The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon

This account of the wild life of the celebrated English painter covers his childhood in Dublin; his years of gambling, drinking, and petty thievery; and the enormous genius expressed in his art

Farson, an art critic and author of a biography of his great-uncle Bram Stoker, The Man Who Wrote Dracula , draws on his 40-year friendship with Bacon to write this gossipy, loosely constructed and ultimately self-indulgent biography of the British painter who died in 1992 at the age of 82. The Bacon who emerges here is a stereotype of the artist as a defiant libertine whose revels flout the decorum of a hypocritical society. Farson discusses at length Bacon's appetites--for wine, for food and for lovers chosen from London's rough trade, including the illiterate, charismatic George Dyer, who was Bacon's frequent model and muse. Most of the friends and hangers-on that clutter Farson's book are too haphazardly sketched to reveal much about Bacon himself; the torrent of anecdotes defies attempts to link Bacon's private life to the screaming popes, truncated torsos and writhing beasts of his corrosive art. Bacon's need, as he put it, to "reinvent the language of paint," remains unilluminated. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

``Gilded gutter life'' means rough but rich trade among gays, and Farson thus identifies the sex life of the English painter Francis Bacon (1909-92) with his work--which many think of with sheer horror. Farson (The Man Who Wrote Dracula, 1976; the fictional Swansdowne, 1987, etc.) was friends with Bacon for 40 years, and he intends a memoir here, not a biography, although the latter is charcoaled in amid the gay barhopping. Born in Dublin around the corner from Oscar Wilde's birthplace, Bacon was so wildly and ingeniously wise that his life seems secondary to his table talk, as captured here and in David Sylvestre's 1975 Interviews. Though eventually very wealthy, Bacon dismissed material possessions, lived in reclusive squalor, thought posterity was rubbish, and--to the outsider--seemed to project some ghastly self-hatred upon the monstrously distorted humans in his canvases. Bacon could paint as literally as anyone, was bored by mere likeness, and set out to distort reality into reality. He'd paint from photos rather than hurt the feelings of subjects who sat for him, then saw themselves ``damaged'' by his distortions. Says Farson: ``He...was totally amoral. He had little time for weakness in others and no patience with human foibles or small vanities. He was easily bored.... Even if he had not become a painter his personality was so original that he would have made an impression on his time.'' When his father found him dressing up in his mother's underwear at 15, he was shipped off to London to live alone on three pounds a week. Completely irreligious, he said he painted death as the shadow of life because he loved life so greatly. A physical masochist, a mental sadist, he offered as his favorite saying: ``We are meat. Cheerio!'' Like crawling in a tub of dead fish--but a great read. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The painter Francis Bacon's disturbing evocations of the human form have come to be regarded as some of the central artworks of the post-World War II world. Figurative in an era of abstraction, his work emphasized traditional painterly qualities in a time of artistic revolution. Always private, Bacon led a life about which little has been known. Farson, long Bacon's friend, fills this knowledge gap in a first-person recollection of Bacon's personality and milieu. He recounts Bacon's daily routines, which often involved highly alcoholic socializing in pubs and restaurants in London's Soho district. He details Bacon's various homosexual relationships and his taste for rough trade. His rendering of Bacon is vivid enough to give us a warts-and-all sense of a man given to extremes and to mercurial shifts in temperament but who was chiefly obsessed with his art. Further, Farson convinces us of Bacon's genius while vividly presenting artistic and gay life in bohemian London and also--a happy bonus courtesy of Bacon's travels--a deliciously vibrant portrait of Tangiers in the late 1950s, when it hosted the likes of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. John Shreffler

In this very personal memoir, journalist Farson, a longtime friend of the artist, portrays Bacon as a man who spent much of his 83 years among the outcasts of society, exploring the darker sides of London until his death in 1992. Farson's straightforward prose covers the general outline of the artist's life but is weak on those times when the author was out of the picture. Though November 1993 saw the publication of another portrait, Andrew Sinclair's Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (Crown), a definitive Bacon biography covering all aspects of the artist's life and work remains to be written. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries as an interesting glimpse into an extraordinary life.-- Martin R. Kalfatovic, Natl. Museum of American Art/Natl. Portrait Gallery Lib., Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.