Word: bacons
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...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...
...center panel and its butchered carcass in the right, the body is the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed. 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 are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim, as in his portrait of the writer Michel Leiris. With Bacon, the windows of the soul...
...piece together his wretched figures, Bacon spent a lifetime ransacking art history. From Poussin he took the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photos of wrestlers gave him a perennial motif--sex as sexual combat. He also drew from sources far outside art. One of his favorites was an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, movie stills and photographs of all kinds pinned to the walls of his studio and scattered...
...Picasso who first showed him the way. In the central panel of one of Bacon's 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 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...