‘Champagne for my real friends!' Francis Bacon masterpiece escapes to the artist's old drinking den
When a work of art fails to excite, interest or move me, the word that comes to mind is 'dead'. Bad art is lifeless, good art is alive and great art is supervital. And it's a supervital masterpiece I am looking at right now. Face as sharply hewn as a Congolese mask, with a flesh-coloured pullover melting into the shadows of his loins, Peter Lacy dominates the room, captured in a gold-framed portrait by his lover Francis Bacon.
That room is the Colony Room Green in London, not the original Colony Room but a bar nearby that lovingly recreates, with the precision of an art installation or stage set, the bohemian drinking den run by Muriel Belcher where Bacon would order drinks all round with his famous toast: 'Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!' Its green walls are covered with art and memorabilia, including a wanted poster made by artist Lucian Freud to recover his own lost portrait of Bacon.
So how has Peter Lacy, who seems an immense, baroque phenomenon propped up in the middle of these cosy confines, made his way home ? He is on 'day release', explains Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia – as in a day out from prison. The Sainsbury Centre has declared that all the artworks it owns are alive: 'Art is alive and animate, waiting to be communicated with by anyone with a soul.' So, Cooper wondered, where would a living work of art want to go if it had a brief escape from the jail of the museum?
It's a pretty good guess that a Bacon painting would choose to return to its creator's old haunt, or at least this replica. The burningly intense painting holds court at the centre of the room. You half-expect it to start dropping acid one-liners to the cackling delight of drunken ghosts – all the Soho monsters and reprobates hovering in the afternoon shadows, drinks in their skeletal hands. It's a lovely bar, but if you do visit the new Colony Room, you won't, sadly, find Bacon's painting. This really is just a day release, although it is all being recorded for a film to be shown from April at the Sainsbury Centre, with actors playing gay men from Bacon's generation and from today, comparing experiences.
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So what is this about? A lightning visit by a masterpiece to a drinking den where the public can't see it except on film? Let's not use the dread words 'publicity stunt'. Instead, let's wonder whether it really is meaningful to claim that a work of art is a living thing, with a mind of its own and opinions about where it would like to go.
Anyone who has ever loved a work of art knows this to be true. It is fundamental to art's power and magic. The Bacon in the bar is electrifying proof. Every smoky brushstroke, every matted smear of black or pink, simmers with life. Lacy is a sentient being, and behind him, you feel the vital presence of the artist himself, the warm blood coursing through his painting hand.
Five centuries ago, the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari praised the Mona Lisa thus: 'In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse.' In fact, art has been experienced by most people in the majority of places throughout human history as animate: that is, as sacred objects in which a divine or magical force is infused. In southern Italy, you can still see statues weep, come to life, process at festivals. In this pleasantly claustrophobic little bar, I am getting that same uncanny feeling about Peter Lacy. Is he about to reach out of the painting and hit me, as he was wont to hit Bacon?
It's a reverence that was replaced in most parts of Europe by the 18th century with a more secular, rational spirit of aesthetic admiration. Works of art – or objects designated as such – were torn from religious or ritual settings and placed in museums. Or imprisoned, to continue the 'day release' image. There we sometimes struggle to feel their magic power, their life.
The Sainsbury Centre is trying to reclaim that intoxicating belief in art, not just through its day-release programme but in its displays, which urge you to encounter artworks as living beings, from carved masks of the Pacific Northwest to Picasso drawings. Its app tells you not the 'history' of an artwork, but its 'life story'; not when it was made, but when it was 'born'.
Gimmicky? Not to me. Either you believe art is alive, or it means nothing to you. Do yourself a favour. Believe.
The Living Art collection displays can be experienced at Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
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