The long holiday weekend is here, and what better way to spend the sunny hours than with an escape into the demented mind of Francis Bacon? The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened their Centenary Retrospective on the artist, the first major New York exhibition on him in twenty years. The NY Times notes that it "won't do much to alter the polarities of opinion around Bacon" but it does dispute the belief that his art declined throughout the years, "indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual." It may be a good opportunity to reevaluate his work, which the museum notes has been seen in a new light following his death in 1992.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is usually closed on Mondays, will be open this Monday in honor of Memorial Day.
