Life laid bare
No painter of the 20th century depicted the unholy trinity of sex, violence and death as consistently and compellingly as Francis Bacon.
So, there’s a parental advisory coupled with praise for “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings.” After a successful run last fall at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, the show opens Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, its only U.S. venue.
Seven signature triptychs by the profoundly influential British artist are scattered through five spacious galleries, among 20 other large canvases and a dozen or so small portraits whose distorted figures sometimes appear to be plucked from a horror show’s hall of mirrors.
During a preview, French curator Didier
A haunting “Self-Portrait” is among works in “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston .
Ottinger said Bacon’s late works have long been under-appreciated even in Paris, where several generations of viewers have grown up with them. In Parus, Ottinger examined how stark-minded literature and philosophy influenced the artist’s final two decades. Bacon left behind a library of more than
1,200 books.
MFAH director Gary Tinterow and curator Alison de Lima Greene take a more thematic approach. It makes sense. Bacon died in 1992, in his early 80s, but this is his first Houston exhibition.
Tinterow said themes that always drove Bacon merged after his muse George Dyer committed suicide in 1971. “But something else happened,” he said. Tinterow sees in these works a “dexterity, facility and mental clarity” that could only have evolved through 25 or 30 years of painting, epitomizing what the artist had always wanted to achieve.
“Bacon didn’t want you to think about his pictures. He wanted you to feel them,” he said.
People say similar things about Mark Rothko, but Bacon wasn’t looking for the sublime — quite the opposite — and he found Abstract Expressionism sorely lacking. “He would look at Rothko’s paintings in dismay, missing the human element, the figure he felt was so important to the story of art,” Greene said.
One of the ironies of the Houston show is that people who haven’t spent much time with Bacon’s large canvases might see them as a marriage of styles woven deeply into the city’s visual DNA: They combine elements of Surrealism with an emotional intensity akin to Rothko’s.
And yet they are neither. The charismatic Bacon liked to say his paintings had no equals. Certainly, at the time he began working, when homosexuality was still illegal, no one was depicting nude males as aggressively. That made his work scandalous and sensational.
By painting the joy of male sexuality, Greene said, “he broke every rule of painting in good society in the 1950s. We look at it with a knowing eye, but it was radical then. Critics never mentioned that he was queer; now that’s at the core of understanding the work.”
But Bacon’s work has always resonated widely because it also is about universal truths. He saw man as a completely futile being, playing out a game without reason. His paintings roil with what Bacon described as “exhilarated despair.” Without being “illustrational,” as he put it, he worms his way into the poignant, existential essence of his amorphous figures.
Kicked out of the family
Born in Dublin to English parents, Bacon was the second of five children. His family lived in Ireland to raise racehorses but moved back to London during World War I; his father was an army officer. He was never happy at home. And when Bacon was 16, his father banished him for wearing his mother’s underwear. He experienced the decadent side of Berlin with an older family friend who became his first serious lover early in 1927, then discovered Picasso at a gallery in Paris and began drawing and painting — a period when he also designed modern furniture.
Bacon set up his first studio in London in 1929, and his visual vocabulary was coalescing by the 1940s, drawing on icongraphy from Old Master paintings (Velázquez and Goya among them, and images of crucifixions and slaughter) as well as Picasso, Van Gogh and others; film noir (an image of a screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” was a favorite); and the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge’s nude wrestlers in motion.
Bacon’s first concern was aesthetics.
Importantly, he worked from photographs and reproductions, preferably damaged ones. Even when he was painting a portrait, he worked from photographs by his friend John Deakin because that freed him up to create. He wasn’t repainting the thing itself; he was painting the sensations he absorbed from it — using an image of the thing, moderated by the passage of time. The frequent depictions of newspaper fragments, watches and shadows in his paintings also suggest time passing.
His figures all appear within or crossing the lines of compositional space boxes, a device Bacon said he used simply to see things better. For the viewer, the rectangles and lines imply psychic windows and doors.
Speaking to the critic David Sylvester in the 1970s, Bacon said he wasn’t trying to convey anything about the nature of man. “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can,” he said. “I don’t even know what half of them mean.”
The show’s first gallery introduces Bacon through dark, tortured-looking self-portraits and works that suggest what else is to come.
The somewhat buoyant 1970 “Triptych” features Bacon in one panel, Dyer in another — both perched on trapezes — and a central image of two nude figures wrestling. Across from that hangs the more colorful and sinister 1967 “Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem, Sweeney Agonistes,” whose panels of wrestling figures flank an image of a murder scene on a train.
Double meanings
Then the eye goes to the also large, single-panel “Study for a Bullfight, No. 2,” from 1969, which relates to the final work of Bacon’s life that appears in the last gallery. His work always contains double meanings, Greene noted. Bullfight
images reference ideas about secularized, staged sacrifice as well as the work of Picasso and Goya.
She pointed out a vignette in that painting based on a photograph of a Nazi rally. “He’d never talk about his work as political,” Greene said, “but he was a very engaged artist.” Images of Winston Churchill and the assassination of Leon Trotsky appear later in the show.
The seminal “In Memory of George Dyer” captures attention in another gallery, but really, every painting in the show is a highlight. Bacon’s beautifully creepy, late-life, biomorphic landscapes are especially surprising — hard to look at but impossible to ignore.
The clarity Tinterow spoke of becomes most apparent in the final galleries, where Bacon seems to be stripping more away, letting images float more freely within large fields of vivid color.
Greene pointed out 1978’s “Street Scene – Car in Distance.” It’s almost “his version of Rothko,” she said, “but … there’s this criticality, an immediacy that is very different. I’m not saying one is better than the other … but it’s fascinating that even in his 70s, he’s taking a polemical stand against what he sees as the false direction of modernism.”
“Study of a Bull,” the last painting of Bacon’s life, ends the show potently.
You could read it as a different kind of self-portrait, with all that a bull might symbolize evident in the smoky image that emerges in the canvas’ top left corner. The shadowy animal, behind a thin film of spray paint, is moving into bright whiteness, ready to take whatever is coming, or maybe charge.
The ailing Bacon knew what was coming for him. He rubbed dust from his studio floor into the paint.
Dramatic canvases reflect Francis Bacon’s unflinching vision