Word: bacon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After the butchery of World War II, Bacon was one of the artists, along with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and a few others, who found a way to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon's boiling men and women is wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are fissured, their torsos are invertebrate; their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities - because with Bacon the body is always in extremis...
...Bacon none of this was a statement about his particular life and times, though his life played a part in it, and so did his times. What Bacon was after was something deeper. He wanted to make the body the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs...
...Picasso was the first source. In the central panel of one of Bacon's great works from the 1970s, Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso's seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed...
...when he was 35 years old. On three panels of bright reddish orange scuffed with grey, a trio of mutant figures grimace, snarl and bark. In two of them, the most expressive feature is the gaping mouth. What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes in any face painted by him are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim. In Bacon's pictures, the windows of the soul...
...1940s Bacon had been making art for almost two decades, but he had exhibited very little before the Three Studies. Until the postwar years, he was largely unknown except perhaps to the older men who supported him, his multitude of male pick-ups on the side and whatever clients he attracted for a time as an interior designer in London. Decades later, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste, the ghostly outlines of his Bauhaus-flavored interiors and steel-tube furnishings found their way into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his paintings. You detect them...