Born the son of a Dublin horse trainer in 1909, Bacon was sent packing by his family at 16, for having had sex with some of his father’s grooms. He went first to London, then to Berlin and Paris (where a Picasso exhibition inspired him to dabble in drawings and watercolors) and finally back to London. Bacon had a profitable flirtation with interior design, but in 1931 he gave it up for the chancy career of a self-taught painter. He exhibited sporadically during the ’30s. Bacon’s asthma spared him wartime military service, and, in 1944, he painted his breakthrough picture, the H. R. Gigeresque “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” New York’s Museum of Modern Art snapped up “Painting” (1946)-depicting, some might say, a shark-mouthed Big Brother giving a speech in a slaughterhouse-and, suddenly, Bacon was the great British hope on the international scene.
If hope was the word. Bacon seemed to have been born to give visual form to existentialism. If any art conveys the post-Holocaust predicament of humankind abandoned in ail absurd universe, it’s Bacon’s screaming popes and fetuslike nudes. Bacon compared his images’ relation to their human sources to the slimy trail a snail leaves behind. But he denied he had any philosophical point to make or even a story to tell. Horror? He insisted he was just a simple realist: “I remember looking at a dog shit on the pavement, and I suddenly realized, ‘There it is-this is what life is like’.” For the last 30 years of that life, Bacon lived in a bathtub-in-the-kitchen flat with paint tubes on the floor and trial brushstrokes on the walls. A notorious drinker, he equally favored low-ball dives and the three-star hangouts rich artists are usually attracted to.
But in spite of a work like “Triptych–May-June 1973,” concerning the suicide of his lover, George Dyer, Bacon’s paintings are not mere illustrations of tragedy. He refused to proclaim for his art some political or educational goal. This is what sets him apart from myriad younger artists who, in an art world newly infatuated with the grotesque, want to use it to end homophobia or expose police states. Ultimately, Bacon’s art is aloof and cool, as much about painting as about the human condition (which is why his detractors thought him insincere). And if, as is likely, Francis Bacon achievers the artist’s version of immortality, it will be only through paintings in museums and not via a cultural charity with his name on it. In 1977, he told an interviewer, “I find the profound vanity of these old men who try to immortalize themselves through foundations very boring.”
Messiaen, a devout Roman Catholic in a secular society, was a paradox. His scores are stark and ecstatic, long and complex but with a heart of simplicity. Though an avant-gardist, he was not a form-shatterer. Yet as a legendary teacher at the Paris Conservatory, he fired up such breakaway composers as Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Messiaen himself belonged to no compositional school. He absorbed the lessons of many centuries and cultures, creating an inimitable blend of, among other things, ancient Greek meter, Hindu rhythms, tonality and serialism. He was obsessed with pulse; his own music depended, he said, “on uneven beats, as in nature. I totally despise even beats.” Spirituality and an astonishing sense of color are his constants. Messiaen, who wanted to (and did) write “iridescent music,” saw-actually saw-rainbows in music. Perhaps his greatest gift was to make us see them, too.
