Francis Bacon (via phytos)

(I don’t know if this is a legit quote, but it’s worth posting one of his most famous paintings with it, Figure with Meat., under a cut. Warning: graphic depiction of animal carcasses and the person depicted in the work is also deeply unsettling.)

According to Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

“Bacon appropriated the famous portrait [Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X], with its subject, enthroned and draped in satins and lace, his stare stern and full of authority. In Bacon’s version, animal carcasses hang at the pope’s back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition. The pope’s hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez’s version, are rough hewn and gripping the church’s seat of authority in apparent terror. His mouth is held in a scream and black striations drip down from the pope’s nose to his neck. It’s as if Bacon picked up a wide house painting brush and brutishly dragged it over the face. The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point. Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation”.^[2]