a higher order

Larry Poons, NY 1986 by Leo Holub (from: Stanford University News)

"[...] There's an old adage that says A clean house is a sign of a wasted life. The following is a description of Beethoven's workspace by a man, Baron de Tremont, who saw it firsthand:
     'Picture to yourself the darkest, most disorderly place imaginable...blotches of moisture covered the ceiling; an oldish grand piano, on which the dust disputed the place with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied chamber pot; beside it a small walnut table accustomed to the frequent overturning of the secretary placed on it; a quantity of pens encrusted with ink, compared with which the proverbial tavern pens would shine; then more music. The chairs, mostly cane-seated, were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night's supper, and with wearing apparel, etc.'"
— Trying to be Perfect
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"Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, remembers very clearly the day in 1997 when she climbed the steep stairs and entered Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. It had been left the way it was when he died, on April 28 1992, and it was a chaos of slashed canvases, paint-splashed walls, cloths, brushes, champagne boxes, a large mirror. She stood and stared for a long time, in a kind of incredulity, "and actually it became quite beautiful." She began to see "paths cut through it," and details. "The last unfinished painting was on the easel when I went in there, and on the floor underneath the easel was a short article on George Michael, from Wham, about how he liked to be photographed from one side. It was like looking into somebody's mind. [...]
     Dawson recognised that the studio was the making of Bacon's art in a more profound sense than just being a comfortable space to paint in, and determined that it should not be dismantled. John Edwards, to whom Bacon had left Reece Mews, felt similarly, and after months of painstaking cataloguing by archaeologists, conservators and photographers - they recorded the exact position of everything - the Hugh Lane Gallery took delivery of the studio, in toto, in 1998. It was opened to the public in 2001. [...]
     In the end, there were 7,500 items - 2,000 samples of painting materials, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvasses, umpteen handwritten notes, drawings, books, champagne boxes, corduroy trousers (he ripped them up and used the cloth to achieve his distinctive paint textures) … it took two years to compile a database of all of it, for the delectation of Bacon scholars in perpetuity"
— Alda Edemariam, The Guardian
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