Metropolitan
Francis Bacon, 1975, Lithograph
Bacon wore ghoulisness and obscurity like a favourite pair of shoes. His work shows it. The hollowed sockets of the portrait on the right, the tattered nose of the man on the left, the pallid skin of both, and the missing limbs of the middle figure, whose body bleeds into purpureal shadows – these hauntings proceed from the mind of an artist who inhabited a mental landscape of terror and truth without comfort. Based on the middle panel of one of Bacon's earlier triptychs, this signed lithograph features the addition of the humanoid figure of the foreground, who looks directly out at the viewer. We lock eyes with this strange, bespectacled nude, and its steady gaze implicates us in the pageant of judgment and disintegration behind it. Easy meanings elude us, and we are compelled to look again.