BAC brings home the Bacon in new exhibit

COURTESY YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART Beacon's contorted faces explode with ferocity.

After a year-long hiatus for renovations, the Center for British Art is back--or has London's Tate Gallery relocated to New Haven? While you might still recognize Louis Kahn's subtly beautiful structure, the art on display indicates that the Center has been utterly transformed. Don't worry, those stodgy old gents in wigs and those generic landscapes haven't gone anywhere--you'll still find many of them on the fourth floor, along with the tried-and-true Turner and Constable. The remaining three-fourths of the exhibition space, however, cocks a snook at any stereotype of British propriety.

On Fri., Jan. 22, the Center will reopen with a triad of shows, exhibiting the work of some of the major figurative artists of the last half-century: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Henry Moore. For these three, the figure, notably absent in much of 20th-century art, never disappeared. Rather, the human body achieved a new status as a vehicle for the anxieties of postwar British society. In featuring the work of these artists, the Center for British Art makes a bold and compelling statement--one that not only emphasizes modern British contributions to the art world, but also asserts the figure's staying power in a modern context.

The Francis Bacon retrospective, covering almost two floors, is unquestionably the highlight of the Center's new offerings. Dynamic, bizarre, and often downright gory, Bacon's distortions of the figure take enormous liberties with representation, while still maintaining a human presence. His raw, angst-laden treatment of the body is rooted in Surrealism's Freudian neuroses and "exquisite corpses," but has less obvious, more established precedents, such as Medieval altarpieces and Classical myths.

The show, arranged more or less chronologically, reveals the relative consistency of Bacon's focus even as his work becomes more ambitious. The earlier works, from the '40s and '50s, introduce bodies and faces without specific identities, their blurred features and composite jumbles of limbs barely recognizable as flesh and blood. Snarling mouths and clawlike protrusions evoke war's animal ferocity, playing off the equally grotesque humanity in Bacon's "Study of a Baboon." When Bacon turns to portraiture in the '60s, the physiological torment only intensifies. Not even the Pope escapes Bacon's contortions of surface. In a series inspired by Velasquez's "Portrait of Pope Innocent X," his face looks like it's been through a meat grinder.

Bacon's smaller triptych portraits are similarly unsettling, chopping up the face from three different angles. In these works, the triptych format serves as a study in movement that effectively multiplies Bacon's observation of character. His sweeps of the brush expose the primal underpinning beneath the mask of individual features. One wonders how his models, often friends or colleagues, felt confronting their own ravaged faces.

Bacon appears to have made certain concessions to art-world trends, although these remain literally and figuratively in the background: his larger triptychs of the late '60s and '70s place figures against saturated color fields that recall Barnett Newman, while many also draw from the artificial palette of Pop Art. Among these, the glowing orange triptych, "Studies from the Human Body," dominates the earlier part of the show.

This piece anticipates the second floor of the exhibit, which is composed almost exclusively of large, roughly life-size triptychs. More ambitious and involved than his earlier pieces, these are generally his most striking works. In them, Bacon finds new ways to rob the human figure of any composure: a torso cleverly quoted from Ingres, who painted bodies wholly free of anxiety, receives ironic amputation at the hands of Bacon. Mythical Furies descend in a reinterpretation of Aeschylus' Orestes. Several pictures "X-ray" the wounded body by inscribing areas in black circles, while others use red arrows to pinpoint pain. Triptychs portraying grotesque suffering are not new, exemplified by Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece; but here, the redemptive pretense has been stripped away, and we are left with a nightmare comparable to Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell. Bacon is at his best in his larger triptychs. Perhaps his seething masses of ectoplasm attain their maximum impact on a life-size scale, inviting empathy and fascination as well as repulsion.

Sharing the second floor with the later Bacon works is a small collection of Lucian Freud's etchings. Freud is well known for his deliberately anti-theatrical, disconcerting depictions of the nude figure in paint. Here, however, the etching medium seems at odds with the tactile nature of Freud's subjects, models whose masses of flesh beg to be rendered with more sensual materials.

Covering the ground floor of the Center, Henry Moore's sculptures provide relief from the distorted, anxiety-laden body. Moore's curvilinear forms soothe the postwar psyche with motifs such as the family and the reclining woman. Using the vocabulary of stylized, organic shapes typical of African and pre-Colombian art and often working in natural materials, Moore turns to the figure as a timeless source of comfort. Along with Bacon and Freud, Moore's work constitutes an important response to the question of the figure's fate in recent art.

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