Beauty In The Slaughterhouse: Francis Bacon’s Books And Painting
Bacon en toutes lettres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (through January 20)
Francis Bacon: Late Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 23 — May 25)
Reviewed by Sarah Stewart-Kroeker and Stephen S. Bush
Humans are susceptible to puncture and cut, and in the end, like all dead organic matter, we’ll spoil. Whatever else we are, we’re meat. Francis Bacon’s paintings incessantly remind us of these truths. Whereas Pablo Picasso’s cubism was perspectival and worked from side to side — merging left, center, and right, Bacon’s is physiological and works from the inside out: interior, surface, and exterior. Organs and bones intermingle with skin and hair. In his oeuvre, the human subject itself serves as the memento mori, it is always figured and disfigured, fleshy and skeletal, animated and decaying.
Georges Bataille, one of Bacon’s influences, wrote that the cultural predecessor of the butchershop was the temple, in which animals were sacrificed and then quartered and consumed. Moderns, in his estimation, have lost their sense of the sacred. In other times and places, bloody rituals bound the members of the community together as they ceremonially consumed the victuals. Today, we want our slaughterhouses out of sight, out of mind, lest we be forced to acknowledge the gore without which there would be no haute cuisine.
Bacon, too, took inspiration from the meathouse. He too would insist that we attend to the pervasiveness of horror that underlies ‘decent’ society. Butchery confronts the viewer in one of the very first paintings one encounters at the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition of Bacon’s work. In the artwork, Second Version of ‘Painting’ 1946 (1971), a man with a smeared face sits cross-legged against a bright yellow background, underneath a hanging cow carcass (with splayed limbs that reference Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox and in turn crucifixion iconography). He is surrounded by two slabs of meat skewered on a circular rail. An umbrella provides shelter, but casts a dark shadow even as it does.
The exhibition, Bacon: Books and Painting, emphasizes the artist’s literary influences. Interspersed throughout the presentation of sixty of his late works are six rooms devoted to authors that marked…
