Possibilities of the Predatory

I'd been doing all my sculpture blogging here http://www.eleanorcrook.com/sculptors/
But I missed catching all the other passing fads and notions ;  and this BLOGGER page stores many of my friends in the linkages down the side. So I return to it....

This summer's topics on my workbench are building up to the centenary of the outbreak of the "Great" War, as my work on WW1 plastic surgery has received some centenary attention, and I am producing a wax group of soldiers and some writings about faces rearranged by artillery and surgery. The rearranged face (or, as the title of a 1960s ICA show puts it "The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head " ) puts me in mind again of Francis Bacon; the elegant threat and insolent violence he painted. I'm reading a recent  book on an important topic : Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda by Martin Hammer, a  study of Bacon's iconographic sources from Tate publishing. Early on Hammer quotes from Sam Hunter's 1952 essay "Francis Bacon, the Anatomy of Horror", and the Hunter passages lash off the page like Bacon's smears by comparison with the exegeses of the contemporary art historian. The vigour of such writing seems lost beyond hope,  impossible today now the language has been professionalised and formulated , mashed up with management jargon and cultural studiousness. Hunter also made public Bacon's use of, and choice of, photographs as awakeners of his imagery, and photographed a selection of his "incunabula".

 A taster, then , from Sam Hunter in 1952: "Needless to say, Bacon's record of contemporary history reads like a lesson in ignominy. His art deals with our most ubiquitous public images and discloses unimagined possibilities of the predatory in the private individual."
Image: Francis Bacon, "Man with Dog" 1953 ( detail)