Figure with Meat
Figure with Meat | |
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Artist | Francis Bacon |
Year | 1954 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 129.9 cm × 121.9 cm (51.1 in × 48.0 in) |
Location | Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago |
Figure with Meat is a 1954 painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The figure is based on the Pope Innocent X portrait by Diego Velázquez; however, in the Bacon painting the Pope is shown as a gruesome figure and placed between two bisected halves of a cow.
The carcass hanging in the background is likely derived from Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, 1655. The painting is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.[1]
Description
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Retrato_del_Papa_Inocencio_X._Roma%2C_by_Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez.jpg/220px-Retrato_del_Papa_Inocencio_X._Roma%2C_by_Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez.jpg)
According to Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Bacon appropriated the famous portrait, with its subject, enthroned and draped in satins and lace, his stare stern and full of authority. In Bacon's version, animal carcasses hang at the pope's back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition. The pope's hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez's version, are rough hewn and gripping the church's seat of authority in apparent terror. His mouth is held in a scream and black striations drip down from the pope's nose to his neck.
The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point. Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation".[2]
Influence
The painting is featured in Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman. Criminals led by the Joker break into an art museum and vandalize various works of art; but upon seeing Figure with Meat, the Joker orders it spared and left intact, remarking "I kind of like this one [...] Leave it."[3] Craig Shaw Gardner's novelization explains that it was in that art that Joker saw "A black-and-white figure, screaming with pain and anguish and madness, a creature both pitiful and terrifying in its intensity, as if it contained all the pain and anguish and madness in the world."[4]
See also
Citations
- ^ Bacon, Francis. "Figure with Meat". The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 17 May 2021.
- ^ Batman, the Joker, and Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat. Chronological Snobbery, Retrieved on March 17, 2010.
- ^ Kroll, Jack (26 June 1989). "The Joker is Wild, but Batman Carries the Night". Newsweek. Tim Burton Collective. Archived from the original on 30 June 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2015. For this and the wider context see Keazor, Henry: “'I make art – until someone dies'. Francis Bacon im Spielfilm“, in: FilmKunst. Studien an den Grenzen der Künste und Medien, edited by Henry Keazor, Fabienne Liptay and Susanne Marschall, Marburg 2011, p. 122–155
- ^ Gardner, Craig Shaw. Batman. Warner Books, 1989. pg 106
External links
- Figure with Meat at The Art Institute of Chicago
- v
- t
- e
- Crucifixion (1933)
- Wound for a Crucifixion (1933)
- Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)
- Figure in a Landscape (1945)
- Painting 1946 (1946)
- Study for Crouching Nude (1952)
- Two Figures (1953)
- Three Studies from the Human Head (1953)
- Study for Portrait II (After the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955)
- Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968)
- Study for a Bullfight, Number 2 (1969)
- Three Studies of the Male Back (1970)
- Blood on the Floor (painting) (1986)
- Study after Velázquez (1950)
- Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
- Figure with Meat (1954)
- Untitled (Pope) (c. 1954)
- Study from Innocent X (1962)
- Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971 (1971)
- Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)
- Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962)
- Three Figures in a Room (1964)
- Crucifixion (1965)
- Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's Poem "Sweeney Agonistes" (1967)
- Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants (1968)
- Triptych, 1976 (1976)
- Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981)
- Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988)
- Triptych–August 1972 (1972)
- Triptych, May–June 1973 (1973)
- Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1964)
- Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966)
- Three Studies for George Dyer (1967)
- Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud (1967)
- Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)
- Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976 (1976)
- Three Studies for Self Portrait (1973)
- Self-portrait (1973)
- Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1979)
- Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86 (1985–86)
- Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981 book)
- Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998 film)