Out of the Black Hole

By ROBERT HUGHES

Two naked figures, faces obscenely eroded by electric-blue shadows, sprawl on a bed. A man huddles like a baboon on the edge of what might be a swing, a coffee table or a hangman's drop. A Pope howls silently behind glass.

There is little need to say who painted them. At 62, Francis Bacon is one of the most immediately recognizable painters in the world. For the past 25 years, critics have predicted the collapse of his reputation. Yet by now it seems that Bacon is one of the very few living artists whose work can (but does not always) exhibit the mysterious denseness of meaning, the grip on experience, which are the conditions of a masterpiece. "Who ever heard," he once sarcastically asked, "of anyone buying one of my pictures because he liked it?" But the tributes fall heavy, and the latest is a full-dress retrospective of 108 works in Paris, displayed in the Grand Palais, through the auspices of the French government--the first time France has so honored any living English painter.

Out of Decay. Up to a point, Bacon's art, in all its hazard and abiding strangeness, grows out of the terms of his life. Born in Ireland in 1909, a descendant of the great Elizabethan Sir Francis Bacon, he spent a childhood whose ambience was decayed status, country eccentricity and the violence of Irish civil war. When Francis was 17, his father caught him trying on his mother's underwear, and banished him from the house. With no special qualifications or ambition, Bacon drifted his way round Europe--to Berlin and afterward to Paris--and worked as an interior decorator in England in the '30s. Of these formative years, English Critic John Russell, in a new book on Bacon (New York Graphic Society; $16.50), remarks, "Berlin and Paris gave him the notion of a big city as an erotic gymnasium. But there is also, in Bacon's makeup, a paradoxical austerity which he traces directly to his father." It is no accident that so many of Bacon's most compelling images are at root father-figures: the shrieking Pope, the dictator mouthing before the mikes, the worsted-sheathed executive with the expression of a wax shark.

Horror Movie. Bacon's work is the kind that invites stereotyped reactions. He is seen as a master of crisis, directing a horror movie. The adjective most often given to his work, nightmarish, is not quite true to Bacon's intentions; it does not go far enough. For nightmares, like movies, end. Bacon's images, on the other hand, are thrust at us as the enduring substance of reality. They are not fantasies, but observation slits into a Black Hole of Calcutta, in which man thrashes about, stifled by claustrophobia and frustration, stabbing with penis or knife at the nearest body. This, Bacon insists, is the real world; it defines the suppressed condition of actual life.

Bacon's work is not pessimistic (or optimistic, for that matter), for it lives outside these parentheses on a terrain of amoral candor about the most extreme situations. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"--so William Blake, whose mask Bacon once painted. Bacon's career has been a pursuit of this truth, from the transvestite bars of 1920s Berlin to the green baize of Monte Carlo, where he still assuages his passion for gambling. He is the Genet of painting, most particularly in the lavishness with which he uses his own psyche as experimental material.

Bacon's figures, in their blurred, spastic postures, relate to the work of early still photographers like Eadweard Muybridge, or art reproductions, movie stills, news flashes. Personality, existence itself, glints like a fish in dark water and is gone. Bacon is a singular draftsman, but his drawing has practically no descriptive function--it serves, instead, to tally a sum of distortions.

"One of the problems is to paint like Velasquez, but with the texture of hippopotamus skin," he once remarked. And he does. Structure emerges from the tracks of the looping brush as though naturalism were being reinvented. The result is that Bacon's distortions have a unique kind of anatomical conviction. Collectively, they amount to nothing less than a group portrait in which Baconian man--lecherous, wary, perversely heroic--carries on his flesh the cumulative imprint of self-destruction.

. Robert Hughes

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