Earlier this season, in what amounted to a curtain raiser for the Bacon retrospective, the Gagosian Gallery mounted a show pairing work by Bacon and Giacometti. There could not have been a better demonstration of the poverty of Bacon's method. There is a coarse methodical belligerence about Bacon's work, and when the paintings are gathered together a museumgoer may be put in something like a trance state. Perhaps visitors come to accept the muffled horrors, repeated in nearly endless variations, as the sum total of artistic possibilities in the modern world. But when Bacon's paintings are juxtaposed with those of Giacometti, who was also working in the postwar years and was equally susceptible to the dark shadows that World War II cast, you can see how limited Bacon's range really is. The Gagosian show, titled "Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers," saluted their admiration for Isabel Rawsthorne, a figure in artistic and literary circles in London and Paris with whom Giacometti was for a time passionately involved. Giacometti and Bacon liked each other, but according to James Lord, in his biography of Giacometti, "concerning aesthetic objectives, the two artists did not see eye to eye. In private, Alberto expressed dislike of the chance effects and crafty sleights of technique so beloved by Francis."
In his paintings Giacometti draws on many themes that we also encounter in Bacon's work. Giacometti is interested in feelings of unease, in our sense of the unknowableness of our own bodies and the trouble we sometimes have in finding our place in the world. But when Giacometti paints, using the brush with a graphic precision, articulating the nose, the eyes, the mouth, the cheekbones, he is at once disassembling the face, insisting like Bacon that we see things from some fresh perspective, and putting the pieces of the puzzle back together, creating a head that is as inviolably whole as a statue in an Egyptian tomb, something of which Bacon is incapable. While there is vehemence about the frontality of Giacometti's portrait subjects, there is also tenderness, and a changeableness that registers in the surprising qualities of light and air, the infinite variety that he discovers in his Parisian grays. Giacometti does not prejudge experience in the way that Bacon does. When Giacometti suggests that a man or a woman is caged or imprisoned, he also insists that they are capable of movement, of struggle--that they still have a chance of controlling their own destiny. Freedom is a possibility in Giacometti's universe, and this can pose a daunting challenge, especially for museumgoers who expect to be told what to feel.
Bacon wants the gravitas of the old masters, but he refuses to understand that the authority of Rembrandt or Goya is grounded in their avid engagement with everyday experience. Bacon never really had any interest in working directly from life. He did not do any drawings to speak of, which is especially strange for an artist who aims to reconceive the human figure. And I think that photography, which played a useful role in the paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard and other artists, is a big, baleful problem in Bacon's work. His blurred or distorted faces and bodies are nothing more than photographs seen in a funhouse mirror. He depends far too much on the fixity of photographs, which he uses to give his paintings a creepy freeze-frame fascination. The photographic image serves as a source of cheap sensation, a defense mechanism, a way of shutting down any feelings that might arise directly from experience. The result is Pop Art seen through a glass darkly, Warhol's Electric Chair paintings without the silkscreen technique. And when Bacon chooses to blur these photo-derived figures, the results are as calculatingly sentimental as anything in Gerhard Richter. The organic nature of painting, the end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting, whether in Rembrandt or in Mondrian, is rejected in favor of a modernist re-staging of a fin-de-siecle freakshow.
If the Bacon retrospective is a hit with the public, it will be because visitors are convinced that there are demons pursuing this artist. His art is presented as a high form of black magic, a way of vanquishing the forces of evil in our times. The wall labels make a point of reminding visitors of Bacon's gambling, his tough-guy lovers, his whiskey-soaked nights in Soho. And near the end of the show the curators leave biography behind and plunge straight into hagiography, devoting an entire gallery to photographs and other assorted talismans that Bacon kept around his studio. Here, along with movie stills, newspaper clippings, and photo-booth self-portraits, we are shown the photographs of friends and lovers on which Bacon based many of his paintings.
This dimly lit gallery, one wall of which is plastered with a photomural of Bacon's famously messy Reece Mews studio, is the show's sanctum sanctorum, the place where visitors can peer at all the rumpled mementoes and imagine that they are witnessing the black magic taking place. After galleries full of lifeless paintings, the curators have had the bright idea of introducing some bits and pieces of the artist's life--which turns out to consist of a heap of photographic images. This is what museumgoing is coming to in the age of reality TV.