by Jon Lackman | 23 November 2009 | Contemporary
From the Guardian:
… the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the death of at least one of his lovers. It was that early beating by his father to which Bacon attributed his taste for masochism – desires that were played out in adulthood with his lover Peter Lacy … Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson … describes the directness of the relationship between Bacon’s desires and his artistic output. “Bacon would goad [lover] George [Dyer] into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning – his favourite time to work – he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system.” Richardson argues that these are among his best works … Richardson argues that Bacon’s art went rapidly downhill when, after Dyer’s death, he entered a relationship with John Edwards, which was “seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones … Richardson is an unusually stern critic of Bacon – who was the subject of a Tate retrospective last year and is revered by such artists as Damien Hirst. The problem, argues Richardson, is that Bacon simply could not draw.
More: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23496