Word: bacons
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...English know what they have got. "Surely the greatest living painter," wrote Alan Bowness, director of London's Tate Gallery. "The greatest painter in the world," claimed Lord Gowrie, England's Minister for the Arts, "and the best this country has produced since Turner." The artist is Francis Bacon, 75, whose second retrospective exhibition at the Tate (the first was 23 years ago) opened last month...
Some art is wallpaper. Bacon's is flypaper, and innumerable claims stick to it: over the past 40 years it has attracted extremes of praise and calumniation. There are still plenty of people who see his work as icily mannered, sensationalist guignol. He is the sort of artist whose work generates admiration rather than fondness. The usual evolution of major artists in old age, whereby they become cozily grand paternal figures, patting their juniors on the back and reminiscing in autumnal mellowness about their dead coevals, has not happened to Bacon, who is apt to dismiss nearly everything painted...
...lexicon of Baconian imagery is famous. Its most familiar component is the screaming Pope, smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm, his throne indicated by a pair of gold finials, the whole enclosed in a sketchy cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down...
...Bacon utterly rejects this view. He sees himself not as an expressionist but as a realist who nevertheless stakes the outcome of his art on an opposition between intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His paintings do not strive to tell stories, but to clamp themselves on the viewers' nervous system and offer, as he puts it, "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." He once remarked: "An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact...
...That "someone indistinct" is, of course, a key figure in Bacon...