| susceptible to images a milwaukee art review |
Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee.
January 27-April 15 2007
Francis Bacon was the only young British artist to gain international
respect in the immediate post-WW II period. Although he first made his
mark in the 1940’s, Bacon’s work blossomed to maturity in the 1950’s.
That key decade, when American Abstract Expressionism boomed and
European painting took a back seat in the art world, is the emphasis of
the Milwaukee Art Museum’s current Bacon exhibit.
The show includes several of Bacon’s famously horrific pope
paintings---slashing, overwrought revisions of Velazquez’s 17th-century
portrait of Pope Innocent X. Velazquez’s commissioned portrait of the
Pope (Doria-Pamphili Gallery, Rome) ranks as one of the most powerful
presentations of a power-monger, a picture in which Pope Innocent
appears anything but. Velazquez portrayed a man of vicious mien and
bird-of-prey glance and posture. Bacon took what was subtly virulent,
and blew it up into a howling monstrosity. Many of Bacon’s non-pope
images are similar: dark caricatures of isolated figures---sometimes
borrowed from film stills or museum pieces or 19th-century photos.
Decaying people in cancerous white paint sink into gloomy
backgrounds, often locked in transparent cubes. For all their
adolescent melodrama, Bacon’s pictures still grip and hit the viewer. His
puking dogs, and screaming heads, and crucified bodies remain
memorable. They possess the same sort of psychological bombast
attributed in the 1950’s to the agonized outpourings of Jackson Pollock,
and Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko, purportedly dredged from
these Abstract Expressionists’ unconscious.
For decades, Bacon’s friends and enemies have dwelled on the artist’s
homosexuality, sadomasochistic practices, nightclubbing lifestyle,
scabrous studio mess, anger against his military father, 40-year living
arrangements with his childhood nanny, and general taste for
dissipation---as the source and meaning of his art. The inscriptions on
the Milwaukee Art Museum’s walls and the video that runs continuously
in the exhibition space give voice to these same interpretations. And
Michael Peppiatt, whose book/catalog, Francis Bacon in the 1950s,
accompanies the exhibition, swims in the same biographic stream: the
text is a catalog of Bacon’s personal relationships, wanderings, and
private hells. Despite this gossipy ocean of Bacon criticism, however,
Bacon’s hyped visions of a diseased world are not necessarily tied
solely to his personal history. Wider perspectives and other
connections deserve attention.
What about Bacon’s pope images as religious commentary? This Irish-
born English artist grew up in violently anti-Catholic circumstances.
Instead of pictures of personal problems, why aren’t Bacon’s visions of
Innocent X viewed as expressions of the endemic English horror of
Roman Catholicism? Bacon produced a number of revisionist religious
subjects---crucifixions with sexual beasts, crucifixions with screaming
mutants, and many triptychs---that most familiar altarpiece form---which
depict modern figures in emptiness and anguish. You might think of all
these works as anti-altarpieces tinctured with anti-Catholicism. Can’t
these sordid mutations of Catholic imagery and practice be icons of
religious disgust? The religious imagery may not just be a scaffolding to
display the artist’s personal narrative. There’s a long history of
Protestant English paintings that spoof and scald and denounce the
chicanery of Roman Catholicism. A portrait of Cardinal Manning (1882;
National Portrait Gallery, London) by the English painter G.F. Watts
seems a predecessor of Bacon’s popes. Watts represented the head of
the Roman Catholic Church in England as a malevolent skeleton,
dyspeptic and paranoid in appearance.
More important than any religious themes in Bacon’s art is his place in
art history and the kinds of art on which his art is built. The most
surprising painting in the Milwaukee show is a small painting of owls
from 1956. The work imitates the techniques and subjects of the
Surrealist Max Ernst. Ernst’s basic technique was to create a
roughened abstract surface by rubbing the surface over textured
boards, or pressing paint-slopped sheets against the canvas. Ernst
then looked at the resultant mess---produced largely by chance---and
“saw” images therein--- the process is like looking at clouds and finding
images of lions or heads or other things. Ernst would then “clarify” the
subjects—by outlining the perceived birds, figures, monsters or forests
with an opaque painted background. The underpinning of this
Surrealist method was the psychologist’s inkblot test. The artist’s
perception of images in the amorphous field supposedly revealed the
artist’s unconscious urges, fears, concerns, symbolic fantasies, and
personal history. Bacon in his owl painting seems to have followed this
same Surrealist pathway and used opaque paint to isolate the “images”
within a textured, smeared patch. He “discovered” the very Ernst-
looking birds in what seems to have been an inchoate clot of colors.
This little painting leads one to look again at Bacon’s other works and
find Surrealist echoes---and they can be found. The see-through cubes
that surround so many of Bacon’s figures bear similarities to the white-
streaks in the canvases of the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta. And
one can find similar transparent geometric structures in the art of
Salvador Dali. In fact the powerful perspective effect of Bacon’s
transparent cubes----the diagonal lines thrust the viewer into illusions of
spatial depth---is remarkably similar to the deep perspectives found in
the works of numerous Surrealist painters, including Dali and Ernst.
Bacon claimed that Picasso was his chief inspiration, but Ernst, it seems
to me, fits better. Bacon’s relation to Surrealism, while often noted by
critics in passing, needs to be emphasized and detailed and taken
beyond the field of Picasso’s Surrealist images.
Bacon’s relation to Baroque painting also needs clarification. His
revisions of Velazquez were not isolated instances of Bacon’s interest
17th-century art. In fact, the dark tonalities of his paintings, the way
movement is suggested, and the diagonal forms that carve out space
all echo the standard features of Baroque art as seen in the works of
Rembrandt, and Rubens, and numerous other painters besides
Velazquez. For example, Bacon’s 1952 portrait in the Milwaukee
exhibition of his artist-friend Lucien Freud, can be considered a
modernized version of a 17th-century portrait. Lucien Freud steps
forward at a slant, activating the entire image; diagonal shadows cast
from the foreground probe into the large painting’s darkened space;
Lucien Freud reaches out toward the viewer, as if to shake hands; his
hands and face are quickly painted strokes that suggest rather than
define the forms; and portions of Lucien Freud’s body dissolve into the
surrounding blackness. Many Rembrandts display basically similar
characteristics.
Bacon’s dog paintings and sphinx paintings have sharply receding
geometric patches of light on the ground, which, like the Lucien Freud
portrait, bear a 17th-century pedigree and push the viewer into depth.
Even the later Bacons in the Milwaukee show--- with half-defined heads
and bodies that melt into their surroundings--- recall the richly painted
art of Spain and the Low Lands in the Baroque era. And Bacon
recognized the Old Master character of his images by putting them
under glass---like all the paintings in London’s National Gallery---and
framing his paintings with large gold and carved frames---just like all
those 17th-century works in museums. Those “antique” qualities of
Bacon’s art separate him from most of his contemporaries in the 1950s,
and make him more a part of Western art’s grand traditions. On the
other hand, Bacon’s rough-textured paint and slashing strokes accord
well with the sensibilities of the Abstract Expressionists in America and
the Tachistes in Europe in the 1950’s. In the final analysis, I find
Bacon’s Old Master traits his most original contribution to the art of the
mid-twentieth century. What he delivered to the period was not just
another note of angst and free brushwork, but a darkened resonance
of hallowed tradition.
- Kenneth Bendiner
Kenneth Bendiner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art
History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Comments? Email comments@susceptibletoimages.com
<<<<<Back to contents page.
Copyright 2007. Material may not be used or reproduced without the permission of the author.
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee.
January 27-April 15 2007
Francis Bacon was the only young British artist to gain international
respect in the immediate post-WW II period. Although he first made his
mark in the 1940’s, Bacon’s work blossomed to maturity in the 1950’s.
That key decade, when American Abstract Expressionism boomed and
European painting took a back seat in the art world, is the emphasis of
the Milwaukee Art Museum’s current Bacon exhibit.
The show includes several of Bacon’s famously horrific pope
paintings---slashing, overwrought revisions of Velazquez’s 17th-century
portrait of Pope Innocent X. Velazquez’s commissioned portrait of the
Pope (Doria-Pamphili Gallery, Rome) ranks as one of the most powerful
presentations of a power-monger, a picture in which Pope Innocent
appears anything but. Velazquez portrayed a man of vicious mien and
bird-of-prey glance and posture. Bacon took what was subtly virulent,
and blew it up into a howling monstrosity. Many of Bacon’s non-pope
images are similar: dark caricatures of isolated figures---sometimes
borrowed from film stills or museum pieces or 19th-century photos.
Decaying people in cancerous white paint sink into gloomy
backgrounds, often locked in transparent cubes. For all their
adolescent melodrama, Bacon’s pictures still grip and hit the viewer. His
puking dogs, and screaming heads, and crucified bodies remain
memorable. They possess the same sort of psychological bombast
attributed in the 1950’s to the agonized outpourings of Jackson Pollock,
and Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko, purportedly dredged from
these Abstract Expressionists’ unconscious.
For decades, Bacon’s friends and enemies have dwelled on the artist’s
homosexuality, sadomasochistic practices, nightclubbing lifestyle,
scabrous studio mess, anger against his military father, 40-year living
arrangements with his childhood nanny, and general taste for
dissipation---as the source and meaning of his art. The inscriptions on
the Milwaukee Art Museum’s walls and the video that runs continuously
in the exhibition space give voice to these same interpretations. And
Michael Peppiatt, whose book/catalog, Francis Bacon in the 1950s,
accompanies the exhibition, swims in the same biographic stream: the
text is a catalog of Bacon’s personal relationships, wanderings, and
private hells. Despite this gossipy ocean of Bacon criticism, however,
Bacon’s hyped visions of a diseased world are not necessarily tied
solely to his personal history. Wider perspectives and other
connections deserve attention.
What about Bacon’s pope images as religious commentary? This Irish-
born English artist grew up in violently anti-Catholic circumstances.
Instead of pictures of personal problems, why aren’t Bacon’s visions of
Innocent X viewed as expressions of the endemic English horror of
Roman Catholicism? Bacon produced a number of revisionist religious
subjects---crucifixions with sexual beasts, crucifixions with screaming
mutants, and many triptychs---that most familiar altarpiece form---which
depict modern figures in emptiness and anguish. You might think of all
these works as anti-altarpieces tinctured with anti-Catholicism. Can’t
these sordid mutations of Catholic imagery and practice be icons of
religious disgust? The religious imagery may not just be a scaffolding to
display the artist’s personal narrative. There’s a long history of
Protestant English paintings that spoof and scald and denounce the
chicanery of Roman Catholicism. A portrait of Cardinal Manning (1882;
National Portrait Gallery, London) by the English painter G.F. Watts
seems a predecessor of Bacon’s popes. Watts represented the head of
the Roman Catholic Church in England as a malevolent skeleton,
dyspeptic and paranoid in appearance.
More important than any religious themes in Bacon’s art is his place in
art history and the kinds of art on which his art is built. The most
surprising painting in the Milwaukee show is a small painting of owls
from 1956. The work imitates the techniques and subjects of the
Surrealist Max Ernst. Ernst’s basic technique was to create a
roughened abstract surface by rubbing the surface over textured
boards, or pressing paint-slopped sheets against the canvas. Ernst
then looked at the resultant mess---produced largely by chance---and
“saw” images therein--- the process is like looking at clouds and finding
images of lions or heads or other things. Ernst would then “clarify” the
subjects—by outlining the perceived birds, figures, monsters or forests
with an opaque painted background. The underpinning of this
Surrealist method was the psychologist’s inkblot test. The artist’s
perception of images in the amorphous field supposedly revealed the
artist’s unconscious urges, fears, concerns, symbolic fantasies, and
personal history. Bacon in his owl painting seems to have followed this
same Surrealist pathway and used opaque paint to isolate the “images”
within a textured, smeared patch. He “discovered” the very Ernst-
looking birds in what seems to have been an inchoate clot of colors.
This little painting leads one to look again at Bacon’s other works and
find Surrealist echoes---and they can be found. The see-through cubes
that surround so many of Bacon’s figures bear similarities to the white-
streaks in the canvases of the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta. And
one can find similar transparent geometric structures in the art of
Salvador Dali. In fact the powerful perspective effect of Bacon’s
transparent cubes----the diagonal lines thrust the viewer into illusions of
spatial depth---is remarkably similar to the deep perspectives found in
the works of numerous Surrealist painters, including Dali and Ernst.
Bacon claimed that Picasso was his chief inspiration, but Ernst, it seems
to me, fits better. Bacon’s relation to Surrealism, while often noted by
critics in passing, needs to be emphasized and detailed and taken
beyond the field of Picasso’s Surrealist images.
Bacon’s relation to Baroque painting also needs clarification. His
revisions of Velazquez were not isolated instances of Bacon’s interest
17th-century art. In fact, the dark tonalities of his paintings, the way
movement is suggested, and the diagonal forms that carve out space
all echo the standard features of Baroque art as seen in the works of
Rembrandt, and Rubens, and numerous other painters besides
Velazquez. For example, Bacon’s 1952 portrait in the Milwaukee
exhibition of his artist-friend Lucien Freud, can be considered a
modernized version of a 17th-century portrait. Lucien Freud steps
forward at a slant, activating the entire image; diagonal shadows cast
from the foreground probe into the large painting’s darkened space;
Lucien Freud reaches out toward the viewer, as if to shake hands; his
hands and face are quickly painted strokes that suggest rather than
define the forms; and portions of Lucien Freud’s body dissolve into the
surrounding blackness. Many Rembrandts display basically similar
characteristics.
Bacon’s dog paintings and sphinx paintings have sharply receding
geometric patches of light on the ground, which, like the Lucien Freud
portrait, bear a 17th-century pedigree and push the viewer into depth.
Even the later Bacons in the Milwaukee show--- with half-defined heads
and bodies that melt into their surroundings--- recall the richly painted
art of Spain and the Low Lands in the Baroque era. And Bacon
recognized the Old Master character of his images by putting them
under glass---like all the paintings in London’s National Gallery---and
framing his paintings with large gold and carved frames---just like all
those 17th-century works in museums. Those “antique” qualities of
Bacon’s art separate him from most of his contemporaries in the 1950s,
and make him more a part of Western art’s grand traditions. On the
other hand, Bacon’s rough-textured paint and slashing strokes accord
well with the sensibilities of the Abstract Expressionists in America and
the Tachistes in Europe in the 1950’s. In the final analysis, I find
Bacon’s Old Master traits his most original contribution to the art of the
mid-twentieth century. What he delivered to the period was not just
another note of angst and free brushwork, but a darkened resonance
of hallowed tradition.
- Kenneth Bendiner
Kenneth Bendiner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art
History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Comments? Email comments@susceptibletoimages.com
<<<<<Back to contents page.
Copyright 2007. Material may not be used or reproduced without the permission of the author.
| Diego Velazquez, Innocent X, c. 1650. Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome |
| G. F. Watts, Cardinal Manning, 1882. National Portrait Gallery, London. |
| Francis Bacon, Owls, 1956. Oil on canvas. Private collection. |
| Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat , 1954. Oil on canvas. Collection Art Institute of Chicago. |
| Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Portraits, John Hewitt, 1966. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Copyright 2006 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London. |