Finding Francis Bacon

I recently went to an exhibition of work by the English painter, Francis Bacon. The context of the exhibition was Bacon's development as a painter, and his debt to the Masters. I don't think Bacon himself had any issues with these influences. In fact, he positively reveled in them.

His stylistic homage to Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and Picasso, was undertaken with an intensity bordering on the autistic. That said, we're all on the scale, somewhere.....

I think that seeing the work juxtaposed with paintings, prints, and sculptures by these Masters, and others, revealed a curious slip of time. Bacon's work is often referenced in his later years, where, rich and lauded by the Art Establishment, with each new painting in appearance more bizarre and controversial than the last, his early 20th century bohemian roots are overlooked. In the gallery, in a brief aside to a particular Impressionist work, the legend beneath the work noted that Bacon first saw, and was influenced by, the work in Paris in 1927.

It follows that Bacon could be termed a 19th century man, in that these influences, the genius only then in its earliest incarnation of acclaim, with the lives of most of these artists still in living memory, affected the eighteen-year-old deeply, a personal commitment that was to span the next sixty years.

The novelist Mary McCarthy once wrote of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, that Bishop's character was that of the first-person I, hidden away, as in a game of hide-and-seek, waiting to be found. Again I paraphrase, but Bishop in turn said of the novelist, who had included her as a character in her novel,The Group, to the chagrin of the poet, that if only McCarthy wrote less, she might have more to say. While these observational barbs are amusing in hindsight, the condition of these artists was antithetical to Bacon's own.

As we left the gallery, my wife observed that all Bacon had was himself, meaning that to review a life in hindsight, in rigid retrospection, within the absolutist, heady atmosphere of internet algorithms,SMART devices, and 140-character comments, leaves us, the viewers, with less, somehow, as though we required a continual revision of our lives and the world around us, to reinforce and validate our existence.

Bacon, it could be said, was at his most revealing when most indifferent to being found.