Inspirations Behind Gerard Schurmann’s 6 Studies of Francis Bacon
The Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) painted the human figure, but often in disquieting images. Many of his subjects, including crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of friends, were done over and over again, changing each time to reflect a different aspect of the subject. His oeuvre comprises 590 extant works, with ‘hundreds’ of other works destroyed by the artist.
John Deakin: Francis Bacon
His habit of working in series resulted in decades-long productions: ‘the 1930s Picasso-influenced bio-morphs and Furies, the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s “screaming popes,” the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the early 1960s crucifixions, the mid-to-late 1960s portraits of friends, the 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler, more technical 1980s paintings’.
The Javanese/Dutch-born British composer Gerard Schurmann (1924–2020) is best known as a film composer from the 1950s to the 1990s and was the orchestrator for the music for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). During WWII, Schurmann was cultural attaché for the Embassy of the Netherlands in London and, with the encouragement of the conductor Eduard van Beinum, became resident orchestral conductor at the Netherlands Radio in Hilversum, the Netherlands. When he returned to the UK, he started as a composer. His output covers all genres of classical music from chamber to orchestral, and film music.
Gerard Schurmann (photo: Arden Ash)
He studied with Alan Rawsthorne in the UK, the start of a lifelong friendship and mentorship. Another lifelong friend was Francis Bacon, starting when they were neighbours in Henley-on-Thames, to the west of London.
Francis Bacon: Study of Gerard Schurmann, 1969 (Private collection)
In 1968, Schumann was commissioned by the 1969 Dublin Festival for an orchestral work. He had been considering a work to pay tribute to Bacon’s art, and so Six Studies of Francis Bacon, entitled in the style of the painter, came to be.
The work is like Bacon’s images – mysterious and yet with bright, clashing chords. One writer called it ‘a major work: a fabulous score, exciting, brilliant, dramatic and subtle, a serious and thrilling piece of music which has touches of genuine humour to offset its often deeply moving seriousness’.
Starting in the 1940s, Bacon painted a number of works of figures in a landscape. This Figure from 1945 is thought to be Bacon’s lover Eric Hall, wearing a suit and dozing on a bench in Hyde Park. Held by the Tate Gallery, their description says, ‘A substantial section of the body has been overpainted, suggesting a black void. An open mouth can be discerned speaking into microphone, a detail that may have derived from photographs of Nazi leaders giving speeches. The pastoral setting is therefore contrasted with the intimations of organised political violence, making this an early example of Bacon’s combination of aggression and everyday mundane reality’.
Bacon: Figure in a Landscape, 1945 (London: Tate)
In this movement, Schurmann presents the musical ideas as though heard from different perspectives: at first, in the middle distance, then at a far distance, and then suddenly ‘looming large in the foreground’.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – Introduction – No. 1. Figures in A Landscape (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
One of Bacon’s most famous series is known as the Screaming Popes. Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X was painted around 1650 and is an ‘unflinching portrait of a highly intelligent, shrewd, and ageing man’. As a portrait of the then-most powerful man in the world, Velázquez’s image captured the confidence and hidden side of his subject. It was Velázquez’s masterpiece that placed him on the level of Titian and other great Italian portraitists.
Diego Velázquez: Retrato del Papa Inocencio X, ca 1650 (Rome: Galleria Doria Pamphilj)
In his ‘Screaming Popes’ series, Bacon painted more than 45 variants on this image during the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the early versions is the one in The Des Moines Art Center (below). Here, the screaming voice is ‘silenced’ by the enclosing drapes and dark colours. His chair is now an enclosing cage, and a transparent over-drape becomes part of his face.
Bacon: Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 (Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines)
It is thought that the screaming image comes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, where a nurse is shown screaming with an open mouth and a blood-stained face. Bacon kept the image in his studio.
The Screaming Nurse, Battleship Potemkin, 1925
Schumann’s setting immediately screams at us with an explosion of brass and percussion. The following section is slower, with a dignified beat, yet with a distorted grandeur that seems like an instrumental Gregorian chant. The third section is again slow, but now with a more incessant pulse. It all ends with a return to the opening scream, now even more insistent.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – No. 2. Popes (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
The British painter Isabel Rawsthorne, married to Schurmann’s teacher and mentor Alan Rawsthorne, was a beautiful woman who was the subject of many artists’ works. Described as a ‘model and muse’, she was involved with Alberto Giacometti and was the subject of both his portrait heads and his etiolated statues, first small then large.
Alberto Giacometti: Head of Isabel (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum)
Alberto Giacometti: Standing Woman, ca 1959 (University of East Anglia: Sainsbury Centre)
Frances Bacon did some twenty-two paintings of her and spoke of her as the ‘only woman with whom he had a close relationship’. They had similar views on art and were famed for their long conversations on art. One of Bacon’s images of Isabel that particularly struck Schurmann was a 1967 painting of her standing on a corner in Soho in 1967.
Bacon: Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street In Soho, 1967 (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
Bacon also made 5 triptych studies of her.
Bacon: Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966
Isabel Rawsthorne, as an artist, has fallen by the wayside, and now it’s in her position as muse and model that we remember her.
Schurmann’s movement opens with a slow theme in the clarinet, followed by a variation set. Like Bacon’s images, this movement is isolated and simple. It seems less like a movement for full orchestra than a little chamber work embedded in the ensemble.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – No. 3. Isabel (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
Bacon’s art always sought to reveal the hidden violence in his subjects. His Crucifixion series brings this to the fore. The 1965 Expressionist work was the one that first brought him to the public eye. It has been compared with both Rembrandt and Picasso in terms of inspiration. Rembrandt’s 1655 work Slaughtered Ox gives us the form and the violence behind the image.
Rembrandt: The Carcass of an Ox (Slaughtered Ox), 1655 (Louvre)
Picasso’s 1932 Surrealist painting Bather with Beach Ball also gives us the same form, but now floating.
Picasso: Bather with Beach Ball, 1932 (New York: MOMA)
The crucified body is covered in a white cloth, making it doubly ghostly. Bacon seems to be summoning the memories of WWI and WWII, and how brutality had overtaken the world. The horrors of war and the transgressions of religion hold an equal role in the image.
Bacon: Crucifixion, 1965 (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen)
From its tempo marking of Presto violente, Schurmann’s movement picks up on the prickliness of Bacon’s image. Gestures are grandiose but ultimately futile, rushing in all directions.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – No. 4. Crucifixion (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
George Dyer, from an East End crime family, became Bacon’s lover in 1963. From then until his death by sleeping pills in Paris in 1971, he was the low-class anomaly in Bacon’s increasingly sophisticated circles. As Bacon became more famous, Dyer felt more and more marginalised and by 1970, Dyer used Bacon’s money to remain ‘more or less permanently drunk’. Despite Dyer’s feelings of being left on the sidelines, his death deeply affected Bacon, and he suffered a months-long emotional and physical breakdown.
In his portrait, Bacon shows Dyer looking one way and pedalling in another, as though the instant before a mighty crash.
Bacon: Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966 (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, BeyelerCollection)
Schurmann’s music is light and speedy, but seems to indicate that this particular bicycle ride was going to end with George in an ambulance speeding off to the hospital while his poor bike remains behind, its wheels spinning.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – No. 5. George and the Bicycle (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
Bacon said that he took to doing self-portraits when he could no longer find models to sit for him. His image emphasizes his lips and eyes, topped by untidy brown hair.
Bacon: Self-Portrait, 1969
Other self-portraits show him after being beaten up, with swollen eyes. The portraits are public but introspective. At the same time as he produced his self-portraits, he was also doing paintings depicting Dyer, blaming himself for his death. His three large-scale ‘black triptychs’ show the moments before, during, and after Dyer’s death and were Bacon’s way of exorcising his guilt.
Bacon: Triptych August 1972 (Tate)
The final movement returns to the feeling of the introduction. Having been through Bacon’s life work via Schurmann’s music, we now have different feelings about this return to the beginning. The ‘brooding seriousness’ has come home and isn’t leavened by anything light. We’re sitting in meditation about the works (both artistic and musical) that we’ve experienced. Just as with so many of Bacon’s works, this one ends with a triptych: three repeated string chords that give us finality but with questions still remaining unanswered.
Gerard Schurmann: 6 Studies of Francis Bacon – No. 6. Self-Portrait (BBC Symphony Orchestra; Gerard Schurmann, cond.)
Schurmann’s Studies have taken us deeply into a modern artist’s life and work, giving us not a surface view but one that looks deeply into both the artist and his works. Bacon’s works can be deeply upsetting, particularly in their use of implied violence, but then he lived in a violent world. Before he met George Dyer, Bacon’s lovers were more powerful than he was, and he was often the victim of beatings and rape at their hands or left damaged and drunk in the gutter. One writer called Bacon’s relationship with Dyer as ‘fraught with conflict, charged with love, blurred by alcohol, and agonisingly dysfunctional’, and the same could be said of Francis Bacon’s life as well.
Schurmann’s work sheds significant light on Bacon’s career, as viewed by one of his close friends. The art of his music lights up Bacon’s art in new and deeper ways.
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