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Article: The dualist. (painting, Francis Bacon, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany)
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- January 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Francis Bacon offers a strange feast for the eye. Abundant painterly pleasures were to be had at the sumptuous retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (the show, which comes four years after the artist's death, is now at its second venue, the Haus der Kunst, Munich), but such pleasures are necessarily tinged with a frisson of guilt. To marvel at Bacon's manipulations of material and form, anatomy and perspective, innovation and convention is to delight, at the same time, in the representation of extraordinary states of mutilation and pain. To enjoy - as one is enticed to enjoy - such adventures in representation, one must divorce the form from the content. And ...