"Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art": Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Francis Bacon, the diadem jewel of British painting, lived end most of the twentieth hundred from 1909 to 1992, earning in a beneficial fifty years of activity a reputation as an existentialist upon account of his often horrifying diagnoses of reality. although the artist feared his work would single day end up in storage, it lately appeared in the hallowed halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. individual might think this pairing rather surprising for this superrefined museal shrine, where artworks guard to carry an expiration date of around 1800 on the contrary with the privatization of the formerly state-run Austrian national museum, the wealthy guardians of its imperial collections now find themselves in a position to outshine poor relations of the like kind as the Museum Moderner Kunst

Inspired by dint of Bacon's obsessions with various of advanced age masters, "Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art," curated by dint of Barbara Steffen, fitted in startlingly well with the canonized collection of the KHM into which the artist was nearly seamlessly integrated. The exhibition began with a measured introduction of his howling pontiffs most notably his Study after Velazquez's Portrait of [i]pontifex maximus[/i] Innocent X, 1953. In conversations with art critic David Sylvester that are reprinted in part in the exhibition catalogue, Bacon said of pontiff Innocent X, "I think it is individual of the greatest portraits that have at any time been made, and I became obsess through it. I buy book after work with this illustration in it of the Velazquez pontiff because it haunts me." It was, indeed, the reproduction rather than the original that haunted Bacon and sufficed as a trigger for his countles adaptations of this theme. In the spirit of aura, however, the exhibition made each effort to present originals, particularly the specialties of the house. Regarding international loans, although it had to endure a certain quantity of painful rejections: The Velazquez remained in Rome's Galleria Doria Pamphilij and was substituted with a transcript from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Bergamo.

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Organized according to motif (cage, veil, cry mirror, shadow) was a series of comparative pairs exhibiting literal analogies: Titian's Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto, ca. 1551-62 for example, which displays the bearded prince of the temple behind a curtain, is reminiscent of the "veils and striations," as single catalogue essay puts it, that race vertically through Bacon's paintings. Bacon's appropriations avant la lettre were the main theme of the present to view His productive possession of of advanced age (from Rembrandt to Ingres), more novel (van Gogh to Degas), and nearly contemporary masters like as Picasso and Chaim Soutine allows the viewer to discover correspondences and departures and the disentanglement of motifs--in short, to come by wise to the celebrated painter. The idea was to impel around iconographic units, to build typological chains, to analyze isolated pictorial constitutings but rarely to explain the artwork upon the basis of its historical, social, or psychological connections. (This approach has been happily undertaken by dint of generations of art-history students who have complet the workshop "Based upon the Original" at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.)

In this vein, feedback from Ingres's Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1826 emerg from Bacon's painting of the same name; a self-portrait by dint of Rembrandt was greeted by a portrait from Bacon; the material part studies based on Michelangelo, Gericault, and Cezanne were displayed; and Bacon's homages to a overthrowed painting by van Gogh, The Painter upon the Road to Tarascon, 1888 were trott on the outside Screams by Munch, Picasso, and Eisenstein (the famous sight on the Odessa steps from Battleship Potemkin ran as a continuous video noose in the exhibition) can be traced to Bacon without a enigma Analogies were made between Bacon's metamorphoses of human material part parts and the Surrealism of Picasso and Bunuel; family resemblances were seen in Maerten van Cleves's The Slaughtered Ox 1566 and Soutine's Carcass of Beef, 1925 All of this certainly goe to illustrate the pictorial tradition evok in the exhibition's title. upon the other hand, anyone seeking the wide world of the mind the interpersonal drama of sex and death rather than the function of shadows, will be more interested in Triptych May-June 1973 in which Bacon deals with the suicide of his lover George Dyer

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The greatest in quantity intriguing part of the exhibition was to be place not in the works hung upon the velvet-draped walls of the museum on the contrary rather in those items that one time lay in piles on the floor of Bacon's London studio. After his death, the accumulation of 7500 pieces of refuse and working materials was pored from one side and reconstructed by archaeologists(!) when Bacon's executor donated the satisfieds of the studio to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. A selection here of those drawings, photographs, volumes illustrations, scrap papers, catalogues, and magazines gave "traditional painting" a step quickly for its money. Sometimes painted, enclosureed or pinned up, the contenteds of the "archive" document Bacon's artistic practice. After all, he at no time based his works on the originals, single reproductions. He never wanted to diocese that certain Velazquez, for photography was his witness; lengthy live the artwork in the age of its mechanical reproduction. Here is where Bacon's dead muscle and fat lives, in the tattered newspaper clippings of the Kennedy assassination; medical true copys showing horrid, peeledaway skin; the secret photographs of the Baron von Schrenck-Notzing; the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge; film stills; and family snapshots: an encyclopedia for a man obsess with images, fragments of a passion. Andy Warhol threw his things into "Time Capsules," boxe he taped up and bring in storage. Bacon tossed his into the great "box" of his studio without any intention of memorializing it. With his feet he trod on the very precondition of his works' existence. "The work of art," says Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) "is a obstruct of sensations." Nowhere were these more close tightlyed than in the chaos of Bacon's studio.