On Francis Bacon at the Met

Pablo Picasso Willem de Kooning Chaim Soutine Francis Bacon Jackson Pollock Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez SFMOMA Considers Unusual Expansion Plan Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian

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Briefly, a roll call. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle: “a pasticheur, a mimic”; the Independent’s Tom Lubbock: a “vulgar entertainer”; the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman: a “pure … painter” whose work was “cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage”; the New York Times’s Roberta Smith: “an artist for our time”; Time magazine’s Richard Lacayo: “one of the artists who found a way, after the butchery of World War II, to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure”; New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz: “more of a cartoonist.”

At the very least, the current exhibition should rescue the artist from the tragically banal pigeonhole into which he’s recently been slotted: art market leading indicator. (Some facile narratives bookend the boom-bust cycle with a pair of Bacons: a 1976 triptych sold to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich at Sotheby’s in May 2008 for a jaw-dropping $86 million; a 1964 self-portrait, estimated at some $40 million, flopped at the same house last November.)

For the following slide show, we asked Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Met, and one of the Bacon show’s curators, to discuss just a few of the paintings on view.

Click on the photo gallery at left to see what Tinterow has to say.