If Bacon’s paintings teach us anything, it’s that madness is always at hand, no matter how average the appearance. We might have the wrong idea about this guy, Bacon suggests. Historically, Bacon’s Figure with Meat is said to be a parody of the Pope Innocent X (1656) portrait by Diego Velázquez it’s often noted that Bacon appropriated the hanging meat of Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655) to flank the gruesome Pope. The artists represented in both Bateman’s and the Joker’s worlds share a similar critique of artifice. (Clearly, this a comic at least mildly obsessed with the pomposities of the art world.)Īrthur’s normie look has roots in another satirical villain of cinema, Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, who keeps a handful of 1980s artworks in his yuppie-tastic New York apartment, including Richard Prince’s Marlboro Man, which was appropriated from magazine ads, as well as Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait in Untitled Film Still #56 (1980), which shows the artist as a beautiful blonde losing herself in her own mirrored reflection. In fact, the museum destruction scene in Burton’s Batman is an echo of a scene from the show: the Joker’s vandalism is embraced by the art world as great Pop art, and Batman must reveal the truth. (Don’t even get me started on Jared Leto’s method acting.) The Joker himself has also been a muse for the art world, particularly for Andy Warhol, who interpreted the Batman logo in several works, made the unauthorized 1964 film Batman Dracula, and even appeared on the ’60s TV show. In art, equating standardized beauty with virtue is a falsity the Joker understands, and with his love of the debased and grotesque, he is merely making a critique.Ī haunted role, the Joker’s other iterations have also been monstrous aesthetes with a look drawn from art, from Nicholson’s tailor-made grin to Heath Ledger’s caked-on stage makeup in The Dark Knight (2008), which director Christopher Nolan admits was inspired by Bacon’s paintings. It makes sense that the Joker would prefer the abjection of the Bacon painting to the romanticism of the Degas ballerina sculpture he so casually knocks to the floor. After all, the face of evil wants to see itself in the visuals that surrounds it: smeared, monstrous, and malformed. In Figure with Meat, the gaping mouth and wild eyes of the figure are not unlike the Joker’s. Bacon’s paintings epitomize the pathos of the postwar era, and depict screaming popes and caged businessmen.
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