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Article: Eminent outrage. (British painter Francis Bacon)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- August 6, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 National Review, 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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IN HIS MOST recent avatar at the Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon appears before us defanged and declawed. The primal rantings now sound like a petulant whimper. The spastic gestures and maimed movements now savor almost of balletic adroitness. And yet nothing has changed in the heart or mind of this octogenarian artist, the elder statesman of the British art world. The latest paintings in this retrospective manifest the same unyielding, implacable anguish that has been his hallmark for almost fifty years.
Rather it is we who have changed. For the past two generations at least, we have been assailed on all sides by art works of such calculated grotesqueness ...