I went into the Francis Bacon show at the National Portrait Gallery with a noisy doubt wedged in my mind: Bacon was not a portraitist, so what is he doing here? I came out after an hour and a half of being slapped around by exciting paintwork with a new dollop of respect for the NPG and a changed understanding of Bacon.
He feels different because we usually see him as an artist who captured the darkness of his times in his work. Born in Dublin in 1909, he lived through two world wars and was deep into adulthood when Hitler and Auschwitz blackened human history. He was in his prime in the 1950s, that especially dank decade, and was there to witness every milestone of the journey towards nuclear destruction. The toxic blood of the 20th century seemed to course through his veins, prompting a habitual view of him as a painter expressing global angst.
I presume the NPG did not set out to challenge this understanding — it is not generally an institution with revisionist ambitions — but by focusing on Bacon’s portraiture the gallery has succeeded in doing exactly that. Rather than an artist who captured the screams of his times, what we get here is a painter who recorded a variety of highly personal moods and meanings in himself and his friends. Yes, there is sadness and angst — plenty of both — but they belong to the people, not the world around them.
The show is loosely chronological but begins anachronistically — and cleverly — with a late self-portrait from the 1980s in which Bacon looks close to tears. The famous distortions with which he “injured” the faces of his sitters have calmed down into a set of physiognomic clichés. The head feels intact. The downcast eyes avoid our gaze. He is lonely. Troubled. Plaintive. And we are set immediately on the path of personal sadness.
It is an effective piece of priming and prompts us to see all the work ahead in a new light. Even his signature image of a screaming pope, which comes next, “borrowed” and adapted from Velázquez’s celebrated portrait of Innocent X, feels different in this context. The screaming popes are always seen as dark embodiments of tragic times. In another show, that reading might have persisted. Here, we are forced to view them differently.
Around his repurposed pope, Bacon has painted a white square in which the bellowing pontiff is fully enclosed, like a man in a glass box. The box imprisons his noise. Instead of seeping out into the wider world, and infecting it, the box contains it and keeps the terror personal. Bacon is making us notice not the universal despair of Velázquez’s pope but the human anxiety locked up in him. The screaming pope is a public figure returned to privacy, not a private figure enlarged to public symbolism.
And it isn’t just Velázquez who is being saluted in this unsettling masterwork from 1949. So, surely, is Edvard Munch, who is rarely mentioned in Bacon literature but whose emblematic The Scream was an obvious trigger for the papal yelling. A section dealing with Bacon and the masters, old and new, reveals a debt to his predecessors that is often under-emphasised.
Picasso in his cubist portraits was a clear pioneer when it came to breaking down the human head into interlocking constituent parts. Rembrandt, represented by his Self-portrait with Beret, taught Bacon how to paint the “presence” of a sitter, rather than their looks. Van Gogh, whose work inspired new brightnesses in Bacon’s paintwork, introduced him as well to the power of the shadow.
And although Van Dyck is not mentioned here, allow me to add my ten pence worth to Bacon scholarship by pointing out that his Charles I in Three Positions — made as a preparation for a Bernini bust — must have been an influence on the triple portraits that begin pouring out of Bacon from the 1960s onwards. A profile, a central view, an opposite profile became his favourite small format.
Having proved that Bacon was always a portraitist of sorts, the show goes from the general to the particular and begins looking at the specific friends and lovers he painted and repainted: Peter Lacy, the love of Bacon’s life, who died of alcoholism in Tangier; George Dyer, the petty criminal from Kray circles, who gave him a stolen Rolex as a hello present; John Edwards, the last lover, to whom Bacon left his estate when he died.
All of them are returned to with obsessive regularity by a painter who becomes tangibly afraid of leaving his comfort zone. Instead of expressing universal anger, what we are really getting here is private admissions of isolation, loneliness, fear.
While the small portraits do away with the need for invention — put the head in the centre and that’s it — the larger compositions feature a complex struggle. To pick out the central figure, and especially their heads, Bacon invents all sorts of framing devices — cages, stages, spotlights, shutters — that can appear more sinister than they are. Friends and lovers look to have been turned into specimens in a bell jar. The true subject here remains people and their emotions. Everything else — the backgrounds, the rooms, the walls — is pictorial padding.
The show has a brilliant finale, a painted shrine to Dyer, who took his own life in Paris on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais. The paintings Bacon made remembering this horrible event are some of his most poignant, notably a huge triptych featuring three interwoven scenes of Dyer hunched over a toilet, overdosing. Has true romance ever been memorialised as unromantically as this?
It is a tearful culmination to a riveting journey that gets unusually close to Bacon and burrows under all his defences.
Francis Bacon: Human Presence is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, to January 19
