MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY

LONDON - That the Francis Bacon retrospective here at Tate Britain has been full of visitors since its recent opening should surprise nobody. The show is a landmark, a hit, and its timing turns out to be nearly perfect.
Sixteen years have passed since the Irishborn Bacon died, at 82, during which the art world has radically changed, and the generation of Americans weaned on postwar abstraction and congenitally skeptical of Bacon is being gradually displaced. The other day there were dozens of young art students, not a few of them sketching, in front of the pictures. I suspect the same will happen when the show, judiciously organized by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, lands in Madrid, then New York. Bacon suddenly looks fresh.
How so- Late in life, it’s true, he became, contrary to his sensational art, a sort of old-school gentleman, chivalrous and immensely kind when he wished to be, reticent otherwise, a monument of postwar Britain . In those days he was painting works like a second version of the triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” the original of which in the mid-1940s had confronted a battered, convalescent nation with what’s commonly called the shock of recognition. Now he was remaking the work, as his friend the painter Lawrence Gowing put it about late Bacon generally, to look more “classically serene.”
“I’m an optimist, but about nothing,” Bacon kept repeating, while lamenting his old age as “a disease, a desert, because all one’s friends die.” He loved to quote Yeats and Proust and T. S. Eliot . A netherworld of dingy hallways and shuttered rooms had long been the arena of Bacon’s art.
So in various respects, by his late 70s, Bacon had come to seem something of a throwback; it was widely said his best work was behind him. But since then historians have mined the sources from which he borrowed images and opened up the crucial subject of gay sexuality in his work, which was long repressed, and this, along with his bad-boy reputation, has made him a source of steady fascination . Most important, with the breathing space of a little time, it’s become obvious how pure a painter he was, not just early on.
His repertory of bloody carcasses and monsters; the mutilated, decomposing heads with immaculate teeth; the mangy dogs and screaming popes and salary men, silent and watchful, caged like zoo animals, then enclosed behind the gold frames and reflective glass, in which we, too, appear like ghosts: it’s all already there in his work by the mid-1950s. So is the touch. In “Figure Study I” or “Head II,” from the ‘40s, the surfaces are busy and dense like stucco or tweed, or thick as an elephant’s hide, but with exquisite veils on top - a mix of roughness and fragility, aggression and sensuality that would define the work across the career. Bacon also swiped thin washes of purple, black and white over what looks like raw canvas to paint his first pope, fussing the gaping mouth, creepily. Spectral hints of gold brocade, refined like Chinese calligraphy, glimmer in the ether. Elsewhere beefy men wrestle and dive into pools of blue-black nothingness. Halfanimal, half-human blobs recline like patients on an operating table or they melt and evaporate. Bacon traveled during the late ‘50s to Tangier, absorbing local color, allowing his technique to loosen, producing “Study for a Portrait of van Gogh VI,” a clangorous mass of red and green, improbably successful, and he painted a few messes too, like “Figure in a Mountain.”
Several triptychs and portraits, reflecting on the suicide of his companion George Dyer in 1971, mark a clear experiment in conflicted sentiment; they’re heartbreaking but simultaneously clinical. As a friend of Bacon’s, the editor Nikos Stangos, once put it, Bacon “never expressed moral indignation about anything.” That explains the work’s ruthless elegance.
Cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage, with the delicacy of those blurry but somehow distinct faces and electric palette, his work translates quite easily to a new century. So does the sweaty sex and violence, luxuriant but couched in aloofness and girded, always, by grand allusions to old masters and learned texts.
Karl Georg Buchner, the 19th-century German playwright, once asked a question that Bacon must have come across. “How,” Buchner inquired, “can you not hear the terrible screams all around that we call silence?”
Through the popes and loser salesman and so much else that Bacon painted, they make this exhibition sing.