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“Bacon had seen how the Surrealists equated the desire to express something new with the need to shock, and it was to form the core of his own artistic belief. When the ‘wild boy from Ireland’ returned to London towards the end of 1928, he was set on a course that would not only scandalise conventional sexual and social morality. He had something far more subversive to do: to disrupt all notions of what art was and what it could express. Beneath the carefully calculated frivolity and the unresolved pain of a rejected son lay the iron determination of a man readying himself to throw a bomb and be held responsible for it.”
“Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual instinct, was an ideal which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the end of his days. If he had a sustaining belief, it was in the supremacy of instinct as the only guiding principle in life—a philosophy expounded at length by the Marquis de Sade. Bacon had an expert knowledge and considerable personal experience of extreme sexual behaviour—and of sado-masochism in particular. He made no secret of his taboo in this area. And when he said that he ‘painted to excite himself’, he surely meant to recreate certain extreme sexual sensations. It would be true to say that, at one level or another, much of what he painted is a projection of sado-masochistic practices, though, as if by some odd consensus of propriety, his pictures were almost never viewed in this light during his lifetime.”
"I feel myself to be an alien in the world. If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you are an alien."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.
"Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains - a searching out of all that is alien and questionable in existence, of all that until now has been held in the spell of morality..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888.
"Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it's very rare...You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. That is it."
Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
"It's only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far. Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before. The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got its looking real."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1987, Thames & Hudson.
'' Actually, I'm the most ordinary person possible. Its just that I like throwing myself in the gutter. Every artist wants to throw himself into the gutter. Its part of his life, its a necessity. You might say that I lead a gilded gutter life, I drift from bar to bar, from gambling place to gambling place, and when I don't do those things, I go home and paint some pictures. I am completely amoral. If I hadn't painted I would have been a criminal....I have always known life was absurd. Life is nothing but a series of sensations.......Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary...I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen. How can I trap this transient thing? ''
...Francis Bacon in conversations.
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