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Art Response 4

Art Response 4. Francis Bacon’s “Painting”. Painting 1946. Critical Commentary.

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Art Response 4

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  1. Art Response 4 Francis Bacon’s “Painting”

  2. Painting 1946

  3. Critical Commentary …Paintingis an olique [sic] but damning image of an anonymous public figure. Half-obscured by an umbrella, he is dressed in a dark formal suit—the unofficial uniform of British politicians of the day—punctuated by an incongruously bright yellow boutonnière. But his deathly complexion and toothy grimace suggest a deep brutality beneath his proper exterior. The sense of menace is accentuated by glaring colors and the cow carcasses suspended in a cruciform behind him, a motif drawn from Bacon's childhood fascination with butcher shops, but also a possible reference to Old Master treatments of the same subject. • Museum of Modern Art http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79204

  4. Art Response 5 Francis Bacon’s “Study of a figure in a Landscape”

  5. Study of Figure in a Landscape

  6. Grass was a favourite motif for Bacon - being both spiky and concealing - but the insertion of the nude body into the landscape was a refinement particular to this moment. It coincided with a number of paintings of wild animals in similar situations which derived from the artist’s two trips through southern Africa, in the winter of 1950-1 and the spring of 1952.

  7. Study of a Baboon

  8. Bacon based the screaming baboon in this painting on a photograph in one of his favorite books, Marius Maxwell’s 1925 Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (1925). Bacon visited Africa many times throughout his life (his mother lived in South Africa) and was reportedly struck by the disparity between the caged animals at the local parks and • those that roamed free. • In Study of a Baboon, this tension can be felt in the placement of the fence, which is ambiguous; it appears to be simultaneously in front of and behind the tree in the foreground. Bacon’s vigorous brushstrokes evoke a violent energy that, for him, was synonymous with beauty. “I would like some day to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty,” he stated. “That would be the ultimate painting.

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