned up others in horrible prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
    In Abu Ghraib,  guards, who were mostly Americans, tortured, beat and water boarded their prisoners. Pictures show some guards really enjoying torturing their prisoners. All of this took place against a backdrop of what came to be known as '9/11'. On September 9, 2001 a group of men from Saudi Arabia and Morocco hijacked American planes and ploughed into the World Trade Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. All the hijackers died as did the passengers on the planes and over 2,000 people who were mostly Americans.
      "Those who are not with us," said then-U.S. president George W. Bush "are against us." The Cold War had ended ten years before. Now a new world wide war, ' The War On Terror' had begun. It's still going on in 2015.
    Berger surely saw this and realized that the idealism of his youth and middle age had been misplaced. The world was indeed a pitiless place. So put John Berger in the camp of disappointed idealists, as Kitty Hauser pointed out in her book on Bacon. Put me there too.
     So though Bacon's view of life is probably right maybe John Berger got it right too - at least once. In the late 1960's, Berger like myself and millions of others thought that progressive forces would win many victories and sweep the world. Yet by 1972, the year Berger first wrote about Bacon, he and others knew that the dreams of the 1960's had been a mirage. Yet Berger remained an idealist. Still, now a man in his eighties, Berger could no longer deny that the world was indeed pitiless.
    "Game, set and match," tennis announcers say at court side when a tennis game is won by one contestant or another.So game set, and match to Francis Bacon who stands out as one of the great figurative painters of the 20th century. Yet I still wish he had been wrong in his view of human beings.