Doom Without Compassion
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art DOOM WITHOUT COMPASSION BY VIVIEN RAYNOR ALMOST as soon as Francis Bacon's canvases became known in England during the '50s, the man became a legend. Such was the impact made by his...
...The full-color catalogue features a Bacon interview by Peter Beard, plus some viewing guidance from Henry Geldzahler...
...On occasion I got a whiff of art nouveau delicacy, possibly emanating from the insistance on curving forms, and the puddle of shadow around each figure recalled Symbolist stylization...
...Those who find they cannot look at Goya's etchings about war will have no trouble contemplating Bacon's public-lavatory atmosphere forever lit by naked light bulbs-particularly now that it has become as "gilded" as the squalor he says he lives in...
...A "narrow-minded" father banished him from home, sending him, according to an interview with Washington Post critic Paul Richards, to a friend-an older man-for supposed rehabitation...
...What little solid information there is about him is thus being repeated over and over again, its value diminished by the underlying premise that there is a bit of 42nd Street in all of us...
...Above all, he gave the impression of being utterly silent...
...the second his being discovered, at the age of 17, in his mother's underwear...
...Evidently the Met, in consultation with Bacon's dealers, is trying to meet what General Electric likes to call our "growing needs...
...Maybe he is the creep that he and his interlocutors insinuate he is...
...Whether the force that pulled him out of his inertia was human or circumstantial, he didn't really begin his career until after World War II, and he reflects even now on the time he lost...
...Whereupon the two of them "ran off to Berlin...
...Meanwhile, Pantheon Books has put out a precis of dialogues between Bacon and English critic David Sylvester, and the painter has been receiving extensive newspaper and magazine treatment...
...His characteristic use of line and mass, and his "boldness" in leaving areas of unpainted canvas visible so that its dun color set off the strong, dry pigments all contributed to making him seem a truly exciting and original presence in contemporary art...
...Born in Dublin in 1910, he was the son of an English racehorse trainer...
...The artist's image has now been consciously aligned with his work, the so-called horror of his imagery justified by that of his personal life...
...Most of the time he appears driven to cover this asset with arbitrary circles and flourishes, frequently dispatching a work with a final ejaculation of white paint...
...Still one wonders why the artist, having let his inner self hang out verbally, appears to shrink now and then from specifying what is going on in some of his canvases...
...If you see somebody lying on the pavement in the sunlight, with the blood streaming from him, that is in itself-the color of the blood against the pavement-very invigorating . . . exhilarating," he observed in the Beard interview...
...The trendiness of absolute candor about everything notwithstanding, necrophiliac fantasies, visions of Cimabue's Crucifixion as a worm crawling down a cross-gutsmut, as someone once brilliantly nailed it-are only depressing in their naughtiness...
...Had he remained the private person he used to be, his impact might have lasted longer...
...Such are the pressures of our time-or of the modernist tyranny, it's hard to tell which...
...The overriding impression was of distortion being used not as an expression of emotion but to conceal something...
...There is nothing truly horrific about it, as he would be the first to agree...
...With his un-English sophistication, Bacon became a White Hope, a major artist to pit against Giacometti and anyone coming from the United States-or so it now seems in retrospect...
...The Met show is altogether a joyous performance in bright yellow, pink, lavender, red, black and various shades of brown...
...To decide whether the intensity of his oeuvre comes from genuine passion or mere obsession is impossible at the moment, publicity having clouded the issue completely...
...But there is no doubt he has a subject-his own spiritual disarray-and he feels deeply about it...
...Yet he is so inhibited by the presence of models that he creates his figures solely through the mediation of photographs...
...For, aside from the work of such colorists as Matthew Smith and Ivon Hitchens, or the refined Cubism of Ben Nicholson, painting was still dominated by the drab "London Impressionism" Walter Sicken had inaugurated eons earlier...
...That is, he throws his mind into neutral and watches the results, as it were, out of the corner of his eye...
...A century or so ago, he could have settled into history as a memorable eccentric...
...Bacon takes the conventional view that the old masters-Velazquez in particular-could both report and "unlock the greatest and deepest things man can feel" in a way that is today impossible...
...The painter's sense of doom is unrelieved by any compassion for his fellow men, a liberal conscience not being one of his psychological burdens...
...His first milestone was an introduction to sex by one of his father's stable boys...
...It is almost pretty...
...Virtually uneducated and entirely without training in art, he received technical help from his friend Roy de Maistre, an Australian painter...
...For all the rock-bottom humanity of the mutilated heads, the nudes frantically buggering on bare mattresses, vomiting or crouching on toilets, Bacon's tragedy is more personal than universal...
...This, perhaps, is the key to the pathos of his paintings...
...There was something exotic about the man, too...
...Of course, he has shown in New York before, notably at the Guggenheim in 1963 and Marlborough Gerson in 1968, but never with the Anacin-like hard sell accompanying this exhibition...
...by the mid-'30s he had all but given up and turned to gambling for both support and diversion...
...Some admirers of his work have likened it to Goya's, but the parallel doesn't hold for a second...
...Bacon's sexual inversion has not exactly been a state secret, yet for some reason it has apparently been felt that it would bolster the distinction of his hanging at the Met to present him as a homosexual who happens to paint...
...The scene changes to the Metropolitan Museum, where 36 of Bacon's latest paintings are now hanging (through June 29...
...After a couple of years on the Continent, during which he became with mystifying ease an interior decorator in Paris, he returned to London possessing a desire to paint inspired by a 1927 Picasso show...
...What has been done to this painter, albeit with his own collusion, is cruel...
...A man in a long apron, a figure resembling a prizefighter and someone else holding a movie camera combine into one of the more enigmatic triptychs...
...To reconcile these contradictions, he paints reality by means of a kind of automatism...
...Real depnwiiy was hard to come by in those days, so it was enough to hear rumors of this rising artist having no permanent abode and frequenting bars too splendidly degenerate to be imagined, even in raunchy old London...
...In any case, he would have been wiser to allow us to go on misinterpreting his pictures as a statement about our collective disaster...
...Cut off from society and superannuated by photography, the artist must eschew conscious reporting, or illustration, and "deepen the game if he is to be any good at all...
...The metaphor is not accidental: "Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being [and] art has now become completely a game by which [he] distracts himself...
...That he did not take up one of the cheerier stances available to the homosexual artist makes him very unusual, even if it only meant choosing another form of exhibitionism...
...Now he can only look great because of the lack of competition in the field...
...The picture of a man descending a flight of steps, and the portrait of the artist sitting leaning on a washbasin, head in hand, are the best in the show...
...Admiring discipline and seeing art as a process of recording but not illustrating facts, Bacon rejects figurative expressionism for its sloppiness and the abstract equivalent for its lyricism...
...That success debilitates is a truism...
...Unforgettable and inimitable, Bacon's art represents a triumph over a chaotic existence...
...This accounts for his near-convulsive technique-an hour-to-hour way of working constantly threatened by a momentary flagging of tension that can ruin a picture...
...Such was the impact made by his businessmen and screaming Popes sealed in their glass boxes that a Bacon show was awaited as eagerly as an installment in a drama, especially by art students...
...Firm in his belief that art is the only thing that matters, he is "not upset by the fact that people do suffer, because I think the suffering of people and the difference between [them] are what have made great art and not egalitarianism...
...Clearly, he arrives at his conclusions via self-projection exclusively, and does not conceive of pain as a shared emotion...
...They are moving in their acute feeling of loneliness and desperation, and here Bacon has allowed his crude draftsmanship to work for him...
...All of the pictures, including several triptychs, have his usual grand scale and a sense of spaciousness...
...His chewed-looking dyed yellow hair sat oddly above a dish-shaped face of pink complexion that looked more German than English, while his customary T-shirts and other vaguely American attire added to the mystery that endowed his tall, remote figure with a special kind of romance...
...nevertheless, there is no other way of accounting for the muting of Bacon's "scream.' The swirling impasto of his flesh is less muddy than before, and though the settings are as bleak as ever, they are flushed by beautiful color...
...What is concealed, besides a kind of visual illiteracy, is not clear...
...Though Bacon attracted some critical attention with this early work, progress was desultory...
Vol. 58 • April 1975 • No. 9
