Category: Art

Bacon’s self-portraits. He does them not because he considers himself of any particular interest, but because he’s the only model around. He paints, of course, not from life, but from photos – strips of them, often, from passport photo machines. Strips of them you’ll sometimes find reproduced in editons of his artworks, and you can recognise them. There’s George Dyer. Isabelle Rawthorne. And Bacon himself, with his wounded eye …

Bacon says he needs to feel the aura of a person, their animal presence. Their movements. That’s what he’s looking for in his portraits. And for his own gestures, too – to discover his own singularity just as he says he can find it in the way someone walks. You like to fold your arm when you relax just so. You chew your teeshirt like that when no one’s looking.

And yet Bacon’s unsentimental; he drops the photos on the floor on his studio. They get scuffed up, paint-splashed. As though they were the record of the raw material his painting needs. As though it was painting that wanted the auras of his friends and not him. Or that it wanted them through his wants, through his loves. That he loved George Dyer because he would paint him. And that he stayed with him, although he was troublesome, because he knew in advance a triptych would be made that depicted his suicide. And isn’t that what the self-portraits show? Not Bacon, but Bacon become image, Bacon as what paint looked for to splash itself, to thicken itself …

But note it is not narration that Bacon seeks by way of his paintings, but its opposite. Dyer’s suicide mattered because it could be broken from itself, unnarrated, not cancelling life, but summoning it to full intensity. Sensation, as Valery said, without the boredom of its conveyance.

Indecency. A big book of Balthus’s paintings, and not because of his adolescent girls. It is the size of the book that is indecent, its imposingness. As though all such books should be small, cheap, and their reproductions should be poor, not good.

What happens to the reproductions of Da Vinci’s paintings in Tarkovsky’s films? They are rain-splashed, rain-mottled. They threaten to vanish into the greeny-blue of the landscape, but not quite. The image survives despite near-ruin: the Lady in Ermine, say; the Madonna cartoon. Survives, but age-marked as though they’d fallen out of the Museum that contained them like Dorian Gray’s painting, and aged all at once.

And so with Balthus’s paintings, so splendidly present in this volume. Their splendour gives them too much immortality, and nothing of what the Japanese call sabi, the patina of age, that Munch tried to lend his paintings by leaving them out in the rain.

It is grey, and it stands against a background of grey. It is made of a cool kind of stone, and turned slightly towards me. From where is it lit? I am not sure; its surface glows as though the light source was above and to the right. Is it real light? The light of a northern sky, like that at the end of The New World? A bluey-white? I am not sure. Certainly the stone seems to belong to the north, as I do. It seems to swell towards me, particularly where there is traced the image of a hand. A hand: splayed and open. A favourite image. As if to say: I have no grip, I can find no purchase. Or: my hand is for nothing; it is just a hand.

The sculpture (the image above) is called Caress. What kind of hand caresses that holds nothing, that reaches for nothing? Perhaps not to reach is also to caress. The hand rests in the air. It holds – nothing. It caresses – nothing. And now the shape of the stone, its form. Rounded and then upwards to two rectangular dips and then a curved ridge. Mysterious object! I do not know why I am drawn to you. From where did you arrive – from what dream? Is it that you are a dream that has not yet reached me? Or the image of dreams to come – all of them, as they will reach me from a future as enigmatic as your presence?

Sculpture, prophet, watch over what is written here. I fancy that your double is buried in my head, that my dreams come from cold stone. Or is it that you are somehow my gravestone, placekeeper of my dead body, from which a spirit that writes has been disturbed?