Viva Lewes Issue #150 March 2019

COLUMN
David Jarman
View from the front row
In Figure Study II, Joe Hill, the new head of
Towner in Eastbourne, curates a personal
response to the gallery’s permanent collection.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the
name of a Francis Bacon painting, dating from
1946 and related to Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion, which was first
exhibited the year before. Bacon considered
Three Studies to be his first real work. Most
of what he had painted before, he destroyed.
Figure Study II was presented by The
Contemporary Arts Society to the museum in
Batley, Joe Hill’s hometown in West Yorkshire.
Apparently, it hasn’t been on display in Batley
in Mr Hill’s lifetime. But I wonder what the
town’s residents, no doubt exercising their
traditional, rather tiresome, insistence on
Yorkshire plain speaking, made of the Bacon
when it was on show.
I remember visiting the Whitechapel Art
Gallery in 2010. One room told the story
of a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow in
1988. One of the display cabinets included
examples of visitors’ responses to the works
on show. Some were puzzled. Ivanov, aged
30, a technologist, wrote: ‘To my very sincere
surprise I wasn’t pleased with the paintings
by Francis Bacon. It is very hard to explain.’
Stepanov, a physician, provided a professional
perspective: ‘According to the photographs,
the artist drinks a lot.’ (Actually, Stepanov may
have been on to something here. Interviewed
by a characteristically out-of-his-depth Melvyn
Bragg, Bacon said that The Three Studies
triptych was completed in a fortnight when “I
was in a bad mood of drinking. I sometimes
hardly knew what I was doing.”) Another
visitor, name and profession illegible, reflected,
more in sorrow than in anger, that: ‘It’s hard
to believe that Francis Bacon and William
Shakespeare are of the same nationality. The
exhibition reminds me that madness is a real
phenomenon.’
Ahead of the show, Bacon wrote: ‘It is a great
honour to be invited to have an exhibition of
paintings in Moscow. When I was young, I feel
I was very much helped towards painting after
I saw Eisenstein’s films Strike and Potemkin.’
It’s well known that the catalyst for Bacon’s
trademark screaming heads, including Figure
Study II, was the face of the screaming nurse on
the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin.
I saw the film again last year. Few trips to the
Depot, while all very enjoyable, are entirely
glitch-free. This time the film jammed after
eleven minutes. All attempts to rectify the
situation proved unavailing. So we had to
reconvene a week later. This time it all went
OK. I always sit in the front row at the cinema,
partly, but only partly, to read the subtitles.
At a tea date recently, someone told me that
Wittgenstein also insisted on sitting in the
front row. Perhaps the only thing that we have
in common. But Wittgenstein
wouldn’t have been
worrying about
subtitles and he
wouldn’t have
been watching
Battleship
Potemkin: he
only went
to American
films – Fred
Astaire and
Ginger Rogers
were particular
favourites.
Illustration by Charlotte Gann
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