Word: giacomettis
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...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 in the 20th century with bleak contempt. He has gone on record as admiring Giacometti and Picasso; for a few others, a few words of respect; beyond that, the sense of isolation is ferocious. The motto of an aristocratic French family declared: "Roi ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis" (King I cannot be; prince I do not deign...
...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, Kokoschka and Giacometti. He breaks the chain of pessimistic expectation by taking his prototypes beyond themselves into grandeur. In earlier art there was a repertoire of classical emblems of energy and pathos, starting with the Laocoon, that painters could draw on for this operation. Bacon's starting point is less authoritative: photographs...
What if this works? This, in essence, was the purpose underlying the uses made of primitive art by surrealism, expressionism, abstract expressionism and their various sequels. It may be sublimated into anxiety, as in the tautly mysterious early work of Giacometti; or transposed into flyaway humor, as in Klee; or semi-industrialized, as in the fulsome productions of late Dubuffet; or, by a host of minor artists, boorishly rehashed as a sign of "sincerity." But it never quite goes away - for who wants to face the tedium of a wholly secular culture...
...major collection of seamy scenes, Paris de Nuit, was a sensation; a larger, franker version published in 1976, The Secret Paris of the 30's, was a U.S. bestseller. Brassaï's multiple talents included friendship, and in his volumes of portraits there are reminiscences of Bonnard, Giacometti, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and, especially, Picasso...
Picasso was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him-from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky-an almost indescribably fruitful one. Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga...