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PARTISAN REVIEW
Modern Art all summer, with a complementary show at Marlborough
Gallery.
The Kiefers were predictably theatrical and immense, calculated to
impress as much by their sheer size as by their Great Themes - this time,
the Caballah, with a little of the Apocrypha and, of course, the Holocaust.
There was the usual overscaled portrait of a man-made structure, rendered
in academic perspective against a textured ground, and a series said to be
about Lilith, Adam's first wife (a difficult woman), and her demon children.
These were symbolized by crude clothing, hanks of hair, barbed wire, model
airplanes, and the kind of wire clothes hangers you get from the dry cleaner,
all coated with ash. Get it? The clothing is made, apparently, to Mr. Keifer's
own design and comes in sizes ranging from adult to doll. It's about as con–
vincing as Ralph Lauren, but with more guilt.
The single construction in the show, an enormous, ramshackle scaffold–
like bookcase, burdened by schematic volumes of folded lead sheets, with a
spill of broken glass on the floor below, did everything the paintings failed to
do. I am not sure about the lateral extensions, but that's a quibble. The con–
trast of brutal timbers, beautiful lead, and fragile shards was eloquent. The
piece was powerful and thought-provoking, with inevitable associations of
violence, of book-burning and
Kristallnacht,
and much more. It was difficult
to believe that this rich, provocative object was made by the same person as
the high-style, ash-encrusted canvases, with their calculated references to
horrors, sanitized, tamed and made elegant.
I suppose Bacon's work could be described similarly, even though his
avowed intent, according to a much-quoted text panel that begins his exhibi–
tion, is to make an equivalent, on canvas, for the way we perceive reality.
"What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in
the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance," Bacon says.
"In
trying to do a portrait, my ideal would really be just to pick up a handful
of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait was there." But
for all the drips and clots, for all the smears and "distortions," the cumulative
effect of the fifty-nine paintings spanning forty-odd years, in the retrospec–
tive, is of extraordinary and conventional facility, academic bravura and
nastiness served up with immense good taste. There's also a great impres–
sion of sameness.
Bacon's style, his way of composing and even the size and proportion
of his canvases was pretty well fixed by the 1960s and since then, his pic–
tures have been put together according to a formula: smooth ground,
schematic tipped space, with a platform or enclosing box, usually outlined, and
a figure or figures, centralized, as often as not. When you come upon a rare
composition that breaks this mold, it seems like a masterwork. Bacon's few
