FRANCIS BACON’S VISION OF ISOLATION

This lovely and coherent Swabian town of 600,000 souls has a splendid new art museum by British architect James Stirling, an edifice that would grace a city five times its size. Opened last year, the widely acclaimed Neue Staatsgalerie at the moment plays host to the works of England’s most eminent living painter, Francis Bacon. Just those few facts make enticing suggestions about a vital and cosmopolitan German culture.

Yet curiously enough, the most haunting image that remains after a visit to the exhibition is that of a mouth frozen in a mute scream. It is, of course the mouth from Bacon’s trademark 1953 painting, “Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” probably the most resonant shriek in the history of modern art. There are others--the distraught lonely soul in Edvard Munch’s “The Cry” of 1895, the grieving woman of Picasso’s “Guernica” of 1936. The thing that lends Bacon’s painting singular significance is its point in time after World War II and the fact that it is based on a great portrait of an individual who embodies all the pomp and power of a temporal institution that claims to derive authority from an extra-terrestrial source.

In Bacon’s version the Pope himself is overcome by a vision of horror that causes him to violate the symbolic demands of his office. In short, the painting represents the moment in European history when collective anxiety was replaced by individual anxiety. Francis Bacon (who must find deep irony in sharing a name with the great 17th-Century empiricist) emerged at the same time as Britain’s Angry Young Man playwrights like Pinter and Osborn and continental Absurdists like Beckett and Ionesco. Despite the fact that Bacon is styled as an individual talent without peer, he was part of a widespread and spontaneous artistic impulse to make art that expressed revulsion at the collective terror and individual tragedy wreaked by the conflagration.

Artists from Bacon to Dubuffet, Giacometti and even California’s Rico LeBrun could be seen to be asking what in hell kind of art they were supposed to make in a world where one side had systematically annihilated 6 million people and the other had introduced that lovely new human refinement, the atomic bomb. Their answer--and perhaps that of society in general--was that they had no answer and that henceforth all art would have no greater significance than what could be read into expression that was flatly idiosyncratic, quirky and damaged.

Bacon--regularly styled as the world’s greatest living painter--is so revered in England that the prestigious Tate Gallery has taken the virtually unprecedented step of according him two retrospective exhibitions in his lifetime (the painter is now 75 and like several other great English creators is actually Irish).

His second retrospective is the one visiting the Neue Staatsgalerie. Gracefully spaced out in a dozen capacious white galleries, it has been cut down slightly from its original 125 works without apparent dilution and tends to lean slightly to works done since 1970.

The event leaves little doubt that Bacon is fundamentally a great painter in the same sense as, say, Titian or Goya, but also makes it clear that he operates trapped in the late 20th-Century vacuum of isolation. That circumstance makes it easy for an uncomfortable audience to dismiss him as an odd little man painting out private terrors, perversions and obsessions in a bedsitter in Chelsea.

Thus the terrifying succubi of his early “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” is vulnerable to belittlement not only as a mere precursor of the gibbering protoplasm of current horror movies but as a simple Freudian oral fixation. A work with a fancy title like “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus” can be sneered off as a homosexual fantasy and Bacon’s preoccupation with flayed flesh as a masochism too extreme to be of general interest.

Bacon’s early work is so searing that its power cannot be ignored. One has the feeling, however, that if this exhibition were on view in Los Angeles it might not play, in the same sense that certain theater pieces that make perfectly good sense in London are incomprehensible in New York.

As time goes on, Bacon’s work grows ever larger and his backgrounds simplify to large areas of flat color. Sometimes it is a rather lugubriously dramatic crimson, others a gentle pastel, but always it is somehow decorative. Cynicism shifts its smug bulk and we are conscious that Bacon is now a famous painter and probably a rich one as well. How are we supposed to take this showy angst seriously?

In laid-back Los Angeles, where much of the world’s unpleasantness can be dismissed with a flick of the mind’s channel selector, Bacon could be tuned out as too hard to take. On his own turf, however, he makes a kind of inescapable sense as a preeminent articulator of a distinctive kind of tension that pervades Europe.

Partly this is because of the artist’s sheer, astonishing painterly authority and the way it exists in the matrix of Old World history. He takes the eloquent distortions of Picasso and gives them the substance of a Rembrandt. The results in small portraits of Michael Leiris and other friends have the hallucinatory plausibility, looking the way a face might at the instant we went quietly mad. Those big open backgrounds are theatrical in the same way as a small theater in the round. They are like a purposeful arena that tells us that that triptych about shaving, that homage to a stack of cigarette butts, that elegy on ghastly luggage, really does form the base of the drama of our absolutely isolated lives. Time and again, looking at Bacon brings to mind lines from T. S. Eliot, his ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, his one-night cheap hotels.

It’s not just the traveler who feels repulsed and guilty because he tried to overcome suffocating aloneness with a hooker and too much hooch. It’s Bacon surrounded by his little circle in London. It’s his friend Isabel Rawsthorne furiously waiting for someone on a London street. It’s everybody.

That, of course, is the truth we don’t want to face in Bacon, our legacy of anomie and the universal tentativeness that makes him title even some of his most finished works, “Study for. . . .” He constantly breaks up of any narrative theme or chronological line so that everything exists in a state of dissociation, and the pure ghastliness that Bacon sees as the basis of life.

In a catalogue essay by Dawn Ades he says, “When you go into a butcher’s shop and see how beautiful meat can be and then you think about it, you can think of the whole horror of life--of those stupid things that are said about bullfights. Because people will eat meat and then complain about bull-fighting covered with furs and with birds in their hair.”

It would seem the only consolation in Bacon is that always chilly satisfaction of seeing things the way they are. Maybe there is more. There is always his immense coiled vitality and the discovery of unexpected insight, the devastating exquisiteness of his own portrait sitting self-consciously next to the sink, a foot wrapping an ankle like a boa constrictor. And, as time goes by, there is a certain calm. We are still absolutely walled up in our own madness, but after a while it seems acceptable. When Bacon paints a guy writhing in his jockey shorts, there is a certain affection in it. When he painted “Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards” last year, the spectral image came out seeming, well, normal.

Maybe we and Bacon are finally getting over the shock of the legacy of isolation left by the great wars and learning to live with the fact that it is the granddaddy of hippie, yuppie and punk alike.