The majestic new biography of Francis Bacon by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan tells us more about Bacon and his circle than anything that has come before. It also serves to complicate what had become a slightly reductive take on this master of 20th century art whom almost every artist I've written about has looked towards both for formal qualities and the autobiographical way in which he excavated for subject matter.

In the early 1960's, Bacon's practice evolved to a more shallow picture plane and more intense color. This painting, Reclining Woman from 1961 is of Henrietta Moraes (see also Michael Andrews rendering of her in a blue dress in my post on his group painting of the denizens of the Colony from a few days ago) who Bacon painted many times from photographs he commissioned from John Deakin. (He of the group photo) Of course, she also had an affair with Lucian Freud who also famously painted her wrapped in a blanket. As I mentioned, Bacon did not like being lumped in with any 'school' but it's clear that they all found inspiration from those close to them.

We don't think of Bacon painting women in general, but Moraes, a free spirited and mercurial intimate, was a frequent sitter. The biography makes plain that in and amongst the more celebrated (and sometimes violent) relations with his lovers, Bacon had good female friends and supporters throughout his life. This image is a precursor to his 1962 triptych of the Crucifixion, a format that was to become something of a regular.

Later Moraes ending up sharing an apartment with Marianne Faithfull. London can sometimes seem a very small town. Her life became somewhat chaotic, and she had to go into rehab etc, but for a time she was the muse par excellence of this stellar London group.

I'm not sure where this painting is now--at the time of the London Calling show it was still part of the Estate.

This week’s posts will revisit the School of London, especially as it was so brilliantly curated in the exhibition at the Tate and Getty, London Calling, in 2016. Brexit made it all the more powerful.

For those of you who missed this--another group of post war artist outliers like the Bay Area Figuratives who didn't necessarily liked being lumped together with each other qua movement--it focused on six prominent painters whose work is characterized by the central role granted to the human figure. These, as partially pictured here, were Lucian Freud (2nd from left), Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews as well as R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, not pictured.

Some were close friends, others admirers, and often were each others subjects. The war had affected Britain in a profound way, and these artists' work reflected the turmoil and re examination of what life meant after all. Mirrored by a film movement that also called into question everything that had come before, it gave me pause: in a way we are in such a moment now, a war of another kind which will inevitably give rise to a movement that characterizes what it all meant. (Black figurative art could be that movement. Isn't it interesting that we go back to the figure so ardently after a cataclysm as if to say this, in the end, is what really matters?)

Like the Bay Area artists, color and the quality of paint and impasto became very important (Kossoff). For Bacon, it was the flatness crossing over from abstraction. Freud broke down his subjects as if he were Vermeer. Some painted from life; others from photographs.

The recent Bacon and Freud biographies shed new light. But as a primer the Tate/Getty show revealed these artists also had been instrumental in refocusing artistic energies "on giving visual representation to the physical and emotional conditions that they inhabited."

Photo: John Deakin