Barry Joule, a friend and neighbour of Francis Bacon, recounts how, after a visit to the Musee Picasso in Paris, the painter admitted that Picasso was the one artist he always felt in competition with, the one he felt he had to struggle to match. The greatest possible honour, he said, would be for his work to be placed beside Picasso's. He'd surely be pleased that he and Picasso, side by side, are the first residents of IMMA's New Galleries in the comprehensively revamped Deputy Master's House at Kilmainham.
The house, which dates from 1763, served as lodgings for the surgeons at the Royal Hospital. As with the main building, the restoration, by Shay Cleary Architects, succeeds in striking a balance between preserving the integrity of the original and accommodating its new function. Besides the suite of gallery spaces inside, the development incorporates a new entrance court, tactfully sited to the east of the house, over a new basement gallery space. The £2.2 million costs were made up by EU Structural Funds, and Exchequer funding from the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands.
The Deputy Master's House certainly starts its new life auspiciously with two major exhibitions, Picasso: Working on Paper, and The Barry Joule Archive: Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon, both of which are open to the public from Thursday next. If Bacon would be delighted at the company he's in, it's not so clear that he'd be pleased at the work that represents him. The word "attributed" in the exhibition's title sounds appropriately cautionary. Though it was certainly in Bacon's possession, and he passed it on to Joule for safekeeping, there has been some debate about the precise authorship of at least some of the material in the archive, and it seems pretty clear that it is not altogether or exclusively by Bacon's hand.
There are no such niggles about the Picasso. Not only was he extraordinarily prolific, he was also a compulsive hoarder who kept absolutely everything. When his friend Sabartes chided him for preserving trivia, he rounded on him: "Why should I throw away that which was good enough to happen to me?" While Bacon preferred the world to think that his paintings arrived fully formed, without any ancillary or preparatory material, Picasso always saw his as embedded in a nutritive humus of myriad sources. He prized every doodle and happily made work from bits and pieces of scrap, and even drew on napkins in restaurants. The world was his canvas.
One of the reasons he is one of the most exciting artists of the 20th century is because he had a frenetically active mind. Every doodle, every scrap encapsulates an idea. He is forever, as Anne Baldassari of the Musee Picasso puts it, "trying everything out in his effort always to outdo himself". And he is an opportunist, capitalising on chance connections, jumping on verbal or visual puns. He never takes a day off.
An exhibition based on an artist's use of newspaper may sound fairly peripheral, but there are good reasons why that is not so in Picasso's case. One is that the introduction of newspaper collage was one of the key moments in the development of Cubism. Picasso adapted Braque's device of collaging wood-textured wallpaper onto paintings and drawings by using fragments of newsprint. In his collage drawings - papiers colles - around 1912, he began to incorporate fragments of newspaper. They are not decorative embellishments. The humble still life with newspaper deconstructs conventional modes of representation, and also recreates a way of experiencing the world: one eye on your cup of coffee and the cafe, the other scanning the latest news story on the Balkan War.
Then there is Picasso's penetrating eye for detail. In the exhibition catalogue, Baldassari's meticulously close reading of the various phases of his use of newsprint unearths countless references, puns and asides built into the juxtaposition of images and texts. The photographer Brassai relates how, in 1939, the French military censors confiscated one of his photographs of Picasso because the painter was using a newspaper featuring stories on the Pope's appeasement of the Nazis as a palette. They felt, probably rightly, that Picasso was expressing his contempt.
Baldassari develops the idea of the newspaper as metaphor in relation to Picasso's work. In conversation with the poet Andre Verdet he commented on his insatiable curiosity and of the way he ceaselessly absorbed information: "I might start a newspaper," he concluded. Like many children he had in fact produced his own hand-written newspaper as a youngster.
Throughout his career Picasso used newspapers as palettes and as impromptu supports for drawings or sketches, as surfaces for doodling and as material for collage, and the show incorporates everything from marginalia to substantial works. Baldassari comes up with a corker of a climactic image. In 1963, the artist "printed a series of drawings straight onto the plate of an issue of Le Patriote". In the midst of a compendium of images, a profile self-portrait is threaded elegantly among the columns down the centre of the page. Picasso literally becomes part of the newspaper.
Both he and Bacon were brilliant self-mythologisers. A significant part of the Bacon myth, actively promulgated by Bacon himself, has it that he worked spontaneously with oil paint on canvas, without the benefit of preparatory studies, with just a few habitual props to hand: tattered photographs by John Deakin, a battered medical textbook on diseases of the mouth, a volume of Edward Muybridge's photographs of the human figure in motion, and so on.
Such material overlaps substantially with what is on view at IMMA, but the latter also suggests that he scoured a wider range of sources for potential subjects for paintings than he led everyone to believe, and that he worked harder at shaping and refining images from those sources. The archive contains huge volumes of photographs related to cricket and football, for example, many of them over-worked quite substantially.
Photographs of cricketers are scraped, perhaps with steel wool or a comparable abrasive substance, so that their bodies are reduced to a kind of ghostly, ectoplasmic blur supported by the paraphernalia of the game.
At the start of a long and illuminating essay on the Barry Joule Archive, art historian David Mellor accurately describes the works as " . . . cryptic. Their content is grotesque, poetic and violent; their form crude." He might have added "clumsy" and "maladroit". Some of them look like murky, inept parodies of the more familiar Bacon. And the vast majority of the material looks as if it was never intended to be seen.
Sometimes it seems that whoever did them was just casually messing around, sometimes more pointedly looking for an image, actively trying to frame it, shape it, pin it down. Mellor ingeniously weaves the material into a radically expanded conception of Bacon's habitual concerns, concentrating on his interest in Africa and the twilight of empire, on the "masculinised violence" and "theatre of homosexual desire" in sports like boxing, football and even cricket, on his forensic fascination with the skin and bodily fluids, on the notion of carnivalesque in celebratory transgression of body taboos, and of course on some masochistic fantasies.
Whatever its eventual status, it makes for fascinating if sometimes rather grisly viewing: there are a lot of medical textbook plates of disease and other very dark imagery indeed. Its very oddness and scrappiness argues in favour of its authenticity. After all, if you wanted to simulate a Bacon, you wouldn't try to create something that goes against the grain of all the received wisdom relating to his work, and that is what the archive does. It is usually art historians who imprison artists in an autograph style. The artists themselves don't spend much time worrying whether what they do is stylistically authentic.
It is, though, slightly disturbing that with relatively few exceptions, the nature of what we see in IMMA doesn't quite fit with comparable material recovered directly from the painter's studio after his death, now in the possession of the Hugh Lane Gallery. There is a different feeling to it. The relationship of the Hugh Lane material to the paintings seems more focused and precise, more in tune with that incisive clarity that Bacon brought to everything. It could well be that this disparity is down to chronology, that the Joule Archive simply contains older material, but there may be some lively debate still to come on the issue.
Picasso: Working on Paper and The Barry Joule Archive: Works on Paper attributed to Francis Bacon can be seen at the New Galleries, IMMA from March 30.
