Word: lilacs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...capture the feverish, nightmare quality of the experiences Bacon depicts, he has developed what is essentially a surrealist dream style to near perfection. Every brush stroke bears the mark of absolute conviction, from the fields of poison green and fetid lilac that deck his backdrops to the calculated white ejaculatory splats that he lashes across the legs of his subjects. There is hatred and hostility in Bacon's vision, but of late it seems to be mellowing. Nothing in his current show comes near to matching the insane intensity of his screaming popes of 1949-53. A study...
...Lilac was found in his hand...
There is also some wild black humor, notably one episode that is a bitter comment on the outside world's long gullibility about Soviet Russia. Two prisoners invent a fantasy about a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Moscow's Butyrki Prison, just after the war. Inmates are washed in "Lilac Fairy" soap, offered wigs to cover their shaved heads. Their cells are temporarily transformed into elegant salons with foreign magazines on their coffee tables. When Mrs. Roosevelt picks out at random a man and asks what he is being punished for, the prison governor replies that he was a Gestapo...
...Lilac Coif. Three of the most diverting larger pictures are by anonymous masters. The Prato Master is responsible for an exuberant Birth of the Virgin, in which graceful Florentine ladies foreshadow those in a similar scene by Ghirlandaio. The ironic hand of The Master of the Cloister of the Orange Trees can be seen in two scenes from the life of St. Benedict...
...picture. Looming above the onlooker, Pontormo's Angel Gabriel is shown as a dissipated Florentine gallant with an exquisite shell-pink ear, hennaed locks and a flattened head. As for the Virgin Mary, she is both innocent and sophisticated, a strangely languorous vessel of the Lord, whose fashionable lilac coif emits a greenish, phosphorescent glow...