Tragic Hero: A Majestic Francis Bacon Show

Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. That’s the conclusion you can’t help taking away from the Bacon retrospective that opened May 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I caught the show last year at its first venue, London’s Tate Britain, and left it convinced that it was one of the most powerful exhibitions I’d seen in more than 40 years of museumgoing.

This has nothing to do with Bacon as the phenomenon of last year’s hot auction market, now extinguished, where one of his triptychs sold for $86 million. By bringing together almost five decades of his work into a collective cry, this show makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, what used to be called a tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, as well as low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of suffering, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in painting, is acute pain. Except in room after room of this magnificent show.

The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 16, marks the centenary of Bacon’s birth in 1909 in Dublin. His father, a truculent British army officer turned horse trainer, shuttled the family for years between Ireland and England. But by the age of 16, Bacon was in London, and living on his own with a small allowance from his mother and the assistance of various older men. Eventually he drifted into a career as an interior decorator while trying to find his way as a painter. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that he arrived at the vocabulary of tortured forms against a flat backdrop that he would develop for the rest of his life.

Along with Giacometti, Dubuffet and a few others, Bacon would emerge as one of the artists who found a way, after the butchery of World War II, to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon’s men and women is wrenched and smeared by their own drives and desires and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are split, their torsos are boneless. Their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities–because with Bacon the body is always in extremis.

So in a triptych like Three Studies for a Crucifixion from 1962, with its invertebrate lovers grappling in the center panel and its butchered carcass in the right, the body is the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed. 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 are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim, as in his portrait of the writer Michel Leiris. With Bacon, the windows of the soul–not that he believed in the soul–always have the curtains drawn.

To piece together his wretched figures, Bacon spent a lifetime ransacking art history. From Poussin he took the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photos of wrestlers gave him a perennial motif–sex as sexual combat. He also drew from sources far outside art. One of his favorites was an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, movie stills and photographs of all kinds pinned to the walls of his studio and scattered on the floor in a sedimentary muck of paper, rags, used brushes and broken furniture that he would dive into for ideas.

But it was Picasso who first showed him the way. In the central panel of one of Bacon’s works from the 1970s, Triptych–In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is 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 his own nightmare distortions of anatomy.

Oddly, the steel-tube furnishings that Bacon favored as an interior designer in the ’30s also found their way years later–in ghostly outline, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste–into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his pictures. You detect them for the first time in his series of paintings from the 1950s that were drawn from the great Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. Flickering white perimeters form a cage for the Pontiff’s impotent fury. Why a Pope? With Bacon there’s never one answer. His great gift was for visual and psychological conflation, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form. Trapped in a kind of isolation booth, where a thunderstorm of granular black strokes rains down on him, the screaming Pope in Head VI suggests the baying, baboon madness of authority. (One source for the image was a photo of Joseph Goebbels in full harangue.) Yet at the same time he’s the face of the powerlessness of absolute power.

That picture of the Holy Father might also bear traces of Bacon’s anguished dealings with his own father, who had rejected his girlish son. But it’s a mistake to read Bacon’s work too quickly by way of his life. That’s true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon’s first big retrospective, in Paris in 1971. In those pictures Bacon didn’t simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to the even bleaker abbreviations of a pitiless world he produced in the 1970s. Dyer’s grotesque end–he was found dead on the toilet from a drug overdose–stands behind these paintings, but they speak to you about more universal miseries. This is the thing so compelling about Bacon, the sense he produces that the suffering is ferocious but the sufferer is dry-eyed.

Not everything he did is a triumph. In the mid-1950s, when he was spending a lot of time in Tangiers in a miserable love affair, he was inspired by Van Gogh and by the keen Moroccan sunlight to experiment with brighter colors and looser brushwork. The result was a series of congested Expressionist canvases that are the weakest in the show. But the high-key palette of those pictures also pointed him to the orange, lilac and beige backgrounds that make his great work of the ’60s and ’70s so unnerving, precisely because the figures struggle in such bright spaces.

By his last decade–he died in 1992–Bacon was almost too fluent in his own bleak idioms. There are cluttered, overdetermined pictures in the last galleries, where you watch him wondering how 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 barely human form flows over the lower edge of the black square. In 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 bowing out, dying as fearlessly as he lived. And when you see it without sentiment, even death can be majestic.

Culture Vulture Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art at time.com/lookingaround