卢塞恩艺术博物馆展出“面对面：培根与毕加索---一个直面的对视”
今年卢塞恩艺术博物馆第一次令人惊奇的以如此的广度和决心展示了帕布洛•毕加索和弗朗西斯•培根晚期作品---一个直面的对视。于1985年和1986年培根创作的九幅重要的油画作品直面毕加索各个种类的许多作品：4个雕塑、13幅油画和五幅素描，除了一幅作品以外其他作品都完成于1960年以后，还包括装在一个小壁橱的毕加索于1968年到1972年创作的156幅铜板蚀刻画系列的大部分作品。展品包括享有盛名的毕加索的杰作，如他的最大的和最简洁的《草地上的午餐》版（1960）和围绕“画家和模特”主题的第一幅油画。有代表性的是这幅作品创作于毕加索83岁寿诞。这两幅作品都在画家的许多主要展览里展出过。同样，培根于1970年创作的三幅相联画作《人体研究》和1972年作品《汉莱塔•毛埃斯肖像》和《自画像》也在他的主要展览里展出过。
然而在此次展览中，观众可以发现很久以来都没展出过的或者很少有机会能看到的作品。不管是从形式上还是从风格上，放弃艺术和人类存在的基本问题的潜能都使得二人的作品持续繁荣。除去成功之外，两位艺术家还有着许多相似之处，以至于很少把二者放在一起比较都让人觉得奇怪。当然众所周知毕加索是培根艺术事业的指引人，培根经常提起此事。然而很少能在作品中找到直接的参照，他们最多可以在个案中可以被看到，那就是当培根采取毕加索的超现实主义主题的时候，因此主要表现在他20世纪三四十年代的最早期作品。从而有了培根---毕加索展览。这种阐明二者关系的认知兴趣也就解释了卢塞恩艺术博物馆展览“面对面：培根和毕加索”。两位艺术家共同的兴趣在于体现效果的策略和绘画主题的聚焦。违背艺术家的意愿一定不会发生，是他们用回顾展影响着艺术的历史---如果没有毕加索的诠释马奈的《草地上的午餐》将会怎样？或者没有培根的“重新聚焦”委拉斯贵兹的《教皇伊诺森十世画像》又会怎样？---正如画家自己喜欢命名他们的再创造。“面对面：培根和毕加索”是卢塞恩艺术博物馆展览项目中的一个高峰。这个展览不能把两位艺术家划归到“正规军”中，但是它依然具有与博物馆历史和卢塞恩历史的联结点。
LUCERNE.- This year the Museum of Art Lucerne is holding – astonishingly, for the very first time with such range and ambition – a direct confrontation of the late phases of the work of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Nine important paintings by Bacon made between 1955 and 1986 face a larger number of works of all genres by Picasso: four sculptures, 13 paintings and five drawings, with one exception all painted after 1960, and – installed in a special cabinet – a large selection from Picasso’s series of 156 etchings made between 1968 and 1972. This Suite 156 can be seen as Picasso’s last creative flourish before his death and, along with Suite 347, as his final legacy within the field of printing.
The exhibits include such well-known masterpieces as Picasso’s largest and also most stripped-down version of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1960) or the first painting from an intense phase of engagement with the theme ‘Painter and model’, 25.20.1964. Typically, Picasso painted it on his 83rd birthday. Both of these works have been shown in many of the artist’s major exhibitions. Similarly, such works as Bacon’s large triptych Studies of the Human Body (1970), the threefold Portrait of Henrietta Moraes and his self-portrait from 1972 were shown in his major exhibitions. In this exhibition, however, visitors will be able to discover many works which have not been shown for a long time, or are only seen very rarely.
Forty years after its production, Picasso’s late work continues to celebrate fresh triumphs. Though Picasso was convinced that ten or twenty years would have to pass before his late paintings were valued, today’s interest would probably far exceed his expectations. His violent figurative painting may in fact occupy a logical space within the development of Picasso’s work and personality, but many of his contemporaries saw it as a rare lapse. Only a retrospective eye can recognise the doors that Picasso’s late work opened up for (figurative) art.
Both formally and stylistically, and in terms of its potential to throw up fundamental questions of art and of human existence. It may be for similar reasons that the already considerable esteem in which the work of Francis Bacon is held has also continued to flourish. The evidence for this lies not only in its recognition in the form of one solo exhibition after another (last this winter in K20 in Dusseldorf or a US tour that closes end of July at Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY), but also in the seemingly incredible rise in the value of his works on the market, taking Bacon into strata hitherto reserved solely for the major Impressionists, Picasso or the heroes of Abstract Expressionism.
Such successes aside, there are so many parallels between the two artists that it is surprising how rarely they are brought together. Of course we know that Picasso was the trigger for Bacon’s artistic career. Bacon’s statements on the subject are constantly quoted. But there are few direct references in the work itself, they can at most be seen in individual instances when Bacon resorts to Picasso’s Surrealist motifs, hence chiefly in his early work from the 1930s and 1940s. Accordingly, the exhibition Bacon – Picasso. The Life of Images (2005) at the Musée Picasso focused upon that era, and the sole example of Picasso’s late work in that exhibition was a nude drawing from 1972. Olivier Berggruen aptly wrote in the catalogue for the show Francis Bacon and the Pictorial Tradition, held a good year previously in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Fondation Beyeler, that actually it was more a matter of ‘illuminating that relationship … from the point of view of their shared interests than of reconstructing specific patterns of influence.
This cognitive interest also underlies Museum of Art Lucerne’s exhibition Vis-à-vis. Bacon & Picasso. At the same time it legitimates the fact that the exhibition, with the exception of a Bacon triptych, comes entirely from a private collection. For once it will not be a question of linking together exactly the ‘right’ works to illustrate a thesis, but of using the juxtaposition of exemplary works to examine Bacon’s and Picasso’s artistic attitudes and solutions from a comparative perspective. The fact that this works in this case is primarily a tribute to the collector who sadly died prematurely (and whose family wishes to remain anonymous), a cosmopolitan and distinguished art-lover with an eye and a sense not only for artistic quality but also for the compatibility of the work of Picasso and Bacon. Characteristically, the collection concentrates on the period after 1960, the beginning of Picasso’s so-called late work, and includes hardly any noteworthy positions apart from works by these two 20th century greats.
The artists’ common interests lie (as Berggruen explained in the mentioned catalogue of the Bacon show in Vienna and Riehen, though the exhibition itself unfortunately did not exemplify it) in their effect-oriented strategy, and their thematic focus on the act of painting. A viewer is almost always implied in both Picasso’s and Bacon’s paintings, repoussoir figures stand in for him, like the portrait of the artist in Picasso’s works on the theme of ‘Painter and Model’ or the likeness of Degas, omnipresent in the etchings of the brothel scenes from Maison Tellier. Bacon, on the other hand, involves the viewer through the spatial arrangements of his scenes. He puts his model on display, sometimes in a cage-like structure, as though in a pillory. The gesture of this art might almost be called violent, in one respect in the directly physical sense, whether it be Bacon erasing already painted areas of his canvases or covering them with an over-painted veil, or Picasso attacking his copper-plates again and again with his tool and acids. Violent also in the extended sense, particularly towards the models, who are dismembered and reassembled on the canvas, stripped bare to be made available as objects of desire, or exposed to their worst nightmares. The relationship between painter and model develops into a universal theme, the battle of the sexes or, in more general terms, a conflict between two poles. Force, power, sexuality, ritual, exhaustion, destruction and death are both the weapons and the prize.
The biographies of Bacon and Picasso provide a nutritious breeding-ground for psychological interpretations. That’s not the issue here. The relational character of their work suggests that we should inquire not into whence but whither. The complex web of relationships within each individual work does not, for example, connect it only with selected models by revered masters of art history, hence with the past and tradition, but explicitly and, as suggested above, also with a potential viewer, and consequently with the future. To this extent, what the works have to tell us today and the way in which they do it is at the centre of our interest, and if Picasso’s paintings reveal previously unseen aspects of themselves in the light of Bacon’s (or vice versa), all the better.
This would certainly not occur against the will of the artists, who were themselves practised in retrospectively influencing art history – what would Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe be without Picasso’s paraphrases, or Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X without Bacon’s ‘reconcentrations’, as the artist himself liked to call his reinventions. Vis-à-vis. Bacon & Picasso is one of the high points of Museum of Art Lucerne’s exhibition programme. It may not count these two artists among its ‘regulars’, but there are still points of contact with the history of the Museum and the history of Lucerne. Through the wonderful exhibition here at the Mu