Other from Joker

Figure with Meat

According to Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Bacon appropriated the famous portrait, with its subject, enthroned and draped in satins and lace, his stare stern and full of authority. In Bacon's version, animal carcasses hang at the pope's back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition. The pope's hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez's version, are rough hewn and gripping the church's seat of authority in apparent terror. His mouth is held in a scream and black striations drip down from the pope's nose to his neck. It's as if Bacon picked up a wide house painting brush and brutishly dragged it over the face. The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point. Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation".[1]
Joker
Fictional Character
At the end of his iconoclastic romp through the Flugelheim Museum in Gotham City in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), the Joker (Jack Nicholson), sticks out his cane and stops Bob from vandalizing the Francis Bacon. He says to him, “I kind of like this one, Bob, leave it." This is a joke about Bacon, of course, and his existential angst, which perhaps in 89 was considered somewhat passe, but also about what the tastes of a psycho in contemporary art might be as well. While most of the works of art that were vandalized were beautiful in conventional ways of art, this was an anti-beauty ugly work of art. The fact that the face of the screaming Pope or Figure with Meat.