I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
Francis Bacon was a British painter whose work often blends
references to art history with deeply personal and disturbing imagery. He was
known for creating paintings that felt like psychological snapshots—intense,
distorted, and emotionally raw. Although he exhibited with artists associated
with Surrealism, some within the movement didn’t think his work fully
fit the label. Still, Bacon shared a lot of their concerns—like exploring the
unconscious mind and using unexpected combinations to produce strong emotional
reactions.
He was familiar with classic European art and had studied
design before focusing on painting. One of his most famous series involves
reimagining Pope Innocent X, a 17th-century painting by the Spanish
artist Diego Velázquez. In Bacon’s version, the Pope sits in the same kind of
throne, but his mouth is open in a silent scream. The face is blurred and
distorted, and the figure is often shown behind a kind of curtain or cage-like
frame. These paintings don’t copy Velázquez’s technique or color exactly—they
twist it into something else entirely.
Part of the visual reference also comes from The Scream
by Edvard Munch, especially in the open mouth and the suggestion of anxiety or
pain. Bacon was interested in how the mouth could express raw emotion, and he
sometimes looked at old medical or dental books to study this. Some of the
mouths in his paintings were based on illustrations where tools were used to
hold the jaw open—images that were both clinical and unsettling.
In some versions of the Pope paintings, Bacon added hanging sides of
beef in the background. That detail echoes the slaughtered ox carcass in a
painting by Rembrandt, and it brings in a sense of physical decay. Bacon
painted directly onto unprimed canvas, which means the oil paint soaked into
the fabric. It gave his work a kind of rough texture but also made it
unstable over time. Many of his paintings have deteriorated because
the surfaces weren’t sealed properly. That technique matched the emotional
content—raw, exposed, and not meant to last.
Bacon once said that he wasn’t painting dreams; he was
painting reality. But his version of reality includes the things most people
try to avoid—fear, pain, violence, and loss. His works are filled with cognitive
dissonance, especially when he places religious authority figures like
popes in vulnerable or grotesque poses. The screaming pope is not just about
religion or power—it can also be read in light of Bacon’s life as a gay man in
mid-20th-century Britain, where homosexuality was still criminalized. The
trapped, distorted figure may reflect feelings of repression and social
pressure.
His paintings aren’t abstract, but they’re also not exactly
realistic. They sit in between—rooted in human anatomy and classical forms, but
twisted by emotion and personal experience. That uneasy mixture of recognizable
images and psychological intensity is what makes his work feel so strange and
unforgettable. Some viewers might call it dreamlike, but others see it more as
a visual form of nightmare.
To really get what’s
going on in the contemporary art world, it helps to understand Pop Art,
especially how it connects to earlier periods. Pop Art came about in the late
1950s and 1960s, mostly centered in Manhattan, New York. A couple of well-known
names from that time are Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. There was also a
music scene connected to it. Since there’s a lot to cover, this focuses just on
a few key figures from that time.
Robert Rauschenberg is usually considered a Pop artist,
though his work sometimes overlaps with other styles. One of the things he’s
best known for is a type of art he called combines. These were artworks
that brought together painting and sculpture using everyday stuff he found,
like trash or random objects. The idea of using found objects goes back to
Marcel Duchamp, who came up with the concept of the readymade.
Rauschenberg took that idea further by assembling or reworking these objects
into new compositions.
One of his pieces, Canyon, is a good example. It’s
about six feet tall and five feet wide, and it includes all sorts of
things—items he found, picked up, or repurposed. There’s a stuffed eagle coming
out of a box, a dirty pillow tied with a cord hanging from a piece of wood, a flattened
metal drum, and a canvas that includes cutouts from newspapers, magazines,
family photos, and bits of political posters. These materials aren’t
traditional for painting or sculpture, which is part of what made his approach
different at the time.
Art history textbooks,
like Stokstad, don’t offer a solid explanation for what Canyon
means. They describe it as being packed with cultural references, too many to
pin down to one specific message. Rauschenberg himself didn’t think it needed a
single clear meaning. He believed that people should interpret the piece for
themselves, finding their own connections or ideas in it. He once said he felt
successful when his art resembled the disorder he sensed in the world.
The way some people see Canyon is kind of like one of
those Rorschach inkblot tests used in psychology—what a viewer says about the
work might reveal more about the viewer than about the artist. Rather than
giving clear answers, the artwork creates space for different people to see and
say different things based on what they notice and think it all means.
This kind of art connects to some earlier psychological
ideas, like the ones we talked about with Freud and Jung—especially Jung's
concept of archetypes. Marcel Duchamp was already playing with those
ideas. What’s happening here is that when you place one image next to another,
people automatically try to make sense of it. Our minds want to create stories
or meaning, even when things aren't clearly connected.
Think about when you look at someone’s refrigerator door.
There might be a bunch of random photos, postcards, magnets, or scraps, but
just by seeing what’s stuck there, you start to imagine what kind of person
lives in that house. Rauschenberg’s Canyon works in a similar way. It’s
kind of like an artist’s version of a fridge door—a collection of images and
stuff that meant something to him, or just seemed interesting, and now viewers
have to figure out what to make of it. That’s probably the easiest way to think
about it.
What makes Rauschenberg, and his roommate Jasper Johns, Pop
artists is that they used popular stuff—images or objects from everyday
life or mass culture—and rearranged them to make new things. They were pulling
things from the culture around them and changing thecontext, which created
different meanings. But even though it’s called Pop Art, it’s not all
that different from what the Surrealists were doing decades earlier.
Take Max Ernst, for example. He made a work called Two
Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which we looked at when talking
about surrealism. That piece is also kind of a combine. He took various
found materials, stuck them together, and added a poetic-sounding title. The
title doesn’t explain everything—it just suggests something—and it’s up to the
viewer to come up with a personal interpretation.
This kind of artwork doesn’t try to give a fixed meaning.
It’s more like a starting point for someone else to build their own idea
around. The artist knows they’re giving up control over what the work “means,”
and they’re okay with that. In fact, they kind of enjoy it. It turns the whole
process into something more open, where viewers are invited to think, imagine,
and decide for themselves, instead of being told what to think.
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were roommates in New York
during the 1950s, and there’s strong evidence they were also in a romantic
relationship at the time. That personal connection shaped their work. They were
part of a close-knit art scene and seemed to influence each other quite a bit.
Johns created works that were similar in method to Rauschenberg’s, even though
they used different terms to describe what they were doing. Rauschenberg used
the word combine to describe his mix of painting and sculpture, while
Johns didn’t apply that term to his own work, even when the materials and
approach were pretty similar.
Like the Dada artists before them—people like Marcel
Duchamp and Hannah Höch—both Johns and Rauschenberg took pieces from
mass culture and everyday life and reused themin new ways. This
recycling of popular or discarded material became a key part of how they made
meaning in their art.
In one example, Johns made a work that included actual cans
of paint, stencils, letters, and other physical objects attached to the canvas.
When you look closely, you can see the words red, yellow, and blue
stenciled onto the surface. The painting is made from two canvases placed side
by side, and it’s called a field painting. That title refers to the color
field style from just a few years earlier, which was practiced by artists
like Mark Rothko.
Artists like Rothko, Kazimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky
were focused on formal elements—color, shape, and texture. Malevich’s Suprematism,
for example, aimed to strip away recognizable imagery and focus on pure
abstraction, emotion, and form. Rothko used large blocks of color to try to
create emotional responses through visual simplicity.
Johns’ painting plays with that idea. He calls it a field
painting, but instead of presenting a smooth, immersive color experience, he
literally writes the names of colors on the surface. It’s like he’s pointing
out the mechanics behind the painting rather than delivering a “pure” visual
experience.
This approach ties into
the idea of cognitive dissonance—a term from psychology that describes
holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. That idea became pretty
central in modern art. In this case, Johns is saying this is a color field
painting, while also making it clear that it isn’t, at least not in the
traditional sense. The tension between the label and the object is part of the
meaning.
It’s kind of like trying to hold a switch in both the on and
off positions at the same time. You’re aware that something is referencing an
earlier style or idea, but also aware that it’s not really the same thing
anymore. That’s the way artists like Jasper Johns played with meaning—there’s a
reference, but also a challenge to what that reference is supposed to
represent.
Pop Art, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, often came with
a kind of dry humor or sarcasm. A lot of it dealt with American culture in a
way that could feel critical, even while using symbols from everyday life. It
wasn’t always patriotic in a traditional sense, but that didn’tnecessarily mean the
artists were unpatriotic either. They were just pointing at things that were
taken for granted and asking people to look again.
In that earlier color
field piece, Johns seemed to be poking fun at the seriousness of formalist
painting by labeling colors instead of just showing them. That playful, ironic
tone shows up again in one of his most well-known pieces: a painting of the
American flag. On the surface, it’s just the Stars and Stripes, but the way he
made it matters. He used encaustic, a type of paint made from melted
beeswax mixed with pigment. That gives the flag a textured, almost waxy
surface.
Underneath that surface, though, he placed pieces of
newspaper from the 1950s, which were glued down like a collage. That newspaper
layer is still visible through the waxy paint in some areas, and it gives the
work a kind of hidden historical context. The flag becomes a cover over fragments
of real events and headlines, almost like sealing them away in a time capsule.
That layering is similar to what earlier artists like Hannah
Höch and Duchamp did with collage, using scraps of printed material to
suggest a deeper cultural or political meaning. In this case, painting an
American flag over 1950s newspapers makes the whole thing feel like a frozen
moment—like a document sealed inside a symbol.
For people in the U.S., the flag is a powerful icon. It
represents the country in a direct and emotional way. Changing it or using it
in an artwork can be provocative. This was just before the rise of political
activists like Abbie Hoffman, and during a time when patriotic imagery was
tightly protected. So painting the flag wasn’t just about making art; it was
also about getting people to think about what that symbol meant, especially
when it covered up layers of history.
Artists like Johns and Rauschenberg were testing what art could be and how far they could push
meaning. The materials and techniques were important, but the ideas behind the
work started to matter even more. That became a big shift in modern art. After
movements like Surrealism, artists started focusing more on the thinking
behind the piecethan on how beautiful
or polished it looked. The object became kind of like a leftover or a trace of
a bigger idea.
By the time you get to Pop Art, the goal isn’t always to
make something pretty—it’s to make something that makes you think. And that
change in priority is one of the biggest things that shaped art in the second
half of the 20th century.
Jasper Johns made a series of works that were kind of like
collages or what’s called assemblage. The word assemblage comes
from French, and it basically means putting different objects together to make
a new whole. It’s just a way of saying you’re assembling pieces—found objects,
materials, textures—into something new that can be looked at as art.
One of Johns’ pieces from this group includes a hinged
canvas, and it has plaster casts of faces stored in a small compartment that
looks like a closet. The idea of being able to open the compartment and
rearrange the faces adds this interactive feeling, even though it’s not
actually meant to be used that way. Above the faces, there’s also a painted target—a
recognizable image—and the surface includes layers of newspaper sealed under encaustic
paint, just like some of his earlier work.
Again, it creates this time-capsule effect. The newspapers
are from the 1950s, and the encaustic preserves them in place. Then you’ve got
the faces, the target, and the structure that looks like a closet—all placed
together in one artwork.
Now, Johns never explained exactly what this work was
supposed to mean, and different people have interpreted it in different ways.
That’s part of how he and Rauschenberg thought about art—you’re supposed to
bring your own meaning to it.
Still, it’s worth pointing out that Johns and Rauschenberg
were both gay men living together in New York at a time when being openly gay
wasn’t widely accepted. There’s a reading of this artwork that sees the target
and the closet structure as possible symbols for that experience. The word closet
has a double meaning when people talk about someone being “in the closet.” And
a target can suggest being watched or singled out. That interpretation isn’t
written into the piece by Johns, but it’s a way some viewers have thought about
it—especially in hindsight, with more historical context.
Even if Johns wasn’t trying to say something specific, it’s
likely he knew that putting those elements together would suggest certain ideas
or feelings. Artists like him often played with combinations that weren’t
random. They left room for viewers to interpret, but they also understood that
people would pick up on certain visual cues.
Pablo Picasso was an artist who changed a lot over his lifetime, and
he's usually a big part of art history classes. To keep it simple, let’s just
hit some key points.
If you compare Picasso’s early work to Paul Cézanne’s
paintings, you can see how Picasso’s style started to shift. Cézanne had this
way of breaking down objects into basic shapes, which influenced later artists.
He didn’t use straight realism—he sort of broke things into parts that looked
more abstract. This way of simplifying forms had a big effect on how Picasso
thought about art.
Many people think Cézanne’s experiments helped open the door
for Cubism, which Picasso later helped develop. Cubism uses flat shapes and
different angles to show an object all at once. One example of this is Guernica,
a painting Picasso made in 1937. It’s large—over 11 feet tall and more than 25
feet wide—and painted in gray, black, and white. It shows people, animals, and
buildings in the middle of chaos, based on the bombing of the town of Guernica
during the Spanish Civil War. The painting doesn’t follow traditional
perspective. Instead, it uses overlapping and broken shapes, which are typical
in Cubist work.
Before this, Picasso had already shown a lot of skill at a
young age. When he was a teenager, he made drawings and paintings that showed
he had a solid understanding of anatomy, shading, and proportion. His early
pieces looked more traditional and realistic. Later, he started trying new
things—using bolder lines, changing proportions, and playing with different
ways of seeing the same object.
Picasso painted Science and Charity in 1897 when he
was around 15 or 16 years old. It’s an oil painting on canvas, and it's now in
the Museo Picasso in Barcelona. At the time he made it, Picasso had already
developed strong technical skills. The painting shows careful attention to
anatomy, shading, and composition, which are usually taught much later in an
artist's training.
The scene in the painting shows a woman lying in bed. On one
side of her is a doctor taking her pulse and recording something. On the other
side, there’s a nun holding a child. The
figures represent two different kinds of help. The doctor stands for
science or medicine, while the nun and child represent charity or faith-based
care. The title, Science and Charity, names both of these.
Picasso’s father, José Ruiz Blasco, was an art teacher who
taught him to draw and paint. Picasso started learning formal art techniques
from a young age. He spent time at the Escola de Belles Arts in
Barcelona, where his father also taught. By the time he was a teenager, he had
already learned the traditional academic approach to painting, including how to
build a composition and how to use light and shadow.
This painting was made during a period when young artists
were expected to copy classical models and master academic painting
before experimenting with new styles. Science and Charity was exhibited
in local art shows in Spain and received awards. The people in the painting
were modeled from real life—Picasso used his father as the doctor figure.
The painting’s style follows the realist tradition.
The figures are shown with lifelike detail, and the setting includes
recognizable objects like the iron bed frame and the glass bottle, which help
place the scene in a hospital or home care environment from the late 1800s.
There are no symbolic objects beyond the figures themselves and their
positions. The nun and the child were often used in art of this time to suggest
care or religious support, but Picasso doesn’t include any supernatural
imagery.
This painting was made around the time Picasso finished his formal
training as an art student. The subject he chose connects to an earlier
tradition in painting—specifically, he’s referencing a theme that artists like
Édouard Manet explored. One example is Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker,
painted in the 1850s. That subject—a lone person drinking absinthe, a
strong alcoholic drink that was also believed to have mind-altering
effects—appears in several 19th-century works. Absinthe was popular
among some writers and artists, who thought it helped spark creativity.
Picasso's version of the absinthe drinker shows he’s
working with the same idea, but using a very different style. Instead of
repeating Manet’s approach, Picasso uses what would have been considered a
non-traditional or modern visual language at the time. While Manet’s work
focused more on realism and used careful shading and proportion, Picasso
distorts the figure. He uses flat shapes, strong outlines, and highly saturated
colors that aren’t naturalistic. These choices are similar to what artists like
Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh were doing in the late 1800s—Gauguin, for
instance, often used flat color fields and heavy outlines, and Van Gogh used
thick, energetic brushwork and intense colors.
In this painting, Picasso uses a female figure instead of a
male one, and the composition is more stylized. The figure is drawn in a way
that ignores strict anatomical accuracy, with simplified shapes and exaggerated
features. This kind of distortion hadn’t really appeared in European art
before, at least not in a deliberate and structured way. There’s also influence
from ukiyo-e, a kind of Japanese printmaking that became widely
collected in Europe in the late 1800s. These prints often used flattened space
and bold outlines, and they helped European artists rethink how to compose an
image.
By the early 1900s, photography had made it easier to
capture realistic images, so painters were no longer expected to just copy the
world as it looked. This gave artists like Picasso more room to explore
personal or symbolic uses of color and form. His use of distortion wasn’t
accidental—it was a conscious decision to break from earlier rules and
experiment with how figures could be represented. The choice to make the figure
look simplified or childlike doesn’t mean it was unskilled; Picasso had already
shown he could paint with realism earlier in his life. Instead, this approach
reflects a shift in what painting could be used for.
