Get out

Julian Bell

• Looking back at Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
  Thames and Hudson, 272 pp, £29.95, June 2000, ISBN 0 500 01994 0

Somewhere in London, two heads would be nodding together: one tall like the boulder topping a cairn, the other broadened like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Two lordly sensibilities, the heterosexual critic and the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself.’ I had no real idea what version of history had brought Bacon to that ‘now’. In fact, I probably understood his responses to Sylvester no better than a dog follows human conversation. It was simply the authoritative urgency that counted: distraction or not, painting stood in some crucial relation to humanity, and somehow it must be pursued.