My friends Francis and Francis

mars 11, 2009 

Francis Bacon the painter and Francis Giacobetti the photographer. At one time when I introduced them to each other, the latter was roaming around the world on a quest for a rather unusual Grail: to take three large format photographs of personalities of every origin and nationality, from the Dalai Lama to Federico Fellini, along with Mstislav Rostropovich, Akira Kurosawa, Lawrence Durrell and many other great world figures. Three photographs – always the same, yet never the same: one of a face and one of a pair of hands in black and white, framing a third featuring the sitter’s irises – the latter, of course, in colour. This ensemble of triptychs is now well known; a lavish publication and exhibitions have made it famous around the world. Quite apart from the technical quality of such a series, (Francis Giacobetti is, as we know, one of the top-ranking photographers of today), one also admires the originality of the concept.

A face (sometimes a half-length portrait), eyes and hands. Thus the photographer sets himself this challenge of art in general and of painting in particular. A challenge is perhaps the best definition of the reiteration of a theme and its variations. Here, other names rush to mind: Rembrandt, Hokusai, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne to name but a few. Bacon too, without doubt, whose portraits, self-portraits and triptychs constitute, on the whole, themes of infinite variations. Bacon, who, in the mould-breaking twentieth century, revealed himself a little more each day as the heir to the great Western pictorial tradition – a painter of discord, violence, and blazing vitality. He, who with just a handful of others, managed through renewal to communicate painting at a time when many wanted to convince us that it had had its day. That Bacon took up this challenge of renewal is sufficient evidence of his determination and daring.
Thus the photographer of triptychs met the painter of triptychs in the latter’s studio, and the visitor to the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery can observe how fruitful this meeting must have been for Giacobetti. Firstly, these remarkable large format black and white colour prints, and then some unique urane silver gelatin prints, which show us the artist’s face, “his closely-set, steely-blue eyes, with their tense, hypnotic stare” – this incomparable predatory look that all creators share. For once Francis Bacon had found his way, painting was all that mattered to him. Here one thinks of Monet painting his wife Camille on her death bed, ‘surprised to find himself using the diluted colours that death had just brought to her still face”, and also of Picasso, “this admirable murderer”, to cite René Char. All of them imperial eagles, wheeling overhead in heights unknown to common mortals. Birds of prey, without doubt, but whose company was never just that of some threatening demiurge – at least, not Francis Bacon, whom I had the luck to meet. On the contrary, he was a man to whom nothing human was foreign.

To return to what surrounds us here, not only would these large format photographs by themselves justify this exhibition, but also the extraordinary ensemble of spontaneous photographs taken during exchanges of conversation, which go far beyond the usual kind of gossipy reportage. Photographs in which, as Paul Eluard remarks in another context, “the virtual objet blossoming from the real object is what in turn becomes the real, the combination of the two making an image from reality to reality.” Reality beyond reality, where the photographer, thanks to his talent and through the miracle of his technique, leads us onto the path of the dead painter, beyond the mirror, in a proliferation of images as inventive as they are moving. For this I thank him.

Michel Archimbaud
Paris, March 2003