I was around twenty years old when I saw my first Francis Bacon, the existential post-WWII masterpiece Painting 1946, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Bacon’s grotesque, dictator-like figure under a black umbrella beside a hanging carcass in a grand surreal butcher shop shocked me into a bleak aliveness with its raw and ugly beauty. The painting’s potent imagery evoked the horror of WWII more than I had gleaned from my high school textbooks. On the train back to the New Jersey suburbs, with Ministry pumping through my headphones, I felt lusciously tortured, as though my body, like one of Bacon’s figures, had been twisted inside out, reflecting my own inner torment.As I sought out more of his work, my reaction only intensified. The reek of human blood emanates from his screaming, superimposed, and sometimes caged figures. If Bacon’s intended goal was to strike at the viewer’s nervous system and elicit a visceral, physical reaction, he had succeeded. In later years, I was not surprised to learn that as a boy Bacon had been fascinated by butcher shops and found the display of hanging meat aesthetically pleasing.In one of Bacon’s most haunting and mysterious paintings, Blood on Pavement, he shows a pool of blood on what appears to be a nighttime sidewalk. No figure. Just blood on pavement under a night sky. Whatever body leaked the blood is not in the painting, but the feeling emanated suggests the blood is the result of a violent act. A visual poet of viscera and blood, there is also in Bacon’s work a quality of foreboding. It’s as though, through his raw and uncompromising vision, Bacon seemed to be reminding us that the possibility of violence in our own lives hovers as shadow.
-Sanjay Agnihotri