YOU ENOCH

Francis Bacon, “Blood on Pavement,” 1988
Oil on canvas; 77 15/16 x 58 1/16 in. (198 x 147.5 cm)
Private collection
© 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London
{Source: Tate Britain}

[Image removed from the Met's website]

Francis Bacon, “A Piece of Waste Land,” 1982
Oil on canvas; 77 15/16 x 58 1/16 in. (198 x 147.5 cm)
Private collection, courtesy of Ivor Braka, Ltd.
© 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon / ARS, New York / DACS, London {Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective.”}

Andrew Sinclair, in his Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (a certainly flawed biography or “social history” of Bacon’s life), reports that, “The room given to Rothko in the Museum of Modern Art in New York had depressed him for a whole day after he had seen it” (251).  Bacon and Mark Rothko, of course, were very different painters.  Yet it is interesting to see Bacon’s non-figurative works included in the MET show.  There is a kinship to Rothko in Bacon’s “Blood on Pavement” of 1988.  Here, in the blood, there is still the human trace, the elemental human marking, the stain of man.  In this sense Bacon is still depicting man.  The trace of man, of the figure inhabiting the canvas, is even more abstract, more vacant, in “A Piece of Waste Land.” Rothko’s works conjure an ambiance akin to a Brian Eno soundscape or an Arvo Part choral work.  Rothko’s work is at odds with Bacon’s approach, yet in these mature works from the 1980s we see Bacon expressing a mastery with his materials, where the color field emerges as an expressive form that equals, or rather counter balances, his violent stabs and strokes of the brush so prominent and essential to his earlier works.