Word: bacon
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...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...
...Pope? With Bacon there's never one answer. His great gift was for conflation, visual and psychological, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form. From a 19th century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he could take the squatting silhouette of a man and dissolve it within the outlines of a crouching boy attributed to Michelangelo. He could borrow the eyeglasses from a famous shot of a screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and perch them on a Pope's nose. In the same way, the meaning of his screaming Pontiff in Head VI fluctuates. Trapped...
...same picture of the Holy Father could also bear traces of Bacon's anguished dealings with his own father, a truculent English army officer turned horse trainer who moved the family to Ireland, where Bacon was born in 1909. "Eddie" Bacon eventually rejected his girlish son and, if Bacon's not always reliable stories can be trusted, even had him whipped by stableboys to make...
...always a mistake to understand Bacon's work too quickly by way of his life. That's true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon's 1971 Paris retrospective. With a picture like Triptych - August 1972 Bacon didn't simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to an even starker abbreviation of a pitiless world. All through the '70s Bacon would flatten and simplify the spaces within which he put his liquid...