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In contrast to Redon’s subjectivity, in which we recognize hope and transcendence to spirit, Francis Bacon projects a unique sense of existential aloneness, dilemma and Sartre-like nausea in images. Bacon responded to the scale of destruction in Europe’s recent wars and to photographs of death camps, and was influenced by Picasso’s work in the ‘thirties. |
With its slashing strokes and distortions, Picasso’s work seemed, to Berger, to possess an intensity not yet seen in art that seemed to merge the viewer with painted sensations of the subject.
Bacon’s painted screams, slashed faces and tortured figures force us to deal with the flesh, nerve, and psyche of the human animal as Rembrandt’s carcass of an ox hanging in a butcher shop forces us to deal with realities of raw flesh and death. When viewing Bacon’s study of Isabel Rawsthorne (shown at right), I can feel the authority of his genius. |
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The enormous gash of the neck and cheek jars me with force, sensation and the ambiguous imagery of pig, tongue and orifice, which suggests a wrenching of contrasts between the interior and exterior of a human-animal body. The contrasts set up by this seemingly spontaneous invention with the assurance of the intense, tiny eye, deft profile, slashed yet dignified lips and nose, convey a sense of dignity and of urgency.
Bacon projects unease and ominous portents that cloud our needs for hope and aspiration. I sometimes wonder if his vision will maintain its current interest if his own homosexuality and the subject of homosexuality become more biologically and morally integrated as legitimate parts of nature’s spectrum. I may be conventionally-minded, but I find that many of his paintings that show explicit sex, drug injecting, tormented bodies, and heavy European existential gloom, partake of contemporary fashion for “rub it in your face” self-absorption and post-holocaust negativity about the human condition. I have noticed that in advertising art in the late ‘nineties, one sees a lot of surliness and “extermination camp” makeup on the faces of models for clothing and cosmetics. One wonders if this trend is an extension of Holocaust fascination, fear of environmental destruction, road rage, power burgers, or what? However, Bacon’s projections of existential angst and aloneness, which must always be with us, are not likely to lose their grip like the Romantic sentimental poses and allusions to death that characterized the funerary sculpture by Canova, who in the 1820s, was considered the most accomplished and fashionably chic sculptor in Europe.
A growing awareness of an individual’s heritage, environment and psychology has held to a near clinical interest in the private qualities of the artist’s enduring personality. In Whitehead’s terms, the body-mind is a concentrator of efficient organization in which orderliness of the world can be revealed. It is the enduring personality, with its ability to project its feelings, that permits the subjectivity of artists to reveal some of the more interesting and hard-to-reach expressions of this orderliness. |
