Exhibit of the week : Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York

Through Aug. 16

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Francis Bacon was “the 20th century’s greatest painter of anger and anguish,” said Richard Lacayo in Time. This major retrospective of Bacon’s paintings powerfully brings together “five decades of his work into a collective cry.” Bacon painted in the language of “acute pain,” littering his canvases with slabs of meat and viscera. His contorted portraits—of wretched life forms, screaming apes, and torture-racked medieval popes—have been both revered and reviled for more than a half-century. Love him or hate him, Bacon’s paintings achieve “a tragic dimension” unparalleled in contemporary art. At their best, they represent the apotheosis of degradation and suffering, a cathartic reaction to the century of total war.

The Met’s feting of Bacon actually “feels more like a coronation than a retrospective,” said Christopher Benfey in Slate.com. “It’s as though after years of painting howling popes and grisly crucifixions, the bad-boy sinner had finally been rewarded with a puff of white smoke from the Holy See.” It’s hard to deny a place in the canon to these gape-inducing works. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), with its trio of eyeless “lamprey-like” figures set against a horrifying orange background, preserves “the visceral impact of religious painting” without the “overt spiritual baggage.” It’s one of the show’s most gripping works, as is the seminal Painting (1946), which features a splayed and crucified animal carcass foregrounded by a half-headed image of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

In the end, though, this show fails to “settle the question of Bacon’s greatness,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. While individual paintings approach genius, many of the early works that once caused controversy in the art world now seem “histrionic and bloated.” Bacon painted until his death, in 1992, and his later works find him in a rut, repeating the same provocative tropes and techniques, minus the “tension” that made his midperiod work soar. There simply may never be an exhibition that will silence Bacon’s detractors, who see his oeuvre as a mere cartoonish expression of angst and a juvenile obsession with the scatological. For some, like me, Bacon remains one of those “artists we fall ardently for in our teens” but whom we unceremoniously drop “later in life as our tastes become more sophisticated.”