|
|
Art of the 20th Century
BACON
"The Theater of the Body"
by Jose Maria Faerna
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), arguably the preeminent British painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon's art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist's penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure.
Bacon's treatment of the face could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Even in repose the features shift and reshape themselves before our eyes, yet they never become unrecognizable despite the swirling paint.
Often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called "the brutality of fact."
Figure and Movement
"Michelangelo and Muybridge are mixed up in my mind together, and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo. ... As most of my figures are taken from the male nude, I am sure that I have been influenced by the fact that Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts." Bacon here describes two of the sources from which his work derives. It is not so much the representation of movement itself in Muybridge that interests him as a certain sense of ritualized action that the poses convey. Similarly, it is not simply the imposing muscular tension of Michelangelo's nude figures—their famous terribilita— that affects him. In contrast, the tension within Bacon's figures, so often in awkward or unlikely positions, is nervous and tentative. What he seeks to create on the canvas is a sense of the figure as the center of swirling energies—in its movement or in its own inner tension. And he conveys those energies through the traces of the moving hand that wields the paintbrush.
