All posts tagged John Deakin

Alistair MacLean reviews

Alistair Stuart MacLean (1922 to 1987) was a very successful Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. His books have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. He wrote high-concept, tightly engineered thrillers with a strong emphasis on plot twists and suspense mechanics, which push his tough male protagonists to extreme physical and psychological limits. The novels from the late 1950s are good but he really hit his stride in the 1960s with a string of gripping thrillers, many of which were quickly made into movies. This streak tailed off in the early 1970s and by the mid-70s they’d become almost unreadably bad. Night Without End and Fear is the Key are personal favourites.

First phase: third-person narrators and war settings

1955 HMS Ulysses War story about a doomed Arctic convoy.

1957 The Guns of Navarone War story about commandos who blow up superguns on a Greek island.

1957 South by Java Head A motley crew of soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilians endure a series of terrible ordeals in their bid to escape the pursuing Japanese forces.

1959 The Last Frontier Secret agent Michael Reynolds rescues a British scientist from communists in Hungary.

Second phrase: first-person narrators: the classic novels

1959 Night Without End Arctic scientist Mason saves plane crash survivors from baddies who have stolen a secret missile guidance system.

1961 Fear is the Key Government agent John Talbot defeats a gang seeking treasure in a crashed plane off Florida.

1961 The Dark Crusader Counter-espionage agent John Bentall defeats a gang who plan to hold the world to ransom with a new intercontinental missile.

1962 The Golden Rendezvous First officer John Carter defeats a gang who hijack his ship with a nuclear weapon.

1962 The Satan Bug Agent Pierre Cavell defeats an attempt to blackmail the government using a new supervirus.

1963 Ice Station Zebra MI6 agent Dr John Carpenter defeats spies who have secured Russian satellite photos of US missile bases, destroyed the Arctic research base of the title and nearly sink the nuclear sub sent to rescue them.

Third phase: ripe

1966 When Eight Bells Toll British Treasury secret agent Philip Calvert defeats a gang who have been hijacking ships carrying bullion off the Scottish coast.

1967 Where Eagles Dare Six commandos are parachuted into snowy South Germany to rescue an American General who has the plans for D-Day and is being held captive in the inaccessible Schloss Adler, the Eagle’s Castle. Except this is merely a cover for a deeper mission – and the pretext for a ripping yarn chock-full of twists, turns and nailbiting excitement.

1968 Force 10 From Navarone The three heroes from Guns of Navarone parachute into Yugoslavia to blow up a dam and destroy two German armoured divisions.

1969 Puppet on a Chain Interpol agent Paul Sherman battles a grotesquely sadistic heroin-smuggling gang in Amsterdam.

1970 Caravan to Vaccarès British agent Neil Bowman foils a gang of gypsies who are smuggling Russian nuclear scientists via the south of France to China.

1971 Bear Island Doctor Marlowe deals with a spate of murders aboard a ship full of movie stars and crew heading into the Arctic Circle.

Fourth phase: bad

1973 The Way to Dusty Death World number one racing driver Johnny Harlow acts drunk and disgraced in order to foil a gang of heroin smugglers and kidnappers.

1974 Breakheart Pass The Wild West, 1873. Government agent John Deakin poses as a wanted criminal in order to foil a gang smuggling guns to Injuns in the Rockies and planning to steal government gold in return.

1975 Circus The CIA ask trapeze genius Bruno Wildermann to travel to an unnamed East European country, along with his circus, and use his skills to break into a secret weapons laboratory.

1976 The Golden Gate FBI agent Paul Revson is with the President’s convoy when it is hijacked on the Golden Gate bridge by a sophisticated gang of crooks who demand an outrageous ransom. Only he – and the doughty doctor he recruits and the pretty woman journalist – can save the President!

1977 Seawitch Oil executives hire an unhinged oil engineer, Cronkite, to wreak havoc on the oil rig of their rival, Lord Worth, who is saved by his beautiful daughter’s boyfriend, an ex-cop and superhero.

1977 Goodbye California Deranged Muslim fanatic, Morro, kidnaps nuclear physicists and technicians in order to build atomic bombs which he detonates a) in the desert b) off coastal California, in order to demand a huge ransom. Luckily, he has also irritated maverick California cop, Ryder – by kidnapping his wife – so Ryder tracks him down, disarms his gang and kills him.

Short stories

1985 The Lonely Sea A motley collection of ‘short stories’, clearly thrown together to exploit his reputation. Of the 14 texts no fewer than 8 are really newspaper articles about disasters at sea, and most of the others are poor; apart from The Dileas, the powerful short story which kick-started his entire career and, maybe, the unexpectedly comic story set on a canal. I’ve read it so you don’t have to.

1 Comment

by Simon on March 23, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged 1873, Amsterdam, Arctic, Arctic convoy, Bear Island, Breakheart Pass, Bruno Wildermann, Caravan to Vaccarès, CIA, Circus, Cronkite, D-Day, Doctor Marlowe, Fear Is The Key, Florida, Force 10 From Navarone, Golden Gate bridge, Goodbye California, Greece, heroin, heroin smuggling, HMS Ulysses, Hungary, Ice Station Zebra, Interpol, John Bentall, John Carpenter, John Carter, John Deakin, John Talbot, Johnny Harlow, Lord Worth, Mason, Michael Reynolds, Morro, Neil Bowman, Night Without End, novel, nuclear sub, nuclear weapon, Paul Revson, Paul Sherman, Philip Calvert, Pierre Cavell, Puppet on a Chain, Ryder, Schloss Adler, Seawitch, Second World War, short stories, South By Java Head, The Dark Crusader, the Eagle's Castle, The Golden Gate, The Golden Rendezvous, The Guns of Navarone, The Last Frontier, The Lonely Sea, The Satan Bug, The Way to Dusty Death, thriller, When Eight Bells Toll, Where Eagles Dare, Wild West, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on March 23, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/23/alistair-maclean-reviews/

Francis Bacon: Human Presence @ the National Portrait Gallery

This is a fascinating and thorough exhibition devoted to the relationship between Francis Bacon (1909 to 1992) – probably one of the most famous and recognisable of post-war British painters – and the ancient genre of The Portrait, which he dragged kicking and screaming into the post-war, nuclear age.

Second of ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ by Francis Bacon (1965) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2024. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia

Just at the end of the Second World War Bacon established his brand with the shocking Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. As you can see there’s a big dollop of Surrealism in the way he has painted what are, in effect, monsters, maybe enabled by the surreal visions of Max Ernst. But the picture contains three other aspects which were to endure in his work:

distortion of a basically humanoid subject
with a formal, portrait setting
sets of three

The nominal subject, ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ is, of course, an extremely traditional subject, going back nearly two thousand years. Bacon has obviously chucked a bucket of post-war Angst in the face of the entire tradition to create something monstrous and yet… the ancient titles remains, and so does the ancient design, namely the triptych i.e. a work of art that is divided into three sections or panels.

These elements – 1) the wild distortion of human appearance, 2) while retaining the key elements of portrait convention, and 3) sets of three – were to persist in his work till the end of his life, 45 years later.

Regarding triptychs, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) says that this exhibition contains 50 or so works and yet it definitely felt like more. It was only in the final and largest room, devoted to portraits of his friends and lovers, that I realised why. It’s because what the NPG counts as single works are often, in fact, sets of three images. I counted nine of them = 27 distinct portraits, making the total number of painted portraits closer to 70 than 50. On the evidence here, the triptych remained central to Bacon’s art for nearly half a century.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing (on the left) Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne’ and, on the right, ‘Three Studies for Portraits’ (photo by the author)

Origins

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bacon’s images of people metamorphosing into screaming chunks of meat shocked and scandalised the art world, here and abroad. They were quickly associated with those twin blows to human dignity, the revelation of the Holocaust death camps and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It became an instantly recognisable brand. But arguably the overfamiliarity of some of his cardinal images (the screaming pope, a body like a haunch of meat on a raised platform) obscure the variety of what he actually painted and its striking development and evolution over the long period from the late 1940s to the early ’90s.

Certainly they can easily overshadow the continuity of his interest in the genre of The Portrait and, in particular, portraits of specific, named individuals. This exhibition is the first in 20 years to concentrate only on Bacon’s portraits, to consider them within the genre and tradition of portraiture, to show how his style of painting portraits changed and evolved over his long career. In the second and central part, it concentrates very much on a handful of repeat sitters – six or seven in all – and Bacon’s relationships with them as friends and (gay) lovers.

In one sense Bacon never developed beyond the extremity of this ‘primal scream of pain’ vision of humanity. And yet, to walk through this exhibition is to quickly realise how the original vision was tempered, modified and, ultimately, domesticated.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:

Portraits Emerge
Beyond Appearance
Painting from the Masters
Self Portraits
Friends and Lovers

1. Portraits Emerge

Includes Head VI (1949) and Study of the Human Head (1953), works that depict anonymous male subjects. Both bear all of the visual conventions of formal portraiture. The sitters are presented in a traditional three-quarter-length format against dark backgrounds and yet, as you can see, all the politeness of traditional portraiture has been thrown out in favour of searing extremity.

In Head VI, the figure is trapped within a transparent cage, while Study of the Human Head peers through striations and appears X-rayed, disconcertingly revealing the sitter’s skull and teeth.

Bacon’s early work was devastatingly innovative, capturing the post-war mood of horror and despair at the bankruptcy of civilisation and morality, and the ongoing terror of the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation.

2. Beyond Appearance

In the early 1950s, Bacon attempted to paint sitters from life in the studio. The heightened drama of the screaming figures made way for portraits that were more individualised, representing his friends and lovers. Bacon avoided traditional domestic settings for his portraits – he detested a ‘homely atmosphere’ – preferring to isolate individuals against an ambiguous dark background within a cage-like framing device.

there are several classics of this type, notably a portrait of R.J. Sainsbury, against one of his jet black backgrounds but confined in the ghostly outline of some kind of cuboid cage. What I noticed about the handful of works in this section was how smartly dressed they were. You can see the white shirt and black tie and dark suit and it all feels as if, despite the nuclear holocaust they seem to have got caught up in, they’re still maintaining the courtesies and manners.

3. Painting from the Masters

This room reveals Bacon’s obsession with two paintings. It’s widely known that he was obsessed with Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (see Head VI above and the link to the Portrait with Meat). I didn’t know that he was equally as obsessed with a less well-known work by Van Gogh titled The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888).

Bacon obsessively reworked it and this room contains 2 or 3 huge sketches for reworkings and they are a revelation. I never know that Bacon could actually be bad. These works, albeit unfinished, are dire. they’re wretched. They’re rubbish. Especially given that a whole exhibition of Van Gogh originals is taking place a few hundred yards away in the national Gallery, these are embarrassingly bad. I’m amazed anyone connected with the artist let them be displayed.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh VI’ and ‘Study for Portrait of Van Gogh IV’, both 1957 (photo by the author)

OK, maybe they’re only studies and never meant to be exhibited, but still… And anyway, next to them is a ‘finished’ work which Bacon did exhibit. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Embarrassing. I thought it was a spoof.

Photos

Bacon ripped photos of art works out of magazines and books and strewed them around his notoriously messy studio, spattered in paint, dropped on the floor, crumpled up and walked over. He found it easier to work from these heavily degraded objects than from pristine poster-sized images.

This habit coincided with the way that, by the late 1950s he’d gotten bored of trying to paint portraits from life. He found the presence of the sitter in the studio inhibiting and restricting and so, from the end of the 1950s onwards, he increasingly used photos of his sitters as the basis of his portraits. Photos don’t fidget, move or need entertaining.

This working-from-photos approach also allowed him the freedom to ‘distort’ the image as he wanted to without having to worry about the reaction of the sitters, who were sometimes quite upset by the finished product. In one interview he spoke about the ‘injury’ which knew he could inflict through his interpretations.

And this also explains why, alongside the 70 or so paintings, the exhibition includes some 35 photos. Now many of them are of Bacon himself, who was increasingly sought after as a subject by top name international snappers such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, Arnold Newman, Mayotte Magnus and many more.

Francis Bacon by Mayotte Magnus (1972) © Mayotte Magnus / National Portrait Gallery, London

But there are also plenty of examples of the photos he commissioned and used as the basis for his portraits, especially taken by the house photographer of Soho, John Deakin. So we see black-and-white photos of regular Bacon sitters such his friend Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne and so on.

There are also three videos of Bacon, including an interview with art critic David Sylvester, a long-term supporter and writer on his work.

4. Self Portraits

The exhibition has a drily humorous quote from Bacon on the wall of this section:

I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.

Despite saying that he ‘loathed’ his own face, Bacon painted over 50 self-portraits and a dozen or so of them are on display here. The curators claim they offer ‘an extraordinary range of responses to his body, psyche and ego over time’ and that they ‘not only track the artist’s relationship with his appearance and his artistic and sexual identities, but also trace his changing technique and innovations in format’.

To be honest, I couldn’t really see this except in the narrow sense that the ‘sitting-on-a-sofa’ self portrait looked very like the scores of ‘sitting-on-a-sofa-portraits’ he did of friends and lovers. The example the gallery’s press team included in the selection we reviewers are allowed to reproduce, for me demonstrates a completely different point, which is how homely and domestic his later work became.

Sweet. He looks like a chubby schoolboy from the 1940s. It could be the cover of a young adult fiction book, certainly of a modern graphic novel. The screaming pope and hunks of meat vibe has completely disappeared.

5. Friends and Lovers

The final section is, according to the curators, the core of the whole show. It brings together about 20 portraits of the lovers (George Dyer, Peter Lacy) and close friends (Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne) who he painted again and again in the later 1970s and ’80s.

Having told us about photographs in Bacon’s practice, the exhibition now brings together contemporary photos of each of these people accompanied by panels which tell us about their lives and relationships to Bacon – and these are placed next to his portraits of them.

The result combines art criticism with quite a lot of gossip, and smatterings of social history about Soho Bohemian life in the 1950s and ’60s, mildly interesting to the average visitor, gold dust to the committed Bacon fan.

For example we get potted biographies of Bacon’s three principle partners, Peter Lacey (1916 to 1962), George Dyer (1934 to 1971) and John Edwards (1949 to 2003) (such white, English names, aren’t they?)

Peter Lacey was Bacon’s long-term partner during the 1950s. The curators tell us that:

The relationship endured almost a decade in spite of numerous complications, absences, infidelities and episodic violence. During their time together, Lacy squandered his inheritance and moved from London to Barbados to Henley-on-Thames. He eventually settled in Tangier, where he played piano in a local bar.

We read that Bacon himself was devastated to learn of Lacey’s death by telegram shortly after the opening of his career-defining retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962. Bacon responded with a small triptych of portraits that memorialised their relationship. In fact it was from that moment that his work began to take a more personal turn and portray friends and lovers rather than unnamed or invented figures.

A decade later, Bacon lost his second lover George Dyer, another potent presence in so many of his paintings. Dyer’s death in 1971 triggered Bacon to make a series of self-portraits which capture his grief and isolation.

I’m afraid I couldn’t help thinking of the famous quote from Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest:

‘To lose one life partner, Mr Bacon, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’

My view

I like the earliest work best. I like the screaming popes and X-ray horrors. In my opinion they have the shock of the new. You can tell that he’s just invented the approach and is experimenting with all the new possibilities it opens up. And also they speak of the times and the new horrors revealed about human nature. They also have a strong science fiction vibe, which I enjoy.

But, in my opinion, this kind of melted molten flesh vibe quickly became a manner and a cliché. J.S. Lewinski’s photomontage of Bacon’s face seen from two angles, rather than shedding light on his compositional process or something, highlights how banal this vision can be. Overlap 2 or 3 exposures of someone’s face at slightly different angles and, bingo! you have the look. At one time these shots were taken as visionary depictions of a prophet of post-war Angst. Now any A-level art student can do the same on their camera phone.

Francis Bacon, 1967 by J.S. Lewinski © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images

Thus I found the last room which, for the curators, is the heart of the exhibition, the most boring. The more I saw the same treatment being meted out to his mates and lovers the more boring it became. Somewhere (in the 1960s) his whole approach became a cliché and a mannerism.

I suppose it’s still disturbing for anyone who’s seeing them for them for the first time, and they do retain an unpleasant butcher’s shop ethos, and yet… It had become a habit and a routine. And the way he applied it to a tiny coterie of friends and lovers, as the show amply demonstrates, somehow neutralises the style even more, defangs it, makes it homely.

In the 1950s the wildest of his paintings seemed to say something searing about the entire human condition. By the 1980s they’re just stylised portraits of a handful of friends. Crudely, I thought: ‘seen one, seen ’em all’. The main interest for me in these studies for a portrait of George Dyer was the colour of his jumper. I used to have a jumper that colour once. I wonder where it’s gone.

Installation view of ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing ‘Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer’ (photo by the author)

I think this is really highlighted by the banality of the later settings or backdrops. The cage paintings take place in some eerie metaphysical space, like the void depicted by Milton between Hell and the universe. By complete contrast the clean steps and comfy sofas of the later works look like they come from Ikea. Clean the melted blob of flesh off them and they could go in the Habitat catalogue.

Styles 1 and 2

Days after visiting it dawned on me that the portraits from the 1950s – ‘Head 4’ and ‘Study for a Human Head’ – are figurative. They actually look in every detail like portraits of human heads, just smeared a bit and with more teeth than you’d normally see, in a spooky X-ray style. By startling contrast, all the faces from the 1960s onwards have been melted and remodelled to look like the Elephant Man.

So there might be micro-gradations and evolutions I’m missing but, fundamentally, the exhibition shows that Bacon had two completely different styles. And, I’m afraid to say, I much prefer the first one. The second style, the melted faces, are – once you get used to them – not very scary. After you’ve seen 10 you’re becoming blasé and after 30 you are, frankly, a bit bored. But this is not true of the portraits done in style 1 for a simple reason: they’re screaming and, to a lesser extent, trapped in those black cells, confined by some fine-wired cage.

I suggest that both conditions – the screaming and to a lesser extent the cagedness – trigger strong and primitive responses in the viewer, a sympathetic sense of extreme pain or entrapment, which is why you remember them. Whereas once you’ve gotten used to the Elephant Man vibe of the Melted Style and become a bit bored by it, then – as I’ve jokingly suggested – you’re more struck by the interior furnishings or what the sitter’s wearing. Certainly there is almost none of the intense response you have to the stricken, gripping first manner. The second approach is a style whereas the first one reflects a plight.

Well, that’s my view. What do you think?

Conclusion

If you have a particular interest in the history of portraiture and how Bacon placed a massive bomb under it in the 1950s and ’60s, opening doors and creating whole new worlds of distortion and terror, then this is a must-see exhibition.

If you’re a Bacon devotee then this exhibition contains much of interest, with lots of biographical information about his relationships with serial sitters, lovers and friends, and over 30 photos of the great man and his buddies.

But if, like me, you’re more of a general visitor, then the show lacks the real bite and edge you might have expected from it. I liked the screeching men in suits in the first and second rooms but then burst out laughing at how bad the Van Gogh sketches are in room 3 and after that, in the last room, was saddened by how the glorious energy of the early works had become surprisingly tamed, mannered and domesticated.

Merch

It always makes me smile the way the wall captions in so many exhibitions talk about questioning this social norm, subverting that societal expectation, interrogating stereotypes, about radical this and revolutionary that and just as they’ve filled you to the brim with revolutionary fervour… you emerge into the gallery shop where you can snap up some simply delightful tote bags, t-shirts, fridge magnets, throws and scarves and perfect gifts for all the family!

You wouldn’t really have thought it possible but the National Portrait Gallery has developed an entire range of Francis Bacon-themed products to accompany this exhibition, including prints and posters, postcards and fridge magnets, fashion products, accessories, scarves, t-shirts and tote bags, baseball caps, books, homeware, and the exhibition catalogue.

Explore the Francis Bacon Human Presence exhibition range of products

I think the Francis Bacon-themed checked socks are my favourite. It’s exactly what he would have wanted.

The promotional video

Related reviews

National Portrait Gallery reviews

All Too Human @ Tate Britain

Britain is a collection of chilly rainswept islands in the North Atlantic, on the same latitude as Moscow (as we may learn to our cost in the decades to come, if global warming really does disrupt the Gulf Stream). For more than half the year the sky is overcast and grey. Whereas the inhabitants of southern countries like Spain or Italy have a tradition of living outside for much of the year, and dressing their finest every night for the evening stroll or passeggiata, ours is a country of fusty pubs for the working class and dinner parties for the posh. Ours is an indoors country.

This basic fact about life in Britain come across very strongly in Tate Britain’s new exhibition, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud And A Century Of Painting Life. It is a show of some 93 paintings, one sculpture and half a dozen black-and-white photographs by some of the most celebrated British artists of the past 100 years who have painted depictions of the human body. In roughly chronological order the artists are:

Walter Sickert b.1860
David Bomberg b.1890
Stanley Spencer b.1891
Chaim Soutine b.1893

Giacometti b.1901
William Coldstream b.1908
Francis Bacon b.1909
John Deakin b.1912

Lucian Freud b.1922
Francis Souza b.1924
Leon Kossoff b.1926
Dorothy Mead b.1928
Michael Andrew b.1928
Frank Auerbach b.1931
Dennis Creffield b.1931
Euan Uglow b.1932
R.B. Kitaj b.1932
Paula Rego b.1935

Celia Paul b.1959
Cecily Brown b.1969
Jenny Saville b.1970
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye b.1970

Mud or Mad

A reviewer of Tennyson’s long poem, Maud (1855) sardonically commented that it would have been more accurately named if either of the vowels had been removed. As I walked round this grim, dark and oppressive exhibition, I began to think most of the works on display could similarly be divided into ‘Mud’ or ‘Mad’, with maybe the additional category of ‘Livid Corpse’.

1. Mud

The School of Mud was inaugurated by Walter Sickert, leader of the so-called Camden Town Group. While John Singer Sargent was painting evocative portraits of fine society ladies or women with parasols lounging in the Mediterranean sunshine, Sickert painted prostitutes in dingy attics or leering crowds in half-lit music halls. The three works by him here are deliberately squalid, dark and dingy, so dark you have to peer up close to see any detail.

Nuit d’Été by Walter Richard Sickert (c.1906) Private Collection, Ivor Braka Ltd

Rooms five and six of the exhibition explore the work of David Bomberg as artist and teacher at Borough Polytechnic, where his emphasis on the tactile quality of paint influenced his students Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

Bomberg is represented by Vigilante, which I quite liked because of its powerful vertical lines, which reminded me of the Vorticist work of Wyndham Lewis or Jacob Epstein. But it was his use of thick impasto which influenced his students and went on to become the distinguishing characteristic of the paintings of Kossoff and Auerbach.

Head of Jake by Frank Auerbach (1997) © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

These murky, smeary, thick abortions of the darkest browns and blacks possible made me think of an explosion in a sewage farm. Some of them made me feel physically sick. The joke is that many of them are meant to be outdoors scenes. Is this how you see or experience London?

Early Morning Willesden Junction by Leon Kossoff

Or this?

Mornington Crescent by Frank Auerbach (1965)

The commentary claims that:

Both Auerbach and Kossoff display great sensitivity to the conditions of light, convey the dynamism of city life and reflect the mood of a specific moment

which I thought might be a joke. Let’s look again at Kossoff’s sensitive depiction of light.

Early Morning Willesden Junction by Leon Kossoff

Not quite so muddy, but still revelling in gloom, bleakness of mood, greys and blacks splattered with neurotic blotches of colour, is the handful of works later in the show by Celia Paul.

Painter and Model by Celia Paul (2012) © Celia Paul, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

Cheerful stuff, eh? The smear-and-daub tradition (Sickert-Bomberg-Auerbach) which this exhibition reveals to be a major thread in modern British art is represented in our day by the bang up-to-date works of Cecily Brown.

Boy with a Cat by Cecily Brown (2015) © Cecily Brown. Photo by Richard Ivey

2. Mad

Only room one deals with the depiction of the human figure between 1918 and 1945. That’s not much space for nearly thirty years, is it? Murky Sickert, distorted Soutine and blue-veined Stanley Spencer are the only artists included (We’ll come back to Spencer under the category of ‘livid corpses’) thus omitting quite a lot of other artists active during this period.

Then it’s quickly on to Francis Bacon, who dominates rooms two and seven with his screaming popes, tortured dogs and baboons, men turning into hunks of meat. All depicted against precise geometric backgrounds as if caught in cages or on stage as specimens. Angst. Existential despair etc.

Portrait by Francis Bacon (1962) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS, London

In the hall outside the exhibition there’s a loop of videos playing which show interviews with some of the featured artists, alongside display cases and wall displays showing photographs of the artists’ studios. Bacon’s was a notoriously filthy, dirty, messy cave with only a skylight allowing the grey light of Soho to penetrate down into the torture chamber. It tends to confirm your prejudices to learn that Lucian Freud’s studio, also in Soho, was nearly as dirty and scrappy.

The room after the early Bacon is devoted to Francis Souza whose strikingly large paintings are done in an edgy, angular, primitive style. The room is dominated by an enormous Crucifixion and a full figure painting of a naked black woman. Reproductions can’t convey how enormous, dark and menacing they are.

Again – dark dark dark, intense or even demented. I actually liked them, they have a terrific style, but God the mood they convey is wretched.

Room ten of the exhibition is devoted to paintings by Paul Rego. To quote the curators (there are three curators, all women):

Women’s lives and stories have often been overlooked in art as a historically male-dominated activity. Rego places them at the centre of her work. Women are portrayed as undertaking a variety of activities, in a broad range of moods and temperaments, as victims, culprits, carers, passive observers and sexually-charged creatures. As viewers we are drawn into and become complicit in an unruly world shaped by patriarchal power.

Here’s an example: can you feel yourself being drawn into it and becoming complicit in an unruly world shaped by patriarchal power?

The Family by Paula Rego (1988) Marlborough International Fine Art © Paula Rego

Obviously, the more you look at it, the more disturbing it becomes. Maybe that’s what the commentary meant. For me the disturbing element is the way the schoolgirl fiddling with the man’s trousers in a way which in recent times we’ve been taught to think of as paedophilia, as being a sex crime. Yet she has the head of an adult woman. So…

Livid corpses

There aren’t any actual corpses on display, that’s just a short hand way of describing a style of painting human skin and bodies which emphasises the whiteness of English complexions, the lack of exposure to sunlight which leaves so many English bodies pale, pallid and covered in blue veins.

The exhibition decisively shows the strong tradition in English art of arranging and depicting the naked human body in the most unflattering way possible, as if it was a corpse just been pulled out of the Thames. It is as unsensual and unsexy as it is possible to be.

One recurrent cliché or trope of this styleis to depict a woman mostly wearing clothes but revealing one slack, white, veined breast in the most unappealing way possible. We see Stanley Spencer establishing this tradition in room one.

Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece by Stanley Spencer (1935)

(There’s a lot more to Spencer than his full frontal nudes, as any visitor to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham or even to the 1910 room in Tate Britain will discover – but for some reason it’s always the saggy-boobed and flaccid-penised nudes which feature in exhibitions like this, never the scores of paintings he did of the cheerfully clothed men and women of his native Cookham.) Anyway, saggy blue-veined boobs was a motif picked up by young Lucian Freud fifteen years later.

Girl with a White Dog by Lucian Freud (1950-1) © Tate

Freud makes his first appearance as a pupil of art school teacher William Coldstream in room four, and then has the largest room in the show – room seven ‘Lucian Freud: In the Studio’ – devoted to him, with 13 big paintings.

It is interesting to learn that Freud’s mature style was the result of his switching from the small brushes which produced the smooth finish of paintings like the one above, to using bigger, coarser brushes which produced a more modern, slightly blotchy style. And that he moved away from the sitter – instead of being close and smooth, his portraits become more distant, more mottled.

Those changes by themselves, however, don’t account for the drastic change from the smooth, light palette of the painting above to his fascination with all the hues of brown, orange, grey and white which result in the characteristic blotched skin of his mature work.

David and Eli by Lucian Freud

The Freud room is full of paintings which revel in the ungainliness and the sheer ugliness of raw, naked, gawky, livid English bodies. Feet with their corns, legs with varicose veins, the tanned face and chest contrasting with the rest of the pallid body, the livid puce of this man’s flaccid cock and balls. In all of Freud’s ugly nudes I get the feeling the painter is daring you to come out and say how disgusted you are. Just how ugly can he make his people, before the viewer cries ‘Enough!’

Recognisably in the same tradition of ‘English ugly’ are the paintings of Jenny Saville although, unlike Freud, for reasons I can’t quite define, I’ve always loved Saville’s work.

Saville broke through in the fabulous Sensation exhibition of 1997, with paintings of grotesquely fat people who seemed to be pushing right up against the surface of the canvas, squeezed and compressed right into your face. All her works are awesomely big.

For some reason, although Freud’s blotchy nudes with their hairy penises and ragged vulvas make me feel like I’m in a butcher’s shop, I find Saville’s work visually thrilling and exciting. But it’s still from the very English ‘school of ugly’.

Reverse by Jenny Saville (2002-3) © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

A little light

Is there any light in this gallery of murk, madness and tormented flesh? Yes, some. I’d never heard of Michael Andrews. In line with the general vibe two of his paintings here are of gloomy roughly-sketched interiors in Soho, namely the notorious Colony Club where Bacon et al. hung out, drank and bitched. But there is also this surprisingly touching outdoors scene.

Melanie and Me Swimming by Michael Andrews (1978-9) Tate © The estate of Michael Andrews

It was admiring the grace and tenderness in this painting which brought home to me how much the qualities of gentleness or grace are missing from almost all of these paintings – certainly from all the screaming Bacons, blotchy Freuds, oily Kossoffs, murky Auerbachs and mad Regos.

And for that matter, scenes simply set outdoors are few and far between in this show: there are none in the Bacon room, none in the Freud room. Even when there are supposedly outdoor scenes, as in the Auerbach and Kossoff rooms, you wouldn’t really know it, so buried are the motifs in layers of industrial thickness sludge.

No – happy, light, outdoor scenes are conspicuous by their complete absence, as is the depiction of the human body as a thing of beauty. Think of Aubrey Hepburn. Think of a ballerina. Think of Lionel Messi nutmegging a defender. Think of a hundred images of people in outdoors settings, laughing at cafes, walking through woods, gardening, sunbathing.

All of that, almost all of actual human life, is consciously excluded from this parade of horrors and corpses.

It’s odd that anyone takes ‘Art’ as being in any way representative of the actual life of its era when it is quite obviously the opposite – the product of a cloistered, hermetically-sealed world which almost makes a virtue of not capturing or depicting the actual lives of the people around it.

The only room which provided a relief from torture and turpitude was room four, devoted to the teachings of William Coldstream at the Slade School of Fine Art. Coldstream developed a process for marking out the canvas with precise grids to help construct a realistic image, deliberately leaving bits of grid visible to hint at the geometric framework beneath the ‘reality’.

Seated nude by William Coldstream (1973)

I liked the precision of his draughtsmanship and the way you can see original lines of the sketch showing through the oil colours. That sense of outlines and shape. Three or four of Coldstream’s relatively light and airy works are included, alongside some by his pupil Euan Uglow.

Georgia by Euan Uglow (1973) © The Estate of Euan Uglow

In the flesh, up close, you can see traces of the lines of the grid which Uglow created across the canvas and many of the little crosses formed by the crossing of lines remain visible through the paint. I like that sense of the mechanical or mathematical emerging from the picture – or the sense of the work being unfinished, a work in progress.

As to the actual image, it’s another unsmiling person. In an exhibition devoted to the depiction of human beings over the past 100 years of English art not one person is smiling, let alone laughing (apart from the mad mother in the Paul Rego painting).

All confirming that ‘Art’ is a bloody serious, sombre, tragic business, you know.

Contemporary artists

The eleventh and final room is devoted to works by four younger or contemporary artists, all four of them women – including Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown and Celia Paul (all mentioned and illustrated above).

The Saville I loved, the Brown and Paul a lot less so. And, alas, as so often with contemporary artists, their work turns out – according to the (female) curators – to be all about sexuality and identity.

In their representations of figures they explore what it is to be human from a contemporary perspective. Throughout their work, they investigate and stretch stereotypical views on femininity, masculinity, race and many other categories that define and constrain identity.

Last word for Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, born in 1970 and so, along with Saville, the youngest artist in the show. According to the wall label she knocks out her paintings in a day of rapid and intense work. I liked both her pieces on display here, because I like disegno, the ability to conceive and carry out accurate line drawings. Both her works here display extremely skilled draughtsmanship, a handy way with oil paints, and the ability to create mood and expression.

Coterie Of Questions by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (2015) © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Still, though – very dark aren’t they? Britain is for much of the year a dark and gloomy place which, at least according to this exhibition, has inspired a lot of dark and gloomy art – and the sombre palette of Yiadom-Boakye’s work fits right into that tradition.

The promotional video

Reviews

More Tate Britain reviews

More Tate Britain reviews

Breakheart Pass by Alistair MacLean (1974)

In a new departure for MacLean, this is a historical novel, set in the Rocky Mountains in 1873. The story is entirely about an ill-fated train journey up into the snow-covered hills. Preliminary scenes in the frontier town of Reese City establish the main characters.

Cast

Colonel Claremont – in charge of 5o US cavalry
Colonel Fairchild – Commandant of Fort Humboldt
Governor Fairchild – governor of Nevada
Marica Fairchild – the governor’s niece and daughter of Colonel Fairchild
Major O’Brien – the governor’s aide
Nathan Pearce – US marshall
Revd Theodore Peabody – chaplain for Virginia City
Dr Molyneux – US Army doctor
John Deakin – supposed arsonist and murderer, captured in a bar-room fight and being taken in chains to the fort

Plot

The cavalry have been ordered to travel by train along the perilous railway up into the blizzard-obscured mountains to bring aid to the isolated Fort Hauberman, where an outbreak of cholera is ravaging the garrison. However, as the journey progresses there is a litany of mysterious disasters:

two key officers never even make it on to the train, missing, presumed dead
the doctor who is to provide the medical care, is found dead, expertly murdered with one of his own scalpels
in a dramatic scene, the rear three coaches of the train – housing all the cavalry – are decoupled by persons unknown on a steep part of the line, so that they run backwards out of control and plummet to their destruction into a deep ravine. Where was the brakeman at the back of the train? Face down on the floor with a dagger through his heart!!
then the preacher, Dr Peabody, goes missing

In other words, the story turns into a ‘closed room’ detective story: one of the survivors in the list above must be the baddie. But what’s the motivation? Why all this mayhem? Well, cutaways to the supposedly ravaged fort reveal that, far from being a hospital for ill soldiers, it has been seized by notorious baddie, Sepp Calhoun, in uneasy cooperation with leader of the savage Paiute tribe, White Hand. And they are talking darkly of the immense profits to be made…

Meanwhile, as the story progresses, Deakin, who they all take to be a savage murderer in response to a Wanted poster listing his crimes of burning down a hotel and blowing up a railway station, killing a lot of people – well, he in fact does what almost every other MacLean protagonist does – operates in secret to identify the real baddies. We see him sneaking round the train finding the bodies of the two missing army officers, discovering that the coffins bound for the Fort are in fact full of guns and ammo, hiding the telegraph equipment (since he suspects the official telegraphists have been corrupted by the gang) and generally uncovering the Truth.

Like previous MacLean protagonists John Talbot, John Bentall, John Carter, Pierre Cavell, John Carpenter, Philip Calvert, Paul Sherman, Neil Bowman and Johnny Harlow, John Deakin feigns ignorance, even pretends to be a criminal himself, but in fact turns out to be a government law enforcement officer, a secret agent, given carte blanche to bring to justice the wicked arms and gold smuggling gang any way he sees fit. In the final scenes it’s just him, pretty Marica, and decent old Colonel Claremont against all the others who are in on the criminal conspiracy.

MacLean’s prose style

MacLean’s style went badly off in the early 1970s (though this is a better-written book than its predecessor, The Way To Dusty Death). a) He knows no subtlety. His characters are always in extremis. And b) their extreme emotions or physical states are described in a peculiarly arch and self-consciously baroque style. It is the opposite of slick and cool; it is stilted and clumsy.

‘Are you sure?’ It wasn’t so much disbelief in Claremont’s tone as a groping lack of understanding, the wearied bafflement of a man to whom too many incomprehensible things have happened too quickly.
Henry assumed an air of injured patience which sat well on his lugubrious countenance. ‘I do not wish to seem impertinent to the Colonel but I suggest the Colonel goes see for himself.’
Claremont manfully quelled what was clearly an incipient attack of apoplexy. ‘All of you! Search the train!’ (p.94)

Exaggeration There is a tendency for things to be totally w, completely x, very y indeed, or there’s no z whatsoever. Without exception the sentences would be more powerful without these adverbs or adverbial qualifiers.

Deakin himself registered no emotion whatsoever. (p.26) Colonel Claremont’s temper normally lay very close to the surface indeed. (p.28) She closed the door softly behind her, then sat on her bed for a long time indeed… in a very short time indeed the darkness would be as close to total as it could be (p.56) They moved very quickly indeed (p.76) Carlos… appeared to be gloomily contemplating what must have been his very chilly feet indeed. (p.113) Deakin heard a sound.. and turned around very very slowly indeed. (p.118) Marica looked at him in totally uncomprehending silence, her face registering almost a state of shock. (p.140) He stared at her in total astonishment. (p.153) Pearce was moving very quickly indeed into the shelter of the leading coach. (p.157) The train, rapidly dwindling into the distance, was now going very quickly indeed. (p.178) O’Brien released the brake and opened the throttle very gently indeed. (p.181)

It’s almost like MacLean is having to convince himself.

In this book I noticed another trait – his tendency to use unnecessary adverbs and then to qualify them – thus adding two syntactical layers of redundancy to his sentences.

He had an almost incredibly wrinkled nut-brown face. (p.20)

You don’t need ‘incredibly’ in that sentence – that makes it sound like a comic. And you certainly don’t need ‘almost’ because that just highlights how pointless the ‘incredibly’ is.

The lean, dark, bitter face was set in lines of an almost frighteningly implacable cruelty… Deakin turned, the same almost viciously hard expression on his face. (p.99)
The impact of his back striking against the coach roof was almost literally stunning. (p.126)
None of the bullets, almost unbelievably, ricocheted about the interior of the cab. (p.159)

It is as if he has lost confidence in himself as a writer. Everything is cranked up in case you miss it. Like a drunk telling a good story, the story survives but is almost drowned in unnecessary embellishments and exaggerations.

The expression of shocked and staring incredulity as he realised that the rest of the train was no longer there was so extreme as to be almost a parody of the real thing. (p.135)

But it is the real thing. Henry is amazed. In whose mind is it almost a parody? In the mind of the imaginer, the author, the creator, who no longer really believes in his creation, who devises a stream of breath-taking scenarios but finds himself laughing out loud at their preposterousness.

In the early and mid-1960s MacLean wrote his best novels with first-person narrators who did an attractive line in self-deprecation even as they surmounted innumerable violent obstacles. But by the 1970s the ironic distance has gone and he is half-ridiculing his own plots and scenes – he himself is quick to point out how tired and clichéd they are – and it undermines their credibility.

Marica performed the classic gesture of putting her hand to her mouth, the dark smoky eyes huge in an ashen face. (p.149)

Why write scenes in which your characters act like parodies, sterotypes and clichés – and then point it out – if you haven’t half-begun to despise your success and your fame. MacLean’s later life is a sad affair of alcoholism, and I’m glad that, when I was a kid first reading these books, I didn’t know anything about it.

Still…

All that said – it’s a short 190 pages and it is a clever tale and it is packed with genuinely exciting scenes. If you peer through the horrible style, and if you ignore the author’s lack of confidence in himself, then Breakheart Pass is like a good graphic novel, action-packed, clever, fast-moving and thrilling. It’s a quick, effective poolside read. But if I was going to give someone an Alistair MacLean novel as an introduction, God, it wouldn’t be this one.

The movie

The novel was converted into a movie within a year, directed by Tom Griest and starring Charles Bronson, Ben Johnson, Richard Crenna, and Jill Ireland.