Patricia Highsmith

Welcoming
New Snippets VII –
Patricia Highsmith


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Looking At Bacon with Highsmith

›What’s next with Sigmund Freud?‹ (Wie weiter mit Sigmund Freud?) was the title of a 2008 brochure by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. This was pointing to the question if the oeuvre of Sigmund Freud still can be considered as being stimulating to the social sciences. Yet, it is tricky with such questions. Because a myriad of other questions might follow.

For example ›what’s next with Freud?‹ in the Humanities. Or Art History.
For those considering the work as Freud already as mere poetry I have the following suggestion. We know that this poetry has stimulated many a writer, many an artist. We count among them for example writer Patricia Highsmith and painter Francis Bacon. But as long as the status of Freud, within the context of whatever field of human practice, is under scrutiny, one might as well look at Bacon with Highsmith. Because Patricia Highsmith, according to Highsmith biographers, regarded the visual interpreation of human condition as the best expression of her own vision of human condition. Which is: It may make sense to look at Highsmith stories and novels, or at the way human beings are driven by psychic forces within Highsmith stories also as a key to Bacon pictures. Wherein human beings seem to be driven, indeed distorted by… well, by what forces? By psychic forces? Or social forces? Or whatever forces.

In sum: perhaps, as to the interpretation of art, we need less psychological notions and theories. But stories that show human individuals in the middle of complex social, psychic and whatever forces. And we might be in dialogue. With writers. With artists, and also with more lyrical artists like Bacon (and perhaps, if indirectly, also with Freud).

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