FRANCIS BACON

Most modern artists were skeptical of realism, of Cartesian accuracy, of Alberti defined space

Francis Bacon was one of these skeptics.

“Bacon was convinced he has seen through “the lie of realism” – even the kind of sophisticated urban realism invented by Manet and Degas in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Realism’s pretense at disinterested truth-telling, its slaving fidelity to appearances – these things were of dubious value, he believed, in the more extreme and fragmented circumstances of the twentieth century.”  1.

I’ve been thinking about Frances Bacon off and on.  In their Screaming Popes series, Bacon at times enclosed their figures in a more or less transparent glass box.  And the boxes are shown with great transparency.  What’s with that?

Did Bacon have any established opinions regarding transparency?  Was the inclusion of transparency a comment on modernism and the world?  I don’t know.  The web is awash in analysis of this painting series.  And there does not seem to be any consensus regarding the transparency of the forms surrounding the popes.  I always thought that Bacon’s reference to the transparent box was a reference to the enclosures that Nazi war criminals sat in during the Nuremberg trials.  But I can’t find any sort of substantiation of this.

Still, as the passage above says, Bacon was heroically striking out against the lie of realism.  They were passionately against fake truth telling.  They were revealing the unseen.

My drawing is Baconish and was done for this page.  For the figure, I used a de Kooning drawing projection.  And then of course the glass enclosure.  Very much fun.

1.  Smee, Sebastian.  The Art of Rivalry.  Random House,  New York.  2016.