Francis Bacon

When I was in college, about a million years ago, I took a course in Art History. It covered an extremely broad range of styles and eras from Ancient Mesopotamia to modern times. The kind of course you take as a liberal arts requirements when you are really just a computer geek.

There are some things that have stuck with me from that course, however. My appreciation of Caravaggio, Vermeer, Chagall and Dali to name a few.  Another artist whose work I came to appreciate was Francis Bacon.  His painting, Figure with Meat, has always been a favorite.  In fact, it was on the back cover of the text book from that Art History course I mentioned.

Kinda grotesque, isn't it?  Yeah, a lot of Bacon's work was.  Margaret Thatcher once described him as ""that man who paints those dreadful pictures", but what did she know?  The bisected carcass of the cow always reminded me of a giant mask, lurking over the seated figure...and he just looks terrified.  Who wouldn't be?  It wasn't until much later that I read up on the piece and found out that it was part of a study that Bacon did on a painting of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez. Or that the slack-jawed look of horror on the man in the chair was lifted from a screen shot from the classic silent film by Sergei Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin.  Another favorite of mine.

Anyway, I just love that painting.  It makes me feel...uneasy.

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. I don't know nuthin' about art.