Cindy Dupuis, student journalist (CD): Hello Jean Luc Angrand, you seem both fascinated and repulsed by the painter Francis Bacon.
Jean Luc Angrand (JLA): Yes, that's accurate. This individual is both a great artist and a monster, and it's this distortion that both fascinates and disgusts me.
CD: What characterizes Bacon?
JLA: Bacon was fascinated by death and by animal carcasses in butcheries; clearly for him, Dyer, his lover, was his carcass.
"We are potential carcasses. When I go to the butcher's, I'm always surprised not to be there in the animal's place," he said at an evening event - Francis Bacon, reflection given to David Sylvester.
DC: He seems to have been very violent psychologically and physically with his lover?
JLA: Dyer, his lover, officially committed suicide during Bacon's absence, in their room at the Hotel des Saints Pères; the day before the exhibition at the Grand Palais.
DC: He often paints Dyer as a piece of meat, you say?
JLA: Dyer was Bacon's human carcass and was very often represented in his paintings in an obsessive manner.
DC: Did George Dyer really commit suicide?
JLA: Given the cruel relationship that bound them both, one can wonder. Bacon's violent sadism may have pushed him too far in their relationship filled with constant humiliation and physical violence; Dyer was mentally fragile and highly dependent.
DC: You talk about Bacon's inhumanity?
JLA: Yes, it's a fact known by all his acquaintances. The inhumanity he displayed during the exhibition and the subsequent VIP evening, after the suicide(?), suggests that the death of his human carcass mattered little to him. The triptychs subsequently dedicated to Dyer seem to express a certain sadistic pleasure from the suffering of his victim.
DC: You suspect murder?
JLA: Yes! It's not impossible that the Parisian governmental network covered up George Dyer's assassination by Bacon, to not harm the major exhibition sponsored by President Pompidou. It's a hypothesis.
DC: You cite a statement by renowned painter David Hockney that's not very flattering of Bacon?
JLA: Yes, it's a revealing anecdote about Bacon's monstrous nature shared by the painter David Hockney, which lets us see Bacon even more clearly.
Shortly after the suspicious death of his lover George Dyer, Bacon told Hockney in a cafe that he had two choices on how to express his feelings about his lover's disappearance: collapse or laughter; he burst out laughing.
David Hockney was paralyzed with horror and shock; the other witnesses felt the same.
DC: You subtitled one of his paintings as an apology for cruelty?
"At the table, there's George Dyer to eat!" seems to say the psychopath Francis Bacon in this painting that I describe in my book "L'art raconté crûment" (Art Narrated Rawly). For Bacon, no pity for George Dyer, the carcass.
DC: In your book, you talk about the great hypocrisy of the art world?
JLA: Yes, I believe many might have realized that Bacon was a psychopath, but it's so much more convenient in the art world to avoid making embarrassing comments.
DC: You see an apology for Nazism in one of his paintings?
According to the official narrative, it's just a bullfight with a banner depicting a Roman Empire flag amidst a crowd in the background.
Come on!
I rather think it's a Nazi flag amidst a sect meeting; that alone gives this artwork an ideological orientation, doesn't it?
Don't lose sight of this interpretation because you wouldn't understand the object of sacrifice. Which sacrifice? The sacrifice of the Bull, which is also the "carcass" George Dyer.
I have a fundamental question: Was George Dyer Jewish?
In any case, Bacon is talking about the killing of a man, Jewish or not.
DC: He also had a grudge against the Catholic Church?
The psychopath Bacon clearly wishes for the death of Christianity. For this, he paints a Pope executed by an electric chair. Nothing surprising from an admirer of the satanist and illustrator William Blake; all satanists are alike.
DC: Thank you, Jean Luc Angrand, for once again sharing your knowledge.
JLA: Thank you, Cindy.