BACON, DE KOONING

Bacon and de Kooning famously encountered each other in 1975 in New York on the occasion of Bacon’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a face-to-face meeting commemorated by a now iconic photograph. While the two artists met previously, knew of each other’s work, and possessed painterly affinities, they have long been positioned as painters staunchly working at alternate ends of the artistic spectrum—Bacon a champion of a heightened and existential figuration and de Kooning a pioneer of gestural Abstract Expressionism. Now, for the first time, Bacon / de Kooning will demonstrate their shared commitment to the medium of paint as a primary means of human expression.

The two artists arrived at their unique practices from different sides of the Atlantic and opposite endsof the postwar art world—Bacon, the standard-bearer of the School of London, and de Kooning at thecenter of the New York School. In the years following the Second World War, both artists confronted theessential question of how to depict the human condition—after the ravages of war, the Holocaust, andthe atomic bomb, at a moment when existentialism had thrown the meaning of human experience intodoubt—and many of their contemporaries had abandoned the figure altogether.

Bacon historically has been read as the eminent figurative painter and de Kooning as the foremostabstractionist—yet this distinction dissolves under closer scrutiny. Publicly, Bacon was scathing towardabstraction, dismissing Jackson Pollock’s work as “old lace” and insisting that pure abstraction “alwaysremains on one level.” However, his own figuration was itself a form of controlled distortion—with paintpressed into the service of what he called “the brutality of fact.” For Bacon, the artist was a “pulverizingmachine” through which everything seen and felt was fed. His extreme distortion, in his words,“unlock[ed] the valves of feeling and therefore return[ed] the onlooker to life more violently.” In his hands,oil paint transformed the body into bruised flesh.

Meanwhile de Kooning arrived at abstraction through the figure—flesh became landscape under thesweep of his brush. His gesture never left the body behind so much as dissolved and reconstituted it.Bacon himself conceded that de Kooning was one of the few painters who could make paint work—a rarecompliment from a man otherwise suspicious of Abstract Expressionism.

In the 1970s, de Kooning reached a new confidence of expression. Describing his practice during thisperiod, he stated, “I made those paintings one after the other, no trouble at all. I couldn’t miss. It’s a nicefeeling. It’s strange. It’s like a man at a gambling table [who] feels that he can’t lose. But when he walksaway with all the dough, he knows he can’t do that again. Because then it gets all self-conscious. I wasn’tself-conscious. I just did it.” Art historian Dore Ashton wrote in 1975 of de Kooning’s creative outpouring,“There could be no quick perception, no general impression that could cover the wealth of experiencereflected [in de Kooning’s recent paintings]... [He] maintains the singularity of intimate detail. In short, heoffers a distinct, unique realm in which imagination prevails.”

Bacon too reached a zenith of his practice around the turn of the 1970s, creating increasingly small-scalepaintings that possessed an extraordinary sense of individual presence. In these portraits, a face alonecarried the force, vulnerability, and complexity of a full figure. Predominantly depicting his close friendsand lovers, in addition to self-portraits, he largely worked from photographs and from memory ratherthan from life. Of sitters, he remarked, “They inhibit me in person because if I like them I don’t want topractice before them the injury that I do them in my work. I would rather practice the injury by whichI can record them in private.” Bacon frequently painted his portraits as diptychs and triptychs, believingthat multiple canvases conveyed different emotional and psychological states and relationships, and thusmore complete representations of his subjects. The exhibition encompasses several examples of the artist’ssingle panels and triptychs—featuring Bacon himself and some of his closest muses, including George Dyerand Henrietta Moraes.

By examining the fertile period from the late 1960s through the 1970s, the exhibition will demonstratethe artistic affinities uniting Bacon and de Kooning. Further, as both artists sought to work at lifesize, Bacon / de Kooning will convey how the tightly prescribed formats led to a shared flourishing ofcreativity—with the more intimately scaled canvases demanding closer scrutiny and technical prowessfrom the artists and a similar intensity of interrogation from the viewer. We are especially grateful tothe private collectors whose generosity has contributed to this landmark exhibition.

Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.