This 20th-century painting foretold our 21st-century moment
There is no exit from Francis Bacon’s 1946 masterpiece “Painting,” a response to the horrors of WWII
When this painting was still on its easel, the director of London’s National Gallery of Art, Kenneth Clark, visited the studio of the man who made it, Francis Bacon. Bacon was 36. World War II had just ended. Britain was in terrible shape.
Clark, who later became known as the enthusiastically erudite presenter of the 13-part television series “Civilisation,” took a close look and mumbled, “Interesting, yes. What extraordinary times we live in,” then quietly made his exit.
There is no exit from this grandiose, overripe, excitingly thuggish work, which Bacon later described as “a series of accidents mounting on top of each other.” The drawn purple blinds — a reference to a photograph of Hitler’s bunker — make sure of it.
If Clark was interested in civilization, Bacon was thinking about its collapse. He conceived “Painting,” 1946, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when the world was struggling to process a whole new repertoire of disturbing imagery: rallies presided over by dictators in suits, naked corpses dumped in open graves, cities reduced to rubble.
But Bacon painted none of that — at least, not directly. He was fascinated by the evidential authority of photography — its ability to bear witness — but he didn’t want truth to be filed away as a thing that happens to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time — as inevitably happens with photographs. He knew that painting could convey things photography could not. It could convey what he called “the brutality of fact.”
[‘Civilizations’ is the most ambitious story about art ever told on television]
So he painted this living nightmare: a meaty-chinned man under an open black umbrella. Hanging behind him, in a hieratic arrangement suggestive of altars, two carcasses of beef. The man looms over a railed, circular enclosure that evokes a witness stand, a casino table or a pulpit. He is surrounded by microphones and more cuts of meat.
The carcasses behind him conjure famous paintings by Rembrandt and Chaim Soutine, painters who saw great beauty in the colors and textures of meat. Bacon’s sides of beef are garlanded with flowers — traditional decoration in Britain’s fancier butchers but also Bacon’s way of ramping up the dissonance, the atmosphere of ritual sacrifice. (“Well, of course, we are meat,” he told David Sylvester, "we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”)
The carcasses deliberately evoke the crucifixion. Bacon wasn’t religious, but he was drawn to the crucifixion, which gave painters a pretext to raise figures into “a very pronounced and isolated position” and which he saw as “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation.”
For all its atmosphere of Grand Guignol, “Painting” was Bacon’s great early breakthrough. It is the work of someone who — just a year after Hiroshima and before the full extent of the Holocaust was understood — was willing to grapple in earnest with the immensity of what had happened. It has a rough, hurried feeling, as of entrails pulled from slaughtered beasts. But something about it also suggests stasis, like a mysterious image that silts up and overwhelms an unfurling dream narrative.
You could say it resembles an oracle. So it seems fitting that, although it was painted in old Europe, it matches this moment in America of profound cognitive dissonance; brute, impenetrable power; and shameless addiction to spectacle.
After Clark walked out of Bacon’s studio, he went to dinner with Graham Sutherland, at the time Britain’s best-known modern painter. “You and I may be in a minority of two,” he said, “but we may still be right in thinking Francis Bacon has genius.”
Great Works, In Focus
This 20th-century painting foretold our 21st-century moment
There is no exit from Francis Bacon’s 1946 masterpiece “Painting,” a response to the horrors of WWII
When this painting was still on its easel, the director of London’s National Gallery of Art, Kenneth Clark, visited the studio of the man who made it, Francis Bacon. Bacon was 36. World War II had just ended. Britain was in terrible shape.
Clark, who later became known as the enthusiastically erudite presenter of the 13-part television series “Civilisation,” took a close look and mumbled, “Interesting, yes. What extraordinary times we live in,” then quietly made his exit.
There is no exit from this grandiose, overripe, excitingly thuggish work, which Bacon later described as “a series of accidents mounting on top of each other.” The drawn purple blinds — a reference to a photograph of Hitler’s bunker — make sure of it.
If Clark was interested in civilization, Bacon was thinking about its collapse. He conceived “Painting,” 1946, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when the world was struggling to process a whole new repertoire of disturbing imagery: rallies presided over by dictators in suits, naked corpses dumped in open graves, cities reduced to rubble.
But Bacon painted none of that — at least, not directly. He was fascinated by the evidential authority of photography — its ability to bear witness — but he didn’t want truth to be filed away as a thing that happens to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time — as inevitably happens with photographs. He knew that painting could convey things photography could not. It could convey what he called “the brutality of fact.”
[‘Civilizations’ is the most ambitious story about art ever told on television]
So he painted this living nightmare: a meaty-chinned man under an open black umbrella. Hanging behind him, in a hieratic arrangement suggestive of altars, two carcasses of beef. The man looms over a railed, circular enclosure that evokes a witness stand, a casino table or a pulpit. He is surrounded by microphones and more cuts of meat.
The carcasses behind him conjure famous paintings by Rembrandt and Chaim Soutine, painters who saw great beauty in the colors and textures of meat. Bacon’s sides of beef are garlanded with flowers — traditional decoration in Britain’s fancier butchers but also Bacon’s way of ramping up the dissonance, the atmosphere of ritual sacrifice. (“Well, of course, we are meat,” he told David Sylvester, "we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”)
The carcasses deliberately evoke the crucifixion. Bacon wasn’t religious, but he was drawn to the crucifixion, which gave painters a pretext to raise figures into “a very pronounced and isolated position” and which he saw as “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation.”
For all its atmosphere of Grand Guignol, “Painting” was Bacon’s great early breakthrough. It is the work of someone who — just a year after Hiroshima and before the full extent of the Holocaust was understood — was willing to grapple in earnest with the immensity of what had happened. It has a rough, hurried feeling, as of entrails pulled from slaughtered beasts. But something about it also suggests stasis, like a mysterious image that silts up and overwhelms an unfurling dream narrative.
You could say it resembles an oracle. So it seems fitting that, although it was painted in old Europe, it matches this moment in America of profound cognitive dissonance; brute, impenetrable power; and shameless addiction to spectacle.
After Clark walked out of Bacon’s studio, he went to dinner with Graham Sutherland, at the time Britain’s best-known modern painter. “You and I may be in a minority of two,” he said, “but we may still be right in thinking Francis Bacon has genius.”