Prelude to Butchery

The triptych centers on what can only be a dismembered corpse, with blood spattered on the castoff clothing and zippered travel bag. On either side are matching panels, which may -- or may not -- be the orgiastic prelude to butchery. On the left, two plump nude figures lie exhausted on a curious coffee table covered with mattresses and fitted with a mirror for self-viewing. On the right, two figures are ravenously devouring each other, while the mirror this time picks up the image of an attendant voyeur calmly chatting on the telephone. The work is by Britain's Francis Bacon, 59, currently being shown at Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. The new proud possessor is the multimillion-dollar Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, which already owns seven Bacons and cheerfully parted with an estimated $150,000 to buy this one.

Bacon's show may prove to be the most popular of the season; in the first week, all 19 oils have been either sold or reserved for prices ranging upward from $35,000 for the smallest multiple-image portraits. For nearly 20 years, he has been renowned in inner circles as Britain's finest figurative painter; his works have hung in U.S. museums since the early 1950s. His commercial success is a telling comment on just how open-minded the general public has become, for Bacon's material is, to put it simply, sick.

Most of the canvases he paints depict pulpy male nudes who couple lewdly on beds or sit like withdrawn junkies in cell-like boxes. The current show also includes many grotesquely distorted portraits of his friends, among them George Dyer, his studio assistant, Isabel Rawsthorne, wife of Composer Alan Rawsthorne, and Painter Lucian Freud, Sigmund's grandson. On one canvas, a hypodermic syringe rises from what looks like a well-beaten body, while in a corner of another a bird that has been plucked stark naked screeches desperately on his perch.

Foetus Crouch. Bacon, of course, makes no bones about the fact that the obsessive subject of his paintings is homosexual despair. He argues, however, that the despair he has observed among heterosexuals amounts to more or less the same thing. Certainly the horror and fascination with which some viewers respond to his works seem to support his contention.

To capture the feverish, nightmare quality of the experiences Bacon depicts, he has developed what is essentially a surrealist dream style to near perfection. Every brush stroke bears the mark of absolute conviction, from the fields of poison green and fetid lilac that deck his backdrops to the calculated white ejaculatory splats that he lashes across the legs of his subjects. There is hatred and hostility in Bacon's vision, but of late it seems to be mellowing. Nothing in his current show comes near to matching the insane intensity of his screaming popes of 1949-53. A study of three male bodies, to be sure, shows one crouched like a foetus and another with his leg in a splint, but the third, who dangles apelike from a pole, has an amiable if freakish mien. A woman lounging in a deck chair turns a face wreathed in a hideous grimace--yet, on second glance, it is obviously nothing more than the grin of a well-fed Cheshire cat.

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