Word: bacon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. That's the conclusion you can't help taking away from the Bacon retrospective that opened May 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I caught the show last year at its first venue, London's Tate Britain, and left it convinced that it was one of the most powerful exhibitions I'd seen in more than 40 years of museumgoing...
This has nothing to do with Bacon as the phenomenon of last year's hot auction market, now extinguished, where one of his triptychs sold for $86 million. By bringing together almost five decades of his work into a collective cry, this show makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, what used to be called a tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, as well as low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of suffering, where is the art that...
...exhibition, which runs through Aug. 16, marks the centenary of Bacon's birth in 1909 in Dublin. His father, a truculent British army officer turned horse trainer, shuttled the family for years between Ireland and England. But by the age of 16, Bacon was in London, and living on his own with a small allowance from his mother and the assistance of various older men. Eventually he drifted into a career as an interior decorator while trying to find his way as a painter. But it wasn't until the 1940s that he arrived at the vocabulary of tortured forms...
Along with Giacometti, Dubuffet and a few others, Bacon would emerge as one of the artists who found a way, after the butchery of World War II, to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon's men and women is wrenched and smeared by their own drives and desires and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are split, their torsos are boneless. Their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities--because with Bacon the body is always in extremis...
...according to Peter G. Bacon ’11, a student in Frank’s course History 1266: “Central Europe 1789-1918,” she’s doing a good...