IN HIS MOST recent avatar at the Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon appears before us defanged and declawed. The primal rantings now sound like a petulant whimper. The spastic gestures and maimed movements now savor almost of ball letic adroitness. And yet nothing has changed in the heart or mind of this octogenarian artist, the elder statesman of the British art world. The latest paintings in this retrospective manifest the same unyielding, implacable anguish that has been his hallmark for almost fifty years.
Rather it is we who have changed. For the past two generations at least, we have been assailed on all sides by art works of such calculated grotesqueness that we have lost all power to be genuinely shocked by anything. We analyze the forms or assay the political correctness of the artifact, depending upon our orientation. Sometimes we even go through the motions of outrage. But we know that ultimately it is only art. Anything Bacon can pitch, we can catch.
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