Francis Bacon

Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle 1966

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944

Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953

When I was in Madrid for a few days last week I checked out the Prado Museum’s latest exhibition. They’ve teamed up with the Tate in London and New York’s MMA to commemorate the birth of 20th century Irish painter Francis Bacon. The Prado (famous for its collection of classical 17th and 18th century painters) seems an unlikely place for a tribute to someone whose art is so modern, alarming, and deranged. But Bacon’s obsession with a portrait by Spanish baroque painter Diego Velasquez made the Prado feel like an eerily appropriate venue. Not to mention the fact that Bacon died of a heart attack while in Madrid in 1992.

Bacon’s biography helps to elucidate the madness behind his art. He was an atheist with an ironic attachment to the Christian symbol of crucifixion. He was a homosexual whose two serious lovers in life were both severely psychologically tormented. Both men died during their relationships with Bacon. He himself also struggled mentally and he tried to ward off his depression with the distractions of the debauched subcultures he found in Soho and Tangier—eating, drinking, gambling, sex. He was extremely critical of his own work and destroyed many of his own paintings.

The exhibition brochure says this about Bacon:

Contemplation of his works requires the highest level of concentration, an unprejudiced viewpoint and a mind and eyes open to the beauty of his technique and his brutally honest vision of the human condition, which made him a creative figure of universal stature.

One of the exhibition rooms played a fascinating video interview with Bacon conducted by art critic David Sylvester in the 1960s. And of course the YouTube gods also have a copy. If you can get past the creepy intro music, the fuzzy black and white film, and Sylvester’s chain smoking, then it’s really worth listening to Bacon’s answers.

“You don’t think you’re working an obsession with Christianity out of your system?”

“How much does it help to have had a certain amount to drink when you’re painting?”

Robert Frank: The Americans

One day, when I have a coffee table, this book will be on it:

The work — 83 photographs in all, edited down from tens of thousands taken on the artist’s treks across the U.S. from July 1954 to January 1957 — wasn’t always revered. A year after its first and largely unnoticed 1958 publication in France, as Les Americains, Frank’s perception-shattering travelogue was released in the States. It was initially dismissed as the jaundiced work of an unpatriotic cynic who kept company with the similarly subversive and ragtag Beats. (Allen Ginsberg was a close friend, and Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the U.S. edition.) In Frank’s United States, idyllic 1950s-era cliches of domestic life yielded to raw black-and-white depictions of class and racial inequality, alienation, corrosive political and religious influence, and the creep of consumer and media culture. Amid the darkness, there were also luminous portrayals of cowboys, cars and other quintessentially American people and things. Each image told a powerful story and reverberated with a deep appreciation for the texture and complexity of our way of life. (From NPR.org)