November 29, 2014 |
Let us imagine a moment in Soho, London, in the 1950s. The moment is in black and white, like John Deakin’s photographs of the period. The men wear dishevelled suits; they are poets, actual poets – that is what they do with their lives. They smoke cigarettes and drink heavily. Deakin’s images have been a surprise hit at The Photographers’ Gallery. I have watched hordes of the graceful, young people of the present stare at his pictures of Soho and Francis Bacon. And his pictures of English poets I imagine few read.
Or drunken painters who lived in alcoholism and poverty (although decades after he died I have seen Robert Colquhoun sell for £20,000 at auction).
What appeal do these images have? Why would anyone re-imagine 1950s Soho?
The men wear suits or jackets and trousers. Photos of Lucian Freud sprawled on a bed could be images of an Oxford undergrad. He is a young man in a cheap room wearing a white shirt, trousers and loose jacket. The look is ex-public school. There are suggestions of class and shifting social strata.
There are also Deakin images of men in rougher clothes – thick jumpers and a black vest or sweater. And cheap-looking trousers. In the 1950s, my father (who used to run an off-licence in east London’s Stepney) remembered that you could easily tell who was “working class”: they wore overalls, the East End dockers dressed like ‘dockers” – the clothes were rougher, thicker, more coarse.
But in the 1930s George Orwell said the manufacture of cheap clothes was beginning to tone down “the surface differences between class and class”. But you can see the “surface differences” in Deakin’s pictures.
Bacon always wears a crisp black shirt, a crisp white shirt and a good suit. But Jeffrey Bernard, Frank Auerbach and Eduardo Paolozzi have a rougher, less-formal style. I guess they are dressing down. They have taken what fashion theorists call “opportunities for self-representation”. There is a picture of W H Auden in denim jeans and crisp-looking shirt. Auden wears jeans because he is a rebel. Because he wants to make us see his difference. He wants to align himself with the working classes.
The books on Auden and Isherwood and Bacon explain it was hip – from their perspective – to be left wing (or communist) and gay. There is at least one quote from the 1980s where Bacon laments the mainstreaming of “gay”. Now that it is legal, he sighs, homosexuality has lost its edge.
Bacon is from the same period as Christopher Isherwood. He was also in Weimar Berlin. In 1927, when he was 18, Bacon’s father sent him to Berlin with a family “friend”/uncle-type figure. It was loosely hoped the friend would cure Bacon of his homosexuality. The “friend”, recalls Bacon “used to fuck absolutely everything”. Including Bacon. For a while he and this “friend” stayed at the Adlon, one of the grandest hotels in the city – remembered by Isherwood as an elite Nazi haunt.
“It had a kind of luxury that could hardly exist anywhere these days,” said Bacon. “I remember putting my hand through the hangings of the four-poster bed we had and pulling the breakfast trolley it was an extraordinary thing with a silver swan’s neck at each corner and all the time you knew that just outside the hotel the most appalling poverty was circling around.”
Pictures of Bacon in the 1930s show a prim, tightly suited figure. The look vaguely upper class and immaculate. In the 1940s he added foundation and lipstick. His suits impressed his contemporaries by their expert tailoring, said Bacon’s biographer. Bryan Robertson, who drank with Bacon in the 1940s, remembers, “the combination of lipstick, carefully dyed hair and precisely cut suits”.
To understand Bacon’s style you have to remember he was young in 1930s Berlin. And in the late 1940s, along with an older, wealthy lover, spent his days “drifting from luxury hotel to luxury hotel, eating and drinking too much”. In Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo.
To understand Bacon you must think about history in terms of space between 1927 and 1957 and compare it with 1957 to 1987. The first period is much more painful. There is more war and horror and death. The second is not pain free but there is more shopping than killing. And more pop.
Bacon’s reading is also key. He read T S Eliot, Proust, Freud, Aeschylus and Nietzsche. Like the poets in Deakin’s images, the world of books and ideas was important to him. It is reflected in the clothes. A certain high-mindedness in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s means certain styles: shapeless suiting, working-class jumpers and denims, fading bags, crisp shirts, soft ties.
Deakin was a sometime Vogue photographer. And some years earlier, like Bacon, a kept man. He lived in Berwick Street and photographed the people around him and their regular bars and clubs. These are the pictures we are talking about in this story – these are pictures that people find fascinating in 2014. He also dates back to the 1920s and 1930s; there is some story of his being a sailor and an older man taking him to Tahiti, where Deakin was painting like Gauguin – it sounds like a Somerset Maugham story – it sounds so old. So long ago.
I wonder about dressing like it’s 1950s Soho. Dressing like Bacon or Auerbach or Bruce Bernard. You would need expensive shirts, thick black sweaters, a raincoat, dishevelled suiting, dark glasses, heavy tweed coat. Deakin mainly pictured white men, but there are some images of black men in 1950s Soho; they are men on street corners in shirts and leather jackets – I can’t unpick the references in their dress.
I don’t see any teds in Deakin’s work. They might be there, but I haven’t seen them. Nothing like the 1950s pictures of John Lennon in tight jeans, quiff and black leather jacket. He looked like he had just climbed off a motorbike, said his first wife. Lennon looked great in the 1950s; he dressed that way because of Elvis, because he was looking to America for influence. Lennon in the 1950s is the same look taken by Alex from the Arctic Monkeys, the best look Alex has taken to date.
The difference between 1950s Lennon and a poet photographed by Deakin is the difference between backwards- and forwards-looking men. Lennon’s entire being was a forwards projection via American rock’n’roll away from post-war England. Same for Mick Jagger. And that is the difference between “pop” and the heavy, death-seeking, alcohol-soaked culture of the 1950s. Who reads the 1950s writers now? Who loves the paintings of John Minton and Colquhoun?
Bacon is the most enduring of Deakin’s subjects. The most famous and present. He took clothes seriously. There were many suits, all wrapped in cellophane at his studio. There was always something expensive and clean to wear. In the 1980s he chose “perfectly cut, dark, double-breasted suits with the hint of a stripe”, says his biographer (Michael Peppiatt). “He looked like an eccentric banker with an impeccable, if slightly gangsterish taste”
And at night Bacon used to go out. I love reading about Bacon. He painted during the day, he drank at night. He drank Krug. He wore a heavy Rolex. He knew elegant hotels and restaurants such as Bofinger in Paris. He went to nightclubs. And at night, in the 1980s, when he was in his seventies, “he would replace the suit with a soft leather blouson, often with epaulettes, and very narrow, sharply creased trousers. This ambiguous look, half military, half effeminate, became more sinister when the artist donned one of his black leather trenchcoats, which he wore tightly belted round his still agile frame”. On a darkened Soho street he “looked as threatening as any of the Nazi chiefs whose photographs he had incorporated into his imagery”.
Bacon himself described his style as “ordinary but better”. I like his style; I have seen nobody take influence from his 1980s dress, where he looks like a character from Helmut Newton. But he liked expensive clothes. He never wore cuff links or rings. And sometimes wore fishnets and stockings under his trousers (but I think this was when he was younger).
There are also images of fashion inside Bacon’s paintings; he painted his well-built East End lovers in their heavy black suits, crisp white shirts and skinny black ties. “He liked excessive manhood,” said Paul Danquah – an old friend of his. “Not sailors masculine suits, that’s what he liked.”
Bacon and Lennon trace a path out of the 1950s. Deakin and others vanish here. Some died before the decade was over, killed by drink and suicide. I think it was the self-discipline of Bacon that got him out – I am sure there are many other factors, but that is one. When I read about Lennon and Bacon I find stories, not just the ones about the LSD (Lennon) and the Krug (Bacon), but stories about aggressive style and pure, super-sharp focus. I hang onto such things for dear life.
By Tony Marcus
