Francis Bacon, Blood on Pavement, 1988, oil on canvas
Face the World
Kind, at three dollars a bottle wine I pick up three bottles of here in Portland,
while in NYC that fine 2007 Joel Gott Zinfandel cost seven Times that, & for
good reason. Kathleen’s favs at the Bacon show were the accessible Study for
Portrait of Van Gogh VI & late 1988 Rothko-influenced Blood on Pavement.
Give me that early 1946-47 Head I, where bestial back simian feline brain & jaw
give way to silent anguish, along with earlier, 1933, ghost-like Crucifixion in
which Grünewald’s Man vanishes, evolving into aforementioned Three Studies
for a Crucifixion, where the volcanic kiss of death erupts right out of the flesh
some critic observed long, long ago, (who was it Panofsky? probably not,
perhaps too simple an observation for him?) that flesh was indeed the reason for
inventing oil paint. For that matter, cough over the brave image of paralytic child
taken directly from Muybridge. Kathleen saw nothing but balls & pricks in Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, while I swore no symbolism is
near at hand, none other than an exfoliate biological viscera laden with Truth in
pain; pour pink blood down hotel aisle carpet stained trumping contemporary
CSI TV bullshit, on top of which the great artist told David Sylvester, after the
latter asked him when he first realized death would happen to him, replying, “I
remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realized, there it
is – this is what life is like.” Or to find the framing throughout his oeuvre
validated via plastic, steel, & glass cage Eichmann faced the world in in 1961 in
Jerusalem.
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