Word: fleshly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Hollywood saw the Babel of exotic accents as one more earnest of its cosmopolitan reach. And so Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer brought their suavity from France; Marlene Dietrich (Germany), Hedy Lamarr (Austria) and Ingrid Bergman (Sweden) helped Garbo flesh out the fantasy of the European woman. From south of the border Carmen Miranda brought her fruity headdresses, Gilbert Roland his purring machismo. Half of England, it seemed, played cricket every Sunday in Griffith Park. And with bitter thanks to Adolf Hitler, Hollywood welcomed hundreds of refugees from the Third...
...Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down the Cross." There are the humping, grappling figures on pallets or operating tables; the twisted, internalized portraits; the stabbings, the penetrations; the Aeschylean furies pinned against the $ windowpane; and the transformations of flesh into meat, nose into snout, jaw into mandible and mouth into a kind of all-purpose orifice with deadly molars, all of which aspire, in the common view, to the condition of documents. Here, one has been told over and over again, is the outer limit of expressionism: these...
...triptychs, when Bacon decisively abandoned the "spectral," scumbled evocations of the face used in his Popes and caged businessmen, his figures had begun to embody an immense plastic power. Sometimes these creatures, knotted in contrapposto, seem desperately mannered; but there are other moments when the smearing and knotting of flesh, not so much depicted as reconstituted in the fatty whorls and runs of paint, take on a tragic density closer to Michelangelo than to modernism. Among those artists who, in the past century, have tried to represent the inwardness of the body, Bacon holds a high place, along with Schiele...
...painting (like the back of the chair in the picture within a picture to the left). The truth is that the Bacon one sees this time at the Tate has much more in common with old masters than with contemporary painting. The paint acquires a wonderful plenitude in becoming flesh. One thinks of the coruscated light, the Venetian red interstitial drawing, in Tintoretto. This kind of paint surface is part of the work of delivering sensations, not propositions, and it is neither idly sumptuous nor "ironically" sexy. But the one thing it cannot reliably do is fix the extreme disjuncture...
...after all, a half- century closer to death than its audience is. Art (Don Ameche), Ben (Wilford Brimley) and Joe (Hume Cronyn) are not mopes or sticks or hypochondriacs, but they know that their time has nearly elapsed, that their body clocks are running down, that pleasures of the flesh are now memories or might-have-beens. So their transformation into rakehells is both joyous and poignant. It is delicious to watch Ameche, 77, Cronyn, 73, and Brimley, 50 (but he can pass for old), kicking up dust as the stars of a geezer's Porky...