Screams in Paint

By R.Z.

At 50, one has the face one deserves.

Francis Bacon's, at 65, bears witness to the preservative effect of doing what you feel like, no matter how extreme, when you feel like it, no matter how late the hour. "I don't really care about my life," says Bacon. "I've led a very hypnotic and curious one -- being homosexual I have lived with the most marvelously disastrous people. Of course one suffers. You like somebody and you suffer from it. But that's how life is." Born the son of a horse trainer in Ireland, raised in a thick atmosphere of decayed gentility and Sinn Fein violence, flung out of home at 16 for making love to the grooms, drifting into Berlin and the tackiest pits of Weimar decadence, changing addresses almost as often as shirts, surviving in an utterly provisional manner as unsuccessful interior decorator in Germany, as professional gambler in England, Bacon is a very English figure -- in some ways a modern (and untitled) type of the Restoration libertine and wit, Lord Rochester.

"There are two sides to me," Bacon explains in a recently published interview with English Art Critic David Sylvester. "I like very perfect things, for instance. I like perfection on a very grand scale. In a way I would like to live in a very grand place. But as in painting you make such a mess, I prefer to live in the mess with the memories and the damage." In photographs of the artist in his studio, we see the most famous English painter of his generation lurking in his lair. The camera flattens the owl-like eyes and avian nose into the mask of a pudgy child surrounded by a volcanic sludge of rubbish: the walls daubed with paint, the tables and floor buried under a dune of exhausted tubes, boxes, crumpled photographs, muck. These, so to speak, are the lineaments of gratified desire. "I never believed one should have any security and never expect to keep any," says Bacon. "After all, as existence in a way is so banal, you may as well try to make a kind of grandeur of it rather than be nursed to oblivion."

The Metropolitan Museum's current show, "Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974," testifies to his success in that haughty project. When Bacon was first talked of in England 25 years ago, his images of ectoplastic businessmen and screaming Popes, based on such then unlikely-sounding sources as pioneer Cameraman Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of human and animal motion, a textbook on radiology, stills from Russian Director Sergei Eisenstein's movies, and an exquisitely colored handbook on diseases of the mouth, were seen as a Guignol of existential dread. Indeed, the scariness of Bacon prevented many people from experiencing his work aesthetically: the scream on the Pope, like the smile on the Cheshire cat, remained while the rest of the picture evaporated. And yet, explains Bacon, "when I made the Pope screaming, I didn't want to do it the way that I did it -- I wanted to make the mouth, with the beauty of its color and everything, look like one of the sunsets of Monet."

Oval Loops. In the past two decades, Bacon's work has gained immeasurably in its scope of color and plasticity of drawing. With the recent triptychs and other paintings, his ambition to reinstate the human figure as a primary subject of art has been to some degree fulfilled. No other living artist can paint flesh at this pitch of intensity, in this extremity of rage, loss and voluptuousness, or with this command over pigment. His typical setting is familiar: an anonymous oval room. It has tubular furniture, somewhere between a Corbusier couch and an operating table. Sometimes a bare bulb hangs down on its cord from the ceiling. It looks both sadistic and as ideal (almost) as Piero della Francesca's suspended egg. The people in the room are also familiar. Sometimes they are anonymous figures, writhing and grappling. The rest are portraits of himself and his friends: George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, the artist Lucian Freud. "Who," Bacon once half-jokingly asked, "can I tear to pieces if not my friends?" Triptych, May-June 1973, with its deliquescent knot of white flesh hunched on a toilet, spewing into a basin and casting a melodramatic bat's shadow on the floor, is an elegy for George Dyer, who committed suicide in a Paris hotel room in 1971.

Paint, in Bacon's hands, acquires a strict and intimidating richness. Working in fast oval loops of the brush, he can give the skin of his nudes a kind of granular density, a thickness of imagined substance, that is quite old-masterly. The flesh is loose, but it is all structure too; and when the form beneath it slides away, obliterated by a wipe of the rag, Bacon can instantly tighten the image back with one detail -- an eye, a patch of spiky hair like hedgehog quills. To a degree few other painters can rival, Bacon convinces you that every stroke and drip counts, that they carry a weight of ethical decision, so that representation is not a matter of filling-in but rather a continual reinvention of the motif. "I use everything from the brushes that sweep the floor to rags. I use everything to remake the images. I am not trying at all to illustrate life." Bacon wants -- and generally manages to put -- the drama in the paint, not in the narrative. In fact, the best triptychs are not narratives in any decipherable sense. "I don't want to avoid telling a story," Bacon remarked to Sylvester, "but I want very, very much ... to give the sen sation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you."

What is happening in a work like Triptych, May-June 19741 What relation does the center panel, with its interior space -- a platform with one figure crawling round the rim and another sit ting in a pool of violet shadow at the back -- have to the two beach scenes on either side? Whose are the two heads in old-fashioned collars that rise, like oppressive icons of paternal authority, be hind the platform? Unanswerable questions. What remains, nevertheless, is an extraordinary density and layering of sensation -- the Grand Manner returned to figurative art, but scraped raw.

-- R . H .

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