Profile
Photos
Comments
WHEN ANGRY, SERVE BACON
By BARBARA HOFFMAN
HAD Prozac been around 50 years ago, Francis Bacon's work might not have sizzled.
He
was an atheist and an existen tialist, a gay man in an England that
imprisoned homosexuals. Angry and driven, he unleashed his paintings of
frenzied dogs, howling mouths and monstrous popes on an often appalled
public.
It was Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher who called him "the artist who paints those horrible pictures."
Now,
100 years after his birth -- and 17 years since his death -- the Met is
bringing home the Bacon with an impressive retrospective: more than 60
paintings, some never displayed before, alongside archival bits from
his London studio.
It's a breathtaking if flinch-inducing look at the self-taught painter who's one of the biggest influences on artists today.
That
he's no longer with us, says Met curator Gary Tinterow, frees us to see
his work "unencumbered by his personality" -- which was bigger (and
bleaker) than life. It's also freed up his archive and lets us visit --
via a life-size photo mural -- his London studio, with its hodgepodge
of bristling brushes and crumpled black-and-white photos.
Like
Greta Garbo, Bacon wanted to be alone, preferring to paint from photos
instead of the real thing. For a time, he also caged his subjects --
popes and apes, particularly -- behind shutter-like lines that masked
any faults in his technique. He also put his paintings behind glass --
the better to let viewers see their own reflections and be drawn into
the darkness within.
Moving from room
to room, you can actually see Bacon tweaking his technique, picking up
what he liked from Goya, Picasso and van Gogh. Thrumming underneath it
all -- the butchered bodies, shadowy businessmen, the libertine nailed
to her bed with a hypodermic syringe -- is a fury that seems to
dissipate in the later, calmer portraits.
You
can see Bacon's technique grow more assured in his paintings of George
Dyer, the petty thief who was his one-time lover (they met when Dyer
broke into Bacon's London studio). The backgrounds of these paintings
are lighter, the feeling warmer.
The
final paintings of bullfights and Greek tragedies seem almost
lighthearted after the mayhem that's come before, thanks perhaps to his
finding peace with the illiterate but good-hearted Cockney he named his
heir.
"Champagne for my real friends,
real pain for my sham friends," Bacon liked to say. (You can buy a
T-shirt with the saying at the museum's gift shop).
He
spent his final days tended by nuns in a hospital in Spain, a crucifix
over his bed. He probably would have appreciated the irony.
