拍品专文
This work is featured in the film Francis Bacon Paintings 1944-62, by the Arts Council of Great Britain and Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1962-63.
By the end of the 1950's Francis Bacon's obsessive need to reinvent Velasquez and Van Gogh in his own distinctive style had begun to wane. Leaving behind the existentialist angst of the screaming Popes, Bacon now found amongst his close circle of friends subjects for a more vital and intimate portraiture. This new cast of characters destined for hideous distortion were largely fellow artists and seedy barflies from London's demi-monde, who drank away their afternoons together in the decadent confines of the Soho drinking club, the Colony Room. "If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them," Bacon said of the resultant paintings.
It is not surprising that Bacon should choose the late Muriel Belcher as one of the first subjects for these new portraits. She was after all the proprietress of the Colony Room, who back in 1949 had offered Bacon a weekly salary of free drinks in exchange for bringing along well-healed punters to her club. "Muriel was one of the women Francis loved," writes fellow Colony member Daniel Farson. "They included his nanny and Isabel Rawsthorne; but though he admired Isabel he was closer to Muriel."
Scandalous, foul-mouthed with a dagger-sharp wit that could slice a victim to the bone of his insecurities, Muriel Belcher was nonetheless the original tart with a golden heart. Perched on her barstool like a sphinx, her lank black hair combed back severely, her large nostrils flared and chin tilted upwards, for over thirty years she grandly presided over a dominion that was little more than a dingy smoke-filled room. "Members only!" was her shrill and disdainful battle-cry in the face of any unfortunate trespassers.
The poet Paul Potts summed up Belcher's special qualities. "I suppose what makes her so difficult to describe is her originality, a kind of non-ecclesiastical cardinal or perhaps a delinquent saint. She is a natural procurer whether it be the bacon for the eggs or a date for a girl-friend. The relatively small room which is her domain and where she is absolute sovereign must be one of the unique rooms anywhere. It is not like other clubs at all, more like a cocktail party... Once you're in you're in.... But if she does not like you - you've had it." (Daniel Farson, The Guilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, p. 55).
Above all Muriel Belcher was a great hostess who was able to fuse under one shabby roof the diverse elements of London society, bringing together titled bohemians, government ministers, bankers, poets and drunks. In the 1950's, moreover, the Colony Room was home to a group of young avant-garde artists who, along with Francis Bacon, included such burgeoning talents as Lucian Freud, John Minton, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach. They were later to become internationally renowned as the School of London, but in the early years they were known as "Muriel's Boys" or "The Colony Room Mob".
Francis Bacon first painted Muriel Belcher in 1959, portraying her in violently animated profile, thrusting neck and tornado-twisted flesh against the calm of a saturated green backdrop.
In 1960 he returned again to the subject of Muriel Belcher with the portrait simply entitled Head of Woman. But whereas the earlier picture represented the notoriously rude and aggressive public face of Belcher, in this new and larger version Bacon explored a more private and lonely aspect of his friend. She is depicted hunched and bruised, her sorrowful features blurred as though the weight of her emotions has drawn heavy on her countenance. "Outside the club she looked like a night-animal caught in the glare of daylight as it scurried over the asphalt," Daniel Farson once observed. He might as well have been describing Bacon's portrait.
This overwhelming aura of melancholy and world weariness, whose roots date back to The Scream of Edvard Munch and which was so powerfully evoked by Bacon in his series of Popes, is further magnified in Head of Woman by the menacing void of the background. The glaring white of Muriel's cumbersome coat isolates her against the inky blackness, while high above her head a rectangle of green seals her seclusion, just as the schematic cages of Bacon's Popes acted as isolation chambers for the demented.
"Only Francis Bacon's marvellous portraits of Muriel capture that indomitable spirit with such unsentimental respect and love," stated Colony Room member George Melly. Asked why he painted Belcher so often, Bacon himself answered, "She's a very beautiful woman. It's as simple as that." For Bacon, beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
By the end of the 1950's Francis Bacon's obsessive need to reinvent Velasquez and Van Gogh in his own distinctive style had begun to wane. Leaving behind the existentialist angst of the screaming Popes, Bacon now found amongst his close circle of friends subjects for a more vital and intimate portraiture. This new cast of characters destined for hideous distortion were largely fellow artists and seedy barflies from London's demi-monde, who drank away their afternoons together in the decadent confines of the Soho drinking club, the Colony Room. "If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them," Bacon said of the resultant paintings.
It is not surprising that Bacon should choose the late Muriel Belcher as one of the first subjects for these new portraits. She was after all the proprietress of the Colony Room, who back in 1949 had offered Bacon a weekly salary of free drinks in exchange for bringing along well-healed punters to her club. "Muriel was one of the women Francis loved," writes fellow Colony member Daniel Farson. "They included his nanny and Isabel Rawsthorne; but though he admired Isabel he was closer to Muriel."
Scandalous, foul-mouthed with a dagger-sharp wit that could slice a victim to the bone of his insecurities, Muriel Belcher was nonetheless the original tart with a golden heart. Perched on her barstool like a sphinx, her lank black hair combed back severely, her large nostrils flared and chin tilted upwards, for over thirty years she grandly presided over a dominion that was little more than a dingy smoke-filled room. "Members only!" was her shrill and disdainful battle-cry in the face of any unfortunate trespassers.
The poet Paul Potts summed up Belcher's special qualities. "I suppose what makes her so difficult to describe is her originality, a kind of non-ecclesiastical cardinal or perhaps a delinquent saint. She is a natural procurer whether it be the bacon for the eggs or a date for a girl-friend. The relatively small room which is her domain and where she is absolute sovereign must be one of the unique rooms anywhere. It is not like other clubs at all, more like a cocktail party... Once you're in you're in.... But if she does not like you - you've had it." (Daniel Farson, The Guilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, p. 55).
Above all Muriel Belcher was a great hostess who was able to fuse under one shabby roof the diverse elements of London society, bringing together titled bohemians, government ministers, bankers, poets and drunks. In the 1950's, moreover, the Colony Room was home to a group of young avant-garde artists who, along with Francis Bacon, included such burgeoning talents as Lucian Freud, John Minton, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach. They were later to become internationally renowned as the School of London, but in the early years they were known as "Muriel's Boys" or "The Colony Room Mob".
Francis Bacon first painted Muriel Belcher in 1959, portraying her in violently animated profile, thrusting neck and tornado-twisted flesh against the calm of a saturated green backdrop.
In 1960 he returned again to the subject of Muriel Belcher with the portrait simply entitled Head of Woman. But whereas the earlier picture represented the notoriously rude and aggressive public face of Belcher, in this new and larger version Bacon explored a more private and lonely aspect of his friend. She is depicted hunched and bruised, her sorrowful features blurred as though the weight of her emotions has drawn heavy on her countenance. "Outside the club she looked like a night-animal caught in the glare of daylight as it scurried over the asphalt," Daniel Farson once observed. He might as well have been describing Bacon's portrait.
This overwhelming aura of melancholy and world weariness, whose roots date back to The Scream of Edvard Munch and which was so powerfully evoked by Bacon in his series of Popes, is further magnified in Head of Woman by the menacing void of the background. The glaring white of Muriel's cumbersome coat isolates her against the inky blackness, while high above her head a rectangle of green seals her seclusion, just as the schematic cages of Bacon's Popes acted as isolation chambers for the demented.
"Only Francis Bacon's marvellous portraits of Muriel capture that indomitable spirit with such unsentimental respect and love," stated Colony Room member George Melly. Asked why he painted Belcher so often, Bacon himself answered, "She's a very beautiful woman. It's as simple as that." For Bacon, beauty was in the eye of the beholder.