Word: humanism
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After the butchery of World War II, Bacon was one of the artists, along with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and a few others, who found a way to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon's boiling men and women is wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are fissured, their torsos are invertebrate; their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities - because with Bacon the body is always in extremis...
...Bacon none of this was a statement about his particular life and times, though his life played a part in it, and so did his times. What Bacon was after was something deeper. He wanted to make the body the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs...
...darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely 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 the nightmare distortions of anatomy that he arrived at by the end of World War II, a time when living flesh had been twisted every which...
...years old. On three panels of bright reddish orange scuffed with grey, a trio of mutant figures grimace, snarl and bark. In two of them, the most expressive feature is the gaping mouth. 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 in any face painted by him are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim. In Bacon's pictures, the windows of the soul - not that he believed...
...where you watch him trying to find a way to make it new. But there are also great ones, like the 1991 Triptych. In all three panels, a large black square is placed like a window within a flat, beige background. In the center, a figure barely recognizable as human flows over the lower edge of the black square. On each side panel, Bacon appears as a painted photograph of his own head pinned to the space above a pair of disembodied legs. Each of these has one foot stepping into the blackness. It's a portrait of the artist...