Part of the focus of this new exhibition (curated by Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison) is the excavation of Francis Bacon the visual manipulator, his chaotic and contradictory relationship with process and technique. Central to this approach is an insight into the artist’s appropriation of the photographic image. The influence of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies in The Human Figure in Motion, in conjunction with Michelangelo’s drawings of the male form, is key to an art historical appreciation of this exhibition.

Yet it is the reliance on and manipulation of the contemporary photography of John Deakin that captures the viewer’s imagination. Bacon’s obsession with tearing, folding and re-aligning Deakin’s images is fascinating when their final reinventions are viewed on the painted canvas. Deakin’s early photographs of George Dyer in a cross-legged seated position form the working basis of many of Bacon’s seated male forms to follow. Visual correlation can be made between the 1965 photographs of Isabel Rawsthorne and the 1969 painting, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, which indicates Bacon’s tendency to cross reference his subject matter with the scattered and re-formed remnants of images that refuse to be ignored by the artist.

Bacon’s ‘destruction’ and recreation of photographic images as part of the systematic process of his work raises the question of violation when considering his partially destroyed canvases. An overt sense of absence is experienced by the viewer when confronted with Bacon’s violently slashed canvases, which appear collectively as a statement in conceptual art. More than that though, this enacted violence embodies the tension between what Bacon views as finally terrible, and what may have been an image of great beauty. However, these images of omission - in their shredded state - enable the detailed analysis of technique, colour and application which is not otherwise possible with such works.

Although there are many exquisite works on canvas, some of which have never been seen, there is a risk that some sections of this exhibition may be too close to documentary for some Bacon followers, and indeed those new to the artist. In its objective to get behind the ‘how’ of Bacon’s paintings, through the display of archival source images and other material, the exhibition itself is arguably unfinished. There is a distinctive lack of Bacon’s iconic Pope series and the more evocative sexual imagery associated with the psychology of homo erotica, works ordinarily associated with other Bacon retrospectives.  At the same time, the inclusion of the permanently displayed Bacon Studio - an archaeological wonder in itself - and the 1998 Perry Ogden photographs of the artist’s living space go some way to disseminate the intriguing and “deeply ordered chaos” endemic in the life and work of Francis Bacon. The Bacon devil is in the detail of A Terrible Beauty in Dublin.

Francis Bacon A Terrible Beauty 28 October 2009 – 7 March 2010 At Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, D 1. Tel: 00 353 1 2225550 Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Web: www.hughlane.ie
The exhibition is free to the public.