THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, March 18, 2020 |A
© THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON/DACS, LONDON/ARS, NY (4)frames in gold and presents under
special glass be genuinely tortured
by a Sartrean view of the human
condition? Yes. Works of art are
not primal screams. Even the raw-
est Expressionist painters, such as
George Grosz or Emil Nolde, lay
down paint and compose their pic-
tures with a detachment required
by the craft.
Granted, in the late paintings
Bacon isn’t struggling much any-
more. He knows what he wants to
do and he goes about doing it. Any
guilt over Dyer’s death has re-
treated to a low background
thrumming. With their themes of
sex, violence and death, these
paintings show us tragedies, maybe
even Tragedy. Nothing, however,
competes with the irony of fate.
Francis Bacon died in a nursing
home, attended by nuns, with a
crucifix hanging over his bed.Francis Bacon: Late Paintings
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
through May 25Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer
in New York.
Editors’ note:The Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, is currently
closed due to the coronavirus.Francis Bacon’s ‘Self-Portrait’ (1971),
above; ‘Study From the Human Body’
(1983), right; ‘Study for Portrait’
(1981), below left; ‘In Memory of
George Dyer’ (1971), bottomHouston
When “Figure in a Landscape”
(1946) and “Study After Velasquez’
Portrait of Pope Innocent X”
(1953) were included in a 1955 Mu-
seum of Modern Art exhibition of
European artists, the British
painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
said, “I would like my pictures to
look as if a human being had
passed between them, like a snail,
leaving a trail of the human pres-
ence and memory trace of past
events, as the snail leaves its
slime.” If this isn’t a longing to
make paintings a vehicle for exis-
tential precariousness, nothing is.
But while Bacon’s pictures—such
as “Three Figures and a Portrait”
(1975) and “Self-Portrait” (1977) in
this exhibition—may set your teeth
on edge, they manage to manifest
a strange and terrible beauty.
The artist left his Irish home at
age 16 after being caught having
sex with one of his father’s stable-
hands. He went to London, Berlin,
then Paris, then back to London.
Inspired in the late 1920s by a
show of Picasso’s drawings, Bacon
was a self-taught painter. It took
him a while to come into his own
as an artist, but his “Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Cruci-
fixion” (1944), with its horrific be-
ings that look something like
fanged newts, made him famous.
“Painting” (1946), depicting a
bloody-faced politician delivering a
speech in a slaughterhouse, ce-
mented his reputation. For a lot of
younger painters in the 1950s and
’60s, Bacon’s screaming popes and
facially torqued businessmen made
him the paragon of nonacademic,
non-Pop, figurative painting.
In the fall of 1971, as
Bacon’s retrospective at
the Grand Palais in
Paris neared its open-
ing, George Dyer, one of
his longer-tenured lov-
ers, committed suicide
in their hotel room.
“Francis Bacon: Late
Paintings” (at the Mu-
seum of Fine Arts,
Houston, through May
25) picks up the work
of the Anglo-Irish rep-
robate at about that
point. He’s still graphi-
cally interested in sex
between men (which,
given Bacon’s cannibal-
Cuisinart representa-
tion of the human form,
takes a bit of decod-
ing), albeit with a
“greater emptiness,” as
curator Alison de Lima
Greene remarked at the
opening.
Many of the approximately 40
paintings in the exhibition are
big—78 inches by 58 inches is typ-
ical—and the color is toned down
from Bacon’s earlier enraged red-
oranges and malevolent magentas
to curiously menacing beiges,
sickly pinks, and powder blues. Yet
there’s enough acid yellow and fi-
ery orange to indicate that Bacon,
by now in his 60s, is hardly a set-
tled personality. Nor has he
changed his preference for work-
ing from the remove of photo-
graphs over using the fullness of
live human models. As if to em-
phasize his belief—expressed in an
interview with the British critic
David Sylvester—that “man now
realizes that he is an accident, that
he is a completely futile being,
that he has to play out the game
without reason,” Bacon makes pe-
culiar snippets of figuration—fau-
cets, lightbulbs—much clearer
than his humans.
What makes Bacon an impor-
tant artist and this exhibition
(which originated at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris) both a visual
knockout and a philosophical
punch to the gut is that Bacon is a
preternaturally talented painter.
No one else has a brushstroke like
Bacon’s surgical swat or his drag
of distanced despondency. Un-
painted sections of his linen can-
vases effectively stand for the un-
finished nature of everything. The
MFAH’s spatially generous installa-
tion wisely avoids overhanging
and proceeds through a series of
carefully calibrated gray galleries,
giving viewers an aesthetically ex-
hilarating show. Finally, as Pompi-
dou curator Didier Ottinger told
me, the exhibition was inspired by
a 2016 Bacon retrospective at the
Liverpool branch of the Tate Gal-
lery. Only four years from idea to
the realization of a major museum
exhibition is impressive.
Bacon’s pictorial pessimism isn’t
perfect. Occasionally some de-
tails—corny splashes of blood, sign
painters’ arrows, and distressed
samples of commercial artists’
press-down lettering—are superfi-
cially irritating enough to inter-
rupt Bacon’s depiction of his pro-
found distress over the state of
the world. If one is skeptical about
Bacon’s unbelief, one could say—
along with critic Jed Perl, about a
Bacon retrospective a decade ago
at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York—that his paint-
ings are merely “modernist melo-
dramas with just the right crowd-
friendly dash of old-fashioned
grandiloquence.”
The real question, then: Can an
artist who makes such big, open,
compositionally fluid, and deftly
rendered paintings that he thenART REVIEW
A Conjurer of
Strange and
Terrible Beauty
Francis Bacon’s troubled life was reflected in
his art, even in the twilight of his career
BYPETERPLAGENS
LIFE & ARTS
NY