We got up early and zipped up to the Met on sunday morning. After dodging the Puerto Rican Day parade we slipped into the museum and made our way up to the second floor where we navigated through the byzantine complexity of galleries until we came upon our goal, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective. And for the next couple of hours we witnessed a powerfully fascinating and disturbing collection of dismembered carcasses, faceless and nightmarish visions of the Pope and abstract renditions of men in underwear. Bacon was initially inspired by a Picasso show he saw in Paris and once described painting as ” a snail leaving a trail of the human presence”. He was a horrible alcoholic and a homosexual that had several tumultuos relashionships, mostly famously with George Dyer, the subject of many of Bacons paintings from the 60′s who overdosed and died the day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris opened in 1971. One of the facts about Bacon that I learned at the show was his inventive use of photography. Bacon never painted from life but instead worked from photographs that he collected over the years. He was heavily influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of human and animal movement and based many of his later painting’s on the photographs of his lover John Edwards. 