Francis Bacon: Human Presence

In the latest exhibition on Francis Bacon, the National Portrait Gallery in London highlights the sublime painter's portrayal of his closest friends, his contemporaries, and his artistic inspirations.

The exhibition is an introspective examination of Bacon’s approach to the human condition. It provides an intimate view of those closest to the artist and what he described as the “cruel injury” of his depictions and twisted explorations in pursuit of an arresting visual “truth.” At a time when chaos abounds in the world, this show is a testament to Bacon’s enduring importance as a modern painter and his influence on painters today.

The show of fifty-five paintings starts with some of his early, anonymously dark, brutal, and thinly painted self-portraits. One of the first we see is a screaming rendition of his lover, Peter Lacy. Curator Rosie Broadley gives a nod to Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who encouraged a young Bacon into the life of an artist.

Bacon never rejected formal skills—he created a new language of paint, combining accident, control, and a sensitive touch.

In Daniel Farson’s 1993 book, Bacon himself said he was shaped by chaos. “During my childhood, I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement Sinn Féin and the wars. Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life.” Though shaped by the philosophies of Nietzsche and the existentialists, he said he “still awoke every morning thinking something marvellous might happen.”

The show revolves around his close friends and lovers. Expertly curated by Broadley, it includes a side room of paintings showing Bacon’s inspirations. Among them are three van Gogh representations Bacon did early in his career, including a heavily expressive one of the Dutch painter in a field. There are two Velázquez pope paintings and also a death mask of William Blake, one of his idols. His near contemporary, Picasso, also inspired Bacon with a destructive approach to representation. A fascinating anonymous small portrait, Man in glasses III, 1963, oil and silver on canvas, demonstrates Bacon’s admiration for Picasso’s deconstruction of facial features. What’s also fascinating is a salon hung wall of faces, painted over the course of a few months in St Ives, Cornwall. These include Head of a man, 1959, depicting ex-lover Ron Belton; Head of a boy, 1960; and Head (man in blue), 1961. All are rendered in dark deep greens and red splotches, with sprawling, smudged, unfocused paint. These are the last ones he did from life, preferring to work from photographs and other reference material thereafter.

Bacon wanted to create an expansive feeling of space around the figure, cropping and enveloping the psychological space around his portraits. “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down, just to see it better,” he said.

Self-portraits dominate the exhibition. There are multiple views—cut-down, twisted, and morphed representations and experimental self-portraits. “As you get older you see fewer and fewer people, and people are less and less interested in you.” So, he painted himself more towards the later part of his career.

In the 1960s, Bacon concentrated more on painting his closest friends: Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabela Rawsthorne, John Edwards, Muriel Belcher, George Dyer, Peter Lacy, and even a portrait of Frank Auerbach. There are multiple images of these identities, often in triptych. His sectioned use of space is quite noticeable en masse [in a group]. He used transparent rectangles to section the backgrounds and portraits, and open them up.

Bacon was lionised in Paris, where he kept a small apartment. Some of his trickier small portraits were painted there, such as Two studies for self-portrait, 1977. But what dominates in the final room is a large triptych of his lover, George Dyer, who died on the toilet of Bacon’s Paris hotel room two days before his major retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971—which Bacon kept quiet on the opening night. A year after the event, Bacon painted this stunning narrative as he tried to deal with Dyer’s death and their failed and complicated relationship.

It took Bacon a long time before he thought of himself as an artist. In conversation with writer David Sylvester in 1975 he said, “I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance . . . I don’t think I’m gifted. I just think I’m receptive.”

There are countless retellings of his wild youth, his open and brave sexual politics during a repressive time after the wars, and his continued life on the edge into his eighties. These experiences of the world fed his hunger for art and picture making, which was always evolving. Most works in Human Presence have a life of their own, there is no repetitive trickery in the tight curation.

It’s noticeable that in his portraits there is a centrality to his figures—often used as a tool for balance in the picture. He emphasised fragmentation, collage, and chance. His manipulation of space sets up a great platform for interpretation from the viewer—all superfluous detail is excluded so the remaining elements become even more significant. It’s an almost clinical simplicity that has influenced a lot of current modern painting.

The flatness of the backgrounds in conjunction with subtle flesh renderings, contortions, and violent splurges of paint on the face and skin give his portraits a heightened dynamic that forces us to engage in an awkward reading of the image. It makes them compelling but not easy for the audience to come to—that wouldn’t have been of much concern for Bacon.

Towards the end of his career there were some repetitive compositions. A slight touch of trickery is involved and there are a few unsatisfying images. But his lack of fear, acceptance of the chaos in the world, and his joyous risk-taking in painting and application of paint is admirable and still pulling in the crowds.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 69 

EXHIBITION
Francis Bacon: Human Presence
10 October 2024 – 19 January 2025
National Portrait Gallery, London