Francis Bacon, Master of Despair : At 80, the artist would seem to belong to another era; why do his paintings still take us off guard?

In the mid-1950s, a UCLA exhibition included a new British artist--Francis Bacon. He was represented by “Study After Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.” Awed faculty dragged their budding-genius students down to have a look. It wasn’t surprising that the kids had never seen anything quite like it, but neither had grizzled art teachers, who had seen a good bit.

The sinister, crafty Pope was pictured suddenly screaming. That seemed significant enough, but the painting’s technique was even more striking--the Pope appeared flickeringly through vertical, thinly applied striations that suddenly gave way to the crazy, free-brushed drapery of his gown and then firmed up to an illusive but deftly realized rendering of his face and purple cap. The image seemed less seen than hallucinated.

Anti-Establishment beatniks roamed the campus in those days wearing black, drinking espresso and acting cool. Cool was the colloquialization of Alienation. Everybody was still learning about the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism; Giacometti and Dubuffet; Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter. Smart people were learning that the Second World War had rendered the world Absurd.

In that ambiance, Francis Bacon had a certain inevitability. Besides, it looked to conservative artists as if this was the guy who would give new meaning to figurative painting in an era dominated by abstraction. Even among the Abstract Expressionists, there was a lot of talk that dribble-and-splash painting was washed up.

Now, some 35 years later, Samuel Beckett has recently died and the County Museum of Art presents a 58-work survey of Bacon’s oeuvre --the first in the United States in some 25 years. The occasion marks the 80th birthday of the artist who has been called the world’s greatest living figurative painter. Notable parallels exist between Beckett and Bacon. Both were born in Ireland but moved away--the playwright to Paris, the painter to London. Although Bacon is technically English, he joins Joyce, Beckett and Camus as either real or philosophical exiles. All startled and shocked the world with radical, disturbing art. By now, Bacon would seem to belong to a past era and thus in a neutral chronological slot where his work can be sorted into the bin marked Modern Classic or that labeled Period Piece.

Things about Bacon’s art invite dismissal. Formalists like to kiss him off as little more than a juiced-up version of Picasso in his surrealist period. The art often seems overly theatrical, calculating its effects like the curtain-line in Pinter’s “The Caretaker” when--after a long silence--a character blurts out, “What’s the game?”

Bacon’s work is increasingly full of empty, flat spaces punctuated by dramatically placed scumbles of figures. A recent diptych of studies from the human body is little more than a series of stagey red rectangles and risers bearing grotesque mutations of torsos. It’s all about effect and we remember that Bacon started his career as a decorator and designer.

His art is intensely mannered and has changed only in nuance over the decades. His stylization invites impersonation and has affected a long string of artists from the now half-forgotten James Gill to Bay Area Figurative Art in general and Ron Kitaj, David Hockney and recent James Dine in particular. Bacon’s mannerism leaves observers with the impression that he has made a career of impersonating himself. This effect is heightened by the character of the art. It seems fair to ask how anyone as immensely successful--and presumably wealthy--as Bacon can go on making art about despair.

The quick answer to that is that the rich and famous are not necessarily content and Bacon has been strange and haunted all his life--an out-patient recluse, compulsive gambler, serious boozer and a homosexual of sometimes self-destructive bent. Also--when so inclined--almost predictably viciously witty and charming.

Given all this, one approaches the retrospective ready to snicker. At first, the once-haunting Pope looks like the payoff of a Monty Python skit where mouse has just run up the pontiff’s skirt. The snarling succubus in the 1950 “Fragment for a Crucifixion” has long since been made cuddly as E.T. Looking at a Bacon portrait where the skin of a face is peeling off, we think of a spy in “Mission: Impossible” pulling off the mask of a latex disguise. A study for a portrait of Van Gogh trudging the road begs for some such caption as, “Pardon me, madame, can you direct me to Arles?”

Today, we view Bacon across a gulf of time, with electronic culture on our side and modernist culture on his. On our side is a detached art inspired by the media and on his, an art that filters history through intense personal experience. His modernist culture included appreciation for ancient classical literature like the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which inspired one recent triptych, and then-contemporary culture, which still included T.S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes.” Bacon’s gang includes Rembrandt, lots of Goya, Muybridge, Eisenstein, Bunel, Godard and Eric Rohmer. Our side stands four-square with MTV.

As you begin to wonder if you haven’t somehow gotten onto the wrong promontory, Bacon begins to get to you again. Of course there is an element of humor in him as there is in Beckett. Humor and muffled horror combine to produce Absurdity. I was once in a head-on car crash I thought was going to kill me. I saw the face of this perfectly nice chap in the other car and thought, “So that’s what death looks like.” Dying felt, well, ridiculous.

Bacon’s art still contrives to take you off guard like an unexpected anxiety attack in familiar, comfortable surroundings. Just as he rarely wanders far from his Chelsea studio, the paintings rarely stray from homey street corners or dowdy apartments. A sudden rush of Angst in such reassuring places peels back the armor of conventional assumption and gives us a glimpse of cauterizing fact.

Bacon jolts us into remembering that we are animals. There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the dog he painted after one Muybridge photo and the paralytic child he took from another, walking on all fours like his brother simians. All beasts are subject to sudden and violent extinction at the hands of other beasts. When he paints two nude men embracing in a field, they are like creatures in a zoo. You can’t tell if they are copulating or killing each other. Maybe both.

The 1946 “Painting” is a charnel house where a flailed carcass presides and a bloody-mouthed man grimaces. He hides under the umbrella of middle-class convention. It is another version of those invisible glass boxes where Bacon paints us imprisoned in rationality, bellowing against its constraints.

The artist is exquisitely aware of human vulnerability. If he weren’t so tough about it, he might seem sentimental or self-pitying. Actually he does sometimes, but not in “Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle,” where he transforms the innocent business of a nice peddle into a metaphor of life’s precarious balance. Dyer rides as if on a tightrope just as the Fool of the Tarot gambols on the edge of a cliff.

Bacon is a master of the tentative. Even his most finished paintings are called “studies.” He has a genius for the illusive, the not-quite-stated, the ominous. And he gets at it through plastic means. Triptychs like “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” do woozy things with space. We are in a red, circular room. Two men look over their shoulders at carrion lying in the foreground. In the next panel, we see a grinning, suppurating corpse on a bed and finally another dematerialized side of beef. It is never clear if the flailed meat is all human or if it is all the same thing viewed from different angles, so we seem to be floating around the room like a jerky balloon, a witness to something as vague as it is awful.

He also has a talent for the telling detail. In the midst of some hairy, unclear scene of muted violence our attention is drawn to a pack of cigarettes, a light switch or porcelain cabinet handle--the kinds of small realities that keep us from dismissing the unpleasant as just a bad dream.

Bacon’s recent art is sometimes an unconvincing attempt at getting up to his old tricks. He is more persuasive these days in a mellower mood. There is subtlety and gravity in a triple self-portrait that doesn’t need to be anything but the thoughtful record of a man thinking quietly about himself.

Significantly, the exhibition (through April 29) runs concurrently with a retrospective devoted to the pioneer New York stain painter Helen Frankenthaler, an artist sometimes thought of as a maker of exceedingly pretty abstractions. Hearing of this unlikely juxtaposition, one immediately wants to title the coincidental pairing “Beauty and the Beast.”

So much for our ideas about art. She turns out to be much tougher than her reputation and he much more tender. The coupling leaves a nice reminder that we can’t experience art according to our notions about it--only looking at it face to face.