Summary
Colm Toibin: Francis Bacon - the art of seeing
"Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon are two personalities who appeared a few years after the Second World War, and whose work dealt in different ways with the drama of loss and despair; both, one might say, saw the presence of man in the world as something strange and almost comically meaningless. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Beckett came from the Dublin merchant class, and Bacon from the huge mass of Protestants from the South. Beckett was born seven years before Bacon, who, by the way, didn't particularly admire Beckett. ... Both Beckett and Bacon, during their youth, watched the power of their class slowly disappear, they lived in families where everyone was completely convinced that the government would be turned upside down and that the people who howled in the night would win and that the rebellion of these people would not be suppressed those around them did not understand Ireland, that they had mismanaged it and were now facing the consequences. This is no less credible because neither Beckett nor Bacon mentioned any of this in conversation or in interviews; what happened in Ireland had an effect on them in a way that they barely realized, and that is why the effect was all the more powerful.
However, it is worth noting that both helplessness and violence, solitude and loneliness, which seems more imposing and lasting than the works of their contemporaries." Colm Toibin
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