History, Myth, Poetry

Peter de Francia once suggested that he only ever made two serious political paintings: The Bombing of Sakiet, which depicted a French military atrocity in Tunisia during the Algerian War, and African Prison (both 1959). To these, it feels necessary at the very least to add The Execution of Beloyannis (1953–54), responding to the death of a famous Greek Communist leader. These are ambitious works that harness the established genre of history painting to reveal contemporary inequalities or abuses of power. Here, perhaps, de Francia was following the injunction of Bertold Brecht (a figure he much admired) to ‘Begin from the bad new things, not the good old things’ – and yet, as de Francia stated in interview with his friend the writer and broadcaster Philip Dodd, his appreciation for the ‘good old things’ was always a rich vein of inspiration. In his great triptych of the 1960s, The Emigrants (1964–66; Tate), de Francia depicts an episode in the Maghreb that was ‘prompted by my hearing a story-teller on a ship telling a story to a group or groups of North Africans going to Africa […] To me, it felt as though it had something Homeric about it.’ He produced many paintings and drawings after figures including Pandora, Prometheus, the Minotaur – a focus on classical myth that was perhaps unusual for an artist committed elsewhere to social realism, though this was a dichotomy he would have rejected.  His reading of modern poetry, too, was broad and deep – included in the selected works in this section are illustrations accompanying works by Césaire, Cavafy, René Char, the Czech writer Miroslav Holub, the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and a remembrance of the great Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.