Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [126]
At her first one-woman show, Kahlo’s doctor said she was too ill to attend, so she had herself carried in on a stretcher as part of the exhibit. Kahlo died soon after. When they pushed her body into the oven to be cremated, the intense heat snapped her corpse up to a sitting position. Her hair blazed in a ring of fire around her head. She looked, painter David Siqueiros said, as if she were smiling in the center of a sunflower.
PARADISE GARDEN: A SHRINE OF OUTSIDER ART
“A man of visions” is how painter Howard Finster (b. 1916) signs his work. He had his first vision at age three in a tomato patch. An apparition of his sister, recently deceased from rabies, appeared announcing he would be a man of visions. Since then, he’s had thousands of visions, some of the Biblical sort like bands of angels, others more futuristic like spaceships.
For forty-five years, Finster preached as a fundamentalist minister, then one day he got paint on his finger and a face told him to paint sacred art. Finster filled in a two-and-a-half-acre swamp in Summerville, Georgia, to create an environment of evangelism he calls Paradise Garden. He paved the walkways with bits of colored glass, rhinestones, mirror fragments, marbles, and rusty tools. He made a 20-foot-high structure called Bicycle Tower of discarded bike frames, lawn mowers, and wheels. What others call junk is a jewel to Finster. “Lots of people said I was crazy,” he admitted. “Noah couldn’t get any support on the ark because it looked crazy to people.”
BODY LANGUAGE. Bacon never worked from live models, although he did many portraits of friends based on memory or photos. “Who can I tear to pieces,” he asked, “if not my friends?” Often he drew inspiration from color plates of hideous wounds or disfiguring diseases, which accounts for the impression of flayed flesh his images convey. Themes of war, dictators, and meat appear frequently in his work, as do images of tubular furniture, a red rug, window shades with dangling cords, an umbrella, a rabid dog, and a bloodied human figure on a bed.
An eccentric who spent his time painting, gambling, drinking, or curled up in a fetal position daydreaming, Bacon called his work “exhilarated despair.” Although museum curators admired his work, Bacon was aware it appalled most collectors. He imagined new acquaintances thinking, “Ha! Slaughterhouses!” when they met him. He never toned down his style, admitting, “Whoever heard of anyone buying a picture of mine because he liked it?”
Bacon, “Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef,” 1954, Art Institute of Chicago. Bacon was fascinated with Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X and did a series of grotesque versions, sometimes with the pope shrieking amid blurred shafts of spectral paint. Bacon reworked the Velázquez portrait in many studies but insists he never saw the original. The screaming pope is hemmed in by luminescent sides of meat, suggesting Bacon’s belief that “we are all carcasses.”
POSTWAR SCULPTURE
Postwar sculptors worked with new materials like scrap metal, new techniques like welding, and new forms like assemblage and mobiles. Although abstraction was their dominant mode, the chief feature of their art was experimentation.
MOORE: ENGLAND’S MOST FAMOUS SCULPTOR. Henry Moore (1898-1986) clearly built on the biomorphic shapes of Surrealists Jean Arp and Joan Miró. He also based his work on natural forms like shells, pebbles, and bones. Subjects