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Francis Bacon shutters at the Met
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Filleted carcases, ghostly dogs, screaming popes, and wrestling men, all conjure up Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective which will close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday August 16. If you have not seen it yet, you should before it leaves. The Bacon retrospective is an amazing collection of his work and includes a curious display of photos and artifacts from his Chelsea studio. As you walk amongst his paintings, you become part of them -- just as he wanted. Bacon requested that his paintings be presented behind glass so that his audience could be part of his twisted world.
Walking though the horror show, it's hard to decide which works are more disturbing. The paintings that use shuttering, where the image fades in and out, or the works with minimal backgrounds. The simple ones take the cake. Although the canvases with shuttering were darker in appearance and more dramatic, the brighter and lusher colors of the minimal backgrounds put the terror into the everyday realm. Pain and suffering isn't hiding in his cluttered studio in Chelsea, but out on the streets and in the landscape of the living.
Bacon painted a number of wrestling men, possibly to work out his "affliction" as he called it or homosexuality. Homosexuality was a no, no back in his day, punishable by law. The black-widow Bacon painted his lovers, two of whom committed suicide on his watch. Most of his lovers were thieves or transients, and he met one of them while being robbed in his home. Who needs Match.com?
Leaving the Bacon show you'll be exhilerated with his take on the grotesque figure. He twist and turns them inside and out with smears and kicks to the guts, pulling you inside and out and sometimes leaving you a little weary and sick.
It wouldn't be a trip to the Met without a stop at E.A.T. on Madison for lunch. You never know who you'll run into there. Over the last couple of years, Meryl Streep, Lena Olin, and Peter Boyle have been spotted there. E.A.T. offers delicious soups, salads, and sandwiches on freshly baked bread. Start out with the carrot soup and then move on to the chicken salad sandwich, of course with a side of scrumptious potato salad. And since it's summer, you must have a glass of rose wine to top off lunch and to toast Francis Bacon on his extraordinary dark engrossing paintings.
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