Bacon / Giacometti

FROM THE BOOK

Two of the twentieth century’s most outstanding artists meet: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Both have influenced art and intellectual discourse in the postwar period. They are individualists, each evolving his own deeply personal style. The Englishman Bacon is a self-taught painter who spent nearly his entire life in London. The Swiss-born Giacometti is a sculptor, painter, and draftsman from a family of artists in the Bregaglia Valley, near the Swiss-Italian border. Despite their differences, which highlight the uniqueness of their respective achievements, Bacon and Giacometti are closely related artistic personalities, with striking similarities in their lives and work. Bacon, born in 1909, reportedly said of Giacometti, eight years his senior: “This is the man who has influenced me more than anyone.”

The two men shared a fascination with the traditions of the artistic past, to which they both felt indebted. Bacon’s main interest was European painting, from the Old Masters, such as Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt van Rijn, to the pioneers of modernism, including Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. Giacometti, too, engaged with contemporary art but was equally intrigued by non-European cultures and by the art of antiquity, particularly that of ancient Egypt. In their positive relationship to tradition, both artists showed anti-modernist leanings, which also informed their lifelong adherence to the human figure and to working from models and photographs.

Both artists consciously elected not to pursue the path of abstraction, which otherwise dominated art after 1945. It was artists such as Bacon and Giacometti, marked by the crisis of humanity following two world wars, who convincingly addressed the turmoil that surrounded them, by seeking in their work to uncover the essence of the human. The modern individual and his or her complex relationships with other individuals and groups, the manifold forms of existential distress and suffering, loneliness and pain, sexuality and violence, life and death: these are some of the crucial themes to which both Giacometti and Bacon devoted rigorous attention. Their quest for truth and beauty in art was accompanied by self-doubt and nagging obsessions, stemming from a persistent fear of failure.

Both artists lived a life of extremes. They worked in small, cramped studios, cluttered to the point of chaos, that served as a source of inspiration and creativity. They combined intensive work with an excessive lifestyle. Giacometti was a chain smoker, and Bacon a gambling addict. They both drank abundantly and had sexual preferences that placed them outside social norms. Giacometti had a known penchant for prostitutes and spent long nights in their company. Bacon lived a relatively open gay life at a time, before 1967, when homosexuality was still criminalized under British law. Both artists had connections with the demimonde, as well as with the art world and patrons from the upper echelons of society. In particular, they were on close terms with other artists and members of the intellectual vanguard in their respective cities. Each achieved fame in his own lifetime and was internationally revered. Both artists could be rough in manner and scathing in their judgments, but exceptionally charming on a personal level, as contemporaries recalled.