Confronting Bacon

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) remains as powerful and daunting today as he did in his prime - the same applies to his art - art that still speaks to viewers remote from the unpropitious post-war world in which his pictures were first exhibited. Important for its wide appeal, Bacon's aesthetic vision was figurative rather than abstract. His paintings suggest some disturbed sense of the human condition beneath everyday life, expressed by the alarmingly distorted physiognomies and bodies.
Bacon ultimately saw himself as the heir to a tradition of experimentation and uncompromising individualism handed down by such European forebears as Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. Like these artists before him, Bacon's main focus was geared towards the human figure, whereas many of his English contemporaries hearkened back nostalgically to landscape themes and a native Romanticism.
Decades after his death he has joined the ranks of Rothko, Warhol, and others as a blue-ship modern 'Old Master'.

Ok, enough history talk. Im starting to sound like Simon Schama.
Lets compare and contrast.

Figure Study I (1945-6) @ The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 
Study for a Portrait (1991) @ The Lefevre Gallery 

The paintings were created some 35 years apart, but together, both paintings encapsulate the trajectory of Bacon's artistic development. Figure Study I seems to be a montage of fragmentary and disconnected elements - an overcoat, a hat, flowers, and more abstract background details - that appear to have crystallized within a improvised painting process, obscuring discarded ideas and layers of paint.
By contrast, Study for a Portrait is larger in scale, and far more legible in its description of a particular, anatomically coherent individual. The thinner paint surface suggests that Bacon started working with a clear idea about the final composition. The earlier picture seems to have been an exploratory struggle for the artist, whereas the later one appears to have come to him more easily and looks relatively deft.

Bacon: 'I think that the best works of modern artists often give the impression that they were done when the artist was in a state of unknowing...when you get to the late analytical-cubist works, there's a totally mysterious relationship to reality which you can't begin to analyze, and you sense that the artist didn't know what he was doing, that he had a kind of rightness of instinct and that only instinct was operating'.

I wish I could go on and on and on about Francis Bacon, but I decided to keep it a little less opinionated. Maybe one day I can write a bit more. (If you want to look him up type in 'artist' after his name or you'll get a completely different dude.)

Don't you get it?

I find it rather funny that my first post as an official "blogger" has to do with time-based media. Those who know me know how worked up I get on some of the ridiculous antics contemporary artists are up to these days. I like subtle. I like purpose and clarity. I don't like artist statements that rationalize the work by making the viewer (or me) feel inferior and less highly evolved...But I'm trying to be a big girl and make this blog as unbiased as possible - so I digress.


Ok, Ed Atkins.
For those of you that read ArtReview there is an article in the current September issue titled "Great Collectors and their Ideas: Julia Stoschek"which has some interesting insights into her collection. Growing up in a family where art was never an interest, Stoschek has a pretty distinct taste - taste that definitely has street cred. September 6, 2013 was the seventh annual exhibition from the collection featuring Ed Atkins and Frances Stark.




Video by Ed Atkins.