Is Francis Bacon the most overrated painter of the 20th century? No, surely that dubious accolade must go to Lucian Freud, the artistic Tweedledum to Bacon’s Tweedledee. To say that an artist is overrated is not to say that his or her work is uniformly bad, that he or she is lacking in talent, or is a fraud. Indeed, even a first-rate painter can be overrated, as is the case with Pablo Picasso, whose reputation is so elevated that it might seem he never made an unwise artistic decision or painted a duff picture.
In his brief foreword to Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words , Colm Tóibín writes that Bacon’s letters “add to our sense of his mystery, his complexity”. It is hard to see the evidence for this assertion – well-intentioned though it surely is – in the couple of hundred dashed-off missives, scribbled postcards and scraps of notes that make up the bulk of this curious ragbag of a book. The meagre haul of correspondence represents all that the editor, Michael Peppiatt, a long-term friend of Bacon’s, has been able to disinter from the midden of material that the painter left behind.
A living, or still-life, example can be viewed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, to which Bacon’s gloriously chaotic London studio was transferred, complete to the last daub of paint and squashed cigarette end, in 1998. The letters do, Peppiatt writes, “fill in all sorts of blanks in our awareness of the artist, however much he aimed at keeping to the bare bones of a.
