Word: humanism
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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...
...triptych like Three Studies for a Crucifixion from 1962, with its invertebrate lovers grappling in the 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...
...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 him the way to his own nightmare distortions of anatomy...
...violent tribal custom" of circumcision, but I do not understand why he cannot stand up to his wife and why he would do something that he is "pretty sure is wrong." Please, Mr. Stein, do not do it! Nobody has the right to make such a decision for another human being. Vincent Favata, ELMWOOD PARK...
...characters come together. The front stage serves as both an extension of the characters’ individual stories and a forum in which to integrate them all.This musical, however, is less of a chronicling of college students’ escapades and drama than it is an exploration of human emotions and the raw struggle that all individuals face. Though it contains scenes bordering on the cliché, the acting, humor, and storyline are not contrived, but they are both entertaining and provocative.“The Quad” neatly packages a four-year experience into a 2-hour performance...