Curation is an art in itself, in that the art of curation is to reveal to us a particular facet of an artist in a new light. The National Portrait Gallery’s ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ does this exactly.
For everything was so carefully calculated and calibrated that it created a serene and sedate calmness throughout where every portrait was ‘settling’ and not ‘unsettling’ (which is the customary cliché associated with Bacon). For here, Bacon was entirely eschewed from the usual (but unfounded) tired tropes associated with his art: absent was the alleged horror, absent was the alleged gore, absent was the alleged angst, absent was the alleged violence.
Comprising 55 paintings, photographs, some unseen before, and two video installations, this meant I could take everything in without feeling exhausted and overwhelmed (unlike the two Bacon retrospectives, which were impossible to take in on one visit). A news release for the press (Wednesday 9 October 2024) refers to ‘his sitters’ and ‘key sitters’ yet, as far as I know, only Lisa and John Sainsbury actually ‘sat’ for Bacon.
Curator, Rosie Broadley, gave a concise introductory talk about the exhibition’s aims and summed up Bacon’s desire to not be so concerned with a literal-likeness but rather the “emanations and pulsations” of the person portrayed. Yet ‘literal-likeness’ is evident in many portraits which are also pulsations and emanations of the person: Bacon’s genius was his ability to unify literal-likeness with emanation-pulsation.
Contrary to the customary contention that Bacon ‘distorted’ and ‘deformed’ faces away from ‘literal likeness’, here Auerbach, Belcher, Dyer, Edwards, Freud, Lacy, Moraes, Rawsthorne, as well as Bacon himself, unambiguously have their own distinctive, instantly recognisable characteristics.
The sedate and serene Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1980, looked nothing like its dull and blurry reproductions; and, again, it seems that Bacon’s paint resists being reproduced. These exquisite and evanescent serene studies reconfirmed my long-standing conviction that the melancholic mood of late Bacon self-portraits have an uncanny affinity to the late meditations of Jawlensky.
Three Studies of Muriel Belcher, 1966, ranks as one of Bacon’s masterstrokes in ‘literal likeness’, encapsulating her eagle eye and Queen Nefertiti nobility as the long-reigning queen of the Colony Room Club. The far-right panel has this black ovoid-like twist suggesting a quick turn of the neck, as she perched on her watch-out stool at the Colony Room Club (illustrated above).
The ostentatiously operatic Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), 1963, sports these three dark circular discs which act as ‘percussive’ punctuating points nailing our nerves and is arguably one of Bacon’s most poignant popes, and, for me, the year when he painted his finest works (such as the destroyed Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs, 1963). This study is a symphony-in-paint where the paint applied becomes morphed into a musical score, where painting becomes orchestration: the musicality of Bacon’s paint and painting has yet to be discovered and ‘heard’. The paint does not scream; the paint sings. Here Bacon is strikingly akin to Kandinsky because ‘notes’ and ‘chords’ are heard everywhere in the ‘compositions’ of Bacon and Kandinsky. Bacon’s paint is heard as well as seen.
A major revelation was that, on seeing Head of Boy, 1960, for the first time, I noted that it was far darker in the flesh, than in auction catalogue reproduction, where they are reproduced far too light; again confirming my thesis that Bacons are incredibly difficult to reproduce with accuracy (illustrated below).
Head of Boy, may well have been a Piccadilly Circus-cum-pub pick-up: there is something sly and shy about this boy with his one ‘alien augen’ and his destabilised demeanour. We do not know who he is, and yet, through Bacon’s caressing eye, we somehow do know who he is in the intimacy of strangers.
Just judging by the swish of hair, and ‘puffed-out’ cheek, Head (Man in Blue), 1961 (illustrated above), is quite obviously a Bacon self-portrait, and certainly not of Lacy. It has Bacon’s embroidered emanation.
My one criticism of the otherwise immaculate curation was the positioning of the larger Head of Boy above the smaller Head (Man in Blue), with the former being harder to view being so high up; whilst on the wall, to the left, was a blank space where it would have hung well. This hanging made no sense at all and just looked arbitrary and cramped (illustrated above).
This is the first time that I have seen the Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964, in the flesh – the only known Bacon portrait of Auerbach. The delicate Baroque brushstrokes encapsulating Auerbach’s audacious aura (illustrated above).
The fleeting face of Man in Blue I, 1954, is a miniaturist ‘non-illustrational’ self-portrait (though not listed as such). The fractured and faceted facial features are painted with such daintiness and delicacy; the hair has a halo of white dashes which give it the shimmering sensation of movement and it is strikingly akin to the photograph of Bacon by Jorge Lewinski (1967) also on display. The word ‘miniaturist’ is never associated with Bacon but it is evident in his Man in Blue series where the faces are all pained with a miniaturist economy.
The magnetic Portrait of R. J. Sainsbury, 1955, and the majestic Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1966, could quite easily be hung alongside any 18th Century portrait and would not look at all out of place for they have a Rococo resonance. There is an extraordinary ancient 18th Century modernity about Bacon’s portraits which must cause a dull headache for art history and art historians alike. Bacon makes no sense in ‘art history’ because where would one ‘place’ him?
The time-tainted photographs by Francis Julian Guttmann and Helmar Lerski of a young Francis Bacon are also quite different ‘in the flesh’ to harsh reproductions which cannot reproduce the traces of time that these original prints have; again, it was like seeing these old photographs afresh for the first time.
The ectoplasmic evanescence of Self-Portrait, 1987, was completely lost in reproduction, and so I was seeing it anew for the first time: this is a portrait of the artist as a young man in old age; what is portrayed is a youthful ghostliness. Bacon looks fragile and frightened, fixed frozen in times long past. Unlike Rembrandt, Bacon did not ‘age’ in his penultimate self-portrait, for, as he grew older, so he became younger ‘with age’. When meeting Bacon, one was aware that he did not ‘age’ and never came across as ‘aged’, as being ‘old’.
Whilst Bacon’s timeless face is without distortion, time itself has become distorted here. Bacon painted the presence of being, and not the passing of time. Time is at a standstill in Bacon’s portraiture: there is no ‘passing of time’ happening here. Bacon painted the presence of being without the sensation of time.
National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff’s mesmerising Study for Self-Portrait, 1963 (illustrated above), is one of Bacon’s most perplexing ‘non-illustrational’ self-portraits. I spent some time observing a few ‘voyeurs’ viewing it and looking rather puzzled and perplexed. Yet it emanates an energy that instantly ‘insinuates’ being Bacon. It therefore made perfect sense to include the displaying of the Self-Portrait with Beret, c. 1659, by Rembrandt, of which Bacon said to David Sylvester: “Well, if you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and if you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational.”1
I analysed it, and whilst it is true that it verges on non-illustration remarkably well, the brush strokes are not by Rembrandt, just as the lips are not those of Rembrandt. Indeed: it is far too crude, harsh and slapdash to have been painted by Rembrandt and totally lacks Rembrandt’s enthralling emanation and sedulous sensibility. It is reproduced in David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon with the cautionary note: “The authenticity of this picture has recently been questioned by certain scholars.”2 (Ironically, in reproductions, it always looks far better because it is far darker and so hides all the flaws and could just about pass for a Rembrandt.)
The culminating room, ‘Friends and Lovers’, is the deliciously culinary ‘haute cuisine’ Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966. The bravura brushstrokes and thick wads of thrown paint pertain to the condition of sculpture, and so one only experiences that sculptural sensation through seeing it in the raw and not in reproduction. This sculptured-painting is argument enough for publishing a coffee-table sized ‘cook book’ on ‘Bacon’s Paint in Close-Up’ for the thrown white whips of paint against the dark ground reminded me of a succulent chocolate gateaux with whipped cream; one wants to eat the paint there and then (illustrated above and below).
With such cultivated curation, George Dyer is ‘positioned’ riding his bicycle towards his own end in the memorial masterpiece, Triptych May-June 1973, 1973, with its sculptural splatters and subsuming shadows culminating in the end of Dyer at the end of the exhibition: here there was a bench where we could meditate on the triptych which was meditation on the memory of a loved one lost: the right-hand panel sports a single white-whip shot of paint suggesting the spirit of Dyer flying off over his shoulder (illustrated below).
Ending with such a masterpiece echoed a masterpiece in curation by Rosie Broadley.
Alexander Verney-Elliott (for The Estate of Francis Bacon)
November 2024
'Francis Bacon: Human Presence'
National Portrait Gallery
10 October 2024 - 19 January 2025
www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/francis-bacon-portraits
Notes:
1 Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact - Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
2 Ibid Illustration number 51, page 59.
All photographs by Alexander Verney-Elliott.
