I’ve been entertaining my brother and his family in New York for the last few days, which is kind of redundant: the city is pretty entertaining on its own. The weather has been strangely cooperative with days more typical of May than July and no rain, something you could not say for the entire month of June.
Among the stranger sights we’ve seen in our travels was a sign on the door of Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory saying they welcomed little people. That seemed to me like putting a sign on a topless bar saying We Welcome Men until I noticed the camera crew filming what appeared to be a dancing Benjamin Button on the ferry landing, and then a gaggle of can-we-still-call-them dwarves confirmed my suspicion: The Little People of America were having a conference nearby.
Almost as strange was discovering, upon our visit to the Metropolitan Museum, that the Francis Bacon retrospective was a hit: an out-the-door, through-the-window, fun for all ages kind of show, with little kids in matching YMCA shirts being paraded past his tortured portraits as if they were the Liberty Bell. Is Bacon ready for his Van Gogh close up? I can’t imagine his painful-to-behold triptychs adorning coffee mugs and shower curtains, nor Don McLean writing a song about Pope Innocent X — but the Bacon T-shirts were moving. Rather than a reproduction of his art work they were adorned with one of the Irish misanthrope’s beloved quotes: “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.”
Amazing show, if you haven’t seen it. In my facile understanding of his biography, I always kind of wondered if maybe his work would not have been so hallucinogenically dark had he taken fewer hallucinogens and not drank so much. But seeing the progression, from the earliest show which purblind art critics misunderstood to the famously twisted self-portraits, I got a better appreciation of the consistent and undeniable dark vision — on informed by war and homophobia and loss and (yes) substance abuse. The portrait of his lover George Dyer, who took his own life, is particularly devastating: a shade unlocks a hotel room door and simultaneously disappears before your eyes…
My teenage niece Ali loved the show too. You don’t have to explain dark and twisted to anyone in the throes of adolescence, perpetual or not.