Francis Bacon Meets Willem de Kooning in a Dazzling Show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

“Bacon / de Kooning” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan brings together two 20th-century masters who, as the gallery puts it, worked “at alternate ends of the artistic spectrum.” Francis Bacon championed a flayed figuration, while Willem de Kooning was in the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism. The show features nine works by Bacon — all portraits or self-portraits — and eight abstract de Koonings. These were lovers of paint who were seduced into divergent styles.The works hanging in the 1932 Beaux-Arts townhouse on East 64th Street are all relatively small-scale — de Kooning at 60 by 55 inches, and Bacon at 14 by 12 inches — creating the impression that the show distills two sprawling bodies of work. De Kooning and Bacon met only once, in 1975, during Bacon’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the photograph, the two are smiling, surrounded by acolytes witnessing something special.Painters Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975. Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe Dublin-born Bacon achieved his breakthrough at age 35 with the 1944 triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” a lurid riff on the biblical theme by way of the Greek Furies, set against a hellacious burnt-orange background. An existentialist of a bleak bent, Bacon was nevertheless a charismatic bon vivant who planted himself at the center of London’s art scene. He was a reputed cross-dresser obsessed with painting popes.The Rotterdam-born de Kooning came to America in 1926 as a stowaway aboard a British freighter, the Shelley. He did not speak a word of English, but found employment as a house painter and then with FDR’s Works Progress Administration before emerging as a mainstay of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Lee Krasner. De Kooning died at 92 in 1997, though his brush had long since been stilled by Alzheimer’s.‘Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes,’ by Fracis Bacon, 1969. Detail. © Estate of Francis Bacon via Lévy Gorvy Dayan The contrast between de Kooning’s abstract style and Bacon’s representational one is blurred by the paintings. Neither was a purist. Bacon’s faces are contorted and distorted into shapes and smudges so dramatic that anatomy can give way to abstraction. A “Study for Self-Portrait” from 1973 features a melting visage that could count Impressionists, Surrealists, and Cubists among its ancestors. One from 1979 bears the distortions of a newspaper caricaturist.Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Portrait,” from 1976, resembles a series of time-lapse photographs shot at a morgue presided over by Pablo Picasso. The woman’s mouth conveys an impression halfway between a muzzle and a scream. Bacon’s mouths are memorable, and often terrifying. In 1985, he mused: “I had always thought that I would be able to make the mouth with all the beauty of a Monet landscape, though I never succeeded in doing so.”Bacon’s persistent interest in maws dates to his obsession with the image of a screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film “The Battleship Potemkin.” In 1957, Bacon painted “Study for the Nurse in the film Battleship Potemkin,” placing the subject in what looks like a ghoulish green chamber. What Whitman called the “barbaric yawp” is more subdued in these portraits, but it is barely suppressed, just barely kept at bay — and out of frame.The de Koonings hanging at Lévy Gorvy Dayan all date from 1977 to 1980, and work across a rhyming palette of salmon pinks and reds, cut by occasional veins of black and green. Occasionally, there is a glimpse of a face, a startling callback to the artist’s totemic “Women” series of the 1950s. These de Koonings are jazzy, almost groovy — far more fun, if less awe-inspiring, than, say, the Pollocks on display a mere mile away at the Met.Bacon’s portraits — including those of his lover, George Dyer — retain a chilly distance reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The howl is all the louder for being muted. De Kooning’s pink abstractions, in contrast, appear as if flesh had been warmed, almost melted. These are two artists heading in different directions, but a half-century after first pressing flesh at the Met, they meet anew on the Upper East Side.

Francis Bacon Meets Willem de Kooning in a Dazzling Show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Francis Bacon Meets Willem de Kooning in a Dazzling Show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

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