Francis Bacon doesn’t terrify me. In fact, I can’t remember a time when this Irish painter, whose centennial retrospective recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, prompted anything in me other than pure fascination and awe. I find that this opinion, much like my love of abstract expressionist master Willem de Kooning, is not one that is widely held among the people of my generation, and when defending myself I’m often left contorting my mouth into positions that look reminiscent of Bacon’s own alien-like creatures. He’s just depressing, the dissenters say, citing the screaming, almost unrecognizable men and women who populate his sparse portraits as reason enough to stay in the 18th Century wing of the museum. Yet, to me, Bacon’s work is a mirror more capable of reflecting a human’s flawed, dizzying existence than almost any other painter I’ve come into contact with. And for that reason above all others, this exhibit is a must see.
Perhaps this comfort around undeniably uncomfortable imagery stems from the fact that I was all but brainwashed into being a Bacon fan. Any night when I crept out of my childhood bedroom to get a sip of water, I was met by four large paintings: one naked man hanging Christ-like on a pole at our stairway landing, one bed-sized self portrait of my father hanging perpendicular to Christ, and a diptych of flesh colored dog-men floating, with little more than a wooden chair filling out the pink and orange panels. It wasn’t a Bacon original, but the painting, which my father had created over many tenuous hours at his downtown studio, may as well have had a page torn from a Bacon book nestled in the corner; the inspiration was clear. As was the fact that my inoculation to this particular brand of art was well underway. (There were only so many times I could walk out of my room and be frightened before the images came to be as comfortable as the pillow from which I’d just lifted my head.)
Walking around the exhibit yesterday I was reminded of the overwhelming amount of energy that explodes from each of Bacon’s canvases; the same type of jolt that used to pop my eyes open as I shuffled around the corner outside my bedroom at three A.M.
For a painter who has openly discussed his distaste for Abstract Expressionism, Bacon, to me, employs much of the same visceral brush technique—where solid lines suddenly fade into nothingness and the only thing identifying the head of a person may be an anatomically misplaced eye socket—as the painters who were parading around New York City’s Soho at the same time Bacon was holed up in London’s equivalent. But Bacon is able to construct a hurricane of movement within the single frame of one of his paintings that is more placed in reality than paintings by his American contemporaries. You get the feeling that when painting portraits of his friends, or his lover George Dyer—as is the case with many pieces in this particular exhibit—he is not just documenting what is sitting on a stool beneath a light bulb in his studio; he is painting the energy in the room; he is painting his overall perception of the person, and every moment of interaction he has had with them is amalgamated into one frenzied blur. Yet for all of his emotional accuracy, there's nothing realistic looking in his photos. Perhaps he summed it up best when he said that "9/10ths of everything is inessential. What is called 'reality' can be summed up in so much less."
Personally, what makes this exploration so thrilling is its closeness to dance. Though the subject matter and use of color may seem more unsettling than your typical day watching a fairy princess at the ballet, the way Bacon tries to both contain and unleash his imagery through the canvas reminds me a lot of how a dancer interacts with a stage. The most exciting performances, just like Bacon’s most exciting paintings (which is to say…almost all of them), are those that manage to respect their boundaries while simultaneously obliterating them and pouring out over the audience. These paintings reach across the orchestra pit and demand that you pay attention.
If yesterday’s crowd was any indication, this exhibit, no matter how unsettling, is a high priority destination for art lovers. And judging from the handful of younger patrons, maybe I’m not the only Bacon lover in my age bracket. After all, a man who shares his name with breakfast’s most delicious meat must have some universal appeal, right?
So, Ranters, do we have any Bacon lovers here?
