Resumen de Vulgar Pictures: Bacon, de Kooning, and the Figure under Abstraction
Francis Bacon’s ostensibly individualist (dis-)fi guration drew frequent contemporary comparison to Willem de Kooning, whose Women, lamented by Clement Greenberg, became the most charged site from which the mid-century body was ‘read’. This essay is concerned not with the infl uence between these artists, but with the critical space their overlap describes.
Emphasis is typically laid on questions of sexism and violence in this ‘middle ground’ work, yet while period attitudes about gender are indeed confi gured within such painting, these are amply examined elsewhere.
This essay identifi es instead an informe practice whereby the bodily propositions latent in gestural abstraction are made legible. This work retains a fraught status within a wider abstract/fi gurative discourse; Bacon’s fl irtation with gestural abstraction forms here an investigative parallel to de Kooning’s fi gurative turn.
Exploiting portraiture’s special claim on ‘realism’, these artists subjected the fi gure to the protocols of a visual regime that sought to expunge it.
