Francis was a man of the flesh. Forget plein air watercolors with frilly parasols and cotton clouds, dismiss the large swaths of Kandinsky blue spread across the canvas and welcome the true Bacon of art. Currently staged in clean, spacious white rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Francis Bacon retrospective invites the viewer to experience the paintings of an artist who never quite fit through the Expressionist label, never squeezed through the figurative art category nor promoted the abstraction and Surrealism of his days.

A Dubliner by 1909 birth, Bacon fled to London in his teens, and a large portion of his life was spent in that very city, gambling, drinking and witnessing the rapid cycle of decay, rebirth, destruction and terror of Europe burning. The Met exhibition chronicles Bacon’s exposure to the intense influences of wars, lovers and interior design (his first career), from a seminal 1944 crucifixion study to a jet of water in 1988. Yet even if Bacon defies a label, he does not ultimately repel critics or historians — the painter’s creations reflect the turmoil of the art world and one of its wild members as he sought to react to the heavy, sweaty mass of the twentieth century.

Bacon’s approach, however, is altogether different from the majority of his contemporaries. In his art, Bacon sought to avoid narrative while recognizing time-lapse (Eadweard Muybridge’s motion pictures were noted as a source of inspiration). Naturally, his paintings bear the burden of the bloody spirit of loneliness, isolation, distance and scars of the time. But he addressed these issues through the flesh, and it’s not the Cubist method of flat surfaces and quadrilaterals that make Bacon’s art distinct. Instead, he chose to portray the skin — distorted, twisted, pulled and dripping, feet extending into oily trails of white paint — in various positions, coiled into faces shrieking with horror. Bacon was particularly fascinated with the mouth, and a sizable amount of paintings in the retrospective are devoted to exploring this interest. While the bodies in his art remain fluid, ectoplasm falling onto the floor, the mouths of his earlier years are delicately pictured in savage expressions. Studies for a crucifixion, gentlemen with yellow flowers in their breast pockets, baboons and Velasquez’ Pope Innocent X (clad in opulent purple robes) — all shriek in agony, their faces stretched, frozen and deeply pained. Fast-forward in the timeline, and these mouths close, dark gentlemen in bars appear on the canvases, quiet but, it appears, still under pressure from within. Later still, salmon-pink figures with contorted bodies find themselves in chairs, beds, pinned with syringes or kneeling beneath black window slats, and Bacon seems to have put some ice on the torture of his previous compositions. A bit of experimentation with brushwork and second-hand images (Bacon shunned direct observation, preferring photographs over the authentic body) along with heavier emphasis on geometric enclosures causes Bacon’s last paintings to have a tighter air of suspended time, but the undercurrent of tension charges through every work.

It’s nearly impossible to enjoy the retrospective because the whole experience sets one on edge. But the exhibit does, at the end, become valuable for its examination of the emotional human detritus of the Western world — the reversed evolution of man suddenly finding his hedonistic cravings dominating over any pretense of high morality. Bacon didn’t shun the ugliness, but placed it in organic forms trapped by man-made cages — clear evidence of his career as an interior decorator but also a sign of contained conscience and animal instincts of a creature that calls itself human. Bacon portrayed people in a skewed manner because reality, perhaps, was too much too handle, so it needed an enclosure and a blurred physiognomy. 20th century Europe revealed a human race that Bacon needed to lock inside a canvas to preserve the man that the world had made. But what now, when we’ve sterilized the marble counters and bleached away the blood? Maybe Bacon resisted time frames and back-stories because he wanted his art to be eternal. The only question remaining is whether his caged figures would react with revelry or revulsion if released into the streets today.