Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt in David Hockney’s studio in Paris in 1975. Courtesy of Michael Peppiatt.
An Interview with Michael Peppiatt – the artist’s biographer, curator, and friend
Michael Peppiatt began his career in 1964 while still a student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge: on the advice of a friend, he journeyed to London’s Soho – once a haven for daring creatives – to seek out interviewees for the magazine Cambridge Opinion. It was here that he first met Francis Bacon, and a friendship was struck that saw Michael become the artist’s confidante and commentator for nearly thirty years. Ironically, my introduction to Michael was on very similar terms; while a student myself at Trinity Hall, I interviewed him at the helm of a literary society he had once himself presided over. Given our mutual interest in modernism, I have since enjoyed many tantalising conversations with Michael about the great artists of the twentieth century, one of which I record here to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Francis Bacon: Human Presence.
MRB: Having been a close acquaintance of Francis Bacon for several decades, what of his personality do you see in his paintings?
MP: There’s something quite touchingly factual about his portraits, particularly his late self-portraits. They show him in desert boots, and that’s what he wore at a certain point; or cashmere polo neck sweaters, when he wasn’t using them to press paint to get a certain ribbed quality on the canvas. So they’re a sort of factual diary, in a way, and if you know what was going on at the time, with the big events in his life, and the tragic events in his life, like the death of his boyfriend George Dyer, there’s a whole series where you see him really coming to terms with the suicide, and with the guilt that was intensified in him. They’re like a diary.
MRB: So, was he being true to himself in his art?
MP: The art always came first. There wasn’t much that was intermediary between him, and his art. Bacon was not self-advertising or self-fashioning; his art is very much a struggle with paint, a struggle with himself, and a struggle with life. He might have fashioned his own image in his general way of life and in his interviews, but I think through his art he was leaving a trace of himself as he was. I think Bacon was quite clever at self-promotion, but when he was painting, he was in front of a mirror.
MRB: Breaking the auction record at the time, Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie’s New York in 2013 for a staggering $142.4 million – do you think Bacon ever foresaw the value his works would accrue?
MP: He liked having money to splash around. He always asked for healthy sale prices for his works when he had a gallery show. He never, as it were, sold himself cheap. I think he was conscious of what his works were making on the market. His dealers tended to give him as little as possible. He knew that a canonisation of the art market was a very, very good thing to have. He talked, even then, about these incredible prices. He probably would have said, ‘yes, but Jackson Pollock made X’, or ‘Andy Warhol sold a painting for Y’, always looking at what the competition was doing.
MRB: In your most recent book, Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words, you recall that Bacon once divulged his hope that ‘one day [he’d] knock [himself] backward with the impact of what [he’d] done’ – was this hope ever realised?
MP: I think no. He was always talking about the one image, as he put it, that would cancel all the others, because it would be more powerful and more complete than anything else he’d done. He was hoping he would eventually do an image that was so strong that it would surpass everything he’d done previously. And I suppose you could say at times he did. His work is uneven like that. There are stronger and weaker Bacons, and there are better and worse periods. So, I think it was his way of keeping going. He always wanted to go further and do something more mesmerising than he’d ever done before.
MRB: You’ve curated several landmark Bacon retrospectives, notably at the Musée Maillol in 2004, and the Royal Academy in 2021 – how do you believe public opinion of his work to have changed since his passing?
MP: Well, he’s become a lot more famous. I met him in ‘63 when he had a burgeoning kind of fame, but nothing like the kind of stature he has gained in the sixty years since. I met him the year after his first Tate retrospective, and of course that put him on the map, but there were still people, as there are today, who absolutely loathed his art. I remember being at the Pompidou together, and it happened there was a fairly recent picture of his being shown of a stumpy figure with prominent genitals; while I was waiting for him, I saw a woman looking at the picture who literally put her hands over her eyes, and when I relayed this to Bacon he said, ‘oh good’!
There were a lot of those quite amusing rejoinders – once I cheekily reminded him that he was being called the greatest living painter, to which he replied, ‘well, there’s not much competition’.
Michael Peppiatt is an art historian, curator, and author. Across an international career spent in London, Paris, and New York, Peppiatt has written regularly for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News, and Art International magazine, which he re-launched as its new publisher and editor from Paris in 1985. He is the author of over twenty books including the definitive Bacon biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised edition 2008). Peppiatt has curated numerous exhibitions worldwide and is a member of both the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature.
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