Transcript Art Response 9

Art Response 4
Francis Bacon’s “Painting”
Painting
1946
Critical Commentary
…Painting is 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
Art Response 5
Francis Bacon’s
“Study of a figure in a Landscape”
Study of Figure
in a Landscape
• 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.
Study of a Baboon
• 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.