Francis Bacon, “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (ca. 1944)Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Call Francis Bacon what you will, but be advised that, given how many things he’s already been called by the hordes of critics who have weighed in on the 65-painting centenary show that visited the Tate in London and the Prado in Madrid and is now rounding out its tour at the Met, you may be repeating someone. Briefly, a roll call. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle: “a pasticheur, a mimic”; the Independent’s Tom Lubbock: a “vulgar entertainer”; the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman: a “pure … painter” whose work was “cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage”; the New York Times’s Roberta Smith: “an artist for our time”; Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo: “one of the artists who found a way, after the butchery of World War II, to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure”; New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz: “more of a cartoonist.”
At the very least, the current exhibition should rescue the artist from the tragically banal pigeonhole into which he’s recently been slotted: art market leading indicator. (Some facile narratives bookend the boom-bust cycle with a pair of Bacons: a 1976 triptych sold to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich at Sotheby’s in May 2008 for a jaw-dropping $86 million; a 1964 self-portrait, estimated at some $40 million, flopped at the same house last November.) Via (ARTinfo)
Francis Bacon is on show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through to August 16th
