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Summary
Summary
It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes... Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos Bacon created around him Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.
Author Notes
Michael Peppiatt studied at the University of Cambridge, where he began his career as an art writer by writing exhibition reviews for the Observer . In an international career as a writer and curator, he has curated numerous exhibitions of Francis Bacon's and other artists' work and been published in Réalités magazine, Le Monde , the New York Times , the Financial Times , Art News and Art International , which he bought and relaunched in 1985. He is also the author of the definitive Bacon biography, the 1997 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma . In 2005 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Cambridge for his published work in the field of twentieth-century art. He is a member of the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2010 he joined the international board of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
In contrast to the bleakness of his art, this starry-eyed chronicle shows the painter could be genial, generous and waspishly funny In the summer of 1963, exactly 200 years after James Boswell first met Dr Johnson, an impressionable young man named Michael Peppiatt was introduced to Francis Bacon in a Soho pub, the French House. It was a momentous occasion, for one of them at least. Peppiatt, a 21-year-old art history student at Cambridge, revered the painter, then (at 53) in the full flush of his talent, and was tickled to be taken under his capacious wing. He found himself not merely part of Bacon's court on his noon-to-night jaunts around the fancy restaurants and louche drinking-dens of London but his chief confidant and protege. The photographer John Deakin, who had introduced them at "the French" that day, later remarked to Peppiatt: "It's incredible, but you've become a sort of Boswell to Francis...He talks to you about everything". His advice is to "get it all down", to be the painter's amanuensis and thus ensure his own place in the mythology of Bacon's "gilded gutter life". Peppiatt didn't need telling twice. In the years since Bacon's death in 1992 he has published five books about his hero, including a full-length biography, Anatomy of an Enigma, in 1996. One might have considered that a sufficiency, but here comes another, this one a memoir of their friendship over 30 years and a reckoning of Peppiatt's own development in his mentor's shadow. The Boswell-Johnson analogy, however, now looks rather presumptuous. For one thing, Boswell -- despite his buffoonery -- was a superb writer even before he began the biography that was his life's work (see his London Journal). For another, his subject was a brilliant talker whose wit and bons mots still crackle through the language. On neither count can Peppiatt or Bacon remotely compare. Francis Bacon in Your Blood is partly a record of its subject's table talk, which Peppiatt sets down as though recalling it verbatim. The strategy is a risky one. While Bacon was indisputably a great painter, his was not a great mind, and the deeper one reads into the book the more threadbare and repetitious its contents appear. His philosophy, if such it can be called, was one of devil-may-care nihilism, expressed in a few gnomic phrases: Life is ridiculous and futile. We come from nothing and return to nothing. Existence is a kind of charade. His "nervous system" is a "compost" from which his paintings emerge. These same pronoucements keep coming around, until they take on an incantatory air. But they are hardly profound. At one point he admits, "half the time I don't know what my painting's about". It's a telling moment: surely the greatness of Bacon's work lies locked in his subconscious, of which there can be no telling. Or as Henry James put it, "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Why should we expect a painter to be able to explain its mystery? And yet the bleakness of Bacon's paintings -- the screaming heads, the flayed and distorted flesh -- is strikingly at odds with his social exuberance. As a host, fortified by drink and company, he could be genial and generous and waspishly funny. Over oysters and Krug at Wheeler's, or caviar and grouse at Claridge's, Bacon carpes the diem and most of the noctem, with Peppiatt in grateful attendance. If the painter is vague about his own art, he is magisterial about others'. He admires Velazquez, Giacometti, Picasso; he is respectful of Lucian Freud (though he later declares that he has "the smallest cock in England"); the rest -- Jackson Pollock ("the old lace-maker"), Matisse ("squalid little forms"), Hockney ("there's nothing really there") -- he disdains. Abstract art he dismisses as "a free fancy about nothing". He says that he can't read novels -- "I find them so boring" -- yet goes on to profess his "deep" admiration of Proust and Joyce, apparently unaware that they were both novelists. If Peppiatt saw the contradiction he failed (or didn't dare) to point it out. Peppiatt makes a starry-eyed chronicler, as besotted with his patron's fine wine and grub as he is with his closeness to the throne. Yet one does wonder what he could have offered in return to Bacon. The thought occurs to Peppiatt, too, worried that he might just be a "person from Porlock", forever getting in the way of genius. Beyond an ability to speak French and supply company at a moment's notice, the young man has very little to recommend him -- as Sonia Orwell, another Bacon intimate, would gloweringly point out. But "Francis" seems content to have made him his pet, and besides, he's convinced that "all men are really homosexual", even if they don't realise it. Peppiatt proceeds on his straight way, girlfriends coming and going, though one is never in doubt that Bacon remains the most important figure in his life -- a substitute, moreover, for his own unsatisfactory father, a manic-depressive who bullied the family for years. The underlying tension between master and protege keeps the pages turning, though Peppiatt's prose seldom quickens the pace. He shows no great resistance to a cliche ("over the moon" and "rose-tinted spectacles" are waved through) and his dipping in and out of the present tense doesn't lend his narrative the freshness he intends. His social nervousness, which might otherwise have been touching, makes his writing plod the more: "When I'm doing one of my large parties I serve a spicy chicken curry with exotic condiments, much appreciated by my French friends, or for a sit-down dinner I often make a slowly braised boeuf bourguignon, to which in a slight departure from the classic recipe I add mushrooms and top with diced bacon, croutons and crisp-fried parsley -- the latter being something I know Francis likes especially, since we had it once in a restaurant on some grilled fish and he pronounced it 'one of the most delicious things you can possibly eat'." Monsieur Pooter lives -- and cooks too! Oddly, Peppiatt is at his most readable on Bacon's painting, the hardest trick of all, and the one area in which he allows his critical discernment the upper hand. Elsewhere his pride and his gratitude smudge the portrait -- he never really pays Bacon the tribute of suspecting him. Their relationship did not have a happy ending. The first cracks opened when Bacon vetoed Peppiatt's projected biography of him, despite his long service as bag-carrier and Boswelliser. The rift became wider when Peppiatt announced he was about to become a father for the first time. Bacon, pale with fury, reacts to the news as a personal "affront". Was this a heterosexual step too far? Did Bacon, now old and ill, fear the prospect of "losing" his one-time disciple? Perhaps he had become too attached to the idea of the tragic exit, like that of his troubled lover George Dyer, who killed himself in a Paris hotel bathroom on the eve of Bacon's 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais. (Peppiatt's reminiscence of Dyer, spouting broad cockney-sparrowisms, is pitifully inadequate). Long goodbyes didn't suit Francis Bacon, and one wonders if his shade would be any better pleased by his friend's ongoing parade of memorials. * To order Francis Bacon in Your Blood for [pound]20 (RRP [pound]25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Anthony Quinn.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As a frustrated art history student at Cambridge in 1963, Peppiatt, rife with hubris and rebelliousness, took over the floundering student magazine, intent on publishing an issue devoted to Modern British Art, about which he knew next to nothing. A tip led him to a London bar and the controversial, rapidly ascending painter, Francis Bacon. At 53, this artist of anguish and connoisseur of excess, who never denied his homosexuality, was only too happy to regale this handsome heterosexual naïf with tales of art and angst, thus launching a volatile, wine-soaked Boswell-Johnson relationship that lasted until Bacon's death 30 years later. A man of epic zest and tempestuous emotions, Bacon spent his days painting his torqued, screaming, chthonic figures, then embarked on marathon nights of drinking in places swanky and louche, mischievously throwing his money around and talking a blue streak. Somehow, through the alcoholic haze and punishing hangovers, Peppiatt kept avidly detailed and candid diaries, the foundation for his highly respected biography of his mentor and friend and the wellspring for this eye-widening memoir-biography hybrid. Every page is fresh, immediate, and flashing with glimpses into Bacon's complicated psyche and Peppiatt's own conundrums. While Peppiatt still struggles to understand the deep-seated masochism that covertly shaped Bacon's dramatic life and ferocious art, he celebrates with ever-replenished wonder the timeless artist's creativity, freedom and energy and total individuality. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist