.he collapsed.
Francis Bacon was one of the first painters I remember being intellectually intrigued by. I loved other artists for their ability to represent beauty via an artistic medium but it was Francis Bacon who I (troublesomely) almost couldn't put a finger on. The violent brush strokes and the frantic, distorted figures that are on display his paintings just raised more questions than they answered. I often saw the violence in his work, not necessarily blood and gore but rather the animal qualities that live just below the surface inside us as human beings.
Seeing the Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday made me more aware of not just the violence in his images but also the sadness that inhabit them as well. His Three Studies for a Self Portrait (see above) always bordered on heartbreaking for me to look at. He exaggerates his features and cuts into his own flesh but also paints himself with better detail than is seen in many of his other work. As other figures have mouths wide open (grinning, laughing, screaming? The question is raised in the show. I always thought of the Pope in Study after Velazquez - on the left - as screaming from inside this cage when it could very easily be him laughing with sick pleasure on his thrown) his own mouth is barely open; meekly breathing in for air with a dullard look. He is sad and pathetic and self-loathing but also seems immensely aware of just how talented he truly is. He often spoke about how he painted himself because there was no left alive in his life but even that statement reflects both misery and ego.
As always, the show was impeccably curated (again, my love and fascination of the curatorial staff at the Met show on bonds, well maybe not the people who put together Model as Muse but that's another tale) and the detail in research reflected a love of the artist's work. I learned about how he almost exclusively painted from photos or other source material and I was delighted to see his fascination with Eadweard "ask me about my tattoo" Muybridge. Bacon's Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) (see right) is directly copied from Muybridge's 1887 motion experiments of a child with CP. The original photograph shows a child almost happily walking forward, facing the camera as if showing off and completely unaware of the fascination an outsider might have. However, Bacon takes that figure and with sensuous brushwork makes it into an animal; something only vaguly resembling a human being that looks more apt for Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
With any retrospective, you can't enjoy every piece of work and there are later paintings that seem half-hearted and without the emotional attachment that created the myth-like status of Francis Bacon. But all-in-all it's an amazing exhibition, showing the work of a painter whose work doesn't seem to reflect any interest in making anyone happy. This is especially noted in the reactions of the tourists who have just wandered in the show; I feel like their disgusted reactions would have made him both amused and angered by their need to try and explain his very personal paintings. My final thought is this: no matter what, every time I look at a Bacon it makes me want to paint and hit brush to (raw) canvas with that passion but I realize I can't for the life of me paint so I can just violently release the shutter of my camera. Well, we all can't have painting retrospectives at the Met.
