"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
I must admit, I really do feel ridiculously pleased with myself whenever I notice a possible connection like this…
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
ABOVE: Francis Campbell Bolleau Cadell, Interior: The Orange Blind (c.1927), oil on canvas, 86.5 x 112 cm. Via TRANSISTORADIO.
ABOVE: Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, March 1991 (1991), oil and pastel on canvas, 147.5 x 198 cm. Collection of National Galleries of Scotland, UK. Via TRANSISTORADIO.
ABOVE: Francis Bacon, Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), oil on canvas, 58-1/16 x 77-15/16 inches. Collection of Berlin State Museums.
Want a Bacon at your bus stop? Well not long to wait now…
From 8 August Art Everywhere will greet you good morning on your way to work, bump into you on the way home from the pub and make waiting for a car parking space at the supermarket a more enlightening experience.
Here’s what Bacon’s Head VI would look like if it makes the final list. Remember, its not too late to get involved:
And yesterday I tweeted the following response, which has been ignored by… uhm, well… everyone… so far as I can tell:
Frankly, I am beginning to wonder if anyone on Twitter ever reads any tweets that are not directed @them. I am following 83 feeds at the moment, and making the effort to read/skim everyone’s tweets, and it’s all I can do to keep up. For anyone who follows a couple of hundred (or more), it must be impossible! Or a full-time job…
But then again, maybe they just didn’t get the joke/reference?
How about you? Do you get it?
Anyone?
Keywords: Ragged Claws Network @RaggedClawsNet: “Francis Bacon’s Head VI makes the bus stop look like a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”
How many times has a painting by Francis Bacon appeared on the cover of a book that is not about the life and/or art of Francis Bacon? I’m no expert, but I can only think of one instance — you are welcome to post a comment if you know of more! — and here it is, scanned from my personal library, along with a small, low-quality JPEG of Bacon’s original painting, Man in Blue V:
Now, although Bacon’s painting itself is simply composed and nearly monochromatic in colour, the contrasty, cropped, colour-reduced version on display on the cover of Darkness at Noon reads to me as little more than a shadow of The Man.
Francis Bacon was born 28 October 1909 and died on this day, 28 April, back in 1992. In other words, today is the twenty-first anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon.
BONUS IMAGE:
A reader delurked today to bring to my attention another book cover with art by Bacon: Hadrianus VII by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), with the Fr. being short for “Frederick”. Here’s what it looks like:
The following ebay wins are so recent, I haven’t even received the items yet:
As I intend to explain in slightly more detail in a later post, it’s not the oddly composed cover of Archie’s Pal Jughead #103 that caused me to buy it — nose meet pocket; pocket, nose — but the interior art. Can you guess why?
Yesterday at Sotheby’s, Francis Bacon’s masterful Triptych 1976 (oil and pastel on canvas in three parts, each 78 x 58 in., 198 x 147.5 cm., 1976) sold for US$86 million at a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art, thereby setting a record for postwar art and contributing mightily to a record-setting total of $362 million in sales (including commission) for the event.
Ragged Claws Network 