Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact: Directed by Michael Blackwood. n an interview led by friend and art critic, David Sylvester, Bacon opens up about his work and the, often times, grotesque and macabre tone of his paintings. His representations of the human figure in portraits and triptychs link him, in his view, to the distorted realism of Van Gogh and Picasso. With his unique take on life and death, Bacon explains to us the dichotomy of his art through an unexpectedly optimistic thesis which he dubbed the "brutality of fact". As Bacon's striking art conveys, with the acceptance of death comes a passionate vitality for life.
This doc. gave me a new appreciation for Bacon’s work, in particular his creative vitality or force. However, I’m still left feeling like his trademark disfigurations are unexplained. Bacon deflects questions about this by simply noting that life involves decay and death, so how is it so unusual that one should portray it? He notes that a painting of a fresh rose contains within it the inevitability of decay.
All of this is true but something of an evasion it seems. Why the choice of portrayals that at times might be reminiscent of horrible war wounds found in Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege?
Maybe the response is that this is just his idiosyncratic vision, the visual choices that organically emerge from his creativity. Maybe as artists people move through the world with master underlying principles that organize that complex of emotion, creativity, life experience and expressive capabilities that constitute their aesthetic impulses. As a root explanation this doesn’t get one any closer to Bacon, however.
Mimesis is dilated in all post-representational art, isn’t it? It’s the bluntly representational that needs explaining, according to Bacon. -Another way the question of his artistic choices eludes.
