Britain’s greatest postwar painter, Soho’s legendary boozer and gossip: the National Portrait Gallery has the perfect subject in its stirring, splendid new show Francis Bacon: Human Presence.
In vital, varied ways, Bacon’s paintings mostly depict the human figure. The NPG opens with a wistful “Self-Portrait” splattered with red aerosol spray paint to create a distancing effect, and concludes with grand baroque dramas in shrill colours: “Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps”, dripping blood, life draining away; the revolving blue stage of “Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror”, the subject’s face brutally sliced in half. So twisted are these representations (the figures recognisable though damaged and wounded by the artist’s painterly violence) that no exhibition until now has considered Bacon primarily as a portraitist.
It’s a rewarding, fresh approach, intimately chronicling the lives of the artist and his close friends and sitters, historically setting his innovations against centuries of tradition in the NPG’s collection. The context illuminates how unprecedented Bacon’s insistence on making “the animal thing come through the human” was. Scenes of his sadistic lover Peter Lacy crouching — about to pounce — in long grass like a fierce beast in “Study of Figure in a Landscape”, or Lacy eviscerated, his internal organs bursting through his skin, in the savage nude “Portrait”, still disrupt expectations of the genre.
Loans are generous, including monumental, eccentric pictures absent from Tate’s 2008 centennial retrospective. Stockholm’s flat pop art “Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach”, both subjects reclining in a bright orange chaise longue, was based on photographs in Paris Match of French soldiers relaxing in Algiers. In San Francisco’s “Study for Portrait (with Two Owls)” a voluptuous, menacing pope on a red throne has for companions a pair of demonic birds, and a third bird shape scrambling his opulent robe — the shadow of death.
Bacon made his name with howling deformations of Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X”; the silken screaming purple and gold “Head VI” held in a thinly sketched cage, often called a “space frame”, is the show’s earliest work (1949). A first portrait commission followed: Robert Sainsbury in a sober suit fused into a black ground. His face, shirt and tie are spotlit, emerging from darkness; like the popes, the businessman looks vulnerable in his space-frame trap.
Robert sat for Bacon in his lunch hour, bringing a sandwich to the studio, but already with his next subject, Lisa Sainsbury, Bacon was uneasy painting from life. “Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa” is derived from hieratic images of Queen Nefertiti, and pictorial artifice deepened by a “shuttering” curtain of cords, achieved by pressing fabric into wet paint, so, Bacon explained, “the sensation doesn’t come straight right out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps”.
From then on, depicting his Soho circle, Bacon worked only from photographs, preferably clear neutral ones taken by his friend John Deakin; he said his subjects’ presence in the studio intimidated him from “injuring” them on canvas. He tore or crumpled Deakin’s shots to inspire his own fragments and dislocations.
Nothing exposes the extreme violence and imaginative intensity of Bacon’s distortions as frankly as these photographs exhibited alongside the paintings in each section devoted to his main sitters. Together, the displays unfold across the largest gallery like a brilliant transgressive party with ever wilder guests arriving.
Henrietta Moraes, in Deakin’s photograph a beautiful, free-spirited brunette, acquires in Bacon’s 1966 nude depiction a face like a chimpanzee’s and bruised, blotchy skin. “Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes” by contrast captures her as in a glimpse across a room: oval head, high cheekbones, wide eyes. Thick crimson borders around the body mimic a halo, or aura — evoking Moraes’s charisma. Yet smears of wet pigment blur and dissolve the image. Everything is transient in this small animated triptych, changing canvas to canvas as in a strip cartoon.
From a Soho street snapshot, you similarly recognise the quizzical semi-profile of the model for “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne”, but not the fury and despair Bacon accords her. This is a triptych condensed into a single picture: Rawsthorne simultaneously a leaping contorted figure turning a key in the lock, a shadow behind the door, and a mask-face nailed to the wall. The cropped pink table and ashtray come from another louche Bohemia, Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Harden”; the pink echoes Rawsthorne’s flesh tones, unifying the composition.
Lucian Freud first arrived to sit for his portrait in 1951 and found it already finished, based on a photograph of Kafka, a sinister shadow added. This depiction compares here with “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” (1964) where his sly predatory features, slathered in white impasto, become really malevolent. Bacon mocks his rival with a light cord trailing over his head, rendering him pathetic, but the soles of his shoes stare defiantly at the viewer.
Bacon acknowledged that every painting was in a sense a self-portrait, “concerned with my kind of psyche . . . my exhilarated despair”. In a key depiction of his dead lover “Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle”, a metaphor for Bacon’s sense of life’s futility and circularity, his own profile peers from Dyer’s head.
He especially deformed his own likeness. He appropriated the right, collapsed head in “Three Studies for a Self-Portrait” from a photograph of a first world war bomb victim; in the central panel the face with blank eye socket subsides into a vortex of gestural brushstrokes, yet remains bizarrely legible. A black whiplash erases the left eye in “Self-portrait” (1973); the right eye meets us with a piercing discomforting gaze. Friends remembered that was just how he scrutinised them.
Bacon’s model, borrowed from Musée Granet for this show, was “the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence . . . there are hardly any sockets to the eyes . . . it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks.”
Bacon holds his own here with Rembrandt, with Velázquez’s flickering fluid brushwork in three “Popes”, and with Van Gogh’s loaded lava-red colour and palette-knifed expressiveness in two versions of “Study for Portrait of Van Gogh”, paraphrasing the lost “Painter on the Road to Tarascon”.
Turn left on leaving the NPG and you are in Bacon’s Soho; turn right and you are at the National Gallery where Van Gogh currently reigns. Seeking to depict contemporary experience in the grand painterly manner, Bacon brought those two worlds together. Throughout this show he achieves his aim of making “a direct assault on the nervous system” to fix in paint “all the pulsations of a person”. Transforming portraiture’s appearance, methods, effects, he retained for modern art its ancient power and conviction.
National Portrait Gallery to January 19; Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, February 14-June 8
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