Passionate Self-Control

Francis Bacon: A Century Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Until August 16, 2009

‘A Century Retrospective’ celebrates one hundred years of Francis Bacon. This symbolic event – the birthday of a dead man – is marked by a greatest hits exhibition, bringing together the most significant works from the most significant periods of Bacon’s career.

Marking this dead artist’s century birthday with an unapologetic ‘walk down museum lane’ does not necessarily shed new critical light on Bacon’s career. However, it does give audiences a fantastic opportunity to understand the essentials of Bacon’s oeuvre; adding light and shadow to the postwar existential philosophy that might otherwise be simply summed-up by Bacon’s iconic portrait of Innocent X. Study after Velazquez (1950), from Bacon’s most famous series, personifies ideas of mental frustration dissolving into futile rage. This commanding image epitomizes the theme of meaninglessness in an absurd world running through the exhibition: a powerful Pope screams at his mortality as he dissolves into the canvas. Yet the beauty of ‘A Century Retrospective’ is in learning how many types of meaninglessness there really are.

Study after Velázquez, 1950

Bacon thrived on the oxymoron: sensuous brutality, frail power, authoritative insecurity. He was fascinated with combining these dueling characteristics and revealing their presence in the known world. Bacon avoided painting from life, and instead drew inspiration from secondary sources; photographs of his friends, images from art history texts, Muybridge’s time-lapse photograph series Human Figure in Motion. What is remarkable is the sense of fantasy and emotional clout produced from these pre-packaged images.

In Study of a Figure in Landscape (1952) Bacon depicts a naked man, crouched in long yellow grass. The man is a heavy painterly presence within the wispy strokes of grass; he watches the viewer watching the man. A sort-of reverse safari scenario occurs as ferocious plains animals are substituted with the humans who hunt them. In this case, both man and viewer are the predators, their menace turned against each other.

Study of a Figure in Landscape, 1952

Bacon tunes the predatory aggression of Study of a Figure in Landscape into sinister refinement in Man in Blue V (1954). The scene is a modern bar where a man with distorted face and neat suit, leans suggestively towards the viewer. If this ‘lean’ seems sexually menacing, then the viewer must own the innuendo of his/her gaze. Again, Bacon cannily maneuvers his audience into a primal experience, where sexual drives can be as senseless and impulsive as the violence of a safari hunt.

Man in Blue V, 1954

Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962

The most overtly violent painting in the exhibition is Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). This garish triptych shows the route from man to meat in three sadistic steps, viewed through a fish-eye lens spotlighting the action of each scene. The first canvas depicts two men with solid forms and craggy faces, staring blankly at slabs of meat on front of them. In the second canvas a man’s body violently disintegrates. He lies on a bare hospital-style bed, his flesh exploding. The mattress and sheets are stained red - one of the few instances of Bacon actually depicting blood. The third canvas presents an amorphic piece of flesh, hung up as butcher’s meat, the flesh identifiable by ribs, vertebrae and small parasitic teeth. A dog peers up at it in the foreground. Bacon’s blunt illustration of the short steps from consciousness to flesh echo Muybridge’s time-lapse photographs, breaking down movement to essentials. Three Studies for a Crucifixion is an exhaustive painting, graphicly posing psychological pretensions and dead flesh as interchangeable states.

Bacon’s later work is more introspective and emotionally enigmatic, compared with his earlier preoccupation with humanity’s shortcomings and outright failings. Portrait of John Edwards (1988) offers a surprisingly serene and recognizable portrait. Throughout his career Bacon commissioned photographer John Deakin to create series of portraits of his friends, from which Bacon would paint. These photographs, on display in ‘A Century Retrospective’, are studio-stained with paint, drawn-on, crumpled, cut and torn. Bacon seems to have treated them carelessly as objects, yet used them intensely. The late paintings that derive from these images are surprisingly more solid and intimate than his earlier works. In Portrait of John Edwards the figure’s flesh is neatly contained within a single form. The armless torso and toeless feet are minor distortions compared with the realism of Edward’s face, chest and legs. The Bacon ‘twist’ occurs on the figure’s left foot, pink flesh subtly melting into pink shadow. Bacon seems to be stating: it may not be obvious, but we are all slowly disappearing.

Portrait of John Edwards, 1988

‘A Century Retrospective’ is an excellent summary of Bacon’s evolving style and subject matter. His paintings move between extreme fragility, where paint seems to fight not to disappear into the canvas, to bold expression of color in dirty, gaudy layers. The resulting technique embodies the tension and contradictory passion of Bacon’s hand. ‘A Century Retrospective’ also reveals Bacon’s shifting subject matter, as he swings between gruesome twisted flesh to the joy and pain of intimate friendships. These blunt and gentle expressions ensure that a survey of Bacon’s art becomes an oxymoron in itself. It is an overview of passionate self-control and messy precision. There is no real meaning behind the celebration of a dead artist’s hypothetical 100th birthday. However, I think the significance placed on this meaninglessness would have appealed to Bacon.