Two British artists, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, thriving within the mid-century avant-garde, have been linked in an exhibition (2014) organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ashmolean Museum of London. Bacon’s bona fides as a loyalist of the grimmest wing of Surrealism have never been in doubt. But the tortured figuration of Henry Moore’s sculptures has tended to encourage more Stonehenge blissing than I-Mean-You-Baby stepping on expensive shoes. But you know, this extremely valuable exercise makes quite a powerful case for those temperamentally remote practitioners unwittingly setting up a correspondence by which to usefully explore a carnal hotbed of subversion and liberation. The photo above juxtaposes a Moore figure, undergoing not all that terrible deterioration, with a Bacon illustration of emergency-ward-level deformation for life. Continue reading →