"Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds" exclaimed The Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 original Batman film, as he and his crew swung open the doors of the Gothem City Art Museum and begun to deface a number of famous works of art. That is, all but one - as The Joker danced about to Prince's song Partyman, he stopped Bob The Goon from slicing up Francis Bacon's Figure With Meat (1954), saying, "I kinda like this one Bob, leave it." Does this mean you have to be a cold hearted, pessimist of human society, Joker-type to appreciate the art of Francis Bacon? Well, the artist once did say that he was "an optimist about nothing." That certainly rings true in the Met's staging of the first major New York exhibition in twenty years, and the only United States venue for this traveling show, of the work of Francis Bacon, an English painter born in Ireland a century ago. 

Although you would have to go visit the Art Institute of Chicago if you want to reenact The Joker saving Figure With Meat, there are plenty of other works in the exhibit at the Met that are Joker-worthy. The show covers the breadth of Bacon's long career and highlights a number of leitmotifs (slabs of raw meat, screaming popes, and grotesque human / animal figures twisted and deformed) that, over the years, turned from a groundbreaking signature style to a hackneyed caricature of itself. Bacon really hit his stride as a self-taught painter in the post World War II years, where his expression of inner turmoil mirrored, in a sense, the existential state of Europe after the war. The most original part of the exhibition, in terms of the curatorial practice, is the photographic source material on view that Bacon used as an aid, since he never liked to paint from real life. These materials exemplify how photography informed the work of Bacon, whose paintings always walked a fine line between abstraction and representation.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is certainly not for everyone, despite its blockbuster attendance. I'll admit, it was the first ever exhibit that I had to walk away from, take a deep breath, reminder myself that there is good in the world, and then walk back in. It is for sure an unusual time for the Met to host the exhibit, when summer is blossoming, and lazy lakeside vacationing is on the mind. Francis Bacon gives off more of a dead of winter feel. However, if you can fare through the storm, you may emerge with a keener sense of the depths of the human mind. 





- John Everett Daquino

(Images: Head III (1948); Untitled Painting (1946). Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)