Today at TNR, Jed Perl reviews Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition, which has already been seen at the Tate in London and the Prado in Madrid, features 130 works, including 65 Bacon paintings and other archival items spanning Bacon's career.
Perl calls Bacon's paintings "modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence." (He also describes them as "noirish graffiti: angst for dummies.")
Click through today's TNR slideshow to see images from the exhibition.
Above, Bacon's Three Studies for a Self-Portrait,1979-1980. ( 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon/ARS, New York/DACS, London).
--Elizabeth Sher and Sharon Eliza Nichols
All digital images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art