October 2009
The Farnham Decorative & Fine Arts Society met for their lecture on Tuesday 20 October at the Maltings in Farnham.
Chairman Peter Duffy and lecturer Dr Nicholas Watkins
Dr Watkins began his lecture with a ‘health warning’ referring to Francis Bacon and stating that there are vast ranges of art but that does not mean that you have to like all art, and that some of it deals with the more distressing side of life.
During the post-war decade Francis Bacon, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland overcame the British inferiority complex and general apathy - if not downright hostility - to modern art and forged international reputations. However, there was little agreement as to what constituted a modern style. Nothing illustrates more graphically their vast differences of approach than the contrast between the styles - and the life styles - of Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) and the younger Francis Bacon (1909-1992); the former all lightness, rational, ordered, serene and contemplative; the latter all darkness, outrageously unconventional and violent. At the same time, Graham Sutherland's combination of surrealist fantasy and stark realism, apocalyptic themes and the quest for roots, appealed to a younger generation coming to terms with the violence, fragmentation and loss suffered during the war.
Photographic portraits illustrated the difference in style from Ben Nicholson’s sensitive self, reflected in a mirror with a vase beside him, to Francis Bacon standing between two meat carcasses, depicting mortality and violence.
Ben Nicholson worked in St Ives with his wife, Barbara Hepworth, and the St Ives Movement developed after the war.
By contrast, Dr Watkins described Bacon’s abused childhood, and the depravity he was exposed to in his adolescence when he was sent to experience the excesses of Berlin in the 1920s. He was also a homosexual at a time when this was prohibited.
A Picasso exhibition he saw in Paris was to change his life; he decided to become an artist, and through his art he attempted to exorcise his guilt and pain. Many of the pictures were disturbing, but Dr Watkins was able to express the meanings of many of the abstract pictures giving members a greater understanding of these complex artists.
Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) became a Catholic and his picture of the Crucifixion at St Matthews in Northampton is powerful. He visited bomb sites and shelters during the Blitz, producing hundreds of watercolors and drawings, and managing to convey the devastation and horror of the war. He also did a portrait of Somerset Maugham on a bar stool and one of Winston Churchill from a high view point, although Lady Churchill disliked this and subsequently had it destroyed.
The lecture closely examined the main themes, influences and impact of this outstandingly talented generation of painters.
Copy by Maralyn Sharpe
Photo by Garham Parlett