Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, until August 16

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1979-80, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Francis Bacon: A Centenary  Retrospective
Metropolitan Museum of Art, until August 16

Sod off.  To escape the lingering odor given off by the career of Francis Bacon, you'd have to be hanging from a refrigerator hook in an abattoir. Not an unlikely place to meet the artist, actually. His paintings of anguish and horror make many avert their faces, not so much from offensive art as from an offensive smell. Goya's blunt, black sketches of rotting corpses hanging from trees in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion strike the same note of crossing sensory boundaries. Bacon joins Jonathan Swift as obsessed with socially aberrant smells, in Swift's case the smell of a lady farting, in Bacon's the sweat of a man having sex with another man. But he is quite willing to throw in the rank odor of bloody meat and dog shit on the sidewalk (Bacon once spotted the latter and proclaimed, "Now there's what life really is.")  The artist's renegade sex life has been vividly portrayed in a film titled "Love Is the Devil," which summarizes his rough-trade view on the subject of love. Such is the sainted renown of Bacon at home—he passes for the English Jean Genet but without a hagiographer on the order of Sartre—that every drunken careen through the low dives of Soho could be a station of the Cross.

Yet there are a host of critics who aren't buying any of it. Before I attended the current large exhibit of over sixty Bacon canvases at the Met, I read New York squibs that labelled him a cartoonist, if not himself a cartoon, a shabby shocker, a Johnny One Note of screaming popes and butcher-shop variety meats.  In addition he was a blowhard who never met an interviewer he didn't want to talk to, and a tireless careerist stage-managing his own fame.  Why did so many articles proclaim that Bacon was at once great but not credible? A painter famous for telling society to bugger off was being handed the same in return.

Yet even if every accusation were true, and there's a viable argument for each, Bacon's work jumps off the canvas and aims a dart into the soul as obviously (one should think) as Rembrandt's or Turner's.  If the greatest achievement of art is to communicate the consciousness of the artist, how can anyone deny Bacon's power?  When you visit the Tate Britain in London, whose walls are lined with honorable accomplishment, the two painters capable of flaying the heart (in a good way) are Turner and Bacon.  They are supreme expression of a culture that managed to produce heroes no culture can contain.

I think ordinary viewers grasp this instinctively. Bacon, like Van Gogh, is critic-proof.  The Met's gallery is all but silent (as an unscripted theatrical effect, an infant was screaming a siren wail on the day I visited), and people stare at images from a modern Hieronymus Bosch, cataloguing a hell of the interior as convincing to contemporary non-believers as Bosch's was to post-medieval Christians.  An appalled shiver unites the crowds, which are thick and constant at this exhibit. In addition to the paintings themselves, the Met has devoted one dimmed side room to a display of flotsam and jetsam from Bacon's famously chaotic studio (now transferred in toto to Dublin), where layer upon layer of compositing photos, news clips, magazine articles, and artistic shards formed a sedimentary deposit. Bacon left the studio in that condition, he said, because he was inspired by chaos, and he liked to await the arrival of happy accidents, a chance glance at a scrap or image underfoot that caused his mind to take flight.

Bacon never took a lesson and never painted from life.  He rose almost fully formed after an early start at interior decorating and street hustling, with a small gray "Crucifixion" in 1933 that resembles an x-ray of the Shroud of Turin, should it happen that the enshrouded figure was a splayed cow. Within months the picture appeared in a book on modern painting opposite a Picasso, the master whom Bacon adored above all others.  I imagine there was a certain shyness he felt before the living. A prowler of public toilets, gambling dens, sordid bars, and cruising spots wouldn't exactly frolic in the normal, and when all is said and done, a model posing in a studio is decidedly normal.

Among all the detritus that satisfied his nesting instinct, I was struck by two images from Bacon's studio. One was a page torn from the studies of bodies in motion taken by the nineteenth-century photographer, Eadward Muybridge.  These became famous as the first stop-action portrayals of men running, leaping, wrestling, and the like. Muybridge married science and art. His images supplied painters with thousands upon thousands of new poses, all in real-time motion, never dreamed of in anatomy classes. At the same time, they removed any hint of idealism, since not every gesture made by the human form is beautiful.

Bacon used Muybridge as a major inspiration; in this case, he saved a page showing two nude men wrestling, amounting to over a hundred postage-stamp sized shots in sequence. It's not only that he transmuted them into men having sex (never explicitly portrayed -- they could be men fighting or even merging like melting jelly or pooled liquid flesh). The startling part is how literal Bacon could be in lifting Muybridge's poses while simultaneously making them so disturbing, as if his own desire-repellence was a transmuting force all its own, capable of damning-celebrating, looking-not looking, touching-cringing at the same time.

The other scrap that caught my eye was of one of Bacon's young, usually thuggish, moody lovers, George Dyer. After Dyer's suicide by overdose in 1971, a grief-stricken Bacon began to paint him even more obsessively than he had in life. According to the painter,  the two met in 1964 when Dyer was attempting to burgle Bacon's apartment, a likely story given that Dyer later planted some marijuana in the apartment, which he now shared with Bacon, and then called the police to come and seize it, arresting Bacon in the bargain.  Rough, handsome, and no doubt adept at various tinges of sado-masochism, Dyer happened to have a classic Roman nose in profile.  But in this particular photo he sits grinning in a chair facing us. It's an ordinary snapshot.  What makes it striking is that Bacon has trampled and folded it many times, adding streaks of color such as a red slash here and there. This deliberate manhandling -- forget the psychological overtones -- gave Bacon access to visual distortions that leapt on to the canvas as distortions of face, figure, character, and mood.

Similar mangling can be seen in much outsider art, the kind produced by schizophrenics who obsessively carry out hallucinatory visions. Bacon was certainly an outsider, and yet he calls from beyond sanity with screams that make more sense of life than one would imagine possible.  Psychosis is ultimately sterile when trying to dig deeper into life. It's too repetitive, self-involved, and private, a maze luxuriant with growth but devoid of fruit. Bacon returns to the same themes with similar compulsiveness -- the Met show includes six of his "Screaming Popes," luridly purplish takes on a painting he thought the greatest ever done, Velasquez's famous portrait of Pope Innocent X.  But when he stretches the Pope's head into an elongated melon, pries his mouth open like a doctor looking for a festering wound (Bacon kept a Victorian volume on mouth diseases close at hand), cages him in a rectangle of gold bars like a papal menagerie, and furrows the gray space all around into curtains of dripping sorrow, the final effect isn't remotely psychotic. It's despairingly religious, as seen by someone who called himself an optimist in a special sense: an optimist of nothing.

In an age of Google images, you can gaze at Bacon's iconic paintings with the flick of a finger. I must admit that seeing them in person doesn't necessarily add as much as seeing Rembrandt or Titian in person.  The pictures have gained some impact of scale, since all but a few are large and at times larger than life. Each is framed, per Bacon's instructions, in heavy gold frames fronted with glass (he wanted the viewer's reflection to become part of the painting -- it doesn't really work).  But Bacon's  existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them.

Still, this is the first major Bacon show in New York in two decades, which makes it unmissable. A final point.  In the audio guide and a projection at the end of the show,  there's quite a bit of Bacon talking about himself in his upper-crust drone that's peculiarly at odds with his tomcat-crawling-the-alley habits. He tends to carry on, almost like an Alec Guinness parody of Francis Bacon.  More to the point, he's constantly evading the pain and honesty of his canvases. Despite some cogent remarks, Bacon was a celebrity poseur as flaccid as Andy Warhol but without the mesmerizing looks.  Bacon flouted a quotation he lifted from Aeschylus: "The reek of human blood smiles out at me." He actually meant it, which is horrifying, but how can such an appetite ever be put into words.