558
PARTISAN REVIEW
sored by
~nd
mounted in
Colc~gne,
and, by one estimate, cover–
ing 900 works by 250 artists. It gathered Italian new wave (Enzo
Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Mimmo Paladino,
among others), German and American neoexpressionism (Jona–
than Borofsky, Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle,
etc.), along with other currents in pattern painting, affiliations
that included and extended beyond those covered in the earlier
show. In both, the format of the historical overview gives estab–
lished status to up-to-the-minute work. In "A New Spirit," to
substantiate the presence of the newer, emerging generation, were
Francis Bacon and Philip Guston, two among several painters
whose pungently sensational art predates, if it does not directly
anticipate, current sensory concerns.
Francis Bacon long ago evolved a visual formula for the chil–
ling effect produced by the sensational treatment of a figure with–
in a theatrical setting. By the 1940s he focused on what might be
considered an inversion of Delacroix's format: a writhing figure
trapped within a staunchly clinical area. Much has been said
about the ambiguous status of this actual space.
It
is customarily
interpreted as an implacable environment that is heedless of indi–
vidual personal anxiety. But this existential explanation does not
exhaust its possible meanings. The metaphor of theater comes to
mind-in particular, the methodical utilization of it by de Sade.
Infamous for their component of cruelty, de Sade's fantasies are
also, as Barthes has pointed out, markedly fastidious, exacting by
means of nonvarying ritual and scrupulous sexual performance.
The sensational affinity between Bacon and de Sade lies not
only in its particulars, however. It lies in their common though
differently realized theatrical approach to the erotic. But it is with
Bacon that one witnesses a dramatic polarity between the personal
vulnerability of the subject and the overtly manipulative style.
The voyeuristic format of the triptych, the arenalike setting, the
precision if not preciousness of the brushwork, and, certainly, the
formulaic composition-all contribute to the experience of ex–
treme dissociation of the style and the libidinous disarray of what
is going on in bed or on the toilet. Even the expressionist
smears developed from the futuristic code for motion are rendered
so precisely that Bacon's style seems
to
be exacting some tribute
from its figures, as if they existed for the express purpose of allow–
ing a virtuoso performance. Bacon's craft effects a dramatic con–
trivance through which desire is tortured.
