Expensive Garbage: Portrait of George Dyer Talking, by Francis Bacon (1966)

So, today we look at another example of the lunacy of the current art market.  On Valentine’s Day this year, the above painting, Portrait of George Dyer Talking, by “artist” Francis Bacon (1909-1992) sold at Christie’s, London, for £42,194,500.  The seller was reported to be a Mexican financier, David Martinez Guzman, who bought the picture from a private collector five years ago for $12 million. 

Two thoughts, before going a bit into the history of this truly revolting picture.  First, I think we have to create a whole new terminology when talking about the “value” of art.  One yardstick of value is the price these things fetch – rubbish sold by hucksters, sharks and con men to blinkered, unthinking, rich and over-entitled dunderheads.  If we want to say that the Portrait of George Dryer Talking is “valuable” because it fetched such a high price, fine.  However, by any aesthetic yardstick, the picture is a ridiculous and mendacious piece of calculated chicanery, without anything to recommend it to anyone with even the slightest sense of beauty or taste.  In short, perhaps we need a new word for “value” to apply towards art that uplifts, instructs, is beautiful, comments on the human condition, and brings the viewer closer to a sense of the sublime, and leave “value” for expensive garbage of the type created by Bacon and peddled by corrupt auctioneers.

Second, the prices fetched for works by people such as Bacon and Damien Hirst (born 1965) and Tracey Emin (born 1963) indicate only one thing: that more and more members of the 1% have too much money and too little taste.  The prices realized for these pictures have nothing whatsoever to do with intrinsic merit, and everything to do with a rapacious art market that turns art into a commodity, and plays into the insecurities of collectors by convincing them that junk is art.  Sad times, indeed.

Above is the picture, along with a photo of the original model, George Dyer.  The story goes something like this:  in 1963 Dyer, a petty criminal and sneak thief, broke into a home in South Kensington.  The place was filled with canvas and paint and half-finished male nudes.  A man – painter Bacon – comes into the room and says, “you’ve got two choices.  I can call the police, or you can come to bed with me.”  Dyer chooses the latter – in the long run, he would have been safer in prison.

Bacon, an abusive drunk, became Dyer’s lover.  Dyer became Bacon’s muse.  Bacon spends years abusing Dyer horribly.  The two stayed together until Dyer committed suicide on October 24, 1971, two days before Bacon’s career-making retrospective at the Grand Palais.  By that time, Dyer himself had become an alcoholic, and suffered long-term depression.  He killed himself with alcohol and barbiturates in a room at the Paris Hotel where he reconciled with Bacon following a breakup.  He was only 36. 

Let’s take a look at this picture – Dyer sits in a bare, purple room with a blood-red carpet lit by a single light bulb.  One eye seems to be missing, almost as if it were gouged out of the skull.  The mouth is covered by gauze or bandaging; at any rate, as an avenue for speech, sound or nourishment, it has been rendered void. 

Dyer’s arms are fused before him, much as if he were in a straightjacket, his hands rendered invisible.  One leg knees upward, as if seeking release, but both legs fuse into an indeterminate swatch of color.  His legs have been rendered as useless as his eye and his hands and his mouth.  Papers of some kind litter the floor, but Dyer looks away from them, in fact, he seems to be trying to get away from them.

What images come to mind?  Prisons?  Abu Ghraib?  Mad houses?  Thoughts of torture, torment and humiliation?  Whatever comes through in this picture, Bacon’s smothering, suffocating influence on Dyer is perfectly clear, as well as Dyer’s anguish.

That such an ugly, decadent and anti-human picture can be considered a modern “masterpiece” is a telling and shameful indictment of us as a culture and as human beings.  That someone would invest £42,194,500 in it – even if the buyer himself thought it was rubbish – is an unpardonable offense to man and nature; much like investing in Nazis in 1933 because they look like a good bet.

Whistler on Art

Originally I had planned to look at various posters selling the latest Hollywood wares, but after 10 minutes of this exercise I came away so despondent that I opted for something a little more interesting.  Look for our take on film advertising at a future date.

On my night table is Whistler on Art, a compilation of selected letters and writings edited by Nigel Thorp.  It makes for interesting reading.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903) is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of art – and his work and influence remain polarizing to this day.  Whistler’s work is perhaps best seen as the bridge between the Academic tradition and Modernism.  Though the Impressionists presented a radical break from established artistic tradition, Whistler was never really a member of their order, nor did he always approve of the excesses of the Impressionists.  Whistler’s influence was long-lasting and deeply felt by painters as diverse as Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent.

But more than his technique and coloration, perhaps his longest-lasting contribution was to the philosophy of art.  Whistler devoutly believed that a picture should always be removed from its narrative, and be seen purely as an arrangement of color, line and mood.  He thought painting should aspire to the quality of music – just as we know music is sad when we hear a funeral dirge without knowing that it is a funeral dirge, and pictures should inspire certain moods and impressions without the viewer knowing any ‘backstory.’  It is no surprise that he used musical terms for many of his pictures, including Nocturne, Arrangement and Symphony

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This, I believe, is all well and good in the latter years of the Victorian era when Enlightenment values and a Humanist tradition prevailed.  However it was Whistler’s views, I think, that opened the door to the excesses of Modernism and the eventual degradation of art.  Surely, the thinking goes, if a picture is any arrangement of color, then mere squares, dots or smears of color are art, as well?  Without Whistler there could be no Damien Hirst, or Tracey Emin.  As Whistler wrote, Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works “arrangements” and “harmonies.”

And that, I believe, was the beginning of the end.  I’m sure if Whistler – a conscientious and industrious if sometimes technique-challenged painter – could resurrect himself from eternity, he would be appalled at how his ideas have been applied to sharks in formaldehyde, urinals, cow effluvia and floor sweepings.  In fact, the great man may have had to rethink his entire philosophy.

Like many who believed in Art for Art’s Sake, what Whistler really argued was that beauty was paramount, more so than moralizing or instruction.  Beauty is at the core of Art for Art’s Sake.  Later painters and philosophers, however, have taken the Art of Art’s Sake credo to mean that art is anything we wish it to be.  It is not.

Reading Whistler on Art is an at-times heart breaking experience.  Letters from his earliest youth show a sweet boy, in love with art and devoted to his family.  Even through his mid-twenties, Whistler seems like a gentle-minded man.  But something happened to his temperament, and the once-youthful sweetness drowned in bile, bellicosity and bitterness.  He became an argumentative, blustery and sometimes clownish figure, always in some kind of contretemps with whatever ‘establishment’ he felt slighted him at that moment.  Perhaps Whistler’s greatest failing is that he never left his emotional adolescence.  It was a template that would be slavishly copied by many Twentieth Century artists.

Here are some pearls to be found in Whistler on Art:  Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an Arrangement in Grey and Black.  Now that is what it is.  To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?

The imitator is a poor kind of creature.  If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.  It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features; in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model.

This is now understood indifferently well – at least by dressmakers.  In every costume you see attention is paid to the key-note of colour which runs through the composition, as the chant of the Anabaptists through the Prophete, or the Huguenots’ hymn in the opera of that name.

Equally fine, though I disagree with the sentiment, is: The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter – perfect in its bud as in its bloom – with no reason to explain its presence – no mission to fulfill – a joy to the artist – a delusion to the philanthropist – a puzzle to the botanist – an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

Interested readers can find some truly champion Whistlers in the Frick Collection in New York, as well as the National Gallery in Washington, DC.