Figure with Not Enough Meat

The Fat

In 1946, figurative painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992), a descendant of Sir Francis Bacon, the champion of the scientific method, began painting variations of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650) – his “Screaming Popes” series.  One of the surviving works in this sequence, and perhaps the most famous of them, Figure with Meat (1954), was purchased by the Art Institute in 1956.    

The catalog essay provided by the Art Institute explains that this “grotesque, almost nightmarish” painting expresses “the ethos of the postwar era” by using hanging meat, inspired by Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef (1657), to present the pope as both “a depraved butcher” and/or “a victim.”  This “existential view of damnation” has found its way into popular culture, placing it forever into that category of works artists simply must know.    

The Fork

According to Clive Bell’s influential work on criticism Art (1913), we must now toss all the aforementioned information aside.  Bell was a champion of formalist criticism, which proclaims, as he describes in his landmark book, that “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.”  If a work of art is “good,” it should illicit “aesthetic emotion” (an emotional experience) - on its own.  Its context – its history, what it represents, etc. – is irrelevant.  Once the fat is yanked away, what will be left for consumption?

The Meat

Removing Figure with Meat from its context, and ignoring the blanket of praise thrust upon the work, one is left with a painting that is, at best, lack-luster and confusing.  The work fails to achieve the terror and revulsion that other works in this series, particularly the terrifying Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (owned by the Des Moines Art Center), do at a glance.  The screaming pope of this work more resembles a smeared image of the cranky, middle-aged, blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Endgame (1957).  The painting is covered by glass (as Bacon intended), which distracts the viewer with the sight of his or her own shadowy image.  

The Meal

The aesthetic experience of Figure with Meat leaves one famished, and has the fright factor of a wall hanging in a poorly-devised, ineffective haunted house.  Although speaking of art criticisms today, a line from James Elkins’s book What Happened to Art Criticism? sums up this baffling work of Francis Bacon best: “There just isn’t enough meat in [it] to make a meal.”