Word: bacons
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...Picasso pictures in the show date mainly from the late '20s and early '30s, when the painter was flirting with Surrealism. Bathers with contorted necks, lovers with daggerlike teeth, minotaurs with ravaged victims - all find some allusion in Bacon's works. "I think of myself as a maker of images," Bacon once said, that produce an impact "immediately on the nervous system." Picasso gave him the artistic vocabulary to do that. Bacon claimed it was this "brutality of fact" that linked their work. But Bacon clearly wins in the cruelty stakes, especially in his nudes. His Lying Figure...
...first-ever systematic analysis of Picasso's influence on Bacon, the show gathers some 100 works of the two 20th century legends. The Musée Picasso even attempts to re-create the show at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, with plates of 40 of the drawings Bacon said "shocked" him into his career. Given that both artists specialized in distorted images, anthropomorphic monsters and screaming faces, the Rosenberg drawings are surprisingly mild. In fact, they are lyrical studies for Picasso's neoclassical works that were criticized at the time as a betrayal of the revolutionary spirit behind his Cubist masterpiece...
...Perhaps Bacon, who never met his idol, was drawn to images that seemed tolerant of homosexuality, like the near-naked androgynous youths (one playing the flute, the other transported by the music) in the sketches for Picasso's monumental Pipes of Pan. When Bacon arrived in Paris at age 18 - after his father caught him in his mother's underwear and threw him out - he was certain of his homosexuality, but less certain of his artistic talent. He flirted with interior design when he returned to London in 1929 and, once he started painting, destroyed most of his early efforts...
...Indeed, crucifixions are one of the major themes of the show, even though neither Picasso nor Bacon was at all religious. In a 1992 interview, Bacon called Picasso's crucifixion scenes "still my favorite of his works." Picasso's oil-on-wood Crucifixion (1930) is a vibrant, surreal retelling of the Calvary story, with cross, nails, lance, weeping women and garments being divided by dice-throwers. Bacon's interpretation, Second Version of Triptych 1944: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, ignores all this action - even the cross - and concentrates instead on three anguished black-and-white...
...Picasso and Bacon used practically identical language to describe their work on crucifixion paintings: Picasso said he had started to draw an interpretation of a macabre early 16th century altarpiece when it became "entirely something else"; Bacon claimed he had the idea of first putting figures around the base of the cross, but then "something happened" and he "just tried to make something else." Bacon also applied his Picasso obsession to his Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (1971), a tribute to his model and lover. You'll see visual echoes of Dyer's shadowy profile in Picasso's nearby...