Mr. Lewis

"Of the younger artists none actually paints as beautifully as Francis Bacon.  I have seen paintings of his that remind me of Velasques and like that master he is fond of blacks.  Liquid whitish accents are delicately dropped upon the sable ground, like blobs of mucus - or else there is the cold white glitter of an eyeball, or of an eye distended with despairing insult behind a shouting mouth, distended also to hurl insults.  Otherwise it is a baleful regard from the mask of a decaying clubman or business executive - so decayed that usually part of the head is rotting away into space.  But black is his pictorial element."*
     Wyndham Lewis wrote this concerning Francis Bacon, and how he compares to the other artists of his generation.  He uses such contradicting words to describe Bacon's work, its beautiful, but also gruesome and disgusting. 


*Brighton, Andrew. "Francis Bacon's Modernism." Critical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (Spring2000 2000): 137. Literary Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed April 28, 2014).