Wordsworth wrote this in 1798:

It is the first mild day of March:

Each minute sweeter than before,

The red-breast sings from the tall larch

That stands beside our door. One moment now may give us more

Than fifty years of reason;

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season. And from the blessed power that rolls

About, below, above;

We’ll frame the measure of our souls,

They shall be tuned to love.

But then he also wrote, romantically, that “pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” Another clue to this British climate is found in T.S. Eliot’s lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The spring may have come quicker than usual here in Holland, and it does not yet seem cruel. In fact this Sunday was a happy day for everyone I saw on the streets, a day of suddenly appearing outdoor seating, a day of skirts and sunglasses, a triumphant day. The world is still gyrating properly, the annual happiness has not been denied. I even saw someone eating ice cream. Sometimes the spring seems as though it is unfairly withheld, in a kind of run on the bank of mass-populous desire for sunlight, but not today. Today we were simply blessed.

And so I had decided to visit the Torture Museum. The idea of voluntarily entering a cold dungeon of materialized horror on such a pretty day amused me. I also figured that I would probably want to see it some day, and today’s mood might be the most pleasant backdrop for an experience that would necessarily include some amount of discomfort, or even fear.

Perhaps there is a logic to the prevalence of lurid, horrific tourist attractions, based on the pleasant relief one gets at the exit, when one steps out of the darkness into the soothing warmth of the city, like from a scary movie up into the afternoon.

Anyway, the Torture Museum turned out not to accept the Museumkaart. I flashed my PIN card to indicate a slightly unconvinced willingness to pay, by now rather excited about seeing the iron maidens and whatnots—but that too was impossible. I would have to pay actual cash to go in. Never mind, I thought, and headed out into the sun. What now? I have to do something for the blog.

Then I remembered that the Nieuwe Kerk, a short walk away, is supposed to have some kind of exhibition about Francis Bacon. The painter, not the scientist. Also known as the guy whom Margaret Thatcher referred to as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” I had some vague idea of Bacon as a subversive, discordant artist, somehow associated in my mind with Buñuelian torture, and I decided to do that instead.

The Nieuwe Kerk is only new compared to the Oude Kerk. It was completed in 1544 and treated roughly in the iconoclastic fury of 1566, then mostly rebuilt after the great fire of 1645. A rough life for this imposing structure. Through the years it seems to have lost most of its religiosity, too, and is now more of a museum. The interior of the church is quite impressive, especially the carved wooden artwork of the main pulpit.

The Bacon exhibition happening in the Nieuwe Kerk is a part of a series called “Single Masterpieces,” which now for the third time “presents a single masterpiece in the seclusion of its magnificent sanctuary.” The first was Rembrandt, the second Andy Warhol, and now Francis Bacon’s triptych In Memory of George Dyer from 1971. It is a triplet of large paintings depicting (or “exorcising”) the painter’s suicidal friend and lover. The figures are grotesque, fleshy, and anxious, in a way that the curator’s text describes as refusing the “golden horizon of salvation” that accompanies classical triptychs of the death and resurrection of Christ.

The curator also admits candidly that “the Masterpiece series is an attempt to compensate periodically for the lack of masterpieces in Dutch churches, a void left when widespread iconoclastic riots, the ‘Beeldenstorm,’ swept through the country’s churches, including De Nieuwe Kerk, in 1566.” Even before the painting is seen, this frames the issue in an interesting way. The display of the triptych seems to assume historic proportions, a significant move within the story of Dutch religion.

Here on the Dam plaza, the very nexus of tourist activity, it is also easy to associate the Nieuwe Kerk with spectacle. There was a boisterous performer doing something with a horse whip, a torch, and a boombox. And of course the horse taxis, the groups of sunbathing stoned backpackers, and the obligatory police bus, anticipating God knows what. Nevertheless, the church itself is rather quiet, spacious, air conditioned—indeed a sanctuary.

The Single Masterpiece is displayed inside of a kind of inner chamber bounded by a beautiful brass choir screen, like a holy of holies. The lighting is perhaps a little problematic, because the paintings are inside a big glass case, which reflects the brass choir screen and various other church extravagances, making it a little hard to see. But if you hang around for a bit and get familiar with the triptych, it comes into focus more clearly. I sat in the pews and watched it for a good while.

There’s also a slightly amusing phenomenon involving the guard telling off photographers, which I observed with a smug glee. I studied the guards’ movements for an opportunity to sneak a photo anyway, but they run a pretty tight ship.

Bacon took inspiration from sculpture. The figures in his paintings often come across as fleshy busts, meat statues against solid backgrounds, encircled and associated within geometric shapes, often struggling or fighting with the shapes, or cornered, surrounded, like boxers in a ring. Perhaps the glass and the guards are part of the exhibition. They surround the artwork with a “crown jewels” aura, the glimmer of value protected by violence.

In fact Bacon’s paintings score extreme prices at auctions. Given the utterly tragic story behind the painting, this all feels somewhat perverse. George Dyer was a petty criminal, a boxer, a complete stranger to the “art world,” who became involved in a very strange and unhappy friendship with Francis. They were lovers, and Francis’s many depictions of George seem to have played a role in their relationship, as a kind of aesthetic legitimization of his troubled manhood, or of his animalhood. Through a kind of atheistic crucifixion, his memory lives on and creates an enormous financial value.

This is not a critique of Bacon himself, just an ironic feeling I get when I attend the exhibition. And maybe I should not be too concerned with the biographical details. Focusing on the personal dramas of the painter is a way to avoid confronting the artwork itself.

Gilles Deleuze, in his book about Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, almost completely ignores the story of George Dyer. Instead, he tries to read the internal logic of the paintings themselves, with only a general sense of Bacon’s “life story.”

“Bacon harbors within himself all the violence of Ireland, and the violence of Nazism, the violence of war. He passes through the horror of the crucifixions, […] or the head of meat, or the bloody suitcase. But when he passes judgment on his own paintings, he rejects all those that are still too ‘sensational,’ because the figuration that subsists in them reconstitutes a scene of horror, even if only secondarily, thereby introducing a story to be told: even the bullfights are too dramatic. As soon as there is horror, a story is reintroduced, and the scream is botched.”

The forces that Bacon paints are violent, horrible, and disturbing. But Deleuze places him in a line of painters who illustrated “force” in a general sense. For example Cézanne, rendering the “folding force of mountains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape,” and Van Gogh, painting “unknown forces, the unheard-of force of a sunflower seed,” and Van Gogh’s great inspiration Millet, who said that a sack of potatoes carried weight in the same way as the Eucharist offertory, and so as a painter of gravity he painted them the same.

I found it a rather beautiful experience to view this “Single Masterpiece” in the Nieuwe Kerk. The whole idea of just showing one work basically appeals to me; I never like having to choose. This presentation encourages you to sit down and just be affected by the painting in a relaxed way. There’s nothing else to see, no hurry to get to the next thing. It’s almost like a concentration exercise.

It is also a way to discover what Deleuze describes as the weird vibrating polyrhythms of Bacon’s paintings. The basic attendant rhythm of the horizontal repetition, and the frozen, static, jagged movements of the figures. Sitting down in front of the triptych, as my eyes jump between the frames, there is some kind of communication between them. It really becomes like an altarpiece, a site of prayer.

In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben meditates on the way humanity engages in “anthropogenesis,” the creation of mankind out of the animal, and the lingering question of man’s animality, and the way this has been expressed in the Western traditions, especially within Christianity. Art played a major role, and I suppose Bacon is a late expression of this struggle.

In the time of the Renaissance, Agamben says, there was a “humanist discovery of man […] the discovery that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas.” For the humanists, this became a clarion call for self-invention and creativity. For Bacon, it seems rather less optimistic. Deleuze explains:

“[…] what Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man […] the common fact of man and animal […] man is coupled with his animal in a latent bullfight.”

This theme was picked up by Erica Fudge in a 2010 essay called Why it’s easy being a vegetarian. She cites Barthes’s wonderful essay on the mythology of steak in French culture: “the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength.” She goes on to claim that “ontologically (if not always practically), [it is easier] being a vegetarian than being a meat-eater,” since for vegetarians, the rule for what’s kosher is trivial: we basically just eat anything that doesn’t run away or scream. Plutarch described the vegetarian’s big question to the carnivore in Essay on Flesh Eating:

“How could his eyes endure the spectacle of the flayed and dismembered limbs? How could his sense of smell endure the horrid effluvium? How, I ask, was his taste not sickened by the contact with festering wounds, with the pollution of corrupted blood and juices?”

Francis Bacon said in 1965:

“I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. […] Of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”

If you go and check out the Bacon exhibition, you can then move on to The Butcher on Albert Cuypstraat for dinner. This American-styled burger joint features large, haphazard patties grilled in plain sight, and the entrance is graced by a hanging cow. Only 100 meters away, Burgermeester’s walls are covered with bovine photos. There seems to be a Baconian trend of flesh depiction in Amsterdam burger culture. There is meat everywhere I go. Fudge concludes:

“So perhaps I have to acknowledge that being a vegetarian is not easy after all, because if we were all vegetarians that would bring with it a radically new sense of who it is we imagine ourselves to be. And that new sense has a potential to be disturbing because it might force us all to acknowledge that, as a man called Bacon once said, we are all meat. And who – or what – would we be then?”

I left the Nieuwe Kerk with an awakened curiosity about modern art. The sun was still blessing the city center with a soothing afternoon glow, “each minute sweeter than before.” I went to have some falafel. Mmm, you know it’s good.