ART « In Which We Regard The Pain of Francis Bacon »
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 8:40AM 
The Expression of Surprise
by YVONNE GEORGINA PUIG
The experience of visiting a museum is informed as much by the art as by with whom the museum is visited. Because I expected to see the Francis Bacon retrospective with a very particular, important, and heartbreaking figure in my life, but ended up seeing it alone, the already devastating qualities of the work took on an isolating, crystalline silence.
I just started reading Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, which is all about how the mind reacts to mass-produced images of atrocity and suffering. The book’s concern is whether we become inured to such images, resulting in a blanket lack of sympathy and understanding regarding war. This got me thinking that Bacon’s work produces exactly the opposite effect.
Hours spent in large epic museums like the Metropolitan can bring about, albeit less significantly, the apathy Sontag fears. Great halls stacked three, four, canvasses high: ancient, burning cities; eyeballs mid-gouge; pale, dying nymphs; the face of a father deciding which of his sons should live; bodies ravaged by pox; a woman, alone, on her knees; decapitated heads, tongues loose and wagging. All of these exquisitely rendered and impactful, but after awhile, nearly invisible. This doesn’t happen with Bacon.
Each pictures chills, and the whole is a sort of spellbinding and terrible abyss, if that makes any sense. The curators quote one critic who describes Bacon’s themes as “vivid and meaningless as a nightmare,” and “leaving the same long-continued feeling of disquiet as a thoroughly bad dream.”
I don’t think nightmare or dream gets to it, though. These are things from which you awake and experience relief. I found this work mysterious because it isn’t easily shaken off or dismissed as unreal. It is humbling in its confrontation of ultimate and terrifying realities. Bacon wanted to portray a godless world, and his vision is truthful. Here is a man with his nose pressed against the pane of oblivion, and the creatures and individuals inhabiting his pictures scream out to it, or from it, or against it. That, or they’re suspended within it. The mouth is Bacon's vessel. The trade off for terror, for life laid bare is meaning. And is it worth it?
The galleries were quiet as far as crowded galleries go. I might as well have been in there alone, and I’m sure others felt the same. I kept asking questions of the person I was supposed to see the show with, and he wasn’t there. So I had to answer them myself. And as I stayed longer in each room, it began to seem that I’d never have the answer to anything, that all these screams were silent, that authentic and true answers were only abstractions, to be found in the yellow teeth of the man leaning over a rot-green bar in Bacon’s “Dreams and Life in Hotel Bedrooms” series.
Or the photographic blur of a mastiff standing over a sewer grate. Or the wet mouth of a pope, emerging from a vertical curtain of dark and light, the creases of his red cloak quivering.
Bacon wished to paint the colors of mouths “as Monet painted sunsets.” Unknown, haunting, taciturn, gorgeous. I left and sat down in the park and didn’t know what to do. I covered my ears without covering my ears. Too quiet.
Yvonne Georgina Puig is the contributing editor to This Recording. She tumbls here for your pleasure.
"Archaic Smile" - Wye Oak (mp3)
"Keeping Company" - Wye Oak (mp3)
"Orchard Fair" - Wye Oak (mp3)
Reader Comments (5)
To quote JJ the day after Bloomsday: "MUTE INHUMAN FACES THRONG FORWARD, LEERING, VANISHING, GIBBERING´..."
Very good indeed, it was a pleasure reading, and also a pleasure to know that someone apreciates Bacon sort of in the way that I do. Standing ovation to paragraph 6.
Wieland Schmied sais about Bacons art "The aim of his woek was to endow things with greater ´intensity´ and attack the nervous system of the viewer" Shorely he did it
I was pretty chuffed at how much there is behind these pictures, this also really helped me understand Bacons work, i'm trying to use his style in my art GCSE. i just love his work