Credit: Dangerous Minds / YouTube Still / Public Domain

Who among us hasn’t had a bit of fun at the expense of abstract art from time to time?

Especially to those not deeply immersed in the world of art, it’s a very, very easy thing to do. After all, for most people, art is as much a function as it is a form, especially painting. For the majority of people, a painting is there to reproduce a beautiful image in the style of the artist who painted it. You can take a little bit of artistic licence with it, but fundamentally, we’d like to understand what it is we’re looking at. Then you get the people looking to push the medium forward.

After that, you get the people who are only interested in the artistic licence and the style of the person who painted it. To be clear, those people are the most important in that artistic medium. No form of art truly lives when it’s stagnant, and if no one’s pushing it forward, then no one really cares about it. These people keep the medium alive and relevant, but Christ, it can be a little much. There are days when you’re dragged in front of the Tate Modern’s latest masterpiece, find that it’s a cheesegrater spattered with purple paint placed on top of a DVD copy of Hot Fuzz, and go “what the shiny fuck am I meant to do with this?!”

Now, people who aren’t passionate about art don’t realise that that reaction is kind of the point. Much in the same way that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ made people feel deeply uncomfortable at the time of their release, transgressive art is meant to alienate people. It’s intended to challenge the notion that art is solely meant to placate and comfort people. Thus, the layman’s reaction is seemingly to scoff at it, the last resort of people who don’t know what they’re looking at.

Or so you might think.

So, what did Bacon and Burroughs say?

If being put off by abstract art is the behaviour of people who don’t understand transgressive art, then surely, one shouldn’t be able to find two men more all in on progressive painting than Francis Bacon and William S Burroughs?

Both of these men are responsible for a handful of works of art as spectacular as they are baffling. Bacon for his raw, unsettling paintings like Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and The Black Triptychs. Burroughs for novels like Junkie and Naked Lunch.

While making a documentary about Burroughs, filmmaker Howard Brookner captured a meeting between Bacon and the man himself, which showed this not to be the case. It showed that when their guards are down, even geniuses like them can be just as bitchy and dismissive of modern art as anyone else. Bacon, in particular, sniffed that the works of Jackson Pollock are little more than “pretty decoration”. He does make a reference to Pollock’s standing as a great artist, saying that he shouldn’t say that to an American, as Pollock is “their great hero”.

“Not to me,” sniffs Burroughs.

Burroughs himself continues, saying that whatever American abstract art is becoming, it might as well be theatre “because it has nothing to do with painting whatsoever”. Ouch.

So, next time some twonk in a scarf starts drawling that you don’t like something because of your “uncultured taste”, you can shoot back that it’s an “uncultured taste” you share with two of the greatest artists of their age.