Francis Bacon – Heraclitean Fire

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain

I went to see the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain today. And I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word for work which is quite so bleak. He was an atheist who made a habit of painting crucifixions; and without the theology, a crucifixion is just a man being tortured to death.

Study of a Baboon 1953

So there were lots of trapped, screaming, contorted and frequently eviscerated figures, brutally unflattering portraits, and distinctly unhealthy-looking flesh. Which makes the work sound like some kind of chaotic stream of consciousness, but actually it seems tightly controlled: figures isolated in large plains of colour.

» Study of a Baboon, 1953, © The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS 2008. Digital image © 2008, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1979. Taken from the exhibition website, which is excellent as usual at the Tate.

Mood music for the apocalypse

It seems weirdly fitting that the Tate’s two current big exhibitions are Rothko and Bacon. I don’t suppose that the Tate can take any responsibility for the gloomy state of the world’s financial market: I don’t think it’s all because City bankers are popping over in their lunch break and being given the willies.

I wonder, though, if you swamped the world’s financial centres with upbeat, cheerful stimuli, whether it would soothe the savage breasts of the money-men. Plaster New York with huge posters by Thomas Kinkade and Beatrix Potter; have Sesame Street and the Tellytubbies playing on big video screens. And all those glowing, scary tickers: don’t have stock values on them, go for zen koans and dirty limericks.