CHICAGO—ArtInfo’s correspondent in Chicago takes us on a tour of gallery exhibitions in that city, including Len Prince’s recent images—of fellow photographer Sally Mann’s daughter Jessie—and two artists offering divergent but complementary looks at postwar America. We also go on a short road trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum for an important and revealing survey of Francis Bacon’s early work.

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MUSEUM EXHIBITION

Milwaukee Art Museum
“Francis Bacon: Painting From the 1950s”
Through April 15

The most interesting museum show in the Chicago area this winter is not actually in Chicago, but 90 short miles north at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

On the shores of Lake Michigan, the museum first put itself on the map in 2001with an architecturally significant and visually breathtaking addition by Santiago Calatrava, but it has done something spectacular once again with “Francis Bacon: Painting From the 1950s,” which beautifully showcases the work from the painter’s most artistically formative years.

The show is deftly curated by Michael Peppiatt, who is considered not only to be a foremost authority on Bacon but also was a close friend of the artist for more than 30 years. His knowledge of Bacon’s life and work brings an intimate perspective to the show. While it doesn’t actually answer the question on everyone’s mind—what are his figures screaming or, rather, howling about?—we can certainly see how Bacon got there.

Arranged chronologically, the carefully chosen canvases (some from private collections and rarely seen in public) reveal the evolution of the artist’s distinctive style, palette, influences, subject matter and attitude. Particularly wonderful is the inclusion of so many studies that show him experimenting with facial distortion, shadows, angles and the dark undertones that later became his trademark.

What we see overall, however, is a man in his full artistic powers, deeply in touch with—and, oddly enough, quite comfortable with—all the demons that drive him: rage, untempered emotion, expressionistic violence, self-destruction, rootlessness and equal parts of decadence and disaster.

While Bacon may have famously said that Picasso was responsible for his becoming a painter, and scholars may claim that he was heavily influenced by Surrealism, by this point in the 1950s, he had clearly internalized these influences to create his breakthrough style.

Today, a half century after they were painted, Bacon’s art still seems subversive, revolutionary and utterly contemporary.

The show originated at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England, and will travel to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, May 5-Jul 30.

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Linda Warren Gallery
“Alex O’Neal: Lick the Sun”
Through March 31

Mississippi-born, Brooklyn-based artist Alex O’Neal takes a stab at pop culture with his first solo show at the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago’s meatpacking district/West Loop arts corridor.

Although O’Neal has a BFA in design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he works in a naif, colorful style, similar to self-taught artists, yet infused with traces of Chicago Imagism in the style of Roger Brown and Ed Paschke.

O’Neal’s drawings and paintings, however, have a far more sophisticated sensibility than typically found in outsider art. In many of his pieces, he has created a parallel universe, populated with animals, masked figures, hippies, overblown women, symbols and exotic landscapes.

Some of his pieces seem to look at what holds a community together—and what tears it apart—inspired, he says, by the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. Other works seem to be one giant social experiment. The current series in particular deals with humans’ relationship with the natural world post 9-11, living in an “unpeaceable” kingdom.

In addition, underlying much of O’Neal’s work is his experience of growing up in Mississippi, exploring where it intersects and where it disconnects from his experience in other parts of the country and the world.