Francis Bacon, National Portrait Gallery: the modern master at his most raw and revealing
There’s a teensy issue with this exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits. The 20th-century British artist didn’t really paint portraits. At least, not in any conventional sense.
Sure, he depicted people, and, sometimes, they were recognisable. Mostly, though, Bacon made them resemble murder victims, or cartoon characters squished by a 10-ton anvil. Faces, in his pictures, are mangled and smeary, like bowls of trifle or banana smash. He didn’t go in for flattery.
No doubt, this inveterate gloom-merchant – who preferred to work from memory and photographs, not life – was expressing post-war angst. He wanted, he said, to convey an individual’s “pulsations”. But, unlike historical portraitists, he had no interest in replicating appearance, or attempting to capture his subjects’ souls.
So, a show of Bacon’s portraits is, in a sense, perverse – which is plain from the off in Francis Bacon: Human Presence. Study for a Portrait (1949) isn’t a study for a portrait at all, but a nightmarish vision of an indistinct screaming man. (Is he being zapped by an electric chair?) Nearby, another howling fellow, this time bespectacled and possibly seated in a café, appears to be exploding. In Study of the Human Head (1953), a third wraithlike chap is X-rayed before our eyes: apart from a magenta smudge, like the ghost of some post-smooch lipstick, Bacon reveals the skull beneath his skin.
Confusingly, the artist often conflated sitters in his paintings: Portrait of Lucian Freud (1951) was based on a reproduction of an old photograph of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, which may explain its drabness. And, although Portrait of RJ Sainsbury (1955) is unambiguously a portrait, it turns Bacon’s patron, the businessman and collector Robert Sainsbury, into a sort of ashen-faced zombie. As likenesses go, it’s brutal: like a boxer after a fight, Sainsbury seems unable to open his swollen right eye.
The show’s final room, “Friends and Lovers”, is devoted to some of his nearest and dearest, whom he painted repeatedly. They include several men with whom Bacon had significant relationships: Peter Lacy, the love of his life, who appears, in one scary picture, like a maleficent gorilla; George Dyer, who died by suicide on the eve of Bacon’s ’71 Parisian retrospective; and John “Eggs” Edwards, a bartender to whom the artist bequeathed his estate.
Does it matter that, even here, there’s minimal differentiation? Don’t be silly. Bacon’s art was universal, not specific; the NPG doesn’t pretend otherwise, and that’s fine. And, although this exhibition, like many Bacon shows, is occasionally guilty of excessive reverence, it freshens up an overfamiliar story by including various gossipy titbits, as well as portraits of the artist himself. A black-and-white photograph by Neil Libbert documents the artist on his 80th birthday. Standing in his studio’s doorway, he clutches a couple of loaves of bread, and a copy of The Daily Telegraph.
More importantly, there are several barnstorming pictures that haven’t been exhibited to death – unlike, say, the Arts Council’s Head VI (1949), in which a hanging tassel torments the ticklish nose of a screaming figure inspired by Diego Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X (1649-50).
Strangely, given that Bacon “loathed” his own face (which could, after all, appear as hefty as a watermelon), his self-portraits, scattered throughout, are the most customarily revealing and powerful things on display. In them, the artist reconfigures himself as a puffy pink phantasm, glowing in the night. As courageous, confessional records of vulnerability, they take some beating.
From Oct 10; information: npg.org.uk