Word: bacons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bloody Beef. Man is a grisly fact to Bacon's eye. With surrealistic swiftness, he slaughters the human form; yet the smithereens seem to scream for recognition. Despite the mayhem he commits with his brushes and his stylistic isolation, he is today considered Britain's greatest living painter. In a recent poll by France's Connaissance des Arts, he ranked fifth among the world's ten favorite living artists. His works are selling for prices...
...Bacon achieved this popularity despite his blatantly repellent subject matter: slabs of bloody beef, shrieking popes, and men performing vague erotic gymnastics. In his recent paintings, he has focused on portraiture. In a frenzy since the beginning of the year, he has painted 30, half of which go on view in Paris' Galerie Maeght this week. The rest the artist cut to bits too small to reach the open market via his trash basket...
Excitement & Horror. Bacon does not accept commissions, and his subjects are quite naturally his closest friends. Frequently he paints Isobel Rawsthorne, wife of Composer Alan Rawsthorne (see opposite page); or the painter Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund. He does not try to provide insights into their specific characters. Says he, "I am really trying to create formal traps which will suddenly close at the right moment recording this fact of man as accurately...
What fascinates Bacon is the perfect portrait of human tragedy. He resurrects the image of man halfway between life and death like some mad coroner who frames the clotted residue of life. "We exist this short moment between birth and death," he says. "You are more conscious of sunlight when you see the darkness of the shadows. There is life and there is death, like sunlight and shadow. This must heighten the excitement of life. And then it heightens the horror...
Through a One-Way Window. Some critics have said Bacon only paints his own despair. "I'm a drifter," admits Bacon, who confesses to living in a hazy homosexual underworld. But, he continues, "I have seen the despair of so many people, whether they are young or old, and it doesn't appear to be much different whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. It's possible that loneliness haunts homosexual people more, especially toward old age." If so, Bacon, now 57, bends his despair to the manner...