Irish Arts Review

Fragments of TimeAuthor(s): Catherine MarshallSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 26, No. 3 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 76-79Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40421249 .

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Fragments of time il

Catherine Marshall

describes the elusive

process of creating an

intimate portrait, i

exemplified in John j i

Minihan's series on i

Francis Bacon j

1, 2, 3 Francis Bacon, London 1976

1

U Francis Bacon at the Tate Gallery, London 1985

k

5 Francis Bacon and John Minihan outside the Malborough Gallery, London 1976

5

photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often

contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.1

Ambiguity is an essential quality in suc- cessful artworks. Without it the work is only superficially representative. While this is true of all artworks it is especially key in relation to portraiture. No one is so omnis- cient that a single image can tell them all

they need to know about another human

being, so the art of portraiture is a very complex and demanding one. It can be achieved through painted or

sculpted likenesses or through photography and there are many fine

examples but in only a handful of these, do we feel that we can really form an acquaintance with the person behind the formal pose or the

officially approved likeness. In the past painted portraits required mul-

tiple sittings through which both artist and sitter had a chance to get to know each other and hopefully imbue the final image with some level of that knowledge. In recent times painted and sculpted portraits have become dependent on photographs in place of slower processes of acquaintance, and the signs, in the form of leaden images are there to prove it. They rarely give the same satisfaction, either on a human or

76 IRISH ARTS REVIEW I AUTUMN 2009

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L 3

an aesthetic level, as the portraits of Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Van

Gogh, however much they might excite by being cast in the artist's blood or some other equally nerve jangling process.

Where does that leave photographic portraitists? The challenge for them is to imbue their portraits, the effect of light through a single shutter opening, with the knowledge garnered through sitting after sit-

ting of the painted equivalents. This is a rare achievement, only attained in Ireland by the late Fergus Bourke and, more recently by, John Minihan.

An exhibition in Waterford of work by John Minihan in this cente-

nary year of the birth of Francis Bacon inevitably evokes his photo- graphic portraits of the painter and prompts discussion about the virtues of both practices. Since Minihan has described himself as a pho- tographer and not an artist2 it is worth considering his portraits of Bacon alongside painted examples by Louis le Brocquy. Le Brocquy and Bacon have another Irish celebrity in common too, the writer Samuel Beckett. How do their respective investigations of these well-known faces add to our knowledge of their famous sitters? Curiously while their practices might seem to represent polar opposi tes, it is not only their interest in celebrity that links le Brocquy and Minihan. The first

important body of work that Minihan produced had little to do with

celebrity. Despite his professional job, as the youngest staff photogra- pher for the Evening Standard where he was sent to find news pictures, John Minihan was powerfully attracted to the day-to-day experience of life in one specific place, his old hometown of Athy in Co Kildare,

which he began to photograph at the age of twenty-three and contin- ued to do so every year for the past forty years. His extraordinary cov-

erage over two days and nights of a wake and funeral in Athy is equalled in Irish art only by le Brocquy 's early works about Travellers or the Achill

landscape, impoverished by the dereliction and waste left by rural

depopulation and emigration.3 Minihan knew Francis Bacon when he recorded the funeral rites of

Katy Tyrrell in Athy Sent to photograph the already famous artist as he was acquitted at the Marlborough Magistrate's Court of a drugs charge in 1971, the two men met again just five years later when Minihan pho- tographed the painter at the Marlborough Gallery in London (Fig 1-3) and in 1977, when Bacon invited Minihan to photograph his exhibition at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris (Fig 7). A number of photo oppor- tunities followed, including Bacon's triumphant exhibition at the Tate in 1985 (Figs 4&6). The culmination of all of this was Minihan 's exhibi- tion, 'Bacon, Beckett and Burroughs' at the October Gallery, London in 1989 which was attended by both Bacon and Burroughs and led to a fur- ther series of photographs of the two men, acquainted since hedonist

days inTangiers, now older and frailer, (especially Burroughs, four years younger but looking much older), as they support each other along a London street (Fig 8). Needless to say, they were not joined by the third-

named-person in the exhibition, Samuel Beckett. Beckett, reclusive and ill, although not as reluctant to be photographed as is often claimed, did not attend the exhibition. Indeed when he and Minihan met, over the

AUTUMN 2009 I IRISH ARTS REVIEW 77

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6 Francis Bacon at the Tate Gallery, London 1985

7 Francis Bacon in front of Triptyque (1976) at the Claude Bernard Gallery, Paris 1977

7

8 Francis Bacon with William S Burroughs arrive at the October Gallery, London 1989

WHAT MINIHAN'S APPARENTLY CASUAL 'SNAPSHOTS' OF THIS NOTORIOUSLY CONVIVIAL BON VIVANT REVEAL... IS A MAN WHO IS ALWAYS ALONE IN HIS THOUGHTS, ALWAYS LOOKING BEYOND THE MOMENT

previous decade Beckett had politely refused to pose with Bacon

although he did remark on how famous Bacon had become in Paris. Minihan refers to Bacon's respect for photography which he percep-

tively describes as, 'the salient influence in much of his work, ' Minihan

goes on to point out, ' In the early 1 970s when Bacon was at the height

of his fame, his most important collaboration was with the photogra- pher John Deakin.4 Bacon's collaborations with Deakin are central to his formative early work. His powerful abstracted forms emerged from a combination of absence and memory. His process therefore was to have Deakin photograph the model while Bacon painted his mental image of it, only referring to the photograph from time to time as a checkpoint. He applied this process particularly to his portraits. When the distin-

guished English photographer Cecil Beaton expressed some reserve about Bacon's portrait of him, Bacon horrified him by slashing the por- trait to shreds and telling his distraught sitter not to worry that he would do a better job from memory. s

Bacon's debt to still images from Eisensteins 1925 film, The Battleship Potemkin, and Poussin 's Massacre oî the Innocents are well known. In each case

screaming mouths and faces distorted by fear and panic were the motifs that attracted him. It is less well known that Samuel Beckett was also a fan of Eisenstein 's, and even wrote in 1936 to ask if he could work with

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PHOTOGRAPHY FRAGMENTS OF TIME

him as an apprentice. While that never came to anything ;the image of the screaming mouth that so attracted Frances Bacon must surely have

prompted Beckett's concentration on a babbling open mouth in Not I, and Neil Jordan's inspired film of the play, and the gaping mouth occurs

again in paintings by Louis le Brocquy,6 who was familiar with each of the artists and probably Eisensteins film. Clearly the gap between artist/writer/film-maker and photographer is a blurred one.

John Minihan's portraits of Bacon are all about memory. They tell us that this is how the artist looked in 1985 on the steps of the Tate, walk-

ing with William S Burroughs in 1989, or standing against the wall of the Marlborough Gallery in 1 976. As you look you find yourself, check-

ing the artist's age, already sixty-seven in the first photographs, a sur-

prisingly youthful eighty in the photographs with Burroughs, and with that awareness of time comes a jolting sense of the discontinuity between those past moments and our present. No single image from the Bacon series provides an overview of the painter. Instead, like le

Brocquy 's multiple studies of Irish celebrities, what the photographs offer us is a series of images, revealing Bacon's different qualities and

moods, an honest confirmation that no one photograph can encapsulate all that is important about so complex and creative an artist. What Minihan's apparently casual 'snapshots' of this notoriously convivial bon vivant reveal, whether he is surrounded by people at the Tate or in the Claude Bernard Gallery, is a man who is always alone in his thoughts, always looking beyond the moment. The ambiguity in these complex photographic portraits resides in our inability to put ourselves inside that mental process which is so visible but unreadable in each and every one. Furthermore, in contrast to the painted portraits of Bacon, Beckett and the others, what Minihan's images force is a realisation of those

people in a past that we can no longer inhabit, we look at them and back at them in the same action and it is up to us, the viewers to make sense of the dislocation if we can, or as Philip Larkin put it,

' to condense, In short, a past that no one now can share'. 7 ■

John Minihan, 'In Retrospect', Greyfriars Gallery, Waterford 12 September- 1 October 2009 All images ©The Artist

CATHERINE MARSHALL is Co-Editor Volume V, Art and Architecture of Ireland, RIA.

1 John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling, Cambridge 1989 p7 2 Minihan, Official website of the Irish Photographer. 3 For further information about these bodies of work see Shadows From the Pale;

Portrait of an Irish Town, John Minihan, Eugene McCabe, London 1996, and Louis le Brocquy; Paintings 1939-1996, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1996.

A John Minihan, Official website.

5 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon; Studies For a Portrait, New Haven and London, 2008, p 32.

6 Louis le Brocquy, b. 1916 Head with Open Mouth, 1971. Private Collection. 7 Philip Larkin, 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', in The Less Deceived,

The Marvell Press, 1955.

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