Slaughterhouse | The New Republic - Jed Perl


Self Portrait, Oil/Canvas, Francis Bacon, 1971

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists... - excerpt
Link Full Text, Slaughterhouse, Jed Perl, The New Republic, June 17, 2009

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