In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, photography and abstraction have precipitated the near demise of the great Western tradition of figure painting. If the genre has persisted in the careers of Dubuffet, Modigliani, de Kooning, and Fischl, it has done so in a manner weakened first by the aversion to realism induced by photography, and second, by the unquestioned acceptance of virtually any and all forms of abstraction. Dubuffet's figurative glyphs lack complexity; Modigliani's portraits are beautiful, but seem superficial; de Kooning's Women are types, not individuals; and Fischl's personages are anonymous actors in staged narratives. In comparison with the wondrous likenesses executed by Holbein, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya, and Ingres, it becomes clear that in each case these Modernists have generalized their subjects. Their depictions, though not insignificant in their own rights, lack the specificity and factuality endemic to the great figurative tradition.
Has that tradition in fact perished? I think not. In the early part of the century, Picasso evolved a radical style which, though nonphotographic, did not preclude highly specific forms of characterization. In the forties and fifties, it was Alberto Giacometti who re-invented figuration. And in the postwar period, Francis Bacon devised an original mode of figurative representation. An Irish-born Englishman, Bacon (b.1909) is perhaps the greatest living figure painter of the Western world. His pictures are not only of real individuals but also tell us something about what it means to have been alive in the late twentieth century. His language is quintessentially of this age.
A retrospective of fifty-eight of Bacon's paintings, organized by James T. Demetrion, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is concluding its North American tour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on August 28. The exhibition spans Bacon's career from the mid-1940s to the present and offers an excellent opportunity to explore the nature of the artist's prodigious achievement.
Bacon's repertoire includes portraits of his friends and himself, his renditions of Old Master paintings, figures in poses borrowed from photographic motion studies by Edward Muybridge, multipanel works based on themes such as the Crucifixion, and occasional landscapes. He has a predilection for naked or partially naked male subjects seated alone on a chair or bed, or coupled in homoerotic embraces. Sometimes he paints men wearing business suits, and less frequently he depicts female nudes, animals, and organic beasts that recall Picasso's biomorphic Surrealism of the 1920s. Typically, his subjects appear isolated against flat monochrome backdrops or in nondescript interior settings. Multifigural compositions are the exceptions, since he feels the presence of separate figures implies a narrative that would necessarily detract from the purity of visual communication. Hence, individual panels in his diptychs and triptychs generally present alternate versions of the some subject rather than adjoining components of a continuous scene.
Profoundly Disturbing
While their subjects seem ordinary enough, Bacon's paintings present some of the most profoundly disturbing images in late twentieth-century art: ghoulish, screaming Popes grip their thrones as though undergoing electrocution; a naked man assumes a simian perch a top a glass-topped coffee table; a paralytic child
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